Christian Right Observer Weekly (Volume 5)
CROW's 7 stories on the Christian Right that you need read this week.
1. NAR Apostle Jim Garlows Biblical Governance Book in the Hands of a Lawmaker Near You
Did you know that New Apostolic Reformation Apostle Jim Garlow will release a new book in 2024? Garlow, who still attends Trump related Mar a Lago events, said that his new book will address all of the acronyms such as DEI and BLM not covered by his 2016 Well Versed: Biblical Answers to Today's Tough Issues.
Garlow's new book is entitled Reversed. Both books are cowritten by self proclaimed Christian supremacist Gary Cass. Cass has said only Christian men are qualified to lead public office and that women should not be governmental leaders. Cass also calls for deportation of all Muslims.
In addition to his new book, Garlow will also publish a youth, children's and coloring book version of Well Versed in collaboration with Liberty University.
National as well as local media and activists should monitor when Garlow's new book is released. Why? Garlow's Well Versed book on Biblical Governance has been distributed to state and national legislators by his Well Versed Ministries and his former Skyline congregant Dran Reese's Salt and Light Council from 2016 to present. In fact Garlow has a website page devoted to photos of legislators with his book. In total, Garlow's website has delivered Well Versed to each of 7383 legislators in all 50 states.
Let's take a quick tour of just a small sampling out of the 7000+ elected officials and caucuses who have received his book:
Former Vice President Mike Pence
Washington State Party members
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate
And for our international readers, Garlow's Well Versed was printed in multiple languages in anticipation of his world tour last year including Brazil, Hungary, Portugal and Albania.
2. Dominionist David Barton’s Pro Family State Legislator Conference Counts 300 Lawmaker Attendees
NAR Apostle Jim Garlow's Well Versed book Joshua Generation co author and his former Skyline Church congregant Audrea Decker is now Executive Director of Christian Dominionist David Barton’s ProFamily Legislative Network. Decker both runs PFLN Network and annual fall ProFamily Legislators conference supporting State & National Representatives who have Godly values in “drafting legislation, providing expert testimony, networking with other legislators, research and background information, sample legislation, and specialist referrals.”
You may have heard of this conference after Christian Dominionist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was a guest speaker in 2021. However, little has been documented about other legislator attendees. Their most recent 2023 conference boasted over 300 legislators from 35 states including:
Oklahoma Representatives Marilyn Stark and Danny Williams
North Carolina Representative Donny Loftis
Idaho Representative Jacyn Goebers
Iowa Senator Sandy Salmon
South Dakota Representative Brandei Schaefbauer
Maine Representative Reagan Paul
Colorado Representative Brandi Bradley
North Dakota Representative SuAnn Olson
Texas Representative Nate Schlatzline former Representative Matt Krause
Arkansas Representative Mary Bentley
West Virginia State Delegate Elias Coop Gonzales
Pennsylvania Senator Doug Mastriano
After attending the 2023 conference Christian Dominionist Mastriano appeared on a podcast and said
"I attended the David Barton Wallbuilders Conference for Legislators.
He had an attorney there explaining it to us. Law firms will help walk you thru that if your local government or school district relying on fabricated ruling called Lemon Test”
First Liberty Kelly Schackleford was a 2022 conference speaker according to attendee Senator Mike Moon. Moon has recently been in the news for drafting an amendment to ban women for life from Medicaid if they've had an abortion. In addition to attending the PFLN conference multiple times, Moon has been documented with Missouri City Elders state leader Jerry Angelo and with an Appeal to Heaven flag typically used by the New Apostolic Reformation Movement.
David Barton has also done a Wallbuilders video segment on the Appeal to Heaven flag. On a video segment with Andrew Wommack, Barton said:
"We hear about 7 Mountains or 7 Mountains of Influence & it really is a deal that when they went into Promised Land, there were these 7 mountains that had to be conquered...One of them is the government." In a Wallbuilders podcast, Barton and Rick Green coached listeners “So don’t call the 7 Mountains. Just say, Jesus said, go be salt & light in the world. Well, there are 7 Mountains of influence. But if that sets somebody off, you don’t have to say that.”
Barton and Green weren't worried about setting their legislators and constituents off when they hosted Christian Dominionist NAR Apostle Lance Wallnau as their 2018 PFLN conference speaker. Activists and media must start tracking what legislators are attending this conference and what PFLN Staff members are communicating with those reps and Senators to prepare to counter Project Blitz type bills.
