Warren Throckmorton

Remember when David Barton and Rick Green told their audience that the leading pediatricians association in the nation urged school staff to stop indoctrinating kids into homosexuality? The initial response from Rick Green to a listener was to claim that there was nothing wrong in what they said on the broadcast when they referred to the American College of Pediatricians as the leading group. Of course, the real leading group, the American Academy of Pediatrics, denied giving any such advice.
Today, I received an email from the American Academy of Pediatrics, alerting me that Wallbuiders had retreated from their earlier position. Here is the email forwarded by the AAP and reproduced with permission:

Hi Debora (sic),
Thank you for your email to WallBuilders Live, I apologize for the delay in response but I hope I can address your concerns!
After airing the episode about ACP David and Rick were informed that the news source they quoted during the episode was mistaken. David and Rick sent a letter to the news source addressing the mistaken information in the story. We apologize for the mix up and appreciate your notification as well.
If you have any further question or concerns please feel free to contact us. Many blessings!
Caroline Henry
wallbuilderslive.com

I took a quick look through Google for anyone else who might have called the American College of Pediatricians the leading association of pediatricians. Can’t find it. If anyone sees something to that effect, let me know.
I wonder if this news will make it on WallbuildersLive.

The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality claims to be a scientific organization. However, a review of their website finds lots of anti-gay advocacy. In the past, when I bring this up with NARTH supporters, what I have been told is that they do it because the APA does it.
While I don’t deny that the mental health groups lean left and this bias comes out at their conferences at times, I wonder why NARTH makes any pretense of being distinct from the APA when they feature non-scientists in prominent speaking spots. Cases in point: this year’s conference features advocate of keeping homosexual criminal Sharon Slater who will speak in an applied workshop (I wonder what application NARTH wants participants to take from Slater’s workshop?). In addition, minister Michael Brown will speak in a plenary meeting to all participants. Brown has a book out called A Queer Thing Happened to America. It is not a science book.
You can hear a little of what he might have to say next month here, courtesy of Right Wing Watch.

Really?
There will always be extremes in any social group who want to say, ‘off with their heads’ to people not in the club. We got our reconstructionists and dominionists and the gays may have them some gay dominionists somewhere. I don’t really think I should be judged by the reconstructionists. Should we judge all gay folk by Brown’s gay dominionists (if they exist)?

The whole article is up at Religion Dispatches.

The American Family Association has taken aim at fellow religious conservative Brannon Howse over his criticism of the AFA’s recent sponsorship of GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s The Response prayer meeting. Earlier this week, Jim Stanley, program director of AFA’s radio network, American Family Radio, sent notices to two talk show hosts who are associated with Howse, informing them that continued presence on the AFA’s radio network was conditioned on severing ties with Howse.
The talk show hosts, John Loeffler and Todd Friel, have shows aired by American Family Radio and also speak at Howse sponsored events. According to Tim Wildmon, president of the AFA, “we identified two people with programs on our networks and told them, ’you have to make a choice.’” In defense of the move, Wildmon said “AFR is under no obligation to run programs of individuals who are going to help Brannon when he is attacking our friends. We make programming decisions all the time.”

Todd Friel and John Loeffler are two guys who were doing their own thing and then out of the blue they get an email from American Family Radio telling them to make a choice. Neither one of them had taken sides with Howse against the AFA’s involvement in The Response. Still they must pick a side now. Loeffler chose to leave the radio station. No word from Friel as yet. He has until Wednesday to cancel with Howse or else the AFA will remove his show.
On a broadcast last week, Thursday I think, Howse said an unnamed evangelical figure wrote to him to say that he had large “megaphones” to use in order to “decimate” Howse’s ministry. The only other evangelical I know who has mentioned Howse in a critical way is David Barton, using the megaphone of Wallbuilders Live.
This is a kind of internecine war where the ideological issues are complicated. Howse is a social conservative speaker who has worked with Barton and the AFA. However, Howse believes it is wrong for Christians to partner with the New Apostolic Reformation. From Howse point of view, the NAR is not apostolic nor a reformation. Most of the teachings are heretical and the AFA and other social conservative groups are selling out to NAR for a mess of right wing political pottage.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday is this coming Sunday.
Religious right groups want ministers to preach about politics on Sunday to the point telling their flocks who they commend for various political offices.
I hope this does not catch on.
It may be Constitutional, but it doesn’t seem good. Churches have a job to do that can be hindered by ministers exercising this right. I have been in churches where such a freedom would split a church. Congregants who think like the pastor of politics might feel empowered but those who don’t could feel intimidated in their own church family.
Ministers, think twice before you make politics more important than the flock. I Corinthians raises some valid teaching about offending others with your liberty. If refusing meat offered to idols was a consideration in the early church, it seems to me that refusal to use a right to speak your mind on politics would be in modern America.

David Barton told Liberty University students in their September 9 chapel that Unitarians were at one time “a very evangelical Christian denomination.” In his effort to define what he called modernism, he said this about the Unitarians the late 18th and early 19th century:

And the example of that is what happens when you look at Universalist Unitarians; certainly not a denomination that conforms to biblical truth in any way but as it turns out, we have a number of Founding Fathers  who were Unitarians. So we say, oh wait, there’s no way the Founding Fathers could have been Christians; they were Unitarians. Well, unless you know what a Unitarian was in 1784 and what happened to Unitarians in 1819 and 1838 and unless you recognize they used to be a very evangelical Christian denomination, we look at what they are today and say the Founding Fathers were Unitarians, and say, there’s no way they were Christians. That’s modernism; that’s not accurate; that’s not true.

