PublicEye.org: Christian Right & Theocracy

The New Christian Zionism and the Jews
A Love/Hate Relationship
By Rachel Tabachnick
The Public Eye

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel spoke at a Christians United for Israel (CUFI) event hosted by the controversial Christian Zionist John Hagee at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Internationally broadcast on GodTV, Hagee presented $9 million in donations to 29 Israeli and U.S. Jewish organizations. Read more...

The Politics of Schism in the Catholic Church
By Frank L. Cocozzelli
The Public Eye, Fall 2009

I heard recently from one of my regular readers (I’ll call her “Kathy”) who shared her concerns about the future of our shared faith. Like me, she is a Roman Catholic with liberal religious and political inclinations. And, like me, she was distressed by several recent major events in the Church: the Ryan Report documenting generations of sexual abuse by the clergy in Ireland, the hostility expressed by several American bishops towards Notre Dame University for inviting President Obama to give the commencement address, and the recent conversion of Florida’s Father Alberto Cutié to the Episcopal Church. Read more...

Younger Evangelicals
Where Will They Take the Christian Right?
By Pam Chamberlain
The Public Eye magazine, Spring 2009

Last October a chartered bus rolled deep through the South, its passengers college-aged young people drawing inspiration from the Freedom Riders of the 1960s. The black vinyl advertising plastered on the side broadcast the riders’ goals, “Equality Ride 2008: Faith in Action: Social Justice for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered People.” The bus brought young LGBTQ activists and their allies face to face with students at 15 Christian colleges in an attempt to generate more acceptance of homosexuality at evangelical schools.Read more...

Exporting the U.S. Christian Right's Agenda

While gender-based discrimination and oppression is nothing new in countries around the world, for the past decade the U.S. Christian Right has been exporting its camapaigns against reproductive rights and gay rights to countries around the world. Exporting homophobia and discrimination against the LGBTQ communities in Africa has entered a new phase. Meanwhile, there ae continued battles over access to abortion, not only in Africa, but in Europe, South and Central America, Asia, and South Asia. Read More...

The Culture Wars Are Still Not Over
The Religious Right in the States and Beyond
By Frederick Clarkson
The Public Eye magazine, Winter 2008

See Also: Culture Wars, Evangelicals, and Political Power
- by Chip Berlet and Frederick ClarksonIn the wake of pre-election punditry that the Religious Right is dead and that the so called Culture Wars are over, I wrote a piece for The Public Eye: “The Culture Wars Are Not Over: The Institutionalization of the Christian Right.”1 The year was 2001, what many now consider to have been the high watermark of the power and influence of the Religious Right in American politics. During the 2008 election season we have heard similar claims by Washington,D.C. insiders and pundits that the Religious Right is dead, dying, or irrelevant or that the culture wars are over or about to be. Such declarations are as wrong now as they were in 2001. Read more...

Post-Palin Feminism
By Abby Scher
The Public Eye magazine, Winter 2008

From the podium at the Christian Right’s Values Voter Summit in mid-September, National Review Institute’s Kate O’Beirne, 59, pronounced that the “selection of Sarah Palin [as the GOP vice presidential nominee] sounded the death knell of modern American feminism.” Read more...

PRA Exposes Racist Obama Charicatures at 2008 Christian Right Gathering

Chip Berlet exposes racist "Obama Waffles" on sale at Christian Right Values Voters Summit -- and wonders if there is a white supremacist subtext woven into the Christian Right. Read that and more coverage of the conference here.

Becoming a Christian Citizen
Electoral Lessons from the Religious Right for the Religious Left
By Frederick Clarkson
The Public Eye magazine, Fall 2008

The main reason why the Religious Right became powerful is not what most people may think. Some would undoubtedly point to the powerful communications media. Others might identify charismatic leaders, the development of“wedge issues,” or even changes in evangelical theology in the latter part of the twentieth century that supported, and even demanded, political action. All of these and more, especially taken together, were important factors. But the main reason for the Religious Right’s rise to power has been its capacity for political action, particularly electoral politics. Read More...

Living in the Gap
The Ideal and the Reality of the Christian Right Family
By Jeremy Adam Smith
The Public Eye magazine, Winter 2007

People who make it their business to track and fight the Right tend, with good reason, to focus on public, political activity, but the Christian Right sees the private home as a major arena of political struggle and a showcase for the world they want to live in. According to key thinkers, the single-family home - awash with enough sentiment to drown an entire city - might be the closest thing the Christian Right has to an actually existing utopian experiment. Read More...

Churches Under Seige
Exposing the Right's Attacks on Mainline Protestantism
By John Dorhauer
The Public Eye Magazine, Summer 2007

The Institute on Religion and Democracy is a well-funded, under the radar organization bent on fomenting dissent within and demoralizing from without Mainline Protestant denominations. It works by turning internal disagreements away from dialogue and into all out battles at which the very life of a congregation is at stake. Even if a church remains within a denomination, too often its social justice agenda is silenced. Read More...

PRA Live at Values Voters Summit

Visit PRA-Wire for special coverage of the Christian Right's upcoming national political conference, the 2009 "Values Voters" Summit in Washington, DC. This gathering of thousands of conservative Christian evangelical activists from around the country will feature leading Right Wing strategists addressing such issues as abortion, "the homosexual agenda," the threats posed to national security by immigration and Islam, racial reconciliation, and voter mobilization.

On the Christian Right

The U.S. Christian Right – the largest player in the "Religious Right" - is an overlapping network of religiously based social movements linked to the political realm through the Republican Party and groups such as the Family Research Council. Christians have always been active in the political and social life of the nation, but this recent manifestation grew as a backlash movement to the social liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s: civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights.

Dominionism is a trend in Protestant Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism that encourages not just active participation in civic life but also attempts to dominate the political process. This is based on the Bible's text in Genesis 1:26, which most mainline denominational Christians (Episcopal, Methodist, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian) interpret as meaning that God gave humankind dominion over the Earth as a mandate for stewardship rather than for asserting total control.

For the Christian Right, it justifies their campaign to re-establish America as the Christian nation it believes it once was. The Christian Right as primarily composed of three main groupings: Christian Conservatives, Christian Nationalists, and Christian Theocrats, defined by how far each is willing to step outside democratic and pluralist principles of civil society to enforce their views.

Flashback

Running Against Sodom and Osama:
The Christian Right, Values Voters, and the Culture Wars in 2006
By Chip Berlet and Pam Chamberlain

For Faith and Family
Christian Right Advocacy at the United Nations
By Jennifer Butler
The Public Eye magazine, Summer/Fall 2000