Atheist George Soros Funds Faux “Evangelicals”

From the Weekly Standard:

For nearly 30 years Richard Cizik represented the National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, D.C. During the George W. Bush administration, he tilted increasingly left and embraced global warming as his iconic issue. A Vanity Fair magazine spread admiringly portrayed him walking on water, just like Jesus. But in December 2008 Cizik stepped too far by endorsing same-sex unions during an interview with Terry Gross NPR. He was forced to resign from NAE.

This summer, Cizik was back with Gross on NPR. He has created a left-leaning New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. Initially after his NAE departure Cizik was affiliated with Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation. Then he became a fellow at George Soros’s Open Society Institute, concurrent to his creating the new liberal evangelical group. With Gross, Cizik was unrepentant about his evolving views on same-sex unions, and possibly marriage. And he was very grateful to the left-wing billionaire philanthropist who made his fall from NAE a soft bump.

Of course, Cizik is a rather open leftist who has made no secret of his Soros funding.

More interesting, and a much more important figure on the religious left is Jim Wallis.

Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who, if his boasts are accurate, has been the chief Evangelical Left chaplain to the Obama administration, has reluctantly admitted that he too has benefitted from Soros’s largesse. In recent years his Sojourners group has received at least $325,000 from Soros’s Open Society Institute. While Cizik lacks a popular following, Wallis writes best selling books like “God’s Politics,” is a sought after campus speaker, and was arguably the chief point man in 2008 for biting a slice out of typically overwhelmingly evangelical support for Republicans.

Unlike Cizik, Wallis was grudging in his admission of a Soros connection. Cizik over the years has shifted from right to left, so his affiliation with Ted Turner, and then Soros, seem natural. Wallis began as a campus radical with the Students for a Democratic Society, touted the Sandinistas during the 1980s, and denounced Clinton for signing Welfare Reform in 1996. But over the last decade Wallis has reinvented a new, cuddlier image as the graying, post-ideological prophet who shuns temporal political labels. When evangelicals became an especially key constituency during the George W. Bush years, Wallis rediscovered and advertised his evangelical roots, though he generally avoids theological self-revelation and describes his evangelical beliefs in political terms. Appealing to evangelical colleges and suburban mega-church yuppies, Wallis probably prefers not to become known as George Soros’s favorite evangelical activist.

Until recently, the Open Society Institute’s website openly listed its grants to Wallis: $200,000 grant in 2004, $25,000 in 2006, and $100,000 in 2007. World magazine editor Marvin Olasky was the first publish to Wallis’s Soros funding in July, while asking the self-professed “non-partisan” Wallis to be more transparent about his work and ideology. Olasky also quoted Wallis from 2005: “I know of no connections to those liberal funds and groups that are as direct as the Religious Right’s ties to right-wing funders.” And Olasky noted that Wallis’s Sojourners group, during Wallis’s transformation into the purported voice of centrist evangelicals tired of Republicans, had climbed from receipts of $1,601,171 in 2001-2002 to $5,283,650 in 2008-2009, as, in Olasky’s words, “secular leftists have learned to use the religious left to elect Obama and others.”

Wallis responded angrily to Olasky’s revelations of Soros funding. “It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living,” Wallis fumed about another recent nemesis in early August to Patheos, a Christian website. “I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing. No, we don’t receive money from Soros. . . . Wallis insisted: “So, no, we don’t receive money from George Soros. Our books are totally open, always have been. Our money comes from Christians who support us and who read Sojourners.” He urged his interviewer: “So tell Marvin he should check his facts, and not imitate Glenn Beck.”

But what about the online listing that showed money from Soros going to Wallis

Evidently after proof of the Soros grants appeared online (despite the Open Society Institute’s having removed the original links), Wallis had his public relations staffer follow up with Patheos with a confession: “I should have declined to comment until I was able to review the blog post in question and consulted with our staff on the details of our funding over the past several years,” Wallis explained. “Instead, I answered in the spirit of the accusation and did not recall the details of our funding over the decade in question.” Wallis denied that Sojourners is “beholden to funders on the political left” and instead promotes “biblical social justice.”

Of course, as is obvious to anybody who has been paying attention, “social justice” is simply a euphemism for a leftist political agenda.

Somehow “social justice” does not include letting people keep most of the money they work for and earn. It doesn’t include school choice. It doesn’t include protecting the unborn. It doesn’t include protecting the religious freedom of Christians (although it’s gung ho about the religious freedom of Muslims and atheists).

It includes only stuff that’s part of the standard liberal agenda, and indeed includes virtually all of the standard liberal agenda.

Nobody has a trademark on the label “evangelical.” Thus anybody can use the term to try to bamboozle people who want to vote for candidates who share the values of Christians, and support issues that embody those values.

But it’s a fundamentally dishonest exercise. And if it ever worked, it’s not going to work much longer.

