I’ve added the IRD Info Project to the “Testify” links on the right. They offer a closer look at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Scaife-funded right-wing PR tank that poses as a voice of evangelical “renewal” in the mainline Protestant denominations. IRD has a long and ignoble history of dishonesty, all aimed at defunding the mission and ministry of any church group that doesn’t follow lockstep after their partisan political agenda. It is a group of bad people doing bad things for money.
The IRD Info Project has produced a documentary (trailer here) detailing the way IRD uses political “wedge issues” to sow divisions in the church.
What really bugs me about this outfit is the way they pass themselves off as some kind of legitimate church or parachurch group, using their political influence to position their partisan, political organization as, instead, some kind of ecclesiastical spokesman. (See, for example, this account of a Senate committee hearing in which IRD’s president is strangely allowed to accompany a group of religious leaders as though he were one of their peers.)
This is the same misleading game that Bill Donohue plays when he pretends his “Catholic League” is some kind of official religious voice simply because his partisan attack-dog platform happens to have the word “Catholic” in its name. I look at the works of charlatans like this and just think: Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, people, stop taking the Lord’s name in vain.
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