On Friday I posted clips from a conference call hosted early last week by Jim Garlow, Chairman of Newt Gingrich's Renewing American Leadership, and organizer of the Pray and Act campaign, which featured the likes of Chuck Colson, Lou Engle, Maggie Gallagher, and Harry Jackson all discussing the importance of the Pray and Act effort heading into the mid-term elections.
Last night, these same leaders once again join Garlow, this time for a live webcast from Washington DC that also featured Walter Hoyle, Chuck Stetson, James Robison, Samuel Rodriquez, Jordan Lorence of the Alliance Defense Fund, Lance Wallnau, Tony Perkins, and Richard Land.
The event itself had just a few handfuls of people in attendance, but it was broadcast by GodTV and I spent my Sunday evening watching it so I could bring you the highlights.
Most of event was standard Religious Right fare, with leaders discussing the paramount importance of fighting abortion and saving marriage as people like Colson marveled at that we are now celebrating homosexuality which, just a few decades ago, was "shameful and embarrassing":
Thirty years ago now, I was running the 1972 presidential political campaign and we were accused, those of you who remember the history of the Nixon era, we were accused of lots of dirty tricks. And one of them was that I had planted gays in the campaign of the President's opponent, Senator George McGovern. I didn't, but I was accused of it because that would have been a dirty trick.
Today, we're celebrating what just 35 years ago was considered something shameful and embarrassing. We're not only celebrating it, we're taking an institution which has been the foundation building block of society and civilized societies going back as far in history as we can go back - a man and a woman joined together as God says as one flesh - and we're saying we want to re-define that.
I don't know about you guys, but you'll never hear me say "gay marriage" again because there is no such thing. There can't be gay marriage. Marriage is a man and a woman. The fact of the matter is you can't have anything called gay marriage. From now on to me it's "so-called gay marriage" or its "civil union" or whatever you want to call it, but it's not marriage.
And then, of course, there was Lou Engle just being Lou Engle as he got revved up about how fasting and prayer can finally reverse the forty year rebellion set off in 1969 with the release of "the Stonewall homosexual movement":
I feel like this is a defining moment in American history. I feel like we're in a moment when epochs have got to turn. In the Scriptures you see the power of the forty day fast to change spiritual eras.
Moses fasted forty days and the law of God was released into the Earth.
Elijah fasted forty days at a time when they had legalized child sacrifice and homosexual and heterosexual prostitution in the days of Ahab and Jezebel. But it was in that darkest hour that God raised up its greatest prophetic movement as well.
God is not done with America. and when that spell of Jezebel ruled over the land, promoting sexual immorality all over the place, God releases a forty day fast through Elijah. With the spell of Jezebel and the discouragement of those who were reformers, God breaks that thing with a forty day fast and releases a whole new era with a movement to release the next religious leaders, spiritual leaders, and political leaders as God ripped through that land and purged Baal worship at that time.
God's the same yesterday, today, and forever. I believe we're at the end of the forty year rebellion of the Sixties. 1969: the Stonewall homosexual movement was released. 69: Woodstock. Forty years from that point, I dare to believe that if they church will take this time seriously in fasting and prayer, we can actually begin to fulfill what a generation has failed in for forty years.
In the very first post I wrote about Pray and Act, I noted how 7 Mountains Dominionism was at the heart of the organization's agenda and pointed to a clip of the leading 7 Mountains advocate, Lance Wallnau, explaining how Christians must take control of these specific areas in order to lay the groundwork for the return of Christ.
In case that wasn't clear enough, last night Garlow actually included Wallnau in the webcast and Wallnau made the case that Christians are in a war for control of these 7 Mountains and the object of this war is permanent occupation:
While we've been trying to preach, secular forces have been educating America. We didn't lose the homosexual argument over night. Twenty-five years, from Chuck Colson's testimony 'til now, tells me that it wasn't because of something we did, it's because of something we failed to do: we didn't influence media and arts. When you've got media and arts, you've got a pulpit going twenty-four hours a day educating your children on values. We didn't educate ourselves regarding the judiciary and so political appointments were made - and we always focus on politicians, we got ga ga at election time, forgetting politicians are the spoil of a different battle; it's the battle of influence.
We have superior weapons, a superior message, and superior power. When it comes to being able to move forward in this, we've got evidence all over the place of how transformation can happen, but it starts with this: clarity is power.
If Christians don't understand that power isn't just in us in the church, there is an authority that is in government, there is an authority in arts and media, there's an authority in family - I look at those as seven spheres where God has to raise up champions.
Napoleon's maxim is "the object of war is victory." You know what we do, we get so dumb - we're supposed to be wise as a serpent and as harmless as doves but we end up being as dumb as a doorknob in lacking the shrewdness we need. When we have elections, when we have victories, short-term victories, we go back and celebrate it like that's it. Well, here's what Napoleon says about warfare: the object of war is victory, but the objective of victory is occupation. We don't win until we occupy high places.
The way that governments and nations are formed is that minorities of people occupy strategic places of influence and they leverage that influence through leverage within networks that are closely, tightly knit together. The church has to become a Kingdom Force, leveraging its influence within greater spheres than just evangelism and then linking shields together. I believe, with prayer and fasting, we will see a freshly invigorated move of God in the United States.
Finally, I want to highlight something that Garlow has been pushing for some time now, which is to intimately link "biblical economics" to the social issues that normally motivate the Religious Right. Garlow is impassioned about the book "Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem" by Jay W. Richards and has been telling anyone who will listen to buy multiple copies of the book for themselves and their friends. So it was no surprise that Garlow brought the subject up during the webcast:
If we have 535 people in Washington, DC - House and Senate - who are voting through laws that cause grandchildren and great-grandchildren of yours yet unborn to be saddled with a debt they cannot handle, that is called thievery.
There's a law against stealing: Thou shalt not steal. We have no right to steal from future generations. So the whole economic issue is a biblical issue.
Debt like we have in America is immoral. It is wrong. There should be a screaming up. This could cause a suffocation and a complete destruction of all we hold dear. The taxation is becoming oppressive.
The reason that we have these kind of bad laws passing in our Congress is very simple: what percentage of the people making the laws are attending a church where the Bible is being taught? Let me go further though: if it's a small percentage that are there, let's just pick an arbitrary number - 10%, 15%, 20% - are attending a church where the Bible is being taught, let me ask you a question, how many of them are going to a church where biblical economics is being taught so the person who goes to make the laws has the moral foundation, the biblical background, to be able to vote through the right kind of laws? We have been silent and I believe the spirit of God is stirring something at a deep level.
Finally, to get a sense of just how Garlow sees the interconnection between economic and social issues, he explains how legal abortion is causing today's unemployment problems:
When I find people who don't morally get it on the issue of abortion, I appeal that way you just appealed. When you consider when abortion started, how many years have passed, the people who were originally killed now would have been having children who were up to the age fifteen. So we have lost massive numbers of people [and] when I'm with unemployed people who believe in abortion, I say "one of the reasons you're unemployed is because there are no houses being bought, there are not cars being purchased, there are no schools being built for people who've been killed. You don't have a job today, in part, because of the massive slaughter of humanity."
People don't understand, it's an economic issue. There's a reason God said be fruitful and multiply. He was serious about that.
