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The American Renewal Project Wants to Mobilize Pastors For the Republican Party

By Yonat Shimron
american renewal project
On Oct. 31, 2022, pastors lay hands on and pray for Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson at an American Renewal Project luncheon in Jamestown, N.C. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has a message for the state’s evangelical pastors: Run for office.

Robinson has repeated his message at least eight times over the past few months at church luncheons across North Carolina hosted by the American Renewal Project, a group dedicated to mobilizing evangelical pastors to run for school boards, city councils, county commissions, the state legislature and beyond.

The project, which has hosted similar events in Iowa, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas, takes the now decades-long effort to get evangelicals engaged in electoral politics one step further. It seeks to bring pastors into elected office.

Robinson, a 54-year-old Republican and a first-time officeholder himself, said the nation needs pastors willing to fight a spiritual war in the halls of power.

“Step up,” he thundered to some 200 pastors and their wives munching on boxed lunches of Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches in Winston-Salem last month. “Join the fight. Don’t join the fight under man’s power. Join the fight under God’s power. Bring the principles of God, not the principles of politics. Bring his words with you.”

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If Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the Moral Majority to get evangelicals to lobby Congress on issues of morality, and if the Christian Coalition mobilized Christians to cast ballots, then the American Renewal Project wants pastors to run as candidates on the Republican Party ticket up and down the ballot.

Now in its 17th year, the project reorganized two years ago to focus on regional pastor luncheons in a handful of states. This year, eight of its 19 luncheons were held in North Carolina, drawing more than 1,500 pastors and their wives. The events were free, and no offerings were taken.

In addition to the lieutenant governor, each luncheon featured North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley, who promised the pastors that if they run, the party will provide them the logistical support they need.

“You’re really good at public speaking,” Whatley told the pastors at each meeting. “You’re great herding cats. God knows, you can raise money. You’re perfect.”

Driving the project is the Christian nationalist notion that America has strayed from its origins and needs to be restored to its Christian foundations.

“America was founded on the Judeo-Christian heritage and established a biblically based culture,” said David Lane, a Dallas, Texas, political operative who founded American Renewal Project. “We no longer have that. Secularism was officially crowned in the mid-20th century.”

Lane said evangelical donors have given him nearly $50 million since 2005 to support his project and convince pastors to take up the cause.

Those invited to recent luncheons come from various denominations. Most are Southern Baptist, charismatic or Pentecostal. The men — there are few, if any, women pastors — are overwhelmingly white. And despite the commonly used term Judeo-Christian, there are hardly any Catholics, and certainly no Jews.

Among those who spoke at most of the eight events across the state were two Baptist pastors on the Nov. 8 ballot. One is running, unopposed, for commissioner in Bladen County; the other is running for the North Carolina House in heavily Republican-leaning Randolph County. Barring a disaster, both will win.

american renewal project
On Oct. 31, 2022, as Gary Miller leads them in prayer, pastors lay hands on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson at an American Renewal Project luncheon in Jamestown, N.C. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

The two pastors peppered their on-stage appeals with biblical references. One cited Peter, Jesus’ disciple, finding the courage to get out of the boat during the storm. The other paraphrased the Book of Esther so beloved by evangelicals: “You’ve been brought into the kingdom for such a time as this.”

A common refrain at the American Renewal Project is that Jesus’ saying, “Upon this rock I will build my church,” is commonly misconstrued. The Greek word “ecclesia,” often translated as “church,” actually means “assembly.” American Renewal’s supporters take this as a sign that Jesus wanted Christians to have influence in the public square, not just inside the walls of a church.

Project leaders think the strategy is working. They claim 50 pastors ran for various North Carolina offices in this year’s primaries, and 25 won their nominations and will appear on this November’s ballots.

The Renewal Project did not, however, provide a list of those vying for public office, and only a handful could be independently verified. The group did not fund any the pastors’ campaigns.

One reason, for the middling response? Pastors haven’t seen public office as part of their call.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson campaigned to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 1988. Mike Huckabee, formerly a Baptist pastor and also former governor of Arkansas, also ran for president in 2008 and 2016. Neither came close to clinching the nomination.

It wasn’t until 1978 that it was even possible for pastors in all states to run. Historically, some states had clauses in their constitutions prohibiting clergy from running for office, a holdover from English common law. In McDaniel v. Paty, the Supreme Court struck down the last of those clauses, ruling that a Tennessee law prohibiting clergy members from serving as political delegates violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

“For much of the 19th and 20th centuries there was a general idea that ministerial service was a separate profession from politics and it was incompatible with running for office,” said Daniel Williams, professor of history at the University of West Georgia.

Black pastors have, at times, been the exception, and almost exclusively on the Democratic ticket. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., onetime pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, served as a Democratic U.S. congressman from 1945 until 1971. The Rev. Jesse Jackson ran unsuccessfully for president in 1984 and 1988. The Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, is now running for reelection to the U.S. Senate. In local races there have undoubtedly been many more.

american renewal project
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson addresses an American Renewal Project pastor luncheon on Oct. 31, 2022, in Jamestown, N.C. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, who is Black, is an exception. He captured the state’s second-highest elected office after a 2018 video that captured him admonishing the Greensboro City Council for attempting to cancel a biannual gun show went viral. Since winning office in 2020, he has defined himself as a culture warrior, decrying “transgenderism and homosexuality” as “filth,” calling for eliminating the state Board of Education and opposing abortion (though he acknowledged that he and his future wife terminated a pregnancy in 1989).

Most recently, Robinson mocked a brutal attack on U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in a Facebook post. “I’m sorry Paul I don’t believe you or the press!!!!” he wrote underneath an image of a Halloween costume for an “attacker” featuring a shirtless, grinning, hammer-wielding man wearing underwear.

