Christian Right Observer Weekly (Volume 9)
CROW's 7 stories on the Christian Right that you need read this week.
1. America First Policy Institute Trains 60 Chairs for its 19-County Project at Turning Point Summit
Did you miss our first brief on America First Policy Institute (AFPI) and “Project 19,” AFPI’s plan for targeting 19 key swing state counties before the 2024 election? Read how they presented their plan to New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) Movement Apostle Jim Garlow's World Prayer Network audience here.
Now, AFPI has presented their “Project 19” plan to 60 plus County Chair attendees at Turning Point Action's “Restoring National Confidence” Summit last month. So who's at the helm of this initiative? Lee Zeldin.
Zeldin and his team will focus on partnering not only with the County Chairs, but also with the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB): “Churches are huge for getting messaging out.” However, they emphasized that messaging provided to partners should be without the AFPI logos. The third prong to their America First messaging approach is their Neighborhood Activist program, because “people trust their neighbors when it comes to news.”
Another AFPI connection is NAR Apostle Lance Wallnau who shared at the Moms for America Conference (MFA) that he and MFA president Kimberly Fletcher had attended a meeting with AFPI. The focus of their conversation? Wallnau’s “Courage Rally” Tours. The featured speaker lineup ranges from rising NAR Apostle Jenny Donnelly to Georgia Congressman Barry Loudermilk.
Wallnau's goal is to not only sway voters toward voting conservatively in swing states but to also start talking about Reformation with “20 million souls on the table.”
In addition to this messaging, Project 19 will “recruit, train and mobilize thousands of grassroots activists to register and turn out real voters in critical battleground states,” per the Washington Times.
The emphasis on voter registrations is concerning given that the Florida state affiliate of AFPI’s sister organization, America First Works (formerly called “America First Policies”), was implicated in a fraudulent voter registration scheme that resulted in ten felony charges in 2020. Two years later, an ex-employee of that state affiliate (“Florida First”) advised former state Senator Annette Taddeo that she had been instructed to cover a portion of the voter registration forms with her hand while holding a clipboard so that voters would leave the forms partially blank, as reported by Florida Politics journalist Jesse Schecker. “Then when they walk away, they fill it out for them,” Taddeo told Schecker. “Their training is very specific.”
Taddeo said that there seemed to have been a multi-year concerted effort to tamper with voter registrations in multiple Florida counties. She referred the matter to the Department of Justice and to state attorney Kathy Fernandez Rundle for an investigation. Neither agency got back to her before she left the state legislature in 2023.
2. Intercessors for America Launches Website to Mobilize 5,000 Election Volunteers
“This is an existential battle that we're in. If we lose this folks, I want to be clear, it is over. People say ‘Oh this is the most powerful important election,” Eric Metaxas voice at an Intercessors for America (IFA) event leads the promo trailer for IFA’s new “Vote Your Values” 2024 website. In a behind the scenes tour, Kris Kubal, Chief Program Officer for Intercessors for America, did a run through of the site for her Facebook audience before it goes live in April.
Partnering with True the Vote (which also has a new program called Scan, Check and Protect), IFA’s goals are trifold:
-Mobilize 5,000 election volunteers
-Ignite 12 million prayers to vote BIBLICAL Values in 🔑 states
-Pray for Election Integrity
More importantly, these three goals are going to inform New Apostolic Reformation adjacent IFA and their partners with data about 2 million voters in nine key states via an interactive virtual map.
Additionally, IFA will funnel their website audience to “True the Vote” when users click “Report Election Fraud.” True the Vote has made regular appearances to give IFA updates from 2020 to present.
IFA’s involvement with True the Vote is concerning. Last month, the Associated Press (AP) reported that True the Vote had told a judge that it had no evidence to support its claims that ballot fraud had occurred in Georgia during the 2020 election. Those claims had been featured in the widely debunked documentary “2,000 Mules,” as further reported by the AP.
3. NC Vouchers Fund a Christian School that Promotes the “Seven Mountains” of Influence
The “Seven Mountains Mandate” (aka the “Seven Mountains of Influence”) is a supposedly divine strategy promoted by Christian dominionists in their quest to take control of all aspects of government and culture for God, as Jenny has reported for the Bucks County Beacon. The mandate was popularized by Lance Wallnau, a politically influential apostle in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR is a network of neo-charismatic extremist leaders who characterize politics as a form of “spiritual warfare” and claim that those who disagree with them politically are literally possessed by demons and/or witchcraft.
One of the “mountains” targeted by these zealots is education. And they seem to have made alarming progress in North Carolina where a Christian academy funded with school vouchers includes the “Seven Mountains” in its mission statement, as initially reported by Justin Parmenter, a public school teacher and advocate in the state who described the situation on his blog as follows:
“The Daniel Christian Academy is a private school in Concord, NC. This school has received public dollars through school vouchers every year since Republicans launched the controversial Opportunity Scholarship voucher program in 2014-15 for a grand total of $585,776. [Paragraph] Daniel Academy’s mission is to ‘raise the next generation of leaders who will transform the heart of our nation’ by equipping students ‘to enter the Seven Mountains of Influence.’”
4. NC GOP’s Candidate for School Superintendent is an Evangelical Homeschooling Proponent Who Wants to Execute Obama and Biden
The North Carolina GOP’s candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction is Michele Morrow, an evangelical former missionary who homeschools her own children (rather than sending them to public schools), has worked as a so-called “parental rights” activist, and has characterized public schools as “indoctrination centers.”
It should surprise no one that Morrow has been endorsed by Moms for Liberty advisor James Lindsay, who launched “OK Groomer” as a slur against public schools and supporters of LGBTQ+ rights.
