I found a very interesting article at Alter Net this morning about this. There are several links in this article which I suggest you visit to get the full effect of what the author wrote about.
This is pretty damn scary. I don't know about you, but I sure don't want some religion in control of my country telling me how I'm supposed to live.
From Alter Net:
The New Christian Right is Global: What Mainstream Media Isn't Telling You
World Christianity is Changing, But Perhaps Not For The Better if You're a Liberal
In Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World, published by Religion Dispatches, I describe Sarah Palin's strange new Christianity, rapidly becoming the face of the new, globalizing Christian right. Along with the story, Religion Dispatches also features my recent interview with Bill Berkowitz, The New Christianity: What the Mainstream Media Has Missed
Over the course of September and October 2008, I was one of a tiny group of writers who correctly identified the highly distinctive nature of Sarah Palin's Third Wave and New Apostolic Christianity. At the web site I co-founded in late 2005 with journalist Frederick Clarkson can be found over 20 unique stories and a score of short video documentaries including a 36 page report (link to PDF of report) concerning Sarah Palin's churches and her religious associations.
Sarah Palin is in the same radical new stream of Christianity as is Ted Haggard which, as I wrote in my Religion Dispatches story, has aggressively exported its new doctrines and practices to the global south: Latin America, Asia, and Africa:
In 1996 a team from Ted Haggard's New Life Church flew to Mali and began furtively anointing entire towns with cooking oil.The strangeness of it gripped Dutch missionary René Holvast, who later wrote: "It was confusing and produced a growing uneasiness. It did not seem to fit our current evangelical theological and anthropological textbooks."...
René Holvast has theological training, but his perplexed reaction was similar to that of Alix Spiegel, a radio journalist who went to Ted Haggard's New Life Church in 1997 to do a story for This American Life...
As I told Bill Berkowitz,
Sarah Palin is, broadly speaking, in the emerging postdenominational movement, which by 2000 encompassed 385 million Christians and is vastly different from the faith as it has been practiced in recent centuries. We identified Palin as in a majority tendency of postdenominationalism known as the neocharismatic movement, or the "Third Wave."Evangelical missionary reference work World Christian Trends calls the Third Wave "a new and disturbingly different" kind of Christianity whose members "can accurately be called radical Christians with some pentecostal /charismatic parallels" and which has, as one of the distinctive characteristics of Third Wave Christian ministry, a heavy emphasis on healing miracles including raising the dead--an emphasis promoted from the pulpit in sermons at Palin's most central church, the Wasilla Assembly of God.
We also found extensive evidence that Palin is in a religious movement founded in 2001 that has coalesced out of Third Wave Christianity; the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).
The NAR is bent on radically reinventing Christianity, and is fast becoming the vanguard of the global Christian Right.
Sarah Palin's new Christianity is rapidly moving to achieve dominance in the GOP, but few Democrats appear aware that Palin's movement even exists. Thus, the danger: that the Democratic Party will be blindsided in the 2012 presidential election, as the New Apostolic Reformation / Third Wave Christianity gambit - of peeling away ethnic constituencies that have traditionally voted for the Democratic Party - comes into play. For more, see: Proposition 8 : A Proving Ground For The New Christian Right
I really do suggest everyone reads the information found through the links. We all need to be informed about just what it is that we are up against. If they gain control, like they want to, it could very well mean the end of Democracy as we know it.
(Hat-tip to Bruce Wilson at AlterNet )
UPDATE: My friend Jacob has more on this over at Contextual Criticism .
The post title is A new form of Christianity - it's enough to raise the dead!
Go see what Jacob has on this.
10 comments:
Thanks for the link, Grandpa Eddie!
That's interesting that we both posted on the same topic...I guess it's true what they say about great minds...
I updated my post, also, linking to you! Thanks again!
What passes for christianity these days can kiss my ass.
Jacob - I like that "great minds" thing.
Thanks for linking to my post, pal.
Gordon - What passes for christianity today isn't what christianity was when my folks grew up, or even when I grew up.
This crap now is insanity!
BTW, I never grew up...at least that's what the Mrs says.
Yeah, I don't think I'd like Sunday School much these days, not that I'm likely to go for a refresher.
Gordon - Me either, pal.
"What passes for christianity today isn't what christianity was when my folks grew up, or even when I grew up."
Actually, it sounds more like the Christianity of centuries ago. Along with environmental collapse and peak oil, it's as if society itself is de-evolving back to the dark ages.
"...de-evolving back to the dark ages.."
I think that's exactly what they are trying to do, Shea.
They want us back in the dark ages where they had control over everyone. Of course back then it was the catholics with the control.
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