Top Ten Major Religious Right Organizations take in Half-a-Billion Dollars over a Twelve-Month Period
Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election—if Senator Barack Obama wins, expect a spate of “The Religious Right is Dying/Mortally Wounded” articles—the Religious Right will not disappear from the American political landscape in the near or distant future. In fact, if you follow the money, which is what Americans United for Separation of Church and State is doing, you’ll see that “the nation’s leading Religious Right organizations took in more than half a billion dollars over a recent 12-month period.” In the October issue of Americans United’s Church & State magazine, Rob Boston reported that: “several of the organizations showed dramatic increases in their budgets; only a few showed a drop.”
Boston’s piece, titled “The Religious Right Top Ten: Right-Wing Religious Forces Have Money, Influence And Power—And They’re Seeking More,” provides useful profiles of the top organizations, and is based on financial information garnered from Internal Revenue Service Form 990. Financials weren’t the only thing Church & State took into account: It “also attempted to determine the influence organizations have on the larger political scene.”
AU’s research indicates that a number of religious right organization are more than adequately prepared to wage many a culture war battle in the coming years—whether from inside or outside the circles of government.
The Top Ten Organizations are:
- Pat Robertson’s Virginia Beach, Virginia-based Christian Broadcasting Network’s revenue in 2006 was $246,986,289.
- James Dobson’s Colorado Springs, Colorado-based Focus on the Family had $156,972,266 in revenue in 2006.
- Pat Robertson and Jay Sekulow’s American Center for Law and Justice/Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism has offices in Virginia Beach, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia and its 2007 revenue amounted to $42,658,159.
- The Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, whose President, CEO and General Counsel is Alan Sears, had 2007 revenue of $31,674,124.
- The Rev. Donald Wildmon’s Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association had $22,547,087 in revenue in 2007.v
- Founded by Dobson and run by Tony Perkins, the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council had $11,783,971 in 2007 revenue.
- ounded by Tim and Beverly LaHaye and currently headed by Wendy Wright. The Washington, D.C.-based outfit had 2007 revenue of $10,640,810.
- Despite the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Lynchburg, Virginia-based Jerry Falwell Ministries is motoring along in the hands of his two sons, Jerry Jr., who is president of Liberty University and Jonathan, who pastors at Thomas Road Baptist Church. Its 2007 revue amounted to $4,208,989.
- The Nashville, Tennessee-based Southern Baptist Convention/Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission is head by Richard Land. SBC revenue in 2007 amounted to $205,716,834, while ERLC had $3,394,327.
- Founded by Tim LaHaye, the secretive Council for National Policy is currently headed by Steve Baldwin. The Washington, D.C.-based operation had $1,690,914 in revenue in 2007.
Americans United points out on its website that there are a number of other important religious right organizations to be aware of, including Gary Bauer’s American Values, Rick Scarborough’s Vision America, and Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition. An expanded version of the Church & State story is available here.
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New Coalition takes on Christian Zionism
Before the end of the year, the Los Angeles Times reported in late October, nearly 45 million people will receive a brochure titled “Why We Should Be Concerned About Christian Zionism.” Among other things, the brochure points out that Christian Zionism “fosters fear and hatred of Muslims and non-Western Christians,” and “can lead to the dehumanization of Israelis and Palestinians.” The brochure also notes that Christian Zionism leads to a conclusion that “involves the death of all non-Christians, including Jews, through apocalyptic warfare or divine judgment,” and “is not based on traditional teaching or doctrines of the Church.”
The brochure is being distributed by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States, an organization made up of 35 different church bodies and some 100,000 churches.
“If we don’t speak up against it—Christian Zionism—then people will think we don’t care or that we agree with it,” said the Rev. John Hubers, supervisor of mission programs in the Middle East and South Asia for the Reformed Church in America.
David Brog, the executive director of Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel—one of the most prominent Christian Zionist organizations in the United States—taskes umbrage at Hubers’ comment: “To say we’re dehumanizing Israelis and Palestinians with our support for Israel dehumanizes us.”
Christian and Jewish leaders in Southern California have formed an organization called Christians Concerned About Christian Zionism. They held a conference on the issue: “Christian Zionism: Rapture and the Holy Land, Theology, and Politics” on October 4 at Pasadena Presbyterian Church.
“We have to wake up Christians,” said the Rev. Gwynne Guibord, of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. “We have to show Christians and others that there is another way of looking at these things, a way that isn’t so antithetical to who Jesus was,” she said. One speaker at the conference, Rabbi Haim Beliak, who teaches at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles and is a co-founder of Jews On First—which tracks Christian Zionism—talked about the growing influence of Hagee and Christians United for Israel.
“My religion and my Zionism have been hijacked by Christian Zionists and their Jewish friends,” Beliak said. “Most of us have the view that the outline for the possibility of peace has been sitting in a drawer ready to be implemented for at least 15 years, and most of us think Christian Zionism is an impediment toward peace in the Middle East.”
