Racism in Alive and Well in the SBC

Rick Scarborough, former fundamentalist candidate for President of the Baptist General Convention of Texas and key leader in the breakaway Southern Baptists of Texas, demonstrated how close racism is to the surface within the ranks of the fundamentalist Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. While appearing as one of the key speakers at the recent Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the Times Online quotes Scarborough as saying, "If this country becomes 30 per cent Hispanic we will no longer be America."

Scarborough has become a rising star in the pantheon of right-wing religio-political organizing. Initially he was one of the key organizers of young pastors for the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Denominational politics, however, was just a stepping stone to secular politics for him.

As pastor of the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas, Scarborough organized his church to takeover city government. He once took credit on the front page of Jerry Falwell's Liberty Journal for getting former Republican U.S. Representative Steve Stockman elected to Congress. Scarborough's church was investigated by the I.R.S. for that boast. Those exploits and more have been chronicled in a recently released novel written by Anselm Davis entitled "An American Theocracy."

The U.S Representative that Scarborough took credit for electing was a one-term Congressman who had strong ties to militia movements and reportedly received advance notice by fax that the federal building in Oklahoma would be bombed.

Most recently Scarborough has been preaching thinly disguised get-out-the-vote-for-republicans "revivals" complete with altar calls to get Christians committed to political action.

Scarborough's white-supremecist vision for America is so racist and extreme that Southern Baptist leaders ought to be falling all over themselves to call him out about it. I'll make note of any that do, but I won't hold my breath while I'm waiting to find one.

Why Mission Organizations are Necessary

Associated Baptist Press reports that eight of the ten Baptists arrested in Haiti for attempting to take children out of the country without documents no longer trust the person leading their mission trip. They say they have been "lied to."

Individual churches taking the independent initiative to do overseas missionary work has become a fad among American churches. The problems encountered by these well meaning but misguided Baptists should demonstrate the need for churches to work with some credible mission organization that can make sure everyone operates within the law.

Frank Page Votes Against Faith-based Accountability

Frank Page, former President of the Southern Baptist Convention, voted against a requirement that would have made faith-based organizations accountable for the way they spend money they receive from the federal government.

A report on the White House website about votes related to the Non-Consensus Reform Report produced by Obama's 25 member Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Parnerships reveals that Frank Page voted against the government requiring houses of worship to form separate corporations to receive direct federal social service funds.

Those who favor the requirement say "the government should require houses of worship that wish to receive direct federal social service funds to establish separate corporations as a necessary means for achieving church-state separation and protecting religious autonomy, while also urging states to reduce any unnecessary administrative costs and burdens associated with attaining this status."

Frank Page and those who oppose the requirement say "the government should not require separate incorporation, because it is not always the best means to achieve these goals, and because it may be prohibitively costly and onerous, particularly for smaller organizations, resulting in the disruption and deterrence of effective and constitutionally permissible relationships."

Barry Lynn voiced his frustration with Page and other members of the Advisory Council who voted against this requirement saying,

I argued that all public funds that go to a house of worship to operate social services should be handled by a separately incorporated nonprofit -- or at least be kept in a separate bank account so we can keep track of how the money is spent. A 2006 report by the General Accounting Office examined faith-based offices in several federal agencies and found a lack of oversight of these programs. . . .

Conservative religious representatives on the Council disagreed. They want sectarian groups to have access to plenty of government money with very little (if any) meaningful accountability. That's the status quo; they like it.

Shame on Frank Page. He, more than any other Baptist in America, deserves the blame for endorsing a system that will corrupt America's churches and allow politicians to use tax dollars for political patronage of favored religious leaders.

Click here for a podcast (33MB Mp3) of my 2-7-10 "Religious Talk" radio program which was devoted to a critique of the federal faith-based program under President Obama.

More Easy Money and Loose Accountability

Nearly ten years ago I interviewed Jim Wallis on my radio program and challenged him about his support for Clinton's "Charitable Choice" program and Bush's "Faith-based initiatives." I asked him several questions and he had a canned response for each of them. Until I asked him, "What could undermine the integrity of the Church's witness more than easy money and loose accountability." That question stumped him.

