United Church of Christ seminarian Chuck Currie follows the mammon money underwriting Republican activists’ two-pronged effort to divide mainstream churches with partisan misinformation over hot-button issues, and then to convert the wreckage into taxpayer-subsidized Republican front groups with religious-sounding names.
A recent case in point, Currie says, is the battle against United Methodist minister Beth Stroud, who is lesbian and whose sermons sometimes read like the words of Biblical prophets.
The warfare waged by the “Institute for Religion and Democracy” and other Republican religious front groups against liberal churches may seem recent. But these same groups have been smearing and dividing U.S. and Latin American churches ever since the contra and death-squad wars against liberal Latin American Christians and native populations in the 1980s.
I suspect that this goes back even further, to a Nixon program called ‘Defund the Left’. It was an attempt, apparently successful, to block money that might go to groups which had a lot of ‘leftists’ in them. Like libraries, colleges etc. The program seems to have continued under private auspices into the present.
Oh, good. Somebody else has picked up on the “follow the money” issue. It really is “follow the money.”