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While National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference President Samuel Rodriguez has quietly pulled out of his position as Vice President of the Oak Initiative, he has failed to denounce the organization's virulent positions and, as these videos from a 2010 speech Rodriguez gave at an Oak Initiative conference, show, Rodriguez was at the time deeply enthusiastic about the Oak effort.
I have made a full transcription of Rodriguez' 15 minute speech, available below the two videos of his speech: |
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Last week, Jerry Boykin appeared on TBN's "First to Know" to promote his new book, "Never Surrender." He made a pretty shocking call toward the end, saying that there's no doubt in his mind that Christians can take the nation back because "God told us to occupy." Full show is here. Boykin makes this statement starting at around the 24:25 mark, saying that this was necessary to safeguard the freedoms that were included in the sermons preached in colonial times. Boykin is speaking in a code that most of TBN's viewers readily understand. It's a call to "occupy" the "seven mountains" of society--an "occupation" that will last until they can bring Jesus back. |
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Well, that didn't take long. Back on September 2, Rachel Tabachnick wrote a piece about Samuel Rodriguez' ties to the New Apostolic Reformation. Rodriguez, for those who don't know, has been vice president of Rick Joyner's Oak Initiative. I say "has" because after being confronted with the Oak Initiative's extreme stances by freelance journalist Greg Metzger, Rodriguez has resigned from the Oak Initiative. (h/t to Right Wing Watch) Although I received glowing testimonies to Rodriguez's character before the interview, I was skeptical. My decades of experience with evangelical and fundamentalist leaders had taught me to hope for the best, but expect the worst. Yet I found that Rev. Rodriguez was genuinely troubled by Tabachnik's charges. He challenged some of the details of her story, but on the principal point—his relationship with the Oak Initiative—he agreed that there was cause for concern. He knew instinctively as I read to him the Oak Initiative's views about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood that this was an affront to what he wished to stand for. While he pleaded ignorance with regards to the details of the Oak Initiative's agenda and website (he claimed he had barely been involved), he assured me that by the end of the day he would resign from the Board and make clear his regret. Five hours later I received an email with his letter to the Executive Board of NHCLC responding to Tabachnik's article and detailing the steps he was taking to denounce extremism, steps that include his resignation from the board of the Oak Initiative. It was, as a mutual friend of mine and Samuel's put it, the most that could be hoped for. In a statement, Rodriguez denounced "all vestiges of Islamophobia or any other platform that engages in fear-mongering." However, one has to wonder about Rodriguez' sincerity, given the links that his National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference has.
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The official website for Rick Perry's August 6th, 2011 nationally controversial The Response prayer event has now disappeared from the Internet, but I had saved copies of many of the vanished web pages.
Here is the core material from three important The Response web pages: the leadership of The Rseponse, and the two pages of endorsers of the event, from Houston and nationally. |
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This is an archived report which originally was posted on April 21, 2007, at ICA apostle Tom Schlueter's Trinity Apostolic Prayer Network website. Shlueter's network was subsequently absorbed into the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, now headed by Schlueter.
The "Report From Olney" describes ceremonies, carried out by ICA apostles Tom Schlueter, Jay Swallow, John Benefiel, Chuck Pierce, and others, that symbolically represented "divorce" of geographic areas and also people groups (such as Native American tribes) from the demon powers of Baal and Leviathan. The ceremonies were described as including the smashing of Native American art objects, such as matrimonial vases.
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It ain't just here, folks!
I have recently returned after living for ten years in Queretaro, Mexico, having just written "The Sudarium Trilogy," a thriller about a holy relic, an innocent girl and a diabolical sect that involves her in a scheme to promote the second coming.
Sheer escapism, right?
By chance, I stumbled upon the Talk to Action site and discovered my "thriller" was far closer to the truth than I imagined while writing it.
In Mexico, there is said to exist a secretive society, made up of wealthy aristocratic Mexicans, whose goal, with the aid of the Catholic church, is to change Mexico into a theocracy in the hands of the select few. The group, founded in university circles in the 60s, is called El Yunque, had its first flowering in Queretro and purportedly counts among is membership highly placed politicians, the country's wealthiest businessmen and prominent members of the clergy.