3. ‘Project 2025’ Threatens Access to Birth Control, IVF, and Gender Affirming Care
Heritage Foundation is a right wing think tank whose members are “animated by their Christianity,” according to Heritage president Kevin Roberts. As you may have heard, the think tank has a sweeping plan for taking over (and in many cases dismantling) federal agencies in the event of a Republican presidential victory this year. The plan is called Project 2025.
An underreported aspect of Project 2025 is the potential threat that it poses not only to the abortion pill (which Project 2025 expressly opposes), but also to birth control, which many fundamentalist Catholics and evangelicals oppose based on their extremist interpretation of the Bible and belief that birth control encourages promiscuity and enables women to eschew their supposedly proper role as breeders and homemakers.
As far back as 2016, Heritage objected to the requirement in the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) that health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control. (At the time, the AHCA included no “religious belief” or “moral objection” exceptions to this requirement, but such exemptions were added in 2018.) In 2015, Heritage president Kevin Roberts (a fundamentalist Catholic who was president of an orthodox Catholic college at the time) similarly challenged this aspect of the AHCA.
It is thus unsurprising that Project 2025 and Heritage expressly oppose any effort to remove the AHCA’s “religious belief” and/or “moral objection” exceptions. (See Project 2025, pp. 483-484.)
Reading between the lines, however, there is reason to suspect that Project 2025 may also pave the way for the Christian Right to remove birth control from the marketplace entirely. I say this because the plan specifically targets the Department of Health and Human Services, including the FDA, which is responsible both for approving drugs and for withdrawing drug approval due to safety concerns. Project 2025, for example, expressly calls for the FDA to withdraw its approval of mifepristone (the abortion pill) under the pretext that it is “dangerous,” as discussed on page 458 of Project 2025.
The Christian Right isn’t entirely clueless. They know they will lose races up and down the ballot if they expressly say that they plan to remove the birth control pill (aka “hormonal birth control”) from the market. If you look for it, though, you will notice that Christian fundamentalist publications and influencers, such as Turning Point USA (an official Project 2025 partner) and Candace Owens, have begun messaging that hormonal birth control is “toxic,” “carcinogenic,” and otherwise “unsafe.” If a Republican president gives the Christian Right control of the FDA, we should expect them to use these purported health concerns as a pretext for withdrawing FDA approval. (Link to tweet 1; tweet 2.)
We should also expect Heritage and its Christian fundamentalist allies to cite alleged safety concerns as a supposedly “secular” pretext for eliminating access to gender affirming care (which they loathe) and perhaps IVF, which they seem to oppose as well.
4. Steve Strang, Sponsor of Mike Flynn’s ‘Reawaken America Tour,’ Is ‘Good Friends’ with Alleged Sex Abuser Mike Bickle
A recurrent theme of disgraced retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn’s Christian nationalist inspired “Reawaken America Tour” (RAT) is the QAnon conspiracy theory, which fear mongers about a shadowy cabal of Democratic-leaning “global elites” with an alleged proclivity for child sex trafficking.
Meanwhile, the RAT is sponsored by Charisma News whose founder, Steve Strang, is a “longtime friend” of alleged sex abuser Mike Bickle, founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (IHOPKC). Over the past several months, multiple women have come forward to accuse Bickle of sexual abuse. One of his accusers was 14 years old at the time of the alleged abuse. Another was 15 years old.
In a recent videotaped statement, Strang said that when he first heard about the sex abuse allegations against Bickle, he said, “Oh no. Not Mike [Bickle] too.” Strang’s use of the word “too” stands out as an implicit admission that, despite all of the fearmongering about the “global elite” (and public schools), it is the church that has a massive sexual abuse problem.
The alarming breadth of this problem is evidenced by the many sex abuse scandals plaguing the Catholic Church, Mormon Church, Southern Baptist Convention, and now IHOPKC, among other Christian conservative ministries and institutions. In fact, the problem of Christian fundamentalist sex abuse is so pervasive that it has its own social media hashtag: #ChurchToo.
5. Evangelical Crusader Michael Farris, Boasts of Overturning Roe and of His Plan to Rewrite the Constitution
Michael Farris is a dangerously influential evangelical attorney who opposes women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and children’s’ rights, as the Bucks County Beacon reported last year. Until recently, Farris served as president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal advocacy powerhouse that was founded by, among others, James Dobson (founder of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family) and Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright. It was Bright’s supposedly divine vision that led to the so-called “Seven Mountains Mandate,” a strategic framework promoted by Christian supremacists in order to take dominion of government and culture.
