Candidates & Politicians Get Rel

Candidates & Politicians Get Religion

"Nutcases" Pushed To The Side
After Campaign Is Over

Baptists First Approved Of Hitler

McCain Gets Religion

July 17, 2008 (Aug 22,2008)
McCain Gets Religion
By Bill Berkowitz
IPS News
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43220

OAKLAND, California, Jul 17 - Over the course of the past few months, Senator John McCain, the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee, accepted and then rejected the endorsements of the controversial pastors Rod Parsley and John Hagee, after media reports about Parsley's vitriol toward Islam and Hagee's views (on) the Holocaust…. He also met with the venerated Reverend Billy Graham and his son Franklin at the family's North Carolina retreat, courted conservative Catholic leaders, and got together with a bunch of religious right leaders in Ohio. In early July, McCain -- who eight years ago had called the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson "agents of intolerance" -- finally received the endorsement of a batch of national conservative religious leaders.

More than 70 evangelical leaders met in Denver, Colorado and, amid concerns expressed about the state of their movement and the religious authenticity of McCain, they came to the conclusion that endorsing the Arizona senator was the only viable option (that is if you only follow mainstream media). "The alternative is so bad we must support John McCain," said longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, the head of the Eagle Forum. In a separate interview with OneNewsNow, Mark DeMoss, president of The DeMoss Group, a high-powered public relations outfit that works with evangelical groups, suggested now that McCain has received the endorsement from these leaders, he shouldn't do anything to diminish that endorsement, no doubt referring to the Hagee affair.

McCain recently came out in support of Proposition 8, the California Marriage Protection Act which states: "Only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." While Christian conservatives were happy to receive that endorsement, McCain has opposed one of their key agenda items: a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Regarding the issue of whether gays should be allowed to adopt children, McCain said he opposed gay adoption. A short time later, his campaign released a statement muddying the waters. When asked recently by The New York Times about his Christian faith, McCain responded that he considers himself a Christian. "I attend church, my faith has sustained me in very difficult times. But I think it depends on what you call an "evangelical Christian." Because there are some people who may not share my views on -- I mean, that covers a lot of ground. But I certainly consider myself a Christian."

Bush considers himself a Christian, yet he says the Muslims worship the same God as Christians worship. Any Bible believing Christian can point to the scriptures in the Bible which show this is false and not a belief of a true, born-again Christian. Senator Hillary Clinton and ex-president Clinton both consider themselves Christians, yet their works have proven them to be wolves in sheep's clothing. Jimmy Carter claims to be a Christian yet he sold out God's Promised Land to terrorists and honors terrorists above God's chosen people, the Jews (even to this very day). Stalin used the Orthodox Church just as Vladamir Putin does today. Hitler quoted scripture in his speeches, claimed citizens should obey him on the premise of Romans chapter 13, and used the Catholic Church to help in the holocaust of God's chosen people, the Jews. The list goes on naming politicians who claim to be Christians in order to secure the vote. A true, Bible believing Christian is wise to these ploys.

Book Says Bush Administration Just Using Christians

Oct. 13, 2006
Book says Bush just using Christians
‘Tempting Faith’ author David Kuo
By Jonathan Larsen

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities. The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book. He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.” “National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races. Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least partially… to the conferences we had launched two years before.”

With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his office’s events, in part because so much of the debate centered on issues of separation of church and state. In fact, the Bush administration often promoted the faith-based agenda by claiming that existing government regulations were too restrictive on religious organizations seeking to serve the public. Substantiating that claim proved difficult, Kuo says. “Finding these examples became a huge priority.… If President Bush was making the world a better place for faith-based groups, we had to show it was really a bad place to begin with. But, in fact, it wasn’t that bad at all.” In fact, when Bush asks Kuo how much money was being spent on “compassion” social programs, Kuo claims he discovered the amount was $20 million a year less than during the Clinton Administration.

Stalin's Religion In the Soviet Union

Aug 17, 2008
Stalin's Religion In the Soviet Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Religion

Stalin's role in the Russian Orthodox Church: Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges of 1937–1938. During World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, after the NKVD had recruited the new metropolitan, the first after the revolution, as a secret agent. Thousands of parishes were reactivated until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time. Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted.

