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      Oklahoma sued for funding US’s first ‘state-sponsored’ religious charter school

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      The American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of civil organizations have filed a lawsuit to stop the Oklahoma state government from funding the US’s first religious public charter school, in turn setting up a fierce debate surrounding religious liberties.On Monday, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Education Law Center and Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of nearly a dozen plaintiffs including parents, education activists and faith leaders seeking to stop Oklahoma from sponsoring and funding St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.The lawsuit, which names the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, the state education department, the state superintendent of public instruction and St Isidore as defendants, argues that the SVCSB violated the state constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, and the board’s own regulations when it voted 3-2 in June to approve St Isidore’s charter-school sponsorship application.Charter schools in the US are publicly funded but independently run. If opened next year, St Isidore will join two dozen charter schools in Oklahoma.According to the lawsuit, St Isidore refused to agree to comply with legal requirements applicable to state charter schools, including prohibitions against discrimination. It states that St Isidore will in fact “discriminate in admissions, discipline, and employment based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other protected characteristics”.The lawsuit argues that the online public school “asserts a right to discriminate against students on the basis of disability”, and that its application failed to comply with the board’s regulations that require the school to “demonstrate that it would provide adequate services to students with disabilities”.The suit also alleges that St Isidore will violate board regulations that require a charter school to be independent of its educational management organization, as the school will hire the department of Catholic education of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City as its educational management organization. The school will also be overseen by the Diocese of Tulsa.Additionally, the lawsuit argues that in violation of the state constitution and the Charters Schools Act, St Isidore will “provide a religious education and indoctrinate its students in Catholic religious beliefs,” adding that its application states that the school “will be a place…of evangelization” that “participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church”.St Isidore, which plans to open in August 2024, describes itself as a school that puts “the church at the service of the community in the realm of education” and that it envisions a learning opportunity for “all students whose parents desire a quality Catholic education for their child”.Speaking to the Guardian, Erin Brewer, the vice-chair of the Oklahoma parent legislative action committee, a nonprofit statewide organization and the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, condemned what she called “state-sponsored religion”.“Our kids have the right to religious freedom and for the state to sponsor religious education and indoctrination, I think it is wrong,” said Brewer.“I think it’s a misunderstanding of what religious freedom means. Religious freedom is an individual right. There’s nothing preventing the Catholic Archdiocese in Oklahoma City from operating as a school … but to request the government to fund that religion … that is not religious freedom because now the government is compelling religion upon students. That is a violation of those students’ rights as well as of the rights of taxpayers who may or may not agree with those religious tenets,” she added.Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Krystal Bonsall, a parent of a public school student who has disabilities that require speech and occupational therapy, as well as Michele Medley, a parent of three children, two of whom are autistic and one of whom is part of the LGBTQ community.Bonsall, whose child requires the accompaniment of a paraprofessional in class, released a statement saying, “Our public tax dollars should not be sent to a religious school that asserts a right to discriminate against students with disabilities. St Isidore should not be allowed to divert scarce resources away from public schools that are open to all children regardless of ability, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.”Medley echoed similar sentiments, saying: “As the mother of two children on the autism spectrum, I have firsthand experience with private religious schools’ unwillingness to accept and meet the educational needs of students with autism and other developmental disabilities.”“I am also aware of the possible religious discrimination against LGBTQIA+ students that could harm my child and others. I don’t want my tax dollars to fund a charter school that won’t commit to adequately accepting and educating all students,” she added.Faith leaders involved in the lawsuit have also weighed in on the debate, with many arguing that such funding is contradictory to religious freedoms.Bruce Prescott, a retired Baptist minister who served as executive director of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists, said, “Religious schools – like houses of worship – should be funded through voluntary contributions from their own membership, not money extracted involuntarily with state taxes from members of a religiously diverse community.”Lori Walke, another plaintiff and senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ also pushed back against the state-funded school, saying, “As a pastor, I care deeply about religious freedom. But creating a religious public charter school is not religious freedom. Forcing taxpayers to fund a religious school that will be a ‘place of evangelization’ for one specific religion is not religious freedom.”In June, the state’s attorney general Gentner Drummond said in a statement that St Isidore’s approval was “unconstitutional”.“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers … It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars,” Drummond added.Speaking to KFOR, Drummond said that St Isidore’s approval marks a “step down a slippery slope that will result someday in state funded Satanic schools, state funded Sharia schools”.The Guardian has reached out to both the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. The SVCSB said that it “does not comment on pending litigation”.Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt praised the SVCSB’s decision back in June when it approved St Isidore’s application, calling it a “win for religious liberty and education freedom in our great state”.State superintendent Ryan Walters, who is named in the lawsuit, condemned the legal action as “religious persecution”, saying, “Suing and targeting the Catholic Virtual Charter School is religious persecution because of one’s faith, which is the very reason that religious freedom is constitutionally protected. A warped perversion of history has created a modern day concept that all religious freedom is driven from the classrooms,” Public Radio Tulsa reports.Other defendants of the school include Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, who told the National Catholic Register in June that the school will be “elevating the soul” of students.Farley also doubled down on the state’s funding of St Isidore, saying, “The only thing that would stop this is a court decision telling us we can’t do it.” More

