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Overviews and Backgrounders on the Christian Right

Below on this page: BattleCry, or Teen Mania, the aggressive youth movement of the Christian right | More overviews and backgrounders

Conversation with Dr. David P. Gushee, founder of Evangelicals for Human Rights

The interviewer is Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak of JewsOnFirst.org, January 11, 2007

David P. Gushee, PhD, is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy and Senior Fellow of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University, a Baptist school in Jackson, Tennessee.

This wide-ranging, half-hour recorded conversation moves from Gushee's founding work with Evangelicals for Human Rights and his argument that torture is always wrong, to Jewish-Christian relations, then to Christian Zionism. That discussion proceeds to considering end-times scenarios and Christian environmental activism, in which Gushee is involved. He also mentions the book he is currently writing about an emerging evangelical center -- as contrasted with the Christian right.

The conversation concludes with a brief discussion about what a centrist evangelical position on homosexual relationships would look like. Gushee, who blogs at CounterCulture, says he rejects the hatred and homophobia expressed by religious right organizations. Click here to listen to the conversation.

BattleCry, or Teen Mania, the aggressive youth movement of the Christian right

Teenage Holy War

Behind-the-scenes with the most militant Christian youth cruade in America.

By Jeff Sharlet, Rolling Stone via The Revealer, April 12, 2007

The following is republished from Rolling Stone #1024, on newsstands until April 19th. The first section of the article is excerpted at RollingStone.com, along with videos of the organization discussed below and a very heated debate between admirers and critics of the BattleCry movement.

This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, "We won't be silent anymore!" Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off "harlots and adultery"; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. "Gimme what you got!" she shouts. They dance -- hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they're ready. They're about to accept "the mark of a warrior," explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England. Nearly three centuries later, these 4,000 teens are about to become "branded by God." It's like getting your head shaved when you join the Marines, Luce says, only the kids get to keep their hair. His assistants roll out a cowhide draped over a sawhorse, and Luce presses red-hot iron into the dead flesh, projecting a close-up of sizzling cow skin on giant movie screens above the stage.

"When you enlist in the military, there's a code of honor," Luce preaches, "same as being a follower of Christ." His Christian code requires a "wartime mentality": a "survival orientation" and a readiness to face "real enemies." The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the "techno-terrorists" of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. "Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world," Luce writes, "so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today's culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real."

Luce is forty-five, his brown hair floppy, his lips pouty. On the screens above the stage, his green eyes blink furiously. "The devil hates us," he exhorts, "and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians. Jesus? He got mad!" Luce considers most evangelicals too soft, too ready to pass off as piety their preference for a bland suburban lifestyle. He hates what he sees as the weakness of "accepting" Christ, of "trusting" the Lord. "I want an attacking church!" he shouts, his normally smooth tones raw and desperate and alarming. He isn't just looking for followers -- he wants "stalkers" who'll bring a criminal passion to their pursuit of godliness.

Cue Christian metal on the mammoth screens flanking the stage: "Frontline," a music video produced at Luce's Honor Academy in east Texas for the band Pillar. It opens with a broken guitar magically reassembling itself, a redemptive reversal of four decades of rock & roll nihilism. Then comes the gospel: "Everybody with your fist raised high/Let me hear your battle cry!" Continue.

Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

By Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times, October 6, 2006

Report notes that in "an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement" that evangelical youth are becoming alienated. Ron Luce, founder of BattleCry and Teen Mania organized the meetings, which featured such speakers as Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard. Goodstein notes the huge numbers of teens involved in Luce's activities and quotes several experts who view the warnings of lost teens as alarmist. Click here.

Battle Cry for Theocracy

By Sunsara Taylor, TruthDig, May 11, 2006

Editor’s note: In this opinion piece, a young activist explores the frightening world of a Christian evangelical youth movement that is holding rock concerts and rallies at city halls nationwide this weekend. (First column a series of three.)

If you’ve been waiting to get alarmed until the Christian fascist movement started filling stadiums with young people and hyping them up to do battle in “God’s army,” wait no longer.

