The Reformed Pastor

I recently wrote about the effort being funded by the Arcus Foundation to infiltrate the mainline and Catholic churches with the gospel of homosexuality. Arcus has poured millions of dollars into this effort in support of an agenda of radical sexual ethical change, which is designed both to change the nature of the churches and to support the larger secular effort to transform American society into a gay-positive one.

The Methodist Thinker (who has also reposted my effort) has sent me a very interesting report from the Center for American Progress. It is called Keeping the Faith: Faith Organizing for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Moral and Civil Rights in a Southern State by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Marta Cook. Thistlethwaite, as any reader of this blog knows, is a regular contributor to the “On Faith” column at the Washington Post, where she is a tediously reliable voice for the far left of Christian thinking. She and Cook have turned out a study of LGBT efforts to infiltrate find allies and work with religious organizations in Tennessee, a study funded by–surprise!–the Arcus Foundation.

A couple of excerpts:

Increasingly, gay and transgender advocates are working with a growing group of faith allies to assert a compelling moral vision of inclusiveness, love, respect, and tolerance. These advocates and faith allies are working together to challenge messages that oppose equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans in both religious communities and in society at large.

Unfortunately, much of the opposition to equality for LGBT Americans over the years has come from organized religion. In particular, many conservative religious leaders and faith-based groups have been vocal in their views that to be gay or lesbian is a violation of God’s will. Beyond preaching, many religious leaders and groups have worked in the political arena to oppose legislation and policies that provide equality for LGBT Americans. Their efforts have distorted the public debate and the diversity of religious views on LGBT equality, hindered LGBT progress, and denied millions of Americans their God-given rights.

While it is crucial to support the First Amendment rights of faith communities to voice their beliefs, it is also crucial to oppose their efforts to impose their theology on a pluralistic democracy and deny justice and equality to millions of LGBT Americans. In addition, it is critical to raise up the voices of people of faith who are advocating for LGBT justice and equality. It is important to broaden and reframe the debate, to say that moral equality is as important as legal and social equality, and to show the advances that organized religion and people of faith have been making over the past years.

This is from the introduction. To their credit, for the most part the authors avoid inflammatory (and ridiculous) language such as accusing Christians of trying to “impose their theology on a pluralistic democracy.” But I guess they thought they needed to toss out some red meat at the start to get the reader interested.

It is interesting, however, that they include here the observation that the participation of individuals and groups upholding a traditional perspective on marriage and sexual behavior are “distort[ing] the debate.” It sounds as though the authors think there is something illegitimate about expressing such beliefs in a public forum. It seems they would prefer a public square where opinions contrary to liberal orthodoxy are simply not allowed, so as not to “distort the debate” by suggesting that there may be other ways of viewing an issue.

In a section entitled, “Tennessee as a case study on LGBT activism in a highly religious state,” the authors offer these conclusions:

•LGBT activists and faith allies in Tennessee have attained a remarkable level of success in a state with a high level of religious affiliation. Despite faith-based opposition that is well-organized and well funded, LGBT advocates have devel- oped creative strategies and messages regarding LGBT equality rooted in faith.

•Tennessee exhibits less of a religious/secular divide between faith groups and LGBT activists than exists in other states. Many LGBT advocates are them- selves faith leaders, and many LGBT organizations recognize that effective faith alliances and targeted faith messaging are critical to success.

•Despite these efforts, serious challenges remain within key faith communities, including white evangelicals, Catholics, and African-American churches. Key to increasing the success of LGBT organizing work in Tennessee is expanding faith alliances. In some cases that means crafting outreach strategies and collaborative efforts to meet communities where they are.

•While certain African-American faith allies are doing brave and significant work in Tennessee to support LGBT moral and civil equality, most do not come from historic African-American churches. African-American and white faith allies agree on the need for more reciprocity in raising issues of social and economic justice for African Americans alongside issues of equal legal rights for LGBT citizens of Tennessee. They see this as indispensible to having more African
Americans become a part of the LGBT movement in the state.

•In addition to cultivating faith allies and making a faith case for equality in Tennessee, growing the organizational and technological sophistication of the LGBT movement in Tennessee is essential to more effectively compete with well-funded and organized opposition.