There have been a few books written about the group, vague and relatively short of details; and videos exist that claim to show an actual initiation of a new member into the orgnization. But for all the vagueness of hard documentation, few are the Mexicans who don't subscribe to its existence.
El Yunque entertains unyielding opposition to democracy and its general social attitudes are best suggested by its name, which means "the anvil" in Spanish.
Dominionism would not appear to recognize borders, although Mexico, as we all know, is just a stone's throw from Rick Perry's Texas.
- David Richards. critic and author of "The Sudarium Trilogy." |
cross-posted at dKos
Voice of America has a fairly good piece today by Jerome Socolovsky on the New Apostolic Reformation. The NAR is a collection of Christian preachers who present themselves as modern-day apostles and prophets. And it's a major player in what's commonly called the "dominionist" movement. It aims to have America be ruled as a Christian nation. Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann have all reportedly associated with pastors or churches with "dominionist" views. The NAR in particular seeks to influence what it calls the "seven mountains": government, religion, media, family, business, education, and arts and entertainment. Socolovsky also did a fairly extensive interview with Peter Wagner. He says that he and his compatriots don't want "control," but simply "influence" it to bring forth God's will. He also says that they don't want to set up a theocracy, which he calls "a very poor form of government." Sorry, Dr. Wagner, but when one of your most prominent compatriots admits that the type of government they want will look a lot like a dictatorship and when you yourself say dominion means rulership, you'll have to pardon us if we don't believe you. |
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cross-posted at dKosYesterday, the Tennessean ran an article (republished in USA Today) showing that the American Center for Law and Justice has paid out a whopping $33 million over the last decade to chief counsel Jay Sekulow, his family or entities related to them. There's a name for this sort of activity--inurement. But if that isn't enough reason for the IRS to peer into the ACLJ's guts, this is--seems that it's been involved in cases that it may not be legally supposed to take part. ACLJ had applied as a charity focused on First Amendment issues. “When any case in which you are involved ceases to involve First Amendment issues, your participation therein will end,” the IRS told ACLJ in a letter dated May 1994. But ACLJ’s recent lawsuits, including ones against health-care reform legislation and Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles, don’t contain arguments based on the First Amendment. Case in point--the ACLJ Website currently includes a link to its effort to get the health-care bill thrown out. And Sekulow's latest blog post on it includes a link to the brief for its suit in a D.C. appeals court hoping to strike the bill down. The brief makes no First Amendment arguments. Even more damningly, the head of the ACLJ's Nashville-area office tacitly admits the Planned Parenthood case is a whistleblower case and not a First Amendment one. |
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Dominionism is not birtherism or a conspiracy. It is the name for what happens when religious certitude grows up and creates a political machine. |
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Rick Perry's relationship with the apostles of C. Peter Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles (perhaps the largest apostolic network in the movement Wagner has collectively named the New Apostolic Reformation) has been firmly established, and traces back almost a decade (or more). But it is difficult for reporters and journalists to answer simple questions, such as: who is an apostle? Who are Wagner's apostles?
To help answer such questions, I'm publishing my collection of PDF files of the membership of Wagner's International Coalition of Apostles, which in 2010 pulled down its previously public membership list. |
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This past week, Rick Joyner's special guest on his Internet TV show, Prophetic Prospectives, has been Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, a leading neoconservative think tank. The two go back quite a bit--Gaffney describes Joyner as a personal hero.
Today's edition is pretty revealing. Joyner leads off by claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood is out to take over the Seven Mountains. Hmmm--projection, anyone? Later, Gaffney made a call for the return of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee--a proposal enthusiastically endorsed by Joyner. So now we have documented proof that one of the leading dominionists has joined hands with one of the leading neoconservatives. Scary.
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Back in 1998, the Religious Right's long war for control of the Texas State Board of Education was hot, and by all reasonable measures, never stopped, and by all reasonable measures, has shown no signs of abating. Here is the text of an article I wrote for In These Times magazine, (the article has not yet made it into the magazine's web archive). It provides a snapshot of the nature of the battle and the stakes at the time. |
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