In recent weeks, BattleCry, a Christian fundamentalist youth movement, has attracted more than 25,000 people to mega-rally rock concerts in San Francisco and Detroit, and this weekend it plans to fill Wachovia Stadium in Philadelphia.

The leaders of BattleCry claim that their religion and values are under attack, but amid spectacular light shows, Hummers, Navy SEALs and military imagery on stage, it is BattleCry that has declared war on everyone else. Its leader, Ron Luce, insists: “This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent—the ‘forceful’ ones—will lay hold of the kingdom.”

More backgrounders and overviews

The Evangelical Crackup

By David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2007

In this widely discussed article, Kirkpatrick argues that the Christian right is coming apart as a national movement, losing its power in the Republican Party, while moderate evangelicals are diluting its monolithic focus on the wedge issues of homosexuality and abortion. (We do not contest these points, although we believe that Kirkpatrick, as other writers, misses the continuing, and in some cases growing power of the religious right on the state and local level.) He writes:

Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.
Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans. Click here.

The Evangelical Surprise

Frances FitzGerald, New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007

Last year the Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio, became a regular stop for journalists covering trends in Christian right politics. In 2004 its pastor, Russell Johnson, helped organize a campaign for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and succeeded in having it put on the ballot for the November elections. It passed with 63 percent of the vote, and many believed that it gave George W. Bush his narrow margin of victory in the state and returned him to the White House. The following year, Johnson launched the Ohio Restoration Project with the goal of recruiting two thousand "patriot pastors" to register three hundred new voters each and bring them to the polls for "values candidates" in 2006 and beyond.

Johnson's meetings and rallies began with a chorus singing hymns while images of the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and American troops in combat moved across huge video screens overhead. Johnson would then speak of "the secular jihad against people of faith" and warn Christians against standing by, as Neville Chamberlain did, while the Jews died in Europe. Talking with visitors to his nondenominational evangelical church, Johnson, energetic and a skillful debater, spoke forcefully on "the bigotry against the teaching of Creationism," the war against Christmas, and Roe v. Wade, which, he said, had led to the crisis in Social Security by killing millions of American taxpayers. He also described how he worked with other state activists, some with ties to national organizations, to create computerized lists of sympathizers in conservative churches throughout Ohio, and to follow up with the distribution of voting guides and the recruitment of volunteers to bring church members to the polls. Continue

Ted Haggard's Hell on Earth

A trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma lays bare the fundamentalism that made the disgraced pastor Ted Haggard live in terror of his own homosexuality.

Sarah Posner, AlterNet, March 23, 2007.

According to Bishop Carlton Pearson, Ted Haggard isn't going to hell. He's already in hell.

Pearson, 53, was a leading light of the contemporary Pentecostal -- or charismatic -- movement until he rejected the concept of hell a few years ago. Hell, Pearson says, does not exist. Salvation by Jesus, he maintains, is not required for eternal grace. Everyone is saved. The only hell is right here on earth, a creation of fundamentalism, scriptural literalism and the terror that fills the hearts of fundamentalists at each impure thought, each shameful moment of sexual longing. "I'm not trying to convert anybody," Pearson told me recently. "I'm just trying to convince everybody that they're loved. Ultimately redeemed, whoever they are." Pearson calls the notion that a supposedly merciful God would torture people in an eternal hell "absurd and vulgar." It's no wonder then, that Pearson was roundly condemned by his peers, including the pre-scandal Haggard, for his radical views. Haggard, Pearson said, "denounced me and said, 'hell is a physical place.' ... Well, he's right, and he's in that hell right now."

