From GRITtv:

In Max Blumenthal’s book Republican Gomorrah and in his GRITtv appearance, he introduced us to Francis Schaeffer, one of the important figures in the anti-choice and religious right movements in the United States. Frank Schaeffer, Francis’s son, wrote a book about growing up in the religious right, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.

Schaeffer has a new book now, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), and in it he takes on both the “incipient fascism” of the religious right and what he called “proselytizing” atheism of Richard Dawkins and others. He joins Laura on GRITtv for a fascinating interview about his own journey, and how people, religious or irreligious, are all looking for answers to the same questions.

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(Billy James Hargis - you would think butter didn't melt - the butter had different ideas)

It's endless - the parade of hypocrites masquerading as "People of God". The Pious, the righteous, the smug - all doling out edicts under the premise of "being chosen" while ingratiating themselves in the acts they so claim to despise.

So another one shows up in the history books - maybe forgotten now, but in the 1960s railed against all the godless fornicators, the infidels, the non-believers. Billy James Hargis, bible thumping anti-communist conservative, built up a sizable congregation of followers, a daily radio show and an empire until it came crashing down, as so many others have done before and since, with widespread allegations of sexual misconduct - in his case, a very public outing via Time Magazine.

But in the late 1960s he was still going full steam, as is evidenced by this interview (supposedly debate but the debater seems hopelessly challenged) where Hargis offers a few bon mots:

Hargis: “Now look at the Jewish people, this is a prime example. I’ve never seen a hungry Jew. I’ve never seen a Jew begging. I’ve never seen a Jew without work. That religion takes care of their people. They don’t ask the state for help, they take care of their own. And we believe that Christianity is nothing more than a continuation of this Jewish concept of . . .with the gospel of Christ relating to salvation being added to that concept.”

Hargis: “I doubt very sincerely that those things (the riots in Detroit and Newark in 1968) were the results of people being mistreated. I think it was results of people maybe being treated too well by the state. They were told they didn’t have to work. They were told they didn’t have to provide for their own. They were told they could get security from the cradle to the grave and these people wanted more and more and more. We’re covetous by nature. We want more and more and more. We see someone with something we don’t have we covet it, we want it. The bible warns against covetesness. Christ told us never to covet somebody else’s. They worked for it, they were entitled to it They had a right to it.”

Hargis: “I’m telling the Negro people to quit whining. I’m telling the poor white people to quit whining. Quit whining about injustices, real or imagined. But get out and better your situation. Stand up on your own two feet. Don’t wait until someone comes along and gives you life on a silver platter.”

The arrogance, as always, is mystifying. That it comes under the guise of compassion is bizarre. That it continues in exactly the same way is astonishing.

Welcome to the Religious Right.

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If you've been a follower of not just Crooks and Liars, but my little corner over here at Video Cafe, you're fully aware already that Rachel Maddow has given the C-Street creepy, Christian cult plenty of coverage on her show on MSNBC. Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, was a guest on this week's Real Time with Bill Maher, and they delved into one topic that I've yet to see Rachel devote a lot of time to, and that was the topic of mega-churches on military bases, and the likes of C-Street member Zach Wamp making sure they're funded. If this isn't enough to make your skin crawl if you care about separation of church and state, I don't know what is.

Maher: And they are you say more of a lobbying group, even though it somehow gets away with being a tax exempt church.

Sharlet: Yeah, at one point they actually discussed, you know we should, we should register as a lobby. We can be a lobby to advance god's kingdom, and then they had a brain storm, you know what, we can be much more effective if we don't register as a lobby and we just work behind the scenes. Which is true. And which is why we have laws requiring you to register as a lobby.

Maher: And one of the things they're lobbiying for is for example mega-churches on military bases.

Sharlet: That's one of the things that's come out in fact as a result of the C-Street revelations. Zach Wamp is a Congressman who lives at the C-Street House.

Maher: Who?