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      Losing Our Religion review: Trump and the crisis of US Christianity

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      Christianity and the “powers that be” have weathered two millennia, their relationship varying by time and place. Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross. Emperor Constantine converted. Henry VIII broke from Rome and founded the Church of England. In the US, the denominational divides of protestantism helped drive the revolution and provided fuel for the civil war.In his new book, the Rev Russell Moore opens a chapter, “Losing Our Authority: How the Truth Can Save”, with the words “Jesus Saves”, followed by a new historical tableau: January 6 and the threat Donald Trump and the mob posed to democracy and Mike Pence.“That the two messages, a gallows and ‘Jesus Saves’ could coexist is a sign of crisis for American Christianity,” Moore writes.Heading toward the Iowa caucus, Trump runs six points better among white evangelicals than overall. As for the devout Pence, a plurality of white evangelicals view him unfavorably.Moore is mindful of history, and the roles Christianity has played: “Parts of the church were wrong – satanically wrong – on issues of righteousness and justice, such as the Spanish Inquisition and the scourge of human slavery.” He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a publication founded by Billy Graham. Losing Our Religion offers a mixture of lament and hope. In places, its sadness is tinged with anger. In the south, the expression “losing my religion”, popularized by REM in a 1991 song, “conveys the moment when ‘politeness gives way to anger’,” Moore explains.Moore’s public and persistent opposition to the election of Trump set him apart from most white evangelicals and would lead to his departure from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).“The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’, who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again,” Moore wrote in spring 2016. “Regardless of the outcome in November, [Trump’s] campaign is forcing American Christians to grapple with some scary realities that will have implications for years to come.”He was prescient. Graham’s son, Franklin, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. At the time, Moore was president of the SBC ethics and religious liberty commission. His politics forced him to choose. He opted for Christ and his convictions. He joined a nondenominational church.His new book is subtitled “An Altar Call for Evangelical America” but it aims for a broader audience. It contains ample references to Scripture, but also to the journalist Tim Alberta, Jonathan Haidt of New York University, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, a liberal group.Of white evangelicals, Moore quotes Jones: “Their greatest temptation will be to wield what remaining political power they have as desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.” Welcome to the culture wars, and to what Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic has called the coalition of restoration.Against the backdrop of rising Christian nationalism and January 6, Moore reads the writing on the wall. He is troubled by the shrinking gap between Christian nationalism and neo-paganism. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he observes. Moore found the presence of prayers in “‘Jesus’s name’ right next to a horn-wearing pagan shaman in the well of the evacuated United States Senate” disturbing, but not coincidental.The Magasphere and Twitterverse bolster Moore’s conclusions.“President Trump will be arrested during Lent – a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” Joseph McBride, a rightwing lawyer who represents several insurrectionists, tweeted last March. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the third day, so too will Donald Trump.”Caesar as deity. We’ve seen that movie before. McBride, however, did not stop there.Hours later, he tweeted: “JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”Three-in-10 adults in the US, meanwhile, are categorized as religious “nones”. Only 40% of Americans call themselves Protestant. The Wasp ascendancy has yielded to Sunday brunch and walks in the woods. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they took the last train for the coast,” as Don MacLean sang. For some, Trump rallies present a variation of community and communion. A younger generation of evangelicals heads for the door. The numbers tell of a crisis of faith.“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the “church itself” does not believe what the church teaches,” Moore laments.Predation, lust and greed are poor calling cards for religion. Unchecked abuse within the Catholic church left deep and lasting scars among those who needed God’s love most. Moore notes the Catholic church’s fall from grace in Ireland and posits that “born-again America” may be experiencing a similar backlash, as a powerful cultural institution lacking “credibility” seeks to “enforce its orthodoxies”.Against this backdrop, Catholicism’s boomlet among younger continental Europeans is noteworthy. Recently, hundreds of thousands converged on Lisbon to hear the Pope. The same demographic helps fuel the resurgence of the Spanish far right. Tethering the cross to the flag retains its appeal.That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched.“What we are seeing now … is in many cases the shucking off of any pretense of hypocrisy for the outright embrace of immorality,” Moore writes.America barrels toward a Biden v Trump rematch. The former president is a professional defendant. The country and its religion sag and shudder. Moore prays for revival, even as he fears nostalgia.
      Losing Our Religion is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Pro-choice Catholics fight to seize the narrative from the religious right

