The United Methodist and other mainline Protestant churches are the targets of a continuing, orchestrated attack by determined right-wing ideologues who use CIA-style propaganda methods to sow dissention and distrust, all in pursuit of a radical political agenda.
The leader of this attack is an organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a pseudo-religious think-tank that carries out the goals of its secular funders that are opposed to the churches' historic social witness. The IRD works in concert with other self-styled "renewal" groups like Good News and the Confessing Movement. IRD answers only to its own self-perpetuating board of directors, most of whom are embedded in the secular political right (Howell, 1995).
The IRD board members operate and have access to conservative publications and media such as First Things, Good News, Christianity Today, Washington Times, The Weekly Standard and Fox News....A major portion of IRD's funding, from its inception, has come from right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.
IRD began in 1982.
Its early focus was international, supporting U.S. foreign policy in Central America during the Reagan years. Today, IRD publishes Faith and Freedom and monitors "mainliners and other Christian groups that often claim to speak for millions but really represent only an extreme few."
Time's list of evangelicals is not an exclusive one. There are some who keep a low profile like Don Eberly.
An advocate of shrinking government, Don Eberly, the head of the Civil Society Project promotes faith-based organizations, private philanthropic initiatives, traditional families, volunteerism and the building of a 'values' society. Whose 'values' is the question.
You won't find him on many of television's talking head programs, you wouldn't be able to pick him out of a line-up, and his essays aren't sexed-up or buzz-worthy, but for more than 15 years, Don Eberly has been one of the leading advocates of a strain of conservative advocacy known as "civil society."
Although vague and often ambiguous, "civil society" advocates intend to shrink government by handing over responsibility for maintaining and administering what's left of the social safety net to faith-based organizations, corporate and community groups, families and philanthropic initiatives. As neoconservative cultural critic Gertrude Himmelfarb has written, "When we speak of the restoration of civil society it is a moral restoration we should seek." And moral renewal, along with building the conservative century, is what Eberly is seeking.
These groups, working hand in hand with Karl Rove, took our country away from us. Let's hope it is not too late to take it back. These people are like hit men who have put out a Contract On America. They are hijackers of democracy. Read these profiles and you will understand that it has never been more important for the Democrats to take back Congress and the White House. Howard Dean certainly has his work cut out for him.
