(Note: This article now mirrored on DailyKos. Recs appreciated.)

I have touched before on the major role that Russia and Iran play in "Joel's Army" end-time theology--and whilst this is very important, I'm actually going to focus on a rather different way "Joel's Army" has targeted the former USSR...and the bloody fruit it is bearing in the US as well as in many of the countries formerly part of the USSR.

Namely, it seems neopentecostal dominionism--of a particular Russian and Latvian variety that was the fruit of the world's first steeplejack and which has been lovingly fed by the most extreme anti-LGBT troopers of "Joel's Army"--is a major motivating force behind a wave of hate crimes targeting LGBT people both here and abroad.

It was Jesus himself who noted "By their fruits ye shall know them"...and in this post, I document how an "orchard" was planted by American dominionist groups to produce bitter fruit indeed, both here in the US and abroad.

A new wave of hate from Mother Russia

There has, recently, been new attention brought to a wave of hate crimes--centered among members of "Russian evangelical" churches in the US, as well as in Russia and Latvia--targeting LGBT people.

Among other things, this movement seems to be connected to the beating murder of Satender Singh, a Fijian national who happened to be gay:

On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless -- two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh's friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh's party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.

The pregnant woman said she didn't want to fight them.

"We don't want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."

One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh's friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.

The Sacramento Bee has noted that at least one of the perps is now an international fugitive:

One of two men charged in the alleged hate-crime killing of Satender Singh in a confrontation at Lake Natoma last month pleaded not guilty Wednesday at his arraignment in Sacramento Superior Court.

Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21, faces a single felony count of intimidating and interfering with a person's rights, a charge that falls under the state's hate crimes statutes.

Shevchenko, with close-cropped brown hair and wearing a white shirt and black pants, shook his head and said "not guilty" when Judge Jaime Rene Roman read the charge against him.
. . .
A second suspect in the case is a fugitive and is believed to be in Russia.

Andrey Vusik, 29, of West Sacramento, allegedly punched Singh on July 1.

Singh, 26, fell backward, striking his head and rupturing a critical part of his brain stem. He died four days later.

Authorities said Vusik left the country after the Fijian man's death. He is sought on a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter and a hate crime.

Among other things, the hate crimes seem to not be restricted to the States--in Russia and Latvia, the hatred is just as virulent:

Gay rights activists blame Singh's death on what they call "The West Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a virulent Latvian megachurch preacher who has become a central figure in the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh's death, which they characterized as a hate crime.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Even worse, the "Watchmen on the Walls" seem to be embracing books on Holocaust revisionism popular in neopentecostal circles--which I'll describe later. And in Russia and Latvia, they seem to be partnering explicitly with the Russian Orthodox Church's version of ultramontaines:

Interfax-Religion reports on the most bizarre anti-Darwinian protest yet, from the Union of the Orthodox Banner-Bearers and the Union of Orthodox Brotherhood in Russia. Apparently the pious members bought a toy monkey, which they then set upon:

The banner-bearers drove the stake in the monkey’s chest. As Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich, the head of the union, explained to onlookers, "it is exactly how satanic cults were punished in old times".

Then the banner-bearers carried the monkey’s coffin on their shoulders behind Sts Cyril and Methodius’s monument, promising to bury it some place outside the city. "Let our distinguished academics see how Orthodox people treat their pseudo-theories", Simonovich-Nikshich said.

This is only the silliest in a series of stunts by the Banner-Bearers: recently we’ve had a more predictable burning of a Harry Potter book ("It burns well", Simonovich-Nikshich noted); last year a picture of Madonna got the Van Helsing treatment.

(The Bartholomew's Notes article above notes further details on the Russian Orthodox equivalent of ultramontaine Catholicism--including a decidedly anti-Semitic aspect).

The world's first steeplejacking

I've written a fair amount on the subject of steeplejacking by neopente dominionists--on the tactics used, the beginnings of certain tactics within neopente churches, and historical examples both religious and political. In fact, better folks than I have written entire books on the subject; at least one major research group for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is also investigating the possibility of attempted steeplejacking of the military by Campus Crusade for Christ (among others).

Little appreciated, however, is the fact that steeplejacking among neopente dominionists has a very early history--almost dating back to the very beginnings of the "Mother of Neopente Dominionism" itself--and it is in fact this earliest of steeplejacks by the Assemblies of God that directly birthed the movement responsible for hate crimes in Russia, Latvia, and in the US by "Russian evangelical" churches.