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      Since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade a year ago, reproductive rights have become an even more contentious issue in an already polarized landscape. With more than 1,500 politicians – mostly men – helping ban abortions since Roe fell, Catholic and pro-choice organizations are increasingly trying to carve out space for themselves in the nationwide dialogue to center their own messaging: that being Catholic and pro-choice are not mutually exclusive.One organization trying to dismantle religious stigma surrounding abortions is Catholics For Choice, a Washington-DC based Catholic abortion rights advocacy group. For CFC, the belief in individual reproductive rights comes as a result of the Catholic faith, not in spite of.Speaking to the Guardian shortly after president Joe Biden – a Catholic – said at a recent fundraiser in Maryland that although he is “not big on abortion, he believes that Roe v Wade “got it right”, CFC president Jamie Manson said that despite Biden’s “good model of not imposing one’s religious beliefs on civil law”, his message echoed rightwing sentiments.“President Biden is playing into a narrative that says, in spite of my faith, I support this. It’s a rightwing narrative that we should not give any energy to. It also creates shame and stigma around abortion,” said Manson.In the US, 63% of Catholic adults say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Additionally, 68% say that Roe v Wade should have been left as is. In a separate survey conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, 24% of abortion patients identified as Catholic.“Catholics overwhelmingly support abortion is because their faith taught them the values of social justice, of the power of individual conscience and of religious freedom… Catholic women who participate richly in the life of the church are having abortions and they have to hear from an all-male hierarchy that when they choose abortion, they’re participating in homicide,” said Manson.“That message is profoundly spiritually violent,” she said, adding, “This is a real pastoral crisis in the church that Catholics don’t want to look at. Every time a high-profile Catholic says, ‘Even though in spite of my faith I support abortion,’ it reinforces that stigma… We need to dismantle this narrative.”To Manson, there are three important ideas deeply embedded in the Catholic tradition which help fuel her organization’s pro-choice beliefs.“The first one is this notion of individual conscience. The catechism says explicitly in all that we say and do, our individual conscience is what tells us what is just and right, not the church. So even if what our conscience tells us to be just and right conflicts with church teaching, we have to go with our conscience,” she said.The next idea is the tradition of social justice, said Manson, which contradicts with the profoundly negative impacts that abortion bans have on already marginalized communities.“Abortion bans and restrictions disproportionately harm people who are already suffering injustices like racism, poverty, immigration laws and domestic violence. The very people that we as Catholics are supposed to prioritize – the marginalized – are the ones who have their suffering exacerbated by abortion bans and restrictions. So there is a deep conflict with our social justice tradition,” Manson said.The third and perhaps the most oft-repeated idea to Manson and other pro-choice faith leaders is religious pluralism.“Catholic teaching supports and respects religious pluralism. And what rightwing Catholics are trying to do is have their theological ideas codified into civil law. By doing that, they’re infringing on the religious freedom of everyone else. Our religious freedom guarantees not only our right to practice our beliefs, but our right to be free of the beliefs of others and so abortion bans and restrictions take away religious freedom,” she said.With far-right Catholic lawmakers continuing to double down on their anti-abortion stances and conservative Christian legal nonprofits funding anti-abortion organizations, the communities that CFC tries to focus on are those that are silent about their support for abortion.“We focus on that population because the majority already are there with us. They’re just afraid to speak about it publicly and that’s because again, of the shame, stigma and punishment that comes from the church when you dare to question this teaching,” Manson explained.“We prefer to cater to that population and we give them information that they need to strengthen their own arguments from a place of faith,” she added.The other focus group of CFC is what Manson calls the “movable middle”, which consists of people who do not know how they feel about abortion and do not feel welcome in the two polarized populations within the abortion debate.“There’s a lot of disinformation that the right wing has put out about abortion over the last 50 years and so we provide them with actual facts. We give them a space to discern how they feel about abortion and make a safe place for people for whom it is a complex issue,” Manson said.Another challenge for organizations like CFC is dismantling certain narratives that automatically enmesh the Catholic faith with anti-abortion stances.“We have to have progressive pro-choice, faithful voices speaking back and centered in the movement now… We really need to counter religious narratives and people who can do that best are religious people. People have to bear in mind the five justices that struck down Roe last year were all Catholic,” said Manson. “We really are fighting a religious force so we have to center religious voices…and take back the narrative that we’ve ceded to this Christian right wing and say, ‘No, because of my faith, I support abortion’ and welcome people who feel conflicted about it rather than making them feel like they’re creating stigma.”Manson added that she doesn’t think the pro-choice movement has done this well “and really needs to if we’re going to transform hearts and minds around this issue”.“I think that they have to center faith voices [because] right now, faith voices are marginalized,” she said. “We need to widen our circle in the pro-choice movement and not create these absolutes and gate-keep each other on messaging.” More

