Yurica Responds to Stanley Kurtz Attack

[Yurica Report Editor's Note: For another scandalous piece that Stanley Kurtz has written see, "Scary Stuff," his deconstruction of Harper's Magazine articles (May, 2005 issue). Click here on this image:

where you'll find it. And read Jeffrey Sharlet's Soldiers of Christ, Inside America's most powerful megachurch. It's now available on line at Harper's. Don't miss this piece! Click on this image to go there:

Stanley Kurtz did his best. In an article titled, “Dominionist Domination,” published May 2, 2005 by National Review Online, he tried to attack and crumble the reasoning in my essay, “The Despoiling of America.” He didn’t have much to work with, so as a last resort he made up things. He invented an essay that does not exist and said, “See! Look at what she wrote!” Then he gave a list of the imaginary faults in his newly rewritten essay and attributed them to me!

Heck. Anyone can do that. And to be charitable, he probably doesn’t even know that the Yurica Report is run by two born again Christian ladies who live on Social Security and that my mom is way up there in her 80’s! He probably doesn’t know that I drove my 1967 VW bug for 38 years until it gave up the ghost last month. And well, that fact isn’t really important anyway, but while I’m listing his ignorance, I thought I would throw that in.

One of the great problems I find with the GOP propagandists who unleash a veritable barrage of negative accusations against liberals, Democrats and Christians, is their hobbled and lame logic. Invariably, it’s launched against anyone who is willing to say, “I’m a liberal because Jesus was a liberal.” Or, “I’m a Democrat because that party’s agenda comes much closer to measuring up to the guidelines Jesus laid out in the New Testament than any other political party in existence today.” For some reason those words are so inflammatory that the far right immediately labels these folks as an “Anti-Christian Jihad” as Robert Novak recently did in his column.[1] It’s the logic they use that bugs me!

I read a story by Monroe Beardsley, the logician, and I’ve never forgotten it. He said:

It’s as if whenever a Christian stands up and says to the so-called ‘Christian Right’ “Miss, your slip is showing,” or “The President doesn’t have any clothes on!” the right explodes with Lysenkoian logic and shouts back, “You’re vision has been impaired!”

Well, let’s take a look at what Stanley Kurtz has to say about me: He says, I wrote my essay “from the fever swamps of the Left.”[2] He has a whole list of things I’m supposed to have: “political paranoia,” “guilt by association,” and “flat-out looniness” for starters. He says, “Joe McCarthy’s got nothing on the good liberal folks who are warning us about a takeover by ‘Dominionists.’”

After admitting that he interwove my essay with someone else’s (who he doesn’t name) to make up the first page of his piece—he says, “The disturbing thing is that this sort of conspiratorial nonsense is being taken seriously by real media and political players!”

This may surprise you, but I agree with him—no one in their right mind should pay attention to Stanley’s creation, let alone “real media” and “political players!”

And then Stanley finally got to the heart of his message: He says, “we,” presumably, we at the “lefty site” of the Yurica Report use “sleight-of- hand to tar ordinary evangelicals with the madcap musings of a few fevered Dominionists.”

Stanley says, [Yurica] takes “the bogus and pathetic claims of influence of a fringe group and exaggerates even those bogus claims beyond recognition!” You see, Stanley thinks the Dominionist movement in the churches is merely a “fringe group” making “bogus claims.” He’s forgotten that Pat Robertson ran for president and set up the Christian Coalition that sends out 40 to 50 million voting card records across the U.S. to influence Christian voters. The situation conjures up Mr. Bush’s hysterical response in the debates with John Kerry: “Tell that to Tony Blair! You think Tony Blair is just a fringe group! You think Great Britain is just a token country!” (Or words to that effect.)

That’s right—Mr. President—now tell that to Stanley Kurtz. Tell him that the Dominionist movement wasn’t started by a handful of unknowns! It was started and led by evangelicals Pat Robertson,[3] Billy Graham,[4] Tim LaHaye,[5] and Jerry Falwell,[6] all of whom appeared (in person or in a clip) on Robertson’s 700 Club Show in 1985 and 1986 and stated the goal was to take over every elective office in America. They said there are 110,000 Bible believing churches in America and if each one would launch one candidate who won office there would be more “Christians” in office than there are offices since there are only about 97,000 elective positions in the country. And at the time this idea was launched nationally, Robertson’s 700 Club topped the Nielsen ratings with a projected monthly audience of 27.8 million viewers! That is not a fringe group Stanley.

I must have scared Stanley because he went on: “Yurica’s wild-eyed and strange and wouldn’t be worth mentioning—except she spoke at a conference” and she “supplements her own accounts with quotes from Harper’s Magazine.” Stanley says, I’m just attacking “Conservative Christians!”

Stanley Kurtz admits that he is not a Christian.[7] But we know it right away because there’s no such thing as a “Conservative Christian” in the Bible! In fact the word “conservative” doesn’t appear in the Bible at all. (Now it just so happens that the word “liberal” does show up in the Bible! But we won’t make too much of that—only to point out that Stanley Kurtz just doesn’t know about these things.)

But by his own account, Stanley Kurtz is a Jewish neo-conservative who works prodigiously as a columnist. He has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University.[8] He’s a fellow of the Hoover Institute.[9] He’s been in the forefront of a fight to reform the funding of Middle East Studies,[10] and to defeat gay marriage in America (because he feels it will destroy all marriages),[11] and he’s been in the forefront of the battle that tries to explain why liberalism is an anti-Christian “religion.”[12] (Again, the poor fellow is just over his head when it comes to explaining the Bible and Christianity to his readers.)

