Anatomy of a Smear
A few weeks ago in New York City, the publisher of Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right is Hijacking Mainstream Religion, held a panel discussion as part of the launch of the book. Scheduled to speak were co-authors Sheldon Culver and John Dorhauer, Michelle Goldberg, Chris Hedges (author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America) and me. Hedges, a divinity school graduate and former New York Times reporter who teaches at Princeton, was ultimately unable to attend — but we were joined by a young spy from the Washington, DC-based neoconservative Institute on Religion and Democracy.
This was not really a surprise. IRD uses a mix of staff and freelancers to infiltrate events of all kinds — denominational and related interest group meetings; as well as events that have no obvious connection to their purported mission of “renewal” of the mainline protestant churches in the U.S. In this case, the spy was Rebekah Sharpe, a 2005 graduate of the University of North Carolina, who has written a series of apparently freelance reports for the IRD web site.
Usually when I write about aspects of the quarter century campaign by IRD and its neoconservative and religious right allies to disrupt and divide the mainline prostestant churches — I am writing from a distance. But this time, it’s personal. The writer and/or her editors have published a piece that grossly misrepresents what I said that evening in New York. In short, it’s a smear.
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