Wallis should have had the foresight to see through a scheme that would give politicians a way to gain leverage over houses of faith. It is hard to maintain a prophetic voice when every time you bark at injustice you are biting the hand that feeds you.

Obama came into office promising change. Many of us were hoping that he would change the faith-based program, or, better yet, to end it. It was soon apparent that putting an end to the office was not going to happen. As David Kuo revealed in his book "Tempting Faith," the office became an essential component in efforts to turn-out-the-vote for the President's re-election.

From the beginning it appears that Obama, being a politician, could not resist the temptation to use the office for his own political purposes. An article in today's Wall Street Journal says Obama is using the faith-based office to court religious conservatives:

President Barack Obama's willingness to keep Bush-era policies on government-backed religious charities opposed by many liberals is helping to woo traditionally Republican evangelical leaders who can influence key blocs of voters.

The approach, according to conservative leaders and liberal critics alike, is part of a broader strategy by Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats to regain credibility with centrist and conservative voters who tend to be more religious and have supported the GOP in recent polls and elections.

By now it should be apparent to everyone that the real purpose of the faith-based office has more to do with politics than with helping the poor. Politicians in both parties are using the office to influence religious leaders. Most religious leaders, liberal and conservative, are lapping it up like so many Esau's selling their birthrights for a bowl of soup. Here, have another heaping helping of easy money and loose accountability.

Not everyone thinks this is such a good idea. On Huffington Post today, Rev. Barry Lynn lists the efforts that he and some others like the Baptist Joint Committee have made, to no avail, to get the president to correct the most egregious problems with faith-based programs. Barry writes,

For example, I argued that all public funds that go to a house of worship to operate social services should be handled by a separately incorporated nonprofit -- or at least be kept in a separate bank account so we can keep track of how the money is spent. A 2006 report by the General Accounting Office examined faith-based offices in several federal agencies and found a lack of oversight of these programs.

All Barry is asking for here is that the President put an end to the easy money and loose accountability. In a nutshell, that's what the government's faith-based programs are. But, it doesn't appear that Obama will be making any meaningful changes to this system.

Again I reiterate what I wrote in a 2004 blog, "If the devil himself designed a government program to encourage corruption and undermine the integrity of the church's witness, could he devise a more effective plan?"

BJC Requests Changes in Faith-based Program

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty has joined several other organizations in calling for the White House to change the way that religious non-profits use taxpayer dollars.

The key change requested is to put an end to the practice of allowing religious non-profits to violate constitutional safeguards and federal laws in their hiring practices. Here are the central changes requested:

The letter urges President Obama to "restore the constitutionally-required safeguards and civil rights protections governing partnerships between government and religiously-affiliated institutions" and recommends three key steps:

1. Religious organizations should be prohibited from discriminating in hiring on the basis of religion within federally-funded social welfare projects.

2. The recommendations of the Reform of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Taskforce should be adopted in full.

3. The Administration should amend existing Executive Orders and make uniform guidance resources for federal agencies on a number of specific issues.

On Becoming an Unhip Oldster

Ars Technica is reporting that blogging has devolved into something that "unhip old people do."

Social networking (MySpace and Facebook) is hip for more than seventy-five percent of teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Twitter is popular with around thirty-three percent of twenty-somethings while less than ten percent of teenagers are into it.

I'm on facebook, but I don't have any desire to be a twitter.

Regarding a Press that Won't Dig for the Truth

Chris Hedges has some harsh words for modern journalism in an essay on Truthdig. As usual, there is a lot of sense in what he has to say. Here's a quote:

Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate employees. They claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek their moral justification in the service of this nameless, faceless mass and speak little about the vast influence of the power elite to shape and determine reporting. Does a public even exist in a society as fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message?

The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became, as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals, a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus, now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial. Our elite oversaw the dismantling of the country’s manufacturing base and the betrayal of the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the press dutifully trumpeted this as a form of growth. Our elite deregulated the banking industry, leading to nationwide bank collapses, and the press extolled the value of the free market. Our elite corrupted the levers of power to advance the interests of corporations and the press naively conflated freedom with the free market. This reporting may have been “objective” and “impartial” but it defied common sense. The harsh reality of shuttered former steel-producing towns and growing human misery should have, in the hands of any good cop reporter, exposed the fantasies. But the press long ago stopped thinking and lost nearly all its moral autonomy.