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      Revealed: New Orleans archdiocese concealed serial child molester for years

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      The last four Roman Catholic archbishops of New Orleans went to shocking lengths to conceal a confessed serial child molester who is still living but has never been prosecuted, a Guardian investigation has found.Upon review of hundreds of pages of previously secret church files, the Guardian has uncovered arguably the most complete account yet about the extremes to which the second-oldest Catholic archdiocese in the US went to coddle the admitted child molester Lawrence Hecker.Back in 1999, Hecker confessed to his superiors at the archdiocese of New Orleans that he had either sexually molested or otherwise shared a bed with multiple teenagers whom he met through his work as a Roman Catholic priest.The admitted conduct occurred during a 15-year period, beginning in the mid-1960s, which Hecker says “was a time of great change in the world and in the church, and I succumbed to its zeitgeist”. In a two-page statement given to local church authorities serving a region with about a half-million Catholics, Hecker says, “It was a time when I neglected spiritual direction, confession and most daily prayer.”Hecker confessed to the misconduct or abuse of seven teenagers between about 1966 and 1979, including “overtly sexual acts” or “affectionate … sex acts” with at least two individuals. In other cases, Hecker reported either fondling, mutual masturbation, nudity or bed sharing, including once on another overnight trip to a Texas theme park.Hecker’s confession said the late New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan spoke with him about an accusation of sexual abuse in 1988. In 1996, Hannan’s successor as archbishop, the late Francis Schulte, received another allegation which the organization deemed unsubstantiated.Hecker’s 1999 admission arrived after one of his victims came forward with another complaint to the archdiocese. The organization responded in part by sending Hecker to an out-of-state psychiatric treatment facility which diagnosed him as a pedophile who rationalized, justified and took “little responsibility for his behavior”.The facility also recommended that the archdiocese prohibit Hecker from working with children, adolescents or other “particularly vulnerable” people.But Hecker did not stop working. In fact, after a sabbatical of a few months, the church ultimately allowed him to continue until his retirement in 2002 – which happened after a Catholic clerical molestation and cover-up scandal that ensnared the archdiocese of Boston prompted worldwide church reforms.When attorneys for the archdiocese – pressured by the Boston scandal – reported Hecker alongside a handful of other clerics to New Orleans police, they only informed investigators about a single one of the cases cited in his confession. And they didn’t mention the confession at all.Law enforcement authorities have never charged Hecker with a crime, even though his number of accusers has only swelled with the passage of time. Despite transparency policies that the Catholic church generally adopted after the 2002 scandal in Boston, New Orleans’s archdiocese waited until it released a 2018 list of dozens of priests and deacons whom it considered to be strongly suspected of sexually abusing minors before it publicly acknowledged that Hecker was a predator.Notably, the archdiocese only stopped paying Hecker retirement benefits in 2020. Citing a moral obligation it had to all clerics, the archdiocese waited until after it filed for federal bankruptcy protection that year (in part because of litigation in the wake of the clergy abuse list) to stop paying these benefits to Hecker and other abusive clerics. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy ordered it.The archdiocese did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but an attorney for the organization last week said in court that the city’s archbishop since 2009 – Gregory Aymond – “is taking every step possible to protect children”.The Orleans parish district attorney, Jason Williams, confirmed that on 14 June the archdiocese turned over “voluminous documents” pertaining to Hecker. He would not say whether his office compelled the church to hand over the files through a subpoena.That production came after Williams’s office spoke with a man who alleged being choked unconscious and raped as a child by Hecker after meeting the priest through a Catholic institution, according to an attorney representing the accuser.Child rape cases in Louisiana have no filing deadlines, and they could carry life imprisonment. Yet it is not clear when or if Hecker may ultimately be charged.Hecker’s attorney, Eugene Redmann, has declined to speak with the Guardian about claims against his client. But he alluded to how Hecker was 91, said the claims were generally from “decades ago” and added that people of advanced age “lose a lot of memory”.“We will address any charges if they are brought,” Redmann said.Reached by phone last week and asked for comment on his 1999 statement to the archdiocese, Hecker paused for several moments before saying: “I am running behind on time and have to get to an appointment.”He then hung up.Read the Guardian’s full investigation here.
      In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline at 800-422-4453. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International More

