#Christian Coalition

[christiancagesupporter]

This means everything to me

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at RWW:

Pat Robertson, who was a central player in religious-right broadcasting and politics for decades, died on Thursday. As People For the American Way President Svante Myrick noted, “Pat Robertson was a key figure in the rise of the authoritarian religious-right political movement. He helped build the movement’s massive media, legal, and political infrastructure, which today is pushing harmful attacks on the freedom to learn, LGBTQ equality, reproductive choice, church-state separation and more.” Robertson was a pioneer and longtime force in Christian broadcasting. His 700 Club television show went on the air in 1963, and long after Robertson was no longer a personal force in right-wing politics, the show gave him a platform for promoting bigotry, conspiracy theories, and right-wing politicians, up to and including Donald Trump. (He stepped down from hosting in 2021 but continued to provide occasional commentary.) Robertson was part of a crop of televangelists recruited by right-wing political operative Paul Weyrich in the 1970s to get conservative white evangelicals more involved in politics in opposition to federal challenges to Christian schools with racist policies and in support of anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ campaigns and hard-right candidates. Robertson started to dedicate a portion of his 700 Club show to right-wing politics in the 1980s.

[...] Robertson founded Christian Broadcasting University in 1977, later renaming it Regent University, where he served as Chancellor.  Through its undergraduate and graduate programs, it promotes its founder’s religious worldview. The law school absorbed Oral Roberts University’s law school, which former Rep. Michelle Bachmann had attended. Bachmann is currently dean of Regent’s Robertson School of Government, and has used it as a vehicle for promoting, among other things, false claims about the 2020 presidential election and Jan. 6 insurrection. Robertson also founded the American Center for Law and Justice, launched in 1990, as his counterpoint to the ACLU, and it uses the courts to promote the religious-right agenda just like its bigger brother, the Alliance Defending Freedom. In its heyday, the Christian Coalition hosted “Road to Victory,” then the largest annual political gathering of religious-right activists. When the Christian Coalition fell on hard times, the Family Research Council picked up the baton, hosting the Values Voter Summit for many years before recently renaming the gathering Pray Vote Stand. Ralph Reed, the political operative who built the Christian Coalition into a political force, made an unsuccessful run for public office before founding the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a voter-turnout operation which also hosts its own annual conference for right-wing activists called Road to Majority.

Televangelist Pat Robertson died at 93 yesterday. He left a very harmful legacy due to his unbridled support for religious right policy priorities and set the building blocks for a right-wing media apparatus.

[gin-juice-tonic]

“Doesn’t sound very cis to me. You know whats even less cis? Giving me 25 dollars.”

(But yes, it certainly sounds like something to at least think about! Jealousy was how I personally figured myself out. Best of luck in whatever you end up learning about yourself.)

[jinouchibhue]

Straight up, I am not calling them The Patriarchy lol

[blazeofbones]

THANK GOD FOR IMPACT'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL

[connieaaa]

On women's education, a conversation between my brother and I - both of us are nonbinary.

Me: I don't know why it finally occured to me, but it's not exactly that women shouldn't be educated - but that they should stay in their place. Grandma had a degree but the degree kept her in the kitchen. Aunt didn't do anything with her (master's) degree. Cousin has a degree but she works as a preschool teacher so she is also still in her place as a woman.

Brother: So education is fine as long as it keeps you where you are supposed to be?

Me: Yep, as long as it keeps you from getting ideas and disrupting status quo

Remember. It's not about maintaining the patriarchy for them - it's about "furthering the gospel". Having theology that maintains the patriarchy is beside the point for them, and completely the point for us.

MY DAD REFUSES TO VOUCH FOR THE FACT THAT I TOOK FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR MY UNIVERSITY.

I was homeschooled and Spanish and Bible is the only thing I was ever taught.

[tears-that-heal]

artist on instagram @proclamationcoalition

[nuthin-up-my-sleeve]

What would life be if porn bots actually had porn on their blog? Hmmmm 🤔

[christiancagesupporter]

I wanna know christians obsession with tall men with dinosaur names

[homophyte]

god i dont wanna get dragged into religionposting bc im not interested in making everyone on earth mad at me but it is still so deeply fucked up to me that critiques of religion--not specific religions--as a system of hierarchy and control are still so far off. we r down here in the muck arguing about whos method of subjugating certain sections of the population is the most based and if you suggest climbing out to get clean or having a different possibly more productive conversation you get accused of being a chrisofascist despite never even being a christian in the first place . fine whatever

[officialyourdailyinspiration]

by Justin Taylor | An exciting opportunity from Crossway: The Treasure Could you imagine what life would be like without your Bible? How would your faith be different? What impact would the lack of a Bible have on your life? What would you miss most about God’s Word? In the West we have near-immediate...

