This encyclopedia documents the role of the National Christian Foundation as the leading domestic U.S. funding source for organizations and institutions involved in anti-LGBT rights activism and which are ideologically hostile to gay rights.
For practical reasons, the encyclopedia covers only a handful of the myriad anti-LGBT groups that NCF funds – the most prominent or especially noteworthy organizations in terms of their anti-LGBT rights activities – out of the over-17,000 entities funded by the National Christian Foundation as detailed in NCF’s 2013 990 tax form filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
The NCF’s “core beliefs” include the statement, “the entire Bible is the inspired and inerrant Word of God; the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” (see: https://www.nationalchristian.com/vision)
NCF’s founders have helped create and lead the elite anti-gay evangelical right – NCF co-founder and current board member Ron Blue has swerved on the Campus Crusade for Christ board and NCF co-founder (the late) Larry Burkett worked as a financial manager for CCC; Burkett was also a founding member of the Alliance Defense Fund (now renamed Alliance Defending Freedom); NCF co-founder and current NCF board member Terry Parker has served on the board of the Family Research Council (see encyclopedia entries for these three organizations.)
Since its founding in 1982, the NCF has given out over $5 billion in grant money, and over 2.5$ billion of that went out in a five year period, from 2009-2013. By 2013, based on its $603 million in grants in FY 2012, the National Christian Foundation was judged by the Chronicle of Philanthropy to be America’s 12th biggest private foundation.
Consider the NCF’s startling rate of growth over the last 6 years – in 2009, the National Christian Foundation gave out $328 million in grants; NCF’s 2015 ministry report states that its preliminary (un-audited) grant total for FY 2014 was $875 million.
The source data for funding listed in this reference work are 2001-2013 National Christian Foundation IRS 990 forms filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Years 2002-2013 of those forms can be downloaded here, from the National Center For Charitable Statistics.
Note: this is an evolving work. Please return soon, as entries will be added on an ongoing basis.
To go to the entry for any given organization, clink on the links below. To return to list, use your browser’s ‘back’ button.
Advocates International
Africa Inland Mission International
Alabama Policy Institute
Alliance Defense Fund / Alliance Defending Freedom
Alliance For Marriage
American Center For Law and Justice
American Decency Association
American Family Association
Americans For Truth About Homosexuality
American Vision
American Values
Assemblies of God
Association of Christian Schools International
Bethel Church
California Family Council
California School Project
Campus Crusade For Christ
Capitol Ministries
Center For Arizona Policy
Chalcedon Foundation
Child Evangelism Fellowship
Christian and Missionary Alliance
Christian Anti-Communism Crusade
Christian Anti Defamation Commission
Christian Broadcast Network
Christian Film and Television Commission
Christian Legal Society
Christian Union
Citizens For Community Values
Compassion International
Concerned Women For America
Coral Ridge Ministries
Council For National Policy
Council For Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Daystar Church
Desert Stream Ministries
Disciple Nations Alliance
Eternal Perspective Ministries
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Evangelism Explosion
Exodus International
Family Research Council
Family Research Institute
Faith 2 Action
Fellowship of Christian Athletes
Fidelis Center For Law and Policy
Florida Family Policy Council
Focus on the Family
Food For The Hungry
Foundation For Moral Law
Freedom in Christ Ministries
Friends of the Bridegroom
Frontline Fellowship
Georgia Family Council
Global Mobilization Ministries
Harvest Evangelism
Healing Rooms Ministries
His Servants
Hope For The Heart
Illinois Family Institute
Indiana Family Institute
Institute in Basic Life Principles
The International Foundation
In Touch Mission International
Intercessors For America
International House of Prayer
Iowa Family Policy Center
John Hagee Ministries
Liberty Counsel
Lilburn Alliance Church
Louis Palau Association
Marketplace Leaders Ministries
Marriage and Family Foundation
Massachusetts Family Institute
Mastering Life Ministries
Mayflower Institute
Media Research Center
Mercy Ministries of America
Michigan Family Forum
Minnesota Family Institute and Council
Minneosta Teen Challenge
Mission America Coalition
National Organization For Marriage
New Hope Charitable Foundation
New Jersey Family Policy Council
North Carolina Family Policy Council
Officer’s Christian Fellowship
Oral Roberts University
Pacific Justice Institute
Patrick Henry College
Pennsylvania Family Institute
Philadelphia Biblical University
Portland Fellowship
Prison Fellowship Ministries
Probe Ministries International
Promise Keepers
Ransomed Heart Ministries
Regeneration Ministries
Revival Prayer Institute, Inc.
Rutherford Institute
Samaritan’s Purse
South Tampa Fellowship Church
Southeast Christian Church
Summit Ministries
Teen Challenge
Teen Mania Ministries
Trinity Academy
The Becket Fund For Religious Liberty
TheCall
The Conservative Caucus
The Family Foundation of Kentucky
The Family Foundation of Virginia
The First Academy (of Central Florida)
The Heritage Foundation
The Howard Center
The Institute On Religion and Democracy
The Liberty Institute
The Navigators
Traditional Values Coalition
Truro Anglican Church
TruthXchange
Truth In Action
Vision America, Inc.
Vision Forum Ministries
Voice of the Martyrs
Watoto Child Care Ministry
The Witherspoon Institute
World Outreach Ministries
Youthbuilders
Advocates International (EIN 54-1646669)
Advocates International bills itself as the world’s biggest faith-based legal association, with thousands of legal professionals around the globe. According to its website, AI “informally links 30,000 advocates and jurists in 156 nations through 100 national Christian lawyer groups linked by six regional networks.” (see: http://www.advocatesinternational.org/content/brief-overview-advocacy-1991-2010)
While Advocates International states that “The goal of AI is justice with compassion in Christ”, it also promotes an anti-LGBT agenda and is developing a close working collaboration with related groups, such as the (NCF-funded) Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) that are emerging in the forefront of the mounting international war on gay rights (see: http://www.advocatesinternational.org/webfm_send/260).
In September 2009, AI’s Africa affiliate Advocates Africa hosted a conference (see: http://www.advocatesinternational.org/content/advocates-africa-0), in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at which ADF Senior Vice President Jeffery Ventrella led a plenary session with the title “Religious Freedom, the Homosexual Agenda and Advocacy”. The likely content of Ventrella’s speech at the session can be inferred from a June 18, 2010 talk Ventrella gave at the ministry of (NCF-funded) TruthXchange, during which Ventrella approvingly quoted TruthXchange head Dr. Peter Jones (whom Ventrella referred to as a friend),
“Whether Christians realize it or not, we are part of a human history that is destined for confrontation and conflict with pagan spirituality and that spirituality is driven, in our times, by a militant homosexual agenda.” (see: http://vimeo.com/26365697)
During his talk, Ventrella mentioned giving presentations around the world on the homosexual agenda, including in Ethiopia – in an apparent reference to his talk at the 2009 Advocates International Ethiopia conference.
Featured speakers at the 2009 AI Ethiopia conference included Campus Crusade for Christ (now rebranded as “Cru”) Vice Presidents Bekele Shanko and Delah Adadevoh – who in 2013 were two of the three featured speakers at Campus Crusade For Christ’s “Pamoja III” conference held from late December 2012 into early January 2013 near Lagos, Nigeria – a conference which drew upwards of two thousand young evangelical leaders from across Africa.
During Campus Crusade’s Pamoja III conference, as described in a Truth Wins Out special report which broke the story on the virulently anti-gay conference, the other featured speaker was Ethiopian Dr. Seyoum Antonios, who,
“claimed, among other things, that seventy percent of gay men have “fecal sex,” which involves ingesting large amounts of feces; that thirty-three percent of gay men are pedophiles, and that gay couples are coming to Africa to “steal their children” and turn them into homosexuals; that homosexuality has come to Africa “to kill us,” and thus must be eradicated; that gays are fifteen times more likely to be murderers; and that Africans should reject aid from Western organizations that are “trying” to infiltrate their continent with the homosexual agenda. Much of his talk seems to be lifted directly from anti-gay American researchers like Dr. Judith Reisman of Liberty University and the widely discredited Paul Cameron.
Dr. Antonios worked the crowd into a frenzy, shouting that “Africa will become a graveyard for homosexuality!” multiple times.” (see: http://www.truthwinsout.org/news/2013/05/35215/)
Giving special presentations at the Advocates International / Advocates Africa Ethiopia conference in 2009 were the following National Christian Foundation-supported organizations: Prison Fellowship International, Campus Crusade for Christ, Alliance Defense Fund, International Justice Mission, and Pepperdine University, USA.
Former Dean of Pepperdine University and now-President and Chancellor of Baylor University Kenneth Starr serves on the Advocates International board (see: http://www.advocatesinternational.org/node/697).
Pepperdine University has established close ties to the Ugandan justice system (see: http://law.pepperdine.edu/news-events/news/2010/05/judiciary.htm), through its “Global Justice Program”.
In 2012, Advocates International’s affiliate Advocates Guyana, responding to a possible push in the Guyana National Assembly to de-criminalize same-sex relations, issued a statement that such a legislative action would be “an assault on our Guyanese beliefs and value system” and “an assault on the family”. Declared Advocates Guyana, “While we defend the human rights of every individual, including homosexuals, we condemn the practice of homosexuality and it’s promotion through legislative amendments” (see: http://www.guyanajesuits.org/cms-assets/documents/88691-264411.201238october-5catholic-standard.pdf)
Another data point in AI’s pattern of anti-LGBT rights activism came in 2008 at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights when,
“At the 44th session in Abuja, Nigeria in November 2008, a further draft resolution was proposed at the NGO forum condemning violence and the culture of impunity of violations of human rights of LGBTI people. A representative of Advocates International,26 challenged the resolution on the basis that there was no consensus on the issue.” (see: http://agi.ac.za/sites/agi.ac.za/files/2_case_study_sibongile_ndashe.pdf)
In 2005, along with the (NCF-funded) Alliance Defense Fund and (NCF-funded) Becket Fund, Advocates International joined what would be a successful effort to protect the religious free speech rights of Swedish Pentecostal pastor Ake Green (see: http://www.akegreen.org/en-2-left/en-2-5.htm), who was being prosecuted under hate speech laws for a 2003 sermon in which Green declared,
“Is homosexuality genetic or an evil force that plays mind games with people? …
The Bible clearly teaches about these abnormalities. Sexual abnormalities are a deep cancerous tumor in the entire society. The Lord knows that sexually twisted people will rape the animals. Not even animals can avoid the fiery passion of man’s sexual lust.” (see: http://www.eaec.org/bibleanswers/ake_green_sermon.htm)
Advocates International speakers have participated in the (NCF-funded) Howard Center’s World Congress of Families events, which have been closely tied to growing anti-LGBT persecution and anti-gay legislation in Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.
According to AI, its Family Task Force “generally supports the principles and purposes of the World Congress of Families and participates in its global meetings.” (see: http://www.advocatesinternational.org/library/family-and-community)
2001 – 51,000
2002 – 171,000
2003 – 21,000
2004 – 21,000
2005 – 16,000
2006 – 1,000
2007 – 15,100
2008 – 26,400
2009 – 16,850
2010 – 2,450
2011 – 6,600
2012 – 5,740
2013 – 9,750
African Inland Mission International (EIN 11-1873101)
Africa Inland Mission International
As a June 30, 2015 AIC Kenya Facebook page post ( https://www.facebook.com/AICKENYA?fref=nf ) states,
“The US Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is a legal right across the United States. Let us pray for the church in America and the world to stand firm in the Truth of God, that same-sex marriage is a violation of the word and the will of God.”
AIM International supports the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) network of Africa Inland Churches that are, in effect, their own continent-wide denomination. AIM was conceived from the efforts of Scottish missionary Peter Cameron Scott, and launched its missions and church-planting work with an 1895 expedition to Kenya, where AIM is particularly well established in Africa.
AIM is among a class of Anglo-American pseudo-denominations (such as the Christian And Missionary Alliance and Serving in Mission), launched in the 19th Century, that are nominally “non-denominational”, heavily missions oriented, and aimed at evangelizing the world’s thousands of “unreached people groups” categorized by such mammoth evangelical global intelligence gathering projects as the Joshua Project, which makes its detailed ethnographic data on thousands of world “people groups” available to various missionary efforts and organizations.
Like the Christian And Missionary Alliance, as it has grown and developed AIM has quietly drifted towards beliefs and practices associated with the New Apostolic Reformation movement and its outlier movements in charismatic evangelicalism, as well as towards the wider church growth movement from which many of the key NAR ideas and practices emerged.
As described in the World Evangelical Alliance book “Doing Member Care Well: Perspectives and practices From Around the World” (page 153, edited by Kelly O’Donnell, 2002, World Evangelical Alliance Missions Commission), AIM has focused especially on building missions infrastructure, including a partnership with the Wycliffe Bible Translators/SIL (also heavily funded by the National Christian Foundation):
“Africa Inland Mission has historically had a vision to provide services for the broader missions community of like- minded mission agencies in East Africa. The counseling ministry is a good fit for the AIM International Services Department, which also provides bush flights, freight shipping and clearing, a guest- house, financial services, etc. AIM has also been involved in developing and manag- ing institutions such as Rift Valley Academy and Kijabe Medical Center.”
As a young man, Peter Cameron Scott “joined the Christian Alliance Training Institute in New York, run by Albert Benjamin Simpson who was the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination.” As described in this encyclopedia, in the entries on the Revival Prayer Institute, the Lilburn Alliance Church, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance, CMA has emerged as a major force in the war on LGBT rights in sub-Saharan Africa. Many CMA churches are now fully New Apostolic, in their beliefs and practices.
The NAR and its charismatic predecessor movements (often referred to under the umbrella term “Neo-Pentecostalism”) are especially committed to opposing LGBT rights, and their demon-obsessed theology – a particularly potent weapon for attacking LGBT populations and other targeted societal groups – has been promoted by AIC churches since the early 1990s (see footnote), when American evangelicals began heavily exporting their Neo-Pentecostal Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping ideas and practices, especially to to Africa.
In a 1999 book, NAR leader C. Peter Wagner described one of the key three “moral nonnegotiables” of New Apostolic churches: “Homosexuality is a sin against God” [from page 7 of his book Church Quake! The Explosive Power of the New Apostolic Reformation (Regal Books, 1999)]
Consequently, it is not surprising that one of the most prominent AIC churches in Kenya, Nairobi’s Africa Inland Church Ziwani, has recently served as a launching point for Kenyan Vice President William Ruto’s mounting rhetorical attacks on LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.
As reported in Kenyan media (see: http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/mobile/?articleID=2000168074&story_title=DP+William+Ruto%3A+homosexuals+have+no+place+in+Kenya ) on July 6, 2015 Ruto declared, in a speech at the Ziwani Church, “The other day you heard that in America the court has ruled about homosexuality but in this country we will defend what is right and what our faith states.”
Ruto continued, “God did not create man and woman for a man to come and marry another man. We believe in God. This is a God-fearing nation and we will be firm on what is right.”
footnote: The AIC has played a substantial role in the recent political ecology of Kenya, and its promotion of Neo-Pentecostal doctrines has helped steer national discourse away from questions regarding political leadership and corruption and towards narratives concerning personal morality. As UK academics Gregory Deacon and Gabriel Lynch describe in their monograph “Allowing Satan in? Moving Toward a Political Economy of Neo-Pentecostalism in Kenya” (from the Journal of Religion in Africa #43 (2013) 108-130, published by Brill),
“[T]he AIC actively fostered neo-Pentecostal ideas, for example through the AIC press publication of Delivered from the Powers of Darkness by the influential Nigerian evangelist Emmanuel Eni, which gave a personal account of Eni’s time as a witch and his redemption through his acceptance of Jesus (Ogembo 2001). Ellis and ter Haar (1998) discuss this particular tract in terms of its reference to evil and therefore as an implicit critique of power and corruption. However, in Kenya these ideas fed into Moi’s portrayals of the country’s socioeconomic woes as resulting not from poor leadership but from individual sin that had allowed Satan to enter the nation. Continuing in this vein, Moi commissioned an inquiry into devil worship as an offfijicial response to a growing belief that ‘devil worship was becoming prevalent in Kenyan edu- cational institutions’ (Ogembo 2001, 7).”
2013 – 135,392
Alabama Policy Institute (EIN 63-0809568)
The Alabama Policy Institute is an example of the overlap of the State Policy Institute system (which promotes pro-business, anti-regulatory legislation authored by ALEC, the American Legislative Council) and the Family Policy Council network associated with Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council (which promotes “pro-family” legislation and issues, as those are typically defined by the religious right.)
The Alabama Policy Institute is listed, by the Family Research Council, as one of the “State Family Policy Councils” (see:http://www.frc.org/state-policy-organizations). A February 20, 2014 op-ed run on the Alabama Policy Institute website states (see: http://www.frc.org/state-policy-organizations),
“[T]he endgame of homosexual activists is not simply to upend duly enacted laws defining marriage. The ultimate goal of their agenda is to use the force of law to silence sincerely held religious beliefs in opposition to same-sex marriage.
Activists in states that allow gay marriage have been targeting bakeries and photography studios owned by citizens who oppose gay marriage based on deeply-held religious beliefs…
…Targeting, intimidation and coercion are the tactics of regimes our nation has fought time and again over its history.
[…]
…The battle to protect basic freedoms never ends and all freedom-loving people must engage or those freedoms will soon be lost.”
2001 – 22,500
2002 – 17,500
2003 – 10,000
2004 – 15,691
2005 – 22,000
2006 – 30,000
2007 – 23,850
2008 – 46,250
2009 – 89,200
2010 – 79,325
2011 – 106,250
2012 – 123,469
2013 – 142,794
Alliance Defense Fund / Alliance Defending Freedom (EIN 54-166459)
Up into 2014, the ADF offered a book – as a complementary gift to ADF donors, that was co-authored by ADF founder and president Alan Sears and which claimed that “[homosexual] activists have followed a strategy akin to what Hitler used back in the 1920s and 1930s to take over Germany”. ADF is tied to anti-LGBT rights activism from the U.S. to Belize to Russia and has played a major role in the the anti-gay World Congress of Families (see: http://www.twocare.org/the-secret-american-money-behind-the-world-congress-of-families/ ).
The umbrella coalition known as the ADF plays a preeminent coordinating and funding role for legal organizations of the Christian and religious right. The ADF in turn works with state-level family policy organizations created under the aegis of (NCF-funded) Focus on The Family and which interface closely with the (NCF-funded) Family Research Council.
As explained during a 2006 3 and 1/2 special briefing to The Gathering (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LYLMYvUhoQ ), The ADF was created expressly to aid existing legal organizations, and local attorneys, in their culture war legal battles; it does not compete with existing Christian right legal organizations, nor does it take over local Christian right legal fights. Rather, the ADF provides not only legal assistance but also targeted financing to support specific litigation. ADF’s supportive function was expressly intended, by its founders, to give ADF leverage to corral existing Christian right legal groups and attorneys away from previously antagonistic legal strategies and towards complementary, mutually reinforcing approaches.
During that 2006 ADF briefing to The Gathering, Family Research Council head Tony Perkins gave a special presentation in which Perkins declared the LGBT rights movement to be the second most dire threat to America next to militant Islam.
The Alliance Defending Freedom was launched in 1994 with a conference call co-hosted by Campus Crusade For Christ founder Bill Bright, who in turn was an inner-sanctum member of the Washington D.C. network known as The Fellowship (long headed by Douglas Coe.) Other co-founders included evangelist D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, and the less well known financial adviser Larry Burkett, one of three co-founders of the now-mammoth National Christian Foundation.
Thus, the ADF is in effect a spinoff from the elite networks of conservative evangelicals associated with The Fellowship and its offspring The Gathering, a fact which provides strong corroborating evidence for journalist Jeff Sharlet’s case (as outlined in several chapters his 2009 book “C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat To American Democracy [2009, HarperCollins] – see: http://harpers.org/blog/2010/09/inside-c-street-six-questions-for-jeff-sharlet/ ) that The Fellowship has played a major role in inspiring Ugandan religious and political leaders to create and promote the infamous Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill.
With its close ideological ties to the virulently anti-LGBT rights, theocratic Christian Reconstructionism movement (explored later in this article) it is hardly surprising that the ADF is – as evidenced by its involvement in planning meetings of the World Congress of Families, one of the main vectors by which American conservative evangelicals are exporting their culture war agenda including hostility to reproductive and LGBT rights – in the vanguard of rapidly globalizing culture wars.
From 2012-2014 the ADF played a major, if not the central, behind the scenes role in the Hobby Lobby v. Burwell Supreme Court case and the welter of similar “religious liberty” court cases that were being litigated across America (see entry on The Becket Fund.)
The legal organizations supported by ADF (most of which are also funded by the National Christian Foundation) represent most of the anti-reproductive rights and anti-LGBT rights legal activism in America and are now playing, as well, a major role in mounting international efforts to restrict LGBT rights.
In 2003, ADF filed a brief in a support of now-overturned sodomy laws in the Lawrence v. Texas case, and in 2008 ADF defended California’s ban on same sex marriage in Hollingsworth v. Perry. The ADF is currently representing a group of plaintiffs challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires employee health plans from for-profit employers to provide contraceptive coverage.
Over the last decade ADF lawyers emerged in the forefront of legal efforts to block same-sex marriage in states across the nation. More recently, the Alliance Defense Fund / Alliance Defending Freedom has become a leader in the American Christian right’s international export and encouragement of anti-LGBT legislation.
The ADF was a co-convener of the 2012 World Congress of Families conference in Madrid, and ADF chief counsel Benjamin Bull has traveled to Russia to meet with Russian legislator Yelena Mizulina, who has led legislative efforts in the Russian Duma to pass anti-LGBT and anti-reproductive rights legislation. More recently, ADF joined a number of major US-based (and NCF funded) Christian right groups such as the Family Research Council and Focus on The Family at planning sessions for the 2015 World Congress of Families event in Salt lake City, Utah (see: http://worldcongress.org/files/1114/4483/3500/WCF_News_November_2014.pdf )
While liberal activist groups such as Thinkprogress ( http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/01/3429448/alliance-defending-freedom/ ) have provided in-depth coverage of ADF activism, existing reports (excepting the work of Twocare.org ) have failed to identify what is by far the biggest source of ADF funding, the National Christian Foundation.
The NCF provided over 25% of the ADF’s annual budget in 2012. In addition, many of the ADF’s other substantial funders, including the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation and the Edgar and Ellen Prince Foundation, are represented at The Gathering along with the National Christian Foundation.
As explored in a 2014 Twocare.org report, The Alliance Defense Fund has close ties to the Christian Reconstructionism movement and has directly co-sponsored Christian Reconstructionist conferences, such as a 2007 conference with the Christian Reconstructionist Vision Forum (see: http://www.alternet.org/story/55717/).
Top Christian Reconstructionists such as R.J. Rushdoony (widely considered the movement’s founder) have advocated imposing capital punishment (via such “biblical” methods of execution as stoning, crucifixion or burning at the stake) for violations of mosaic law such as adultery, homosexuality, female un-chastity (sex before marriage), witchcraft, idolatry, and blasphemy.
2001 – 102,750
2002 – 185,479
2003 – 663,000
2004 – 877,650
2005 – 534,992
2006 – 1,517,669
2007 – 1,574,257
2008 – 2,674,708
2009 – 4,032,927
2010 – 9,357,128
2011 – 9,606,281
2012 – 10,065,276
2013 – 11,341,187
Total – 50,958,635
Alliance For Marriage (EIN 52-2198448)
The fortune of the narrowly-targeted Alliance for Marriage has risen and fallen with the religious right’s efforts to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage. NCF funding to the AFM reflects the peak period of this effort, from 2004-2007.
AFM’s past support for civil unions may have ultimately led to its downfall, with harsh criticism ( http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-gay-marriage-movement-fractures ) of the ADF’s approach coming from the more virulently anti-LGBT groups that have gained prominence within the Christian right even as barriers to same-sex marriage began to fall in one U.S. state after another.
2001 – 10,000
2003 – 120,000
2004 – 330,000
2005 – 427,500
2006 – 217,500
2007 – 315,000
2008 – 115,000
2009 – 106,000
2012 – 3,000
2013 – 0
total – 1,644,000
American Center For Law and Justice (EIN 54-1586817)
Started by televangelist Pat Robertson, the ACLJ has an active relationship with Robertson’s Regent University. ACLJ has established satellite legal centers active in Europe, Russia, and Africa, which fight against LGBT rights and legal abortion, and the religious right’s traditional panoply of culture war issues (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-freedom-and-liberty-group-aclj-backed-russian-gay-propaganda-and-blasphemy-b )
The ACLJ also receives heavy funding from the Alliance Defending Freedom – making it, in effect, an extension or subsidiary of ADF.
2001 – 6,250
2002 – 30,100
2003 – 137,850
2004 – 190,850
2005 – 137,850
2006 – 224,650
2007 – 275,053
2008 – 225,855
2009 -193,765
2010 -182,625
2011 – 277,260
2012 – 278,045
Total – 1,882,893
American Decency Association (EIN 38-2772745)
ADA is a Michigan spinoff of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association. Wildmon was an original signatory to the Coalition on Revival.
2001 – 100
2002 – 100
2003 – 2,500
2004 – 10,200
2005 – 15,700
2006 – 10,000
2007 – 30,400
2008 – 17,100
2009 – 16,500
2010 – 16,750
2011 – 15,800
2012 – 15,800
2013 – 25,300
(EIN 64-0607275 note: the AFA has also received substantial funding from The Gathering attendee Ken Eldred, through his Living Stones Charitable Trust [EIN 52-7038921] which from 2009 to 2011 gave the American Family Association $800,000)
The American Family Association is headed by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, an original signatory to the theocratic Coalition on Revival. The AFA is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group (see: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/american-family-association)
While some organizations on the Christian right have over the past several years moderated their anti-gay rhetoric, the AFA’s anti-gay speech has become, if anything, even more extreme.
Since 2010, the AFA’s director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy Bryan Fischer has been rebroadcasting tropes originally minted by Scott Lively, that Hitler and top Nazis were gay. In a May 27, 2010 AFA column (see: http://www.afa.net/blogs/blogpost.aspx?id=2147494882) Fischer wrote,
“Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews…
[…]
Scott Lively’s well-documented book, “The Pink Swastika,” exposes a secret homosexual activists don’t want you to know about Nazi Germany: that although the Nazis did persecute homosexuals, the homosexuals the Nazis persecuted were almost exclusively the effeminate members of the gay community in Germany, and that much of the mistreatment was administered by masculine homosexuals who despised effeminacy in all its forms.
What follows is a summary of the information contained in Lively’s book…”
Scott Lively has made repeated appearances on AFA Radio, including a 2013 appearance with the AFA’s Sandy Rios, during which Lively claimed that the biblical flood was God’s punishment for the writing of “wedding songs to homosexual marriage”. (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/noahs-flood-caused-by-wedding-songs-homosexuals-scott-lively_n_2450404.html)
In March 2002, during the time of his first trip to Uganda, anti-LGBT agitator Scott Lively was serving as Director of AFA California. According to AFA 990 tax forms, the national American Family Association was at that time providing material assistance to its state-level affiliates.
2001 – 15,450
2002 – 4,200
2003 – 4,000
2004 – 245,445 ( 50K AFA Radio )
2005 – 67,000 ( 50K AFA Radio )
2006 – 42,200
2007 – 194,545 ( 101K to AFA radio )
2008 – 284,700 ( 143K to AFA radio )
2009 – 175,300 ( 50K to AFA radio )
2010 – 296,490 (1,500 to AFA radio )
2011 – 267,309 ( 50,850K to AFA radio )
2012 – 427,694 ( 419,617 to AFA Radio)
2013 – 208,554
Total – 2,232,587
Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (EIN 541829289)
One of the most flamboyantly anti-gay groups on the Christian Right, AFTAH is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group. In 2013, AFTAH head Peter LaBarbera spoke at an anti-gay rights conference at Jamaica, during which he touted ex-gay therapy, stating, “The dirty little secret that the media and homosexual activists are desperate — desperate — to squelch is that people are coming out of homosexuality every day. This is the work of God, this is the work of Jesus.” The prior year, in 2012, LaBarbera was a participant in the 2012 World Congress of Families, in Madrid.
While NCF funding of LaBarbera/AFTAH has been minor, it is nonetheless surprising given LaBarbera’s long history of inflammatory anti-LGBT rhetoric (see extensive Truth Wins Out coverage at http://www.truthwinsout.org/tag/peter-labarbera/ ).
2007 – 5,500
2008 – 6,000
2009 – 5,000
2010 – 2,500
2011 – 0
2012 – 1,000
2013 – 1,000
American Vision (EIN 58-1374143)
Classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group, American Vision is an openly Christian Reconstructionist ministry.