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      Pat Robertson obituary

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      Although the concept of separation of church and state is entrenched in the US constitution, the influence of churchmen in political affairs is an American tradition dating back to the colonial era. Indeed, modern media has made the voice of contemporary evangelists every bit as powerful as Cotton Mather’s sermons were to the early Puritans. Pat Robertson, who has died aged 93, rode the growth of cable television, and a shrewd sense of the economics of the business, to become the most overtly political, and arguably the most influential, of them all.When Robertson appeared on the front of Time magazine in 1986, the cover line read Gospel TV: Religion, Politics and Money. The melding of those three strands of his career was not always seamless, though in American fundamentalism, material wealth is usually seen as a visible sign of God’s blessing. Through his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), he progressed from televised faith healing to a serious run at the US presidency in 1988, and made a fortune in the process.Robertson started that campaign for the Republican nomination with a petition, and contributions, from 3 million viewers, and finished second in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of the then vice-president George HW Bush. But voters gave him little support in the Republican primaries, and Bush of course went on to the presidency.Robertson, who had handed control of CBN to his son Tim, then founded the Christian Coalition of America. Having failed to take over the Republican party, his “rainbow coalition” of fundamentalists would attempt to steer the party in its ideological direction.The coalition’s lobbying exerted immense influence, helping spearhead the right’s assault on President Bill Clinton, and provided both a fundraising and ideological template for Bush. Although the coalition was censured and fined for coordinating its campaigns directly with the Republican party, and for improper aid delivered to then-House majority leader Newt Gingrich and the Virginia senatorial candidate Oliver North, its success spurred on Robertson’s indulgence in another grand tradition of American evangelical preachers, the hubris that found him courting constant controversy, and frequent financial scandal.Controversy became inevitable with the shift from mainstream politics to the Christian Coalition. Preaching to the converted meant the restraints on expressing his true beliefs were lifted. The framework for those beliefs was set out in his 1991 bestseller The New World Order, an amalgam of historical conspiracy theories, which posited an alliance of Masons and Jewish bankers who controlled the world.Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. He predicted that the staging of “gay days” at Disney World would result in God’s retribution through earthquakes, tornados, terrorist bombings or meteors.Asked to be “nice” about rival Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians or Methodists, he said: “I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the antichrist.” He described leftwing academics as “racists, murderers, sexual deviants, and supporters of al-Qaida”.In 2005 he called for the assassination of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and explained Ariel Sharon’s 2006 stroke as God’s retribution for giving land back to Palestinians. He later apologised to Sharon’s family and claimed to have been misquoted.That followed Robertson’s standard pattern, of making wild accusations that pleased his core audience, then claiming to have been misquoted by an anti-Christian mainstream media. Most notoriously, on his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”. After the ensuing uproar, he claimed that due to a malfunctioning earpiece he had not actually heard what Falwell was saying when he agreed with it.Robertson came by his political ambitions naturally, being related through the family of his mother, Gladys (nee Willis), to two presidents, the Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, while his father, Willis Robertson, was a US Senator from Virginia, one of the conservative segregationist southern Democrats dubbed “Dixiecrats”. He was born in Lexington, Virginia, and christened Marion Robertson, but was nicknamed Pat, because his older brother, Willis Jr, would say “pat, pat, pat” while patting baby Marion’s cheeks.Pat was educated at two military academies: McDonogh, near Baltimore, and McCallie, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Washington and Lee University in his home town. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marines, but his claims to have seen combat with the First Marine Division in Korea came back to haunt him during his run for the presidential nomination.His Republican rival, Congressman Pete McCloskey, who had served with Robertson, said Robertson’s father had used influence to keep him out of combat, and that his primary responsibility had been to keep the officers’ clubs stocked with liquor. Robertson denounced this, and allegations by fellow Marines that he had consorted with prostitutes, as attempts to discredit him.Robertson returned home to gain a law degree in 1955 from Yale, but failed the bar exam. Soon afterwards, he was converted by the Dutch missionary Cornelius Vanderbreggen. By the time he was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1961, he had bought his first television station, in Portsmouth, Virginia, and established the Christian Broadcasting Network. He gave Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker their first break, doing a children’s programme, and started the breakfast-time show The 700 Club, its title taken from a fundraising drive for 700 subscribers.Robertson’s early success was based on televised faith healing. Critics pointed out that God seemed to speak through Robertson while taking programme cues from the director. His style, with fixed smile and narrow eyes, could seem almost a caricature of a snake-oil salesman, but its appeal was unquestionable, as CBN eventually claimed an audience in 180 countries. It functioned as a network of affiliated stations subscribing to its programming, but in 1977 Robertson started his own cable channel, CBN Cable, offering mainstream entertainment bookended by The 700 Club.Renamed the Family Channel, its profits eventually threatened CBN’s religious non-profit status, so Robertson set up International Family Entertainment, with himself and Tim as its heads, and sold the Family Channel to it. In 1992 he took IFE public, making $90m on the launch. In 1997, IFE sold the Family Channel to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network for $1.9bn. Fox has since sold it on to Disney, but as a condition of the original sale, the channel, now called Freeform, is still required to broadcast The 700 Club, hosted by Pat’s son Gordon, president of CBN, twice a day.Evangelists including Oral Roberts and Bob Jones had founded their own colleges, and Robertson’s television success spawned CBN University, now called Regent University, at the CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, the city where Robertson lived in a hilltop mansion with its own landing strip. On a number of occasions he credited his public prayers for steering hurricanes away from Virginia Beach, though he was unsuccessful with Hurricane Isabel in 2003.More controversial than Regent was his international humanitarian charity Operation Blessing. In 1994, it was claimed in his local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, that Robertson’s impassioned fundraising for Operation Blessing’s refugee airlift in Rwanda and Zaire was at least partly a cover for the use of his aircraft to transport diamond-mining equipment for the Robertson-owned African Development Corporation. A long investigation by Virginia’s Office of Consumer Affairs recommended Robertson be prosecuted for fraud, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Earley, brought no charges against him. The George W Bush administration made Operation Blessing the second-largest recipient of federal relief funds in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which was seen in some quarters as payback for Robertson’s support.In 2003, Robertson used The 700 Club as a platform to argue on behalf of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who had been indicted by the UN for war crimes. It emerged that Robertson had an investment in a Liberian gold mine, which he claimed was intended to help pay for Operation Blessing’s humanitarian efforts in the country, but which was allowed to go bankrupt after Taylor’s departure from office.Other business enterprises included the Ice Capades, a pyramid sales scheme, and a financial services venture with the Bank of Scotland, which was cancelled after Robertson called Scotland “a dark land overrun by homosexuals”. No matter how outrageous his statements, Robertson never alienated his core audience, and could count on the committed support of born-again Christians who felt the Lord spoke through him, and rewarded him for passing on his message, as did countless politicians hungry for his endorsement.He married Dede (Adelia) Elmer in 1954. She died in 2022 and Robertson is survived by their sons, Tim and Gordon, and daughters, Elizabeth and Ann, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. More

