My wife forwarded to me a link that pointed to an excellent article that appeared on alternet.org.  Here are some quotes from the piece as well as the link:

“We’re literally coming to the gas tank and getting filled up,” Pastor Jeff calls out, and a ripple of assent goes through the room. “So how do we obtain help from God for our needs?” He jokes that he made 35 altar calls before he felt secure about his own salvation. “Now I know His ear is inclined to my prayer. How do I know that? Because I found it in Scripture! You pray for a good surgery and there’s a good surgery – is that a miracle? Of course it is! Because it could have been a bad surgery.”

When the music softens to a slow dance, the handsome young pastor, Frank Thompson, announces this Pentecostal church’s 10th anniversary celebration. “If the Enemy had his way, we’d have never gotten out of the living room,” he says. “About 30 adults paid $5,000 a month to rent a hotel room because the Enemy wanted to discourage us. But God kept us going. And when we got here, God said, ‘I am going to work another miracle for you, I am going to change your mortgage from $5,400 to $3,400 a month.”

He moves into his preaching: “Did you all know that Procter and Gamble is doing a massive hiring of homosexuals and lesbians? We’re supposed to be the ones receiving those people into church to get them changed. All the stuff they are trying to do to keep the church separate from the state, there’s just a massive effort by the Enemy to eradicate what this nation was founded on. You vote for who God tells you to vote for. Don’t be fooled by political rhetoric. As Oral Roberts said, this election is a spiritual battle. And it should not be motivated by whether we are at war or not. The Bible says there will always be wars. You need to be looking at morality issues, the stuff that destroys countries. You need to be paying attention to the homosexual and lesbian issues. Because the Enemy is on the offensive.”

“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit. …”

“One of the hallmarks of mainline Protestantism is that faith and thought are inextricably bound,” says Greenhaw. “But the institutions have secularized, the educational system has collapsed and the deep commitment to education has fallen apart. This incredibly thoughtful, stretching experience in which no question is too hard to ask, has become, ‘Don’t ask that question because I might have to come up with an answer and I don’t think I could.’”

“I feel like there is a lot of fear in the institutional church,” Wilding says suddenly. “I think they are afraid of being relevant, because they don’t understand the world we live in. Meanwhile, the Republican party has become so conservative Christian that people can look away if we are killing Muslims, because they are heathen. And that’s when I don’t want to be a part of any organized religion. To claim the moral high ground – to me, that’s when you’re in trouble, when you feel like you have God on your side.”

God On Their Side

By Jeannette Batz Cooperman, AlterNet. Posted October 28, 2004.

—–