In 2013, American Vision head Gary DeMar stated, “I’m sure that people who have jumped ship to embrace pro-homosexual marriage have not thought through the consequences of their decisions, especially young people who are almost always in an affirming mood. The day will come when they will have children, and there won’t be a thing they will be able to do to stop predators from taking advantage of their children because ‘it will be against the law to discriminate.’ “
2001 – 5,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 500
2004 – 0
2005 – 5,0
2006 – 5,000
2007 – 30,000
2008 – 5,000
2009 – 2,500
2010 – 100
2011 – 0
2012 – 0
2013 – 0
American Values (EIN 52-1762320)
American Values is headed by Gary Bauer. A Director of Opposition Research for the Republican National Committee while in law school, Bauer served, from 1982-1987, as President Ronald Reagan’s Deputy Under Secretary for Planning and Budget in the Department of Education. Bauer served as President of the Family Research Council from 1988-1999.
On page 35 of the American Values 2012 990 tax form, the American Values “Statement of Values” declares, “The liberal culture has targeted our kids. Hollywood serves up a steady diet of irresponsible sex and violence. The pro-abortion crowd gives them condoms and birth control pills.
…American Values will oppose condom handouts and fight to keep the gay agenda out of the schools.
American Values will help empower your kids to stand against the liberal culture.
[…]
American Values will respond to the attack on marriage. The strategy of the homosexual rights movement is to use the courts and state referendum to redefine marriage And they intend to silence or destroy any group that opposes their political goals.
American Values, with your help will fight this radical agenda state-by-state and here in Washington.”
2001 – 34,250
2002 – 26,500
2003 – 27,000
2004 – 14,000
2005 – 20,750
2006 – 33,250
2007 – 66,500
2008 – 366,650
2009 – 37,850
2010 – 34,350
2011 – 42,000
2012 – 48,000
2013 – 33,125
Total – 822,075
While the Pentecostal denomination the Assemblies of God is not typically identified as an anti-LGBT hate organization, the officially AoG statement on homosexuality ( http://ag.org/top/beliefs/relations_11_homosexual.cfm ), approved in 1979 (and not updated since then) cites Old Testament scripture, including scripture from the book of Romans, which mandates capital punishment for homosexuality.
The AoG statement also suggests that AIDS may be a punishment from God and states, “Former homosexuals describe a disgusting lifestyle of perversion and sexual obsession.”
According to the AoG statement “One of the myths propounded by pro-homosexual advocates is that homosexual orientation is genetically determined and that people have no choice in the matter. There is no scientific evidence to support this claim.”
It also cites long-debunked research: “In a study of the median age of death for heterosexuals and homosexuals, less than 2 per cent of homosexuals survived to age 65.”
The Assemblies of God runs a network of hundreds of addiction recovery centers, both in the U.S. and internationally, called Teen Challenge. Some Teen Challenge centers practice “reparative therapy” and attempt to change sexual orientation through exorcism.
Some U.S. Teen Challenge centers receive public funding.
One of the Assemblies of God official websites features ( http://agtv.ag.org/gtc-demon-possession ) a video presentation, given at the 1996 Teen Challenge National Conference, in which late pastor Herb Meppelink describes the nuances of demon-deliverance, otherwise known as exorcism.
A 2010 talk2action.org story ( http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/11/1/175127/415 ) documents examples of exorcisms at Teen Challenge centers.
2003 – 0
2004 – 3,000
2006 – 99,800
2007 – 83,400 (combined, all AoG entities/missions)
2011 – 5,005,293
2013 – 281,431 ( AoG World Missions )
(other AoG ministries and nonprofits)
Assembly of God Phillipsburg, KS
2012 – 15,404
EIN 480584200
2011 – 400
2012 – 500
EIN 43-1002542
2011 – 2,000
2012 – 2,000
Ein 44-0577787
2011 – 118,280
2012 – 310,415
Association of Christian Schools International (EIN 95-6072587 : also funded by The Gathering’s Huston Foundation & Stewardship Foundation)
As a January 2013 report ( http://www.southerneducation.org/getattachment/135f0b35-4738-441e-a2ac-013eaa255183/Georgia%E2%80%99s-Tax-Dollars-Help-Finance-Private-Schools.aspx ) from the Southern Education Foundation – “Georgia’s Tax Dollars Help Finance Private Schools with Severe Anti-Gay Policies, Practices, & Teachings” – describes,
“The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) accredited 94 private schools in Georgia at the beginning of 2012, 76 of which were eligible to receive tax-funded scholarships. ACSI does not promulgate a public statement of faith for its members, but it publishes model policies and practices as well as provides advice and counsel on how schools can best exclude or expel gay students.”
The Association of Christian Schools International provides academic certification for numerous Protestant fundamentalist private schools with explicit anti-gay policies, as detailed in the (also see “The Hidden War On Gay Teens, Rolling Stone magazine, October 10, 2013 – http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-hidden-war-against-gay-teens-20131010 )
2004 – 10,000
2005 – 0
2006 – 8,000
2007 – 6,000
2008 – 10,000
2009 – 0
2010 – 1,000
2011 – 21,000
2012 – 31,400
2013 – 1,000
Bethel Church, Redding, CA (EIN 94-1514037)
The Redding, CA Bethel Church has been the launching pad for a growing national network of the religious right’s “2.0” ex-gay ministries, called “Sozo” (see: http://bethelsozo.com/sozo-network/) Sozo is a non-copyrighted, non-trademarked brand name for the Bethel Church style of “spiritual healing”. According to Bethel Sozo, “Sozo ministry is a unique inner healing and deliverance ministry aimed to get to the root of things hindering your personal connection with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With a healed connection, you can walk in the destiny to which you have been called.”
“Deliverance” is the frequently used shorthand for “deliverance from demon spirits”, otherwise known as exorcism.
National Christian Foundation funding of the Bethel Redding, CA church can only be positively determined for one year, 2009, but Bethel Redding is by far the most prominent of any of the several churches named “Bethel” in the U.S., so the likelihood is that some of the vastly increased NCF funding going to Bethel churches is going to Bethel Redding.
Bethel Redding is one of the strongholds of the fast-growing New Apostolic Reformation movement and promotes the doctrine that believers can wield all of the miraculous powers described in the New Testament book of Acts as having been demonstrated by Jesus’ apostles following his death. These powers include the ability to raise the dead, which is frequently attempted at the Bethel Church (see: http://www.redding.com/photos/2010/jan/17/37811/)
One of the most prominent Sozo entities is Andy Reese’ “The Freedom Resource” ministry (see: http://www.thefreedomresource.org/). Reese’ ministry is promoted by the NCF-funded Mastering Life Ministries. Reese is author of the book “Freedom Tools For Overcoming Life’s Tough Problems” (2008, Chosen Books/Baker Publishing Group).
Bill Johnson, the head of Bethel Church Redding wrote the forward to Reese’ “Freedom Tools” and Johnson’ plug, “This book is sure to bring healing to the church” is featured on the front cover. Another prominent endorser of “Freedom Tools” has been Rich Stearns, president of World Vision U.S.A.
Freedom Tools presents demon deliverance as an integral part of the process of psychological and spiritual “healing”. Within the book’s therapeutic paradigm, homosexuality is a coping mechanism to deal with “emotional wounding”:
“Some behaviors are are designed to protect the person from his pain or provide a solution to it: addictions, ritualized actions, anorexia, homosexuality, etc. Tjey are pain-management coping mechanisms.
A person then either tries to arrange their life in reaction to, or avoidance of, these painful areas…
This web of deception, sin and wounding, created over time in an unsuspecting life, is called a ‘stronghold’. It feels hopeless and unchangeable. That place, or those places, may be inhabited by the demonic–a base of operations.” (Freedom Tools, pages 76-77)
Freedom Tools goes into considerable detail concerning the actual process of carrying out exorcisms, including providing specific language, chants or incantations, which are to be used in the process. On page 171 Reese writes,
“Most of the time when we know we have dealt with lies and are ready to cast out, we simply call the demon by the name of its apparent function within the person and command it to leave, all without incident of resistance. Often we lead the person to speak the commands.
The person senses a lightness, relief, inner cleanness, etc.” (Freedom Tools, page 171)
But exactly what is being “cast out” seems open to other interpretations given Reese’ statement, on the same page, that “the ability of the demonic to resist being removed is often directly proportional to the person’s belief system and especially their choice, their true will and desire.”
The words “homosexuality” and “homosexual” appear only once each in Andy Reese’ book Freedom Tools. In the footnotes, on page 245, Reese refers readers to “my friend David Kyle Foster’s website: http://www.masteringlife.gospelcom.net, especially for homosexual issues.”
Andy Reese has contributed to the growing climate of homophobia in Uganda by traveling to Uganda to train pastors in the National Fellowship of Born Again Pentecostal Churches, Uganda’s biggest network of born-again churches boasting, by some claims over 10,000 member churches, by other claims 20,000. Reese’ publicity for the book has included distributing a photo of Reese standing alongside former National Fellowship of Born Again Pentecostal Churches overseer Alex Mitala, who is holding Reese’ book. The photo caption reads, “Alex Mitala leader of 10,000 churches in Uganda where Andy’s team trained over 400 pastors in Freedom Tools” (for one version cfo this image, see: http://web.archive.org/web/20090315222511/http://www.thefreedomresource.org/)
Alex Mitala – who has served as an apostle in the U.S.-based International Coalition of Apostles (now renamed the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders) – has been a quiet but steady force in the mounting anti-gay crusade in Uganda.
In 2008, Mitala presented Ugandan Martin Ssempa with an award for what the Ugandan government-controlled New Vision news service termed Ssempa’s “anti-gay crusade” (see: http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/13/649677). At the ceremony, Mitala told Ssempa, “You are not fighting alone. We are with you.” and according to New Vision Mitala “said homosexuality was one way of making the world extinct.”
In 2013, Mitala passed leadership of the National Fellowship of Born-Again Churches on to Joshua Lwere, in a ceremony in which Mitala called upon Lwere to “fight homosexuality and pornography in Uganda” as a Uganda news service characterized it. Stated Mitala, “Some Ugandans are praising homosexuality and some believe it is their right but you should stand not to allow this moral decay in this country.” (see: http://chimpreports.com/index.php/news/10456-bishop-lwere-urged-to-fight-homosexuality-pornography.html). The ceremony was presided over by Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni.
All three – Janet Museveni, Joshua Lwere, and Alex Mitala have traveled to the Argentina “nation transformation” conferences of New Apostolic Reformation leader Ed Silvoso, who helped launch what is perhaps the NAR’s biggest apostolic association, the International Coalition of Apostles.
Later in 2013, Joshua Lwere aggressively lobbied for passage of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill.
During the same time period, Lwere traveled to the United States for megachurch speaking appearances during which he characterized homosexuality as one in a number of “demonic strongholds” that can oppress cities and geographic territories.
That paradigm, Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping, was not native to Africa. It was pioneered in the late 1980s by a core group of New Apostolic Reformation leaders including Ed Silvoso, C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, and others and subsequently exported to Africa and the developing world. (see: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1273/fighting_demons__raising_the_dead__taking_over_the_world/)
2006 – 1,500 (“Bethel Church” no EIN provided)
2007 – 5,350 (“Bethel Church” no EIN provided)
2008 – 1,500 (“Bethel Church” no EIN provided)
2009 – 4,400 (EIN of Bethel, Redding, CA provided)
2010 – 1,581 (“Bethel Church”, no EIN provided)
2011 – 87,300 (“Bethel Church”, no EIN provided)
2012 – 313,100 (“Bethel Church”, no EIN provided)
2013 – 65,850 (“Bethel Church”, no EIN provided)
California Family Council (EIN 16-1667739)
The CFC played an important organizing role in the successful effort to pass California’s anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8.
2001-2005 – 0
2006 – 155,000
2007 – 1,000
2008 – 432,000
2009 – 55,100
2010 – 5,600
2011 – 12,200
2012 – 6,400
2013 – 60,050
California School Project (EIN 20-3226605)
The California School Project co-partners with the Pacific Justice Institute to evangelize in California schools. The project is headed by Campus Crusade For Christ’s Warren Willis, who first brought anti-LGBT rights agitator Scott Lively to Uganda, in March 2002. CSP gives school presentations and promotes the establishment of Bible clubs in schools.
2008 – 1,000
2009 – 0
2010 – 500
2011 – 0
2013 – 2,350
Campus Crusade For Christ (EIN 95-2814920)
Campus Crusade has played a significant, if little-noticed, role in exporting the religious right’s anti-LGBT rights agenda.
Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright’s efforts to political mobilize conservative evangelicals began in the 1970s and Bright’s ties to far-right business elites enabled him to play a major role in recruiting financiers to bankroll the emergent religious right that burst into national consciousness in the late 1970s to early 1980s.
It is little surprise that Campus Crusade is a major recipient of NCF funding; two of the three initial founders of the National Christian Foundation had close ties to Campus Crusade – one as a former CCC financial manager ( Larry Burkett ), the other as a member of CCC’s board of directors ( Ron Blue ).
Shocked by rising crime, teen pregnancy, and divorce throughout the 1970s and 1980s, top leaders of the emergent Christian right, such as Bill Bright, had turned to the radical solutions outlined by the overtly theocratic Christian Reconstructionism movement.
In his 1986 book “Kingdoms At War: Tactics For Victory In Nine Spiritual War Zones”, Bright openly endorsed both the theocratic Coalition on Revival (see: http://www.reformation.net/) and the writings of top Christian Reconstructionists including R. J. Rushdoony. Bright co-authored the book with Coalition on Revival signatory Ron Jenson.
In a chapter of the book titled “War Strategy: We Need a Battle Plan”, Bright and Jenson write, on page 61,
“Satan is a master of surprise, and often he does it by slowly desensitizing us, lulling us to sleep so that we are unaware of his schemes. By contrast, too often Christans broadcast all they do… There are times we need to keep quiet. Dr. Steven F. Hotze learned this in Houston. In an attempt to defeat proposed legislation favorable to homosexuals, he organized a low-profile, grass roots campaign. When the news finally reached the media, it was too late. The homosexual rights ordinance was overturned by an 81 to 19 percent margin.
We might also start various ‘front’ groups. One of the most effective Christian movements in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was the Christian World Liberation Front at the University of California, Berkeley. It was organized to counteract the radical movement on campus. Few people knew that its leaders were on the staff of Campus Crusade For Christ. They adopted the appearance and some of the methods of the radical left, and were so successful that eventually there was more talk on campus about Jesus Christ than about Karl Marx. Many believed it helped defuse the radical leftist movement on that campus…”
In the mid-1990s, Bright was one of the co-founders (along with James Dobson, Larry Burkett, D. James Kennedy, Donald Wildmon, and Marlin Maddoux) of the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom) that according to Human Rights Campaign Vice President Fred Sainz is “easily the most active antigay legal group” ( see: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/us/legal-alliance-gains-host-of-court-victories-for-conservative-christian-movement.html ) and which has emerged as a significant force in the World Congress of Families that internationally has rallied social conservatives worldwide against gay rights, and reproductive and women’s rights.
During a 2006 three and a half hour presentation at The Gathering, Alliance Defense Fund leaders recalled how Bright co-led, along with the late D. James Kennedy, the initial conference call, of several dozen evangelical organizational leaders, that led to the formation of the ADF.
During the presentation, one ADF speaker declared that (the principle of) separation of church and state was not in the Constitution. Joining the presentation, Family Research Council head Tony Perkins declared the gay rights movement to be the second greatest America faced, second only to militant Islam.
According to Scott Lively, credited with helping inflame anti-LGBT hatred from Eastern Europe and Russia to Uganda, Bright and lively were friends (see:http://www.defendthefamily.com/pfrc/newsarchives.php?id=8239619); and according to Lively it was Campus Crusade For Christ leader Warren Willis who initially brought Lively to Uganda, in March 2002, to speak along with Ugandan Stephen Langa at an anti-pornography conference (see: http://www.defendthefamily.com/_docs/resources/3038513.pdf).
In 2013, Campus Crusade hosted a pan-African conference (see: http://www.truthwinsout.org/news/2013/05/35215/ ), titled “Pamoja 3” that was attended by several thousand young evangelical leaders from across Africa, during which top-billed speaker Dr. Seyoum Antonios, who leads an effort in Ethiopia to legislate capital punishment for homosexuality, vowed before cheering conference attendees that, “Africa will become a graveyard for homosexuality!”
In his speech, which was introduced by Campus Crusade for Christ Vice President Bekele Shanko (originally from Ethiopia), Antonios claimed “that seventy percent of gay men have “fecal sex,” which involves ingesting large amounts of feces; that thirty-three percent of gay men are pedophiles, and that gay couples are coming to Africa to “steal their children” and turn them into homosexuals; that homosexuality has come to Africa “to kill us,” and thus must be eradicated; that gays are fifteen times more likely to be murderers; and that Africans should reject aid from Western organizations that are “trying” to infiltrate their continent with the homosexual agenda.”
Also co-leading the “Pamoja 3” conference along with Shanko and Antonios was Campus Crusade For Christ Vice President Delanyo Adadevoh (originally from Nigeria). Since the mid-2000s, Adadevoh has led the formation of a pan-African evangelical Christian “transforming leadership” network ( see: http://transformingleadership.com ) which has featured the enthusiastic participation of Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza – who in 2009 signed into law repressive new anti-LGBT legislation and is an acolyte (see: http://www.twocare.org/anti-gay-nar-backs-embattled-president-of-burundi/ ) of the New Apostolic Reformation movement that is in the vanguard of antigay activism on every continent on Earth except Antarctica.
Adadevoh’s “International Leadership Foundation” website ( note: Adadevoh’s ILF is to be distinguished from another, more prominent US-based entity with the same name – http://http://www.ileader.org ) currently advertises upcoming ILF seminars to be hld in the African nations of Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, and South Africa.
2001 – 2,345,482
2002 – 3,125,85
2003 – 2,646,613
2004 – 3,332,936
2005 – 2,898,640
2006 – 4,233,159
2007 – 4,587,858
2008 – 4,667,026
2009 – 5,285,042
2010 – 4,576.272
2011 – 4,045,406
2012 – see CCC’s Jesus Film Project (over $12 million in FYI 2012)
2013 – 10,345,242
total 2001-2013 — $44,956,959
Campus Crusade sub-ministries, 2001-2012 — 20,622,853 (see appended at end of alphabetized list)
Capitol Ministries (EIN 68-0005663)
Among legislators on Capitol Hill who participate in Capitol Ministries are some of the most extreme far-right congressional representatives and senators in America including ( http://capmin.org/site/index.php/about/congressional-sponsors ) : Representatives Michele Bachman, Paul Broun (who has declared that evolution “is from the pit of Hell !”), Louis Gohmert, Steve King, and Joe Wilson, who interrupted President Barack Obama’s 2009 State of the Union speech by shouting out “You lie!”.
The Capitol Ministries document “The Bible And Policy: Same-Sex Marriage” conflates same-sex marriage with bestiality: “If one reasons pragmatically for the approval of same-sex marriage, e.g. “the gays whom I employ seem happy,” then how does one respond to the happy employee who just married his or her horse?” The same document cites Leviticus 20:13: “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their blood guiltiness is upon them.”
The document also makes the strange argument, “Not only is homosexuality and same sex marriage voided by God in His Word, but Biology as well condemns homosexuality and same sex marriage: One cannot be a homosexual evolutionist.”
(see: http://capmin.org/site/resources/bible-studies/5-28-12.html)
The sudden near-cessation of NCF funding to Capitol Ministries correlates with rising negative publicity over Washington politicians associated with the The Family/Fellowship that followed in the wake of journalist Jeff Sharlet’s two books on The Family.
2001 – 0
2002 – 100
2003 – 37,000
2004 – 33,000
2005 – 20,500
2006 – 211,500
2007 – 401,000
2008 – 493,765
2009 – 612,500
2010 – 1,000
2011 – 0
2012 – 5,000
2013 – 1,800
Center For Arizona Policy (EIN 86-0618922)
According to the Center For Arizona Policy, which boasts that “since 1995 130 CAP-supported bills have become law”,
“There are many documented cases of homosexuals modifying their behavior and becoming heterosexual through Christian ministries and counseling.[5] This strengthens the case that homosexuality is a behavior based on choice, not on genetic fate. Organizations like the members of the Restored Hope Network continue to show that there is help and potential for overcoming sexual sin in any form.” (see: http://azpolicypages.com/marriage-family/homosexuality/)
2001 – 36,000
2002 – 32,500
2003 – 55,100
2004 – 40,000
2005 – 81,393
2006 – 233,900
2007 – 236,000
2008 – 190,400
2009 – 201,250
2010 – 174,550
2011 – 236,250
2012 – 177,350
2013 – 166,550
Chalcedon Foundation (EIN 95-6121940)
Chalcedon is the preeminent think tank of the Christian Reconstructionism movement (see: http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisre1.html), founded by the late Rousas J. Rushdoony. States prominent Christian Reconstructionist David Chilton, “”The Christian goal for the world,” is “the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics.”
Typically viewed as marginal, the movement has nonetheless gained widespread ideological traction through its promotion of a libertarian vision for radically shrinking government – a vision that is not inherently theocratic but nonetheless advances the Reconstructionist political agenda, which foresees churches and local government moving into the void created as federal and state government are radically pared down.
Rushdoony, and leading Christian Reconstructionists such as Gary North, have advocated the imposition of biblical law, substantial parts of the pre-Talmudic Mosaic code, in all spheres of society. This would include Old Testament scriptural mandates on capital punishment for a range of offenses including adultery, homosexuality, witchcraft, blasphemy, idolatry, female unchastity (sex before marriage), and incorrigible rebelliousness among children.
In the Winter 2005 quarterly newsletter of The Gathering, in an op-ed titled “Thou Shalt Not Kill the Family”, Christian Reconstructionist pastor Kenneth L. Gentry argued that, per Leviticus 20:9, disobedient and incorrigible children should be put to death (see: http://thegathering.com/newsletter/2005-Winter.pdf).
Wrote Gentry, “…the family must align itself with God and His Law, rather than with blood ties or emotional attachment, as is so often the case. God and His Law
must have priority over feelings and sympathies.
[…]
Not blood, but faith should rule us. Not pity, but God’s Law must govern our conduct toward those who have set themselves against God—even if they are our own children.”
While Christian Reconstructionism’s punitive legal agenda has gained the movement moderate notoriety, often overlooked is its wider vision for government and society – a type of “theocratic libertarianism” (see: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/1/6/14215/07913/) which envisions dramatic reductions in the size of federal and state government, whose functions would be limited to little more than providing for national defense and meting out the draconian punishments required under Reconstructionism’ interpretation of biblical law. Explains author and researcher Rachel Tabachnick,
“[Theocratic libertarianism] would dramatically reduce the federal government and control society through enforcement of biblical law at the local and state levels. Theocratic libertarianism has become a foundational philosophy for some of the Religious Right, but it is also surprisingly seductive to Tea Partiers and young people, some of whom may not fully understand what is supposed to happen after the federal government is stripped of its regulatory powers.” (see: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/1/6/14215/07913/)
Few Christian leaders, and vanishingly few politicians, are avowed Christian Reconstructionists. But the very existence of the movement serves to move the Overton Window, by making positions that might otherwise seem extreme look moderate by comparison.
In the Christian Reconstructionist vision, biblically mandated capital punishment – via stoning, crucifixion, or burning at the stake (all forms of capital punishment mentioned in scripture) – would be only rarely necessary exactly because of the severity of the punishment. Potential criminals, “evil doers”, would be restrained by fear. In a 1993 speech, prominent Christian Reconstructionist Joseph Morecraft exclaimed that the role of “civil government” should be to ““terrorize evil doers… to be an avenger! To bring down the wrath of God to bear on all those who practice evil!” (see: http://www.politicalresearch.org/1994/03/)
Another vector for the widespread diffusion of Christian Reconstructionist ideas has been the Coalition on Revival:
COR was an initiative launched in the mid-1980s under the intellectual shepherding and guidance of top Christian Reconstructionists such as R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, Gary DeMar, and David Chilton, that helped move previously apolitical fundamentalist and charismatic Christians towards political engagement and activism. Under the guidance of Rushdoony’s Reconstructionists, evangelicals in COR drafted a series or documents that mapped out how biblically-derived principles could be applied in all spheres of society. Through COR, the numerically small Christian Reconstructionist movement has been able to
Many of prominent The Gathering participants and funders (such as Howard Ahmanson, Marvin Olasky, and Herb Schlossberg) have direct ties to leading Christian Reconstructionists, and numerous ministries funded by the National Christian Foundation are headed by signatories to the Coalition on Revival. NCF also funds several ministries of unabashed Christian Reconstructionists including current Coalition on Revival steering committee member, South African evangelist Peter Hammond.
While National Christian Foundation funding of the Chalcedon Foundation has been small, a frequent attendee at The Gathering (the NCF is the biggest foundation represented at The Gathering) has been Howard Ahmanson, one of Chalcedon’s main sources of financial support up into the mid-1990s.
Up to 1995 Ahmanson gave Chalcedon over $750,000 and sat on the Chalcedon Institute’s board. In 2001, Howard Ahmanson was at R.J. Rushdoony’s dying bedside.
At The Gathering 1997, under the auspices of Howard Ahmanson’s Fieldstead Institute, Ahmanson’s private unincorporated funding vehicle, one current and one former (Herb Schlossberg) Fieldstead program director gave a presentation outlining a master strategy for combating “organized homosexuality”.
Elements of that strategy – which included the dual approach of demonizing LGBT people and promoting ex-gay therapy – have since been implemented in Russia, Uganda, and elsewhere around the globe.
Master architect of that plan Herbert Schlossberg has close ties to leaders of the Christian Reconstructionism movement including Gary North and the late Howard Phillips.
Christian Reconstructionism’s founder R. J. Rushdoony declared Schlossberg’s book “Idols For Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture” to be one of the most important books of the 20th Century. Reviews by Gary North and others in Rushdoony’s movement praised Schlossberg’s book for its presentation of Christian Reconstructionist ideas.
In 1985 Howard Ahmanson told the Orange County Register that “My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives”. In a 2004 interview with the Orange County Register Ahmanson indicated that although it was not a “necessary” practice, the stoning of homosexuals, as a capital punishment, might be morally acceptable.
In March 2009, Don Schmierer, a program director at Ahmanson’s Fieldstead Institute (sometimes referred to as “Fieldstead and Company”) who co-led the 1997 presentation with Schlossberg, spoke at a Kampala, Uganda conference credited with dramatically escalating anti-gay hatred in Uganda.
Schlossberg’s ministry, the NCF-funded His Servants, sells a line of ex-gay reparative therapy books translated into multiple languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Hindi. Schmierer’s ex-gay book line appears to have been the fruition of one of the components of the plan to combat “organized homosexuality” that Schmierer and Schlossberg laid out at The Gathering in 1997.
2002 – 1,000
2003 – 0
2004 – 400
2005 – 0
2006 – 100
2007 – 0
2008 – 2010 – 0
2011 – 100
2012 – 0
2013 – 0
Child Evangelism Fellowship (EIN 95-1502345)
The Child Evangelism Fellowship has established its “Good News Clubs”, that target young school children for evangelizing, in thousands of public schools across America. As detailed in a Twocare.org investigative report, CEF was one of the leading ministries engaged in the 1992-1997 program under which American evangelicals indoctrinated millions of school children in former Soviet Union countries (see: http://www.twocare.org/how-antigay-american-fundamentalists-indoctrinated-russias-school-children-1992-1997/)
As detailed in journalist Katherine Stewart’s book “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children” (2012, Public Affairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group), in its 2001 ruling in the case Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the United States Supreme Court that public schools could not exclude religious groups from establishing after-school activities in those schools because religion, the majority opinion argued, is essentially a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Souter wrote that “this case would stand for the remarkable proposition that any public school opened for civic meetings must be opened for use as a church, synagogue, or mosque.”
Subsequent legal decisions which built upon that decision established that religious groups can rent out public school facilities on the weekends. By 2011, one survey found weekend churches had been established in roughly twenty percent of all public schools in New York City.
Following the Good News Club v. Milford Central School ruling, religious groups rushed to create after-school programs in public schools. The most prolific of these has been Child Evangelism Fellowship, which has established its “Good News Club” Bible classes in over three thousand public schools across the nation.
As Katherine Stewart’s book “The Good News Club” describes, Child Evangelism Fellowship promotes a fundamentalist, Christian nationalist, supremacist form of Christianity suffused with anti-LGBT hostility.
In 2010, Stewart attended the CEF’s triennial National Convention, which featured as a keynote speaker Dr. A. Charles Ware president of Crossroads Bible College.
Ware is co-author, with Young Earth creationist Ken Ham, of the 2007 book “Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots” which on page 168 states, “The homosexual agenda is extending its tentacles throughout the United States culture via media, entertainment, education, and the political system.”
On page 172, Ware and Ham wonder how same-sex marriage will not lead to legalized bestiality:
“If homosexual relationships are legitimized based upon personal desires, where does society draw the line with other deviant and destructive behaviors that some find despicable? What makes marriage to children, multiple parties, deceased individuals, or animals wrong?”(p. 172)
2001 – 83,500
2002 – 15,300
2003 – 122,700
2004 – 143,810
2005 – 51,320
2006 – 742,245
2007 – 531,510
2008 – 147,980
2009 – 306,780
2010 – 457,779
2011 – 184,065
2012 – 269,715
Total – 3,056,704
Christian and Missionary Alliance (EIN 13-1623940)
Christian and Missionary Alliance leaders have played a significant role in organizing and inspiring Ugandan religious and political leaders in the vanguard of Uganda’s anti-LGBT crusade, through their organization of the Atlanta-area based international “College of Prayer”.
