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 —…