Last week, we unearthed a video from 2023 in which Farris boasted of his work leading the ADF “through the season where we were responsible for much of the Dobbs decision” that overturned Roe. “We drafted the law for the state of Mississippi that led to the Dobbs decision. We did all kinds of legal work for them all through the process. We were … silent co-counsel.”
But Farris isn’t done inflicting his Christian fundamentalist worldview on the American public. He also hopes to change the U.S. Constitution through a so-called “Convention of States” (COS). As reported by Political Research Associates, the COS is a “group mobilizing an effort to rewrite the U.S. Constitution through a set of amendments….” Farris co-leads the COS with Tea Party veteran Mark Meckler, but he says that he (Farris) is the one who thought of it.
In explaining the purported need for a COS, Farris and the COS claim that most federal agencies are predicated on a supposedly overbroad interpretation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, including the General Welfare Clause and Commerce Clause. They seek to revise (narrow) those clauses in order to eliminate the federal agencies that oversee, among other things, education (which Christian fundamentalists want to be “Biblical” and anti-LGBTQ+), the environment (which they apparently think is doing fine), presumably social security (which Farris calls “unconstitutional” and immoral), and “health and human services,” including child protective services (which Farris seems to want Christians to handle themselves, despite rampant church sex abuse).
In order to call a COS, proponents must persuade 34 state legislatures to apply for one. Here’s a “progress map” from the COS website.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) supports both the COS and a similar (somewhat narrower) effort called the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force (BBATF), which would eliminate federal agencies under the auspices of balancing the budget. According to an analysis published by the Federalist Society in 2018, the BBATF has arguably secured 33 states (it could be more now), a questionable assertion that depends on the inclusion of decades-old applications in the calculation. Despite the dubiousness of this tallying method, Congress may nonetheless rubber stamp it if the increasingly radicalized GOP takes control of the Senate and retains control of the House in the 2024 election. It’s an alarming possibility discussed in a recent piece by Democracy in Chains author Nancy MacLean.
6. The Pentecostal “Prophets” for Trump Roadshow Takes Off
They are on a “Mission to Save America.” In order to assemble and activate their “Flashpoint Army,” a cabal of pro-Trump “prophets” and personalities including NAR Apostle Lance Walnau, “Christian Nationalist” Gene Bailey, Evangelical Andrew Wommack, “America’s Constitution Coach” Rick Green, Mike Lindell, will be headlining 7 events leading up to the election this year.
“It’s time for patriots and believers to come together to get informed, equipped and activated as—together—we will rescue America. Join us in a city near you in 2024 as we come for two days of encouragement, discussion, ministry and equipping,” the tour’s website states.
The first one, a 2-day event, happened in Colorado Springs last week, and you can watch a recording of it on Facebook.
Here are some highlights on YouTube
Their other destinations include Columbus, Omaha, New Orleans, Tulsa, Virginia Beach and Fort Worth.
“The personalities and themes of the tour are borrowed from ‘FlashPoint,’ a Christian current-events program that appears on the VICTORY television channel, owned by controversial Texas televangelist Kenneth Copeland,” reported Religious News Service.
Evening sessions will be live-streamed.
7. New Podcast Explores Why Some Christians Support Authoritarianism and Nationalism
“If you want to understand 2024, learn about what happened in 1933.”
Baptist News Global announced Steven D. Martin’s new podcast “The Altar and the Eagle.” The goal is to help listeners understand why so many Christians are supporting fascist and authoritarian politics and politicians (like Trump) by probing past Chrsitian support for the Nazis.
Here’s what Clergyman Martin writes on his website:
“In 2004 I made a documentary film, “Theologians Under Hitler,” which exposed the extent of Christian support for Nazi Germany. It changed my life, and those of others who saw it and took its message seriously.
Twenty years later, we have arrived at the brink of what I feared: America, where it “can’t happen here,” faces an election in which one candidate has pledged a dictatorship “on day one.” Christians across the nation will vote for him; Christian leaders will endorse him from their pulpits. And this challenges the very foundation of the faith.
This podcast tells the Church’s history during the Third Reich.”
As Baptist Global News pointed out, “Martin has chosen to produce scripted podcasts, each telling a story on a different topic. Thus far “The Altar and the Eagle” has four 20- to 25-minute episodes: “Prelude and Welcome,” “The Stab in the Back,” “A Gift and Miracle of God” and “Sex and Fascism: A Church Leader’s Guide.”
You can support his work on Patreon.