I ran this by a Bible scholar friend of mine — the sort who reads scripture in its original languages, and who reads the contextual documents of the period, and this was his response:

like many Protestants, they have no coherent hermeneutics and so they can just quote whatever they like however they like. I mean, the passage is about Paul, not them. Furthermore, Paul is arrested for this and, according to the traditional reading of what happened after Acts leaves off, was executed. I assume they are not including that in their plan. Talk to kings means more like the cliche speaking truth to power, not going golfing with them.

I should add that he meant no sleight against Protestants but merely a recognition of an intellectual reality of much–but certainly not all–of contemporary American evangelicalism recognized by no less an evangelical scholar than Mark Noll of Wheaton College.

I’ve questions about a lot of the proceedings, but one speaker on the list especially stands out — General Claude “Mick” Kicklighter, who came to my attention after he was assigned to produce a Pentagon Inspector General’s investigation of the “Christian Embassy” story I broke in Harper’s in 2006. This involved a sectarian evangelical organization that promoted itself with uniformed, on-duty testimonies from senior Pentagon officers — a violation of the Military Code of Conduct no less egregious than, say, a general ordering his subordinates to vote for a particular candidate, and perhaps moreso — one of the generals involved, Pete Sutton, saw his assignment to the Turkish high command ruined when that resolutely secular body — they resist the Islamization of Turkish government — concluded that he hadn’t been honest with them about his mission.

Kicklighter’s investigation concluded that seven flag officers had violated the military code of conduct, that the senior Pentagon chaplain had breached security, and that some of these men had no clue they’d done anything wrong. Indeed, one described sectarian Christian Embassy as a “quasi-federal agency” — that’s a formal term, and includes NASA and the CIA — in apparent ignorance of the first sentence of the First Amendment which, as an officer, he took an oath to defend with his life.

But Kicklighter let em all walk; hardly a slap on the wrist. Military observers were mystified. Then we discovered that Kicklighter is on the board of the Fellowship Foundation — the Family. Why does that matter? Because the Fellowship Foundation and Christian Embassy have crossed financial streams in their support of overseas junkets for congressmen — the sort of mixed-money that is now illegal under the 2007 Open Government Act, implemented to clean up the mess of the Abramoff scandals. (For whatever it’s worth, like Abramoff the Family has taken congressmen golfing in Scotland.)

The above, alone, is a scandal. So imagine my surprise when I read in Professor Anne Loveland’s widely-respected scholarly study, (American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942-1993 (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), that Christian Embassy had gained a foothold in the Pentagon in the late 1970s through none other than Claude Kicklighter.

That’s right — the general investigated himself.

Nobody who loves the Constitution, left or right, can oppose the active role of people of faith, including evangelical and, yes, fundamentalist Christians, in the public square. I’ve never argued against the right of men like Kicklighter to live their faith openly and to share it with others when appropriate. I’ve defended it.

But that’s not what’s happening here. This is the opposite of bold Christian faith. In fact, the Fellowship won’t even call it Christian faith. The reject the label Christian. They reject, too, public accountability — semantically and in practice.

There those in the Fellowship who would like to change things. We’re all waiting.