From God’s Senator, a profile of Sam Brownback in Rolling Stone:

One of the little-known strengths of the Christian right lies in its adoption of the “cell” — the building block historically used by small but determined groups to impose their will on the majority. Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide founded a network of “God-led” cells comprising senators and generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that the cells — God’s chosen, appointed to power — could construct a Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would do so “behind the scenes,” lest they be accused of pride or a hunger for power, and “beyond the din of vox populi,” which is to say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they were not known at all.

“Communists use cells as their basic structure,” declares a confidential Fellowship document titled “Thoughts on a Core Group.” “The mafia operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the four-man squad. Hitler, Lenin and many others understood the power of a small group of people.” Under Reagan, Fellowship cells quietly arranged meetings between administration officials and leaders of Salvadoran death squads, and helped funnel military support to Siad Barre, the brutal dictator of Somalia, who belonged to a prayer cell of American senators and generals.

Brownback got involved in the Fellowship in 1979, as a summer intern for Bob Dole, when he lived in a residence the group had organized in a sorority house at the University of Maryland. Four years later, fresh out of law school and looking for a political role model, Brownback sought out Frank Carlson, a former Republican senator from Kansas. It was Carlson who, at a 1955 meeting of the Fellowship, had declared the group’s mission to be “Worldwide Spiritual Offensive,” a vision of manly Christianity dedicated to the expansion of American power as a means of spreading the gospel.

The writer forgot to mention al Qaeda. They use cells too. I recommend everyone, regardless of political or religious persuasion, read that profile.

The next time someone talks about a “liberal media conspiracy,” point them to that article and tell them to perform a text search for “Values Action Team” and “Fellowship” and ask them to explain away the theocratic conspiracy led by Brownback, Dobson, et al. Something needs to be done to strip these cretins of their power before America turns into another Israel (moderates thrown out by extremists).

I’ll die before I let bastards like Brownback and Dobson press their dirty thumbs into my forehead. I’m genuinely afraid this movement is going to cause a civil war one day and I’ll end up having to shoot some people very close to me who take up arms on the other side of the front.

h/t Andrew Sullivan and Lefty