Despite Thistlethwaite’s standing as a former seminary president and professor (I don’t know what, if any, faith background Cook has), it’s pretty clear that this report is written from the perspective of people who are trying to get churches to buy into an ethical stance that is meant to serve a political objective. There is no concern or interest expressed in this report for the faith communities’ theological or moral integrity, no qualms whatsoever in trying to get them to overturn biblical and historical teaching, all for political purposes. LGBT activists are encouraged to seek liberal allies in the churches, and join forces with them to achieve political ends. And if those allies are able to gain further allies in their churches, great.

Tennessee, of course, is a pretty conservative state, one where just over 50% of the population identifies with some form of evangelical Christianity, so it’s no surprise that virtually everyone mentioned in this report is from the Protestant mainline, which in any event is always going to be the most fertile ground for infiltrators such as Arcus or CAP. But most states aren’t so conservative, and evangelicalism is less influential elsewhere. Evangelicals in the mainline churches in more liberal states, especially, need to be on the lookout for alliances such as this, and be prepared to expose them for what they are–attempts by those outside the church to weaken, change, and co-opt it from within.

The bottom line is that religion is about human well-being.

–The Rev. Daisy Machado, academic dean and professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary, a well-known school of social work in New York

A woman named Abby Johnson has become Planned Parenthood’s Public Enemy #1. She is a former PP clinic director, someone who was Employee of the Year in 2008, who finally became disgusted with industrialized abortion. She has been exposing the organization’s slimier side for some time now, and has a new column in The Hill:

Planned Parenthood’s bottom line is numbers. And, with abortion as its primary money-maker, that means implementing a quota. I know this is true because I worked at one of their Texas clinics for 8 years, two as the clinic director.

Though 98 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services to pregnant women are abortion, Planned Parenthood and its political allies have sworn up and down that taxpayer dollars do not to pay for abortion. But of course they do. Planned Parenthood gets one-third of its entire budget from taxpayer funding and performed more than 650,000 abortions between 2008 and 2009.  An abortion is expensive. Its cost includes pay for the doctor, supporting medical staff, their health benefits packages and malpractice insurance.  As clinic director, I saw how money affiliate clinics receive from several sources is combined into one pot, not set aside for specific services….

It also claims to help reduce the number of abortions. Not only is this not what Planned Parenthood actually accomplishes, but its goal couldn’t be more opposite.  As a Planned Parenthood clinic manager, I was directed to double the number of abortions our clinic performed in order to drive up revenue.  In keeping, Planned Parenthood headquarters recently issued a directive mandating that all of its affiliates provide abortions by 2013….

Planned Parenthood has found other ways to increase revenue at the expense of women’s safety. Abortion consultations are now often done without a doctor in the room through online “telemedicine.” Abortion is a severely traumatic and potentially dangerous procedure. Even as Planned Parenthood’s 2008 Employee of the Year, I saw this aggressive push toward more “efficient” telemedicine as risky.

Another nuisance the organization is seeking to do away with is reporting sex abuse of minors. It has sued to overturn a child abuse reporting law applying to minors under 14 on the grounds that it violated a girl’s “constitutional right to privacy.” Planned Parenthood called the bill unnecessary given that its medical personnel are already obliged to report such matters and that filing additional reports would only “overload” the government. Planned Parenthood doesn’t want to bother the government with protecting minors.

It also can’t be bothered to enable women to make informed decisions.  Planned Parenthood has adamantly opposed laws in nearly two dozen states that require clinic staff to show a woman a sonogram before an abortion.  With all the supposed health services these clinics provide, why should they fear sonograms?  Because they cut down on its biggest income source.

Abby Johnson has become a genuine hero who has exposed the Planned Parenthood assault on decency and truth for what it is. Let’s pray the Lord continues to give her the courage she needs to stand against one of the most destructive forces in American society today.

Whenever someone wants to object to the Christian belief that salvation is found in Christ alone, they bring up Mohandas Gandhi. The 20th century Indian political activist is a secular saint, and lots of non-Christians cannot conceive of the possibility that Gandhi is not in heaven. Even lots of Christians have a problem imagining heaven without the Mahatma; a recent blog post at Sojourners by Kiran Thadani included this:

As someone who did not grow up in the Christian tradition and a great-grandchild of a nonviolent activist who worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the 1940’s, the statement: “Gandhi’s in hell” creates a deep sadness in my spirit.

