November 26, 2022

Texas Baptists reject Christian nationalism in November resolution; affirm religious liberty

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/11/texas-baptists-reject-christian.html

The largest state-affiliated group in the Southern Baptist Convention, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, with 1.7 million members, has rejected Christian nationalism in a resolution passed by messengers at their annual convention in Waco this month.

The resolution avoided using the specific term "Christian Nationalism,' but the content clearly rejected any of its tenets. It affirmed religious liberty and also condemned any government attempt to commandeer churches for secular purposes.

Some of the critics of the resolution, according to the report in the Baptist Standard, felt that the resolution should have called out Christian nationalism by name, citing examples from Germany in the 1930's when Pastor Dietrich Boenhoffer and other confessing Christians called out the Nazi movement by name. It was also noted that the resolution was introduced and supported by many younger pastors and church leaders. Supporters said the term was avoided to steer clear of politics, and focus on the mission and purpose of churches.

November 26, 2022

To Georgia Democrats: Flood the Polling Places Tomorrow!!!

Just so you know, friends, I've made a sacrificial contribution to Senator Warnock's re-election in the runoff campaign this week. I'm not a major giver by any stretch of the imagination, but this is important enough for all of us to support and do whatever we can to get this Senator back to his seat. I've also talked to many of you on the phone, encouraging you to go to the polls during this runoff.

If I lived in Georgia, I would be standing in line in the dark, before the polls open tomorrow, to purposefully cast my ballot on a Saturday, to make a statement on purpose in support of the right to vote, for early voting to be convenient, and for Senator Warnock.

Since I can't vote in Georgia in person, I would like to ask you to vote on my behalf, and on behalf of the millions of Democrats who are supporting you and pulling for you. If you can vote tomorrow, that would be absolutely wonderful.

Thank you!

November 26, 2022

A "slow awakening" to the subversion of the church by Trumpism is happening among some Evangelicals

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-slow-awakening-finally-some.html

When Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a Turning Point USA gathering in Phoenix in December of 2021, and said, "We've turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference--I understand the mentality--but it's gotten us nothing. OK?" that should have done more than "ruffled a few feathers," as he suggested. The message in that statement, along with the entire manner in which Trump Junior, and Charlie Kirk, who is the founder of the Turning Point organization that promotes the "culture war" side of Trumpism, present their message, is the complete opposite of the Christian gospel and the way that Jesus taught his followers to live in the world.

Those words, from Trump Junior, when reported, as they were, should have caused an earthquake shock of horror among conservative Evangelicals who claim to believe the Bible is the "inerrant, infallible, only authority for Christian faith and practice." The fact that it really didn't do that is a clear indication that there's been a shift in conservative Evangelicalism from depending on God's Holy Spirit and written scripture, to attempting to align their mission with secular political interests and become a tool used to win elections for a demagogue.

As a result, a Phoenix pastor has determined his cause is now to lead Christians away from the MAGA cult. In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, Pastor Caleb Campbell revealed that he decided to make wooing Christians away from the MAGA movement his personal cause after he attended a Christian event hosted by Turning Point USA, the right-wing activist group founded by Charlie Kirk. During the event he attended, says Campbell, Kirk misappropriated quotes from the Bible in order to make it sound like God wanted Christians to be armed to the teeth with firearms. "I was absolutely terrified and horrified," Campbell tells the Globe and Mail.

It's about time. Or is it too little, too late?

November 23, 2022

I wonder if a few corporate donors were willing to set up PACs for some of the GOP congressmen

who are representing very marginal districts, and who need to be more centrist to have a shot at re-election, if they agree to stonewall the agenda of hatred and revenge, and only support congressional measures aimed at resolving inflation, crime and avoid the extremist Marjorie Taylor Green junk?

What do you think is their price?

November 23, 2022

Two deep red Arizona counties have supervisors who are threatening not to certify their vote.

According to Chris Hayes this evening. They are supporting the claims of election denying, anti-Patriot, anti-Democratic anti-American Kari Lake, who lost the governor's race.

But these are both deep red counties and one of them, Cochise, is where the GOP candidate for US House of Representatives district 6, gained most of his margin of about 5,000 votes over Democrat Kirsten Engel. Legally, county supervisors have no authority to certify or not certify the vote totals in Arizona, that's the Secretary of State's job. So if these two counties don't submit their count by the November 28 deadline, their votes are excluded from the total. If that happens, then Engel would win the congressional seat by about 10,000 votes, two state representatives and one state senator, all Republicans, would lose their races, and almost all of their votes, and the Republican attorney general candidate, who trails by about 500 votes, would lose by over 20,000, and the Republican who was elected state sutperintendent of public instruction would lose about 50,000 votes, and also lose his race.

