:The Rev. Rod Parsley challenged critics to identify themselves.

Vehemently denying that he plays partisan politics from the pulpit, the Rev. Rod Parsley said yesterday that he would not be silenced from preaching about moral issues by liberal ministers who this week filed a complaint against him with the Internal Revenue Service.

Parsley, in a news conference at his sprawling World Harvest Church complex in southern Columbus, labeled the complaining pastors as the "anonymous 31" and called on them to reveal their identities.

"The anonymous 31 have chosen to speak behind the masks of personal and political agendas, media manipulation and intimidation, and we simply will not be silenced by those tactics of fear," Parsley said.

Groups like the Ohio Restoration Project are dangerous for many reasons:

1. They confuse the Gospel teachings with the Republican Platform.

2. They create a sense that to be a good pastor you must be a patriotic one (and they define patriotic as being in complete compliance with their own narrow views). The only loyalty a pastor should be concerned with is their loyalty to God. A minister cannot serve both church and state.

3. They seem to have no respect for the US Constitution or the other laws our land.

Those other brave religious leaders in Ohio who are working to put a stop to these crimes should be applauded for their efforts. Americans cannot afford to stand silent as the Religious Right works to replace our democracy with a theocracy where only their views are valued. Democracy and respect for pluralism are ideals worth standing up for.

Well I expected the left to try and impede the Republican grassroots machine. I didn’t expect it to come from so-called brothers and sisters. I participated in the Bush re-election campaign and one of the things I was asked was to have a voter registration drive in my church. I was not asked to tell the congregation to vote for Bush or anybody in particular. I was asked to get people who were not already registered to do so. So the claims of partisanship because of voter registration are pure crap. As for biased material, why don’t the liberals abide by their own rules? When I go to the polls in the Catholic church around the corner, democrat volunteers are there passing out materials in the parking lot. I am always given voting “instructions” with a sample ballot. Always the democrat candidate was selected and the liberal issues chosen as “examples”. Surely they can’t complain about the practice they themselves employ.

As for recommending a conservative candidate, who do they think a conservative church would promote? If they are like my church then the pastors probably don’t say “Vote for this guy or that guy”. They will tell you to vote period. Political issues can be viewed in light of scripture as to being right and wrong but whether we vote for or against is still left to the individual. Unfortunately the leftist mind set is convinced that conservative Christians are mindless bumpkins who live only to do the will of the pastor and therefore no mention of current events or politics must be made on church grounds or the thought-controlled masses will march off lemming-like to the polls to vote Republican. If the moonbat Christians spent less time in their tax codes and more time in their Bibles they would realize that Jesus taught about current events and politics too, emphasizing their importance to Christians.

If you want to see the culmination of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's dream - the church as party headquarters - go to Ohio. There, two preachers, the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church and the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church, are diligently working to build an army of conservative Christian voters who will dominate the Republican Party, then Ohio government, then Washington.

Johnson, who calls those to his left "secular jihadists" and condemns public schools for not teaching that Hitler was "an avid evolutionist," has founded the Ohio Restoration Project. Its mission is to enlist 2,000 religious leaders as "Patriot Pastors" who will sign up hundreds of thousands of new voters and mobilize an activist corps within their flocks.

The goal is to capitalize on the 2004 election success that had regular churchgoers in Ohio who identified themselves as white evangelical or born-again voting for George W. Bush over John Kerry by an astounding 97 percent to 3 percent ratio.

Parsley, an Ohio televangelist with a megachurch of 10,000 weekly worshipers, has launched Reformation Ohio, an organization with similar goals.

While they expect their efforts to pay off with multiple election victories, in the short term Johnson and Parsley want to elect Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell governor in November. Blackwell is an African-American Christian conservative who led a successful ballot initiative in 2004 to ban same-sex marriage.

Johnson and Parsley say their institutions do not endorse candidates. But they have engaged in transparent electioneering on behalf of Blackwell - exclusively featuring him at events and in educational materials.

The details of Johnson's and Parsley's political activities are exhaustively laid out in a complaint filed with the IRS and signed, not by the ACLU or People for the American Way, but by dozens of religious leaders. Initially, 31 pastors of Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and other, mainly Protestant, denominations signed the letter that says the tax-exempt status of Johnson's and Parsley's churches and affiliated organizations should be revoked. Since then, at least two dozen more have asked to be included.

The pastors say when they told their congregations about joining the complaint, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Here is the countervailing force. If the Christian Right is going to turn its followers into Republican Party operatives and its churches into political war rooms, then the moderate Christian community has to push back.

Slowly, it's starting to happen.