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      Republican bill requiring display of Ten Commandments in Texas schools fails

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      Republicans in Texas failed to pass legislation that would have required the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in every public school classroom.The controversial bill, authored by the Republican state senator Phil King, would have required schools to display the Old Testament text “in a conspicuous place in each classroom”, in a durable poster or frame.Passed by the Texas senate last week, the bill failed in the house. But it represented another sign of just how far to the right the conservative-majority Texas legislature is willing to go.Civil rights groups condemned the bill as an assault on religious freedom and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the US constitution.In a statement, the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties of Union said: “Parents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn.”Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a non-profit advocacy group, told the New York Times: “Forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments is part of the Christian nationalist crusade to compel all of us to live by their beliefs.”The bill is far from the first attempt by far-right Texas lawmakers to embed Christianity in public education.In 2021, a Texas law came into effect requiring schools to display any donated “In God We Trust” signs, so long as they were in English.More recently, a bill was passed in the Texas legislature that would allow religious chaplains to act as school counselors as soon as the next school year.Another bill would allow public schools to observe a moment of prayer and hear a reading from a religious text, such as the Bible.In 2005, as Texas attorney general, the current Republican governor, Greg Abbott, won a case over attempts to display the Ten Commandments on a monument on the grounds of the state capitol building. More

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      Muslim mayor turned away from White House Eid event: ‘There is a secret list’