Now, that statement is problematic for me as well, but only because none of us know the eternal fate of any given individual. As a matter of principle, the thought that Gandhi might be in hell is no more disturbing than that any other individual might be.

But here’s the real point: the reason why Gandhi is the person who is always mentioned in this context is because of the myth that he was somehow “better” than the run of humanity. Unfortunately, a new biography, entitled Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, suggests that such a view needs to be laid to rest.

A review of the book by Anita Desai in the New York Review of Books offers this Gandhian view of the African residents of the Transvaal region of South Africa:

It was when the so-called Black Act was passed in 1906, forcing Indians living in the Transvaal to register, that he held meetings and urged his fellow men to burn the permits they were required to carry and found himself being marched off, as he wrote, to

“a prison intended for Kaffirs…. We could understand not being classified with the whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. It is indubitably right that the Indians should have separate cells. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.”

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Roberts offers this:

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals.

A ceaseless self-promoter, Gandhi bought up the entire first edition of his first, hagiographical biography to send to people and ensure a reprint. Yet we cannot be certain that he really made all the pronouncements attributed to him, since, according to Mr. Lelyveld, Gandhi insisted that journalists file “not the words that had actually come from his mouth but a version he ­authorized after his sometimes heavy editing of the transcripts.”

We do know for certain that he ­advised the Czechs and Jews to adopt nonviolence toward the Nazis, saying that “a single Jew standing up and ­refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees” might be enough “to melt Hitler’s heart.” (Nonviolence, in Gandhi’s view, would apparently have also worked for the Chinese against the Japanese ­invaders.) Starting a letter to Adolf ­Hitler with the words “My friend,” Gandhi egotistically asked: “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has ­deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” He advised the Jews of Palestine to “rely on the goodwill of the Arabs” and wait for a Jewish state “till Arab ­opinion is ripe for it.”

Gandhi claimed that there was “an exact parallel” between the British ­Empire and the Third Reich, yet while the British imprisoned him in luxury in the Aga Khan’s palace for 21 months ­until the Japanese tide had receded in 1944, Hitler stated that he would simply have had Gandhi and his supporters shot. (Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce’s “service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and ­Labour, his passionate love for his people.”) During his 21 years in South Africa (1893-1914), Gandhi had not opposed the Boer War or the Zulu War of 1906—he raised a battalion of stretcher-bearers in both cases—and after his return to India during World War I he offered to be Britain’s “recruiting agent-in-chief.” Yet he was comfortable opposing the war against fascism.

None of this is to say that Gandhi was a worse human being that others ( he, like the rest of us, was a sinner who fell short of the glory of God), nor is it to denigrate his genuine accomplishments. It is to say that when someone suggests that God would be somehow unjust to refuse Gandhi entry into His Kingdom on the basis of his lack of faith in Christ, we need to respond that he was–just like us–a deeply flawed, sinful human being who is no more deserving of a place in heaven on the basis of his own righteousness than anyone else.

(Reviews via T19 and MCJ.)

You’ve heard about the Rev. Terry Jones, I’m sure. He’s the idiot down in Florida who’s one of the very few people low enough to associate with Westboor Baptist Church in Topeka, he runs a church that sounds like a cult, and he recently burned a Koran after saying last fall that he wouldn’t.

I don’t know whether he’s a Christian or not (in any event, it isn’t for me to say one way or the other), but he certainly doesn’t act much like one, and he’s a publicity hound who, like his friends out in Kansas, does nothing but set back the cause of Christ. All that said, one has to wonder about a reaction like that of Valerie Elverton Dixon in Sojourners today.

She laments Jones’ backslidding on his promise to not burn a Koran, and I join her in that. But she then goes on:

Terry Jones and his congregation claim to be a church based on New Testament teachings. This is clearly not the case. Jesus teaches us to “not judge.” (Matthew 7: 1-5) By putting the Quran on trial, pronouncing judgment, and then burning the Quran as punishment, he has not only made a mockery of the United States Constitution and the principle of the separation of church and state and made a mockery of the American legal system, but he has also usurped the power of almighty God.