His problem is of course that he doesn’t know a lot about the Bible or about Christianity, particularly the homely Pentecostal kind—or the evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity that millions of Americans believe in. He doesn’t appear to know a single thing about what Jesus taught and who Jesus associated with. This is all so strange a development, considering the positions he has taken. Bizarre is perhaps a better word. You see, he thinks “liberal” philosophy is anti-Christian[13]—when if he’d just do a little reading—he’d find that Jesus originated liberalism and God promoted liberalism in the Old Testament. But for Stanley Kurtz to come face to face with a real Bible believing, spirit filled, water baptized believer—he would have to junk all his clever stories and anti-Christian agenda—and if he did all that—he would lose all his power and probably his job! (We need to pray for him.)

When Stanley Kurtz talks about “liberalism” in the historic sense—he especially wants to divert his readers from thinking about “liberalism” in the Bible! All the folks who want us to vote against our Christian beliefs have to do this—else we’d know we’d be sinning when we voted to elect folks who want to destroy the very heart and soul of the message Jesus brought to humanity. So Stanley Kurtz and our backslid preachers, like Pat Robertson and you know all of those big time pastors and big time TV show hosts—they’ve got to get all America to forget what the whole Bible says! They may quote a few teeny verses here and there to get folks to believe that God hates the poor and to divert us from the tax system set up just for the purpose of establishing the biblical equivalent of social security, welfare, Medicare and Medicaid as described in the Bible—plus a God inspired immigration system as well—but their diversion just isn’t going to work. There’s too many old ladies on Social Security who’ve read the Bible once a year for almost every year they’ve been alive—and these little old ladies aren’t going to sit still anymore and let those hypocrites in Washington and on the TV shows lie about the Word of God! The old ladies of America who’ve got calloused knees because they’re prayer warriors—are rising now! We’re not going to take the lies about Jesus anymore!

Jesus has always been democratic! He has always said that all of the law is fulfilled in two verses: (you Saints know the ones I’m quotin’): that we are to love the Lord our God with our whole hearts, minds and souls and our neighbor as ourselves!!!! Now if you love your neighbor as yourself—your neighbor has the right to speak and we have the obligation to listen: that’s Democracy! Your neighbor also has the right to vote! Your neighbor also has to have all the rights that you have—even if he’s despised by some—even if he’s gay, even if he’s a Muslim—else you don’t love your neighbor as yourself! That’s Jesus talking—not me! See Jesus created equality with that verse. These so-called conservative folks want to create elitism. They don’t want to feed and clothe the poor and to pay taxes for that purpose. They want power they won’t grant to you and me. That’s not Jesus talking! That’s another voice. That’s not Christianity—that’s the spirit of anti-Christ.

Oh Stanley, Stanley, how far you’ve gone by twisting the truth of Jesus! Honey, it’s not too late for you! Jesus is standing and waiting for you to come home right now! Come home to Truth! He’s waitin’ for you.

Endnotes: Click on the endnote number to return you to the text.

[1] Novak, Robert, "Baseball Politics" http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/printrn20050326.shtml

[2] Kurtz, Stanley, “Dominionist Domination: the Left runs with a wild theory,” May 2, 2005, National Review on line (http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/kurtz/kurtz200505020944.asp

[3]Yurica, Katherine, “The Despoiling of America,” The Yurica Report, February 11, 2004. Pat Robertson is quoted on page 21: “God’s plan is for His people, ladies and gentlemen to take dominion…What is dominion? Well, dominion is Lordship. He wants His people to reign and rule with Him…but He’s waiting for us to…extend His dominion…And the Lord says, ‘I’m going to let you redeem society. There’ll be a reformation….We are not going to stand for those coercive utopians in the Supreme Court and in Washington ruling over us any more. We’re not gonna stand for it. We are going to say, ‘we want freedom in this country, and we want power…’”

[4] Ibid. See text above footnote 17 in “The Despoiling of America” for the Billy Graham quote. “[T]he time has come when evangelicals are going to have to think about getting organized corporately….I’m for evangelicals running for public office and winning if possible and getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch of government. I think if we leave it to the other side we’re going to be lost. I would like to see every true believer involved in politics in some way shape or form.”

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_ednref16

[5] Ibid. See the Tim LaHaye quote at endnote 14 of “The Despoiling of America” essay; La Haye appeared on the show in a clip with Phyllis Schlafly. “Tim LaHaye predicted on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show on September 25, 1985 that 110,000 evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal churches could sponsor one person per church to run for office and win, that in a decade they would hold every office in the U.S. At the time, he said there were only 97,000 public offices in the U.S. so “we would have more Christians in office than there are positions.” By 1994, for the first time in forty years, Republicans regained control of Congress.

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm#_edn14

[6]Ibid. Jerry Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club Show on April 24, 1986 and made essentially the same statement that LaHaye made one year earlier. See above Tim LaHaye quote.

[7] Kurtz, Stanley, “Getting Nervous? Middle East Specialists (try to) defend their clique.” January 28, 2003, National Review Online (http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/kurtz/kurtz012803.asp

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ferrara, Christopher A., “Common Sense Catholicism – from a Jewish Columnist,” http://www.fatimaperspectives.com/cs/perspective233.asp

[12] Kurtz, Stanley, “The Church of the Left,” National Review, Dec. 12, 2002. http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=874

[13] Ibid.

A Short Review of Katherine Yurica's
Rebuttal of Stanley Kurtz' Attack
By Lee Laurais

These days, when I hear someone describe him or herself as a
Christian, I'm apt to duck behind the piano as I expect that I'm in
the presence of a war-mongering, gay-bashing, profiteering, violence-
prone, right wing yahoo who couldn't care less about the poor, the
outcast and the marginalized and who would happily trade his or her
birthright of freedom and decency for the mess of pottage that our
decadent, irresponsible, national leadership has gotten us into.