My discovery of the "Earliest of Steeplejacks" came by investigation of a particular article on Russian neopentes linked to increasing invective against LGBT people (which has been mirrored by Jews On First, a Jewish anti-dominionist organisation, and originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times). Namely, this bit of the article:

These immigrants are different from their Russian-speaking counterparts in New York's Brighton Beach, San Francisco's Richmond district or West Hollywood, all established Russian-immigrant enclaves that are mostly Jewish or Russian Orthodox and generally coexist with large gay populations.

West Hollywood's 11-member Russian Advisory Board recently voted 8 to 3 to send a letter to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzkov, asking him to reconsider his decision banning gay pride events in the Russian capital.

"We want you to consider the unique partnership that has developed here in West Hollywood between the large population of Russian-speaking immigrants and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community," the letter said.

The Sacramento community, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly evangelical -- Baptist and Pentecostalist. The charismatic Pentacostal church, introduced in the Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev, includes speaking in tongues and washing of feet. The churches' social views are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

"The main issues in the Russian community here," said Vitaly Prokopchuk, a Sacramento County sheriff's deputy, "are gay issues, abortion issues and family-definition issues. To these people, these issues are very cut-and-dry in the Bible."

And research on Ivan Efimovich Vornaev...well, that turned out to be damning indeed.

The first link was to this German-language site, of which a rough translation is below:

VORONAEV, Ivan Efimovich (1886?). Founder and director/conductor of the Russian Pentecostal Church. Voronaev was born 1886 in the province Orenburg in central Russia. After his conversion (to the Baptist church) in the year 1908 it served as (Russian Baptist Church) pastor in Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk. Because of a wave of progroms by the Russian Orthodox Church he left Russia in 1911 and became a minister of a Russian Baptist Church in San Francisco. From the city church in Seattle he finally came to New York City, where he served in a secondary Russian Baptist Church congregation (1914). He eventually came in contact with Pentecostal pastors associated with the Assemblies of God. Together with 20 further Russian Baptists, which had been "baptised in the Holy Spirit", they created the first Russian Pentecostal Church in New York on 1 July 1919. - On 15 July 1920 he traveled to Bulgaria, where it created 18 churches, which formed the nucleus of the important Bulgarian Pentecostal Church in short time. From Bulgaria he continued to travel to Odessa and Leningrad and founded Russian Pentecostal churches there. Baptists and "Evangelical Christians" also soon joined him. In the year 1927 the first Pentecostal Congress for the entire Soviet Union took place, and Voronaev became a president of the “Union of the Christian Evangelical Faith”, how the Russian Pentecostal Church called itself. At this time the movement counted already 320 churches with approximately 80,000 members. - In the year 1930 Voronaev--according to Communist statements--renounced his belief; His wife, Katherina Voronaev, denied this statement. After K. Voronaev('s renouncement), Ivan Efimovich was arrested on 6 July 1930 along with with 800 other ministers and shipped in cattle cars to Siberia. In the year 1933 K. Voronaev was also arrested. Both were in the year 1935 released from detention for a short time. They were kidnapped from 1936 to 1940 again to Siberia. After its renewed release V. tried to emigrate into the USA, however was unfortunately again arrested. It is presumed he died in captivity. Since Katherina tried to find K. Voronaev and had written to her children in the USA, she was also arrested in 1949 on charges of espionage. Only in the year 1953 she was allowed to emigrate due to a personal intervention of president Eisenhower into the USA.

In regards to the recantation (of pentecostalism) of Voronaevs, it must be assumed it was either a lie or that he came under torture. Durng the years 1935-36 Voronaev had preached in the Baptist Church of Kaluga up to its short dismissal, and he did not join the “Soviet Atheist's society” (set up for propoganda purposes), as he was a Believer (and it was not the case he was an Atheist).