The “College of Prayer” works to establish local prayer and worship groups of anti-gay Christian leaders and politicians across Africa and the developing world.
One of those groups is a chapter of the College of Prayer in Uganda, launched by American COP founder Fred Hartley Jr. III and led by Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet.
COP Uganda includes as a member Ugandan MP David Bahati – who introduced a draft of the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill to Uganda’s parliament in early 2009. Oyet himself claims to have helped co-author the bill.
2001 – 700
2002 – 1,000
2004 – 75,500
2005 – 195,441
2006 – 75,000
2007 – 2,734,300
2008 – 123,495
2009 – 1,145,916
2010 – 850,892
2011 – 319,879
2012 – 1,223,550
2013 – 1,239,850
total – 7,985,346
Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (EIN 95-1921156)
Founded in 1953 by Fred C. Schwarz, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade became, following Schwarz’ death, a project of Summit Ministries (also funded by NCF) led by Dr. David A. Noebel (see: https://www.schwarzreport.org/about ) who in 1977 published his book “The Homosexual Revolution”, dedicated to anti-LGBT rights crusader Anita Bryant.
Noebel’s book characterized homosexuality as “a kind of national death wish” which sought to “change the natural order created by God himself.”
Summit Ministries is closely aligned both with the John Birch Society and the Christian Reconstructionism movement, and focuses on the indoctrination of youth through the creation of “worldview” curriculum and by running a summer youth camp program that teaches Summit’s “worldview” to attendees.
2001 – 0
2002 – 4,000
2003 – 4,500
2004 – 4,500
2005 – 4,500
2006 – 4,000
2007 – 4,000
2008 – 0
2009 – 2,800
2010 – 6,300
2011 – 4,000
2012 – 4,000
2013 – 0
Christian Anti Defamation Commission (EIN 65-0962138)
The former head of late TV preacher D James Kennedy’s now defunct dominionist Center For Reclaiming America For Christ, Gary Cass has been a featured speaker at Christian Reconstructionist conferences (see: http://www.alternet.org/story/55717/).
In 2012, Cass presented, as one of several “irrefutable proofs that Barack Obama is NOT a Christian”, Obama’s support for gay rights. “[T]he Bible is very clear about homosexual acts being a very evil thing”, wrote Cass. (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/obama-not-christian-because-bible-very-clear-about-homosexual-acts-being-very-evil-thing)
2009 – 400
2010 – 0
2011 – 3,000
2012 – 0
2013 – 0
Christian Broadcasting Network (EIN 54-0678752)
As exhaustively documented by Right Wing Watch (RWW), a project of People For the American Way, the Christian Broadcasting Network, founded by Pat Robertson, has been a major global vector for anti-LGBT propaganda and right-wing conspiracy theory (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/search/node/%22Christian%20Broadcasting%20Network%22)
In 2013 on CBN, Robertson made the claim, as characterized by RWW, that “gay people in San Francisco try to cut people’s fingers with special rings in order to infect them with AIDS” (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gay-aids-ring-video-pat-robertson-doesnt-want-you-see). Robertson’s seemingly endless propagation of anti-gay tropes includes suggestions that homosexuality is caused by sexual molestation (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-ask-your-gay-son-if-his-coach-molested-him). In an October 2013 broadcast, Robertson likened transgender people to castrated horses (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-who-admits-he-doesnt-know-what-transgender-means-compares-transgender-people-h)
Robertson’s vilification extends to eliminationist hate speech targeting entire societal groups. In an April 2014 CBN commentary bemoaning the impact of the “Obama administration and their allies”, Pat Robertson stated,
“Something has got to be done, we have to get free of these people because it’s like a mass of termites that is eating away at the structure of this great edifice we call the United States of America and they’re burrowing in and they’re getting paid to destroy us.” (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-lambasts-obama-administration-termites-destroying-america)
Robertson’s use of the term “termites” was not new. In 1986, Robertson stated, “It is interesting, that termites don’t build things, and the great builders of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have the desire to build something. He is motivated by love of man and God, so he builds. The people who have come into institutions are primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own traditions, that we have…. The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation.” (Pat Robertson, as quoted by New York Magazine, August 18, 1986)
Feminism has also attracted Robertson’s ire. In a 1982 fundraising letter he proclaimed, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” (see: http://www.tv.com/m/shows/the-700-club/trivia/)
Such hate speech is frequently dismissed by the American mainstream as fringe, and Pat Robertson characterized by secular media as a merely a crank. But the Christian Broadcast Network’s global reach enables it to disseminate content in countries where such claims, from Pat Robertson and other CBN figures, may go unchallenged. As described by CBN itself,
“CBN proclaims the Gospel in 65 languages to 147 countries and territories through evangelistic TV programs, video evangelism, online ministry, and prayer centers. Through CBN offices in more than 20 countries, local Christians are equipped to produce quality media, provide discipleship, and facilitate humanitarian relief in their regions.” (see: http://www.cbn.com/partners/about/our-ministries/project-globalreach.aspx)
2001 – 12,000
2002 – 26,250
2003 – 29,300
2004 – 170,375
2005 – 155,635
2006 – 520,080
2007 – 1,108,780
2008 – 717,690
2009 – 1,370,350
2010 – 970,150
2011 – 212,425
2012
2013 – 451,740
Christian Film and Television Commission (EIN 13-2961538)
The Christian Film and Television Commission produces Movieguide, which assesses the suitability of movie and television programming for conservative Christian audiences.
CFTC founder and head Ted Baehr is a current Steering Committee member of the theocratic Coalition on Revival (see: http://www.reformation.net/ )whose members pledge to give their lives if necessary to impose biblical law, and a biblical template, in all sectors of society.
Baehr has established a personal friendship with Natalya Yakunina, wife of Vladimir Yakunin, member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circles. Yakunin runs the Russian rail system. Natalya Yakunina is a major leader in Russia’s anti-LGBT rights Christian conservative, nationalist backlash.
Dr. Baehr is on the Board of Advisers of (NCF-funded) Mastering Life Ministries, headed by David Kyle Foster, which promotes videos of ex-gay ministry leaders.
2001 – 5,000
2002 – 20,300
2003 – 10,000
2004 – 2,200
2005 – 1,001,000
2006 – 504,500
2007 – 11,500
2008 – 56,150
2009 – 194,750
2010 – 130,600
2011 – 58,000
2012 – 0
2013 – 54,100
Total 2,048,100
Christian Legal Society (EIN 36-6101090)
The Christian Legal Society has partnered with the (NCF-funded) Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund) in the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez case which came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010. In that case, CLS and ADF argued that an officially recognized student CLS chapter at a public university could bar LGBT students and non-Christians from leadership positions.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the Christian Legal Society, that a CLS chapter at a public law school could only be recognized by the school if it allowed non-Christians and gays to become chapter leaders. (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/christian-legal-society-martinez-upends-campus-religious-groups_n_1508295.html and http://www.clsnet.org/page.aspx?pid=528)
The Christian Legal Society also filed an amicus brief (see: http://www.clsnet.org/page.aspx?pid=534) in the The Bronx Household of Faith v. Board of Education of the City of New York court case which concerns the right of religious entities to rent worship space in public schools. Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers have been the chief litigants for the Bronx Household of Faith in the case.
As the Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union Donna Lieberman testified in 2012 in the ongoing court case, the Bronx Household of Faith ‘rejects New York State law recognizing same-sex marriages because it fails to recognize “the authority of God, creator and sovereign of the universe, as the authority above the state.’ “ (see: http://www.nyclu.org/content/testimony-new-york-city-council-regarding-churches-worshipping-schools)
2001 – 1,000
2002 – 1,000
2003 – 3,500
2004 – 4,000
2005 – 6,000
2006 – 24,000
2007 – 15,000
2008 – 103,500
2009 – 64,800
2010 – 88,550
2011 – 67,850
2012 – 48,678
2013 – 36,000
Christian Union (EIN 22-3834440)
Christian Union was created to evangelize at the elite East Coast universities Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. CU leader Matthew Bennett is one of 15 leaders in a secretive 2014 anti-LGBT rights initiative called the “Princeton Group”.
Christian Union events and magazine coverage have showcased numerous leaders who have been featured speakers at The Gathering including Eric Metaxas, the late Charles Colson, and Marvin Olasky.
Christian Union promotes the leadership and the demon-obsessed doctrines of the New Apostolic Reformation, including the practice of exorcism, and has held conferences promoting some of the most extreme ex-gay ministries in America – such as Ellel Ministries USA, and some of the most extreme leaders – such as Che Ahn, who now heads the NAR’s Wagner Leadership Institute (WLI). One of the adjunct faculty of WLI has been Julius Oyet, who claims to have co-authored Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill.
In 2010 Christian Union organized rallies – at Princeton, Dartmouth, U Penn, and Yale – for the virulently anti-gay ministry the International House of Prayer, which was featured heavily in the 2013 award-winning documentary God Loves Uganda (see: http://www.godlovesuganda.com/). IHOP head Mike Bickle has stated that homosexuality “opens the door to the demonic realm” and characterized the “gay marriage agenda” as “rooted in the depths of hell” (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/mike-bickle-warns-homosexuality-opens-door-demonic-realm) Bickle has repeatedly preached that, according to the Bible, in the coming end-times two-thirds of Jews will be forced into work camps, prison camps, and death camps. (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpRV0spflIE#t=1m)
In its Fall 2011 issue, the Ivy League Observer featured an article by one of the leaders of the Princeton Group initiative, venture capitalist Chuck Stetson, a co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage and the CEO of the (anti-gay) National Marriage Week.
In 2012 Christian Union held an eight-school conference on faith healing featuring the New Apostolic Reformation’s Che Ahn, co-founder with Lou Engle of the virulently anti-gay group TheCall.
In the same year, Christian Union’s Doxa Conference series featured Ugandan evangelist John Mulinde, who helped organize a May 2010 TheCall rally in Kampala, Uganda – a rally which featured both Lou Engle and top Ugandan leaders in the forefront of Uganda’s anti-gay crusade and the push to pass Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill.
Also in 2012, as described in CU’s publication the Ivy League Christian Observer, Christian Union’s Winter staff conference featured Andy Taylor, national director of Ellel Ministries USA. Ellel promotes the doctrine that homosexuality can be caused by demon possession and teaches methods for exorcising such demons. In 2007 Ellel Ministries co-head Jill Southern stated,
“[Homosexuality] is usually a result of homosexual abuse in very early childhood when they were wrongly touched but there are other possible causes such as gender confusion and rejection by a peer group as a ‘weakling’… So this spirit of homosexuality has an appetite for homosexual acts, and is using your body for its own appetite. When a homosexual person confesses and repents the sin, we can tell the spirit to leave and the homosexual desire will also go… When we engage in ungodly sex, we are enjoining our spirit to the demonic spirit behind it, and this destroys our lives.Ungodly sex allows our spirit to be penetrated by the demonic power behind the ungodly act.” (see: http://www.exgaywatch.com/2007/11/uk-charismatic-leader-sexual-abuse-causes-spirit-of-homosexuality/)
Matthew Bennett, Christian Union co-founder, could be found in 2014 among the 15 listed leaders of a new entity, called the “Princeton Group”, formed for “developing and deploying an action plan to protect marriage and preserve religious liberties”. (see: http://www.hrc.org/blog/entry/nom-exposed-exclusive-key-nom-figures-scheming-behind-the-scenes-action-pla)
Other members of the Princeton Group include key players in the fight against same-sex marriage and LGBT rights including the following leaders whose respective organizations have received National Christian Foundation funding: Brian Brown, President of the National Organization for Marriage, Maggie Gallagher, Co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, Luiz Tellez, President of the Witherspoon Institute, Alan Sears, President of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and William Mumma, President of the Becket Fund.
The ideological bent of Christian Union shines through in its semi-annual publication the Ivy League Christian Observer:
In the Winter 2014 issue, we find a glowing cover of an October 2013 appearance of Heritage Foundation fellow and Princeton alumnus Ryan P. Anderson at a Princeton University event sponsored by the Anscombe Society. Anderson has come to occupy an increasingly prominent position among those in the anti-LGBT rights movement attempting to establish intellectually defensible arguments against same-sex marriage and in April 2014 made the claim that same-sex marriage is “an elite luxury good bought for on the backs of the poor.” (see Heritage Foundation entry)
The same 2014 Ivy League Christian Observer features a sympathetic, in-depth portrait of Kyle Duncan, who is the lead attorney for the Hobby Lobby stores in a case – that challenges provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – and which is due to be decided by U.S. Supreme Court in Summer 2014. Writes ILCO, Hobby Lobby and some forty other corporations in the case “oppose the act’s requirement for employers to expand health coverage to include contraceptives linked to early abortions.”
According to Political Research Associates Senior Fellow Frederick Clarkson, a decision in favor of Hobby Lobby and its co-plaintiffs could result in an historically unprecedented expansion of religious freedom rights to corporations that would allow exemptions from existing federal and state law based simply on viewpoints or religious belief. Thus, either individuals or corporations might legally be able to discriminate, in what Clarkson calls the “sacralization of bigotry” (see: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/06/03/video-fred-clarkson-explains-the-fight-for-religious-freedom/)
Christian Union also promotes the religious right’s typical slate of positions – opposition to legal abortion and stem cell research and support of sexual abstinence and Intelligent Design.
In 2010 Christian Union brought Intelligent Design expert Walter Bradley to Princeton and its Ivy League Christian Observer has showcased Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Michael Behe, author of the influential ID book “Darwin’s Black Box”.
2004 – 0
2005 – 138,653
2006 – 500,000
2007 – 1,400,000
2008 – 2,145,693
2009 – 1,955,276
2010 – 1,818,940
2011 – 3,172,300
2012 – 3,381,000 (“The Christian Union”)
2013 – 5,766,158
Citizens For Community Values (EIN 31-1075684)
Citizens For Community Values was a top financial sponsor of the wave of 2004 state ballot amendments banning same-sex marriage. While National Christian Foundation direct funding of CFCV has been modest, heavy NCF funding has flowed, indirectly, to CFCV through the Alliance Defense Fund/Alliance Defending Freedom.
2001 – 18,000
2002 – 17,500
2003 – 0
2004 – 0
2005 – 0
2006 – 0
2007 – 0
2008 – 2,000
2009 – 0
2010 – 1,000
2011 – 1,000
2012 – 2,800
2013 – 200
Compassion International (EIN 36-2423707)
Compassion International, one of the world’s biggest evangelical aid agencies, has played
a quiet but significant role in exporting the anti-LGBT ideology of the American evangelical right, especially through its material and leadership support of evangelist Luis Bush’s “Transform World” initiative.
Compassion International is publisher of Bush’s 2009 book “The 4/14 Window: Raising Up a New Generation to Transform The World”, and Vice President of Compassion International Bambang Budijanto serves on the Transform-World steering committee. (http://www.transform-world.net/newsletters/2013/Global414Summit.pdf).
In the forward to Luis Bush’s book, then-Compassion International President Wess Stafford stated,
“Every major movement in history has grasped the need to target the next generation in order to advance its agenda and secure its legacy into the future. Political movements (like Nazism and Communism) trained legions of children with the goal of carrying their agenda beyond the lifetimes of their founders. World religions have done the same with the systematic indoctrination of their young—even the Taliban places great emphasis on recruiting children. … It seems that, historically, the Christian evangelical movement is one of the few that has allowed children to remain a second-rate mandate—the Great Omission in the Great Commission.”
Bush’s book also states, “Secular education does not enlighten; rather, it dims one’s grasp of the ‘real reality’ rooted in scripture… Godless secular indoctrination is an age-old problem.”
Compassion International leader Dan Brewster, Director of Holistic Child Development Academic Programs for Compassion International, has been in the forefront of the development of the “4/14 Window” concept, as outlined in Brewster’s 2011 Compassion International book “Child, Church, and Mission” (http://www.europeanea.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/dan_brewster_childchurchmission_revised-en-web.pdf) which features the same imperative, on indoctrinating children, as expressed in the quote above, from Wess Stafford.
Luis Bush’s book “The 4/14 Window” presents Ugandan Stephen Langa as having helped reverse Uganda’s rising HIV infection rate. Along with Ugandan Martin Ssempa – another Ugandan who has been both in the forefront of Uganda’s state-supported anti-gay rights crusade and also a leader in promoting sexual abstinence over the previously successful “ABC” approach to HIV/AIDS mitigation – Stephen Langa was a co-author of the 2004 Uganda National Abstinence and Being Faithful Policy and Strategy on Prevention and Transmission of HIV. Since implementation of the new abstinence-based policy, Uganda’s HIV infection rate has risen.
In 2009, the year the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill was introduced in Uganda’s parliament by MP David Bahati, Stephen Langa was a featured speaker at the 2009 Transform World conference held by Bush in New York City, as a leader of the “family and religion” track. Langa was also featured at a 2010 Transform World conference in Ethiopia. see: http://transform-world.net/newsletters/2010/Ethiopia.pdf). In
Stephen Langa has been widely recognized as one of the leading Ugandan figures lobbying for passage of the Anti Homosexuality Bill. Transform World is affiliated with the overtly theocratic Coalition on Revival and is “using major portions of the Coalition on Revival Worldview Documents (also known as the 17 Sphere Documents) in the Transform World Connections Handbook which is being given to conferees.” (see: http://www.churchcouncil.org/ICCP_org/Adopting_Organizations/AAA_Intro_Page.htm).
2001 – 18,588
2002 – 12,978
2003 – 277,613
2004 – 1,389,832
2005 – 714,581
2006 – 1,814,722
2007 – 2,078,944
2008 – 2,862,715
2009 – 2,099,144
2010 – 1,529,263
2011 – 1,274,773
2012 – 1,062,527
2013 – 1,856,381
Total – 16,992,061
Concerned Women For America (EIN 95-3580894)
Concerned Women For America has been one of the active U.S. participants in the World Congress of Families, and along with two other NCF-funded World Congress of Families participants, Focus on the Family and Family Research Council, has led the American Christian right’s establishment as a presence at the United Nations.
(note: other The Gathering foundations give substantially more funding to CWA than does NCF)
2001 – 600
2002 – 106,000
2003 – 1,600
2004 – 7,300
2005 – 1,600
2006 – 6,400
2007 – 10,000
2008-2010 – 0
2011 – 12,163
2012 – 14,500
2013 – 15,220
Total – 175,383
Coral Ridge Ministries (EIN 65-0496702)
Up until the death of its founder D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Ministries served as a leading force for Christian dominionism in America. Writes political scientist John R. Pottenger, in his book “Reaping the Whirlwind: Liberal Democracy and the Religious Axis” (2007, Georgetown University Press),
“As senior minister of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and president of Coral Ridge Ministries, an international Christian broadcasting organization based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Kennedy preaches sermons reflecting the doctrines of theonomy and dominionism of Christian Reconstructionism. He has been relentless in encouraging his followers to political action: “As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence…” (pp. 235)
Kennedy’s now-defunct Center For Reclaiming America was known for
2001 – 16,600
2002 – 21,643
2003 – 85,750
2004 – 271,525
2005 – 157,700
2006 – 43,500
2007 – 25,900
2011 – 22,750
2012 – 0
2013 – 6,100
Council For National Policy (EIN 72-0921017)
While The Gathering is almost exclusively an affair of the dominionist Protestant evangelical right, The Council for National Policy brings together top funders of both the secular and theocratic far-right with movement activists and strategists.
CNP membership has included the Koch brothers, many The Gathering funders including Howard Ahmsanson and members of the DeVos, Coors, and Friess clans, and also overtly secular funders such as Richard Mellon Scaife.
In a 2005 interview, seminal architect of the religious right and new right Paul Weyrich stated that the Council for National Policy was “an organization that, in the words of Rich DeVos, brings together the doers with the donors.” (see: http://www.q-and-a.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1016)
The 2012 990 tax form of the Council For National Policy lists Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, as the current CNP president.
2001 – 7,600
2003 – 3,500
2004 – 5,850
2005 – 5,000
2006 – 9,000
2007 – 9,000
2011 – 6,000
2012 – 57,500
2013 – 15,060
Council For Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (EIN 36-3635678)
CFBM&W is a Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated initiative to defend traditional sex roles.
2001 – 21,000
2003 – 15,400
2005 – 2,500
2009 – 100
2011 – 100
2012 – 200
2013 – 0
Daystar Church head pastor Johnny Enlow is one of the most outspoken New Apostolic Reformation leaders on homosexuality. Ugandan Julius Oyet, one of the co-authors of the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill has spoken at Enlow’s Daystar Church and Enlow has been a speaker along with Oyet at conferences organized by his church member Os Hillman (himself a recipient of National Christian Foundation funding).
In his 2008 book “The Seven Mountain Prophecy: Unveiling The Coming Elijah Revolution”, Enlow writes, on page 171,
“A mass homosexual parade and celebration that was to bring many millions of dollars to New Orleans was scheduled the week Katrina hit the city. Baal was doubling up in the city by adding homosexual decadence to his existing active altar there. Hurricanes Wilma and Rita also each brought judgment on cities that were about to host major gay events—Key West and Cancun—thus seriously curtailing the celebration of gay acceptance. God loves homosexuals so much that he will spare no expense in making it clear that homosexuality is an abomination to Him and that He can deliver someone from it.”
On page 68, Enlow writes,
“The world will come to learn, for example, that though God passionately loves every homosexual, remaining in that sin will cause someone to fall under the sword of His judgment. Feelings don’t validate a homosexual lifestyle any more than they validate a murderer’s desire to kill….
One of the primary roles of future government leaders will be to instruct in righteousness. The more God’s judgments are poured out on earth, the more explicitly will they be able to give that instruction.”
2011 – 1,000
Desert Stream Ministries (EIN 95-3889820)
Ex-gay Desert Stream Ministries is currently housed at Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer and is one of the member ministries in the “Restored Hope Network” that represents an attempt to rally the remaining ex-gay ministries still active after the collapse of Exodus International, in which Andy Comiskey once played a major leadership role.
In 2010, Desert Stream Ministries head Comiskey admitted (see: http://www.truthwinsout.org/pressrelease/2010/03/7561/) that Desert Stream had been “cast out of our home church”, the Vineyard Anaheim church, because “a longstanding staff person from Desert Stream had sexually abused at least one teenager who had sought help from us.”
2003 – 0
2004 – 5,000
2005 – 5,000
2006 – 50,400
2007 – 1,250
2008 – 9,452
2009 – 12,882
2010 – 5,850
2011 – 3,000
2012 – 6,500
2013 – 0
Total – 99,334
Disciple Nations Alliance (EIN 95-0682390)
The Disciple Nations Alliance teaches “Biblical worldview” seminars to developing world leaders. The core ideas are derived from Christian Reconstructionism. One key concept is the idea that underdevelopment and poverty stem from a lack of a Christian (fundamentalist) worldview. DNA co-founder Darrow Miller is on the Summit Ministries Worldview Academy faculty list.
The NCF-funded Food For The Hungry (also a USAID recipient) provided key seed money and leadership to found the nonprofit Disciple Nations Alliance.
Stephen Langa, one of the top Ugandan anti-LGBT activists, has worked closely with DNA since 2001 and has been described as an official DNA trainer. In 2013 Langa traveled to Arizona to meet with DNA leaders Darrow Miller and Bob Moffitt.
While the leaders of Disciple Nations Alliance claim no official legal or financial connection to Langa’s activities, DNA’s own statements and tax forms tell a different story.
The Disciple Nations Alliance’s 2008 IRS 990 tax form lists a DNA grant to “Samaritan Strategy Africa” of $144,500. According to DNA, Stephen Langa is the East Africa Coordinator (see: https://www.disciplenations.org/samaritan-strategy-budding-in-sudan/) for Samaritan Strategy Africa, a trans-African network, with at least six regional offices, that provides “Christian worldview” training. According to Food For The Hungry/UK, Samaritan Strategy Africa is “a team of African leaders who have banded together to execute an ambitious plan to take the DNA teaching across the continent.” (see: http://www.uk.fhi.net/hopeforafrica.html)
Beside his work with DNA, Langa also has been a speaker at the conferences of Transform-World, a global “Transformation” franchise run by evangelist and missiologist Luis Bush (no relation to family of Presidents George W. Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush) which operates from locations in Asia, to Ethiopia, to Brazil. Transform-World promotes doctrines from the theocratic Coalition on Revival.
In the forward to the 2009 Luis Bush/Transform-World book “The 4/14 Window: Raising Up A New Generation To Transform The World”, which is published by Compassion International, Wess Stafford, longtime head of the Compassion International aid and development charity, describes the need to target children 4-14 years old for indoctrination – as 20th Century political movements such as Nazism and communism have done.
Along with Purpose Driven Life book author Rick Warren, Stafford was a featured speaker at The Gathering 2007. Along with Stafford, Warren also an advocate for the indoctrination of youth as practiced by violent secular 20th Century revolutionary movements such as Nazism, Bolshevism, and communism under Chairman Mao Tse Tung during China’s bloody Cultural Revolution.
Such thinking goes to the very top of the elite evangelical right, as evidenced by The Fellowship head Douglas Coe’s insistence, captured on video in 1989, that Christians should follow Jesus with the same level of fanatical devotion shown by the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao – whose young Red Guard were willing, during the Cultural Revolution, to cut off the heads of their own parents for the good of the state (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYeGR7O1lKI )
2007 – 0
2008 – 9,000
2009 – 18,000
2010 – 113,000
2011 – 306,000
2012 – 0
2013 – 184,000
Eternal Perspective Ministries (EIN 94-3125475)
EPM’s Randy Alcorn is one of the most prolific authors on the Christian Right (see: http://www.epm.org/books/)
EPM’s website features a major resource section on homosexuality (http://www.epm.org/resources/tag/homosexuality/) and in that section, in a March 29, 2010 op-ed titled “Is The Homosexual Lifestyle Worthy Of Minority Status?”, Alcorn writes,
“I have never met a former white, former black, or a former hispanic… In contrast, the homosexual lifestyle is immoral, and a matter of personal choice, not unalterable destiny.
Even if it could be proven that the homosexual orientation is inborn (some people are still desperately trying to prove this), the choice of homosexual behavior is still just that — a choice… To have desire toward something does not mean one is helpless to control his behavior.
Both scientific research and the personal experience of thousands of people show that a homosexual orientation can usually be unlearned. But even if it isn’t, anyone can choose to refrain from homosexual (or heterosexual) sexual practices. This is good news to anyone seeking to escape a hollow lifestyle dishonoring to his Creator.
[…]
God freely forgives those who repent of a godless lifestyle — including materialism, adultery, prostitution or any homosexual or heterosexual sin…
If you or a loved-one want help escaping from the “gay” misery, help is available from dozens of “ex gay” Christian ministries around the country. Here are a few you can contact: Restored Hope Network, PO Box 22281, Milwaukie, OR 97269 (www.restoredhopenetwork.com); Outpost, P.O. Box 22429, Robinsdale, MN 55422-0429 (www.outpostministries.org)
…To give special status or rights to those choosing the personally and socially destructive homosexual lifestyle is to approve and endorse that behavior, and inevitably to spread it. To do so is morally wrong. It is also the worst possible thing we can do for homosexuals, who need to hear about the way out of bondage, not be encouraged to plunge deeper into it.”
2001 – 5,000
2002 – 11,000 (“Eternal Perspectives”)
2003 – 1,000 (“Eternal Perspectives”)
2004 – 1,100
2005 – 1,675
2006 – 14,000
2007 – 24,500
2008 – 19,250
2009 – 3,150
2010 – 3,550
2011 – 10,000
2012 – 7,500
2013 – 12,050
Ethics and Public Policy Center (EIN 52-1162185)
The Ethics and Public Policy Center advertises itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy”. A crucial earliest hotbed for the neoconservative movement, E&PCC
The Center boasts an array of leading Catholic, Protestant and Jewish intellectual social conservatives and has played a substantial, if stealthy, role in America’s ongoing culture wars – including fighting LGBT rights. As characterized in 2009 by the Washington Post, E&PPC “studies the link between Judeo-Christian morality and national and foreign policy.”
E&PPC and Foreign Policy
Founded in 1976 by Ernst LeFever, E&PPC was one of the original incubators for the neoconservative movement; its leaders and fellows have over the years supported the Reagan Administration’s “Star Wars” missile defense initiative (which, charged critics, would have dramatically increased chances for all-out nuclear war between the US and the former Soviet Union), launched PNAC – the Project For a New America Century (accused by critics of laying a template for the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq) and argued for a US “preemptive” attack on Iran, to prevent that nation from acquiring nuclear weapons (see: http://eppc.org/publications/our-fallout-shelter-future/ .)
From the start, E&PPC’s applicaton of “Judeo Christian” morality was highly selective. Ernest LeFever was president Ronald Reagan’s first choice, in 1981, for the State Department assistant secretary of human rights but was rejected by the US Senate amid controversy over his stance that abuses of human rights by right wing authoritarian regimes should be addressed via quiet diplomacy; by contrast, LeFever held that the United States should directly confront human rights abuses by communist or socialist regimes.
