For anyone who wants to read a book that really goes inside the movement to indoctrinate children through our public schools, I highly recommend the new book The Good News Club by Katherine Stewart. I received an advance copy of the book months ago to review, but, because of working on my own book, just didn't have time to read it and write a review before it came out on January 24. But I'm reading it right now, and from what I've read so far, this is the best book I could imagine to explain to people just how the "The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children," as the book's subtitle describes it, is happening right under everybody's noses.

Should Chick-Fil-A be known for its extensive ties to, and funding of, some of the most aggressively anti-gay groups in America, as well as its role in catalyzing the national "Protect Marriage" (by fighting same-sex marriage) movement -- or should the fast food chicken chain be regarded as an exemplar of the spiritual value of "gratitude"?

According to a project under the aegis of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture called the Spiritual Capital Initiative, that's funded with almost $1.9 million dollars from the John Templeton Foundation, it's the latter: gratitude.  

Michelle Boorstein at The Washington Post's "Under God" blog reports that Faithful America's petition calling for Kansas House Speaker Michael O'Neal to resign now has 40,000 signatures.  That's up from 30,000 a week ago ago when I reported for AlterNet the continuing story of imprecatory prayers directed at president Obama.

The "joke" for several years has been "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109.8."  The verse states, "Let his days be few, and let another take his office."  Haw, haw, haw.  But as anyone who takes the time to look at the Psalm itself will see, the very next verse states:  "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."    

Not so funny after all.

And that continues to be the point.

Since the Supreme Court's 1962 decision banning prayer in the public school classrooms, conservative evangelical Christians have been at war with public education. Many conservatives point to that decision as the harbinger of America's moral decline. For years, Christian Right organizations and their leaders have railed against teachers' unions, opposed tax increases to improve public education, and have even gone so far as to encourage Christian parents to withdraw their children from the public schools. During this period, the Christian Right ran stealth school board candidates and took control of the decision-making process in numerous school districts.

Now, it appears the movement has found another way of imposing its religious views in the public schools; through thinly disguised afterschool Bible study programs.

This is a new twist on "biblical economics" that I've not heard before.  According to Alabama State Sen. Shadrack McGill, a 62% pay increase for the state's legislators in 2007 was  necessary, but large increases in teachers' pay would violate "a biblical principle." McGill was speaking on January 30 at a prayer breakfast that he organized in Ft. Payne, Alabama. McGill voiced his objections to separation of church later that same day at a Jackson County School Board meeting that resembled a revival; participants prayed and sang with their hands raised in the air. (Video below.)

This morning I contacted the offices of Rep. Daniel B. Short and Chief Clerk of the House Richard Puffer and confirmed that C. Peter Wagner was indeed the recipient of a tribute from the Delaware House of Representatives on January 19.  Right Wing Watch posted the link to the Global Spheres e-mail in which Wagner described his reception in Delaware, titled "Apostolic Government in Delaware," and describing the tribute by the Delaware State House for his work "commissioning apostles."  A copy of the tribute and full text follow the article.

[Update 2/2/12: The Delaware House Democratic Caucus contacted me with a statement explaining that individual members can approve a tribute and it should not be considered an endorsement by the Delaware House of Representatives. See a copy of the full text from the Democratic Caucus in the update at Right Wing Watch and also see this Talk2action diary.]

The trial date for Bishop Robert W. Finn,of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri will be September 24, 2012.  Finn and the diocese were charged with failing to report suspected child abuse of one of his subordinates, Rev. Shawn Ratigan.

We have written a great deal here at Talk to Action about the Religious Right culture of conspiracy theory, labeling and demonization as animating factors in resulting hate and violence.  (See Chip Berlet's recent post, for example.)  

However, I fear that as a culture, we (in the broadest sense of we) are becoming so accustomed to the inflammatory excesses of the Religious and other elements of the Right, and their rise to higher levels of public discourse, that we are no longer taking these things seriously.

As the finale of our extended celebration of Religious Freedom Day, we are honored to welcome George Washington as a guest front pager.  

Mr. Washington was, among many things, the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, the President of the Constitutional Convention, and the first President of the United States.  In the second year of his presidency,  he received a letter from Moses Sexias, Warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island,  (now called Touro Synagogue) in which Sexias noted his people's previous second class citizenship and praised the new era of equality:  

Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens...  behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People -- a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance -- but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship...