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      The US Secret Service denied security clearance for Mohamed Khairullah, the longest-serving Muslim mayor in New Jersey, and prevented him from attending a White House Eid al-Fitr event on Monday afternoon marking the end of Ramadan.Khairullah, who was critical of the Trump administration’s travel ban in 2017 that restricted entry to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries, received the call from the Secret Service while he was en route to the White House. President Joe Biden revoked that ban in 2021.“It’s disappointing and it’s shocking that this continues to happen under our constitution which provides that everyone is innocent unless proven guilty,” Khairullah, 47, told NewJersey.com. “I honestly don’t know what my charge, if you want to put it that way, is at this point, to be treated in such a manner.”In a statement to the newspaper, United States Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi confirmed that Khairullah was denied entry to the event on Monday night, regretting “any inconvenience this may have caused” and noting that they were unable to “comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House”.Two days earlier, Khairullah, who has been mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, a small town of 6,000 people, for more than 17 years, appeared alongside the state’s governor, Phil Murphy, at the gubernatorial mansion for an Eid celebration.Khairullah, who was born in Syria before fleeing persecution as a teenager and moving to the United States with his parents in the 1990s, served as a volunteer firefighter and delivered humanitarian aid to refugees in Syria and Bangladesh for the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation. In 2019, Khairullah had been detained for three hours at John F Kennedy international airport after he returned from a trip to Turkey with his family.Khairullah told NewJersey.com that he sought out more information from federal officials on why he was detained but they would not disclose their reasoning. After he informed the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of what happened, the group reviewed a leaked copy of the federal terrorist screening dataset, which contains details on more than 1 million people suspected of being involved in terrorist activities, and informed him that his name and birthdate appeared in it.The Council on American-Islamic Relations has criticized the list for containing “almost entirely lists of Arabic and Muslim names” and called on the Biden administration to stop the FBI from spreading information from that terrorism dataset. Representatives for the group condemned the White House’s denial of entry to Khairullah, with the New Jersey chapter’s executive director, Selaedin Maksut, describing it as “wholly unacceptable and insulting”.“If these such incidents are happening to high-profile and well-respected American-Muslim figures like Mayor Khairullah, this then begs the question: what is happening to Muslims who do not have the access and visibility that the mayor has?” Maksut told the local New Jersey news outlet.Khairullah lamented that he could not enter the “People’s House”, telling NewJersey.com that “there is a secret list I can’t clear my name from and it still haunts me and follows me where I go”.“It’s not a matter of ‘I didn’t get to go to a party.’ It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity,” Khairullah added to Al Jazeera. “And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.” More

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      in US Politics

      The pro-Trump pastors embracing ‘overt white Christian nationalism’

