Nonprofits - You've Got Them All Wrong

Turns out churches do feed the hungry, clothe the naked and
care for the widows, orphans, and people with disabilities.

 

Some trouble-maker posted a question on Facebook today, no doubt hoping to stir up a hornets nest.  The question?

• Should churches be tax exempt? 

The outcry from the left was instantaneous and predictably lop-sided. These precious snowflake progressives cried out loudly that churches should only maybe be allowed exemption for the actual feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless they did and NOTHING else. This reveals a stunning lack of understanding of what churches do and what a nonprofit is and why they are tax exempt. Let me 'splain...

 

First of all, not every 501(c)(3) tax exempt nonprofit is involved in feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless. If that were the criteria for tax exempt status, you'd have to shut down most of the nonprofits in the United States. Here's what the regulation for tax exemption says:

• To be tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, an organization must be organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3), and none of its earnings may inure to any private shareholder or individual.

There are, of course, other 501(c) nonprofit organizations that have different requirements, but for this question we're talking about churches. A 501(c)(3) organization may be tax exempt if its primary activities are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering amateur sports competition, preventing cruelty to children, or preventing cruelty to animals.

 

The United States Government has determined that it is far less expensive to defer taxes to groups which perform these types of activities than it is for the government to do them. I might add that it's a danged sight more effective too. It's far easier for groups of local folk to identify community needs and problems and create programs and organizations to deal with them than it is for a bunch of politicians thousands of miles away in Washington DC to guess what those needs might be and create a one-size-fits-all government program to solve all those unique local problems. It's the "if all you've got is a hammer everything looks like a nail" conundrum.

 
Nonprofits perform missions on behalf of groups of people that are working for the betterment of their community in some way. Some provide counseling to those with mental illness or those who are bereaved. The church does this too. Some NPOs provide recreation for the disabled or for groups of individuals who have a shared interest. The American Legion and VFW are nonprofits that provide a lot of support for their members in a lot of areas. 

 

Recently Obama's IRS went after veteran's organizations because they had balked at providing private information about their members that the IRS is not supposed to be privvy to - like social security numbers and private information of that sort. The VFW and American Legion both felt they did not want to be responsible for recording their members social security data. 

 

Groups like Sierra Club get tax breaks for a portion of their work that is not direct lobbying even though their primary purpose is actually lobbying. They and the World Wildlife Fund spend surprisingly little on actual animals. Mostly they pay lawyers. They get around that by providing legislators with "educational material". They neither feed nor house the homeless so, by the reasoning of the anti-church contingent, they should be taxed on pretty much everything they do.

Churches do many things, often more efficiently than the government. Food pantries in my home state did so well that the feds cut the Food Stamp budget for East Texas by $800,000. The local bureaucrats had a fit and started a $150,000 marketing campaign with the message "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform." Turned out they just needed more application. It's not like they were going to lower the threshhold for admittance to the program or approve any more application. They just wanted to demonstrate "need" so they could get their budget increased so they wouldn't have to lay off a bunch of suddenly useless bureaucrats.

Churches minister to the spiritual needs of their congregations. You may, instead, prefer to rescue abandoned gerbils, donkeys, tigers elephants or boa constrictors. There's a nonprofit for each of those. You may want to host Renaissance Faires to promote chivalry. There's a nonprofit for that. You may want to save the whales, the owls, or the art of quilt-making. There's a nonprofit for that.

 

The point of having nonprofits be tax exempt is to allow Americans to band together for a cause they mutually believe in, collect a few assets with which to perform their mission, and to do some good without the tax man getting all up in your business and taking from money from you that people gave you to do something else with. The group's members and supporters, wise heads in government (an oxymoron if there ever was one) decided that these sorts of endeavors were things which should not be taxed.

Being not-for-profit has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with the fact that no profit is distributed to stakeholders, board members or shareholders. Every penny gets plowed back into the work. If you aren't making a profit and doing those things listed above, then you are and should be tax exempt and it doesn't matter whether I like what you are doing or not so long as your supporters do.

 

You may dislike religion. You may just dislike my religion. So what? I'm not fond of snakes, but I will defend to the death, your right to rescue them without being taxed for your selflessness. Sometimes I think some of my liberal friends have forgotten that it's not all about what they like or want. Some people may like or want different things than you like or want. That doesn't mean you get to punish them by taxing them or banning their activities. I'm not a fan of some environmentalist groups. They still get to exist and they still get to try and do good things that they think ought to be done. Heck, I might even show up with a trash bag for one of their beach cleanups. We don't have to be enemies simply because we differ on how to solve a problem we both often agree needs to be solved. You don't have to like me or my opinion. You just have to leave me be to have it as I leave you be to have your opinion, however wrong-headed it might be.

