Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion
By John C. Dorhauer
What you are about to read is going to sound like some wild conspiracy theory. That’s because it is. It is a theory. It’s about a conspiracy. And it’s pretty wild.
I didn’t believe it myself until all the research I and others uncovered led me to see that, beyond a doubt, some Christians are being trained to infiltrate other Christians’ churches in order to foment dissent and silence voices that oppose their very restrictive views on the great moral issues of our day.
The research culminated in a book I co-authored with The Rev. Sheldon Culver: Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion.
One of the first times I got an insight into the power, reach and indignities of these conspirators was the night of my first book signing. I was in Brooklyn, standing on a street corner waiting for my publisher to come pick me up and take me to Manhattan for the signing. My son called my mobile phone and asked if I had any access to wifi. I had my laptop, but was standing on the street. I checked, and the bodega behind me had a signal I could use.
My son said, “Go to Steeplejacking.com.” I told him I didn’t have a website for the book. He said, “Dad, just go there.” So I did.
Standing right there on the street corner, with traffic flying by outside that bodega, I logged onto a website I did not build: steeplejacking.com. What I found surprised the heck out of me. It was a blank page with black background. There was a continuous scroll that simply read in stark, white letters: “Steeplejacking: Don’t believe in conspiracies.”
The irony was that reading that scroll proved the conspiracy. They had bought the domain names for steepljacking.com, .org, and .net.
At the center of this conspiracy is a group called the Institute on Religion and Democracy located in Washington, D.C. It is directed by a former CIA-trained psych-ops agent named Mark Tooley, The IRD is funded by heavy hitters from the neo-conservative side of the political right. Those benefactors don’t care a whole lot about religion or faith. What they care about is that every social justice movement in this country has been fueled, funded and fostered by religious leaders with a conscience, a pulpit and a congregation.
The IRD was built and funded by these benefactors with deep pockets to create propaganda, rehearse talking points tested in focus groups, identify wedge issues (issues that would generate the most virulent anger and foment the greatest controversy), train and deploy operatives to foment dissent both in local congregations and at wider church gatherings, author and circulate documents that articulate their doctrine and orthodoxy, deploy their staff to attend church gatherings of progressive leaders and then write screeds to their minions that would describe these opponents as evil and heretical.
Political funders with unchecked ambitions and deep pockets bought into the design and mission of the IRD. They were growing weary of religious leaders with a conscience and a voice who could and who did build movements to free slaves, give women the vote, create labor unions, end Jim Crow, and threaten to legalize same-gender marriage.
The creation of the IRD was a covert attempt on their part to minimize the impact that religious leaders and bodies have had to bend the arc of history slowly towards justice. And it worked. They were founded in the early 1980s and have been functioning ever since with very little interference or notice from the churches, leaders and people most impacted by them.
Their work goes unnoticed and therefore largely unimpeded, both because they are practiced in the art of deception while denying all the things I and other researchers into their machinations have written about them, and because most of the audiences to whom I speak about these matters either refuse to believe this or lack the tenacity needed to combat their tactics.
One of the researchers with whom I worked was a gifted leader, the United Methodist preacher and clinical psychologist, Andrew Weaver. We traveled the country together, leading workshops on our discoveries and training church leaders to defend themselves against these attacks. He used to say this: “These guys are playing tackle football, and we are playing touch. We are going to lose this game every time.”
The first time I spoke with Andrew was at a gathering in St. Louis, well before the book was written and when we were still developing the research to back the theory. I was working with churches there that were being attacked from within by their own members. They couldn’t figure out why this was happening to them. We called our clergy together to speak about what we were learning.
The night before, I got a call from a TV journalist representing the show 20/20. They wanted to know if they could bring a camera in to cover our meeting with clergy the next day. I had no idea how they had found out about this. Nor could I yet understand why a national news crew in New York wanted to attend a meeting of local clergy in St. Louis. I was only beginning to get a sense of how big this thing is – and that call confirmed for me what was truly at stake.
Sure enough, that journalist was there the next day with her cameraman. As the workshop began, Andrew Weaver was talking about the IRD. Ten minutes in, he stopped short. A young man I did not know had walked into the room. Andrew, having stopped his presentation, said, “Meet John Lomperis. He works for the IRD. He’s here to slander us on the IRD website tomorrow.”
Sure enough, that’s who that was and that’s what he did. A 20/20 crew from New York and an IRD agent from Washington, D.C. came to track our gathering. Something was going on here.
For years after that, every time I went to speak about the book and tell the story of the conspiracy, someone from the IRD was there to track me and misrepresent on their website everything I said the next day.
Another key insight came during my visits to rural churches, suburban churches and urban churches whom I knew were not in any way related to each other denominationally or otherwise. They all were living through the same phenomenon: fights were erupting, arguments were proliferating, votes were being called for, and otherwise healthy and happy churches were being split apart. Here is what we found: No matter where we went, they all had the same handouts. When we asked them where they got them, they were circumspect. “Oh, we found them on the internet.”
That was the key that set us on the right course. We suspected someone out there was producing and circulating these documents. As we researched further, our first suspicion that some entity was orchestrating this was verified. It took us the better part of two years to figure out the work and purposes of IRD.
We found documents that promised their funders that they, the IRD, would train operatives to: write and circulate documents that called for their own understanding of strict bibilical orthodoxy; to infiltrate churches posing as new members, getting on boards, making motions at annual meetings, and forcing pastors to take positions consistent with IRD Bible teachings; to attend denominational gatherings and present resolutions forcing bodies to vote for positions on abortion or gay marriage or other wedge issues.
We warehoused and catalogued hundreds of documents that were circulated in our churches. These documents were used to discredit the denomination and foster hatred toward its leaders. We uncovered individual operatives functioning covertly in our churches. We wrote protocols and strategies for how clergy and key leaders should deal with these machinations.
We connected with investigative journalists like Fred Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle between Theocracy and Democracy and ongoing editor of the website, Talk2action. We met with Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, whose own research both deepened and confirmed what we had discovered.
We proved the theory – and it was wild. The IRD are still operating. They have the desire to mitigate and minimize the impact that religion has on social justice movements that impede the ambitions of their benefactors. They do it because they feel empowered by God to silence voices that do not conform to their own narrow theologies.
Like inquisitors from the past, they believe the church must be purified of heretics. Functioning with an “the ends justify the means” ethic, they continue to infiltrate our churches with their trained operatives. They distort the teachings of mainstream religion. They continue to do this largely unnoticed by religious bodies who suffer because of their machinations, but who remain largely ignorant of their work and are functionally blind to their existence.
They continue to play tackle football while we play touch. And, yes, we are losing this game. We are losing it badly.
— Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer is General Minister and President of the United Churches of Christ.
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