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Last week, from Thursday, October 13 through Saturday, October 15 the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council put on its annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC., A prime networking event for the Christian right where anti-LGBT and anti-Muslim rhetoric is rife, this year’s summit welcomed its first sitting president as a speaker, Donald Trump.
Starting with the rise of the Christian right during the Cold War, the movement’s leaders mythologized America as a “city on a hill”—a nation with a divine mission to be a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. Is that dream now crumbling?
Sarah Posner at Vice:
Last fall, in the imposing Republican Palace in Chișinău, Moldova, the capital of this small former Soviet republic wedged between Ukraine and Romania, the World Congress of Families, an American initiative that promotes “family values” worldwide, gathered under the theme “Uniting East and West.” The opening ceremonies, held in the palace’s high-ceilinged ballroom, with its lush, caramel velvet draperies lit by ornate crystal chandeliers, featured a performance by Moldovan women and girls in virginal white dresses, along with videos projected onto a jumbo screen of couples frolicking in the verdant countryside.
Over the course of the two-day conference, a nearly annual event in which politicians and activists from around the world gather to forge relationships, this rural, natalist vision was repeatedly described as under attack by the threat of decadent liberalism—a global menace imposing “gender ideology,” “aggressive feminism,” and “death culture” on “the natural family.”
Accompanied by military pageantry, Moldova’s president, Igor Dodon, a stone-faced ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, made a grand entrance. Dodon governs a country sharply divided over whether to strengthen ties with the European Union or tilt toward Russia. He made his stance clear in a grimly delivered speech in which he railed against “an anti-family ideology, which is artificially propagated all over the world.” He called for a comprehensive national program whereby the government would enlist the Orthodox Church, mass media, and civil society to jointly “promote family values in the society.” He warned that any “festivals and other events that promote immoral principles”—a broadside against gay pride parades, which Dodon has consistently opposed since becoming president in 2016—could be outlawed.
Back in the United States, the World Congress of Families’ home base, Dodon’s proposals could run afoul of the Constitution, because they would ally church and state in imposing religious moral standards and suppressing free speech and association. As the weekend progressed, it became clear that “Uniting East and West” was not about exporting American-style freedoms and Constitutional protections to the nascent democracies of post-Soviet central and eastern Europe. Instead, it was about Western social conservatives embracing the rising right-wing authoritarianism in Eastern countries. Indeed, many in the US Christian right believe America has failed as a role model for the rest of the world—that liberalism, unrestrained, has brought a once great nation to its knees. To them, the “illiberal” autocrats across the Atlantic are fast becoming the new standard-bearers in a global battle for traditional values, an antidote to what they see as rising decadence and moral relativism in the West.
“Around the world there are those who don’t wish for unity, who don’t have the same vision of truth and of family,” said Brian Brown, the president of the International Organization for the Family, the parent organization of the World Congress, in his opening speech. Moldova, by contrast, “is blessed with a president that is willing to stand for truth.”
Such discontent with America’s sway marks a sea change for a movement with roots in opposing communism, long seen as an authoritarian ideology that crushed religious freedom; indeed, many no longer see the US as uniquely positioned to champion “biblical values.” So, as the global political power centers shift toward rising authoritarianism—away from American-style liberal democracy—significant players on the Christian right are gravitating to where the power is.
Beginning with the rise of the Christian right during the Cold War, the movement’s leaders mythologized America as a “city on a hill”—a nation with a divine mission to be a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. In this telling, America’s founding by Christians seeking to escape religious persecution gave it a special status, a nation with the moral authority to act as an exemplar of individual liberty and a defender of democracy and religious freedom against the forces of totalitarianism.