 

So, if you happen to be driving by my church on Saturday morning and see me there, and don't like it, guess what?  You can keep on driving and neither your rights nor mine, neither your enjoyment of the day nor mine needs be threatened.  Live and let live is a pretty good motto. Otherwise you could find the IRS taxing you for saving spotted owls and snail darters. They tend to take a mile if you give them an inch.

© 2017 by Tom King

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Tim Tebow

Poor old Tim Tebow has been the topic du' jour among fans and critics alike lately. Apparently he prays before games and stuff.

His critics say he's "shoving religion down people's throats. To prove there's something wrong with praying on the sidelines, the sports and political press have really been working hard to find some sin or other they can pin on him so they can call him a hypocrite - without much luck, yet.


I don't get it.

If Tebow were to don feathers and do a little dance to the "Great Spirit" or bowed toward Mecca or burned some incense to a little golden Buddha he kept on the sidelines for spiritual comfort, the media would be all over the story.  Tim would be bravely practicing his faith in the face of great persecution. There would be feature articles and interviews aplent.  But because Tim's a Christian he's supposed to be "shoving his religion down people's throats". 

This is, of course, preposterous. The fact Tebow's critics can raise their voices to ridicule and mock Tebow's expression of personal faith merely proves that their throats are entirely free of any residue of Tebow's Christianity. 


C'mon guys. Check it out. Freedom of religious expression is one of the cornerstones of our way of life here in the United States. If Tebow was a Buddhist or Muslim or Native American shaman, you'd not hear one word of criticism from me. I am allowed to kneel and pray wherever I want to, so I respect the right of others to practice their own religion so long as it does not interfere with my right to not participate. I am allowed to practice my faith despite the fact that I'm in the majority religiously speaking.


If someone held a gun on the fans at Bronco games and made them recite the Lord's Prayer, I'd see what they were complaining about. But they're not. Tebow's periodic take-a-knee thank-you's to God force no one to change their beliefs, their behavior or their religious practices. They threaten no one's safety. They have no influence on the outcome of the game (though if you believe in magic or that God cares about how football games come out, I suppose you could argue that Tebow's prayers do impact whether or not Denver scores or not.  In that case, though, all you'd need to do is pray for the other team to neutralize it.

Unless, of course, you think Tebow's more holy than you and therefore a more powerful prayer. In which case you should apply to the NFL commissioner (whoever that is these days) to have the practice outlawed on the grounds that God is cheating for the Denver Broncos.  

I'd love to see the commish make a ruling on that one!

And, by the way. Christianity is not contagious. It's a choice and no easy choice at that. You can't become a Christian just by touching one or being near one that is praying. Tebow shouldn't be treated like a leper for being openly Christian any more than you should treat gay people like dirt for being openly gay.

Sometimes I think Tebow's critics have seen one too many Exorcist movies. Perhaps they fear that he's going to start exorcising demons from the NFL next. If he does, expect to see the Detroit Lions burst into flames any day now.


Relax, guys. Tebow's just praying. He's not reporting you to the Sunday School teacher with the boney finger that once told you that you were going to hell for whatever it was you were doing or touching that you weren't supposed to be doing or touching.

I'm just saying,

Tom

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Poor Old Saddam - How Could We Have Been So Mean?

A leftist friend of mine wrote this in response to my article "The Moral Sword" on Christians and preemptive war:

• A better analogy is there is a man who in the past beat up his neighbors. His limbs were crippled and his weapons taken away. You suspect that he may have acquired new weapons. The police are currently searching him, but you can't wait for them to finish because you WANT to throw him from his wheelchair and beat him senseless. So that's exactly what you do. Then you have the audacity to claim that this is Christian behavior. Hiding behind the flag and hiding behind a cross doesn't change the fact that there was no moral or legal justification for Bush's war of choice in Iraq.

Seriously? He's comparing Sadaam Hussein to an injured man in a wheelchair? The same guy who slaughtered Shiites who attempted to revolt. The same guy who left ditches full of villagers who displeased him. The same guy who, had we not had armed aircraft flying cap over the Khurds, would cheerfully have slaughtered them as well?