That state department position went to future E&PPC president Elliott Abrams (who took the E&PPC helm in 1996). In the early 1980s from his state department position, Abrams would become a key player in the Iran Contra affair in which US weapons were sold to Iran to finance the “Contra” insurgents that were mounting <a terrorist attacks against Nicaragua, aimed at toppling its socialist Sandanista government.
More broadly, at the State Department, Abrams helped steer the Reagan Administration towards its support for Central American nations such as Guatemala and El Salvador that during the the early to mid-1980s, under the banner of anticommunism, were mounting genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns against their civilian populations.
More recently, the Ethics and Public policy Center has been a partner with and financial sponsor of the World Congress of Families which, since the late 1990s, has rallied “pro-family” (and anti-LGBT rights) social conservatives on a global scale. In its support of WCF, E&PPC has been joined by Fieldstead and Company, the major philanthropic vehicle for anti-LGBT rights funder Howard Ahmanson. Current E&PPC fellow Herb Schlossberg – who served as a Fieldstead’s program director during the 1990s, conceived the master religious right plan for fighting “organized homosexuality” that was presented at The Gathering in 1997.
Michael Cromartie, E&PCC ties to The Fellowship, and the “Just War” invasion of Iraq
De-facto head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Vice President Michael Cromartie, a frequently featured speaker at The Gathering. Cromartie took over as acting director for E&PPC in 2001, with the departure of E&PPC president Elliott Abrams, who had served since 1996.
According to critic Tom Barry, writing for Counterpunch, E&PPC helped forge a working alliance between secular neoconservatives, Christian conservatives, and the broader religious right. Over the decades since its 1976 launch, E&PPC “has functioned as the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive theology and secularism” (see: http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/02/09/elliott-abrams-the-neocon-s-neocon/ )
Michael Cromartie has brought to E&PPC his close ties to the elite Washington, DC evangelical network known as “The Fellowship” which hosts the National Prayer Breakfast and has been accused, by journalist Jeff Sharlet, of having inspired Uganda’s festering national anti-LGBT rights crusade.
One of the most prominent members of the Fellowship (according to the Billy Graham Archives at Wheaton College) was the late Nixon Administration lawyer and hatchet man Charles Colson.
After being convicted and sentenced to prison for his Watergate scandal crimes, Colson converted to born-again Christianity and was subsequently personally groomed as a top Fellowship leader by longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe (note: along with Cromartie, Colson has been one of the most frequently featured speakers at The Gathering, which functions as a private philanthropic funding adjunct of The Fellowship.)
After graduating from Covenant College, an elite fundamentalist Presbyterian school (“We are a community committed to the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, and everything we do is grounded in our Reformed theology and worldview”) which over the years has received heavy funding from the Maclellan Foundation, the young Michael Cromartie was chosen to serve as Charles Colson’s special assistant for Prison Fellowship Ministries (see: http://www.ttf.org/mr-michael-cromartie ).
In was in some ways an unlikely pick for Colson, because Cromartie had been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War while Colson, during his time in the Nixon presidential administration, had – as one of his dirty tricks operations – arranged for union operatives from the AFL/CIO to savagely attack – and beat with steel reinforcement bars – protesters at a Manhattan anti-Vietnam war rally (an incident known as the “Hard Hat Riot”.)
But (as discussed in the biography Charles W. Colson: A LIfe Redeemed [2007, Waterbrook Press]) Cromartie – a brilliant student who brought to the task a deep knowledge of theology – served as an unofficial Christian intellectual mentor who introduced Colson to the top thinkers and theologians of the emerging neo-fundamentalist (or “Neo-Evangelical”, or “New Evangelical”) movement.
Cromartie steered Colson away from the separatist and politically disengaged stream of fundamentalism, and towards the quietly but heavily politicized Neo-evangelical movement that had been launched in the 1940s under the leadership, especially, of theologian Harold Ockenga and his close friend Billy Graham – another key member of The Fellowship.
As Ockenga conceived, the Neo-Evangelicals would not, like the fundamentalists had done in the 1920s and 1930s, flee modernity or separate themselves from secular society; they would instead “infiltrate” (Ockenga used this term) the secular realm, placing their operatives in key positions from which to advance their cause – which was the divine redemption of the world, the evangelization of all its peoples, and the establishment of God’s dominion over all sectors of society.
In his writing Ockenga, the first president of the National Association of Evangelicals, described the Neo-Evangelical project both as infiltration (a tactic that would soon be ascribed, during the coming McCarthyite “Red Scare”, to American communists, socialists, and even liberals accused of being “fellow travelers”) but also in terms of the strategy and tactics of actual warfare. The Neo-Evangelical movement, proposed Ockenga, would – in the manner of the Nazi Blitzkrieg – simply bypass secular areas of strength, to encircle and starve them into submission.
While Michael Cromartie served to connect Chuck Colson with elite mentors in the emerging Neo-evangelical movement who imparted a level of intellectual sophistication to Colson’s fervent neophyte born-again faith, Colson may well have influenced Michael Cromartie in ways just as profound – Cromartie’s next career move would be to join the recently launched Ethics and Public Policy Center that, among its various projects, has served as an indefatigable cheerleader for American military adventurism.
For example, in 2003 E&PCC published a March 31 op-ed (“The Just War Case for The War”) by the noted Catholic theologian George Weigel which argued that classic Christian “just war” theology supported a US attack on Iraq. Weigel, then an E&PCC fellow, had earlier appeared on a January 1, 2003 PBS’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly segment arguing the “just war” case for a US preemptive strike on Iraq, on the basis that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction that posed on existential threat to its neighbors (see: http://video.pbs.org/video/2361761695/ ).
After the invasion revealed that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein had not possessed the alleged WMD’s, an April 21, 2004 E&PCC op-ed from Weigel (“Iraq and Just War, Revisited”) simply reiterated the accusation and heaped on the charge of alleged (and widely considered specious) Iraqi ties to the sponsorship of terrorism. When the scandal of the American use of torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison broke, Weigel unfurled a July 13, 2004 E&PCC op-ed (“Abu Ghraib and Just War in Iraq”) that argued the American public revulsion at the scandal underscored the underlying morality of the American people as well as the “Just War” credentials of the American invasion and occupation – an enterprise which has led to the devastation of most of the previously affluent, modern, well-educated, and secular nation of Iraq.
In a June 23, 2014 E&PCC op-ed, E&PCC fellow Roger Scruton, in “Why Iraq is a Write-Off” argued that the Iraq debacle was somehow inevitable because of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement in which Britain, France, and Russia negotiated the carving up of the Ottoman Empire. The arbitrary new nations (e.g. Syria and Iraq) and boundaries created by that Agreement created states inherently unstable, argued Scruton, because they encompassed tribal, ethnic and religious factions inherently at odds and not cemented by any secular national ethos. Scruton neatly elided the reality that American military adventurism had effectively obliterated what Iraqi nationalism had existed, and removed a dictator who, for all his brutality, had effectively held the nation together.
Reconstructing the World: The Answer is Jesus
One of Michael Cromartie’s resume distinctives has been his participation in a little known but pivotal 1987 conference known as the Villars Consultation, which – under the co-sponsorship of the international evangelical aid and development charity Food for the Hungry and Howard F. Ahmanson’s Fieldstead and Company – brought representatives of leading Christian aid and relief groups (such as World Vision and Food For the Hungry) together with leaders from the Christian Reconstructionism movement and representatives from its main political front, the Coalition on Revival, whose COR members pledged their lives to “to help the Church rebuild civilization on the principles of the Bible so God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven” (see: http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psychology/cor/general.htm.)
Along with Cromartie, other Villars participants included Howard and Roberta Ahmanson and top Fieldstead & Company leaders, Coalition on Revival steering committee member Ted Baehr, Christian Reconstructionist (and COR member) theorists George Grant and David Chilton, World Vision Vice President Evon Hedley, multiple leaders of Food For The Hungry International including Darrow Miller, conservative evangelical strategist Herbert Schlossberg, and journalist Marvin Olasky – one of the leading intellectual architects of George W. Bush’s Faith Based Initiative.
[note: both Howard Ahmanson, George Grant especially for his pioneering work in launching the “ex-gay” movement), Darrow Miller, and Herb Schlossberg have played major (and mostly unnoticed) roles in the American religious right’s domestic and international wars on LGBT rights.]
In a similar manner in which the 1980s-era Coalition on Revival created plans for how to impose biblical law and the “biblical worldview” in all sectors of society, The Villars Consultation launched a now-burgeoning school of thought on how to integrate the “biblical worldview” into Christian aid and relief work.
In effect, Villars began a process that re-conceived evangelical aid and relief work as a holistic enterprise in which evangelism and pro-capitalist free market solutions were fused; in the new Villars paradigm, spreading the gospel and teaching the “biblical worldview” were integrated into Christian aid and relief work and became regarded, moreover, as indispensable to successful economic develop and the reconstruction of healthy societies.
Of particular interest in terms of LGBT rights, this “biblical worldview” includes the vision of implementing some version of biblical (mosaic) law including laws against homosexuality.
The “Villars Statement on Relief and Development” (see: https://disciplenations.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/the-villars-statement-on-relief-and-development1.pdf ), signed by the 40-odd evangelicals attending Villars, stressed 13 key points:
“[W]e raise our concerns over the following issues
1. The failure to operate from a distinctively Biblical perspective in both methods and goals.
2. The tendency to focus on meeting material needs without sufficient emphasis on
spiritual needs.3. The attempt to synthesize Marxist categories and Christian concepts, to equate
economic liberation with salvation, and to use the Marxist critique, without recognizing the basic conflict between these views and the Biblical perspective.4. The emphasis on redistribution of wealth as the answer to poverty and deprivation
without recognizing the value of incentive, opportunity, creativity, and economic and
political freedom.5. The attraction to centrally controlled economics and coercive solutions despite the
failures of such economies and their consistent violation of the rights of the poor.[…]
9. Focusing on external causes of poverty in exploitation and oppression without
confronting those internal causes that are rooted in patterns of belief and behavior
within a given culture.10. The need to make conversion and discipleship an essential component of Christian
relief and development work, and to carry this out in conjunction with the local
church.11. The need to apply the teaching of the Bible as a whole in the areas of personal life,
family, and work, but equally in the shaping of the culture and social life.12. The need to reaffirm the Biblical support for the family as the basic social and economic unit and its right to own and control property, and to stand against any ideology that would diminish the family’s proper role in any of these areas.
13. The need to oppose a false understanding of poverty which makes poverty itself a
virtue, or which sanctifies those who are poor on the basis of their poverty.”
As the Villars Statement’s response to those stated “concerns” made clear, poverty, hunger, and underdevelopment generally were, more than any other single cause, to be attributed to a lack of the “Christian worldview”.
Thus, at the root the wretched of the developing world were suffering because they possessed the wrong ideas, the wrong beliefs, the wrong culture. Per the Villars Statement,
“In response to these issues we draw attention to the following Biblical teaching and its
implications for relief and development:1. God created mankind in His own image, endowing man with freedom, creativity,
significance, and moral discernment. Moreover, prior to the Fall, man lived in
harmony with all of God’s creation, free from pain, suffering, and death.2. The devastating reality of sin and evil, hunger, oppression, deprivation, disease,
death, and separation from God is the result of man’s rebellion against God, which
began at the Fall and continues through history.3. The causes of hunger and deprivation, therefore, are spiritual as well as material and
can only be dealt with adequately insofar as the spiritual dimension is taken into
account.4. Man’s rebellion against God affects every aspect of human existence. The Fall resulted in God’s curse on creation and in destructive patterns of thought, culture, and
relationships, which keep men and women in bondage to poverty and deprivation.5. The work of Christian relief and development, therefore, must involve spiritual
transformation, setting people free from destructive attitudes, beliefs, values, and
patterns of culture. The proclamation of the gospel and the making of disciples,
then, is an unavoidable dimension of relief and development work—not only for
eternal salvation, but also for the transformation of culture and economic life.6. When people were held in bondage to hunger and deprivation by unjust social
structures, the Bible consistently denounced those who perpetuated such
oppression and demanded obedience to God’s law. The Biblical emphasis, then, is
not on “sinful structures,” but rather on sinful human choices that perpetuate
suffering and injustice.7. God’s ultimate answer for suffering and deprivation is the gift of His only Son, Jesus
Christ, who broke the power of sin and death by His own death and resurrection.”
In short, the real and lasting answer was not food, knowledge of better farming techniques, schools, or medical care, or any other secular remedy. The answer was moral and spiritual uplift, through Jesus.
Over the subsequent decades, key evangelical aid and development theorists who attended Villars, such as Darrow L. Miller – little known in secular culture but whose ideas have exerted vast influence within the myriad U.S.-based evangelical aid and relief groups that sprang up after World War Two (some of which have annual budgets of over a billion dollars) – have extensively fleshed out the initial vision embodied in the “Villars Statement”.
An entire literature, from Miller and other evangelical aid and development theorists, now spells out exactly how the Villars Statement vision is to be, in quite practical terms, applied in the field; and, major evangelical aid and relief organizations are now integrating this approach into their international programs.
Adding considerable intellectual gravitas to the project (and inspiring evangelical missions theorists such as Miller) has been the simultaneous rise of a secular school of thought, advanced most notably (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiELJTIQT8Q ) by Lawrence E. Harrison, a former USAID official who worked for two decades in Haiti, and by Samuel P. Huntington. These two scholars have shaped a theoretical development perspective which posits that Western cultural values rooted in Christianity – and in the case of Harrison, especially Protestant Christianity, have played an indispensable role in the economic and political success of the European and North American West.
In a very real sense, for Howard F. Ahmanson – whose Fieldstead and Company philanthropic group cosponsored (with Food for the Hungry, an enterprise Fieldstead has heavily funded) the Villars Consultation – Villars was the logical extension of Ahmanson’s funding of the theocratic Christian Reconstructionism movement (Ahmanson had, up into the early 1990s, bankrolled its leading think tank, the Chalcedon Foundation.)
As of when Ahmanson cosponsored the Villars Consultation, he was still serving on Chalcedon’s board of directors and over the years had been closely mentored by Chalcedon founder R. J. Rushdoony, considered the father of Christian Reconstructionism and whose dying bedside Howard Ahmanson sat vigil at in 2001.
The Green Dragon
The Villars Consultation was in fact a sub-project in a much wider and more ambitious Ahmanson/Fieldstead project that ran from the 1980s into the early 1990s: the sponsorship of the TURNING POINT Christian Worldview series, a whole line of books (over a dozen) which analyzed and critiqued various contemporary policy issues through a Christian Reconstructionism-informed analytic lens.
Kicked off with the 1987 publication of the TURNING POINT Christian Worldview series book Turning Point: A Christian Worldview Declaration (1987, Crossway Books) by Herbert Schlossberg and Marvin Olasky, the series was designed to advance lines of argument that would appeal both to conservative Protestant and Catholic intellectuals alike and featured such little-known but deeply influential (within certain religious right circles) books as E. Calvin Beisner’s Prospects For Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (1990, Crossway Books.)
Beisner’s book drew heavily on the ideas of famed economist Julian Simon (who, along with prominent conservative Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, endorsed the book) and argued that environmentalist concerns which arose in the 1970s were hyperbolic and stood in the way of economic development that could lift the world’s poor up from destitution.
Beisner – who had served as the general secretary for the 1980s Coalition on Revival (and was also general editor for COR’s “worldview” documents, on how to implement biblical law in all spheres of society) – would go on to form the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (later renamed the Cornwall Alliance) – a petrochemical and fossil fuel industry funded front group that comprises the rump faction of U.S. religious right leaders opposed to action to curb anthropogenic climate change and who depict concern over the issue as part of an elaborate and sinister plot.
E&PPC Vice President Michael Cromartie serves (along with Marvin Olasky and E&PPC fellow Herbert Schlossberg) on the advisory board of the Cornwall Alliance, which in recent years has depicted concern over global warming as part of a vast satanic conspiracy referred to as the “green dragon”.
The Cornwall Alliance asserts (http://www.cornwallalliance.org/alert/cornwall-alliance-releases-an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/) that the Earth’s biological and climate systems are controlled and regulated by divine provenance:
“We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”
Domestic Policy, and the battle against LGBT rights
One of E&PPC’s current fellows, Herbert Schlossberg, was the intellectual architect of a master plan to fight “organized homosexuality”, announced at The Gathering in 1997, that commenced in 1998 with the mammoth 1998 “Truth in Love” national advertising advertsing cmpaign that promoted “ex-gay” leaders such as John and Anne Paulk.
Starting in 2012, a new initiative by the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s “American Religious Freedom Program” (see: http://www.religiousfreedom.org/about_us/)
advised (see: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/religious-freedom-origin-story) the Kansas state legislature in the creation of Kansas’ House Bill 2453. Kansas House Bill 2453 would have given private citizens, religious entities, and even government employees the legal right to discriminate against same-sex couples. The bill was passed by the Kansas House of Representatives but not taken up by the Kansas Senate.
The bill would have allowed private citizens, religious entities, or government employees the right to refuse to:
“- Provide any services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; provide counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits, related to, or related to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement.
– Solemnize any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement.
– Treat any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement as valid.” (see: http://kslegislature.org/li/b2013_14/measures/documents/hb2453_00_0000.pdf)
One of the current fellows at the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Herbert Schlossberg, who during the 1990s helped formulate a complex master strategy for combating “organized homosexuality” that was presented at The Gathering 1997 Co-presenting the anti-LGBT rights plan, at The Gathering, along with Schlossberg was Don Schmierer, then-serving as a program director for anti-gay funder Howard Ahmanson, one of the top funders of California’s anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8. In March 2009, Schmierer – who markets a line of “ex-gay” books translated into multiple languages including Russian, Chinese, and Hindi – was a speaker, along with Scott Lively, at a Kampala, Uganda conference credited with dramatically escalating anti-LGBT hatred in Uganda.
De-facto head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Vice President Michael Cromartie, a frequently featured speaker at The Gathering.
Through Cromartie come close ties between E&PCC and the elite Washington, DC evanglelical network known as “The Fellowship which hosts the National Prayer Breakfast and has been accused, by jourbalst Jeff Sharlet, of having inspired Uganda’s festering national anti-LGBT rights crusade.
One of the most prominent members of the Fellowship (according to the Billy Graham Archives at Wheaton College) was the late Nixon Administration lawyer and hatchet man Charles Colson, who was personally groomed as a Fellowship leader by longtime Fellowship head Doug Coe (Colson has also been one of the most frequnetly featured speakers at The Gathering.)
Cromartie’s many ties to the Christian Reconstructionism movement (and its political front the Coalition on Revival), include Cromartie’s participation in the key 1987 Villars Consultation, which mapped out a Christian Reconstructionism-based vision for evangelical international aid efforts.
Along with Cromartie, other Villars participants included Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, and top Fieldstead Institute leaders, Coalition on Revival steering committee member Ted Baehr, Christian Reconstructionist theorists George Grant and David Chilton, World Vision Vice President Evon Hedley, multiple leaders of Food For The Hungry International including Darrow Miller, conservative evangelical strategist Herbert Schlossberg, and journalist Marvin Olasky – one of the leading intellectual architects of George W. Bush’s Faith Based Initiative.
Ethics and Public Policy Fellow Herb Schlossberg was the intellectual architect of the “stealth group” strategy to fight “organized homosexuality” outlined at The Gathering in 1997.
One major initiative of EPP&C has been the Faith Angle Forum – a semi-annual all-expenses paid forum, usually held in Southern Florida, which “brings together a select group of nationally respected journalists and distinguished scholars for in-depth discussions of cutting-edge issues at the intersection of religion and public life.”
Described as “the best junket in all of journalism”, The Faith Angle Forum has established Michael Cromartie as one of the “go-to” sources on questions regarding religion and politics for many of the top journalists reporting on religion. The ranks of Faith Angle Forum featured authorities informing America’s media elites at the conference are heavily populated with speakers who have been featured at The Gathering.
In 2008 at The Gathering, Peb Jackson — a Council on National Policy member who has served as a vice president at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church and also worked at the Maclellan Foundation (which at The Gathering 1997 helped organize an anonymous funding conduit for Gathering donors who wanted to give to project that would fight “organized homosexuality”) — emphasized, to The Gathering foundation heads at the talk, the cost effectiveness of investing in Cromartie’s Faith Angle Forum project :
“It’s great to see these consequential opportunities here, and for a few bucks – this guy is one of the most effective returns on investment. I think it’s, probably it’s like $150,000 bucks, and he needs 70 or 80 [more]. He doesn’t even have a secretary and he’s making these big changes…”
Besides funding from the National Christian Foundation, E&PPC also receives substantial funding from other The Gathering foundations.
Among his other roles, Cromartie serves on the advisory board of an evangelical coalition called the Cornwall Alliance that opposes action to address climate change, depicting concern over global warming as part of a vast satanic conspiracy referred to as the “green dragon”.
The Cornwall Alliance asserts (http://www.cornwallalliance.org/alert/cornwall-alliance-releases-an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/) that the Earth’s biological and climate systems are controlled and regulated by divine provenance:
“We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”
Leading the Cornwall Alliance is E. Calvin Beisner, a participant along with Michael Cromartie at the Villars Consultation. Beisner was also general editor for the “worldview” documents, on how to implement biblical law in all spheres of society, produced by the theocratic Coalition on Revival.
2001 – 5,000
2003 – 5,000
2004 – 20,000
2007 – 5,000
2010 – 65,000
2012 – 15,000
2013 – 2,000
Total – 117,000
Evangelism Explosion (EIN 23-7068456)
Evangelism Explosion International (also see Truth In Action entry) was the global missions ministry of late D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Church. Kennedy’s many projects included the Center For Reclaiming America, known for its patronage and promotion of leading Christian Reconstructionists. The EEI approach to same-sex marriage shines through in a January 2013 EEI website op-ed :
“Aren’t you glad we’re such a “tolerant” nation? We’re so accepting that it’s just fine if you want to “marry your canary,” as Christian apologist Greg Koukl says.
But our relativistic everything-goes age does have one iron-clad rule: DO NOT apply biblical morality to social issues. Violate that rule and you are toast—as last week’s public shunning of evangelical pastor Louie Giglio shows.
Giglio had accepted an invitation to give the benediction at President Obama’s second inaugural, but withdrew after a mid-1990s sermon surfaced in which the Atlanta pastor opposed homosexual conduct. He told listeners in the sermon that homosexuality is “sin in the eyes of God, and it is sin in the word of God” and also issued a call to “lovingly but firmly respond to the aggressive agenda” of homosexual activists.”
The op-ed quotes the late D. James Kennedy, “When you have an immoral society that has blatantly, proudly, violated all of the commandments of God, there is one last virtue they insist upon: tolerance for their immorality.” (see: http://evangelismexplosion.org/tolerance-police-arrest-louie-giglio/)
2001 – 37,000
2002 – 17,500
2003 – 20,000
2004 – 104,200
2005 – 82,800
2006 – 235,438
2007 – 323,766
2008 – 521,098
2009 – 456,877
2010 – 438,951
2011 – 909,480
2012 – 408,808
2013 – 515,783
Exodus International, North America (EIN 26-0785505)
Until its recent demise, with the statement from Exodus president Alan Chambers that ex-gay therapy does not work, Exodus was the leading reparative therapy organization. A new ex-gay umbrella organization, the Restored Hope Network, is positioned to fill the niche once occupied by Exodus.
2001 – 0
2002 – 6,600
2003 – 4,000
2004 – 27,500
2005 – 1,000
2006 – 5,500
2007 – 70,500
2008 – 33,000
2009 – 0
2010 – 5,700
2011 – 4,100
2012 – 26,800
2013 – 13,000
Total – 197,700
Family Research Council (EIN 59-1792772)
The FRC is one of the highest profile Christian right organizations working against LGBT rights, both within the United States and internationally. FRC president Tony Perkins also serves as the head of the Council For National Policy.
In a 2006 at The Gathering, during an Alliance Defense Fund three and a half-hour special briefing titled “How people of faith are being silenced here in America”, Family Research Council President Perkins stated,
“I think we’re at great threat, externally, from radical Islamists who want to destroy us and our way of life… The second greatest threat I think this nation faces is internally, and it’s from the radical homosexuals that want to destroy the underpinnings of our nation… the homosexual, the radical homosexual, wants to destroy our way of life”
Among the FRC’s high-profile events was the 2009 “prayercast” against health care reform (see:http://www.frcaction.org/pressrelease/frc-action-to-host-live-prayercast-tonight-on-health-care-reform-) which included TheCall head Lou Engle and Bishop Harry Jackson, one of the most aggressive among African-American pastors working against LGBT rights. In 2007, Bishop Jackson partnered with Cindy Jacobs and Kimberly Daniels in leading opposition to the Hate Crimes Bill, later signed into law by President Barack Obama (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7VnSDRk5tU)
2001 – 590,105
2002 – 988,954
2003 – 949,485
2004 – 1,131,750
2005 – 1,037,900
2006 – 2,435,175
2007 – 2,344,941
2008 – 2,444,840
2009 – 1,667,448
2010 – 1,414,525
2011 – 1,260,040
2012 – 1,442,180
2013 – 1,559,879
Total – 19,267,222
Family Research Institute (EIN 46-0649778)
By 2006, when the National Christian Foundation gave $12,000 to Paul Cameron’s Family Research Institute, over two decades had passed since Cameron had been disavowed by two of America’s most important relevant professional associations.
In 1983, the American Psychological Association had dropped Cameron from its membership “for a violation of the [APA] Preamble to the Ethical Principles of Psychologists”; In 1985, the American Sociological Association adopted a resolution that stated, “Dr. Paul Cameron has consistently misinterpreted and misrepresented sociological research on sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism” and observed, “Dr. Paul Cameron has repeatedly campaigned for the abrogation of the civil rights of lesbians and gay men, substantiating his call on the basis of his distorted interpretation of this research.”
Cameron’s discredited research has established many of the tropes used to demonize the LGBT community which are now being deployed in Africa and elsewhere beyond U.S. shores, including claims that homosexuals have vastly reduced life expectancy, and the [debunked] statistical association of same-sex orientation with pedophilia.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it, “Paul Cameron is an infamous anti-gay propagandist whose one-man statistical chop shop, the Family Research Institute, churns out hate literature masquerading as legitimate science. Cameron dresses up his “studies” with copious footnotes, graphs and charts, and then pays to publish them in certain journals.” ( http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/paul-cameron )
2006 – 12,000
2007 – 3,000
2008 – 4,000
2009 – 3,000
2010 – 3,000
2011 – 0
2012 – 0
2013 – 0
Faith 2 Action (Janet Porter/Janet Folger) (EIN 74-3068193)
Head of Faith 2 Action Janet Porter, née Janet Folger, fronted for the 1998 “Truth In Love” ex-gay promotion campaign that briefly helped establish ex-gay leaders such as John and Anne Paulk as household names across America.
2009 – 500
Fellowship of Christian Athletes (EIN 44-0610626)
Leaders in the non-denominational Fellowship of Christian Athletes are required to sign a “Sexual Purity Statement” which includes the following:
“God desires His children to lead pure lives of holiness. The Bible is clear in teaching on sexual sin including sex outside of marriage and homosexual acts. Neither heterosexual sex outside of marriage nor any homosexual act constitute an alternative lifestyle acceptable to God.”
The statement also stipulates, “I understand that if I am found being involved in a lifestyle that does not conform to the FCA’s Sexual Purity Statement… I will need to step down from my leadership position with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.”
(see: http://image.teamfca.net/siteuploadfiles/FCA/2700706F-CF38-4FCD-B9E09BAEB17A3C29/8D77B8C2-29AE-4056-9AC3104B94D755FD.pdf)
Up into 2014, the website of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes featured a testimony from an athlete who claims to have been miraculously “delivered” from homosexuality through her conversion to Christianity. Wrote the author,
“through His love—that one-of-a-kind, unconditional, sacrificial love like no other—I was delivered from homosexuality. I ended my relationship with the woman and began to love Christ above anything and anyone else.”
2001 – 58,255
2002 – 114,125
2003 – 234,392
2004 – 356,371
2005 – 378,480
2006 – 932,717
2007 – 1,450,424
2008 – 1,094,120
2009 – 945,497
2010 – 1,080,234
2011 – 1,199,576
2012 – 102,021
2013 – 2,168,986 (does not include local FCA branches)
Fidelis Center For Law and Policy (EIN 20-2787890)
(www.catholicvote.org) The Fidelis Center mobilizes Catholics to pray for the Autocam v. Sibelius case (v. Obamacare) and against the legalization of same-sex marriage (see: http://www.catholicvote.org/arizona-losing-our-religion/ ). NCF funding of the Fidelis Center is uncharacteristic in that NCF (and the Gathering) rarely fund Catholic organizations. Nonetheless, major leaders associated with The Gathering such as the late Charles Colson led aggressive efforts to build “co-belligerant” working relationships between Protestant evangelical and Catholic groups.