The Russian Orthodox Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. An Act of Canonical Communion was signed on May 17, 2007, followed immediately by a full restoration of communion with the Moscow Patriarchate; there remain some issues not fully healed to the present day. Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.

Hillary Gets Religion

February 24, 2005
Hillary Gets Religion
from OpinionJournal.com
http://holycoast.blogspot.com/2005/02/hillary-gets-religion.html

Peggy Noonan sees right through the Hillary religious rhetoric: Hillary. Forget her prepared speeches; put aside her moderate statements on Iraq and abortion. This is how you know she's running for president in 2008. Ten days ago a reporter interviewed her in the halls of the Senate (another kind of cloister) and asked if she planned to run for president. She did not say, "I'm too busy serving the people of New York to think about the future." She did not say, "Oh, I already have a heckuva lot on my plate." She said, "I have more than I can say grace over right now."

I have more than I can say grace over right now. What a wonderfully premeditated ad lib for the Age of Red State Dominance. I suggested a few weeks ago that Mrs. Clinton was about to get very, very religious. But her words came across as pious and smarmy, like Tammy Faye with a law degree. Maybe she still thinks in stereotypes; maybe she thinks that's what little Christian ladies talk like while they stay home baking cookies. Whatever, it was almost as good as her saying, "I'm running, is this not obvious to even the slowest of you?"

The Religious Affiliation of

President William Jefferson Clinton

July 04, 2000
The Religious Affiliation of
President William Jefferson Clinton
http://www.adherents.com/people/pc/Bill_Clinton.html

Bill Clinton: Although a Southern Baptist, many in the SBC take issue with Pres. Clinton on a variety of matters. At the 1999 Southern Baptist annual convention (Atlanta, GA), formal resolutions were passed condemning recent actions by the president, including his declaration of June as "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" and the appointment of James Hormel (a homosexual) as the ambassador to Luxembourg. Resolutions calling for his home church in Little Rock to initiate formal church discipline against him were ruled out of order. The SBC also voted (1994) to applaud statements which rebuked Pres. Clinton for his pro-abortion stance. Monica Lewinksy does not figure into his religion.

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.... Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Matt. 7:17-20

How Baptists Assessed Hitler

Sept 8, 1982
How Baptists Assessed Hitler
by William Loyd Allen
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1336

William Loyd Allen teaches church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is a doctoral candidate. He is pastor of Rolling Fork Baptist Church in Gleanings. This article appeared in the Christian Century September 1-8, 1982, p. 890. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. On August 4, 1934, thousands of delegates to the Baptist World Alliance congress in Berlin filed into the Tagungshalle, where Adolf Hitler had recently addressed as many as 15,000 Germans. John W. Bradbury, delegate and Boston pastor, wrote of his journey into the Fatherland:

Crossing the border was a dreaded experience. After all I had read in American and foreign newspapers I was prepared for a tense atmosphere. The impression lingered around me that police would be everywhere; spies would be listening to our talk; danger lurked around the corner; and many similar kinds of bogies. Then, besides, it was the day following the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna. Really I dreaded a repetition of August 1914 [Watchman. Examiner XXII 34 (August 23, 1934)]. As he entered the hall, Bradbury saw a huge painting of historic Baptist figures William Carey, J. G. Oncken and Charles H. Spurgeon standing at the foot of a cross. Alongside this trinity hung an equally imposing flag of the Third Reich -- a vivid reminder of the bloody June purge of many of Hitler’s former friends and the repression of the Jews.

John R. Sampey, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, wrote: While everywhere the Baptists from other lands were treated with marked courtesy, some of us felt that our German Baptist brethren were uncertain and disturbed concerning their future. They talked little, but the atmosphere seemed to some of us charged with uneasiness and fear. . . . Our Baptist brethren in Germany face a very grave crisis. They will find it difficult to be loyal both to Hitler and the Lord Jesus [Western Recorder CVIII 34 (September 6, 1934)].