If he was in a wheelchair, the man at the very least had an AK-47 laying across his lap. And he threw the police out. They couldn't search for anything. Why do you guys insist on painting that psychotic megalomaniac as though he were some poor mistreated, misunderstood humanitarian. If he could have gotten his hands on a nuke or two Saddam would have used them in a heartbeat. Everyone knew it and were scared he would; so much so that Democrats voted overwhelmingly to support President Bush's preemptive strike agains Hussein at the mere hint that he "might" be trying to get his hands on weapons grade uranium.

It's not like we wanted to hurt Iraqis. That's a major flaw in leftist rhetoric on the subject. They assume the Iraqis were loyal to Saddam Hussien. They weren't. They deserted in droves as soon as they knew we were coming. They danced in the streets as soon as Saddam got out of Dodge. When he was gone, we shut down the war and declared it over - perhaps a bit prematurely, but such was the desire to stop shooting at rank and file Iraqi people that we were prepared to risk stopping all out war (which is safer for our soldiers) so we could better avoid hurting innocents. It cost American lives to do so, but then, that's just the sort of people we are.

What people don't realize is that we dropped and fired more explosives and bullets than in WWI and WWII put together and didn't kill but a miniscule fraction of the people. We tried very hard not to hurt innocent people and our soldiers often were hurt or killed as a result of that reluctance.

As to our cruelty toward poor helpless Saddam Hussein, he deserved what he got. We should have gone all the way to Baghdad and strung him up the first time. A lot of innocent Iraqis would be alive now if we had and we wouldn't still be digging up mass graves in the Iraqi desert.

As Colin Powell said on visiting the site of a small village where Saddam's soldiers machine-gunned every man, woman and child because a teenager threw a rock at him, "We should have done this years ago."

I wasn't hiding behind anything in saying it was a hard decision.  It  is not a peculiarly Christian behavior -  conducting a war to stop a genocidal maniac like Saddam Hussein. There are other religions and philosophies that find his sort of behavior unacceptable too and condone the act of taking such a person down for the sake of others. The strong in many faiths are expected to protect the weak.

No audacity to it. I never said attacking another country something Christians routinely do as an act of faith. What I actually said was, "When someone acts like he has weapons of mass destruction, denies he has them, but has a history of outright lying about the subject, then "What do we do about it?" becomes a tougher question. On a personal level, that kind of situation requires a personal relationship with God and some coaching on His part to figure out the answer - and I've found that, in such situations, God does present the answers."

Translation: "Figuring out what is the right thing to do with evil despots is something you have to work out between yourself and God."

Liberals keep saying there was no moral or legal justification for the war in Iraq. There actually was. The original cease fire, which was still in effect, specified that weapons inspectors would be permitted inside Iraq to insure they were not building WMDs. It was clearly proven that Hussein was stalling, delaying and shuffling truckloads of stuff around the country in an attempt to keep inspectors from looking at it. After the war, scientists in his weapons program led soldiers to caches of materials he'd ordered buried in the desert. Weapons labs were uncovered (but not reported to the public) all over Iraq. AND Hussein threw out the inspectors completely, a clear violation of the treaty. We had a perfect legal right, according to the treaty to continue the earlier conflict. Hussein's treaty violations were in and of themselves an act of war and the treaty called for war to begin at the moment of those violations.
I love the Palestinian treaty logic - the kind where you sign a treaty and as soon as the Israelis stop blowing you up with tanks and planes, you lob some missiles over the border and then complain loudly when the Israelis shoot back.

The point of my earlier post was that what to do is a hard decision. The principle of turning the other cheek, which we do a lot of as Americans, and the powerful desire to right wrongs and defend the innocent, are usually in conflict. I made it pretty clear what I believe, but left the subject pretty open-ended.

If your philosophy is to "absorb" damage because you believe we somehow deserve it or because it is morally right to do so, us being bigger and stronger and somehow owe it to the less fortunate to let them crash planes into our skycrapers and set off bombs in public places and otherwise take out their frustrations on us, then it is absolutely your right to believe that is the right course of action.

All I was saying was that it's hard for Christians to stand by and watch wholesale murder. We certainly didn't like it in Yugoslavia (and it was Muslims being slaughtered there). I cheered when President Clinton stepped in to stop it. We didn't like it when the Hutus and Tutsis murdered each other or when warlords drafted child soldiers into their armies in Chad and the Sudan.

My question to my liberal and libertarian buddies is, "Should America intervene militarily to help the helpless or to depose evil dictators?"

