Lately at Holy Moly, we’ve been kicking around the idea of how to welcome people. Do we do it well, or do we do it badly (and risk a snarky write-up in The Ship Of Fools “Mystery Worshipper” annals)? This is something we’ll have to work out in the coming weeks.
With that in mind, I was pretty horrified but unfortunately not all that surprised to run across this:
WAYNESVILLE, N.C. – The minister of a Haywood County Baptist church is telling members of his congregation that if they’re Democrats, they either need to find another place of worship or support President Bush.
I ran across this story at via TBoggs. There’s an “action items” diary at Daily Kos on it.
Another article raises the tax-exempt issue succinctly, which was endlessly debated on the original dKos thread:
Chan Chandler, pastor of East Waynesville, had been exhorting his congregation since October to support his political views or leave the church, said Selma Morris, a 30-year member of the church.
“He preached a sermon on abortion and homosexuality, then said if anyone there was planning on voting for John Kerry, they should leave,” she said. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard something like that. Ministers are supposed to bring people in.”
Repeated phone calls to Chandler today have gone unanswered and he was not available at the church or his home to comment on the allegations.
It’s not clear whether the church’s tax-exempt status could be jeopardized if the claims about Chandler are true.
The Internal Revenue Service exempts certain organizations from taxation, including those organized and operated for religious purposes, provided that they do not engage in certain activities, including involvement in “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
Valerie Thornton, a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service, said she could not comment on the East Waynesville situation specifically, but noted that “in general if a church engages in partisan politics it could put their tax-exempt status in jeopardy.”
The story seems to have hit the national and international wires. I bet coffee hour tomorrow is going to be interesting, what with all the news media camped out on the steps of the church.
David and I were having a discussion about “the coming theocracy” just last night over dinner. He’s convinced it’s whoey. I’m convinced it could happen. This was kicked off by several events yesterday, including:
Religious Schools Train Lawyers for Culture Wars. This was a story with the author of this book:
God on the Quad : How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. In the NPR “web extra” question and answer section, she makes it sound as if the rise in religious higher education (new colleges opened, enrollment way, way up) isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that intellectual rigor and racial diversity are not lacking on religious university campuses. However, the law students interviewed for the story scare the hell out of me.
Every now and then I check back at TheocracyWatch.org
. And every time I do, I get freaked out by the wealth of evidence. The “theocratic right” want to take over. They want dominion over all. And they’ve been working for years toward this goal.
So yeah, I was debating with David last night that a Handmaid’s Tale-style takeover could happen. What I’d like to see is an SF TV series based on just such a thing, if only to counter all the “Rapture/Left Behind” type movies and series and get apathetic non-voters to get as freaked out by this shit as possible.
Meanwhile, a major part of the “message” of the theocratic right is that “homosexxxuls bad, God-fearing Christian straight (parent) good.” And that all God-fearing Christians must work for the Dominion of God and Jesus over everything. And though they’re a minority, they know that an apathetic majority won’t bother to defeat them at the polls, until bit by bit and year by year, they take over just about everything.
About the time David and I are elderly old fogeys, there might be a knock on our door.
Our only hope is that the pendulum of political opinion in this country will swing the other way, as it always has when extremists at either end of the political spectrum get a little too much power.