Cochise County has been plagued by a host of inept, incompetent, corrupt politicians who have fallen into the fantasy land of election denying. They wanted to mandate hand-counting of ballots in their county, something to drag the results out for weeks after the election.

November 21, 2022

Will Evangelicals stand up for their faith and call out Republicans' agenda of hate and revenge?

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-republican-agenda-of-hate-and-revenge.html

Don't expect much.

"Business in the evangelical industrial complex will continue as normal. Until the next scandal. Which is certain to come. Because the lying and corruption is rampant in evangelicalism."--Julie Roys, Could the Meltdown at Cedarville be Evangelicalism's Chernobyl?" The Roys Report, July 2020

It is difficult to center positions taken by conservative Evangelicals on Christian doctrine and theology. Most of the churches, even those affiliated with denominations and fellowships, are independent and autonomous and if they have a pastor or church leader who wanders off the beaten path and tries to build personal loyalty from a congregation around unique interpretations of obscure Old Testament passages of scripture, there is no way to hold them accountable because they intimidate their own church members into submission and there is no other means of accountability. People like Trump's "spiritual advisor" Paula White, or the Tennessee pastor who likes to make headlines, Greg Locke, are actually heretics by the more widely accepted standards of Evangelicals.

But political power has trumped Biblical truth, bringing Mormons to the pulpit of Liberty University among Baptists and other ultra-conservative Fundamentalists who characterize Mormonism as a demonic cult. The lust after worldly power is a temptation that is hard to resist. So it's not surprising that they're willing to compromise sacred beliefs for political gain. Trump, who is not a Christian by his own admission, demands, and gets, their loyalty. Don Jr., at the Trump political organization's "Turning Point" rallies, tells the young Evangelical-leaning audiences who show up to abandon Jesus' teachings, that "turning the other cheek" and "loving your enemies" may be nice things to do, but "they won't get you anywhere in this world."

So as Republicans abandon their constituent's desires to play politics and try to get revenge for being losers, will Evangelicals call them out or will they continue to sell out their faith for political power?

November 18, 2022

A "Tsunami of corruption"

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-tsunami-of-corruption.html

Of course I would like to give credit where credit is due. The title came from somewhere in the cluster of news reports I've watched and to which I've listened over the past eight or nine days since the election. More than likely, I was doing something else when I heard it, it caught my attention and I wrote it down and went on with what I was doing.

As Americans, we've always thought, and we have been taught, that our constitution is the best bulwark we could possibly have against the threat of dictatorship and extremism. We have naively thought that we are the model democracy, so much so that our approach to foreign relations involves the imposition of our kind of democracy and our values on other people of the world. We've found all kinds of excuses to explain why it didn't work in some places. But we've never really backed off of that view. And so, we have been brought to the precipice of a cliff, closer to losing what we have than at any other point in our history, in my opinion, closer even than we were in the 1850's and 1860's before and during the Civil War.

The crimes this man, Trump, has committed are as well documented as is possible, in thousands of pages of a special investigation conducted by Robert Mueller, and in thousands of pages of testimony and investigation conducted by Congress about his instigation and incitement of the insurrection on January 6th, 2020 and now, in his criminal removal of top secret documents from the White House following his presidency. That doesn't count the multiple cases of fraud and sexual abuse he has settled or for which he has had to pay fines and penalties in his business dealings.

So, in this country, with our pride in our constitution, our democracy, and our idealism, how is it possible that this man is free to announce yet another run for the Presidency? How is it possible, riding a "tsunami of corruption" with evidence in hand, that he is even free?

November 18, 2022

So if Kari Lake thinks there was election fraud in

Arizona, particularly Maricopa County, then Biggs and Schweikart shouldn't have won, huh?

November 16, 2022

Waiting on Trump indictments

Election is over. If Trump had been indicted, it would have given Dems an even bigger boost. Do they want Senator Warnock back? This would help him.

There's been enough time. Get it done.

November 16, 2022

Why is this insurrectionist, anti-American, Fascist being allowed to announce a candidacy for

President?

How does that happen in a constitutional democracy? He's running to be president of something he intended to destroy, and that's bad enough.

But we're letting him do it.