___ No. It's none of our business!

___ Not if we think we can "control" the evil despot by smart diplomacy.

___ Yes. In all cases, even if it interferes with the rulers of a sovereign nation,

___ Only when the oppressed agree with us?

___ Only when the oppressed are nothing like us and, frankly hate our guts?

___ Only if the people being oppressed ask us to (even though how we find out what 'the people' might be somewhat problemtic)?

___ Only if they don't have any oil or anything valuable to sell us?

___ Only if they belong to a trade union?

___ Only if a Democrat is president?

Honestly, I wonder sometimes if liberal commenters actually read things before they post or do they merely press some kind of "talking points" button and phrases like "hiding behind the flag" and "no moral or legal justification" just spew out? I mean, I'm up for a discussion and the wheelchair story was at least an attempt to address the point with an analogy, albeit one that really doesn't fit. But wouldn't it be refreshing if they would speak to the text and not to what they think is behind the text or to what they assume some ignorant redneck tea-bagger like me probably said somewhere in that big old sea of text up there that they didn't want to have to actually read for comprehension.

Tom King

Is American Religious Freedom a Myth?

And is that an excuse to scrap it in the New World Order?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

David Sehat wrote a muddled article on the Huffington Post that seems mostly aimed at complaining that religion has too much influence in politics. When a majority of Americans belong to churches and formal religious bodies, it seems inevitable that religion should inevitably impact public policy, though that influence is an indirectly shaping influence rather than a directly controlling one because of the Constitution that prohibits the government from "establishing" a state religion..

I had difficulty identifying what Sehat's beef was with the first amendment. Sehat's complaint about America's system of religious tolerance seems to be not that people aren't allowed to attend the church of their choice, but that the way we guarantee that right makes it almost impossible to elect an atheist to public office because of the indirect effect of religion? Is he suggesting that we fracture the influence of religions like Christianity by turning churches into political parties?

There is some hint at that based on his "I'm smarter than you" toned article. He suggest that the European model is more honest in that churches participate directly in political parties. He wants us to stop congratulating ourselves and feel properly guilty about the failures of our ancestors to meet the ideal of religious separation from government.  Once we feel properly guilty, we are somehow supposed to become more honest in our political debate.

And how is that?  Will that mean we change our beliefs on size of government, spending, abortion, energy policy, global warming? 

It's ironic that he quotes de' Tocqueville for support, an author whose home country, France, murdered and persecuted religious groups like the Waldenses, the Hugenots and finally the Catholics, brutalizing the faithful via government and sometimes government/religion partnerships. Of course, the French revolution gave them an openly atheist form of government and after years of bloody pogroms, the country was left with few openly religious people. Is that what Sehat wants?  Religion minimized rather than respected and celebrated? Is that what's so insidious about the "Myth of American Religious Freedom".

The article came out on National Religious Freedom Day. Sehat doesn't think we should celebrate that.

Yes, America does have a checkered past where religious liberty is concerned as it does with every other element of the Bill of Rights. What Sehat doesn't allow for is the time it takes to change an entire culture. If you start with the ideal and make progress over time towards the ideal, you wind up with a country that is always rather better than when it started. We did that with civil rights, women's voting rights, freedom of speech, and the press and assembly. We've had to fight it out in courts and legislatures for 200 plus years. As a result we're better than we were.

I never can understand why people think that because we were once less than true to our ideals, that it gives us a reason to go backward - to accept less than the ideal we worked so hard to achieve.

My own church's members were locked up in Tennessee for farming on Sunday (we go to church on Saturday) in the early 1900s. We fought that in courts and unjust Blue Laws were ended.  Just because Americans haven't always achieved the ideals we hold sacred, doesn't mean we should scrap the whole constitution in favor of a socialsit/progressive remake that sacrifices those ideals for some sort of illusion of security.

I hope we are smarter than that.

Tom King

Does the Constitution Separate Church and State?

Christine O'Donnel got a lot of flack the other day for saying, in a debate with Democrat Chris Coons that "there is no separation of church and state".  The audience ridiculed her, pointing to the Establishment Clause for proof.

So what does the Establishment Clause actually say?

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Sounds straightforward doesn't it and, I believe, an open-minded person would have little trouble understanding what the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were getting at.  For quite some time an organized group of Christians has been referring to the principle outlined in this section of the first amendment as the principle of "separation of church and state".  This group refers to a Thomas Jefferson letter to a group of pastors which describes the Establishment Clause as a wall separating church and state.