Huh? I’ll get to the matter of judging in a moment, but what in the name of Thomas Jefferson is the rest of that about? Does the Constitution prohibit burning a book? Granted, it’s one of the stupidest ways of exercising your free speech rights, but if you want to make a public spectacle of yourself, what’s the Constitution got to do with it? “Separation of church and state?” What, did Barack Obama or the state of Florida tell him to burn a Koran? And as stupid as Jones’s action is, how does that “usurp the power of almighty God”? Is that even possible?

It’s enough to make one say, “please, ma’am, just step away from the keyboard, and nobody will get hurt.”

Having invoked a couple of irrelevant secular legalisms and accused Jones of doing something impossible, she then proceeds to mangle Scripture and suggest that every Christian is as ignorant of Islam as she is:

One reason Jesus teaches us to “not judge” is because we do not have enough information. We do not know enough about Islam or about the Quran to condemn it. We do not know how many  lives have been saved, how many hearts have been comforted, how many minds have found clarity, how many disputes have been settled, or how many people have found the love of God and come to know Jesus from reading the Quran.

This is just incomprehensible. It’s not like Islam is a Middle Eastern form of Rosicrucianism, a secret society with lots of texts they don’t let outsiders see. You can find the Koran on the Internet, for goodness sake, as well as tons of information. The fact is that we know that Islam teaches that 1) Jesus was not God incarnate; 2) He didn’t die on the cross; 3) He didn’t atone for the sins of the world; and 4) He didn’t rise from the dead. Put that together, and you have a religion that rejects the way of salvation that has been revealed in Jesus Christ.

I have no clue how many lives have been saved (though I know for sure that plenty have been lost) because of Islam. I have no idea how may have found comfort in it, how many minds have found “clarity,” whatever that means, or how many disputes have been settled. Many may think they have found “the love of God,” or that they “know Jesus” because they’ve read the Koran, but the God to whom they are seeking to relate is not the God of Jesus Christ, and the Jesus they think they know is a figment of Mohammad’s imagination.

For a former Christian seminary professor to claim that Christians may not render judgment regarding the truthfulness of Islam because “we do not have enough information” is one of the most obstinately dumb things I’ve heard an allegedly educated person say in a long time.

There’s more, not all of it wrong, but I’ll leave it at that. Oh, and no matter how wrong Dixon is, Terry Jones is still a disgrace.

For more than a year, people such as the PCUSA’s Israel Palestine Mission Network and the mainline church-supported U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation have been using something called the Goldstone Report to bash Israel unmercifully. They have used the report–commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council–to accuse Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and specifically the intentional targeting of civilians, in Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza during January 2009. They have ignored anything it said that was critical of Hamas, but there wasn’t that much of that in it.

For instance, last June the IPMN wrote in support of the unchanged Middle East Study Commission’s report to the PCUSA General Assembly:

We often hear about rockets being fired out of Gaza, for instance, that have affected a relatively small number of Israelis; and yet officially as a nation we refuse to hear, and therefore accept, the numbers of casualties and deaths reported in the Goldstone Report to the United Nations regarding the unbridled mayhem in Gaza caused by countless hi-tech Israeli weapons over a sustained period of time.

In November of 2009, the USCEIO asked its supporters to write Congress to oppose a resolution that would have criticized the Goldstone Report, offering talking points for their correspondence:

As you may know, last week Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced H.Res.867, trashing the Goldstone Report on war crimes committed before, during, and after Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” assault on the Gaza Strip. Please join the US Campaign in our attempt to stop this terrible resolution.

Anyway, yesterday the Washington Post offers us an Emily Littella moment from the man whose name is on the report:

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly. The purpose of these investigations, as I have always said, is to ensure accountability for improper actions, not to second-guess, with the benefit of hindsight, commanders making difficult battlefield decisions.

Oh, and guess what? Hamas has not acted likewise:

We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. [Emphases added.]

Ya think?

Goldstone was extraordinarily naive both to think that Hamas would take his recommendations seriously, and to not recognize that those who wish Israel ill would use his report in a one-sided fashion to delegitimize Israel’s defense of its people. Nevertheless I applaud the fact that his eyes have been opened, and look forward to IPMN, USCEIO, and their allies correcting the mistaken impressions, one-sided citations, and misstatements of facts that have followed in the report’s wake.

I also believe in the Easter bunny, and look forward to his coming on April 24.