2007 – 10,000
2008 – 129,000
2009 – 4,000
2010 – 229,500
2011 – 142,500
2012 – 0
2013 – 89,500
Florida Family Policy Council (EIN 53-2436800)
In the 2008 election, under the leadership of President John Stemberger, the Florida Family Policy Council helped organize the successful push for an anti-same sex marriage state constitutional amendment.
Besides his ongoing hostility to LGBT rights, Florida Family Council head Stemberger has been accused, by the National Black Justice Coalition, of making racist public comments for seeming to suggest, on a Florida talk radio show, that August 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri – riots that followed the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager – were not really about the police shooting but were, rather, manifestations of a “barbarian society” caused by a decline in traditional marriage.
Stemberger has stated that Florida LGBT activists working for a Jacksonville sexual nondiscrimination ordinance are “a radical group of political operatives who want to force their aberrant views on human sexuality upon the rest of society by the mandate and penalty of law.” (see: http://www.glaad.org/blog/who-john-stemberger-and-whats-really-driving-his-boy-scouts-crusade)
The Florida Family Policy Council resource page (see: http://flfamily.org/issues-research/marriage-family/gay-marriage/) on gay marriage links to an extensive list of opinion pieces by authors such as Maggie Gallagher of the National Association for Marriage, Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Al Mohler, who in an article titled “Can Animals Be Gay” makes the following case:
“those pushing for the normalization of homosexuality want to be able to point to research that would prove the normality of homosexuality in nature…
[…]
Evidence of homosexual behaviors among animals is just another reminder that we live in a fallen world — one in which every dimension of creation bears evidence of the Fall. This new research points all the way back to Genesis 3.
Efforts to claim a genetic basis for homosexuality are rooted in the assumption that our genes tell us what God’s intention for us is… Only the Word of God can tell us what God’s intention is. We cannot derive our sexual morality from a laboratory — much less from observations of an albatross colony.”
2005 – 5,000
2006 – 0
2007 – 7,000
2008 – 109,000
2009 – 500
2010 – 40,588
2011 – 34,000
2012 – 28,500
2013 – 166,250
Focus on the Family (EIN 95-3188150)
While Focus on the Family has within the domestic United States recently toned down its anti-gay rhetoric, FoF nonetheless continues to aggressively support, both domestically and internationally, coordinated and well funded attacks on LGBT rights.
For example, in early 2014 Focus on the Family president Jim Daly weighed in on controversial Kansas House Bill 2453, that would have legalized discrimination, by individuals or religious entities, on the basis of gender of sexual preference. Daly noted that orthodox Christian were both for and against the bill. Daly then referred readers to an op-ed at Citizenlink, Focus on the Family’s “public policy partner”, which was strongly in support of the bill. (see: http://jimdaly.focusonthefamily.com/are-some-christians-really-supporting-homosexual-jim-crow-laws/).
But Daly is in fact the President and CEO of Citizenlink (formerly called Focus on the Family Action), FoF’s 501(c)(4) lobbying and political action wing which gives several million dollars a year to fund the constellation of family policy organizations that promote the evangelical right’s social policy agenda at the state level – including bills such as Kansas House Bill 2453 (note: HB 2453 was the creation of the Ethics and Public Policy Center – see E&PPC section.)
FoF support of evangelical right state-level family policy organizations that oppose LGBT rights and reproductive rights conforms with a strategy laid out during a key 1994 anti-gay rights strategy conference held at the Colorado Glenn Eyrie castle headquarters of The Navigators.
During the conference, FoF representative John Eldredge, who brought “greetings and warm regards from Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family”, told attendees – among whom were representatives from the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, the Christian Coalition, the Christian Reconstructionism movement-linked U.S. Taxpayers Party, and the Conservative Caucus, whose longtime head Howard Phillips called Christian Reconstructionism founder R.J. Rushdoony his “spiritual mentor” – that “those of us at Focus on the Family in the public policy fight see this issue as one of the key issues of our time. So much hinges on what happens with the full agenda of the militant gay movement.”
Emphasizing the importance of keeping up a smooth public relations front, Eldredge told attendees, “We must never appear to be attempting to rob anyone of their rights — their constitutional rights. We must never appear to be mean-spirited or bigoted.”
Eldredge also stressed that the religious right’s national anti-gay rights effort must be “perceived as a genuine grass roots uprising”.
On the international front, Focus on The Family’s more recent active participation in the World Congress of Families – which has included the participation of top Focus on the Family leaders in WCF planning sessions – further underlines the fact that the softening of FoF’s anti-LGBT rhetoric has been mainly a public relations ploy.
The World Congress of Families – whose conferences have featured anti-gay rights agitators such as Scott Lively, Judith Reisman, and ex-gay consigliere Don Schmierer of Fieldstead and Co. – has been designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-gay hate group.
Focus on The Family currently provides three publications concerning the issue of homosexuality. One of those, “What Does The Bible Say About Homosexuality: Answering Revisionist Gay Theology”, showcases, in a section titled “The Holiness Code”, Leviticus 20:13 – “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.” (see: https://focusonthefamily.webconnex.com/co-tvsexuality?refcd=209501)
Focus on the Family founder and longtime head Dr. James Dobson has long been an enthusiastic endorser of Summit Ministries, which sells “Christian worldview” teaching materials and runs a “worldview” summer camp for youth.
In a 2011 op-ed, longtime Summit Ministries head Dr. David Noebel (who stepped down from heading Summit that year) claimed, “Obama and his radical homosexual mafia plan to sodomize the world and make such perversion seem as wholesome as apple pie and vanilla ice cream.” (see: http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=7843)
James Dobson has been an enthusiastic promoter of Summit Ministries since 1987, when Dobson’s son Ryan attended one of Summit’s “worldview” programs and reportedly underwent a “massive change”. Declares Dobson, “I consider Summit Ministries to be one of the very best resources available, and I don’t say that lightly.” (see: http://www.summit.org/about/endorsements/)
Summit Ministries’ ideological proximity to Christian Reconstruction is manifest is its long partnership with South African Christian Reconstructionist pastor Peter Hammond, who serves on the current Coalition on Revival Steering Committee. Writes Hammond,
“The Summit students and staff became the largest supporters of Frontline Fellowship, and the main sponsors of Bibles and film evangelism equipment for Sudan. It is been my great privilege to be able to be their representative…” (see: http://www.frontline.org.za/index.php?option=com_djcatalog2&view=item&id=36:tribute-to-brent-noebel&cid=2:memorials&Itemid=171)
Hammond holds Africa “biblical worldview” conferences patterned after those held by Summit (see: http://www.christianaction.org.za/index.php/articles/biblical-worldview/258-why-we-all-need-a-biblical-worldview)
Both Hammond’s ministries and Summit Ministries are heavily funded by the National Christian Foundation (see respective entries on those ministries.)
2001 – 820,133
2002 – 1,929,607
2003 – 2,678,900
2004 – 3,754,238
2005 – 4,600,955
2006 – 5,914,566
2007 – 4,299,990
2008 – 4,300,491
2009 – 4,709,207
2010 – 3,089,389
2011 – 3,404,496
2012 – 5,252,804
2013 – 4,202,156
Total – 48,956,932
Food For The Hungry (EIN 95-2680390)
One of the more significant of the U.S. evangelical international aid nonprofits, Food For The Hungry funded the development of former Food For The Hungry Vice President Darrow L. Miller’s “Biblical worldview” courses, based on Christian Reconstructionist concepts, that are being taught across Africa by the Food For The Hungry-funded spinoff nonprofit Disciple Nations Alliance.
Food for the Hungry grants helped fund the creation of the Disciple Nations Alliance, which has worked directly with Ugandan Stephen Langa, one of the top lobbyists for the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill.
Disciple Nations Alliance teaches “Biblical Worldview” principles outlined in DNA leader Darrow Miller’s book (co-authored with Stan Guthrie) “Discipling Nations: The Power of Truth To Transform Cultures” (1998, Youth With a Mission Publishing). “Discipling Nations” states “the laws of the state are to be founded on the law of God” and declares, “We are God’s soldiers claiming territory for our King.”
Food For the Hungry leaders were signatories to the 1980s umbrella group Coalition on Revival, whose members pledged to give their lives if necessary to rebuild society along biblical lines and impose biblical law. Besides the National Christian Foundation, Food for the Hungry has also been funded by Howard Ahmanson’s unincorporated Fieldstead and Company and by USAID.
Food For the Hungry leadership participated in the 1987 Villars Consultation, which helped map out a Christian Reconstructionism-inspired vision for evangelical aid and economic development efforts that grew and flourished (with the help of US government funding) over the subsequent three decades.
2001 – 141,548
2002 – 2,284
2003 – 22,624
2004 – 97,624
2005 – 44,410
2006 – 212,821
2007 – 472,812
2008 – 541,414
2009 – 500,066
2010 – 656,976
2011 – 373,373
2012 – 507,372
2013 – 299,886
Total – 3,873,210
Foundation For Moral Law (Judge Roy Moore) (EIN 03-0502850)
Alabama Chief Justice Judge Roy Moore is widely known for installing a two and a half ton Ten Commandments monument at the Alabama State Courthouse in 2001. (see: http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v19n3/clarkson_dominionism.html )
In early 2014, Moore “mailed letters Wednesday to all 50 governors urging them to get their legislatures to call for a convention to add an amendment to the U.S. Constitution saying the only union recognized by state and federal governments is “the union of one man and one woman.”, reported the Associated Press (see: http://blog.al.com/wire/2014/02/alabama_chief_justice_roy_moor_1.html)
2009 – 5,000
Freedom in Christ Ministries (EIN 33-0361836)
A practicing exorcist, Neil T. Anderson, is considered one of the leading Protestant authorities on techniques to expel (“demon deliverance”) demon spirits alleged to possess human beings. The existence of “gay demons” is taken for granted within Anderson’s oeuvre (note: Anderson sits on the board of advisers of Mastering Life Ministries, which is run by ex-gay leader David Kyle Foster. MLM repackages discredited ex-gay propaganda, especially video, for international audiences. MLM videos have been re-dubbed in a range of major world languages.)
2001 – 25,000
2002 – 25,700
2003 – 16,350
2004 – 1,400
2005 – 4,950
2006 – 3,000
2007 – 2,250
2008 – 31,800
2009 – 4,900
2010 – 55,800
2011 – 2,800
2012 – 10,000
2013 – 33,401
Friends of the Bridegroom (EIN 74-2938033)
Friends of The Bridegroom is one of the supporting ministries behind the emerging International House of Prayer powerhouse, which had spawned hundreds of connected “houses of prayer” in the U.S. and internationally. Bickle has preached that Apostle Paul preached that “In the last days… the homosexual agenda will become so intense that, before the Lord returns, marriage will be outlawed in various parts of the earth” and stated that “the gay marriage agenda… is rooted in the depths of Hell”. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqjW6jmoXZM)
(Also see entry on IHOP)
2004 – 100,000
2006 – 30,823
2007 – 3,530
2008 – 69,640
2009 – 0
2010 – 232,563
2011 – 130,349
2012 – 0
Total – 566,905
Frontline Fellowship (EIN 20-8155389)
Frontline Fellowship (also see entry on sister ministry In Touch Missions International) is a ministry of Peter Hammond, listed as a current Coalition on Revival Steering Committee member.
The Rev. Peter Hammond is co-author of the 2001 book “The Pink Agenda: Sexual Revolution in South Africa and the Ruin of the Family”. As Hammond’s minsitry website explains (see: http://www.frontlinefellowship.net/inc/sdetail/119/341), “The Pink Agenda exposes the truth about homosexual behavior and its links to crime, violence, suicide, substance abuse, paedophilia and disease. It explodes the myths that homosexuals are “born that way” and “cannot change”.
According to the Frontline Fellowship book description, The Pink Agenda poses the following questions:
“Why do men involved in homosexuality and sodomy have an average life expectancy of 42 compared to 73 for other men?… Why are homosexuals 24 times more likely to commit suicide than other people?… Does the international “gay” movement include the lowering of the age of consent for sex with children, especially boys, and the normalization of pedophilia?”
Hammond is also author of the book “Biblical Principles for Africa”, which presents a Christian Reconstructionist template for society, and his ministry gives “Biblical worldview” seminars throughout Africa, patterned after the Biblical Worldview trainings held by the James Dobson-endorsed Summit Ministries.
Hammond writes, concerning the late Martin Luther King, Jr.,
“King was not a legitimate reverend, he was not a bona fide PhD, and his name was not really ‘Martin Luther King, Jr.’ What is left? Just a sexual degenerate with a Marxist agenda… Even in the 1960s, ‘the controlled’ media and politicians were determined to push their racial mixing program on America. King was their man and nothing was allowed to get in their way.”
Hammond has also depicted the late Nelson Mandela as, first and foremost, a terrorist.
2008 – 20,000
2009 – 20,000
2010 – 32,000
2011 – 30,400
2012 – 11,200
2013 – 27,000
Total – 140,600 (The NCF has also given $721,211 to In Touch Mission International, sister ministry of Frontline Fellowship)
Georgia Family Council (EIN 58-1928520)
As one description put it, “The Georgia Family Council is your typical anti-gay organization: supporting legislation to ban gay marriage and calling the legalization of gay marriage “regression.” (see: http://www.policymic.com/articles/12219/all-the-anti-gay-companies-you-fund-when-you-spend-5-25-on-a-chick-fil-a-sandwich)
2001 – 44,200
2002 – 70,000
2003 – 99,901
2004 – 38,942
2005 – 157,956
2006 – 111,500
2007 – 212,500
2008 – 237,250
2009 – 156,920
2010 – 238,250
2011 – 226,655
2012 – 0
2013 – 0
Global Mobilization Ministries (EIN 20-1030740)
Founder and director of mission at Global Mobilization Ministries is Alison Barfoot, who is described as a “key actor directing the Uganda Anglican Church towards an oppositional stance towards homosexuality” in the book “American Culture Warriors in Africa: A Guide To The Exporters of Homophibia and Sexism” ( 2014, Political Research Associates).
Barfoot was co-rector of a Kansas Episcopal church which broke with the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) over the 2003 ordination of openly gay Gene Robinson as ECUSA’s bishop for the state of New Hampshire.
Barfoot’s Kansas Christ Church subsequently joined the Anglican Church of Uganda under the leadership of Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, who has openly supported the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill. Orombi also served as head of the Uganda Christian University (see Truro Church entry), another vector for the U.S.-funded export of anti-LGBTI religious ideology to Uganda.
Under Orombi’s leadership, the Uganda Anglican Church has served (along with the Nigerian Anglican Church under the leadership of Peter Akinola) as a harbor for American Episcopal churches which have broken away from ECUSA over divise culture war issues such as same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy, abortion, and other reproductive rights issues.
Henry Orombi has, in turn, worked closely with prominent (and frequent) The Gathering speaker Rick Warren, who has helped provoke schisms within the Episcopal Church (see: http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2008/12/22/7590) and even offered schismatic groups worship space at his Saddleback Church (see: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/news_reports/rick_warren_offers_safe_harbor.html).
2004 – 800
2005 – 7,400
2006 – 6,400
2007 – 6,200
2008 – 4,500
2009 – 4,000
2010 – 8,000
2011 – 5,000
2012 – 4,000
2013 – 1,000
Harvest Evangelism (EIN 94-2684511)
Ed Silvoso’s Harvest Evangelism ministry works directly with Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni – rumored in Uganda to be the most important driving political force behind the Anti Homosexuality Bill – and also includes, in its “International Transformation Network” team Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet, who claims to have been part of a committee that conceived the bill and picked MP David Bahati to introduce it in Uganda’s parliament.
In 2005, Julius Oyet – who has held top leadership roles in Uganda’s two born-again umbrella associations – traveled to Ed Silvoso’s yearly “Nation transformation” conference near Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Joining Oyet was Joshua Lwere, future head of Uganda’s National Fellowship of Born Again Pentecostal Churches, whose membership represented a key block of political support for the Museveni regime.
In 2006, Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni herself traveled, with an entourage that included her daughter Patience and top Ugandan government leaders and religious leaders including Ugandan evangelist and head of Uganda’s National Fellowship of Born Again Pentecostal Churches Alex Mitala, to Silvoso’s yearly Argentina conference.
Oyet, Lwere, Mitala, and Janet Museveni have all played major roles in Uganda’s ongoing anti-gay crusade. Oyet himself claims to have helped co-author Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill, and First Lady Janet Museveni is widely rumored to be the biggest political force behind the bill.
2001 – 35,000
2003 – 0
2004 – 0
2005 – 0
2006 – 48,852
2007 – 47,494
2008 – 817,000
2009 – 113,948
2010 – 52,344
2011 – 89,279
2012 – 51,388
2013 – 54,494
Total 1,309,799
Healing Rooms Ministries (EIN 91-2011121)
The International Association of Healing Rooms miracle healing franchise is run by one one of the apostles in the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders (formerly the International Coalition of Apostles, led for the decade of the 2000s by church growth guru C. Peter Wagner).
Testimonies on the IHR website claim miracle healings of brain, bone, and lung cancer and also “deliverance” from the “homosexual lifestyle”.
One of the professed co-authors of the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill, Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet, runs a Kampala, Uganda Healing Rooms Ministries franchise.
2001 – 0
2002 – 0
2003 – 0
2004 – 0
2005 – 22,916
2006 – 37,838
2007 – 40,004
2008 – 2,800
2009 – 3,000
2010 – 10,000
2011 – 1,500
2012
2013 – 450
Total – 118,508
In 2009, an anti-gay rights conference held in Kampala, Uganda came to the widespread attention of American liberal media and LGBT rights groups, which subsequently highlighted the participation of anti-LGBT rights agitator Scott Lively.
But another speaker at the conference was even more significant, for having helped create the broader anti-LGBT rights strategy in which Lively has played an aggressive role.
The ex-gay ministry His Servants is run by Don Schmierer, a Program Director For Howard Ahmanson’s Fieldstead & Company from 1992-2011 (and maybe even more recently).
Howard Ahmanson is a frequent attendee at The Gathering who has been one of the most significant funders of anti-LGBT rights activism on the evangelical right. Up to 1995, Ahmanson was one of the top funders of the Chalcedon Institute, the leading think tank of the Christian Reconstructionism movement, whose leaders propose mandating the death penalty for a range of offenses including adultery, blasphemy, childhood rebelliousness, female unchastity (sex before marriage), homosexuality, and witchcraft.
Don Schmierer’s long career of anti-gay activism ranges from his March 2009 participating, along with notorious anti-gay agitator Scott Lively, in the Kampala, Uganda anti-LGBT rights conference (“Exposing the Truth behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda”) widely credited with raising anti-gay hatred in Uganda to a fever pitch, to his presentation, to The Gathering in 1997, of a master strategy for combating “organized homosexuality”.
Schmierer’s ministry His Servants sells a line of high-production value ex-gay reparative therapy books including Schmierer’s 1998 book “An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing the Homosexual Condition in Today’s Youth”, which cites now-discredited research from Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse claiming a 33-60 percent success rate in therapy aimed at the “conversion from heterosexual to homosexual orientation.” Schmierer’s line of reparative therapy book have been translated into almost two dozen world languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Hindi.
In 1997 at The Gathering, Schmierer led a session during which he and other anti-LGBT rights strategists including Herb Schlossberg outlined a mutli-dimensional strategy to combat “organized homosexuality”.
Raising funds, from The Gathering’s deep-pocketed investors, to implement that plan was a program manager for the Maclellan Foundation – one of the most significant foundations at The Gathering and central to the creation of the National Christian Foundation.
Howard Ahmanson, who uses his unincorporated Fieldstead and Company to finance his philanthropic and political causes, has long been one of the most significant and strategic funders of anti-LGBT rights causes in America. Ahmanson was a key financial supporter, up to 1995, of the Christian Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation and up to 1995 served on the Chalcedon board of directors.
Ahmanson also provided heavy funding for California’s 2000 election anti-same sex marriage Proposition 22 and also the 2008 election anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8.
Another of Howard Ahmanson’s projects has been the funding of efforts to promote schisms within mainline Protestant denominations, over divisive “wedge” issues such as same sex marriage and the ordination of gay clergy.
Leading those drives towards schism have been the so-called “Renewal” groups within the Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and other traditionally centrist or liberal Protestant denominations.
Fieldstead and Company program director Herbert Schlossberg has served as president of one of the major “Renewal” groups within the Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Action – which is a project of the Ahmanson-funded Institute on Religion and Democracy.
2001-2004 – 0
2005 – 242,775
2006 – 197,000
2007 – 192,000
2008 – 227,000
2009 – 178,000
2010 – 200,000
2011- 170,000
2012 – 160,000
2013 – 245,000
total – 1,811,775
Hope For The Heart (EIN 75-2191528)
Head of Hope For The Heart is June Hunt, heiress to the Hunt oil fortune. Hope for The Heart’s downloadable PDF resource on homosexuality ( http://www.hopefortheheart.org/pdfs/OLQR-pr-Homosexuality.pdf ) attributes male same-sex attraction to stereotypical, cliches such as “Failure to identify with his weak or absent father… Viewing his father as weak and powerless and his mother as overpowering…. Recoiling from women because of his domineering, controlling mother… Despising being taken as a surrogate “husband” by his lonely mother…. Failure to bond with his non-affirming father… Feeling he can never measure up to his father’s standards of manliness….Envying his athletic brothers.”
2001 – 1,000
2002 – 1,000
2003 – 1,000
2004 – 1,000
2005 – 0
2006 – 300
2007 – 100
2008 – 0
2009 – 1,005,100
2010 – 5,000
2011 – 812,500
2012 – 13,957
3012 – 32,900
Illinois Family Institute (EIN 37-126588)
The Illinois Family Institute is one of twelve organizations funded by the National Christian Foundation since 2001 that is on a Southern Poverty Law Center list of groups which “pump out demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities” according to a 2010 SPLC report ( http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/winter/the-hard-liners )
2001 – 4,600
2002 – 0
2003 – 0
2004 – 3,000
2005 – 500
2006 – 26,500
2007 – 6,000
2008 – 8,300
2009 – 7,000
2010 – 1,600
2011 – 1,300
2012 – 1,850
2013 – 2,600
Total – 67,750
Indiana Family Institute (EIN 35-1790240)
As chronicled by GLAAD (see: https://www.glaad.org/cap/indiana-curt-smith), President of the Indiana Family Institute Curt Smith,
“
— Promotes conferences that seek to “change” gay people
— Admits: “…I believe homosexuality is harmful to all, including society, and is against the teachings of the God of the Bible…”
— Equates homosexuality with bestiality and adultery: “The Judeo-Christian worldview at the heart of Western culture and so our legal and governmental systems (Ten Commandments, an “eye for an eye,” the very concepts of mercy, justice and rehabilitation) promotes marriage and family while decrying other modes of sexuality — homosexuality, bestiality, adultery, etc”
— Uses skewed “research” from activists who share his view to claim “that gay men can change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation” and that “homosexual orientation is not an immutable fact of nature or Creation.”
“
IFI President Smith has testified before the Indiana House in favor of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (see: http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/01/22/3195191/indiana-house-committee-advances-constitutional-amendment-banning-sex-marriage/)
One project of the Indiana Family Institute has been the Indiana Pastors Alliance (see: http://www.hoosierfamily.org/indiana-pastors-alliance) which,
“
…exists to further the following objectives:
– Affirm the authority of Scripture as objective Truth (2 Timothy 3:16)
– Acknowledge God as the Creator and Governor over His creation (Genesis 1:1)
– Proclaim Jesus Christ as the “Ruler over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1:5)
– Obediently pursue Jesus’ command to be “salt and light” to the culture
– Bring Biblical solutions to contemporary social problems
Encourage informed Christian thinking about contemporary social issues
– Preach boldly about moral issues from the pulpit
– Enlist our congregations to get involved in the political process…
”
2001 – 1,000
2002 – 22,450
2003 – 6,500
2004 – 13,000
2005 – 17,550
2006 – 42,725
2007 – 44,560
2008 – 29,400
2009 – 23,461
2010 – 22,455
2011 – 33,900
2012 – 42,325
2013 – 39,150
Institute in Basic Life Principles (EIN 36-6108515)
IBLP founder and head Bill Gothard, can be considered an ultra-Christian Reconstructionist. According Martin Selbrede, to one of the current leaders of the Christian Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundaiton, a possible deal between Gothard and R. J. Rushdoony – in which Gothard would have published and promoted Rushdoony’s books – fell through because Gothard demanded, as a condition of the deal, that Rushdoony cut from his books Rushdoony’s support for divorce in the case of marital infidelity. Gothard insisted that divorce be prohibited under any and all circumstances – so, the deal, potentially very lucrative for both parties, fell apart.
In early 2014 Gothard resigned from the IBLP following accusations over sexual harassment from over 30 different women. ( see: http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/april/bill-gothard-breaks-silence-on-harassment-claims-by-30-wome.html )
2001 – 0
2002 – 21,500
2003 – 20,000
2004 – 9,500
2005 – 0
2006 – 6,500
2007 – 2,000
2008 – 500
2009 – 19,500
2010 – 23,700
2011 – 17,200
2012 – 35,450
2013 – 37,250
The International Foundation/Fellowship Foundation (EIN 53-0204604)
The main nonprofit foundation associated with “The Family”, AKA “The Fellowship”, which hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast; The Family was the subject of the 2008 book “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” by journalist Jeff Sharlet (2008, HarperCollins)
In his book “C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat To American Democracy” (Little, Brown, 2010), Jeff Sharlet charged that the international neo-fundamentalist, Washington D.C.-based network known as “The Family” had helped to inspire Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill.
Longtime head of The Family Douglas Coe is one of the three agents of The International Foundation listed on its 2012 990 tax form as having received financial compensation from the nonprofit.
In 2009 Coe was featured (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYeGR7O1lKI) in an NBC segment that showcased a 1989 speech Coe gave at the Glenn Eyrie headquarters of the (NCF-funded) organization The Navigators, during which Coe claimed that young Chinese Red Guard who were willing to chop off the heads of their own parents to advance the interests of the state drew inspiration from the teachings of Jesus.
Stated Coe, “They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of their mother, father, brother, sister and their own life. That was a covenant, a pledge. That’s what Jesus said.”
Jeff Sharlet, who lived for several months at one of The Family’s group homes near Washington, D.C. told NBC, “We ere being taught the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao… And I’d say, ‘Isn’t there a problem with that?’. And they would even seem perplexed by the question. Hitler’s genocide wasn’t really an issue for them. It was the strength that he emulated.”
Many leaders funded by the National Christian foundation and who are associated with The Gathering (including Wess Stafford and Rick Warren) have evinced sentiments very similar to Doug Coe’s, admiration of the dedication of the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao.
The yearly conference known as The Gathering was conceived during a mid-1980s meeting at The Cedars, The Family’s Arlington, Virginia mansion used as a retreat and prayer center.
Many critics doubted journalist Sharlet’s dark depictions of The Family – a subject especially hard to research given that it functions through informal relational networks and because, following publication of Sharlet’s first book on The Family, the Billy Graham center restricted access to its extensive archive of Family-related documents that had formed the research backbone of Sharlet’s book.
By contrast, the activities of the foundations whose heads attend the yearly conference known as The Gathering can be readily traced through funding patterns in the 990 tax forms that those foundations file yearly with the Internal Revenue Service, and also through audio archives of sessions from the yearly The Gathering conference going back to 1996.
For all practical purposes, The Family and The Gathering can be considered the same, conjoined entity.
2001 – 57,050
2002 – 76,500
2003 – 54,338
2004 – 139,200
2005 – 110,749
2006 – 424,316
2007 – 538,399
2008 – 515,409
2009 – 525,418
2010 – 503,150
2011 – 564,750
2012 – 688,176
2013 – 1,478,858
In Touch Mission International (EIN 94-2783852)
In Touch Mission International is a sister ministry of Front Line Ministries, headed by Peter Hammond a leading Christian Reconstructionist and current Coalition on Revival Steering Committee member.
2001 – 5,260
2002 – 5,000
2003 – 55,000
2004 – 15,000
2005 – 174,000
2006 – 15,000
2007 – 103,800
2008 – 167,200
2009 – 77,000
2010 – 17,450
2011 – 8,900
2012 – 77,600
2013 – 14,900
Total – 736,110
Intercessors For America (EIN 04-2576811)
John Beckett, IFA founder and head, was an original Coalition on Revival signatory. The IFA website showcases numerous anti-gay articles re-titled by IFA was inflammatory headlines such as “US embassy raises flag in support of homosexual deviants” and “Limbaugh Right, O’Reilly Wrong: Homosexuals Molest Kids”. (see: http://www.ifapray.org/prayertopics.php?id=5)
2001 – 20,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 10,000
2004 – 10,000
2005 – 10,000
2006 – 11,200
2007 – 15,750
2008 – 10,300
2009 – 5,350
2010 – 5,750
2011 – 300
2012 – 2,100
2013 – 100
International House of Prayer (EIN 74-2938033)
2001 to 2003 – 0
2004 – 15,500
2005 – 15,900
2006 – 43,134
2007 – 54,087
2008 – 90,135
2009 – 297,229
2010 – 93,949345
2011 – 73,800
2012 – 874,930
2013 – 16,935
Total 1,575,599 (plus 2013 141,770 to IHOP Forerunner Christian Fellowship EIN 45-2262183 )
Iowa Family Policy Center (EIN 42-1461169)
The Iowa Family Policy Center is the educational arm of the Iowa Family Leader,
Because of the unique, unusual role the Iowa caucuses play in the American election primary system, the Iowa Family Policy Center wields great influence over Republican presidential hopefuls.