Pearson has known Haggard since they were classmates at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa in the 1970s. ORU, founded in 1963 by the televangelist and faith healer Oral Roberts, demanded "holiness" and required students to sign an honor code pledging not to drink, smoke, dance, party, have sex, or even think about sex. Continue

The State of the Religious Right: 2007

God’s Lawgivers? Carrying the Water for the Religious Right in Texas Government

Texas Freedom Network Education Fund, 2nd annual report on the religious right in Texas, February 8, 2007

This report, according to the Texas Freedom Network, "takes a close look at state officials who carry the water for the religious right in Texas. The report describes how Terri Leo, R-Spring, and other far-right bomb throwers on the State Board of Education are dragging our public schools into the culture wars. It also profiles key legislators - including newly elected state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, and state Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford - who are leading the assault on religious freedom and individual liberties at the Capitol."

The report includes: histories of state legislation on school vouchers, sex education, stem cell research and textbook censorship. Additionally it contains a descriptive list of religious right groups in the state and an analysis of the 2006 Texas Republican Party platform. Click here.

Evangelicals feud as religious right founders leave public stage

Associated Press, The Boston Herald, March 19, 2007

As they court the evangelicals who have become so crucial to their party, Republican presidential candidates are stepping into the middle of a family fight.

Christian conservative activists are more split than ever over whether to keep the movement’s focus on abortion, marriage and sexual chastity - or scrap that approach as too narrow.

The founders of the religious right, now in the twilight of their leadership, see even the suggestion of expanding the agenda as a dangerous distraction. In public, and sometimes in personal ways, they are trying to beat back the challenge. Continue.

The Theocratic Agenda Is Heading for a Statehouse Near You

Well-coordinated "faith-based" initiatives and anti-evolution lobbying in state capitols from New Jersey to Colorado signal a stealth national strategy by Religious Right organizations.

Rob Boston, Church and State (American United for the Separation of Chruch and State), March 10, 2007.

Utah seems like a strange state to experiment with voucher subsidies for religious and other private schools.

Politically and culturally, the Beehive State is dominated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Seventy percent of the state's residents belong to the church. Most Mormons are content to send their children to public schools, where they are often released during the school day for religious instruction offsite. There aren't even many private schools in Utah. Continue

Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouse

Fueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director

Bill Berkowitz, Media Transparency, February 5, 2007

As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s. William Martin, the author of "With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America," pointed out that after Weyrich came to Washington in 1969, he "received a revelation of how he might accomplish his dream [bringing together working class Catholics and evangelical Protestants] when he attended a political strategy session run by liberal operatives." Continue

Hand That Feeds

By cyncooper, Talk2Action.org, March 3, 2007

Wade Horn has been very kind to Religious Right organizations, including the one that he founded in 1994 with Religious Right money -- the National Fatherhood Initiative in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Appointed by President Bush as Assistant Secretary for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services, Horn oversees an annual budget of 47 billion dollars. Horn has shown that he knows all about the hand that feeds, and now, he has taken care to feed the National Fatherhood Initiative with a "Capacities Building" grant in the amount of $999,534 from a program he started in his agency and called by the familiar-ringing name of the "Responsible Fatherhood Initiative." Continue.

Learning to Cry for the Culture

Let's remember Francis Schaeffer's most crucial legacy--tears.

John Fischer, Christianity Today March 19, 2007

He was a small man -- barely five feet in his knickers, knee socks, and ballooning white shirts. For two weeks, first as a freshman and then again as a senior, I sat in my assigned seat at Wheaton College's chapel and heard him cry. He was the evangelical conscience at the end of the 20th century, weeping over a world that most of his peers dismissed as not worth saving, except to rescue a few souls in the doomed planet's waning hours. While Hal Lindsey was disseminating an exit strategy in The Late Great Planet Earth, Francis Schaeffer was trying to understand and care for people still trapped on the planet in The God Who Is There. Continue

The Kingdom and Power of Mac Hammond

The leader of a Brooklyn Park megachurch sees no conflict among his faith, wealth and politics. Others believe he crosses lines that should be more sharply drawn.

By Jon Tevlin, Star Tribune (Minneapolis), February 10, 2007

In the early days, Mac Hammond's church was a hotel room. His congregation was his family and a handful of supporters. He had studied English, not theology, and taken a few Dale Carnegie and self-help courses. Continue.