These days, however, it's not the usual Christian groups calling for recognition of separation of church and state, but progressive socialists who use this same phrase to support recent efforts by the government under the guise of enforcing separation of church and state to establish "freedom FROM religion" in the public square, rather than "freedom OF religion". 

Okay I get why conservatives are saying the Establishment Clause doesn't call for separation of church and state.  However, as a member of a Christian church whose free exercise has been repeatedly trampled upon by government in the past 150 years, it makes me nervous to hear you say there is no "separation".  When political lobbyists from Christian churches in the past talked about separation of church and state with reference to the Establishment Clause, we meant that the government should be separate and not controlled by any religious denomination or vice versa.  In that respect there is and should be a wall of separation. But the wall we refer to, only prevents interference by government with religion or religion with government.  It does not mean we cannot vote by our religious principles if we are elected officials.  It does not mean we cannot pray in public places or acknowledge religion's role at the very bones of our country.  It doesn't mean taking "God" out of things.  It only means we will not have priests and clerics running our government nor our government running our churches.

Once again the wisdom of our fathers is aimed squarely at those who lust for power and would imperil our liberties by seizing more of it than they are very wisely limited to by the constitution.

I just as vehemently object when progressives apply apply the establishment clause in a way that forbids any kind of religious practice in the public square.  This essentially establishes a kind of formal atheism, in effect, as our state religion.  It violates the establishment clause as surely as it would if the president started taking orders from Joel Osteen or Pat Robertson (or Mullah Omar for that matter). 

It is as wrong for the President to issue mandatory sermon topics to pastors as it would be for bishops to dictate US foreign policy.  I belong to a church whose members have been imprisoned for laboring six days a week because "laws" declared it was the wrong six days (remember the Blue Laws).  When a sheriff can drag a simple American farmer out of his field and jail him for months because powerful church leaders forced passage of a religious law, there is something not right. Clearly this was a violation of the establishment clause. These laws were resisted and after more than 70 years on the books these laws were repealed.  Still, every few years for decades since, some well-meaning someone trots out a proposed bill to formalize in law, what they believe is the correct day of worship. Such laws would enlist  government aid in enforcement of a tenant of religious belief that has no basis in natural law.

Personally, I think if Blue Laws ever do come back, they are more likely to come from the left than the right, but then not everyone agrees.  If conservatives are the party of liberty, then let's just make it clear what we mean when we make statements like the one O'Donnell made.  She badly needed to explain.  Such blanket statements as "There is no separation of church and state," make me nervous. The speakers sound like folks determined to re-establish the old theocracies that we fought so hard to free ourselves from.  I know that 99% of conservatives are not out to codify religious belief in the law of the land. Most of us have learned our lesson about what ills that can cause.

Glenn Beck is always telling us to look at history.  Well, when you do, you'll discover that 'social gospel' progressives were the ones that rammed through some of the more draconian of the Blue laws at the turn of the last century.  For the "good of the workers", people actually went to jail for plowing fields on Sunday, even though they had been in church the day before.  The folks who coined the phrase "separation of church and state" were the ones who ended such laws.  They are devout Christians and most are very conservative.

Let me be clear. I don't think conservatives are the greatest threat to establish a state religion.  I think conservatives do need to make it excruciatingly clear what they mean when they say there is no "separation" of church and state. Let's try not to sound like we're fixing to bring back the Inquisition and witch trials.  Unfortunately, some of our less thoughtful brethren aren't so careful with how they present their views on church and state issues.

Even church leaders like the Pope have called for codifying church doctrine in law.  A papal letter a few years back called for good Catholics to force passage of laws to protect Sunday as the day of worship in their own countries.  I read the pastoral letter when it came out. That would be problematic in the U.S. because of the Establishment Clause. 

There's where the wall should be built. We need that wall to tell church leaders where lie the limits of their authority.  We need that wall to also tell the government where they have no right to diddle with the free exercise of our religion.

The test of our belief in the establishment clause will come when a Christian judge posts a copy of the ten commandments on his wall and next door a Muslim judge posts a passage from the Koran on his and the Buddhist next door to him sets a little golden Buddah on his desk.  Will we protect each man's "free exercise" of his religion and trust him to make rulings according to the law alone and not to his personal belief?   I would hope so.