Unfortunately, not all Baptist delegates to Berlin interpreted the tragedy of the German situation as perceptively as Sampey did. Some responded favorably to Hitler’s fascism. “Quite a number of correspondents of our Southern Baptist papers writing about the BWA seemed to have a kindly feeling and a good word for Hitler and his regime,” Wrote R. H. Pitt in Religious Herald, singling out one variety of Baptists who seemed particularly vulnerable to German propaganda. Victor I. Masters of the Western Recorder went even further, writing, “Most of the testimony we have from our brethren who went to the Baptist World Alliance in Berlin has seemed with great spontaneity and readiness to accept the opinion that all is well in Germany -- especially in regard to religious liberty.” Even Dr. Bradbury, the Boston pastor who dreaded crossing the German border, changed his mind about the Nazis.

Why the about-face? Knowing now the depth of the violence which was beginning to grip Berlin in 1934, we wonder why some Baptists, particularly Americans, were susceptible to Hitler’s propaganda. What in their appraisal of foreign affairs allowed them to be seduced by Nazism? How could they support a regime so incompatible with peace and justice?

For one thing, Baptist delegates tended to assess larger social issues through the narrow gauge of a simplistic personal ethic. The Alliance noted, “It is reported that Chancellor Adolf Hitler gives to the temperance movement the prestige of his personal example since he neither uses intoxicants nor smokes” (Official Report of the Fifth Baptist World Congress). Even Dr. Sampey, wary of the Nazis, cautioned against too-hasty judgment of a leader who had stopped German women from smoking cigarettes and wearing red lipstick in public. After being so afraid to enter Germany, Dr. Bradbury, once there, found himself delighted with the forced morality of the fascists. He wrote: It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown. The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries (Watchman-Examiner XXII 37 (September 13, 1934).

Surely a leader who does not smoke or drink, who wants women to be modest, and who is against pornography cannot be all bad, or so the reasoning went. As M. E. Aubrey of England observed in the Baptist Times, Hitler had “brought almost a new Puritanism, which makes its appeal to our Baptist friends, and for the sake of which they can overlook much that cuts across their natural desires.” Baptists from the United States ignored the fact that interpreters were barred from even rendering the word “democracy” in Aubrey’s speech. Priority was placed on personal habits, to the detriment of larger, more vital issues.

Charles F. Leek, a delegate from Montgomery, said it more plainly: Evangelical Christianity transcends all political and social systems and finds its own manner of expression regardless. Without compromising precepts and principles it may accommodate its means and methods to shifting conditions [Alabama Baptist XCIX 36 (September 6, 1934)]. Some Baptists believed that evangelism and the world order existed on separate planes that never intersected, and that the church belonged only on the evangelistic plane. As long as governments like Hitler’s did not interfere with soul-saving, they could be tolerated.

Such a separation of spheres of reality opened the way for a militaristic and racist nationalism. Beginning with the statement “The order of redemption is effective in the Church, but does not shape the world as a whole,” Paul Schmidt, editor of the German Baptist paper Wahrheitszeuge, argued (as reported in the Official Report of the congress) that vigorous races overcoming weaker ones by force is an expression of natural law. Stating that “we must recognize the facts,” he urged the congress to stop expecting “developments that the Church cannot affect and that Jesus clearly would not bring about.” These arguments, based on an anti-Semitic motive, must have sounded familiar to Baptists of the American South. They used some of the same rationalizations to justify discrimination against blacks.

A final reason for Baptist vulnerability to Hitler’s 1934 policies was a single-issue criterion for appraising foreign governments: anticommunism. In 1934, if a government was anticommunist, it deserved recognition and support. Dr. Leek wrote: Our observation is, that while Hitlerism is doubtless not the ultimate end, for Germany directly or Europe indirectly, it is for Germany a safe step in the right direction. Nazism has at least been a bar to the universal boast of Bolshevism [Alabama Baptist XCIX 36 (September 6, 1934)]. Will Baptists choose to follow these traditional Baptist principles of peace and justice or pluck the bitter fruit of violence, whose seeds were planted by a minority 48 years ago? The numbers, wealth and fervor of Baptists in America make an answer to this question important to all Christians.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits (Matt. 7:15-16).