We told you earlier this week how Gov. Rick Perry has employed a disturbing mix of faith and militancy in a note to conservative evangelical pastors. Gov. Perry wrote the note in an invitation for pastors to attend a Texas Restoration Project event in Austin next month. The governor isn’t the only person linked to the Texas Restoration Project who dips into the rhetorical well of militant Christianity. Another prominent speaker at the far-right group’s events has been the Rev. Rod Parsley of Ohio, who has said the mission of a Christian United States is to destroy Islam.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain welcomed Parsley’s support earlier this year, calling him a “spiritual guide.” But Parsley’s rhetoric has been so incendiary that McCain was finally forced to distance himself from the Ohio pastor. For a taste of that red-hot rhetoric, see the video clip below. (McCain’s repudiation of Parsley came later.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCy2yMarPqI&hl=en&fs=1]
You can read more about Parsley here and here and about his connection with the Texas Restoration Project in a Texas Freedom Network Education Fund report here. Gov. Perry, who claimed in his invitation to pastors that “radical jihadists” are out to destroy “our Judeo Christian heritage,” is very familiar with Parsley, and not just through the Texas Restoration Project. In 2005, Parsley spoke at a ceremony in a Fort Worth evangelical school at which Gov. Perry signed anti-abortion legislation and a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. Birds of a feather…
What about our secular/deist founding which is more accurate? The only mention of god or jc in an official US document is the treaty of tripoli where it’s acknowledged that “the US is not in any sense founded on the xian religion”.