Is Avoiding Taxes Patriotic?

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported that 29 American Defense Contractors used offshore foreign subsidiaries from 2003 to 2008 to avoid paying social security and medicare payroll taxes.

The biggest offender was Kellog, Brand and Root (KBR).

Is it good business practice to avoid paying payroll taxes for the long term health and benefit of your employees? Is it patriotic?

Why do stock holders continue to employ executives who engage in such practices?

Why aren't stock holders penalized for accepting dividends from companies that transfer their social responsibilities to honest taxpayers?

Why has the Supreme Court ruled that irresponsible corporate "persons" like KBR should be permitted to devote unlimited resources to elect politicians of their own choosing?

French Premier Nicholas Sarkozy's outburst against bankers who "made a fast buck with other people's money" could be directed toward more than just bankers. The malady seems to permeate our entire legal, political and economic system.

Still Snowing

I stepped out onto my front porch at 4:20 PM to snap this picture. It has been snowing since about 10:30 AM this morning. We've got well over a foot of snow on top of 3/4 inch of ice that we got last night.

And, it's still snowing -- with huge snow flakes. Just look at them.

No, that's not dirt on a window pane, there's nothing but air between me and the trees. No, there's no lint or moisture on my camera lens.

All those white specs are snowflakes -- including the dark one in the upper left hand corner.

What Does Book Banning Accomplish?

A couple days ago the newswires were full of stories about the Southern California school district that banned copies of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from the classroom because a parent was offended by its definition of "oral sex."

Today the newswires are full of stories about the Culpepper County Virginia school district that removed "unedited" versions of Anne Frank's Diary from its bookshelves.

If you actually look at the passages in these books that are supposed to be offensive, you will find that there is nothing prurient in either one.

Frankly, much more prurient interest was generated by the Baptist preachers and TV Evangelists who were obsessed by the desire to publicly denounce President Clinton's peccadilloes with Monica Lewinsky than by the dictionary and the diary combined.

How many teenagers in the 1990's had heard of "oral sex" before right-wing preachers worked overtime to have President Clinton impeached?

How many teenagers today would have thought to look up "oral sex" in a dictionary before Merriam-Webster Dictionaries were banned in Southern California?

How many teenagers would have been interested in reading an "unedited" version of Anne Frank's Diary before a school district in Virginia banned it?

Unintended consequences are still consequences.

Are Oklahomans Preparing to Imprison Liberal Ministers?

There's some confusion about the bill (HB 3408) that this blog was discussing.

I'm pulling this post until the confusion clears.

Is Democracy in America a Useful Fiction?

TruthDig has posted an essay by Chris Hedges entitled "Democracy in America is a Useful Fiction." Hedges has long been warning that the U.S. has become a proto-fascist state. Hedges is much more pessimistic than I am, but, as the "military-industrial complex" (President Eisenhower's term) , the "terror-industrial complex" (Colin Powell's term) and multinational corporate "persons" (U.S. Supreme Court's term) secure more and more power, his warnings appear to be increasingly relevant.

Here's an insightful paragraph from Hedges latest screed:

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

Harvest of Rage

Since Joseph Farah at WorldNet Daily maligned me for saying there are "extremists" within the Christian faith, a number of right-wing bloggers have echoed his statements over the internet. In addition to denying Christian extremism, Farah and his blogging buddies are distorting the record regarding the beliefs of Timothy McVeigh. They contend that McVeigh distanced himself from Christianity in an interview he gave to Time Magazine in 2001. Did he? Here's what he said:

TIME: Are you religious?

MCVEIGH: I was raised Catholic. I was confirmed Catholic (received the sacrament of confirmation). Through my military years, I sort of lost touch with the religion. I never really picked it up, however I do maintain core beliefs.

TIME: Do you believe in God?

MCVEIGH: I do believe in a God, yes. But that's as far as I want to discuss. If I get too detailed on some things that are personal like that, it gives people an easier way alienate themselves from me and that's all they are looking for now.

All this text discloses is that McVeigh distanced himself from Catholicism, not Christianity. It also reveals that he did not want to discuss his faith further because he knew most people would find it repulsive. So, what was repulsive about his faith? Was he an atheist? No. Was he a secular humanist? No. What do we know about his beliefs at the time he was bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City?

