Below is the latest newsletter from the Tennessee Council for Political Justice.
Newsletter #175 — Tennessee ACLU: The Left’s Biggest Hypocrite (part 2 of 5)
Leftist organizing starts in Nashville
In 1996, a Vanderbilt PhD candidate documented how the radical socialist Saul Alinsky style of community organizing started in Nashville. In 1989, an interfaith group called The Nashville Sponsoring Committee (NSC) contracted with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) to train the them in community organizing.
The groups financially supporting the NSC included the Catholic Archdiocese of Nashville, the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee and the Jewish Fund for Justice.
IAF was founded in 1940 by the Chicago socialist and political radical Saul Alinsky, a “Communist/Marxist fellow-traveler.” Alinsky started the IAF’s training institute in 1969. It was designed as a “school for professional radicals” that sought redistribution of wealth and communist centralized government control:
“The Alinsky radical has one principle — to take power from the so-called Haves and give it to the so-called Have-nots… a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the ‘people,’ which delivers power (and wealth) into the hands of a radical elite and makes them feel good about themselves in the process.”
IAF is not grassroots organizing; it is a tool of the professional left. It is the Alinsky-radical-trained professional organizer who sets the local group’s agenda and then uses techniques specifically designed to manipulate the group into rejecting the status quo and demanding “change” (revolution).
Early on, IAF was funded by wealthy elites and Catholic institutions. Between 1992 and 1997, IAF received approximately $6,466,500 from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).
IAF’s expansion into the South, and specifically into religious organizations, was strategic. The NSC and IAF served each other’s purposes; IAF would help the local group organize (Nashville), and the religiously identified NSC would provide a veneer of moral credibility for IAF’s revolutionary campaigns for social change, political power grabbing and undermining the middle class traditional order.
In 1993 the NSC paid IAF’s Southeast Regional Director Gerald Taylor $50,000 for professional community organizing services and to help the NSC mutate into the organization Tying Nashville Together (TNT).
Gerald Taylor
Religious groups that invested their financial and human resources in TNT, aligned themselves with Alinsky’s tactics and adopted leftist politics as their first religion of choice. Aligning with Alinsky was an ironic choice for these religious communities considering that Alinsky dedicated his playbook Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer, citing him as the first true radical to have “rebelled against the establishment…”
Alinsky said that there were no hard and fast truths, no moral or ethical considerations that should guide a group’s demands or what they would do to achieve their goals. In Rules for Radicals Alinsky wrote that:
“The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.
Alinsky counseled that “revolution” came by change from within. His strategy was to infiltrate churches, political parties, unions and other structural institutions, work into positions of authority and decision-making and introduce change from within.
Did the authors of the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood manifesto read Alinsky too?
Of the religious groups cited, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal body (I can’t speak with certainty about either the Catholic group or the Jewish group) are all three liberal churches, meaning that they are this-worldly oriented, having given up long ago believing in the miracles of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, an actual, physical resurrection of the God Man, Jesus Christ, a real heaven and a real hell.
And being this-worldly focused, they take the ethics found in Scripture and make of that their god. Social justice is their rallying cry. And on and on. A topic deserving of our attention because it explains why these church bodies were snookered by the left into adopting its goals and not the goals of Jesus Christ: preach the gospel of forgiveness to sinners.
@HarrietHT: More importantly, the three denominations you cite gave up believing in the necessity of Jesus’ atoning death on the cross, his resurrection, and that salvation is by grace rather than “good deeds”. Such denominations would be far more welcoming to a Communist or other Marxist than to someone who would be willing to sign on to the beliefs of the Wesley brothers if Methodist, the Westminster divines if Presbyterian, or Cranmer and Ridley if Episcopalian.