Straw Jeremiads and Apologists for Christian Nationalism

By Chip Berlet, (Senior Analyst, Political Research Associates), February 12, 2007

At Talk to Action we try to remain respectful of religious and spiritual beliefs (and secular, agnostic and atheist beliefs), which we feel is the intent and content of the founding documents of our pluralist society. We also try to maintain a distinction between serious concerns over theocratic, dominionist, and Christian Nationalist tendencies, and hyperbolic claims that tend to demonize people of faith and exaggerate the problem in a way that paints all Christians with a broad brush.

Now the backlash against our concerns (and those of others worried about these trends) has reached a new level of sophistication in right-wing intellectual journals. In their recent articles, Ross Douthat in First Things and Mary Eberstadt in Policy Review serve as apologists for Christian Nationalist tendencies by creating what I call Straw Jeremiads, and then easily setting them on fire. Continue.

Haggard’s mecca materialized, but vision may now be fading

By Paul Asay and Dave Philipps, The Gazette, December 31, 2006

Colorado Springs has been called an evangelical mecca, the Vatican of the Religious Right, a New Jerusalem. And it didn’t get that way by accident.

God chose this city, the Rev. Ted Haggard said. He said he saw it all in a vision 22 years ago: The city would grow from an unremarkable Western town into a fountain of devotion splashing Christian thought around the world.

One by one, the pieces of his vision fell into place. His church, which started in an unfinished basement, grew to become the largest in the state. Prominent radio personality James Dobson brought Focus on the Family to the city. A landslide of Christian nonprofits followed. Colorado Springs was home to two of the most powerful evangelicals in the country.

Haggard was a presidential adviser and political power broker. This summer, he sat in his book-lined office at New Life Church, smiled and said: "It’s happened. My whole vision has happened." Continue.

Click here for the Gazette's interactive map of these ministries' global reach.

Second evangelical exits Colo. church under cloud

By Alan Gomez, USA TODAY, December 19, 2006

An ongoing review of staff members at New Life Church initiated in the wake of the Rev. Ted Haggard's dismissal has resulted in the resignation of a pastor who oversaw a youth ministry at the Colorado Springs mega-church.

Christopher Beard, 35, who founded the "twentyfourseven" ministry that taught leadership skills to young adults, stepped down Friday after admitting to several acts of poor judgment, including an incident of "sexual misconduct." Continue.

Church and state

From the pulpit, conservative politics

By Peter Smith, The Courier-Journal, (Louisville, Kentucky), November 26, 2006

When a Louisville megachurch held a controversial national rally in support of conservative federal judicial nominations last year, political satirist Jon Stewart quipped:

"Megachurches -- I can't be the only one frightened when our houses of worship sound like they could take on Godzilla."

Stewart, host of "The Daily Show" on the Comedy Central network, was summing up fears that megachurches have emerged as a political force at a time when people's politics are increasingly defined by their religious commitment.

The more religious voters are, as measured by how often they attend church, the more they tend to vote Republican, according to surveys in recent elections.

The rise of the conservative Christian political movement in recent decades has come from many sources -- including publications, direct-mail appeals, Web sites, activist organizations such as the Christian Coalition and broadcasters such as Jerry Falwell. And megachurches have played a role, too. Continue.

The Top 10 Power Brokers of the Religious Right

By Rob Boston, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, Posted on Alternet, July 7, 2006.

Boston lists the ten most powerful religious right groups in descending order of revenue and provides brief profiles. Continue

Middle America: Welcome to the centre of the USA

Rupert Cornwell, Independent online, May 19 2006

Cornwell visits the "dead center" of the US, Kansas, to report on "malaise" reflected in the Republicans' declining polls. He writes:

... the state is a cameo of the political tensions gnawing at the entire country - so much so that a book, What's the Matter with Kansas? last year became a national bestseller. But the title of the British edition, What's the Matter with America?, was even more indicative. What has happened in down-home Kansas, for the author Thomas Frank, illustrates what is happening everywhere in the US. The conservative Republican movement, led by Ronald Reagan, that gained its grip on Kansas, has gained a grip on the country, argues Frank, by luring erstwhile Democrats to vote for the party of the rich and big business, persuading them to place conservative cultural values ahead of their basic economic interests...