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      A far-right religious group with ties to Donald Trump loyalists Roger Stone and retired Army Lt Gen Michael Flynn, is planning events with pastors in swing state churches in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere to spur more evangelical backing for the former US president’s 2024 campaign.But the group, Pastors for Trump, is drawing sharp rebukes from mainstream Christian leaders for being extremist, distorting Christian teachings and endangering American democracy, by fueling the spread of Christian nationalism.The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based evangelical pastor and businessman Jackson Lahmeyer leads the fledgling Pastors for Trump organization. Lahmeyer told the Guardian it boasts over 7,000 pastors as members and that he will unveil details about its plans on 11 May at the Trump National Doral in Miami, an event Trump will be invited to attend.Stone, a self styled “dirty trickster” who Trump pardoned after he was convicted of lying to Congress, is slated to join Lahmeyer in speaking on 11 May according to the pastor. Lahmeyer added he will talk more about his pro Trump group at a ReAwaken America evangelical gathering on 12 and 13 May at the Doral.Lahmeyer said the pastors group intends to sponsor a “freedom tour” with evening church meetings in key swing states this summer, an effort that could help Trump win more backing from this key Republican voting bloc which could prove crucial to his winning the GOP nomination again.Lahmeyer described the genesis of Pastors for Trump in dark and apocalyptic rhetoric that has echoes of Trump’s own bombast. “We’re going down a very evil path in this country,” he said. “Our economy is being destroyed. It’s China, the deep state and globalists.“China interfered in our 2020 elections,” he added. “This is biblical what’s happening. This is a spiritual battle.’But those ominous beliefs have drawn sharp criticism.“This kind of overt embrace of white Christian nationalism continues to pose a growing threat to the witness of the church and the health of our democracy,” said Adam Russell Taylor, the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners.“This pastor and this effort are trying to impose a Christian theocracy. It’s imperative that Christian leaders of all backgrounds including conservative ones speak out about this effort as a threat to our democracy and to the church.”Other religious leaders warn of dangers that Pastors for Trump poses by marrying Christian nationalism with political vitriol and election lies.“For years, Trump has tried to co-opt religious leaders to serve his campaign, even attempting to change long-standing tax law to allow dark money to flow through houses of worship,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.“Tragically, far too many pastors have confused political power with religious authority and have thrown their lot in with Trump, no matter the cost to their ministry. Pastors for Trump is the next step in this unholy alliance, mixing Christian nationalism, election lies and vitriolic language in a gross distortion of Christianity.”There’s ample evidence that Lahmeyer has embraced religious and political views replete with extremist positions.Lahmeyer has previously attacked former House speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “demon”, and former Covid 19 adviser Anthony Fauci “a mass murdering Luciferian”. To Lahmeyer, the attack on the Capitol on January 6 by a mob of pro Trump supporters was an “FBI Inside Job”.Besides his apocalyptic rhetoric, Lahmeyer’s effort has echoes of the two-year-old ReAwaken America tour that has combined election denialism with Christian Nationalism and regularly featured Flynn at its two day revival style meetings.In 2021, Flynn provided strong and early backing for Lahmeyer in an abortive primary campaign by the pastor to gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat from Oklahoma.Flynn, who worked to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden by pushing bogus claims of election fraud and who Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russians before briefly serving as Trump’s national security adviser, is a real hero in Lahmeyer’s eyes.“Flynn is a leader and general,” Lahmeyer told the Guardian. “I trust him and I have come to love him. He’s been like a father to me.”Those bonds were reinforced in early 2021 when Lahmeyer introduced Flynn to Clay Clark, an Oklahoma entrepreneur and a member of his church, who teamed up with Flynn to host some twenty ReAwaken revival-like gatherings over the last two years nationwide, all of which Lahmeyer said he’s attended.Late last year, Lahmeyer unveiled Pastors for Trump on Stone’s eponymous Stone Zone podcast, a relationship that was forged in 2021 when Stone served as a key paid consultant to Lahmeyer’s primary campaign.Pastors for Trump is “interwoven” with the Trump campaign, “but we’re a separate grassroots group”, Lahmeyer said, indicating it is a 501(c)(4) non profit social welfare, which is awaiting IRS tax status approval.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo date, the pastors group has created a two person board that includes South Carolina pastor Mark Burns, a key Trump campaign religious adviser who backed Trump’s 2016 run and who told the Guardian that he’s a “spiritual adviser” to Trump.Lahmeyer said his group hopes to arrange an event in Las Vegas in August to coincide with a ReAwaken America gathering that’s scheduled there, and that he expects to start fundraising to increase his group’s membership and activism.Asked if Stone and Flynn may participate in the various swing state church gatherings, Lahmeyer said: “I’d be dumb not to ask them. Stone and General Flynn are huge supporters.”To push the group’s pro-Trump messages, Lahmeyer has arranged a few prayer calls in recent months that have included Stone, Flynn and ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, all of whom promoted bogus claims of election fraud in 2020 and tried to help Trump overturn his loss to Joe Biden.One call that included a segment with Trump in late March which Lahmeyer hosted and that Stone and Flynn participated in, went badly awry when the sound quality was interrupted for several minutes with Trump on the line.Lahmeyer told the Stone Zone the next day that trolls had infiltrated the “backstage” of the platform they were using, while Trump fingered the “radical left” for hacking his phone when he tried to join the call.The launch of Pastors for Trump came not long after an uptick in public criticism of Trump from some evangelical leaders that suggested waning support among evangelicals.Dr Everett Piper, the ex president of a Christian university, in November wrote an op-ed entitled “It’s time for the GOP to say it: Donald Trump is hurting us, not helping us.” Piper wrote that in the 2022 midterms Trump “hindered rather than helped the much-anticipated ‘red wave’”.Likewise, the Iowa based president and CEO of the Family Leader Bob Vander Plaats, has tweeted about Trump that “It’s time to turn the page. America must move on. Walk off the stage with class.”Little wonder that in January, Trump blasted evangelical leaders who publicly criticized his new campaign for their “disloyalty”.Some scholars and recent polls, however, suggest Trump still has very significant support in the evangelical circles, and that he should garner hefty support again from evangelical voters in the primaries if he’s the nominee.“Trump’s enduring appeal to evangelicals is the greatest single triumph of identity politics in modern American history,” David Hollinger, an emeritus history professor at Berkeley and the author of Christianity’s American Fate, told the Guardian. “The evangelicals who flocked to Trump have good reason to stay with him.”Still, Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee is alarmed at the Pastors for Trump campaign.“Most clergy avoid endorsing political candidates, even in their personal capacity, because they know the polarizing impact it would have on their congregations and the distractions it would cause from their calling and the mission of the church.”Similarly, Taylor of Sojourners says Pastors for Trump is particularly worrisome. “This is further evidence that the threat of muscular white Christian nationalism is real and needs to be counteracted.” More