Last week, I briefly examined Barton’s claim that Unitarians were a “very evangelical denomination” with the help of college professor and attorney Jon Rowe. In a 2007 post, Rowe noted that Unitarians during the era of the Founding Fathers denied the Trinity and the deity of Christ. While Unitarians used the Bible to come to their conclusions, one cannot call them evangelical in any meaningful or current sense of the word.
I also asked two Grove City College colleagues with expertise in religious history, Gillis Harp (professor of history) and Paul Kemeny (associate professor of religion and humanities), to react to Barton’s claim about the Unitarians. First, Dr. Kemeny contradicted Barton, saying:

To call nineteenth-century Unitarians a “every evangelical Christian denomination” is like calling a circle a square. While many were deeply pious, Unitarians rejected the deity of Christ and consequently the Trinity. Since the common sense meaning of “evangelical Christian” usually entails an affirmation of Christ’s deity and by implication the Trinity, it strikes me as a rather oddly creative use of the term to suggest Unitarians were “evangelical Christians.”  The Unitarians’ early nineteenth-century critics, such as orthodox Congregationalist theologian Leonard Woods, would likely be surprised to learn the Unitarians were actually “evangelical Christians after all.

As Kemeny notes, the orthodox theologians of the time did not think of Unitarians as orthodox. The Congregationalists of the eighteenth century were in dispute with their fellows who were moving in the Unitarian ways. For instance, President John Adams is often listed as a Congregationalist, but, as I documented previously, his views were decidedly Unitarian.
Dr. Harp also discounted Barton’s theory, saying

It is misleading to refer to early 19^th century Unitarians as ‘evangelical.’  If Barton means that they were far more orthodox on many basic doctrinal matters than are Unitarians today – then, sure, one can say that.  But belief in the incarnation and substitutionary atonement are both essential to evangelicalism and these were both firmly repudiated by all Unitarians in this period.  Some Unitarians certainly continued to follow evangelical personal habits (daily prayer, Bible study, promoting evangelism) but that doesn’t make them evangelical doctrinally.

Christian scholars Harp and Kemeny agree that the claim is faulty. What about the original sources? If Unitarians of the era were evangelical in doctrine, perhaps this would show up in their writings. However, even a cursory examination of the leading Unitarian thinkers demonstrates that Barton is incorrect.
Barton cites Jared Sparks as a man who said George Washington was a Christian in the evangelical sense. However, Sparks was a leading Unitarian. Sparks’ ordination to the ministry in 1819 was the occasion for William Ellery Channing to preach a sermon outlining Unitarian beliefs in a break with the more orthodox Congregationalists.
Sparks was also the editor of the Unitarian Miscellany and Christian Monitor. In an 1821 edition, he explained the Unitarian position on Christ.

Unitarians believe, that Jesus Christ was a messenger commissioned from heaven to make a revelation, and communicate the will of God to men. They all agree, that he was not God; that he was a distinct being from the Father, and subordinate to him; and that he received from the Father all his power, wisdom, and knowledge. (p. 13)
Although unitarians do not believe Christ to be God, because they think such a doctrine at variance with reason and scripture, yet they believe him to have been authorized and empowered to make a divine revelation to the world. We believe in the divinity of his mission, but not of his person. We consider all he has taught as coming from God; we receive his commands, and rely on his promises, as the commands and promises of God. In his miracles we see the power of God; in his doctrines and precepts we behold the wisdom of God; and in his life and character we see a bright display of every divine virtue. Our hope of salvation rests on the truths lie has disclosed, and the means he has pointed out. We believe him to be entitled to our implicit faith, obedience, and submission, and we feel towards him all the veneration, love, and gratitude, which the dignity of his mission, the sublime purity ot his character, and his sufferings for the salvation of men, justly demand. But we do not pay him religious homage, because we think this would be derogating from the honour and majesty of the Supreme Being, who, our Saviour himself has told us, is the only proper object of our adoration and worship. (p. 15-16)

Regarding sin, Unitarians denied original sin and consequently the need for Christ’s atonement to pay the penalty for sin. Again in 1821, Sparks wrote:

We have only room to state, that we do not believe “the guilt of Adam’s sin was imputed, and his corrupted nature conveyed to all his posterity;” nor that there is in men any “original corruption, whereby they are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.” (p. 19)

Disputes between trinitarians and the anti-trinitarians (as unitarians were often called) raged in eighteenth century New England. Historian E. Brooks Holifield wrote in his book Theology in America that the divinity of Christ was in doubt among New England clergy as early as 1735, adding

By 1768, Samuel Hopkins could claim that most of the ministers of Boston disbelieved the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. By 1785, James Freeman succeeded in leading the Episcopal congregation at King’s Chapel in Boston to delete Trinitarian views from their liturgy. (p. 199)

In his speech to Liberty University quoted above, Barton refers to 1784 as a point of reference for what Unitarians were. Perhaps he has this transition at King’s Chapel in mind when the church went from Anglican doctrine to Unitarian beliefs. The minister at the time, James Freeman, considered the church Anglican. However, in another sign that orthodox leaders of the day did not consider Unitarian views to be in line with traditional doctrine, the local Bishop refused to ordain Freeman in the Anglican church.
A question for Mr. Barton: Since the Unitarians at the time took pains to distinguish themselves from orthodoxy and the orthodox leaders of the day did not consider unitarian beliefs to be what we would today call evangelical, why would we dispute them now and call them “very evangelical?”