Sharlet: Zach Wamp. Great name. He's running as the Governor of Tennessee.

Maher: Zach Wamp.

Sharlet: Wamp.

Maher: Wamp.

Sharlet: Wamp. Remember his name. Wamp.

Maher: How could I forget it. It's...Zach Wamp, where is he from?

Sharlet: Chattanooga. Wamp of Chattanooga. Um, Wamp pretended...

Maher: What does he want to do?

Sharlet: Well, he's ganged up with a group of his buddies on the subcommittee of the appropriations committee, and what they're doing is funneling last years, over fifty million dollars towards the construction of mega-church chapels on military bases around the country. Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Fort Hood down in Texas, and a lot of these constructions, in fact I think the biggest buildings that the Army is building now.

Maher: And you've written about this too. I mean broaden this out a little bit. The military, I don't think people know this story either. This is really scary stuff, that the people with the guns are becoming sort of a messianic cult.

Sharlet: That's, that's when, you know, it starts getting scary. When there are guns attached, right? Well fifty years ago...

Maher: Guns and tanks. I mean, you know...

Sharlet proceeded to quote from his article at Harpers, Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military. Scary, scary stuffl. As Maher pointed out when ending the segment, Sharlet is a brave man for doing the reporting he's done.

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I was listening to the Thom Hartmann show the other day, and Thom was interviewing an author that caught my attention. Little wonder since the topic was "Is there a secret society of Christian crazies and is Mark Sanford a member?".

That author was Jeff Sharlet and after listening to to Hartmann interview, I wondered if anyone in the main stream media would put him on the air. Of course, Rachel Maddow, who seems to be getting all of the best guests lately-- or at least when the "news" hasn't been canceled all week for Michael Jackson's death and she mysteriously ends up taking vacation the same week-- ended up being the first one to have him on.

Sharlet is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Scary, scary stuff for any of us that don't like the idea of our government being run by creepy, extremist, right wing Christain fundamentalists.

Sharlet also wrote a piece for Rolling Stone on Sam Brownback which is well worth the read back in 2006 titled God's Senator: Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback.

Maddow: As part of the research for the book, Jeff lived among the family and saw many of its actions first hand. [...] What is C-Street? I know it's a house on C Street in Washington. How is it part of the family?

Sharlet: Well, the C-Street house is actually a former convent and now it's registered as a church and it's run by The Family and used by them to provide housing for six to eight congressmen at any given time, and to provide spiritual counseling for these congressmen.

Which all sounds fine so far, but what makes it a little bit different than other Christian conservative organizations, two things, you said that it's secretive. Indeed the leader of the group describes, he says, the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have. And the other things is the nature of the influence they want to have.

I got to sit in on one of these spiritual counseling sessions between the leader of the family and Congressman Todd Tiahrt when I visited the C-Street House, I actually met Sen. Ensign there. As the leader of The Family was counseling Congressman Tiahrt, he had this very standard issue, bill of issues related to the Christian right. He said you've got to have a bigger vision of what we're talking about here. He called it Jesus plus nothing.

He said it's sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave as examples men who he believed understood the way power should be wielded. He actually gave as examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.

Maddow: Wow. When I read your book, The Family, when it first came out in hardback, my notes on um, I write notes in the flyleaf about what I was thinking about. And my notes about it, I went back and looked, were that it was essentially to promote, it saw its role as promoting American power, world wide, unfettered capitalism with no unions, no programs to help poor people, all with this idea that godly powerful rich men should get as many resources as possible personally, and they should just privately help everyone else. That is the impression that I was left with. Was I close?

Sharlet: That's dead on the money. The family began, it's the oldest Christian conservative organization in Washington and it goes back seventy years. And the founder believed that god gave him a new revelation saying that Christianity had gotten it wrong for two thousand years and that what most people think of as Christianity, as being about, you know, helping the weak and the poor and the meek and the down and out, he believes god came to him one night in April in 1935 and said what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful. And that these powerful men who were chosen by god can then if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle-down fundamentalism.

