Good Christians think you are FULL OF IT!
The demonstration of solidarity with Israel is consistent with a long-standing alliance with that country, which Christians consider a part of the biblical Holy Land.
cnn.com
Christian Coalition: Vote and vote conservative
Once-powerful political force aims to raise national profile
Friday, October 11, 2002 Posted: 5:29 PM EDT (2129 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Christian
Coalition leaders fired up the
faithful Friday with a pro-Israel rally
and a pitch to renew the group's
power by rousting out the vote in
November for conservative
candidates.
"Get the few liberals out. If you don't do it,
it ain't gonna be done," Sen. James
Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, told the crowd at the
Washington Convention Center. "You will
be doing the Lord's work, and he will
richly bless you for it."
"Faith with Action" was the public theme
of the coalition's Road to Victory
conference, which opened Friday. The
underlying purpose of the three-day event
was to raise the Christian Coalition's
profile after a string of setbacks and to turn its claimed 2 million supporters into
voters on November 5.
The conservative activist group and its new president, Roberta Combs, are battling a
widespread perception that the coalition is far less a political force than it was in the
mid-1990s.
Combs, a longtime coalition organizer from Hanahan, South Carolina, took over the
group in December after founder Pat Robertson said he wanted to spend more time
on his ministry.
"I think that as long as we're here, we'll also have influence," Combs said this week
in an interview, after months of avoiding media contact. "We're still here; we're still
involved."
Some people assumed the coalition was disappearing as a political force. Director
Ralph Reed left in 1997 to become a Republican activist in Georgia and became
chairman of the state party last year. In 1999, the Internal Revenue Service ruled
against the coalition's tax-exempt status, which forced it to reorganize. Robertson's
depa rture last December was a blow.
Reed's party chairmanship became a symbol of what has happened to the Christian
conservative movement.
Part of the reason for the Christian Coalition's lower profile, however, is its success.
Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, after 40 years of Democratic
majorities. Seventy million voter guides and 1 million get-out-the-vote calls helped
elect George W. Bush president in 2000.
Bush sends video
Bush sent the convention a videotaped
message Friday, greeting the Christian
conservatives and promising an
administration that would advocate the
group's key agenda items: anti-abortion
activism, low taxes, limited government
and judges who don't legislate.
The demonstration of solidarity with Israel
is consistent with a long-standing
alliance with that country, which
Christians consider a part of the biblical
Holy Land.
So with an ally in the White House and "the largest and best-equipped lobbying team
in coalition history," the group opened its annual meeting with messages designed
to motivate.
The notion of separating church and state with such policies as disallowing prayer in
public schools "is a deception from Satan," said Joyce Meyer, a convention sponsor.
"If God is in fact separated from the government, then we can never possibly have a
godly government," Meyer said to a standing ovation. "There's no way for America to
be good if she's not godly."
Meyer, head of Joyce Meyer Ministries of Fenton, Missouri, said activists probably will
find more spiritual awareness in the aftermath of the "wake-up call" of the Sept. 11,
2001, terror attacks. God did not cause the attacks, she said, but they should teach
the country a lesson.
"If we don't obey God, God's protection is lifted," Meyer said. |
