 Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaking today at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. |
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich plans to launch a new outreach to Christians and religious conservatives, because Washington’s bureaucracy just doesn’t “get it,” he said in an interview.
Gingrich told Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News his organization, called Renewing American Leadership, has some of the nation’s top Christian activists on its board.
Gingrich said he’s been affected personally by the changes in America society; specifically the attacks on established Christianity and its traditions.
“I am very sobered that my grandchildren might live in a secular society that might drive God out of public schools in such a way that they are now antireligious centers of propaganda,” he said.
“Part of my journey began with (Reagan aide) Mike Deaver,” he said. “And he was doing good with Alcoholics Anonymous around the city of Washington. It’s clear that this is the most effective anti-addiction program in the world. And a federal bureaucrat tells him, ‘We would love to strengthen and increase the program but we can’t because the first step is God.’ And he goes, ‘Can you develop an 11-step program?’ And Deaver broke up – he said, ‘I don’t think you get it.'”
Gingrich said what he’s seen in the past few years has convinced him that “we’re in a crisis in which the secular state, if allowed, will fundamentally and radically change America against the wishes of most Americans.”
Gilgoff reported Gringrich this spring will speak to a handful of large gatherings organized by David Barton, who worked with the Republican National Committee’s outreach to pastors in 2004.
The former House speaker said he will release this fall a movie about the role Pope John Paul II played with his 1979 trip to Poland in the fall of the Soviet Union.
“You’ve had such rising hostility to religious belief that I wanted to reach broadly into the country and dramatically raise public awareness of threats to religious liberty,” Gingrich said in the interview.
Gingrich told Gilgoff there’s a need for organizations to support traditional and conservative America.
“You look at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals outlawing saying ‘one nation under God.’ You look at the current [White House] effort to impose the secular state as a matter of conscience on people who believe profoundly that abortion is an act of murder, and we go from tolerating abortion to telling doctors you can only serve if you cooperate in abortion,” Gingrich said.
“You look at the current effort in Connecticut to impose a legal order that would destroy the Catholic Church. And you have to ask yourself, when you have this kind of continued assault on religion, whether you need to reach out to the whole country and talk about these kind of issues,” he continued.
Gingrich said the “overtness of the assault on religious liberty has risen dramatically,” and he has decided “it’s time to challenge head-on secular domination in the West.”
He also expressed some criticism of President Obama.
“The gap between his rhetoric and symbolism and his actual policies is so radically different. The stimulus package had a lot of money in it for sex education and included a prohibition against any money being used in buildings used for religious purposes,” he said.
“Every evidence is that they’re going to move on a Freedom of Choice Act, which would remove every limit on abortion at the state level. He has appointed people with very close ties to abortionists who offer late-term abortions. The evidence we have so far is that he’s going to move methodically to limit the use of freedom of conscience and impose abortion on institutions.”
Nor did Gingrich agree that the clout of economic or social conservatives or Christians is weakening.
“The Obama financial mess and the Geithner misstatements and the tax increase proposals – all those are driving fiscal conservatives back to a realization that if you’re liberal on social policy you’re also bankrupting the country fiscally. There is a much greater openness to working together now than even a month ago,” he said.
Gingrich said President Reagan’s huge success was because he brought “together three big streams of American thought: national security, economic growth, and belief in core historic values, and many of those are inherently religious. You can’t have an honest discussion of American history without recognizing the depth of religious influence. Look at Lincoln’s second inaugural, which is 703 words long and includes 14 references to God and two quotes from the Bible.”
But he said now the nation has an “educational system has grown rabidly anti-religious.”
The report said this week Gingrich’s organization partnered with the American Family Association to promote anti-tax rallies around the nation on April 15.
As WND reported, Gingrich told a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, last month that the Reagan revolution needs to be revived.