In 2011, the IFPC, known for hosting Republican candidate debates, released a pledge on family values, “The Marriage Vow – A Declaration of Dependence upon Marriage and Family”, which included support for the anti-same sex marriage Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), that was quickly signed by presidential hopefuls Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann.
Controversy subsequently arose when media noticed a passage in the pledge that, as characterized by CNN, “contained a controversial preamble suggesting black children born into slavery had better family structures than black children now.” (see: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/11/gop-candidates-caught-in-slavery-controversy/). The passage read,
“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”
At an April 2014 Iowa Family Leader candidates’ forum, IFL head Bob Vander Plats stated, “When you abort 55 million babies, when you undermine the family and marriage, God’s first institution, and you say marriage can be anything you want it to be, when you trample on religious liberty in the Constitution… You cannot run away from the heart of God and expect God to bless the country.”
During the event, three candidates running for U.S. Senate vowed to block federal judges who did not adhere to “natural law” provided by God. (see: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/29/iowas-gop-senate-candidates-vow-to-block-judges-who-wont-follow-biblical-law/)
2003 – 250
2012 – 25,000
John Hagee Ministries (EIN 74-1986308)
Reported Charisma News in August 2013, “Despite revisions to the original document, pastor John Hagee still opposes a proposed city ordinance intended to protect the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in San Antonio, Texas.”
Hagee’s decades-long career of fulmination against homosexuality and LGBT rights includes sermons with titled such as the 1996 sermon “Homosexuality: Alternative or Abomination” (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iDAeQCUEYA) in which Hagee claimed that AIDS could be spread by mosquitoes and, quoting one alleged medical authority, asked, “are you worried about your salad being served in a restaurant that employs homosexuals? You had better be”.
In his book “What Every Man Wants In a Woman: 10 Essentials For Growing Deeper in Love” (Charisma House, 2005), pastor John Hagee argued for a “constitutional amendment recognizing only the marriage between a man and a woman” and warned,
“If we fail to achieve this, the gates of hell will be opened… If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
What does the Bible call homosexuality? Let’s look at Leviticus 18:22. It reads,: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman.It is an abomination.
Leviticus 20:13 states: “If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
…It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality.” (page 69)
On page 70 of his book, Hagee characterized God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah: “God executed an urban renewal program with fire and brimstone. God’s opinion of homosexuality has not changed.”
Following closely in his father’s footsteps Matthew Hagee, who has taken over as head pastor at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, claims AIDS is a “choice” (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyS5vFIhRpE) and fulminates,
“We are at a tipping point when the church can watch the homosexual agenda be advanced in public schools and we sit back and whine about it. Recently the California legislature decided that homosexual history in American will be taught to kindergartners… It’s shameful that the homosexuals can get a curriculum in the public school and the children of God cannot… The church was not put here to whine. We were placed here to win.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bvHkgcUkmc)
In 2005, John Hagee broadcast a sermon, that was also marketed in video format by Hagee’s ministry, in which Hagee claimed that God had sent Adolf Hitler and his Nazis to persecute Europe’s Jews and so drive them towards Palestine, the only land where Jews were meant by God to live according to Hagee. (see: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/5/15/141520/281)
2001 – 200
2002 – 200
2003 – 200
2004 – 68,140
2005 – 70,000
2006 – 160,100
2007 – 56,717
2008 – 81,400
2009 – 171,100
2010 – 171,149
2011 – 10,000
2012 – 60,069
2013 – 0 ( 83,981 to “John Hagee Ministries”, EIN 74-1764843 )
total – 789,206
Liberty Counsel (EIN 59-2986294)
The Liberty Counsel is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-gay hate group. As the SPLC describes, the Liberty Counsel “is affiliated with Liberty University Law School in Lynchburg, Va., a legacy of the late conservative icon Jerry Falwell. It was founded and is still chaired by Mathew (Mat) Staver, who also serves as director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy at Liberty University, and provides legal assistance with regard to religious liberty, abortion and the family.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a heavy recipient of NCF funding, in turn provides substantial grants to the Liberty Counsel. In 2012 the Liberty Counsel agreed to represent evangelist Scott Lively in a lawsuit filed by the NYC-based Center For Constitutional Rights, on behalf of the Ugandan gay rights group SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda). (see: see http://www.lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14100&PRID=1165 ) The major 2012-2013 National Christian Foundation increase in funding to the liberty Counsel is suggestive in light of LC’s legal representation of Lively.
In early 2015, leading up the oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, the Liberty Counsel organized a “Defend Marriage Pledge”, who signatories wanted to “warn the Court not to cross the redline of natural marriage” (see: http://www.lc.org/index.cfm?PID=14102&AlertID=1917 )
2004 – 15,000
2005 – 20,740
2006 – 10,800
2007 – 2,500
2008 – 2,780
2009 – 7,050
2010 – 5,100
2011 – 6,343
2012 – 31,550
2013 – 55,490
Total 157,353
The Lilburn Alliance Church is the Lilburn, Georgia home church of College of Prayer leader Fred Hartley, III. Note NCF’s $13,200 2006 grant 2006; in 2007, Hartley’s Revival Prayer Institute gave Julius Oyet $11,350 for travel to the United States, to Hartley’s Lilburn church. (also see entry for the Revival Prayer Alliance)
2001 – 2,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 0
2004 – 700
2005 – 150
2006 – 13,200
2007 – 1,000
2008 – 100
2009 – 247
2010 – 0
2012 – 150
2013 – 800
Total – 18,347
Luis Palau Association (EIN 93-0713827)
Widely known as the “Latin Billy Graham”, Louis Palau established his name and career through nation-hopping evangelistic crusades (though Palau now eschews the term “crusade”, as divisive.)
Throughout his career Palau has been close to Billy Graham and also tightly linked to The Family/Fellowship, which hosts the National Prayer Breakfast.
Palau has spoken at The Fellowship associated events such as The Gathering and was a featured speaker at a 2012 Atlanta, GA event commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the founding of the National Christian Foundation (see: https://vimeo.com/54365578 ). NCF is the biggest philanthropy represented at The Gathering, which as an event was conceived at a mid-1980s meeting at The Fellowship’s “The Cedars” Arlington, VA Mansion retreat center overlooking the Potomac River.
Like Billy Graham, Louis Palau has taken pains to project an ecumenical, inclusive image. But, like Graham, Luis Palau also has ties to radically sectarian, dominionist streams of evangelicalism – such as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders urge their followers to burn or destroy all objects and scripture associated with competing faiths (and even with different sectarian forms of Christianity.)
Palau was an original signatory to the theocratic Coalition on Revival, an evangelical front of fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, and charismatics that was shepherded by Christian Reconstructionist leaders such as Gary North, Gary DeMar and, in the initial phase of COR, R. J. Rushdoony. COR helped disseminate Christian Reconstructionist and dominionist ideas widely within conservative evangelicalism.
Luis Palau was an honorary co-chair (along with Bill Bright and Billy Graham) of the AD2000 And Beyond movement that served as a major vector for the globalization of the New Apostolic Reformation movement and its characteristic ideas and practices (such as Spiritual Mapping.)
Louis Palau also has been an honorary co-chair of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, an organization dominated by NAR apostles from the International Coalition of Apostles (according to the NDPTF’s 990 tax forms, which list multiple ICA apostles on the NDPTF board.)
Palau is also linked to top NAR leadership by marriage, to Louis Palau’s sister Ruth Noemi Palau (now Ruth Silvoso.) The familial relationship has both helped to establish New Apostolic Reformation leader Silvoso as a superstar in the firmament of international right-wing evangelism, and also tapped Silvoso into the avante-gaurd of evolving missions strategy: Silvoso’s career began as a member of the Luis Palau Evangelistic Association ministry team.
One of the listed members of the Luis Palau Association’s Next Generation Alliance (see: https://web.archive.org/web/20150712152416/http://legacy.palau.org/alliance/next_generation_alliance/nga_evangelists/ltop/ ) has been Ugandan Evangelist Julius Peter Oyet, who is in turn a member of of the Uganda branch of Silvoso’s International Transformation Network.
In a 2010 interview, Oyet told French video documentarist Domenic Mesmin that, “it is not Uganda that is putting a death penalty on homosexuals, it is God and his word.”
Oyet (see: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/6/15/15356/9867) has helped propagate the most extreme anti-LGBT vilification in Uganda, including participating in Ugandan Martin Ssempa’s public screenings of fringe gay pornography. At a Spring 2010 Kampala, Uganda rally, Oyet told his audience,
“It is not Uganda putting a death penalty on homosexuals, it is God and his word!… Now, listen to me – the sodomy people, the homosexuals, are even more foolish than dogs. There’s no female dog that mates with a female dog, there’s no male dog that lusts after a male dog. Even animals are wiser than homosexuals! – Do you hear me?… We do not condemn homosexuality just because we are Africans. We condemn homosexuality because it is written in this holy book – the Bible tells us, according to Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22, “You shall not lie with a man as a man lies with a woman. It is an abomination.”… I want to invite you to declare ‘no to sodomy’, every one of you. Uganda says ‘no to sodomy! No to sodomy! No to sodomy! No to sodomy!”
In 2010, only a few months after Western media attention became fixated on the role that TheCall head (and NAR prophet) Lou Engle (with financial help from the National Christian Foundation) had played in inciting anti-gay hatred in Uganda by staging a May 2010 TheCall rally in Kampala, Luis Palau’s son Andrew Palau held a series of Luis Palau Association rallies in Uganda with the help of Bishop Julius Oyet (see: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/October/Evangelist-Palau-Spreads-Love-in-Uganda/ )
In footage promoted by the Luis Palau Association, Oyet can be seen praying over and laying hands on Andrew Palau; Oyet is also a featured member of Luis Palau’s Next Generation Alliance.
In his book “That None Should Perish: How To Reach Entire Cities For Christ Through Prayer Evangelism”(Regal Books/Gospel Light 1994) Silvoso enthused, “Because of my association with Luis Palau and his team, I knew that we were on the cutting edge of God’s movement in Latin America. We did see nay cities open up to the gospel for the first time. Luis even led to Christ the president of one nation.” (pp. 29)
Ed Silvoso has been credited with convening the 1999 Singapore meeting that led to the formation of one of the NAR’s most important apostolic networks, the International Coalition of Apostles. Silvoso was also one of a small group (that included C. Peter Wagner and Cindy Jacobs) who helped pioneer the practice of Spiritual Mapping (in the late 1980s in the Argentine city of Resistencia.)
Over the past decade, Louis Palau’s son Kevin Palau has taken his father’s ministry in a bold new direction, through a partnership with the secular, liberal city of Portland Oregon in which each year thousands of volunteers from hundreds of area churches volunteer in a civic improvement campaign.
Other major ministries on the evangelical right, such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, are now looking towards Kevin Palau’s model as a possible way to rebrand conservative evangelicalism, to move past the stigma of the divisive culture wars – especially the perception that the movement is anti-gay.
Palau and his two sons have made an especial effort to evangelize in the liberal/progressive city of Portland, Oregon.
This project, launched in 1999, has born dramatic fruit. In an interview for Marvin Olasky’s World magazine, in the June 14, 2014 issue, Palau told Olasky that “Our openly gay mayor would now say, ‘Nobody has helped the city of Portland more than the evangelical community.’ His understanding of what Christians are like has totally turned around.” (see: http://www.worldmag.com/2014/05/pioneering_palaus)
The initiative was launched in 2008, described in an in-depth 2009 story in Willamette Week, as a “five-month volunteer effort by 26,000 Portland parishioners, logging more than 100,000 hours refurbishing 50 school campuses, giving haircuts to the homeless and donating 45,000 pounds of canned goods to food banks.”
The yearly “season of service” was pioneered by Luis Palau’s son Kevin Palau, who has led an effort in which churches under Palau’s aegis are partnering with Portland public schools, to mentor students in the Portland public school system. Explained Palau to Olasky,
“Our school superintendent, who happens to be a very prominent member of the gay and lesbian community, came and said, ‘We want you to find a church partner for every school in Portland public schools.’ So we now have 252 public schools with an evangelical church partner simply asking the question, ‘How can we serve?’ It’s been a revolution in relationships.”
This effort – which has neutralized, at least in a public relations sense, charges that participating churches are anti-gay, has helped ignite church growth in Portland according to Palau:
“We’re beginning to see churches grow and new churches planted, because we’ve demolished that straw man argument of “Oh, you’re just anti-this and anti-that.” South Lake, for example, has planted a church in the Roosevelt neighborhood with 150 people coming. We invite the whole city to come to our festival, our mayor gives a welcome, and the gospel is proclaimed.”
Like Luis Palau, Ed Silvoso has also targeted a chosen liberal, gay-friendly enclave, San Francisco. In “That None Should Perish”, Silvoso describes how his revolutionary technique of “prayer evangelism” can drive from even the darkest satanic redoubts the forces of evil:
“Let us choose what could well be the darkest spiritual place in America: the San Francsico Bay Area. This is where the Church of Satan was founded; where witches and warlocks have legal status; where homosexuals and lesbians heavily influence government; where selfisness rules. Humanly speaking, the San Francisco Bay Area–home to six million people–seems to be beyond hope.
But is it hopeless? Not at all! There are already 4,400 Bible-believing congregations in the San Francisco Bay Area…[…]
The Church in the Bay Area is already strategically positioned to strike at the enemy.” (pp. 90-91)
2001 – 120,900
2002 – 179,000
2003 – 297,000
2004 – 474,442
2005 – 897,800
2006 – 1,436,033
2007 – 2,171,275
2008 – 1,999,900
2009 – 1,318,726
2010 – 581,750
2011 – 745,486
2012 – 777,763
2013 – 984,914
Total – 11,984,989
Marketplace Leaders Ministries (EIN 20-5399884)
MLM is the ministry of Os Hillman, a friend of Julius Oyet. Both have participated in Ed Silvoso’s International Transformation Network.
Hillman has organized conferences which have featured the participation of both Ugandan evangelist Julius Oyet, who claims to have co-authored the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill, Fred Hartley, Jr. III, whose College of Prayer International’s Uganda branch is headed by Oyet and includes Ugandan MP David Bahati, who introduced the bill in Uganda’s parliament, and Atlanta pastor Johnny Enlow, perhaps the first pastor to blame Hurricane Katrina on a New Orleans gay parade and who suggests criminalizing homosexuality.
2001–2006 – 0
2007 – 2,100
2008 – 1,000
2009 – 550
2010 – 550
2011 – 5,100
2012 – 1,000
2013 – 4,400
Total 14,700
Marriage and Family Foundation (EIN 26-0142546)
In 2005, top leaders from Chick-Fil-A, including Don Cathy, launched the Marriage and Family Legacy Fund, which later change its name to the Marriage & Family Foundation. It was a project of the Chick-Fil-A led “Marriage CoMission”, a coalition of dozens of ministries and organizations dedicated to fighting the “downward spiral of marriage and the traditional family in America.”
The project included the participation numerous anti-LGBT organizations and leaders including Exodus International, Citizens for Community Values, the Alliance For Marriage (a driving force behind state anti-same sex marriage amendments), leaders from Focus on the Family, leaders from The Navigators, Campus Crusade For Christ Military Ministry, Alan Carlson and Larry Jacobs of the Howard Center, members of the Georgia Family Council, and representatives from Campus Crusade For Christ (Family Life). All of the above have been funded by the National Christian Foundation. Also participating was Hugh O. Maclellan of the Maclellan Foundation – one of the most important funders of the NCF and an attendee at The Gathering. (see: https://web.archive.org/web/20070724230345/http://marriagecomission.com/partners/?&page=1)
While Chick-Fil-A’s funding of anti-LGBT organizations, at least through its Winshape Foundation, appears to have ceased following scrutiny and pressure from LGBT rights organizations, Chick-Fil-A’s Senior Vice President and CFO James B. “Buck”: McCabe nonetheless serves on the board of directors of the National Christian Foundation, one of the top funders of anti-LGBT rights groups on earth.
2008 – 1,120,500
2009 – 112,042
2010 – 401,000
2011 – 100
2012 – 350,000
2013 – 0
Total – 1,983,642
Massachusetts Family Institute (EIN 04-3113783)
The Massachusetts Family Institute statement on “Marriage and the Family” reads,
“Since the primary purpose of marriage is the procreation and nurturing of children, marriage can only be the union of a man and a woman. The concept of an alternative definition that includes same-sex couples is fundamentally flawed. It is a travesty that a Massachusetts court decided to thrust a radical social experiment upon an unwilling populace by legalizing same-sex “marriage.” This government endorsement of motherless and fatherless families is both reckless and dangerous. A maturing child needs the gender-specific influences of both a mother and a father.
Though strenuous efforts to allow the citizens of Massachusetts to vote on the definition of marriage have failed for now, MFI is dedicated to restoring marriage to its natural definition. The costs to family, children and culture are too great to concede this battle to those who would see marriage and family redefined to the point of irrelevancy.”
(see: http://www.mafamily.org/issues/marriage-and-family/same-sex-marriage/)
Eric Metaxas, a recently featured speaker at The Gathering, is the scheduled speaker at an upcoming
Massachusetts Family Institute fundraising banquet in October 2014. (see: http://www.mafamily.org/event-items/banquet2014/)
2001 – 0
2002 – 700
2003 – 400
2004 – 100
2005 – 1,000
2006 – 0
2007 – 0
2008 – 0
2009 – 0
2010 – 2,000
2011 – 2,000
2012 – 1,500
2013 – 1,500
Mastering Life Ministries (EIN 62-1542382)
Headed by longtime “ex-gay” leader David Kyle Foster, Mastering Life Ministries (MLM) is currently producing (as its main organizational project) the “Pure Passion” video series – which features videos of ex-gay leaders, and alleged experts who purport to describe long-discredited “cures” for same-sex attraction.
Some of these “experts” are leading advocates of the paradigm which depicts same-sex attraction as caused by, linked to, or associated with demon spirits. Other Pure Passion “experts” present same-sex attraction as resulting from “brokenness” or “wounds” sustained in childhood. (see: http://vimeo.com/purepassion/videos/ )
[note: these two paradigms are not mutually exclusive.]
Some of David Kyle Foster’s newer videos are filmed at Mike Bickle’s International House of Prayer (IHOP – see IHOP entry in this encyclopedia.)
Foster’s ministry has produced lines of his ex-gay speaker videos that have been over-dubbed for speakers of Russian, Bulgarian, Japanese, Farsi, Spanish, French, and German.
MLM comes with high-level endorsements; its board of directors includes no less than C. Peter Wagner, one of the most important and influential leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation movement whose apostles and prophets have been in the forefront of anti-LGBT rights activism from the United States to Uganda, Burundi, Nigeria, and Kenya, to Russia.
Another board member of MLM is Ted Baehr, on the current board of the theocratic Coalition on Revival, whose members are pledge to give their lives, if necessary, to impose biblical law in all sectors of society. Baehr has participated and spoken at World Congress of Families events and is personal friend to Natalya Yakunina, wife of Vladimir Yakunin (a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin) who heads Russia’s vast and strategically critical rail system. Russian NGOs associated with the Yakunins have been in the forefront of Russia’s “family values” war on LGBT rights.
A third MLM board member of is British evangelist Peter Horrobin, one of the world’s leading experts, among Protestant charismatic Christians, in the practice of exorcism. A fourth MLM board member is J.I. Packer, who is widely regarded as one of the leading theologians in North American Protestant conservative evangelicalism.
2007 – 18,000
2012 – 45,000
2013 – 180,000
The Mayflower Institute’s Marshall Foster was an original Coalition on Revival signatory. Foster’s institute promotes a Christian nationalist version of American history.
2004 – 500
2006 – 1,200
Media Research Center (EIN 54-1429009)
Headed by current Council for National Policy board member L. Brent Bozell III, the Media Research Center in 2006 launched, as a sub-project, Robert H. Knight’s Culture and Media Institute.
Knight, who co-authored the anti-same sex marriage Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), has also endorsed Peter Hammond’s 2001 anti-gay book “The Pink Agenda”.
2001 – 103,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 5,000
2004 – 5,000
2005 – 16,000
2006 – 0
2007 – 5,200
2008 – 7,800
2009 – 7,300
2010 – 9,500
2011 – 7,900
2012 – 57,150
2013 – 1,950
Mercy Ministries of America (EIN 72-0973419)
Mercy Ministries is headed by Nancy Alcorn, who (along with her husband Randy Alcorn) moves in circles of apostles and prophets associated with the NAR movement.
A 2010 talk2action.org story ( http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/11/1/175127/415 ) features video footage of former Teen Challenge center pastor Nancy Alcorn, who runs the National Christian Foundation-funded Mercy Ministries, telling a church audience why her ministry relies on exorcism, rather than medication, to cure mental health problems allegedly caused by demons that attach themselves to their victims because of lust, pornography, and promiscuous sexual activity.
In the video Alcorn states, “Jesus did not say to medicate a demon, he said to cast them out.”
Alcorn’s ministry focuses on young women with addictions and behavioral problems. Mercy Ministries has come under heavy criticism for allegedly abusive practices ( see: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/02/21/dark-side-mercy-ministries/ ).
One alleged Mercy Ministries former client testifies, “I was judged right from the start because of my sexuality and they continually told me that was wrong and I shouldn’t have those thoughts. I was told that homosexuality was a demon that needed to be cast out of my life. I was told that it was the devil trying to control me and lie to me.” ( see: http://thetruthaboutmercy.wordpress.com/tag/nancy-alcorn/ )
2001 – 200
2002 to 2005 – 0
2006 – 35,000
2007 – 36,000
2008 – 18,750
2009 – 512,200
2010 – 81,074
2011 – 27,450
2012 – 17,750
2013 – 53,732
Michigan Family Forum (EIN 38-2906382)
2005 – 0
2006 – 17,300
2007 – 5,000
2008 – 34,000
2009 – 12,000
2010 – 23,500
2011 – 47,000
2012 – 42,700
2013 – 29,350
Minnesota Family Institute and Council (EIN 41-1439560)
2001 – 6,000
2002 – 3,000
2003 – 3,000
2004 – 4,250
2005 – 8,000
2006 – 5,021
2007 – 16,824
2008 – 11,700
2009 – 18,861
2010 – 1,700
2011 – 5,000
2012 – 100,893
Minneosta Teen Challenge (EIN 41-1517351)
Teen Challenge is a an international network of addiction recovery centers run by the Pentecostal denomination the Assemblies of God. Teen Challenge has officially endorsed exorcism as a therapy since 1996 (see main Teen Challenge entry)
2001 – 5,000
2002 – 10,000
2003 – 10,000
2004 – 10,500
2005 – 10,300
2006 – 37,500
2007 – 64,300
2008 – 64,150
2009 – 32,000
2010 – 48,712
2012 – 51,040
Mission America Coalition (EIN 23-7317473)
2009 – 600
National Organization For Marriage (EIN 20-7472471)
National Christian Foundation funding of NOM begins just as religious right efforts to prevent the legalization of same sex marriage were faltering in the United States. Meanwhile, NOM leaders such as Brian Brown has emerged as aggressive participants in the World Congress of Families that is credited with helping to inspire anti-LGBT and anti-reproductive rights legislation in Russia and Eastern Europe.
2007 to 2008 – 0
2009 – 100,000
2010 – 30,100
2011 – 77,200
2012 – 117,400
Total – 324,700
New Hope Charitable Foundation (DBA New Hope Ministries EIN 68-0335100)
The ex-gay New Hope Ministries is run by Frank Worthen, one of the original board members of Exodus International North America when it was founded in 1976. New Hope has acquired, as a co-leader, Anne Paulk – who was a co-star in the 1998 “Love Won Out” campaign that showcased ex-gay couples in full-page ads which ran in leading print media venues such as the New York Times.
Amidst the campaign, Anne and John Paulk were featured in a 1998 cover story in Newsweek – which in 2014 would run a de-facto apology for its glowing 1998 story on allegedly successful examples of reparative therapy (see: http://www.newsweek.com/ex-ex-gay-pride-249282)
Based on Twocare.org research, the “Love Won Out” campaign appears to have been planned by a working group that included Herbert Schlossberg and Don Schmierer, who co-led a presentation at The Gathering 1997 on how to combat “organized homosexuality”.
Frank Worthen and Anne Paulk are founding members of the Restored Hope Network that formed in 2012 amidst the move of Exodus International away from the claim that reparative therapy works.
Other founding members of the Restored Hope Network include Ron Smith of New Hope Ministries, Andy Comiskey of Desert Stream Ministries (NCF-funded, see entry), David Kyle Foster of Mastering Life Ministries (NCF-funded, see entrry), Dr. Robert Gagnon of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (NCF-funded), Stephen Black of First Stone Ministries, and Jason Thompson of Portland Fellowship (NCF-funded, see entry)
2012 – 3,600
2011 – 3,600
2010 – 3,600
2009 – 4,900
2008 – 4,000
2007 – 2,400
2006 – 2,400
2005 – 1,400
2004 – 0
2003 – 0
2002 – 0
2001 – 5,000
New Jersey Family Policy Council (EIN 22-3388998)
Another in the Focus on the Family-linked network of state family policy councils. As described by Equality Matters, a project of Media Matters for America, the New Jersey Family Policy Council claims “Homosexuality Is Unhealthy, Can Be Cured, Linked To Pedophilia” (see: http://equalitymatters.org/blog/201202090002)
2012 – 8,500
2011 – 7,500
2010 – 31,250
2009 – 30,000
2008 – 22,500
2007 – 35,000
2006 – 38,000
2005 – 27,500
2004 – 0
North Carolina Family Policy Council (EIN 56-1751596)
2002 – 2,500
2003 – 66,500
2004 – 293,700
2005 – 267,850
2006 – 281,500
2007 – 148,000
2008 – 277,750
2009 – 280,290
2010 – 158,000
2011 – 118,120
2012 – 230,615
Officer’s Christian Fellowship (EIN 38-1415401)
( see: http://www.ocfusa.org/static/uploads/bible-studies/genesis19.pdf )
2001 – 3,000
2002 – 7,500
2003 – 5,000
2004 – 16,000
2005 – 7,400
2006 – 14,100
2007 – 34,400
2008 – 293,300
2009 – 267,250
2010 – 273,700
2011 – 19,383
total – 941,033
Oral Roberts University (EIN 73-0739626)
In 2008, money (cycled through the NCF) from the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby, a national chain of arts and crafts supply stores, almost single-handedly rescued financially troubled Oral Roberts University from bankruptcy. The Greens are frequent attendees of The Gathering. Hobby Lobby is a co-plaintiff in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court (http://www.npr.org/2014/03/25/293956170/hobby-lobby-contraceptive-case-goes-before-supreme-court) which challenges provisions of the Affordable Care Act which require for-profit corporations to provide contraceptive services in employee health plans.
The official ORU student pledge includes, “ I will not engage in or attempt to engage in any illicit, unscriptural sexual acts, which include any homosexual activity and sexual intercourse with one who is not my spouse through traditional marriage of one man and one woman.” (see:http://www.oru.edu/admissions/undergraduate/pdfdocs/honor_code.pdf)
U.S. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is an alumnus of the defunct Oral Roberts University Law School, where she studied under law professor John Eidsmoe, who is listed as a current steering committee member of the theocratic Coalition on Revival. Eidsmoe has argued that LGBT members of the U.S. military should be subject to enforced reparative therapy (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/bachmanns-mentor-wants-bring-ex-gay-reparative-therapy-military)
Congresswoman Bachmann’s husband Marcus Bachmann runs an ex-gay reparative therapy clinic that was exposed in an 2011 undercover investigation by Truth Wins Out’s John Becker (see: http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2012/04/24224/)
2001 – $50,000
2002 – $5,000
2003 – (ORU MIssion) – $150
2004 – $25,000
2005 – 0
2006 – $11,226
2007 – $1,000
2008 – $47,440,500 (ORU missions – $1,700)
2009 – $7,572,475 (ORU missions – $2,000, ORU Evangelistic Association $100)
2010 – $6,735,669 (ORU Alumni Foundation – $25,000)
2011 – $28,496,200 (ORU Alumni Foundation – $250,000)
Total – $90,337,070
2012 – 14,036,350 (Oral Roberts Missions and Outreach – 73-0739626)
Pacific Justice Institute (EIN 91-1823641)
PJI offers pro-bono legal support for a range of religious right causes. Beyond the amounts listed below, it also receives substantial funding through the NCF-funded Alliance Defending Freedom.
In 2008, at a California rally against same sex marriage, Pacific Justice Institute head Brad Dacus compared stopping same-sex marriage to stopping Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ddOODw9Rg). Dacus subsequently apologized for the comparison.