The phrase comes from the Sermon on the Mount, a pivotal passage for evangelicals, in which Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
John Winthrop, the future governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, used the phrase in an address titled “Model of Christian Charity,” delivered to colonists who sailed from England in 1630. In the speech, he challenged his followers to act with Christian virtue once they arrived in the New World. “The eyes of all the people are upon us,” Winthrop warned. “If we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
Centuries later, as right-wing Christian activists took up anticommunism as an existential crusade, Ronald Reagan resurrected Winthrop’s words, this time in the service of American exceptionalism. Reagan began using the phrase in 1969, as governor of California, adding the theatrical “shining” in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974. Six years later, in his successful run for president, Reagan enlisted the support of young Christian right organizations like the Moral Majority, and “shining city on a hill” became a mantra and the centerpiece of his campaign’s final, memorable speech. According to Daniel T. Rodgers, a historian emeritus at Princeton University and the author of As a City on a Hill, Reagan turned the phrase into “one of the most widely recognized building blocks in the culture of American nationalism.”
Reagan’s oratory and cultivation of the religious right as a decisive electoral force helped fix this origin myth in the minds of many Christian right activists. To them, the “shining city on a hill” represented a nation that protected the “traditional family” and the “unborn” by ensuring that government was guided by biblical rather than secular values. The phrase saturated books, sermons, political speeches, Christian summer camps and schools, homeschool textbooks and curricula, and political propaganda films. Even years after the Iron Curtain fell, during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush, another candidate who depended heavily on the conservative evangelical base, described America as “chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world.”
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was a shock to the system. Under Obama, the federal government took steps to protect the rights of trans people, required employers’ health insurance plans to cover contraceptives, and Obama appointees to the Supreme Court helped make marriage equality the law of the land. Republican leaders and Christian-right activists not only stoked fear that America was losing its treasured “city on a hill” status. They began to assert that American democracy actually was stifling the freedom of conservative Christians, and therefore was slipping as a beacon to the world. David Green, the founder of the Hobby Lobby craft stores, became an icon to the Christian right after his company sued the government, claiming the contraception rule violated his company’s religious freedom—a battle that Hobby Lobby won at the Supreme Court in 2014. As that case made its way through the courts, Green pointed to the regulation as evidence of the erosion of America’s divine status. “If there’s any hope for our government, it will be via Christians declaring that our foundation is in going to God’s Word to define our laws,” he wrote in 2013. “This is how we began as a nation and, if we hope to once again be a ‘city on a hill,’ it’s what we must return to.”
With its inaugural Congress in 1997, Allan Carlson helped found the World Congress of Families to respond to what he called a shared crisis of declining marriage and fertility rates in the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet bloc. More recently, Carlson suggested that transgender rights, too, could be undermining America’s status, asking, in a 2017 cover story in the conservative monthly Chronicles, “A City on a Hill—With Transgender Toilets?” Carlson, a historian who has taught at Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Michigan, may be an obscure figure to outsiders. But his academic research, most notably his stark warnings that secularization, urbanization, and family planning will lead to a fertility crisis in the West—what the World Congress has called a “demographic winter”—has provided an air of legitimacy to Christian-right arguments against contraception. The academic journal Carlson edits, The Family in America, influential on the Christian right, has called federal funding of family planning the “US War on Fertility.”
Now, for Carlson, America had a new role model: Viktor Orbán, the autocratic prime minister of Hungary, who hosted the 2017 World Congress. “If we want to make America great again,” Carlson wrote in 2017, we should follow Orbán’s lead. For several years, human rights organizations, the European Union, and the US foreign policy establishment had been sounding alarms that the powerful central European leader was not only undermining democracy in his own country, but developing a template for enacting across Europe what he infamously labeled, in a 2014 speech, “an illiberal state.”
Read the full article at Vice.
Family Research Council president Tony Perkins appeared on “Breitbart News Daily” yesterday to boast of the his group’s far-reaching influence in the Trump administration, arguing that Trump’s recent announcement that he would ban transgender people from serving in the military was in part the result of FRC’s collaboration with the White House.
