Home Christian News The American Renewal Project Wants To Mobilize Pastors for the Republican Party

The American Renewal Project Wants To Mobilize Pastors for the Republican Party

Most recently, Robinson mocked a brutal attack on U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in a Facebook post. “I’m sorry Paul I don’t believe you or the press!!!!” he wrote underneath an image of a Halloween costume for an “attacker” featuring a shirtless, grinning, hammer-wielding man wearing underwear.

Robinson, who is not a pastor, shares with the American Renewal Project a mythical vision of America’s founders. At this week’s pastor’s luncheon at a church in Jamestown, near Greensboro, he rhapsodized about the faith of the Mayflower Puritans and the pioneers who traveled west in covered wagons in search of land. There was no mention of the displacement of Native people or the enslavement of Blacks.

“Those people were made of something different,” Robinson bellowed. “Look at us now. You got people that can’t get around the corner of Walmart without GPS. We have literally forgotten how to do anything.”

At the end of Robinson’s 15-minute testimony, Gary Miller, the project’s director, asks pastors to get up and lay hands on the lieutenant governor and pray for him. For about two minutes, the pastors crowd around the stout, broad-chested Robinson. They lay hands on his back or lift their arms up in the air and pray out loud — a moment reminiscent of Trump’s Oval Office prayer circles.

Pastors surround and pray for North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson at a pastor luncheon hosted by the American Renewal Project in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Sept. 19, 2022. RNS photo by Yonat Shimron

Pastors surround and pray for North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson at a pastor luncheon hosted by the American Renewal Project in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Sept. 19, 2022. RNS photo by Yonat Shimron

Renewal Project leaders do not take a public stand for former President Trump or unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Lane, the group’s founder, said he is not involved in helping reelect Trump and does not believe the election was stolen.

His fight, as he wrote in his weekly email, which he says is emailed to 80,000 pastors, is against “profane secularists and cultural Marxism.”

“If North Carolina Christians stay home on election day, then those in active rebellion against God will get the chance to elect their representatives,” he wrote in a recent email to followers, in which he also castigated the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina for holding its annual meeting on Election Day.

The last of this year’s luncheons were held this week. But Lane’s work is not done. Immediately after Election Day, Lane is headed for Israel with a delegation of pastors he wants to convince to run for office. A frequent traveler to Israel, Lane has taken Huckabee and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul along on these trips.

Cameron McGill, the Baptist pastor and Bladen County commissioner who traveled to Israel with Lane in 2019, is returning  this year to help convince a new crop of pastors to step up and run for office.

“God has called us not just to build our church but to impact the culture,” McGill said. The trip to Israel, he said, may help U.S. pastors see how Jesus himself did so.

This story was produced with a grant from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.

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