But proof perfect of Thomas Frank's theory of political inversion in Kansas came the evening before. I was having dinner in the Topeka Steak House, a rough and ready place a few miles east of town, where customers roll up in their pick-up trucks and SUVs and most are on their way home by 8 pm. I was reading What's the Matter with Kansas? over a decent ribeye steak when my waitress saw the title and asked what it was about.

"Oh," I replied, "It says that ordinary people in Kansas have been duped into voting against their economic interests when they back Republican candidates." But the waitress, a mother of three called Linda McGinty, was having none of it. "Democrats just support programmes to keep themselves in power," she told me. What about the evolution row, I asked. "I feel we shouldn't teach about Darwin unless we teach about intelligent design," she replied, adding that she herself was a creationist. "This country was founded according to God's law, and we did so well. Now we're going the other way, and look what's happening."

Click here to read Cornwell's thoughtful article.

Wing and a Prayer: Religious Right Got Bush Elected - Now They Are Fighting Each Other

Campaigners who fail to keep the hardline faith face threats and intimidation

by Stephen Bates, published on May 31, 2006 by the Guardian / UK, via Common Dreams

There's nothing new here, but it's interesting to read how the British reporter interprets the religious right for his compatriots. For example:

Such partisan tactics are perhaps to be expected in a divisive political climate, with both sides excoriating each other in moralistic terms in a way that has not been seen in Europe for many years - and which is increasingly incomprehensible to many Europeans.

To Judge Roy Moore, who was unseated as chief justice of the Alabama supreme court in 2003 for refusing to remove a five-tonne granite monument on which were carved the Ten Commandments from the court's foyer, that just shows how far Europe has slid.

Judge Moore, campaigning in the state's primaries to supplant the incumbent Republican governor, during a visit to address a women's club in the town of Enterprise, told the Guardian America was falling into Godlessness, too: "That's it, we're going the same way England is now, without God. Is it true that Islam is taking over there?" he asked.

This is a common idea in rightwing circles and, if some of the arguments sound overheated - a recent radio discussion in Virginia on stem-cell research took it as read that only Christians were capable of moral decisions - the religious right has reason to fear that its reach is declining.

Please click here for the report.

When Would Jesus Bolt?

Meet Randy Brinson, the advance guard of evangelicals leaving the GOP.

By Amy Sullivan, Washington Monthly, April 2006

Sullivan reports that evangelical Christian activists and voters are turning away from the Republicans. Her main case in point is Randy Brinson, founder of Redeem the Vote, who was welcomed into the highest echelons of the religious right and decided it wasn't for him.

When religious conservatives convened a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington a few weeks after the election, Brinson was invited. The room was full of men who had played some role in keeping the White House in Bush's hands. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention sat at Brinson's table. Rick Warren, author of the bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life, wasn't far away. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) came over from the Hill to talk with the group. The mood was celebratory, but with an aggressive, hostile edge. They had won, and now they wanted to collect.

The main item of business that day was what to do with Santorum's colleague, the pesky pro-choice Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.). Specter held a crucial position as chair of the Judiciary Committee and had recently outraged this group by telling the press that he would apply “no litmus test” to judicial nominees. Now they wanted him gone, ousted, stripped of power. When, in the midst of escalating rhetoric, Brinson spoke up to suggest that perhaps punishing Specter wasn't the wisest decision, the idea wasn't well received. “That,” he says, “was my first inkling that I wasn't one of them.” If being a player in this world meant calling for the heads of moderate Republicans and ginning up fake controversies like a supposed “war on Christmas,” Brinson wasn't terribly interested.

Brinson is now working with the Democrats. Click here for Sullivan's report.