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The fine upstanding folks at the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission have announced their Top Ten Instances of Christian Bashing in America. It's highly amusing, of course (Jack Black and you Prop 8 backers, I think you can count on going to hell), but this one caught my eye:

INSTANCE #3: Barack Obama Defames Christianity

According to research into President Elect Obama's own statements about faith, and an examination of Obama's position on moral issues, CADC has determined that by any biblical and historic Christian standard, Barack Obama is not a Christian, although he claims he is a "devout Christian."

First, I'm a bit confused: How exactly did Obama "defame" Christianity by claiming to be a Christian? This is Christian-bashing exactly how?

But then there's the matter of what Obama's writings and statements actually are pertaining to his faith:

Barack Obama was not raised in a religious household. Like his mother, he said he "grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion." His father was born Muslim but became an atheist as an adult. His mother's family members were "non-practicing" Baptists and Methodists. It was after college that he encountered a "spiritual dilemma." He realized something was missing in his life and he felt drawn to be in church.

Obama said he had begun to sense God beckoning him to submit to His will and dedicate himself to discovering truth. So one day he walked down the aisle at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and affirmed his Christian faith. During a "Call to Renewal" Keynote Address in June 2006, he refers to himself as a progressive Christian. And in this New York Times article, Senator Obama's denomination, the United Church of Christ, is described as "a mostly white denomination known for the independence of its congregations and its willingness to experiment with traditional Protestant theology."

Barack Obama's Expressions of Faith:

Barack Obama said that his faith "plays every role" in his life. "It's what keeps me grounded. It's what keeps my eyes set on the greatest of heights." In the "Call to Renewal" Keynote Address he also said, "Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts. You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away - because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey."

However, I think I began to get a picture of why Obama might not be a "real Christian" for these folks when I took a look at what he has on his website [pdf file]:

Faith should not be used as a wedge to divide.

“We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drives us further apart.” – The Audacity of Hope.

“Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America – there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America – there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” – Democratic National Convention Keynote Address.

The separation of church and state is critical and has caused our democracy and religious practices to thrive.

“[Conservative leaders] need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn't the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland ... It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religion, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith…” – Call to Renewal Keynote Address

We are a nation of many faiths and of those with no faith at all. The religious practices of all must be respected.

“Given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” - Call to Renewal Keynote Address

For the hardcore evangelical crowd -- who practice a pinched, narrow, picayune, highly judgmental kind of Christianity -- these kinds of sentiments are indeed blasphemy, even though they're perfectly in keeping with what Jesus of Nazareth preached. Indeed, I know many very serious Christians -- priests, pastors, and theologians among them -- who hold similar if not identical views.

And I've known many evangelicals who consider all such people (myself included) not to be "real Christians." But I'm content knowing that God, and not they, will be the final arbiter of that.

[H/t Bill Berkowitz at Religion Dispatches]

Yahoo:

Some prominent evangelical Christians say they have not been invited to participate in or attend the Republican National Convention less than three weeks before the event is to begin

Analysts said the move likely reflects a GOP desire to sideline its more polarizing supporters during a tight presidential race, but convention organizers deny they're marginalizing the religious leaders. Republican strategist Ralph Reed said Wednesday that invitations just started going out to evangelical figures, but he would not release any names.

The Rev. Franklin Graham, who delivered the invocation at President Bush's inauguration, has had no request to attend so far, said Graham spokesman Mark DeMoss.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who offered a prayer at the 2000 convention, said he has not yet been asked to do so this year. He plans to go "quietly in and quietly out" of the New York event, although he insists no one in the Republican campaigns asked him to keep a low profile.

The Rev. Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and a one-time Republican presidential candidate, said, "I've had no request from anybody to be there." Unlike Falwell, Robertson believes the GOP is deliberately keeping him and other evangelicals away.