What Soros has done would be quickly recognized as a dirty trick in any political campaign. Imagine a Republican candidate recruiting people to pretend to be liberal Democrats and then start attacking his opponent from a “liberal Democratic” perspective. This, in fact, is no different from what atheist Soros has done.

Are the Quakers Going Pagan?

From Christianity Today:

When his partner died in 2004, Kevin-Douglas Olive reached a crossroads in his faith. Even though he had been a Quaker for almost two decades and put his trust in Jesus, he began to explore other ways of tapping into the divine.

“I had this experience of (my partner) after death, and he spoke to me and woke me up out of my sleep,” Olive says. “It freaked me out, because I really didn’t believe in that stuff; . . . my faith in God had disappeared when my partner died.”

He started to explore Wicca, a nature-based pagan religion, surrounding himself with pentacles, candles and incense. But that didn’t stick. “It seemed like more make-believe on top of the Christian make-believe,” he says. “I was rejecting one; I didn’t want to bring in another.”

Even after Olive found his way back to Jesus, he retained some elements of paganism. While he upholds the standard traditions of his local Quaker meeting hall, he privately incorporates pagan ritual into his prayer.

He’s part of a small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan — a trend that may or may not exist in other Christian traditions, but certainly not in such an organized, public fashion.

Across the board, the number of Quakers is dwindling, to roughly 100,000 in the U.S. But if Quakerism continues to catch on among the estimated half million pagans in the U.S., those who embrace both traditions predict that could reverse the Quakers’ downward trend. Still, some Quakers worry about losing their own traditions through the process of accepting new ones.

In the last decade, this dual faith has sprung up around the country, including Quaker-pagan gatherings, seminars, an extensive presence on the Internet, and even explicitly Quaker-pagan congregations. There may be only several hundred Quaker pagans, but among American Quakers, their presence can be distinctly felt.

“It seems that now, in most liberal meetings at least, you can always find a few members that identify as pagan,” says Stasa Morgan-Appel of Ann Arbor, Mich., who has facilitated a Quaker pagan interest group since 2002.

Quakers — officially the Religious Society of Friends — are divided into four main branches, three of which are explicitly Christian. Pagans have been generally joining the liberal fourth branch, the Friends General Conference, which counts 30,000 members in North America, including Morgan-Appel.

Liberal Quakers are less tied to the Christianity and instead hold established Quaker practices, such as unprogrammed pastor-less meetings, as the basis of their faith. Because of that flexibility, many liberal Quakers no longer see Jesus as divine, and some don’t believe in God at all.

It may seem strange that pagans would join the Quakers, which began in the 1600s with strong anti-pagan sentiment. Founder George Fox even altered the days of the week because of their pagan roots. To this day, Quakers refer to Sunday as First Day, Monday as Second Day and so on.

Witnessing about Jesus in Olive’s meeting has become infrequent. “People here come from so many different places, spiritually,” he says. “Meetings can be very quiet, as many people are afraid to voice views that others might not hold to be true. We talk about God, but we don’t really put a name to him or her.”

Unitarian-Universalist Pagans

Sometimes, one runs across a web page that one assumes to be a parody.

And sometimes, it turns out to be entirely serious.

Thus it was with Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. The page exclaims:

Welcome to CUUPS!!

Explore the beauty of Pagan, Goddess, and Earth-centered spiritualities woven together with Unitarian Universalism.

The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, Inc. (CUUPS) is an Independent Affiliate of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA). The Statement of Purpose in our bylaws states that CUUPS exists to enable:

• Networking among Pagan-identified UUs; providing outreach of Unitarian Universalism to the broader Pagan community continentally.
• Providing educational materials on Paganism for Unitarian Universalist congregations and the general public.
• Promoting Pagan - Jewish & Christian dialogue; encouraging the development of theo/alogical and liturgical materials based on earth and nature centered religious and spiritual perspectives.
• Encouraging greater use of music, dance, visual arts, poetry, story, and creative ritual in Unitarian Universalist worship and celebration.
• Providing support for Pagan-identified UU religious professionals and ministerial students; and fostering healing relationships with our mother the Earth and all her children.

OK, does it still look like a parody?

Well . . . the official Unitarian-Universalist web site has the following blurb:

There are many Wiccans, witches, Pagans, and people with other earth-based spiritualities who lead and worship in Unitarian Universalist congregations. At last count, 19 percent of our members identified with an Earth/Nature centered faith. This is one of the fastest-growing groups within our faith.

The sources of inspiration for the UU faith are too many to be counted, but delegates from each congregation have agreed that one of the predominant sources of our faith is, “Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.”

In addition to modern Paganism, many Unitarian Universalists find spiritual inspiration in other forms of nature-based spirituality, including simple seasonal reverence, modern Transcendentalism, and other nature-honoring paths.

The Unitarians, of course, consider themselves open, tolerant, inclusive and non-dogmatic.

But at what point does not standing for anything become itself a dogmatic principle?