The Infiltration of the American Churches by Right Wing Extremism

American Political Conservatism Has Done a Home Invasion of Churches

by Web Minister Paul J. Bern

It all started out with a paid Facebook posting of mine for a crowd-funding campaign I’m currently running on social media. The campaign is for a start-up for an electronics recycling center to help clean up the mess we’ve made of God’s planet (you can view the campaign, and donate if you can, from this link). It’s sponsored by my on-line ministry, plus two other ministers working with me, and we have 6 volunteers so far. But the ministry’s name, as my readers know, is Progressive Christian Ministries of Greater Atlanta Inc., and the howls of derision by political right-wing religious nuts has been similar to that of wolves on a full moon night. It seems that God is a religious conservative to these misguided individuals. God forbid that Christianity should ever be associated with anything Progressive!

To myself on the other hand, the meme “conservative Christian” is a contradiction in terms, since from a political vantage point Jesus was a progressive at least, or even a (gasp!) democratic socialist. So why is the term ‘conservative Christian’ an oxymoron? Because political conservatives are called such because they conserve on everything — especially money. Much of what they have they inherited from their now-deceased rich relatives, or they made it gambling on the financial markets (isn’t that all that Wall St. really is?). No wonder they are so afraid of anything that threats their ‘Giga’ nest eggs! And that includes working people like us. Show me a political conservative, and I’ll show you a stingy individual, because stingy people are always conserving. Hence the name, OK? And there is no such thing as a stingy Christian. Not really.

It’s been said that when poor people get together to make a political statement it’s called ‘rioting’, but when the wealthy get together to make a statement it’s called ‘lobbying’. Conservatives despise the poor while catering to the wealthy, and this is especially true for Christian evangelicals and so-called “fundamentalists”. That got me to thinking about the state of modern Christianity. There are those who call themselves ‘Christians’, fundamentalists or…