The Devil Inside

Bob Moser, The Nation, March 30, 2006

Moser focuses on the corrosive effect of the Abramoff scandal on Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition leader, now Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia. The report suggests that Christian right "values voters" may be discouraged by the taint of sin on Reed and others and turn away from politics and voting. Click here

Right Is Might for GOP's Aspirants

By Janet Hook, The Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2006

Even as some Christian conservative voters are turning left, Republican presidential hopefuls are outdoing one another to appeal to religious right voters. Click here to read the report.

Megachurches drawing a big flock

Large congregations rely on conservative values, strong pastors, study finds

By John Blake, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 1, 2006

A survey of megachurches found that they are not a transitory phenomenon, and their size may enable them to become racially diverse. "The survey reveals that virtually all megachurches share common traits of a dynamic senior pastor, emphasis on conservative values, and building small groups to offset its size." Click here to read the report.

See also the study on which the article is based. (Click here)

Public Radio series on "Christianity in the Public Square" surveys rise and role of religious right

National Public Radio, May 5-7, 2005

"In recent years, but especially since President Bush won re-election in November, religious conservatives have been fighting the culture wars with new assertiveness. In a five-part series, NPR's Religion Correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty examines the rise of conservative Christianity in public life." Series segments include: examinations of the putative "Christian character" of the US; the commonalities of conservative Catholics and Protestants; a struggle over a school health class curriculum; the fundamentalist legal powerhouse, Alliance Defense Fund; the institutions educating lawyers for the religious right. Click here for the main page of the series.

Soldiers of Christ I

Inside America's most powerful megachurch

By Jeff Sharlet, Harpers Magazine, Posted on Thursday, May 26, 2005. Originally from May 2005

Sharlet writes of the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, and more broadly, about the extremism that is cultivating itself in that city.

Some believers call the city the Wheaton of the West, in honor of Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian conservatism; others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vatican,” a phrase that says much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in history, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America. Evangelical activist groups (“parachurch” ministries, in the parlance) in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds, though a precise count is hard to specify. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce missionary guides, “family resources,” school curricula, financial advice, athletic training programs, Bibles for every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the ministries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose radio programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular), magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide.

Please click here for the report

A Nation Under God

By John Sugg, Mother Jones Magazine, December /January 2006

"Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today. The movement's founder, theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers-a number that includes many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades, from abortion to homeschooling.

"Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists; Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably the Southern Baptists." Click here to read this very important report on the Mother Jones website.

See also: Click here for an excellent chart, "Expanding Universe," by Frederick Clarkson in the same issue of Mother Jones, which maps the religious right as an astronomical chart -- with pop-up descriptions of each stellar body.

Just how monolithic are American Evangelicals?

Laura R. Olson, Niemann Watchdog, October 31, 2005.

"All the political emphasis on evangelicals has been on the Republican right," notes Clemson University Professor Laura R. Olson. "Is there such a thing as an evangelical left? One might think not, but in fact there are several evangelical interest groups that advocate moderate-to-progressive politics, especially regarding issues of poverty, racial justice, and the environment." Please click here to read the article.

Class Matters: On a Christian Mission to the Top

By Laurie Goodstein and David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, May 22, 2005

"Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical C.E.O.'s pray together on monthly conference calls, evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street and deep-pocketed evangelical donors gather at golf courses for conferences restricted to those who give more than $200,000 annually to Christian causes. Their growing wealth and education help explain the new influence of evangelicals in American culture and politics." This report focuses on evangelical missionaries to Ivy League colleges. Click here to read the report.

Schism Grows Between Religious Right and Left

By William Fisher, Inter Press News Agency, January 10, 2006

This report contrasts, revealingly, the top news stories of 2005 rated by religious right website readers and what the progressive magazine Sojourners considers its top achievements for 2005. Click here to read the report.

Christian colleges rebound

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, USA Today, December 14, 2005

"Enrollment has increased 70.6% since 1990, from 135,000 to 230,000, at the 102 evangelical schools belonging to the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Over the same period, enrollments at all public and private colleges increased by 12.8% and 28% respectively." Click here to read the report.