As a judge, I'm sure I would find it difficult to rule in favor of someone who is right under the law and yet wrong by all that's holy.  Judges do it every day, though - because of the wall that separates faith from mere human law. That wall protects those on both sides of it.  One day, this world will end and no such wall will be needed.  Till then, thank God for the Establishment Clause.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King - Tyler, TX

Unholy Alliances

If you watch the news, you will soon begin to detect the subtle machinations of individuals and groups seeking power. Weaving strands upon strands into a tapestry, a master planner seems to be at work behind it all, intent on cobbling together a strategy that will bring about a single world government - all power gathered in a single authority.

I believe this is a bad thing.

"The truth shall set you free," said He whose hand created the worlds and all that in them is. Every element of the society proposed by God is long on freedom and short on rules.  Just 10 in the first one with a two word summation in the second go round. God's idea of government doesn't require 3000 pages of.regulations and powerful administrators, bosses and dictators.When God set up the government of Israel, it was long on local decision-making. There were a few judges, some priests and no kings, dukes or permanent nobility. Later, when the Israelites successfully lobbied for a King, God warned them that it was a  very bad idea.  Even then, they cast lots for a King, relying on God to influence the process.  This was unlike any other society of the time. Every kingdom in the world back then was all about accumulating power in the hands of a single person - a strong man.  The governments of the time were hotbeds of corruption and intrigue.

If you want to be Prince of this World you need the support structure, right?  So how do you do that? How do you make sure your hold on power is perfect?

The Hapsburg monarchs of Europe did it by convincing everyone that every noble family needed a little spritz of Hapsburg blood in the veins. Soon, every European monarch was kinfolk with Hapsburgs ruling countries whose languages they could barely speak.. The writers of children's stories conspired with the nobles by telling generations of impressionable peasant children tales of poor girls and boys who discovered suddenly that they we really lost princesses or the sons of kings and earls elevated in station only by the mere accident of blood.

The rise of the United States of America nearly wrecked it for the noble classes.  America was a nation built upon the revolutionary ideas of John Locke (and coincidentally on the principles of the new and old Testament). These principles held that all men were created equal and that God gave each man the right to achieve and accomplish all that he might wish by dint of hard work and perseverance. The noble classes were abolished, despite how uncomfortable many Americans were with that idea, especially the wealthy landed gentry. It is not an accident that it has become fashionable in the press of late to dismiss Locke and his contemporary revolutionaries as passing cranks that are overdue to be replaced.  

We are once again witnessing the rise of a new nobility, a political and economic elite with pretty much the same cast with the same intent as always - to secure power in their own hands and to keep the peons quiet.

Historically, this was done with money, soldiers and a firmly entrenched class system. Read the history books. They keep plugging away at the same old dream - world domination, all power in the hands of a few. All ordinary men, not equal, but all the same and all safely kept down where they can do no harm to the elite and powerful nobility.

Sadly, they have the tools now that they need to carry it off thanks to the technological revolution. We have the computers and networks, databases and tiny little chips they need to mark us, label us and track us, to control what we buy and sell, what we eat and where we travel. Does anyone really believe they aren't trying all over again to revive the old dream of power?

And remember what other political power has traditionally been brought into the any serious grab for power?

Anyone?

Anyone?

If you said the "Church", you've read your history well. The enlistment of the political church in support of the new world order, the green, global, socialist, progressive movement is an essential step in bringing about the conditions that will lead to the end of the world. Not that that's what the plan is, it's just how Revelation says it will work out.

The church organization has always been vulnerable to being used by the powerful as a power base. Historically, churches of all sizes have been co-opted by corrupt leaders as a tool to beat down and control the populace. It is not the perfect tool because churches often have actual Christians in them and real Christians are frightfully independent and courageous. The don't like anyone who takes the authority on themselves that belongs only to God and will oppose those persons.  Protestantism's huge breakaway from Catholicism was the consequence of corruption of the clergy and the use of church power for political purposes.

I see a movement in the liberal churches today to unite, to share clergy and ceremonies, not only with similar Protestant churches, but also with the Catholic church and with neo-pagan, African, Middle-Eastern and Eastern faiths. The environmental movement and it's Wiccan and pagan elements are finding alliances in the apostate Protestant church.

At this point, the Roman Catholic church is putting out feelers, not only to other Christian churches, but also to the environmentalist movement.  It's leaders send ever more distinct signals of support to the progressive/socialist new world order movements as well. The Catholics so far, still remain officially aloof form the progressives due to the abortion issue, but you wonder how long that will last, with the Pope calling for a single world government. The question is, are they doing like senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska and waiting to see what the payoff will be before they set aside their principles and climb aboard the New World Order Choo-Choo.

Me,  I'm waiting to see and watching the news.

Tom King - Flint, TX