The secularists have done their best to decouple "God and Country" but obviously the anti-war group Code Pink knows better:

Code Pink is now resorting to witchcraft to beef up the number of its supporters protesting Berkeley’s controversial Marine Corps Recruiting Center.

The women’s anti-war group has told ralliers to come equipped with spells and pointy hats Friday for "Witches, clowns and sirens day," the last of the group’s weeklong homage to Mother’s Day.

"Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war," Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

Wonder what the U.S. military’s Wiccan chaplains think of this?  Hmmm…

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It wasn’t supposed to happen this way:

 On Tuesday night, we mentioned the dustup between two Democratic pundits, Ms. Brazile and Mr. Begala, who engaged in a prime-time debate about the coalitions being built by Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Begala, a Clinton supporter, said the party could not win in November with just “eggheads and African-Americans,” that the party could not ignore white middle-class voters. Ms. Brazile, who said she was not “undecided but undeclared” when it came to her choice for a candidate, shot back that Mr. Begala’s notions were dividing the party. (And that she’d chugged down many a beer with Joe and Jane “six-pack” in an effort to woo white voters.)

But it did.

Identity politics have been a characteristic of the left for a long time.  The idea was equality of outcome but the result is division.  As along as the division ran along left-right fault lines, it worked to the left’s advantage, but right at the moment that’s not the way things are going.

And don’t forget, the Hispanics haven’t weighed in yet, either.

If the Republicans in general and McCain in particular can ever figure out how to make the most of this self-inflicted problem, the Democrats will have a disaster on their hands.  The answer to that question will decide this election.

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The new Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is spot on with this one:

In an interview with ReligiousIntelligence.com, he said that the good work done by many Christian and evangelical groups is often just ignored and derided. “I think there is a culture now in our society where if something is even vaguely Christian, if there is a whiff of evangelical fervour about it then it’s almost somehow verboten to fund it,” he told the paper at a hustings event in the lead-up to the election.

He continued: “I think that’s quite wrong because if you look at the good that these groups do and you look at the way we’re going to transform society and undo the breakdown that we’ve seen in family life, the growing-up of kids without boundaries and all the rest of the things we’ve been talking about in this campaign, the Christian groups are essential.”

The reason for this is primarily rooted in politics.

Ever wonder why liberals, when they whine about Evangelical preachers, always bring up Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?  It’s simple: these two, more than others, awoke the "Religious Right" in the 1980’s and facilitated the triumph of the Reagan Revolution.  Ever since then the left, here and abroad, has propagated an inchoate fear of Evangelicals, reflecting their own terror of being dethroned by movement so populistic and alien to everything they stand for and, as an elite, live for.  I personally think they’d rather have shar’ia; the deeply political nature of Islam is something they don’t like, but understand.

This is amazing considering that, IMHO, Evangelicals have a notoriously weak game plan to actually finish the job and take over society, in the West at least.  But then there’s the Third World…and if you think that Western Evangelicals inspire terror, the thought of their Third World counterparts getting the victory and redistributing the world’s inequitable distribution of wealth really has some reaching for the brown pants.  But only those who can see past their own racial paradigm are focused on this, and that hasn’t quite reached critical mass just yet.

The back side of Johnson’s comments–to fund Evangelical projects–has certainly had a lot of play on this side of the Atlantic, but there’s a danger there too–that the state will seek to redefine the people’s religion in the course of underwriting it.

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As we approach the celebration of Pentecost, it’s a good time to take a look at one relatively new feature of praise and worship: singing in the Spirit.  It emerged in Charismatic churches and prayer groups in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but at the time the concept of recording praise and worship was just not up to speed, as it would be starting in the 1980’s with the Integrity recordings.

There are a few exceptions to this, and this week’s podcast features one of them, including singing in the Spirit: Holy Father, from the British group Valley of Achor’s album A Door of Hope, produced in 1975.

The rest of this album can be found at The Ancient Star-Song.

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