[bluastro-yellow]

aaand it's suddenly 1922 *faccetta nera starts playing*

[diabolicflame93]

Nehemiah's Story - Day of the Homeschooled Child

CRHE's Day of the Homeschool Child. Isolation and abuse in homeschooling.

The CRHE or Coalition for Responsible Home Education has pushed for April 30th to be “Day of the Homeschooled Child.” They have asked for stories that wouldn’t be traditionally told by homeschool alumni. “Some homeschooled children grow up in families that exploit lax homeschool laws to isolate, neglect, and abuse them. Hidden away from any person or system that could help, these children are…

[thisblogisforprivatenotes]

Reading about fucking conservative freaks using "judeo-christian values" to justify their bigoted policies towards queer kids in the education system

[tears-that-heal]

artist on instagram @proclamation coalition

[firstumcschenectady]

“Changing the Narrative” based on Deuteronomy 15:1-4 and Matthew 26:1-16

I grew up in the country, and went to college in rural New Hampshire, so when I started interning as a pastor in urban Los Angeles, …. well, there was a big learning curve. I was scared of cities, because they were just new to me, and I found them overwhelming. Los Angeles is a major urban center, and like most of our urban centers it has dazzling wealth and heartbreaking poverty. Homelessness is an especially huge problem in Los Angeles because people spend their live savings to get there expecting to “make it big” by walking down the street and having a producer hire them for a major movie. Also, it isn't cold there, so there aren't networks of code blue shelters.

I worked at a wonderful church, the Hollywood United Methodist Church, and in ways similar to here, the congregation itself was a mixture of the housed and the unhoused, and no conversation about the church happened without awareness of their unhoused neighbors. One of the most distressing moments of my life was in getting to know the unhoused in the Hollywood Church and those who lived around it, and realizing that many of them were the same population as the people I cared for at Sky Lake Special Needs camps. That the most vulnerable among us were living the hardest lives is a lesson I've never gotten over. While I served there we would also go to Skid Row – the poorest part of Los Angeles - and serve meals, an experience that wiped any lingering blinders I had about the justice of unfettered competitive capitalism.

After my first year interning at Hollywood, I went on a mission trip to Cuba with Volunteers in Mission. We started in Havana, and eventually drove east to the site where we would work. After several days on the road I finally realized that I was tense all the time because it constantly felt like we were about to slip into a neighborhood like Skid Row, and I expected the punch to the stomach that I'd experienced in seeing Skid Row. But, in Cuba, everything felt like the neighborhood before you got to jaw-dropping poverty. But you never got to jaw-dropping poverty. This was 2004, and I've since learned that in the early years after the US embargo there really wasn't enough enough food, but by 2004 the island had figured out how to feed and house everyone sufficiently – even though cement crumbled and drug stores were largely bare.

There wasn't much panhandling in Cuba either. There was a little bit, in tourist spots, but our hosts pointed out that because everyone is housed and fed in Cuba, the panhandling was for extra money, not for for basics. I ended up going back to Cuba a few years later, and had very similar experiences. Like the metaphors of a fish being unable to understand water, it took leaving unfettered competitive capitalism for me to be able to see it.

This week I had the chance to attend a conversation led by the Labor and Religion Coalition on the New York State Budget. Many of us are familiar with the Federal Poverty Line, right? And we're also familiar with it's limitations, namely that it is abysmally low and a person or family living above that line will still be struggling to make ends meet. You may already know about the United Way measure “ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed)”, but I didn't. (Can't tell you if I hadn't heard it or hadn't retained it though. Shrug.)

ALICE is a measure of who isn't making ends meet in society. Fabulously, United Way does an amazing amount of work with the data on Alice. For instance, in NYS 14% of people live under the poverty line. Another 30% of people are in ALICE, and 56% of people are “doing OK” and making ends meet. The numbers a bit worse in Schenectady – in our city 49.8 people live below the ALICE threshold, which is to say that HALF of the people in this city aren't making ends meet.

