Tom – That is what you have to call someone far left?!
The man is a theological conservative who attends a meeting and all of a sudden he is a far left activist?
Wow. As Richard might say, No. Sale.

Tom – Right is right even if the people are left. However, what is your evidence of the leftness of the pastors? Oh wait, the farleftness of the pastors? To me, the political views are not that relevant here (we are talking about opposition to the League of the South). However, you keep making this claim. What is your basis for it?
This really is a ridiculous argument and one that Barton used on me. If these guys are “far left” then words really have no meaning anymore.

So these guys can’t be evangelicals because you say so? Only certain people are allowed to oppose the League of the South?

White evangelical voters are widely presumed to march in lock step with the right wing of the Republican Party. The reality is more nuanced. Some, like [Rev. Chris] Beard, say their faith has led them to question conservative orthodoxy on issues such as immigration, the environment and racial and economic equity.
“Evangelicals,” he said, “are quickly discovering the whole Gospel. And that has implications for how we engage the public sphere.”
Words like that are music to the ears of President Obama’s reelection campaign, which desperately needs to make inroads among people like Beard and his flock, especially in such battleground states as Ohio. It is part of a broad effort in key states to scratch for every possible vote in what is expected to be a nail-biter election.
The meetings that Beard attended were officially nonpartisan, and there was no mention of either Obama or Republican Mitt Romney. Still, they were part of an effort by liberal groups to mobilize religious voters, union voters and others before the election.
“This is like one layer of an overall strategy of building progressive infrastructure in the state,” said Kirk Noden, executive director of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, an umbrella group for liberal community organizers in Ohio. He said it was especially important to target white evangelicals.

FTR, I have no problem with religion in politics, left or right. But let’s just be clear and honest about it.

[I]n what sense can [America] be called a Christian nation? Not in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or that the people are in any manner compelled to support it. On the contrary, the Constitution specifically provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Neither is it Christian in the sense that all its citizens are either in fact or name Christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within our borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all. Nor is it Christian in the sense that a profession of Christianity is a condition of holding office or otherwise engaging in public service, or essential to recognition either politically or socially.
In fact, the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions. Nevertheless, we constantly speak of this republic as a Christian nation – in fact, as the leading Christian nation of the world.
So, if being a Christian nation is not based on any of the above criterion, then what makes America a Christian nation? According to Justice Brewer, America was “of all the nations in the world . . . most justly called a Christian nation” because Christianity “has so largely shaped and molded it.”
Constitutional law professor Edward Mansfield (1801-1880) similarly acknowledged:

In every country, the morals of a people – whatever they may be – take their form and spirit from their religion. For example, the marriage of brothers and sisters was permitted among the Egyptians because such had been the precedent set by their gods, Isis and Osiris. So, too, the classic nations celebrated the drunken rites of Bacchus. Thus, too, the Turk has become lazy and inert because dependent upon Fate, as taught by the Koran. And when in recent times there arose a nation [i.e., France] whose philosophers [e.g. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, etc.] discovered there was no God and no religion, the nation was thrown into that dismal case in which there was no law and no morals. . . . In the United States, Christianity is the original, spontaneous, and national religion.

Founding Father and U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall agreed:

[W]ith us, Christianity and religion are identified. It would be strange, indeed, if with such a people our institutions did not presuppose Christianity and did not often refer to it and exhibit relations with it.”

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**You don’t think leftists like the “Cinncinnati Area Pastors” don’t use Jesus and the Beatitudes routinely to sell their socialist/communitarian vision of the state? Puh-leez. And FTR, I think it’s all valid.