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has reported that about 20 to 40 million Americans are Christian Zionists.
“I would say the whole flier seems to me to be describing a stereotype of a Christian Zionist,” Brog said. “There are some Christian Zionists who are opposed to the peace process in the Middle East, but that does not define a movement of millions of Christian people.”
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Bush turns to Faith-Based Groups to Bail US out of Health Care Crisis
In July, the Commonwealth Fund, a health care research foundation, issued a report titled the “National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2008,” which “found that last year more than 100 million Americans, almost half the working-age population, were uninsured, underinsured, unable to pay their medical bills or untreated because of costs last year. Media reports in September showed that government Medicaid enrollment and spending are increasing as the economy worsens,” according to the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy.
Even for an administration that has couched political initiatives in the language of faith, unleashing the “armies of compassion” on the vexing issues of poverty, homelessness, and addiction, it seems like a stretch that it would look to faith-based groups to solve America’s health care crisis.
Nevertheless, that appears to be what the Bush Administration is doing. And it is falling far short of providing Americans with proper health coverage.
A group of local grassroots health care providers that met last week at the White House, finds that “the community-based response [to health care issues] represents a band-aid approach to a system-wide epidemic of rising medical costs, disparate levels of care and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured Americans,” the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy recently reported.
“You’re describing the perfect storm,” Neil Calman, CEO of the Bronx, New York-based Institute for Family Health, a speaker at the event, responded to an audience member’s comment: “People are going to find the situation will get increasingly worse and government is going to have less and less. We have to pull from all resources. It will be the challenge of the coming years.”
In the twenty-second meeting in a monthly series dubbed “Compassion in Action Roundtables,” hosted by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Calman, “whose institute is the lead agency in a coalition of 40 faith-based and community organizations that provide health care, was one of a dozen religious and community organization leaders and government officials to speak Oct. 22 at an event highlighting ‘Community-Based Solutions for Health Needs.’”
The Roundtable pointed out that Jedd Medefind, acting director of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, “said health care activities featured at the meeting represented a ‘tip of the iceberg’ of national efforts by both the government and nonprofit organizations. He acknowledged problems of inadequate affordable health care and lack of insurance, but said, ‘alongside that we have glimmers of hope,’ among them the fact that five million more people received medical care at Community Health Centers (CHC) since 2001.”
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Saving the GOP from Itself?
Over the next few months, as George W. Bush prepares to leave the White House and return to Texas, conservatives across the land are licking their wounds, wringing their hands and plotting their comeback. A debate about the future of the Republican Party and the role of the religious right within it will commence.
If the McCain/Palin ticket goes down to defeat, the blame game will predominate—at least at first. Then the questioning will begin:
- Did the nomination of the Alaska governor help or hurt the ticket?
- Did playing solely to the base—religious conservatives in particular—limited the ticket’s appeal?
- Does the Party have to become more mainstream, more inclusive, and more tolerant?
- Is Palin to be the Party’s savior? Or, have the American people learned more than enough about some of the less-than-ethical ways she goes about her business?
Everyone will have an opinion and most of those opinions will be flawed. After all, it is nearly impossible to predict what will happen in the coming year, let alone in 2012.
Christianity Today’s Sarah Pulliam recently interviewed Ross Douthat, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the co-author of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” Douthat believes that “Conservatives are going to have to head into a long series of ideological fights within the party.” And the Party should recognize “that social conservatism, broadly understood, should be the bedrock of conservatism in America.”
“Broadly speaking,” said Douthat, “the challenge for the Republican Party is not to jettison social conservatives but to find a way to deepen the social conservative, pro-family message beyond just the classic culture-war debates. What would it mean to have a pro-family tax policy? What would it mean to have a pro-family health care policy?”
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RD Tidbits
- Hein to Baylor: Jay Hein, who was deputy assistant to President George W. Bush and director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has been hired by Baylor University as Distinguished Senior Fellow and director of the Program for Faith and Service at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR). Hein had headed the White House Office from August 2006 until September 2008.
- TVC’s last ditch slam against Obama: If the past is prologue, then one of the final anti-Obama e-mails sent out by Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition possibly sets the stage for what is to come from the religious right during an Obama administration. The subject line of the e-mail was “Obama’s Policies: Your Congregation’s Right to Know,” and the perspective—predictably anti-gay and anti-abortion—was provided by a new media outfit called The Judeo-Christian View. Dr. O’Neill Dozier, the General Publisher of JCV, claims to have an initial print circulation of over 325,000 and an e-mail list of approximately 5,000,000. Dozier, a former National Football League player is the founding and current pastor of The Worldwide Christian Center, a non-denominational community church in Pompano Beach, Florida.