What was particularly interesting in the presentation this week was the visual on recent poverty rates.

Namely, that during 2020, when the government focused on responding to people's needs with stimulus checks, child tax credits, and expansion of SNAP benefits, people living under the national poverty line hit a 20 year LOW.

And since then, the rates have been creeping back up. The work of the Labor and Religion Coalition and their partners The Poor People's campaign includes asking NYS to readjust it's priorities. Stop having regressive tax laws that benefit corporations and the wealthy, and use the income gained to bring greater support for the most vulnerable.

Compared to how we have been operating as a society, this feels like a PIPE DREAM. There so many barriers, so many counter arguments, so much fear of the accusation of “raising taxes.” But then I read the Bible, and I read it with the guidance of Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Rev. Dr. William Barber, and God is behind that pipe dream.

Which, for me at least, means it is possible.

Which means we can dream about what it would feel like to live in a society where everyone is housed, and housed adequately. Archaeology suggests that in the first 400 years of Ancient Israelite society – the years before kings – all the houses were about the same size. Which means that society was organized around mutual care for each other and sharing of resources. I've been shocked to learn from the book “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow that MANY ancient societies were really egalitarian like that, including ones with major urban centers, including ones that were stable for many centuries. The ancient Hebrews weren't an outlier.

The Hebrew Bible, though, gets really clear on what is needed to create a society where people care for each other. Everyone needs access to resources – in their case land. Did you know that in Hawaii the native people divvied up the land like really narrow pieces of pie because they knew every group of people needed access to the resources of both the land and the sea? God has worked with peoples in so many times and places to take care of each other, and that means it is possible. Liz Theoharis sufficiently mentions the other rules, “forgiving debts, raising wages, outlawing slavery, and restructuring society around the needs of the poor.”1 That's what we hear in Deuteronomy today. That's what Jesus reflect on in the gospel.

I'm struck by her clear statement that “charity will not end poverty.” It reminds me of the Simone Weil quote, “It is only by the grace of God that the poor can forgive the rich the bread they feed them.” As long as we have a society that makes some people rich BY making other people poor we'll have lots and lots of opportunities for charity, but nothing will change.

Our work, I believe, is the work of “narrative takeover.” For us, it may take some time. There is a lot in this unfettered competitive capitalism that we've been trained not to see, or to think is necessary, or acceptable, and the work we're doing with “We Cry Justice” this year helps us reframe the narrative.

What IS the purpose of a society? If it is to fulfill “there will be no need among you,” then we know what direction to turn in, even it it will be a long journey to get there. It is funny, isn't it? That people know the quote “the poor you will always have with you” but they don't know that the implication of it is “as long as you fail to follow what God is asking of you.”

So I invite us to this dream. What would it be like to live in a society that houses people well, where everyone had enough nutritious food, where healthcare can accessed? Can you even dream it? What are the implications? I think life would be easier for teachers – because so many barriers to learning would be eliminated. If those who spend their lives fighting to make ends meet were able to focus there gifts elsewhere, what could they offer? We would be able to offer great care to those who are aging, those who are young, and those with special needs – none of which we're doing now. People fighting to survive might then have energy for art, music, gardening, and other wonderful things that would enrich their lives and the lives of those around them! I suspect mental health would increase, because the fundamental fear of falling through the safety net wouldn't keep people up at night, and because there would be less stress, and more time for people to connect with those they love. Lives would probably get longer, violence would decrease, ERs would be less crowded, I think there might even be less litter and faster scientific progress. OH, and just that quick reminder- studies say that housing everyone, and feeding everyone, and getting healthcare to everyone would COST US LESS AS A SOCIETY THAN HOW WE DO IT NOW.

Kinda makes you wonder who benefits from how we do it now, doesn't it?

OK, that's probably about as much fish trying to see the water as we can take for a day. But I'd love to hear from you what else WILL happen when we make God's dreams a reality.... let's keep on building that narrative for each other, until we can see the dream clearly and then see the ways we are most gifted at moving towards it. May there be no need among us. Amen

1Liz Theoharis “1: Is Ending Poverty Possible?” in We Cry Justice, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021) used with permission.

Rev. Sara E. Baron 

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 

Pronouns: she/her/hers 

http://fumcschenectady.org/ 

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

January 28, 2024