The Texas Renewal Project event scheduled for later this month will have another notable speaker: Gov. Greg Abbott.
We already wrote about this event, but the addition of the state’s top elected official appears to be new, according to an email invitation that went out late last week.
Abbott will join former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, at a hotel in Austin for a “pastors briefing” designed to turn clergy into politicians.
To gain a little more insight on what these Renewal Project trainings are all about, and why you should care about the politicization of congregations, take a look at how the chief organizer of the trainings, David Lane, opened a similar training in Charleston, S.C., earlier this year:
“Fifty-five million babies dead. Red ink as far as the eye can see. Homosexuals praying at the inauguration. … Lord, have mercy.”
Yeah, heaven forbid that a gay person would have the audacity to pray. Lane added this in an interview:
“My No. 1 ask is, can you register 100 percent in your pews? No. 2, can you preach biblical values and make sure people connect the dots? They don’t understand. They don’t know how to ascertain the facts and understand the issues of the day as God talks about them. … No. 3, make sure they go vote those biblical values every single time.”
As we wrote earlier, this new training program is part of a long-term movement to mobilize right-wing pastors and their congregations as key parts of a partisan political machine — a machine clearly designed to benefit Republican electoral candidates backed by religious-right groups.
6 Comments
Cruz and his addled father keep trying to prove that this is a Christian nation despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
They are beyond despicable as is our contemptible governor.
Texas is a laughingstock around the world. Our attorney general has been indited on felony charges just like our former governor.
Politics is not part of the church. They are supposed to be about RELIGION, not spouting political lies.
I’m so HAPPY that I am not one of them. What really bothers me about them is that they teach LOATHING AND HATRED for people who are not them. Who on this green earth would anyone want to kowtow to those places of hate?
When they’re not doing anything else, they still have a burning hatred for the LGBT community. Shame on them.
I totally agree with cutting off their tax free exemptions. If they preach politics, they have violated their contracts. The problem with the funny-mentalists is that they think their excrement is odor free. They think that THEY are the law because they have bibles where Jesus talks in red.
Texans voted that ahole into office by NOT VOTING against him.
Those ignorant jackasses think that their point of view is the ONLY point of view because they THINK that they can interpret everything by usurping parts of scripture and using it anyway they want.
Hell, I can PROVE THERE IS NO GOD by misusing their own bibles. How? Go to Psalm 14:1. It clearly states that there is no God.
Oh, did I forget to put that in CONTEXT? Golly gee. It says The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
See what you can do when you yank only a part of something in scripture? Ditto for their abhorrent of grabbing something totally out of context by omitting some text before or after what they try to twist the meaning of something.
Abomination. What does that mean? Well…it is in the bible, so that settles it. REALLY? According to Hebrew scripture it was spoken to the nascent children of Israel. They were going from Egypt to what is now Israel. God was teaching them to not do what the pagans were doing. The word simply means “this we do not do.”
The people who love to hate LGBT human beings because they THINK it means what the English translation says but they are so damned ignorant that they think that the freaking books were written in English!
Although eating shell fish and pork and animals that were not killed in a special way are ABOMINATIONS, they break those laws and become abominations. But they think that something God said can be broken by a mere human. That is not the way it works, but they are so ignorant that they don’t consider that they are breaking God’s laws. Ha!
Abbott has no right to screw around with religious bigots, you know, separation of church and state?
I give up trying to get them to understand. And BTW, Jesus was NOT his name. They do not want to understand that Jesus is an ENGLISH word. Properly translated his name was Joshua.
“Useful idiots.”-Karl Rove, a/k/a one of the most evil blobs of protoplasm ever to live and breathe-on a par with Dick Chumley, Halliburton Whoredog, and his 8-year, dimwitted corporate sock puppet, the Lil Shrubster (the star offspring of The Bush Crime Family, with Jebthro Shrub getting antsy in the wings, desperate to show us how he can fu*k things up even mo’ betta than Junior did).
A lovelier bunch of “Good Christian” people you’d be unlikely ever to meet.
The faithful in the Christian fundamentalist and conservative evangelical pews evidently have still not figured it all out. Republican politicians, who openly admit at Washington, DC cocktail parties that they think most fundies and evangelicals are stupid backwoods hicks, are still lying to them about supporting their issues in Congress and the Executive Branch of American government. They lie and pretend just to get their votes, perform meaningless public acts to make it look as if they are doing something (when they are really not), and are always careful to ensure that the fundies and evangelicals NEVER GET the governmental changes they want. Take their votes and leave-em high and dry!!! This has to be one of the biggest rackets on planet Earth. I see no evidence of the people in the pews waking up to the fact that they are being used and abused.
The pastors are violating the terms of their churches’ tax-exempt IRS status. No tax-exempt organization is to endorse politicians. I hope Gov. Abbott is inviting some IRS lawyers to this event.
Why, anyone please explain to me why these pastor/ministers/whatever’s have tax exempt status’. Lets get rid of his if this is what they are doing.