In addition to demeaning public (secular) schools. Morrow has glorified the idea of executing former President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden, as reported by CNN. In response to a May 2020 tweet calling for Obama’s imprisonment, Morrow posted, “I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad” and “We could make some money back from televising his death.”
Similarly, in response to a December 2020 tweet about whether to comply with Biden’s mask-wearing advice, Morrow replied, “Never. We need to follow the Constitution's advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!!”
Yes, a majority of North Carolina Republicans voted for this bloodthirsty zealot in the state’s recent primary election. You can read more about her “Christian” values in iVoter guide where she sold herself as “an Evangelical Christian who believes that God created the heavens and the earth and everything on the earth and every living thing and person. I believe that the Bible is Holy, inspired and inerrant and that every person is created in the image of God.”
5. The Claremont Institute (a Project 2025 Partner) is Tied to a Secretive Christian Authoritarian Society
Officials with the Claremont Institute, a highly influential Christian Right think tank, belong to a secretive Christian authoritarian society called the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), according to recent reporting by the Guardian. Those officials include Claremont president Ryan Williams and Scott Yenor, Claremont’s director of state coalitions. Former Claremont “Lincoln Fellow” Nate Fischer also belongs to SACR, per an earlier report by the Guardian.
The Guardian has also revealed that an “internal” SACR “mission statement” speaks of “recruiting a ‘brotherhood’ who will ‘form the backbone of a renewed American regime’ and who ‘understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise’; whose ‘objectives’ include to ‘collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime.’” (Italics added.)
The internal memo also reportedly states that SACR’s founders “believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.” (Italics added.) It adds that, “We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance” of their beliefs. (Italics added.)
Talking Points Memo (TPM) has also published startling information about SACR this week.
In addition to the astonishing facts unearthed by the Guardian and TPM, voters should know that Claremont is an official partner of Project 2025, a plan supported by approximately 100 organizations with the express goal of dismantling much of the federal government and then presiding over what remains. The lead organizer of Project 2025 is Heritage Foundation whose president, Catholic fundamentalist Kevin Roberts, joined with Claremont president Ryan Williams (the SACR member) in “war gaming” the potential for violence leading up to January 6.
As for Nate Fischer, in addition to his involvement with Claremont and SACR, he’s a co-founder of American Reformer, which recently published an article by Kevin Roberts.
American Reformer also supports a new organization (the Center for Baptist Leadership) founded by William Wolfe, a self-described “Christian Nationalist” and former Trump official who co-edited a horrifying manifesto titled “The Statement on Christian Nationalism,” which advocates forcing the American public to submit to Christ-ordained “magistrates,” as Jenny reported last week. Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought (founder of the Center for Renewing America) has boasted on social media of working with Wolfe to “scope out a sound Christian Nationalism,” as previously reported by Politico journalist Heidi Przybyla.
Like Claremont, Vought’s Center for Renewing America is an official partner of Project 2025, which should concern all Americans (except for those who want to live in a far right Christian authoritarian regime).
6. Outgoing Republican State Rep. Says Texas Is Run “by a Few Radical Dominionist Billionaires”
Outgoing Texas State Rep. Glenn Rogers didn’t hold back in a column after being defeated in a primary challenge for allegedly crossing Governor Greg Abbott by opposing his school voucher program and because of his “unwillingness to be compliant with the two billionaire, ‘Christian’ Nationalist, power brokers that run this state” – Tim Dunn and Farris Wilk. Now Rogers is no liberal Republican. I wouldn’t even describe him as Centrist. He is deeply conservative and has co-authored and sponsored bills that are abhorrent, like the abortion “bounty” bill. But the pro-gun lawmaker did offer some uncensored straight shooting on school vouchers and the Christian oligarchs pushing them in the state.
“History will prove vouchers are simply an expensive entitlement program for the wealthy and a get rich scheme for voucher vendors…History will prove that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is “bought” by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a Theocracy that is both un-American and un-Texan.”
And thanks to $6 million given to Governor Abbott from Pennsylvania anti-public education billionaire Jeffery Yass “to distribute to several challengers running against voucher-opposing incumbents in the Texas House,” Rogers will retire and can watch this theocracy unfold which even he can’t stomach. Check out Texas Monthly’s report about Rogers falling into the crosshairs of Abbott and his two Texas oligarchs. Also, check out their recent article “Why Is Texas the Epicenter of Christian Nationalism?”
7. Book Banning Crusade Isn’t Letting Up. In Fact, It’s Getting Worse
The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom released updated data today on banned and challenged books in the U.S. and what it shows is that despite trends last election where school boards were taken back from extremists, their book banning crusade is far from over:
“OIF documented 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship, more than the previous two years combined (2,571 in 2022; 1,651 in 2021), as well as 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials, and resources in 2023. Four key trends emerged from the data gathered from 2023 censorship reports:
Pressure groups in 2023 focused on public libraries in addition to targeting school libraries. The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year, accounting for about 46% of all book challenges in 2023; school libraries saw an 11% increase over 2022 numbers.
Groups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles, often dozens or hundreds at a time, drove this surge.
Titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47% of those targeted in censorship attempts.
There were attempts to censor more than 100 titles in each of these 17 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.”
Christian extremists, like Moms for Liberty, as well as the Independence Law Center, the legal arm of PA Family Institute, have been on the frontlines in this battle to ban books. (Read Jenny Cohn’s “Moms For Liberty And The Dominionist Assault On America’s ‘Education Mountain’” and Peter Greene’s “The Independence Law Center Seeks to Impose its Biblical Worldview on Pennsylvania School Districts”.)
And public libraries being increasingly targeted is another disturbing, though not surprising development.
Here is a video of NAR-affiliated Christian musician Sean Feucht interviewing Kirk Cameron for his podcast in an episode entitled “Taking Back Our Public Libraries for God.”
And yes, they are going after book stores too.