There is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was deeply influenced by the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity is a profoundly racist and theocratic form of faith that developed in the late 1970's and spread like wildfire through rural communities throughout the U.S. in the 1980's.

The chief guidebook for Christian Identity eschatology is The Turner Diaries written by William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. The book is a fictional account of the "day of judgment" for which Identity adherents are preparing. Here's a summary of the book by Joel Dyer, author of Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning (1997) -- by far the best explanation in print for what led to the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City:

In his book The Turner Diaries, Pierce describes a race war that ends with the government being overthrown. Pierce’s book is more than fiction. The most radical elements of the movement view it as a vision or blueprint for action. In the book, the Aryan forces used armored car robberies to finance their revolution. In real life, the radical white supremacist group called "the Order" used Pierce's book as a guide to their armored car robberies in the Northwest. In the book, the revolutionaries blow up a federal building as part of their antigovernment war. In real life, the bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Building was almost a carbon copy of the incident in Pierce's book. As I mentioned earlier, Timothy McVeigh had photocopies of a portion of The Turner Diaries with him when he was arrested. McVeigh also sold copies of the book at gun shows around the country.

Later in Dyer's book he describes the obsession McVeigh had with The Turner Diaries:

And then there was The Turner Diaries. Friends have said that it was McVeigh’s favorite book. Some accounts have described McVeigh’s appreciation for William Pierce’s violent book of racist fiction as something more than literary zeal. McVeigh is said to have slept with the book under his pillow. After leaving the [military] service, McVeigh sold the book at gun shows, sometimes for less than his own cost. Fellow gun-show merchants said it was as if the contents of the book were his religion and he was looking for recruits. The Turner Diaries apparently changed McVeigh's life.

Some researchers deny that William Pierce is an adherent of Christian Identity faith and contend that he merely uses God-talk to appeal to his more religious readers. Pierce's personal religious beliefs are not at issue here. In my opinion, McVeigh was one of those who responded to the traces of Christian Identity beliefs that are woven into Pierce's book. This opinion is supported by Dyer's belief that McVeigh felt the need to receive advanced authorization from a secret common-law or military court:

By holding a military court, hard-core radicals can keep their violent plans a secret, while still using the idea of a court to cleanse their conscience. Based upon the movement's almost sacred need to justify its actions, we can assume that for many pipe-bomb incidents, assassinations, church burnings, and acts of paper terrorism, there is a cell of at least five people involved and that there was a common-law or military court trial that took place beforehand, . . .

Did the cell of radicals who blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City hold a military-style trial beforehand? I suspect the answer is yes. Many of my contacts within the movement have told me it's likely such a trial took place. But they deny having any firsthand knowledge of such an event.

Dyer does not mention all the evidence that exists that ties McVeigh to the Christian Identity movement. More than anyone else, Dyer provides the deepest insight into the traumatic psychological experiences that have created a void in the lives of people who find Christian Identity appealing.

In a nutshell, orthodox Christianity ignored the pain and neglected the injustices that were being inflicted on rural America by our government. Christian Identity offered those in the absolute depths of despair convenient scapegoats to blame. Then they offered them a revolutionary purpose that gives meaning to their lives and hope for the future. Unfortunately, the future they hope for has little room for people of other races or of other faiths.

Dyer's worry about the possibility of upheaval at the turn of the century is now dated, but the subtitle of his book still holds true. Oklahoma City was only the beginning of the harvest of rage. Our current "Great Recession" has recreated and compounded conditions almost identical to those that led to rage in the heartland in the mid 1990's. This time the entire country is being affected.

It's time for Dyer to do an update and revision of his outstanding book.

Poteau Does Ten Commandments Monument Right

The Daily Oklahoman is reporting that residents of Poteau in Le Flore County Oklahoma have erected a Ten Commandments monument on the lawn of a bank in their city.

Originally intented for the lawn of their county courthouse, citizens of Poteau decided that private property, rather than public property, was a better place to put monuments that endorse religion.

Kudos to the citizens of Poteau for realizing that the government must remain benevolently neutral in regard to religion.