 Washington's famous reply echoed Sexias' words in an unambiguous and memorable fashion of which the contemporary Religious Right and the pols who pander to them are incapable, and would rather that we forget.  -- FC

Given the secretive nature of the movement, documenting the involvement of public figures in C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation can be a time-consuming project. Over the last two years I've been piecing together evangelical pollster and author George Barna's considerable involvement in the NAR. Now, as with many such projects long in the gestation, it's become suddenly politically relevant - because Barna is one of three New Apostolic Reformation figures in Newt Gingrich's recently created Faith Leaders Coalition.

Gingrich's claims about an Alinsky-Obama-socialist conspiracy against Christianity and freedom echo conspiracy theories from the Tea Parties, Glenn Beck, the John Birch Society, and the 1990s Militia Movement.

To an alarming extent the frame of Obama bringing socialism to America includes allegations that Obama and his allies are part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Whether this conspiracy tracks back to Marx or Satan is open to debate. Further to the Right are recruiters for White supremacist groups suggesting the conspirators are Jews or Muslims using Obama as a puppet. This is not a healthy dynamic for civil society--and we have seen it before.

I have just confirmed with the Newt 2012 headquarters that Apostle Dutch Sheets has endorsed Newt Gingrich and will join the campaign's national Faith Leaders Coalition. (Link to copy of press release.)

Sheets is an internationally known leader of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and one of the apostolic authorities over the 50-state prayer networks. Other NAR apostles, including Lance Wallnau, promoted Gingrich through these networks prior to the South Carolina primaries. Participants were encouraged to read an 18-page letter from Jim Garlow citing reasons for his support of Gingrich and the validity of his spiritual "restoration," and also directed participants to a link to audio of a January 12 conference call with Gingrich and South Carolina pastors.

It's impossible to measure the impact of the NAR's support on the outcome in South Carolina, but it is becoming clear that NAR leadership is getting in line behind Gingrich despite the endorsement of Rick Santorum by James Dobson and other "old guard" of the Religious Right.

It has been a long time since Randall Terry, the founder of the notorious anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue, has been anything more than a gnat on the political landscape. Where once he commanded an army of anti-abortion activists, a series of financial missteps, and personal indiscretions, including his being censured by his church, the Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, "for a pattern of sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women," according to a Washington Post report nearly twelve years ago, had relegated him to the outer Mongolia of the radical right.

These days, however, Terry is planning to change all that by playing an active, and he knows disturbingly provocative, role in this year's Super Bowl festivities.

While Terry won't be singing with Madonna at halftime, he intends to raise his voice, and profile, by paying for graphic anti-abortion commercials that must be shown in a number of television markets airing the Super Bowl.

Want to see and hear what the current leading Republican Presidential candidates say when they speak to the leading Christian Right activists?

Held annually in Washington, DC, the Values Voter Summits are the most important public meeting of the organized Christian Right in the  United States. It is also a place where Presidential hopefuls try out different frames and memes.

In this T2A post we have a long segment where Gingrich field tests his attack dog rhetoric against liberal elites in 2010; Ron Paul declares that the Federal Reserve creates "counterfeit" currency and that Obama is not King, but God is King in 2011; and Mitt Romney is, well, Mitt Romney in 2009.

The links in the next section are huge, raw, unedited mpg video files that I videoed for notes and fact-checking quotes for my journalistic and scholarly articles on the Christian Right.

This essay, (part of our continuing celebration of Religious Freedom Day) which draws on material I have previously posted here at Talk to Action, appears today at Truthout, a national news site which "provides an independent platform for  in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis, to reveal systemic injustice and offer transformative ideas to strengthen democracy."

Separation of church and state, a defining issue in our history, is also a defining issue for Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. The emergence of Romney as the GOP frontrunner and the rallying of top religious right leaders to Santorum at a meeting in Texas over the Martin Luther King Day weekend casts the two politicians' views in sharp relief.

Both candidates have staged high-profile speeches to define themselves in relation to John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 campaign speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association - a speech that has served as the model for how politicians balance religion and public life for a generation. But when they stepped up to the podium to define themselves in the bright light of history, each pandered to the religious right.