As a Christian pastor, I was deeply troubled that a group of pastors would choose to sue other pastors. What, I wondered, is their view of the Body of Christ? What is their understanding of 1 Corinthians 6.1 in which the apostle Paul says:

If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?

As a Christian pastor, I have also been troubled by the continued over-identification of the challenged churches (in this case) with far right Republican politics. Where, I have wondered, is there a place for a thoughtful Christian Democrat in these churches? How does a non-Christian who has contrary political leanings hear the gospel without being thoroughly turned off? Do these churches really want to align themselves with politicians who may have mixed motives or unbiblical perspectives on various issues? Do we really have only two options – the option offered by the political left or the option offered by the political right?

I interpret St. Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth differently than Pastor Nathan. The historical situation that this congregation was facing suggests that Paul was talking about court cases involving property ("dispute with another" and "be cheated"). The Roman government permitted Jews (and Christians) to apply their own laws in local property matters. This is very different from judging those who violate Roman law (Romans 13:3-4). Paul advised that everyone must obey the laws of the state or experience its judgment.

In signing the letter of complaint I joined 30 colleagues who shared a common concern. We came together from various faith traditions, differing theological perspectives and individual life experiences to ask that the laws of our nation be enforced.

We think that the two churches and pastors named in the complaint are violating federal laws. I don’t object to their speaking out about religious values or political issues. This kind of public dialogue informs and enhances everyone’s ability to live together in community. I do object to their endorsing a political candidate. . . .

I am very concerned that many conservative evangelical churches and religious leaders in the United States have entered into a Faustian bargain to gain political power and legislative influence. By espousing an ideology of self-righteousness they have undermined the credibility of their moral witness in society today.

My own vision of what might be propitious for our day, split as we are, not so much into denominations as into schools of thought, is that we need a kind of generous orthodoxy which would have in it an element of liberalism—a voice like the Christian Century—and an element of evangelicalism—the voice of Christianity Today. I don't know if there is a voice between those two, as a matter of fact. If there is, I would like to pursue it.

Most of those who contemplate the possibilities of being "post"-evangelical do so because of a difficulty they find in reconciling what they see and experience in evangelicalism with their personal values, instinctive reactions and theological reflections. For some people the agony created by this conflict is very considerable. . . . One young man, who had grown up in an evangelical home, spoke with pain about the dilemma: "I don't know where to go. I no longer feel I can call myself an evangelical, yet don't wish to be a liberal. What am I?" Other people are more nonchalant about it, like the young woman who told me: "Evangelicalism helped me to begin with, but I feel I've outgrown it now." Arrogant? Possibly, yet she was voicing something which cropped up continually in my discussions with people: the feeling that evangelicalism is supremely good at introducing people to faith in Christ, but distinctly unhelpful when it comes to the matter of progressing into a more "grown up" experience of faith.

What do they mean by "grown up"? Lots of things, but I will just mention the one which is cited most often: the desire to interact on a more positive level with theologies and perspectives which do not come from an evangelical source.

The feeling people have is that such perspectives are only ever mentioned in evangelical circles in order to be promptly dismissed as rubbish or as a disgraceful compromise. "I have suffered twenty years of religious and theological censorship," one person exclaimed. "I have been warned about this and told to keep away from that. I've had enough of it. It's time for me to make up my own mind." (2-3)

Churches of sufficient high-ness, e.g., Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and (occasionally and in spite of their struggles) Anglican, see themselves as the One, the Holy, the Catholic, and the Apostolic church advertised in the Creed. Such churches see themselves as occupying uniquely, not merely notionally (as in a agnostic sense) but actually, the place of Ark of Salvation for the entire world. (Parenthetically, this is the "elephant in the room" in ecumenical engagement between Protestants and Catholics. They can find mutual agreement in many things, but this audacious view the Catholic Church has of itself ultimately destabilizes any mutual accord.. . .)

Thus, such Churches consist in not merely the delivery of God's Word to the world, which the [Protestant evangelical] megachurches sometimes do very well, but in the delivery of the Sacraments, i.e., objective, physical marks of grace normatively necessary for eternal salvation, to the Faithful. This latter ecclesial definition was watered down slightly by Luther in his reformation, watered down considerably more by Calvin's, and is rejected out of hand by the heirs of the Anabaptists, which today include nearly all "megachurches" and all their (smaller) fellow Low Church Evangelical Megachurch- Wannabes.

That might sound counterintuitive. After all, the Howard Dean campaign showed the power of the liberal blogosphere. And the liberal-activist Web site DailyKos counts hundreds of thousands of visitors each day. But Democrats say there's a key difference between liberals and conservatives online. Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders. (Hillary Clinton, for instance, is routinely vilified on liberal Web sites for supporting the Iraq war.) Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.