Christianity Today Doubles Down on Samuel Rodriguez
If you know the full story of Samuel Rodriguez these words are a farce and you will see Christianity Today’s decision to further his agenda as a monumental strike against their reputation as centrist gatekeepers of the evangelical movement. But in case you are new to the Samuel Rodriguez story or are in need of a refresher course in Samuel Rodriguez’s understanding of “love and civility”, here are a few key examples of how he speaks “about issues in our culture”: Before a large Christian rally Rodriguez said mockingly that a Muslim leader he knew had prayed this prayer:
I come in the name of Allah, Allah and the prophet Mohammad blah, blah, blah, pass the ammunition, all that good stuff
Rodriguez has backed his uncivil speech about Muslims with equally uncivil actions by helping to found and then serving as vice president of the virulently anti-Islamic Oak Initiative as they were engaged in a national campaign called “Sharia: Threat to America”. In this 2010 quote Rodriguez ascribed these motivations to President Obama’s environmental policies:
Business and capitalism are dirty words in many White House and progressive circles, except in two ways. Business is good when it can be co-opted and manipulated by government to advance “progressive” energy, social or economic agendas. And capitalism is a virtue in the sense of capitalizing on every crisis to promote those agendas through the guiding principle enshrined by leftists like Saul Alinsky and Rahm Emanuel
At a 2010 meeting of the Oak Initiative meeting Rodriguez said “we need a Tea Party movement” because under the Obama administration
government has taken over the auto industry, the banking industry, the health industry, soon the energy industry. We have never been in this place before. Our founding fathers are turning in their graves. This is big government on steroids.
As the 2010 midterm elections neared, Rodriguez’s Oak Initiative produced and widely distributed a video by Oak board member (Ret.) Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin’s entitled “Marxism in America” that included this analysis of the Affordable Care Act that Obama had signed:
Remember Hitler had the brown shirts and in the night of the long knives even Hitler got scared of the brown shirts and killed thousands of them. Well, so you say, are there any signs that that’s actually happened. The truth is, yes. If you read the healthcare legislation…it’s actually in the healthcare legislation.