In 2013, PJI issued a baseless press release with misinformation claiming that at a Colorado public school “a teenage boy was entering girls’ bathrooms and, according to some students, even making sexually harassing comments toward girls he was encountering. When the parents confronted school officials, they were stunned to be told the boy’s rights as a self-proclaimed transgender trumped their daughters’ privacy rights.” That press release earned PJI the “LGBT Misinformer Of The Year” award from the liberal activist think tank Media Matters For America (see: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/12/29/lgbt-misinformer-of-the-year-the-pacific-justic/197371)
Pacific Justice Institute head Brad Dacus has claimed (http://www.truthwinsout.org/blog/2012/05/29564/) that “there’s overwhelming evidence that reparative therapy actually works. …I know it’s at least over 80 percent, I believe it’s 80-85 percent success rate. These are people who leave the lifestyle, get married to people, have children, and enter heterosexual relationships.”
2002 – 15,923
2003 – 15,000
2004 – 1,000
2005 – 0
2006 – 0
2007 – 0
2008 – 5,300
2009 – 13,300
2010 – 15,480
2011 – 9,350
2012 – 14,650
Patrick Henry College (EIN 54-1919810)
2001 – 1,000
2002 – 1,000
2003 – 10,000
2004 – 20,000
2005 – 51,000
2006 – 65,000
2007 – 100,000
2008 – 154,750
2009 – 466,914
2011 – 109,300
2012 – 200,300
Pennsylvania Family Institute (EIN 23-2569197)
2009 – 5,000
2010 – 5,000
2011 – 2,620
2012 – 9,000
Philadelphia Biblical University (EIN 23-0973290)
One of the leading anti-gay agitators in Uganda, Martin Ssempa graduated from Philadelphia Biblical University in 1994. In 2006, Ssempa “received an honorary degree from PBU in 2006 for his ministry of compassion to HIV/AIDS victims in his native land”.
2005 – 50,000
2006 – 50,000
2007 – 50,000
2008 – 50,000
2009 – 50,000
2010 – 50,000
2011 – 50,000
2012 – 0
Portland Fellowship (EIN 93-0958183)
)
Until recently, the Portland Fellowship had been judged to be one of the more moderate of the ex-gay ministries. But amidst the move of Exodus International away from its previous endorsement of reparative therapy, the Portland Fellowship was one of the ex-gay ministries which broke away from Exodus to form the hard-line Restored Hope Network – of which Portland Fellowship head Jason Thompson was an original board member.
As described on the Portland Fellowship website,
“Since 1980, Portland Fellowship (called ‘Reconciliation’ from 1980-1988) has been helping men and women find a way out of homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ. With more than three decades of research and experience, Portland Fellowship has gained recognition as a leading authority on healing for the homosexual. Over the years we have counseled thousands of men and women and continue to provide on-going services to over 100 people monthly. Staff members have appeared throughout local and national media on such programs as The 700 Club, The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC’s World News Tonight, Good Morning America, MTV, The Sally Show, Geraldo, TBN, local and national radio programs.” (see: https://www.portlandfellowship.com/history.php)
2007 – 37,500
2008 – 3,500
2009 – 0
2010 – 0
2011 – 0
2012 – 6,000
Prison Fellowship Ministries (EIN numbers 62-0988294 and 51-0247185)
2001 – 631,200
2002 – 657,165
2003 – 506,103
2004 – 1,742,865
2005 – 1,194,145
2006 – 1,466,920
2007 – 1,453,751`
2008 – 1,587,081
2009 – 962,969
2010 – 1,078,278
2011 – 785,243
2012 – 703,132
Total – 12,768,852
Probe Ministries International (EIN 75-1416858)
Probe Ministries is an apologetics ministry that promotes
ex-gay apologetics (see: http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4465835/k.9241/Homosexuality.htm)
2002 – 5,000
2003 – 0
2004 – 7,700
2005 – 4,250
2006 – 500
2007 – 7,960
2008 – 5,920
2009 – 7,920
2010 – 8,600
2011 – 8,660
2012 – 11,760
Promise Keepers (EIN 84-1157834)
At its height in the 1990s the Promise Keepers, which led the vanguard of the Christian mens’ movement, was able to pack football stadiums with crowds of 50,000 or more. In the PK manifesto “Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper” evangelist Tony Evans urges PK men to,
“sit down with your wife and say something like this: ‘Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.’ Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back.” (see: http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/promkeep.html)
Promise Keepers founder Bill McCartney, who helped build the University of Colorado football team into a powerhouse on the college football circuit, has called homosexuality “an abomination of Almighty God” and called gay people “curable”.
McCartney, who served on the advisory board of Colorado for Family Values, a group which in the early 1990s attempted to pass a Colorado constitution ban on gay rights, has declared that homosexuals are “a group of people who don’t reproduce yet want to be compared to people who do.” (see: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/15/us/boulder-journal-coach-s-anti-gay-stand-ignites-rage.html )
The Promise Keepers official statement on homosexuality reads, “We believe that the Bible clearly teaches that homosexuality violates God’s creative design for a husband and a wife and that it is a sin (Matthew 19:4-5; Romans 1:24-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10).”
2001 – 48,750
2002 – 12,150
2003 – 6,100
2004 – 229,761
2005 – 46,650
2006 – 152,080
2007 – 118,532
2008 – 146,300
2009 – 38,100
2010 – 421,600
2011 – 1,023,800
2012 – 222,600
Total – 2,466,423
Ransomed Heart Ministries (EIN 84-1535770)
Former Focus on The Family leader and Ransomed Heart Ministries head John Eldredge is author of the bestselling book “Wild At Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul” (2001, Thomas Nelson. Eldredge’s books have helped establish the pop-psychology substrate beneath the “ex-gay” mythos. (see http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/6/29/94224/1951)
“Gender confusion”, according to Eldredge, results when young boys are not allowed to fully express their innate aggressive, even violent, urges. “My boys chew their graham crackers into the shape of handguns at the breakfast table” wrote Eldredge, in “Wild At Heart”. The problem, according to Eldredge, is an emasculating overemphasis on manners:
“‘Where are all the real men?’ is regular fare for talk shows and new books. You asked them be women, I want to say. The result is a gender confusion never experienced at such a wide level in the history of the world. How can a man know he is one when his highest aim is minding his manners.”
Eldredge also writes, “Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it. If we believe that man is made in the image of God, then we would do well to remember that “the Lord is a warrior (Exodus 15:3).”
Eldredge’s paean to manly aggression has been unexpectedly popular among the former head of the ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels La Familia Michoacana and its successor the Knights Templar, which established their fearsome reputation by committing mass decapitations.
As AP News noted on the occasion of the death of the founder of the two drug gangs, Nazario Moreno, ‘La Familia reportedly took its inspiration from an odd source: the book “Wild at Heart” ‘. Evidence has emerged that Nazario’s Knights Templar members ‘proved their loyalty through an act of cannibalism’.
Nazario had made Eldredge’s book required reading for La Familia Michoacana members and, according to a report from the Mexican Justice Department, had paid Mexican rural teachers to distribute “Wild At Heart” through the Michoacan countryside.
In his capacity as a leader at Focus on the Family (from 1988 to 2000) Eldredge helped shape the Christian right’s strategy on combating LGBT rights.
At a key 1994 conference held at the Glenn Eyrie headquarters of The Navigators (also funded by NCF), Eldredge, then serving as Focus On The Family’s Director of Seminars and Research, emphasized the need to wrap an underlying eliminationist agenda in layers of PR:
“To the extent we can control our public image, we must never appear to be bigoted or mean-spirited. And you noticed the qualification— to the extent we can control our public image. We must never APPEAR to be attempting to rob anyone of their rights, of their constitutional rights…
…I think the gay agenda, and I would not say this as frankly as I will now in other cultural contexts, I think the gay agenda has all the elements of that which is truly evil. It is deceptive at every turn…it is destroying the souls and the lives of those who embrace it, and it has a corrosive effect on the society which endorses it, either explicitly or even implicitly.”
2003 – 0
2004 – 1,000
2005 – 7,000
2006 – 90,500
2007 – 54,600
2008 – 57,485
2009 – 19,900
2010 – 26,750
2011 – 58,589
2012 – 114,610
Regeneration Ministries/Regeneration, Inc. (EIN 52-1244128)
Founder of ex-gay Regeneration Ministries was Alan Medinger, was the original executive director of Exodus International. Medinger died in 2010. Regeneration is billed as one of the oldest ex-gay ministries. Its website links to the Restored Hope Network, PFOX, NARTH, and Andy Comisley’s Desert Stream Ministries.
Regeneration’s website (see: http://regenerationministries.org/) features endorsements from Andy Comiskey, National Public Radio commentator Frederica Matthewes-Green, and the late Chuck Colson, head of Prison Fellowship Ministries and also a Gathering featured speaker, whose published endorsement states,
“Christians need to help people who are fighting homosexuality and sexual addiction in their lives . . . it’s about helping people trapped in a cycle of sexual dysfunction. People are hurting . . . and instead of helping them we are papering over their problems . . . contact Regeneration to see how your church can be equipped to help people break free from these cycles of sin and despair.”
Northern Virginia director for Regeneration Bob Ragan was the Exodus International board chairman in 2009 when his fellow Exodus board member Don Schmierer (also then working as a program director for Howard Ahmanson’s Fieldstead & Co.) attended the March 5-6 2009 Kampala, Uganda anti-LGBT rights “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals’ Agenda” credited with dramatically escalating anti-gay persecution in Uganda.
2001 – 2,500
2002 – 385 (Regeneration, Inc.)
2003 – 1,000
2004 – 0
2005 – 0
2006 – 2,950
2007 – 5,000
2008 – 4,248
2009 – 5,000
2010 – 3,640
2011 – 3,640
2012 – 2,640
2013 – 500 (“Regeneration Inc”)
Revival Prayer Institute, Inc. (EIN 58-2559217)
RPI is the Parent ministry of College of Prayer, which works with Ugandan Julius Oyet, professed co-author of the Ugandan Anti Homosexuality Bill.
Headed by Georgia pastor Fred Hartley Jr. III, the Revival Prayer Institute has financed travel, by American evangelicals from the Christian and Missionary Alliance, to Africa and elsewhere to establish satellite branches of the College of Prayer.
On its 2007 IRS 990 tax form, RPI lists two grants to “Bishop Julius Oyet”, totaling $11,350, as “scholarships” for “travel to US from Uganda”. Oyet’s address was listed as a Post Office Box in Lilburn, GA – where Revival Prayer Institute head Fred Hartley III’s Lilburn Alliance church is located.
The National Christian Foundation’s biggest grant to RPI, in 2009, corresponds with heavy College of Prayer organizing in Uganda.
From April 16-18, 2009, less than a week before the draft of Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill was introduced in Uganda’s Parliament, the Atlanta-based College of Prayer held two major events in Kampala, including a Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast that was broadcast on Ugandan national radio.
Later in the year, on October 14, 2009, Ugandan MP David Bahati tabled the bill. On both occasions, College of Prayer President Julius Oyet was present in Parliament.
The College of Prayer Uganda includes MPs David Bahati, Benson Obua-Ogwal, and Nsaba Buturo – all of whom have played a part in the promotion of the bill, which Oyet has himself enthusiastically promoted (including working with Martin Ssempa, in gathering several million signatures for a petition calling on Uganda’s parliament to pass the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill.
Two weeks after Bahati tabled the Anti Homosexuality Bill (activated it within the legislative process of Uganda’s parliament), from October 31 to November 1, 2009 College of Prayer International President Fred Hartley III led the first COP teaching module in Uganda, for COP Ugandan Parliament members including David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo, Uganda’s head of the Office Of Ethics and Integrity.
Describing his time in Uganda, Hartley stated, in a November 27, 2009 appearance on a colleague’s radio show,
“just two weeks ago I was with the members of parliament and had a marvelous time, these are dear brothers and sisters in Christ and they are in earnest about righteousness and the cause of Christ and the amazing thing is they are standing for righteousness in areas that where we have long ago sold ourselves down the river but they’re looking to us for spiritual mentoring to, that they – as kings and queens so to speak – can stand in kingdom alignment and operate according to Biblical principles in their spheres of influence. And it’s a great honor to serve them.”
Hartley also had glowing words for Julius Oyet:
“Uganda, it’s an amazing thing. Our leader, Bishop Julius Oyet, with Lifeline Ministries – I met him, a dear friend of Os Hillman, Marketplace Ministries, here in Atlanta – when we were introduced it was just a divine appointment and he invited us to come to Uganda. He has crusades with up to 50,000 people and I’ve seen three thousand saved in one night. He is friends with people in high places and the members of parliament came to the College of Prayer and enjoyed the time so much they invited me to speak at their parliamentary prayer breakfast this year. We were expecting maybe 25 members of parliament and 75 other city leaders. There were 248 who came, 50 members of parliament, and they invited me and the College of Prayer to come back twice a year for the next three years and mentor them.”
Oyet claims to have helped conceive the Ugandan Anti Homosexuality Bill and has forthrightly stated that the Bible mandates the death penalty for homosexuality.
Since 2011, Fred Hartley III’s College of Prayer has been raising money for Julius Oyet’s Uganda College of Prayer branch (see: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/1/11/172937/830 )
Fred Hartley III has held prominent leadership roles in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, including serving as the CMA’s prayer and worship leader at the Christian and Missionary Alliance 2011 General Council meeting.
2007 – 1,000
2008 – 0
2009 – 7,500
2010 – 0
2011 – 0
2012 – 5,100
2013 – 5,000
Rutherford Institute (EIN 523-1267484)
Rutherford Institute lawyers successfully argued, before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the (NCF-funded) Good News Club ministry – which specifically targets young children in its evangelism efforts and promotes religious supremacist and eliminationist ideology – the Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001) Supreme Court case. (see: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_supreme_court_recognizes_that_hostility_toward_religion_is_just_as_dang)
Since that 2001 Supreme Court decision, the Good News Club has established its bible clubs in over 3,500 American public schools, as chronicled by journalist Katherine Stewart in her book “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (2012, Public Affairs/Perseus Book Group) (see: http://www.thegoodnewsclub.com/book)
In her book, Stewart describes attending (see:
http://www.thegoodnewsclub.com/blog/2013/03/good_news_clubs_and_the_gay_agenda3) a national Good News Club conference which featured, as a keynote speaker, NCF-funded evangelist Charles W. Ware – who co-authored with Young Earth creationist Ken Ham the book “Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots” (2007, Master Books) in which Ware and Ham write,
“The homosexual agenda is extending its tentacles throughout the United States culture via media, entertainment, education, and the political system.” (p. 168)
Rutherford Institute head John W. Whitehead denies being a Christian Reconstructionist, and a 2007 interview with the nonprofit advocacy group Jews on First (see: http://www.jewsonfirst.org/08a/whitehead.html) seems to indicate that Whitehead has moved some ideological distance from Christian Reconstructionism since his the days of his close association with Christian Reconstructionism’s founder R. J. Rushdoony and Rushdoony’s most important financial patron Howard Ahmanson, also one of the Institute’s top financial backers.
The extensive foundational ties of the Rutherford Institute to Christian Reconstructionism are outlined by journalist and researcher Frederick Clarkson, in a chapter of “Eyes Right: Challenging the Rightwing Backlash” (1995, South End Press, edited by Chip Berlet) :
“The Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead was a student of both Schaeffer and Rushdoony, and credits them as the two major influences on his thought. … [I]t is not surprising that Whitehead goes to great lengths to deny that he is a Reconstructionist. Rushdoony, introducing Whitehead at a Reconstructionist conference, called him a man ‘chosen by God.’ Rushdoony then spoke of ‘our plans, through Rutherford, to fight the battle against statism and the freedom of Christ’s Kingdom.’” … “The Rutherford Institute was founded as a legal project of R. J. Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation, with Rushdoony and fellow Chalcedon director Howard Ahmanson on its original board of directors. Whitehead credits Rushdoony with providing the outline for his first book, which he researched in Rushdoony’s library. ” [p.69]
2001 – 1,000
2002 – 1,000
2003 – 1,000
2004 – 2,000
2005 – 1,500
2006 – 2,500
2007 – 4,500
2008 – 5,200
2009 – 5,800
2010 – 8,800
2011 – 11,200
2012 – 8,950
2013 – 8,200
Samaritan’s Purse (EIN 58-1437002)
In a March 27, 2014 statement, Samaritan’s Purse President and CEO Franklin Graham praised World Vision U.S.A. for receiving a decision to employ individuals in same-sex marriages:
“World Vision has reversed their decision to employ individuals who are in same-sex marriages, after an onslaught of negative reaction. In our country today, there is tremendous pressure on Christians, churches, and Christian organizations to lower our moral standards. God is clear in His Word, and His standards never change. I’m thankful that Christians across the country urged World Vision to reverse their decision, and prayed fervently that they would do so. Three cheers.”
(see:http://www.samaritanspurse.org/article/franklin-graham-statement/ )
2001 – 57,560
2002 – 141,948
2003 – 210,325
2004 – 582,900
2005 – 937,818
2006 – 994,520
2007 – 853,284
2008 – 2,097,372
2009 – 1,676,090
2010 – 2,195,647
2011 – 1,231,921
2012 – 0
2013 – 2,410,707
South Tampa Fellowship Church (no EIN)
The South Tampa Fellowship Church presents a textbook quality case study in how the ex-gay industry has gone underground. This church runs a local “Celebrate Recovery” program – a national addiction recovery program launched from The Saddleback Church of frequent speaker The Gathering speaker Rick Warren – who has been noted for his encouragement of anti-LGBT animosity in Africa and, specifically, Uganda.
The South Tampa Fellowship Church main website does not specify that its “Celebrate Recovery” program can cure same-sex attraction.That program maintains its own website, distinct from the church’s website, and a search for the word “homosexual” on the Celebrate Recovery South Tampa Fellowship Church website produces no results at all.
But a search on the same website for the term “same-sex” leads to this:
“After two years of being a part of this support group, my struggles with same-sex attraction subsided. I continued, however, to struggle with denial and a growing temptation to drink” (see: http://www.crtampa.com/2013/celebrate-recovery-connection-july-312013/ )
2008 – 3,000
2009 – 5,200
2010 – 49,800
2011 – 334,825
2012 – 885,955
2013 – 177,877 (“South Tampa Fellowship”)
Summit Ministries was until 2011 headed by David Noebel – whose long participation in the American far right has included teaching at a school associated with Billy James Hargis’ Christian Crusade, running the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (founded by Fred C. Schwarz), membership in the John Birch Society and the Council For National Policy and – through Summit Ministries – training youth in the “biblical worldview”, a Summit curriculum firmly rooted in Christian Reconstructionist doctrine.
Noebel’s anti-gay writing includes his 1977 book The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination (dedicated to Anita Bryant) which characterized homosexuality as “a kind of national death wish” that sought to “change the natural order created by God himself” and the 1996 book AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (co-authored with Wayne C. Lutton and Paul Cameron).
In a 2011 op-ed, Dr. David Noebel (who stepped down from heading Summit Ministries that year) railed against “Obama and his radical homosexual mafia plan to sodomize the world and make such perversion seem as wholesome as apple pie and vanilla ice cream.” (see: http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=7843)
One of the foremost intellectuals of the dominionist Protestant right, Noebel has helped shape the political outlook of entire generations of American evangelicals through such tropes as his claim, as outlined in his 1965 pamphlet “Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles”, that the Beatles were part of a Soviet plot to brainwash American through rock music.
Noebel’s most notable contribution, as expressed in his 1991 book Understanding the Times: The Religious Worldviews of our Day and the Search for Truth (1996, Harvest House, republished in 2006) may be his idea that secular humanism has replaced communism as the leading threat to America and Christianity.
One close colleague of David Noebel has been Christian Reconstructionist Peter Hammond – who might be characterized as “South Africa’s Scott Lively”. Hammond is an unabashed Christian Reconstructionist and co-author of the stridently anti-gay 2001 book The Pink Agenda – Sexual Revolution in South Africa and the Ruin of the Family (see encyclopedia entries for Hammond’s Frontline Fellowship and In Touch Mission International.)
Endorsed by Focus on the Family founder and longtime head James Dobson, Summit is one of the notable points of intersection between the mainstream, populist Christian right, as represented by Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and the farther reaches of the hard evangelical right.
2001 – 14,000
2002 – 6,900
2003 – 10,500
2004 – 2,700
2005 – 16,000
2006 – 46,350
2007 – 58,850
2008 – 53,100
2009 – 144,500
2010 – 147,300
2011 – 146,100
2012 – 392,100
2013 – 329,100
Total – 1,317,500
Teen Challenge (see section on Assemblies of God. figures include NCF funding for numerous Teen Challenge centers with different IRS EIN numbers)
This U.S. and international chain of Assemblies of God addiction recovery centers uses non-medical, unscientific methods, including exorcism, for treatment of addiction and attempts to change sexual orientation.
2001 – 20,000
2002 – 18,600
2003 – 62,113
2004 – 62,000
2005 – 46,825
2006 – 231,000
2007 – 113,200
2008 – 135,168
2009 – 370,090
2010 – 164,630
2011 – 149,998
2012 – 106,250
total – 1,464,874
Teen Mania Ministries (EIN 73-1284606)
In his 2005 book “Battle Cry For A Generation”, Teen Mania head Ron Luce (who has personally appeared at The Gathering) noted a decline, among the post-WW2 Baby Boomer generation, in belief in the infallibility of scripture and then cited, on page 4, the alleged consequences,
“Morally corrupt films and television… An increasingly perverted music industry… The pornographic invasion of the Internet… Civil initiatives promoting gay marriage…. Battles to remove the Ten Commandments from public buildings, and fights to take “under God” out of our Pledge of Allegiance”.
In a section, on pages 49-50, titled “A morally bankrupt climate has arisen”, Luce bemoans,
“You walk past the Victoria’s Secret and glance into the storefront window: Your eyes fall upon massive posters of half-naked women…
[…]
You stroll into Abercrombie and Fitch to pick up a catalog: You end upo paging through gay and lesbian pictures (set in strip clubs and shower rooms) that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago…
[…]
…Transgendered persons are a non-issue, Gay Pride is celebrated, and some [Abercrombie and Fitch] commercials even seem to sell the idea of being ‘gay’ more than a product.”
2001 – 500
2002 – 1,647
2003 – 500
2005 – 55,800
2006 – 22,200
2007 – 21,000
2008 – 170,430
2009 – 328,918
2010 – 81,623
2011 – 6,700
2012 – 84,628
2013 – 109,250
Trinity Academy (EIN 48-1137874)
“A Christian school in Kansas is at the centre of mounting controversy after it emerged that it reserved the right to expel students if any of their family members were gay or transgender.
A so-called Statement of Understanding sent to parents who wish to send their children to the private school located in Wichita, requires them to agree that a student who attends can he asked to leave if their home life promotes anything “counter to the school’s understanding of a biblical lifestyle”. All pupils and parents are required to sign the document.” (source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christian-school-in-kansas-threatens-to-expel-students-if-they-have-a-gay-family-member-a7040371.html )
2003 – 75,000 ( “Trinity Academy”, no EIN given )
2003 – 51,115 ( “Trinity Academy”, no EIN given )
2004 – 53,500 ( “Trinity Academy”, no EIN given )
2005 – 136,600 ( “Trinity Academy”, no EIN given )
2006 – 601,138 ( “Trinity Academy”, no EIN given )
2007 – 238,700 ( “Trinity Academy”, no EIN given )
2008 – 84,820
2009 – 9,500
2010 – 37,299
2011 – 32,300
2012 – 313,651
2013 – 613,815
The Becket Fund For Religious Liberty (EIN 52-1858532)
The Becket Fund For Religious Liberty, which bills itself as the “premier religious liberty law firm in the United States” ( http://www.hobbylobbycase.com/about-the-becket-fund/ ) represented the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby craft supplies store chain, in the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case that was decided in favor of the Greens and Hobby Lobby by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2012, when the Becket Fund began to represent the Greens in the case, National Christian Foundation grant money to Becket suddenly increased over ninefold, from $10,000 in 2011 to $94,340 in 2012. Then, in 2013, NCF funding of Becket doubled, to $185,000.
This substantial increase in NCF funding to Becket presents strong evidence for the central role played by both NCF and the Alliance Defending Freedom (NCF’s heaviest funded legal organization, which received $11,341,187 from NCF in 2013) in the Hobby Lobby case and the dozens of similar cases across American that ADF argued and supported in the lead-up to the Hobby Lobby decision including the Conestoga Woods v. Sebelius case that was folded into the Hobby Lobby case.
As described in a July 14, 2014 Twocare.org report ( http://www.twocare.org/gathering-greens-etc/ ), during the September 12-15, 2013 at the annual meeting of The Gathering, held in the Alliance Defending Freedom’s home base of Scottsdale, AZ, three generations of the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, were present for the event. Giving a special un-recorded presentation was Alan Sears, Alliance Defending Freedom’s president.
The Becket Fund is also an organizational partner of the American Religious Freedom Program (ARFP), a sub-project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (see E&PPC entry). ARFP has played a major role in the wave of “religious freedom” bills that began to flood into state legislatures in early 2014.
ARFP advised the Kansas legislature on Kansas House Bill 2453 that would not only have allowed private individuals and religious entities to discriminate against same-sex couples but also extended that ‘right to discriminate’ to government employees. (see: http://www.kansas.com/2014/02/13/3287827/susan-wagle-bill-that-allows-service.html)
William P. Mumma, President of the Becket Fund, serves on the ARFP advisory board (see: http://www.religiousfreedom.org/about_us/page/board-of-advisors)
2001 – 25,000
2002 – 65,000
2003 – 5,000
2004 – 0
2005 – 0
2006 – 45,000
2007 – 15,000
2008 – 35,000
2009 – 10,000
2010 – 5,000
2011 – 10,000
2012 – 94,340
2013 – 185,000
TheCall head and co-founder Lou Engle has claimed that homosexuality can be caused by demon possession and be cured by exorcism of those demon spirits.
In 2008, the year of heaviest NCF funding for TheCall, Engle’s organization played a substantial role in lobbying for the passage of California’s anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8. TheCall held a major stadium rally prior to the 2008 election, but also maintained eight California field offices for turning out the pro-Proposition 8 evangelical church vote.
In May 2010 TheCall held a rally in Kampala, Uganda attended by top leaders in Uganda’s anti-LGBT crusade including Julius Oyet, David Bahati, and Nsaba Buturo.
2008 – 166,366
2009 – 600
2010 – 300
2011 – 0
2012 – 1,300
The Conservative Caucus (EIN 51-0206842)
Until his death, the Conservative Caucus was headed by Howard Phillips, founder of the Christian Reconstructionism-linked Constitution Party (originally the U.S. Taxpayers Party). Phillips referred to R.J. Rushdoony as his spiritual mentor.
2001 – 10,000
2002 – 5,000
2003 -15,000 (Conservative Caucus Research, a separate Howard Phillips-run 501(c)(3))
2004 – 6,000 (Conservative Caucus Research)
2005 – 20,000 (Conservative Caucus Research)
2006 – 22,500 (Conservative Caucus Research)
2007 – 20,000 (Conservative Caucus Research)
2008 – 30,000
2009 – 15,000
2010 – 25,000
2011 – 10,000
2012 – 10,000
Total – 188,500
The Family Foundation of Kentucky (EIN 61-1167112)
As USA Today reported in a an August 3, 2014 story,
“The broadest attack yet on states’ gay marriage bans will be Wednesday in a packed courtroom in downtown Cincinnati, where lawyers challenging four states’ prohibitions will stand shoulder to shoulder in hopes of convincing a three-judge panel that the bans are unconstitutional.”
Addressing a rally against same-sex marriage, according to USA Today was Family Foundation of Kentucky executive director Kent Ostrander, who – in a statement that likened the legalization of same-sex marriage to ‘martial law’ – told his audience,
“Across the nation, it is tantamount to martial law on state marriage policies when relatively few federal judges are overturning marriage amendments that millions of people have voted upon and decided”
2001 – 4,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 11,200
2004 – 22,000
2005 – 44,750
2006 – 65,050
2007 – 58,800
2008 – 88,350
2009 – 110,180
2010 – 82,788
2011 – 128,650
2012 – 247,299
The Family Foundation of Virginia (EIN 52-1425355)
2008 – 1,300
2009 – 6,800
2010 – 7,925
2011 – 2,860
2012 – 19,500
The First Academy (of Central Florida) (EIN 59-0696287)
The First Academy is run by the Orlando First Baptist Church – a fact which is only mentioned on the First Baptist Church website inside several biographies of church leaders who run the First Academy (see: http://www.firstorlando.com/about/meet_our_leadership/pastors_and_ministry_leaders_bios/articletype/articleview/articleid/13). The First Baptist Church runs a branch of the addiction recovery program “Celebrate Recovery” (launched by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church) that promotes a version of reparative therapy.
