Jesus the Empowered Social Worker.

[Via Relapsed Catholic.] Yea, I know, more religion. But it is Christmas, after all, and twits everywhere are forcing us to listen to their embarrassing drivel.

Take Howard Dean...please. In any event, here is a fine deconstruction of Howard Dean's approach to religion and politics which is worth reading.

Dean is, of course, currently a Congregationalist. I found the following passage to be interesting and a good explaination of the devolution of the Congregationalists into irrelevance:

I was raised Congregationalist. I know Congregationalism. And Howard Dean, seen through my eyes, is no Congregationalist.

Dean’s own church, the First Congregational Church UCC of Burlington, Vermont, retains the name it began with in 1805 but was taken over years ago by the United Church of Christ (UCC).

For nearly half a century this 1957 “union” of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches has been democratically absorbing the property of local Congregational Churches.

It has done this by mobilizing local Social Gospel liberal activists in a community, persuading them to join the local Congregational Church, and then having these mostly new members demand a vote of the congregation now packed with outsiders over whether to merge with the United Church of Christ.

Such an attempted takeover failed in the Congregational church where I grew up, but not before leftist activists succeeded in voting to transfer the church’s summer camp property to their own breakaway entity. This was entirely legal. It took advantage of small Congregational churches’ democratic nature and vulnerability to vote-packing. Nationwide, this technique apparently has been used (to one degree or another) to gain control of literally thousands of Congregational churches and their property and to convert them into UCC member churches.

Actually, it appears that similar infiltrations of traditional congregations has been practiced in other denominations, sometimes with a purge of the more conservative elements as happened with the ECUSA a few years ago over the issue of ordination of women. And the use of denominational money for leftist agenda items seems to cut across denominational lines.