Safiyah Riddle at RWW:
Family Research Council president Tony Perkins appeared on “Breitbart News Daily” yesterday to boast of the his group’s far-reaching influence in the Trump administration, arguing that Trump’s recent announcement that he would ban transgender people from serving in the military was in part the result of FRC’s collaboration with the White House.
When Alex Marlow, the host of the program, asked Perkins if he saw President Trump’s Twitter declaration of the policy change—which took even many people in the Pentagon by surprise—coming, Perkins responded that he “was not surprised” because the FRC has been “working with the White House” in order to obstruct the “cultural grenade” of the Obama-era policy that paved the way for allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military. While Perkins conceded that he “didn’t know what the exact action” was that the administration would take, he “knew they were going to do something.”
[...]
Perkins also described how his organization successfully “worked with the president and the White House to get the executive order out back in May” that undermined the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits such as churches from making public political endorsements. He added that FRC is now working with the administration on the “second phase” of that plan, which will involve the Department of Justice developing guidelines for federal agencies to address the “loss of religious freedom” that has resulted from “this sexual anarchy.”
Perkins previewed these new guidelines on his own radio program earlier this week, saying, “We are going to see government agencies basically put on notice that they have to respect religious freedom. And that is not just the ability to believe, it is the free exercise of religion.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions also hinted at the coming “religious freedom” guidelines in a speech to Alliance Defending Freedom this month.
FRC’s senior fellow for policy studies, Peter Sprigg, told Newsweek recently that the group has “big communications channels with the Trump administration” and that Perkins “has met and knows Donald Trump as well.”
From the 07.27.2017 edition of SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily:
Working on thesis and just... The prevailing discourse against normalizing queerness is that "homosexual activists in our schools do indeed 'recruit children'... 100% of our children, 'gay' or straight- as soldiers in the war against truth, common sense, and tradition moral values" (Peter Sprigg "Homosexuality in your child's school 2006). But look around you! Those morals you claim to protect are being subverted in MONSTROUS ways, not by queer individuals but by people who uphold the stated dogma! It's ironic and disgusting. I fail to understand how anyone could hold this position in light of overwhelming evidence that it is precisely this attitude that actually 'subverts' truth, common sense, and morality and fuels violence towards innocent children and adults.
Family Research Council Releases Anti-Transgender Report
Peter Sprigg
The Family Research Council [FRC] has issued a 42-page document titled, “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement.” Naturally the recent release is not intended for it’s audience, primarily Evangelicals, to come to understand the transgender community, but more to provide them with more “proof” that our community is delusional, non-existent and thus should be treated…
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Tony Perkins' trans hate group: Regulate gender identity with constitutional amendment
Tony Perkins’ trans hate group: Regulate gender identity with constitutional amendment
LEXIE CANNES STATE OF TRANS — If I were to guess which trans hate group would be the first to propose a constitutional amendment to stifle the rights of trans people, Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council (FRC) would be my first choice.
FRC spokesperson Craig James stated that in their war with the LGBT community, transgender rights is now their biggest target. Another spokesperson, Peter…
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Obama Signs New Executive Order Restricting Religious Freedom
Obama Signs New Executive Order Restricting Religious Freedom
By: Greg Campbell
It’s gone relatively unreported, but on Monday, President Obama signed yet another executive order- this time targeting the religious rights of Americans.
The new executive edict issued by Obama prohibits FEDERAL CONTRACTORS from discriminating against homosexuals and those who identify as a different gender than that which they were assigned at birth.
The move is sure to…
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Betty Crocker goes homo
Betty Crocker goes homo
Like JCPenney, Target, DC Comics, Archie comics, Kraft Food’s Oreo cookie, Nabisco’s Honey Maid crackers, Cheerio breakfast cereal, and fast fooder Burger King, Betty Crocker has also embraced the rainbow flag and gone homo.
Dustin Suggins reports for LifeSiteNews, July 14, 2014, that the 90-year-old homemaking company Betty Crocker says it is adjusting to the times by promotingall relationships…
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