Truth Wins Out’s acclaimed Center Against Religious Extremism (TWOCARE), offers original, in-depth, and on-site reporting.
“Please, come join us,” insisted an attractive college student flashing her bright Aquafresh smile.
Before I was able to decline her friendly invitation I was gently pulled into a large prayer circle of thirty or so Charismatic Christians. “I’m sorry my hand is sweaty,” the girl said with a sheepish grin.
Those were the last words she spoke that I understood. We quickly surrounded a handful of young preachers who whooped and hollered before surrendering English for the unintelligible language of tongues. The manic participants sounded like a cross between a prayer service and a Native American tribe preparing for battle.
Eventually, they raised their hands toward the sky pointing to God, which allowed me to escape and enter the seating area at Ford Field, where Lou Engle, founder of The Call, had gathered 27,000 fundamentalist Christians from across the nation on 11.11.11, a date that came to him in what he believes to be a divinely inspired vision. The majority of the crowd was Caucasian, however a significant number were African American. There was a large youth component, but the age of participants reached across the spectrum.
While I can’t speak for the entire conference, which was a 24-hour call to fast and prayer, I did spend 14 hours at Ford Field watching sermons, surveying sideshows, videotaping the gathering, and interacting with the hyped-up crowd. So, my observations, while not complete, do offer a significant snapshot of the 11.11.11 Detroit rally.
In a press release prior to the event I wrote that I expected 11.11.11 Detroit to be a “gay bashing” and “Muslim trashing” extravaganza. After all, The Call had chosen Detroit as its rally site in an effort to convert the region’s estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Muslims.
The Associated Press reported that Apostle Ellis Smith, Engle’s local “point person” for The Call, referred to Islam in a sermon leading up to the revival as a “false,” “lame” and “perverse” religion.
Engle had previously held an infamous event in Uganda that whipped up anti-gay hysteria. In 2008, the electrifying preacher organized a rally at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium in support of Proposition 8, a successful measure to prohibit marriage equality in California.
To my surprise, the festivities, which were aired on God TV, were appreciably toned down. Sure, there was red meat on the menu, but it was not the all-you-can-eat buffet that I had come to expect from Engle and other leaders of the 7 Mountains Movement (aka The New Apostolic Reformation) that he is a key part of.
Indeed, most of the aspersions on Friday evening and Saturday were deliberately cast though euphemism. Homosexuality was never explicitly mentioned, but was instead lumped together with other “sins” under the umbrella of “sexual immorality.” Other times, speakers camouflaged their anti-gay agenda by simply saying they supported “traditional marriage.” During the entire time I observed the event there was not one reference to healing homosexuality and no “ex-gays” were trotted up on the stage to tell tales of how they “prayed away the gay.”
However, the Detroit Free Press reported that Apostle Smith claimed that at the event, “a lesbian came from the homosexual community and said she has never experienced such love. And she is now working to change her lifestyle.”
(I’m sure this alleged lesbian was very stable and well adjusted because it is common for healthy and secure LGBT people to spend weekends attending revivals that consider them demonic.)
The conversion of Muslims was also downplayed and “Dearborn,” referring to the Detroit suburb with perhaps the nation’s largest Muslim population, euphemistically replaced the word “Islam.”
It took several hours to figure out what was really going on – but I gasped when the disturbing pattern finally revealed itself. This elaborate show had all the trappings of a modern religious revival – from the thumping music to the two gargantuan video screens suspended above the enraptured audience. But this ostensibly religious event was little more than a political front.
Its real aim was to peel African American support away from the Democratic Party in a swing state during a critical election year. Not only is President Barack Obama’s reelection at stake, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow is locked in a tight race that includes social conservative and former GOP Rep. Peter Hoekstra. This cynical revival was not about “values” — it was about votes. It was not about worship, but winning office for Republicans by promoting what writer Ed Kilgore called in The New Republic, a “big-God, small-government creed.”
The amazing part was that the audience seemed totally unaware of the underlying motives and machinations. After all, the words “Democrat” and “Republican” were never spoken and there was only one local politician identified on-stage. It seemed that even some of the minor speakers might not have been privy to the overarching strategy. Nonetheless, a brilliant display of political subterfuge was unfolding as the oblivious crowd bopped to Christian rock with their hands swaying above their heads.
This is not the first attempt of white fundamentalists to lure black voters away from the Democratic Party. Immediately following the 2004 presidential election, social conservatives made a strong push to lure African-Americans. Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center hate group, The Traditional Values Coalition, hosted a right wing meeting of 70 black religious leaders in Los Angeles.
“In 2004, the religious right was concerned about re-electing George W. Bush,” said Al Sharpton at First Iconium Baptist Church. “They couldn’t come to black churches to talk about the war, about health care, about poverty. So they did what they always do and reached for the bigotry against gay and lesbian people.”
Unbelievably, at the Los Angeles meeting Sheldon played an anti-gay video featuring disgraced Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. Remember, Lott had to step down as Senate Majority Leader after he publicly pined over Strom Thurmond not winning the presidency as a Dixiecrat. African-American columnist Leonard Pitts put Sheldon’s power grab in perspective:
“Whether the issue was slavery, segregation, lynching, voting rights or housing discrimination, social conservatives have always taken a position that history later judged to be ignorant and flat-out wrong….which leaves me at a loss to understand why any African American possessed of a functioning brain would give this atavistic bunch the time of day.”
Still, the attempt was gaining some momentum until Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, which badly frayed the burgeoning unholy alliance. The effort was further hampered by the emergence of Barack Obama as the Democratic standard bearer.
In this renewed effort in Detroit, Lou Engle and his minions were smart. They wisely figured out that direct attacks on the Democratic Party would not fly, nor would all-out verbal barrages against President Barack Obama, who still has strong African American support. They also understood that the baggage surrounding white Evangelical racism would have to be addressed and surmounted before real progress was made.
To overcome these obstacles and recruit African Americans to vote for the GOP they devised what seems like a five-part strategy.
1) Pick a key swing state with a beleaguered city that had an economically disadvantaged African American population
2) Create an emotional spectacle where tearful white people pleaded for forgiveness and repented onstage for past racism
3) Sharply define new wedge issue(s) and create a racially-based conspiracy theory that could ultimately be used against the Democratic Party
4) Exploit these emerging wedge issue(s) to the point they become more important than fixing the economy
5) Redefine voting criteria so candidates are primarily judged by where they stand on these wedge issue(s) – with the ultimate goal of leading many African Americans to conclude that they are best represented by the conservative GOP.
Lou Engle understands that much of Michigan is conservative. If he were able to peel off fifteen or twenty percent of Detroit’s black Democratic vote, he might be able to turn the state solidly red. The main wedge issue he selected to accomplish his plan is abortion. For good measure, he helped weave a conspiracy theory: Sinister white bigots who run programs like Planned Parenthood were using abortion to reduce African American birthrates.
“What Birmingham is to the civil rights movement, Detroit is to abortion,” bellowed Engle at the event. “Detroit has a calling…blacks and Latinos could lead the parade of history.”
Engle’s message was aided by a parade of socially conservative African American ministers. One preached that black people must choose “BC (Biblical Correctness) over PC (Political Correctness).” The subtext was that the pro-life GOP is on the side of the Bible and thus should be the party of African Americans. Another pastor was even more explicit when he declared that African Americans had a choice: “God’s way or a political party’s way.” (Read More)
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