The student application for First Academy contains a series of moral codes for applicants to agree to including, “I will avoid cursing, sexual immorality (including professing to be a homosexual/bisexual or practicing homosexual/
bisexual behaviors—Lev. 20:13, Rom. 1:27), witchcraft, dissension, and cheating.” (see: http://www.thefirstacademy.org/files/Admissions%20Images/StudentApplication.pdf)
Various iterations of the First Academy student handbook contain similar provisions (see: http://www.thefirstacademy.org/files/tfa_community/Parent-Student_Handbook_2014-2015.pdf).
2006 – 500,000
2007 – 127,000
2008 – 130,000
2009 – 16,811
2010 – 32,100
2011 – 7,000
2012 – 1,123,200
The Heritage Foundation (EIN 23-7327730)
The Heritage Foundation maintains an extensive website subsection devoted to arguments against LGBT rights, especially same sex marriage (see: http://www.heritage.org/issues/family-and-marriage/protecting-the-institution-of-marriage)
Heritage fellow Ryan T. Anderson has come to occupy an increasingly prominent role among the opposition to marriage equality (see: http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/05/21/2040851/the-arguments-against-marriage-equality-apparently-have-nothing-to-do-with-gay-people/)
In April 2014 Anderson made the claim that same-sex marriage is “an elite luxury good bought for on the backs of the poor.” (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/heritage-foundations-ryan-anderson-calls-gay-marriage-elite-luxury-good-bought-backs-poor)
2001 – 10,000
2002 – 1,000
2003 – 11,000
2004 – 16,400
2005 – 215,200
2006 – 15,700
2008 – 1,028,150
2010 – 26,875
2011 – 91,195
2012 – 1,017,175
Total – 2,432,695
The Howard Center (EIN 54-1788267)
The main initiative of the Howard Center has been the World Congress of Families, a global initiative which has brought together “family values”-oriented social conservatives, both secular and religious, from different religious traditions, and across Christian denominational divides.
The World Congress of Families has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT Hate group. WCF conference speakers have included Scott Lively, Don Schmierer, and Judith Reisman.
The WCF has played a significant role in encouraging anti-LGBT legislation in Russia and Eastern Europe.
2002 – 15,000
2003 – 2,250
The Institute On Religion and Democracy (EIN 52-1265221)
The IRD, which historically received heavy funding from Howard Ahmanson’s Fieldstead & Co., has aggressively worked to provoke schisms in mainline Protestant denominations over wedge issues such as the ordination of gay clergy, same sex marriage, and abortion.
2002 – 35,000
2004 – 200
2007 – 2,000
The Liberty Institute (EIN 75-1403169)
As reported by the Des Moines Register in a July 23, 2104 story,
“An Iowa newspaper editor fired after publishing his views on homosexuals is claiming he was the victim of religious discrimination by his former employer.
Bob Eschliman, former editor of the Newton Daily News, filed a complaint this week with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office in Milwaukee arguing that he was terminated May 5 because of his religious beliefs. If the dispute isn’t resolved to Eschliman’s satisfaction, he could sue in federal court to seek financial damages.
In late April, Eschliman, 41, a member of Christian Reformed Church of Newton, wrote a personal blog post criticizing the ‘Queen James Bible,’ a website that rewrites the Christian Bible to be friendlier to gays. Eschliman accused ‘the LGBTQXYZ crowd and the Gaystapo’ of trying ‘to make their sinful nature right with God.’ “
Representing Eschliman in the case is the The Liberty Institute.
Head of The Liberty Institute Kelly Shackleford, Esq. has a history of hyperbolic claims, such as concerning the U.S. Air Force’s firing of “Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Monk, who claims he was relieved of duty for disagreeing with a lesbian commander over the issue of gay marriage” (as reported by Right Wing Watch). In a 2012 appearance on the Glenn Beck Show, together with Wallbuilders head David Barton, Shackleford claimed that if members of the U.S. military are not free to openly express their religious views “we’ll end up with Hitler’s SS”.
Beyond the purview of LGBT rights, Shackleford has depicted health care reform as an attack on religious freedom that indicates “a government that is totalitarian”.
2008 – 0
2009 – 250
2010 – 11,605
2011 – 22,500
2012 – 117,068
The Navigators (EIN 84-6007896)
The Navigators is among an elite core of evangelism and “discipleship”-focused ministries closely associated with The Fellowship – which hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
In 1994 the Glenn Eyrie castle headquarters of The Navigators hosted a secret anti-LGBT rights conference which included representatives from Focus on The Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, the Christian Coalition, Concerned Women of America, and the Christian Reconstructionism-linked U.S. Taxpayers Party.
Also attending were Dr. Judith Reisman, who promotes and endorses Scott Lively’s book “The Pink Swastika”, Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, and Peter LaBarbera, now head of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality, who in 2014 formed a new anti-gay group with Lively (see: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2214073680.html)
At the Glenn Eyrie conference, speakers outlined an evolving, multilayer strategy to combat LGBT rights. Elements of this strategy would later resurface at The Gathering in 1997, when Fieldstead & Co. program director (and The Navigators member) Don Schmierer and former Fieldstead & Co. program director Herb Schlossberg would present, to The Gathering’s deep-pocketed investors, a strategic plan for fighting “organized homosexuality”.
Writing for Freedom Writer, journalist Mike Shaver described (see: http://www.publiceye.org/ifas/fw/9408/gleneyrie.html) the presentation of Focus on the Family leader John Eldredge – who outlined a “stealth” strategy in which national-level organizations such as Focus on The Family would operate through state and local proxy groups:
“John Eldridge, the first speaker, brought ‘greetings and warm regards from Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family.’ ‘Dr. Dobson,’ Eldridge told the group, ‘and those of us at Focus on the Family in the public policy fight, see this issue as one of the key issues of our time. So much hinges on what happens with the full agenda of the militant gay movement.’
Eldridge outlined an agenda for the religious right to follow in its assault on gay rights. The agenda must:
– Change public perception about gay rights
– Use ideas and language that appeal to the public
– Create the impression that the anti-gay movement is a grass-roots movement
– Use lay people to keep the anti-gay movement going
– Develop a long-term project to convince evangelical pastors to support the anti-gay movement.We need to ‘tell America WHY heterosexuality is best for individuals and society.’ ‘That case,’ he said, ‘needs to be made strongly, and supported by what Americans consider ‘gospel truth,’ — that is empirical science. That is the high priest of our culture.’
‘Shrewdly,’ Eldridge continued, ‘we need to show why society needs to make certain demands on people sexually.’ He said that public perception has to be changed. ‘We must never appear to be attempting to rob anyone of their rights — their constitutional rights. We must never appear to be mean-spirited or bigoted. We must be shrewd to get consensus for our position by appealing to shared values and concern, and issues of fairness and justice.’
Eldridge stressed that the anti-gay movement must be ‘perceived as a genuine grass roots uprising.’ He said that ‘home rule’ is important, because a top-down approach doesn’t work. If a community perceives that an outside, national group is behind local activism, the community will rebel against it. So, the perception of grass-roots organizing, or home rule, is critical. He explained that this is why Focus on the Family is staying in the background. His national group, he noted, is like an 800-pound giant compared to Colorado for Family Values, which has a half dozen people in a one-room office….
‘I would not say this in other cultural contexts,’ Eldridge explained, ‘but the gay agenda has all the elements of that which is truly evil. It is deceptive at every turn. It is destroying the souls and lives of those who embrace it.’ “
2001 – 200,340
2002 – 94,810
2003 – 180,000
2004 – 74,100
2005 – 392,170
2006 – 540,305
2007 – 781,054
2008 – 924,456
2009 – 974,130
2010 – 1,064,925
2011 – 806,879
2012 -1,800,186
Total – 7,833,355
Traditional Values Coalition (EIN 33-0625188)
Describes People For The American Way (see: https://www.au.org/resources/religious-right/traditional-values-coalition),
“For many years, Sheldon carved out a niche for TVC by engaging in unrelenting gay bashing. (TVC’s Web site includes a section titled “Causes and Cures Of Homosexuality And Gender Identity Disorders.”) In 1995, he even persuaded conservative members of the House of Representatives to hold hearings on the alleged “gay infiltration” of public schools. But in recent years, Sheldon has diversified, ramping up his assaults on church-state separation, public education and the federal judiciary.”
In a December 13, 2005 op-ed titled “The War on Christianity” posted on the TVC website, Rev. Sheldon declared,
“A dangerous Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic coalition has formed – and we’d better be willing to fight it with everything in our power. These people are playing for keeps. Their hero, Mao Tse Tung, is estimated to have murdered upwards of 60 million people during his reign of terror in China. Do we think we can escape such persecution if we refuse to fight for what is right?”
2001 – 13,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 0
2004 – 1,200
2005 – 0
2006 – 0
2007 – 0
2008 – 200
2009 – 1,500
2010 – 1,900
2011 – 700
2012 – 1,600
Truro Anglican Church (Truro Church) (no EIN)
The Truro Anglican Church surfaced briefly in media coverage of Ugandan MP David Bahati’s sponsorship of Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill, in December 2010 when Bahati traveled to the United States, and was hosted by a Truro Church member, former Director in the Office of Non-Public Education at U.S. Department of Education Jack Klenk.
While Bahati’s religious affiliation has been characterized as traditional Anglican, the Truro Church is anything but. Nominally Anglican, the Truro Church has in fact been a vector for the spread of the radical Spiritual Mapping/Spiritual Warfare paradigm created by New Apostolic Reformation leaders such as C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Ed Silvoso, and others (see: http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/29340 “Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Missionary Paradigm, 1989-2005”).
Most of the high-level Ugandan Christian leaders in the vanguard of Uganda’s anti-LGBT rights crusade have ties to the NAR (Henry Luke Orombi) or have served directly in its America-based apostolic and prophetic networks (Julius Oyet, Alex Mitala, Joshua Lwere, John Mulinde).
The Truro Church, both dominionist and heavily charismatic, has boasted some of the most prestigious members of Washington’s hard right political elite. Wrote journalist David Corn, for The Nation magazine, in 1991,
“On a recent Friday night, several hundred suburbanites gathered in Fairfax, Virginia, to sing battle songs. “We are an army of salvation,” they chorused. “Lead us into battle,” they roared. The congregation vowed in song that they would fight until every nation is on its knees before Jesus Christ. The site of this religious pep rally–the Truro Church–is where Judge Clarence Thomas worships.
Thomas, once a practicing Catholic, has been attending Truro, a charismatic Episcopal church, for about a year…
…The Friday evening ceremony was a jubilant occasion. The faithful stood much of the time with arms lifted high, palms facing skyward, singing tributes to Jesus Christ. Some seemed transfixed; some spoke in tongues…
…The Rev. John Howe, until 1989 the rector at Truro, was a key endorser of the 1988 presidential campaign of [Pat] Robertson, who once called for a theocracy with “judges speaking in tongues on the bench.”
Truro’s services and tapes present a clear message: True Christians engage daily in actual, not metaphorical, hand to hand combat with Satan. In a taped lecture series on “Spiritual Warfare,” Tom Tarrants reveals that the Devil and evil spirits “carry on a relentless battle behind the scenes” to affect “world events.”… Lecturer Beth Whitnah averts that Satan is behind the “pollution of the whole entertainment industry.”
Charismatics are instructed to heed orders. On one tape, the Rev. Brian Cox, associate rector of a sister church, the Church of the Apostles, exhorts Truro’s congregants to obey unquestioningly God’s commands. “When the Father tells you to do something,” Cox says, “you don’t argue with Him…You don’t need to know why.” During a 1987 sermon at his church, according to two people who were there, Cox preached that the goal of the charismatics is to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, adding, “The Kingdom of God is not a Democracy.” After that sermon, he embraced a member of his flock, Oliver North…
Who knows why Thomas attends services at Truro. Several Episcopal churches are closer to his home.” (see: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-11085908.html)
Stephen F. Noll, a longtime associate pastor at the Truro Church (formerly the Truro Episcopal Church before Truro broke away form the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. [ECUSA]), is in agreement with C. Peter Wagner on the need for believers to engage in Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping.
In his book “Angels of Light, Powers of Darkness: Thinking Biblically About Satan, Angels & Principalities” (Intervarsity Press, 1998), Stephen F. Noll writes, on page 12, “Pentecostal teaching gained a considerable boost among mainstream evangelicals when C. Peter Wagner of the U.S. Center For World Missions began to speak of a battle with ‘territorial spirits’ as a necessary part of Christian mission.” Noll concurs with Wagner: “hedging out the demons is a particular responsibility of the church in its mission strategy and its inner discipline.” (pp. 150)
Within the Spiritual Warfare/Spiritual Mapping paradigm,demon powers oppress humanity and all creation, and individual demon, “territorial spirits”, hold sway over particular cities, towns, and geographic territories. But demons can also can infest humans, and territorial spirits can also express themselves through individual human beings, sometimes referred to as “strongmen”.
In this paradigm, Homosexuality is generally understood as, variously, caused by or association with demon possession or “demonization”; homosexual acts ‘open the door’ to those conditions.
In an indication of how far the Truro Anglican Church has drifted towards New Apostolic Reformation movement, in January 2014 the church held a “Sozo Prayer Training Seminar”. Described the church website (see: http://truroanglican.com/events/sozo-prayer-seminar/),
“Sozo is an exciting and growing prayer ministry that was birthed out of Bethel Church in Redding, California, helping people to receive salvation, healing and deliverance.
This seminar focuses on teaching useful tools for setting people free: the healing of past wounds in order to break strongholds; replacing lies with truth; and closing “doors” to spiritual opposition.”
The course description linked directly to the bethelsozo.com website of NAR leader Bill Johnson’s NCF-funded Bethel Church (see Bethel Church section). Johnson enthusiastically endorses the Freedom Resource ministry of NCF-funded Andy Reese, whose book Freedom Tools explicitly describes homosexuality as linked to demon possession. Reese claims to have conducted mass trainings of Ugandan pastors, under the supervision of NAR leader Alex Mitala (Mitala has been a listed apostle in the U.S.-based International Coalition of Apostles, now called the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders.)
Another Truro Church link to Uganda is through its support of the Uganda Christian University, through its organization Uganda Christian University Partners (UCUP), which receives NCF funding. Jack Klenk serves on the UCUP board of directors.
Uganda Christian University has been one of the vectors through which New Apostolic Reformation ideology has infiltrated the Ugandan Anglican Church. Stephen F. Noll, former associate pastor at the Truro Church, was the first president of Uganda Christian University, Uganda’s first private chartered university, founded by the Ugandan Anglican Church in 1997.
Henry Orombi, former Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, served as Chancellor of Uganda Christian University from 2004-1012. In 2008, Orombi spearheaded the launch of Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Living” program in Uganda (see: http://www.christianpost.com/news/rick-warren-launches-purpose-driven-plan-in-uganda-31752/ and http://www.rickwarrennews.com/080329_uganda.htm).
During his March 2008 visit to Uganda to promote his Purpose Driven program in Uganda, Warren told Orombi and other Ugandan religious leaders that “Homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right”. Warren also met with First Lady Janet Museveni and spoke at Uganda Christian University.
2009 – 3,300
2010 – 3,600
2011 – 8,600
2012 – 9,900
TruthXchange (EIN 75-3099544)
Formed in 2003 under the name “Christian Witness To a Pagan Planet”, TruthXchange claims homosexuality and yoga advance an anti-biblical pagan agenda and promotes the sort of Christian presuppositionalist “worldview” precepts also advanced by Summit Ministries (and which closely resemble Christian Reconstructionist presuppositionalism.)
TruthXchange claims that all belief systems cleave into two grand patterns, “one-ist” and “two-ist” – with “two-ist” systems representing the “correct” fundamentalist Christian viewpoint and “one-ist” belief systems representing “pagan” belief systems.
Director of TruthXChange Dr. Peter Jones is author of “Letter To a Homosexual Friend”, in which he writes (see: http://truthxchange.com/books/letter-to-a-homosexual-friend/),
“First of all thank you for your confidence. Telling me that you are a homosexual took courage, especially because you know I’m a Christian. You might have thought I would be afraid of you, look down on you, judge you, or consider you unworthy of friendship. Nothing could be further from the truth.
You are just like me–a fellow human being… […]
In seeking to help you understand the theological and spiritual implications of your homosexual life style, I must square with you. Your chosen sexuality is deeply tied to a pagan religious agenda that denies the Creator and sees no need for salvation…”
Jones also inveighs against the practice of yoga, writing,
“The god of gay marriage and yoga is not the transcendent personal Creator of Scripture, but the divine self within, who creates its own reality and the laws to go with it. So, losing the God of Scripture is not merely a religious event. It means we lose the objective source of law.” (see: http://truthxchange.com/articles/2013/07/02/laying-down-the-law-on-yoga-mats-and-marriage/)
Jeff Ventrella, head of Blackstone Legal Fellowship for the Alliance Defense Fund, has appeared on the TruthXChange radio broadcast (see: http://truthxchange.com/media/2012/02/14/jeffery-ventrella-esquire-two-ism-and-the-law/)
E. Calvin Beisner, who heads the climate change denialist religious coalition called the Cornwall Alliance (see: http://www.cornwallalliance.org/) has also appeared on the TruthXchange radio broadcast (http://truthxchange.com/media/2012/02/16/dr-cal-beisner-two-ism-and-politics/)
Dr Peter Jones is one of the featured speakers on the Cornwall Alliance’s “Resiting the Green Dragon” video series, which paints efforrts to curb man-made climate change as in reality a conspiracy to create a satanic one-world government. (see: http://www.americanpastorsnetwork.net/resource/resist-the-green-dragon/)
Jones’ two presentations for the “Resisting the Green Dragon” series are titled “Rescuing People from the Cult of the Green Dragon” and “Go Therefore and Make Disciples: Advancing the Gospel in a World Permeated by Environmentalism“.
2009 – 7,500
2010 – 41,000
2011 – 8,500
2012 – 25,500
(EIN 65-496702) Truth In Action is the working name of Coral Ridge Ministries Media, Inc.
As chronicled by RightWingWatch, in 2012, the same year that Truth In Action was funded by the National Christian Foundation, the ministry showcased activists who likened homosexuality to slavery and called for its criminalization.
(see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/truth-in-action-homosexuality-slavery-threat-freedom and http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/truth-in-action-moral-chaos-liberalism-gay-rights).
2012 – 14,200
Vision America, Inc. (EIN 76-0572974)
Dominionist Vision America pastor Rick Scarborough has called upon Christians to get involved in politics and “take back” America for Christ (see: http://vimeo.com/12082232)
In an early 2013 sermon, Scarborough declared, “Twenty years ago, who called a sodomite ‘gay’? We had laws in Texas ’til 2002 that we sent them to prison! That was based on the Bible, by the way.” During the sermon he also predicted, “It won’t be long until we’ll be calling pedophiles ‘happy people.’” (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/21/rick-scarborough-gay-use-sodomites-_n_2733482.html)
In a late 2013 radio appearance with (NCF funded) anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera, Scarborough discussed the possibility of filing a “class action lawsuit” against homosexuality on the grounds that “homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer.” (see: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scarborough-we-need-class-action-lawsuit-against-homosexuality)
2005 – 0
2006 – 20,000
2007 – 0
2008 – 0
2009 – 5,250
2010 – 6,000
2011 – 5,000
2012 – 20,000
Total – 56,250
Vision Forum Ministries (EIN 74-2984736)
Until the unexpected demise of Vision Forum Ministries in the wake of a sex scandal that embroiled its head Doug Phillips, Vision Forum was one of the leading Christian Reconstructionist organizations in America.
In a 2009 interview with Think magazine (“Current Issues From A Distinctly Christian View”) published in the April 2009 issue of Think, Phillips stated,
“The homosexual agenda has targeted the family for destruction. The mission is to redefine the family, to replace the Biblical meaning of manhood, and to remove all vestiges of Biblical patriarchy from society.
The Biblical family is predicated on God’s created order and His dominion mandate for men and women to be fruitful and multiply and to steward the earth. It presupposes complementary but distinct roles for men and women. Husbands are to provide loving, sacrificial leadership for the family. Wives are to follow their husbands in the Lord. Children are to honor their parents. All of this is anathema to the homosexual movement…
[…]
The truth is this: Homosexuality brings judgment on the land. It kills (as we have been reminded by the AIDS crisis). It is not a victimless ‘personal decision’ but a wrongful act with far-reaching implications for the nation. It is a violent, family-destroying sin, which, if tolerated, will devour a generation of young men and women.”
In the interview, Doug Phillips also called for “a return to Biblical patriarchy—the loving and sacrificial leadership of families by fathers, men who lead their families with godliness and vision.” Doug Phillips was perhaps the most prominent leader in the “Quiverfull” movement (see: http://quiverfull.wordpress.com/about/) that encourages women to submit to male authority, leave their jobs, and return to the task of bearing as many children as possible.
Vision Forum has published writers such as William O. Einwechter, who not only argues for the criminalization of homosexuality but also for the execution, per Old Testament scripture, of disobedient children. (see: https://web.archive.org/web/20030817101330/http://www.natreformassn.org/statesman/03/stndisob.html)
The late Howard Phillips, Doug Phillips’ father and founder of the Christian Reconstructionism-linked Taxpayers Party, later renamed the Constitution Party, served as a co-director of Vision Forum Ministries.
2007 – 0
2008 – 65,000
2009 – 90,000
2010 – 106,000
2011 – 71,000
2012 – 57,500
Voice of the Martyrs (EIN 73-1395057)
While The Voice of the Martyrs was founded, in 1967, to aid persecuted Christians worldwide, it has also collaborated with virulently anti-gay Christian Reconstructionist ministries, such as in its co-sponsorshp, along with the (NCF-funded) Chalcedon Foundation and the (NCF-funded) Vision Forum, of the annual “Providential History Festival” (see: http://www.providentialhistoryfestival.com/2014-fall-festival/).
Brad Phillips, brother of Christian Reconstructionist and former head of the now-defunct Vision Forum Doug Phillips, is head of the Voice of the Martyrs effort in Southern Sudan.
2001 – 22,487
2002 – 88,000
2003 – 41,590
2004 – 67,500
2005 – 70,029
2006 – 226,500
2007 – 190,316
2008 – 326,185
2009 – 248,935
2010 – 328,969
2011 – 320,951
2012 – 236,763
Watoto Child Care Ministry (EIN 59-3445250)
One of the most dynamic churches in all of Uganda, the Watoto Church, in Kampala, has both led Uganda’s burgeoning orphan care industry and its anti-LGBT rights crusade. In 2009, during his visit to Uganda for an anti-homosexuality conference, Scott Lively gave a special presentation at the Watoto Church. Ugandan Stephen Langa, on of the top lobbyists for the Uganda Anti Homosexuality Bill and a close ally of Lively’s, is an elder at the Watoto Church. Watoto was also host of the first “Vision Conference” held in Uganda by the American team, Darrow Miller and Bob Moffitt, who would later form the Disciple Nations Allliance, which gives Christian Reconstructionism-derived “worldview” trainings across Africa.
2005 – 12,191
2006 – 0
2007 – 11,116
2008 – 150,680
2009 – 3,000
2010 – 2,710
2011 – 2,530
total – 182,227
The Witherspoon Institute (EIN 55-0835528)
The Witherspoon Institute funded the now-notorious, discredited Regnerus Study (see: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/03/04/mark_regnerus_testifies_in_michigan_same_sex_marriage_case_his_study_is.html), and similar studies by Witherspoon Fellow William H. Jeynes.
2012 – 25,000
World Outreach Ministries (EIN 58-1387722)
Grove City professor Warren Throckmorton identified World Outreach Ministries as having processed American funds going to the ministry of Ugandan anti-gay crusader martin Ssempa. (see: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2010/01/11/americanresponse/)
2001 – 1,000
2002 – 1,000
2005 – 1,000
2006 – 200
2007 – 400
2008 – 2,423
2009 – 1,371
Youthbuilders (formerly National Institute of Youth Ministry. no EIN provided)
Jim Burns’ Youthbuilders was one of the outlets for training materials created under the auspices of a team brought together by Howard Ahmanson’s unincorporated Fieldstead & Co. to form a strategy for combating “organized homosexuality”.
That team included Don Schmierer and Herb Schlossberg – who have both served as program directors for Fieldstead & Co., and ex-gay ministry head Jim Johnson. At The Gathering 1997, this Fieldstead special team presented a sophisticated, multi-level plan for fighting “organized homosexuality”( see: http://www.twocare.org/transcript-the-gathering-1997-the-homosexual-agenda/).
At the presentation, a program director for the Maclellan Founbdation solicited funds (through an anonymizing mechanism, likely a donor-advised fund) to implement the plan. As Don Schmierer explained to The Gathering, on the production of “ex-gay” training materials,
“the one thing that has been produced this year, and we had to get involved in producing it ourselves – it’s the training material for Jim Burns’ National Institute of Youth Ministries, to go along with what they’ve done, type of thing. We have it both in English and Spanish. It’s not completed yet, we just stole it from the printer, this week, and it was faxed to us in a hurry, just to get it here so we at least could have something to show you.
We’ve been working – we’ve had to work on this, our team had to work on this personally to get this material done. We’re working on a second book, that would be stand-alone, and the area that we’ll be addressing is ‘prevention’. “
(see: http://www.twocare.org/transcript-the-gathering-1997-the-homosexual-agenda/)
The planned book that Schmierer referred to was published the following year, in 1998, as “An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing The Homosexual Condition in Today’s Youth” (1998, Word Publishing). An Ounce of Prevention was the first in a series of books and resources, on how to “prevent” homosexuality, produced and sold by Schmierer’s [NCF-funded] His Servants ministry, which has had offerings from the book, video, and curriculum line translated into multiple languages including Russian, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Schmierer’s “Celebrating God’s Design: A Balanced and Biblical Perspective on Today’s Toughest Youth Problems”, co-written with Lela Gilbert (Promise Publishing, 2002) was endorsed by Jim Burns. States Burns,
“Celebrating God’s Design is a unique new curriculum series that takes a balanced and biblical look at important youth issues including gender confusion, tolerance, and challenging family dynamics.”
2001 – 156,000
2002 – 159,000
2003 – 53,000
2004 – 40,000
2005 – 0
[Campus Crusade For Christ sub-ministries funding by NCF]
Athletes in Action EIN 95-6006173 (plus other EIN number CCC AIC entities)
2001 – 6,345
2002 – 10,180
2003 – 23,280
2004 – 13,000
2005 – 35,850
2006 – 37,700
2007 – 144,050
2008 – 167,000
2009 – 82,600
2010 – 125,650
2011 – 131,100
2012 – 0
Total – 775,755
Christian Embassy EIN 95-6006173 ( CCC ministry, evangelizes on Capital Hill and in the Pentagon )
2001 – 5,000
2002 – 1,500
2003 – 5,500
2004 – 15,000
2005 – 5,300
2006 – 6,700
2007 – 5,000
2008 – 7,200
2009 – 12,750
2010 – 18,000
2011 – 16,860
2012 – 0
total – 98,810
Faculty Commons EIN 95-6006173
2006 – 0
2007 – 0
2008 – 2,000
2009 – 1,600
2010 – 750
2011 – 55,000
2012 – 0
Total – 59,350
Family Life EIN 95-6006173
2001 – 24,250
2002 – 52,500
2003 – 50,000
2004 – 242,350
2005 – 5,250
2006 – 88,650
2007 – 209,350
2008 – 322,000
2009 – 12,275
2010 – 111,600
2011 – 104,600
2012 – 0
Total – 1,172,825
Global Aid Network EIN 95-4578963
2001 – 0
2002 – 50,000
2003 – 0
2004 – 15,000
2005 – 101,640
2006 – 26,600
2007 – 27,800
2008 – 29,220
2009 – 33,400
2010 – 7,400
2011 – 2,750
2012 – 17,050
Total – 310,860
Great Commission Foundation EIN 35-1057090
2001 – 4,000
2002 – 5,000
2003 – 13,100
2004 – 14,900
2005 – 10,800
2006 – 58,200
2007 – 113,760
2008 – 80,510
2009 – 78,000
2010 – 0
2011 – 50,500
2012 – 35,062
The Great Commission Foundation 95-2814120
2010 – 40,000
2011 – -7,387
The Jesus Film Project (Campus Crusade For Christ International) EIN 95-6006173
2001 – 0
2002 – 0
2003 – 40,705
2004 – 354,100
2005 – 193,813
2006 – 1,346,868
2007 – 1,390,833
2008 – 867,138
2009 – 193,200
2010 – 1,471,706
2011 – 2,306,758
2012 – 9,651,178
Total – 16,425,466
Josh McDowell Ministries ( CCC )
2001 – 40,000
2002 – 14,000
2003 – 3,964
2004 – 85,500
2005 – 27,840
2006 – 34,000
2007 – 10,000
2008 –
2009 – 90,000
2010 – 23,000
2011 – 48,750
2012 – 0
Total – 377,054
Keynote EIN 33-1863088
2007 – 10,000
2008 – 400
2009 – 400
2010 – 700
2011 – 1,600
2012 – 0
Total – 13,100
Military Ministry EIN 95-6006173
2001 – 200,000
2002 – 0
2003 – 0
2004 – 0
2005 – 109,750
2006 – 100,100
2007 – 121,100
2008 – 71,200
2009 – 156,650
2010 – 86,500
2011 – 81,500
2012 – 0
total – 926,800