Robinson, who is not a pastor, shares with the American Renewal Project a mythical vision of America’s founders. At this week’s pastor’s luncheon at a church in Jamestown, near Greensboro, he rhapsodized about the faith of the Mayflower Puritans and the pioneers who traveled west in covered wagons in search of land. There was no mention of the displacement of Native people or the enslavement of Blacks.

“Those people were made of something different,” Robinson bellowed. “Look at us now. You got people that can’t get around the corner of Walmart without GPS. We have literally forgotten how to do anything.”

At the end of Robinson’s 15-minute testimony, Gary Miller, the project’s director, asks pastors to get up and lay hands on the lieutenant governor and pray for him. For about two minutes, the pastors crowd around the stout, broad-chested Robinson. They lay hands on his back or lift their arms up in the air and pray out loud — a moment reminiscent of Trump’s Oval Office prayer circles.

american renewal project
Pastors surround and pray for North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson at a pastor luncheon hosted by the American Renewal Project in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Sept. 19, 2022. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

Renewal Project leaders do not take a public stand for former President Trump or unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Lane, the group’s founder, said he is not involved in helping reelect Trump and does not believe the election was stolen.

His fight, as he wrote in his weekly email, which he says is emailed to 80,000 pastors, is against “profane secularists and cultural Marxism.”

“If North Carolina Christians stay home on election day, then those in active rebellion against God will get the chance to elect their representatives,” he wrote in a recent email to followers, in which he also castigated the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina for holding its annual meeting on Election Day.

The last of this year’s luncheons were held this week. But Lane’s work is not done. Immediately after Election Day, Lane is headed for Israel with a delegation of pastors he wants to convince to run for office. A frequent traveler to Israel, Lane has taken Huckabee and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul along on these trips.

Cameron McGill, the Baptist pastor and Bladen County commissioner who traveled to Israel with Lane in 2019, is returning  this year to help convince a new crop of pastors to step up and run for office. 

“God has called us not just to build our church but to impact the culture,” McGill said. The trip to Israel, he said, may help U.S. pastors see how Jesus himself did so. 

Yonat ShimronYonat Shimron is a national reporter and senior editor for Religion News Service.

 
 
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13 Responses

  1. Jesus came and told his disciples, ‘I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.'” (Matthew 28:18-20)

    He did not say, Therefore, go and plot to take control of the governments and speech of all the nations. Force the people to be baptized, and teach them to obey all the commands I have given you.

  2. This is so wrong on multiple levels. I would think a Pastor( he or she) would have enough to do with meeting the needs of the congregation.

  3. Presumably/hopefully pastors serve in the role they do because they are responding to God’s calling. Why then would one dilute the time they can give to such an important task by additionally seeking to serve in government? Pastors focusing on their pastoral call does not preclude other Christians from responding to God’s prompting of them to seek to serve Him even through government roles (my husband and I have both served in our town).

    Additionally, I was disappointed to read that Mr. Whatley would encourage pastors to consider what they do in their work as reflective of their own talents (“you’re really good at public speaking… you’re great at herding cats… you can raise money. You’re perfect.”), rather than recognizing and encouraging them to serve through the strength and means that God provides. It is God who changes hearts; He is willing to work through us, the imperfect clay vessels that we are. None of us are perfect.

    1. From the article:

      “One reason, for the middling response? Pastors haven’t seen public office as part of their call.”

      “42. Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions use their authority over them.
      43. But it is not this way among you. Instead whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant,
      44. and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of all.
      45. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”” (Mark 10:42-45, NET)

      I would suggest these pastors completely leave their church duties to people who will spend full time on them , if they wish rather to live the secular life❗????????

  4. From the latest DeSantis ad. While showing a picture of Ron DeSantis the Narrator says the following.
    “On the 8th day God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.” Go watch the whole thing.

    ‘I don’t need Ron DeSantis to be Christ, I just need him to be governor.’
    —Michael Steele
    Me? I think it sounds a bit blasphemous.

    1. Regina:

      Sadly lots of evangelicals will view this in a positive light. I am not interested in their Jesus. What little I know of the Bible and Jesus condemns many things they now support and regularly do.

      1. I can’t count the number of times I was told by an Evangelical that the church I was raised in is the Whore of Babylon.
        I feel no schadenfreude, I am heartbroken.

      2. Tom Parker,

        “What little I know of the Bible and Jesus condemns many things they now support and regularly do.”

        That is why you cannot bring up MMLJ/10 Commandments within the evangelical church, it reveals the truth of the situation, and who/what they serve.

    2. Reginia Sabe,

      “On the 8th day God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

      Evil always inverts the truth, puts their own words over God’s, and makes man the savior.

  5. By aligning with the Republican Party, these people are saying lies and conspiracy theories are perfectly acceptable. They do not stand for truth any longer. This casts doubt on the truth of what they preach in their churches. It’s impossible to take any of them or what they preach seriously any longer.

  6. Christianity has never done well when it married itself to political power, and this is no exception. Jesus was put to death by the state at the behest of religious leaders. It seems odd at best that those who claim to follow him would crave worldly power, much less in a party that has propagated lies and conspiracy theories galore.

  7. I don’t know what to think about this ongoing issue about race in America, because the Pilgrims and Puritans had murderous intentions against the Indeginous people in America, because they simply wanted them all gone. Then there’s the matter of forcibly importing Black people from Africa here to work for free. Most of the details were very well hidden because the world wouldn’t respect this country anymore,if the truth about historical events came out, even the Nazis and Communists got their ideas about ethnic cleansing from the settlers here. That truth only recently came out,too. I wish we’d gone to Switzerland instead,knowing what I know now !!

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