References:

J. Colletti, Voronaev, Ivan Efimovich, in: The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, Stanley M. Burgess und Eduard M. van der Maas, (Hrsg.), Grand Rapids 2002, 1179-80; - Steve Durasoff, The All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union: 1944-1964, New York Diss. 1967; - ders., Bright Wind of the Spirit: Pentecostalism Today 1972; - William C. Fletcher, Soviet Charismatics. The Pentecostals in the USSR (American University Studies Series VII), Frankfurt 1985; - Walter J. Hollenweger, Handbuch der Pfingstbewegung, Bd 1-10, Genf 1965-67; - Paul Schmidgall, Von Oslo nach Berlin! Die Pfingstbewegung in Europa, Erzhausen 2003; - P. Voronaev, My Life in Soviet Russia 1969.

(Emphasis mine.)

Of note--the Assemblies of God are generally recognised as being a separate denomination around 1914--this steeplejacking of the Russian Baptist Church (likely Reform Baptists, as I'll note below) was in fact begun all of five years after the Assemblies started--hence why I state that steeplejacking, alas, is part of their core theology and "in their blood" at this point.

Another paper on the subject has noted explicitly how the Assemblies steeplejacked a large number of Reform Baptist congregations throughout Russia as well as Voronaev's primary role as steeplejacker (of note, this is from a source largely sympathetic):

Pentecostalists in the Soviet Union achieved a startlingly rapid growth during the 1920’s. Voronaev and some of his early, zealous converts began their ministry by worshipping within Baptist congregations and teaching those already converted to the Baptist faith. A significant number of Pentecostal believers was attained rather quickly as pentecostalism drew away a considerable number of Baptists, whose theology was nearly identical to their own. The key difference between Baptist and Pentecostal theology, baptism by the Spirit made manifest by the speaking in tongues, or glossalalia, was apparently enough to cause many to choose Pentecostalism over Baptism.

Another dead-tree source of note discussing Assemblies steeplejacking of Reform Baptist congregations in Russia and Eastern Europe is Religion in the Soviet Union by Walter Kolarz (St. Martin's Press, 1961) which is available via Questia online (for those with accounts through this service). Chapters IX and X are particularly relevant; among other things, the Russian Baptists were heavily influenced by the Holiness movement that spawned pentecostalism (and was effectively a "proto-dominionist" movement in the US).

There are also indications (from other writings) that cell churches may have been used in Ukraine (as a method originally of establishing a "true church" within a KGB-controlled congregation)--cell churches have historically been used as methods of steeplejacking, however, as noted.

Russian neopentecostalism is, almost in its entirety, an Assemblies-daughter--and, especially since the 1990s and the re-opening of the ex-USSR to religion, definitely in the "Joel's Army" camp, as we'll see below.

Neopentecostals and historical revisionism--or how America's "Joel's Army" is watering the ground for some bitter fruit

Some of the influence of neopentes in the ex-USSR has been by the most extreme members of the dominionist movement here in the States.

Notable among these is Scott Lively, who is among a group of writers who are very popular in neopente circles for promoting a version of Holocaust revisionism--namely, claims that gay people are responsible for not only the Holocaust but a number of great purges in human history such as the Inquisition (rather than being among the victims).

One of Lively's books--The Pink Swastika--is in fact known to not only be popular in Assemblies circles--but was actively promoted and material contributed to it by at least two Assemblies of God churches. From the Acknowledgements section the book (pages xv-xvi):

Acknowledgments

The process of creating a book involves directly or indirectly, a great number of people who lend their inspiration. It is with deep respect that we express our gratitude to the many great historians, men like Konrad Heiden, who wrote A History of National Socialism and Der Fuehrer; William Shirer whose book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, became one of the most respected and classic texts on Nazi history; and, of course, Samuel Igra, whose obscure but important 1945 work, Germany's National Vice reveals a hidden side of history seldom seen or acknowledged. To these who were there and who honestly reported what they saw and experienced, we are indebted. They are our guides to the future.

We would especially like to thank Dr. Charles Socarides, President of NARTH, The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, for his support and encouragement. Dr. Socarides is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

We would also like to express our gratitude to Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Secretary and Editor of the NARTH Bulletin and Founder and Clinical Director of the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Southern California. Dr. Nicolosi has published two insightful works on reparative therapy and homosexuality which offer hope and the option of positive change for the homosexual.

Other individuals with whom one or both of us have had the honor of
working are Mr. Peter LaBarbera, editor and publisher of the Lambda Report on Homosexuality, a Washington D.C.-based publication that monitors the homosexual agenda in American politics and culture; Sam and Mona Kaplan, editors and publishers of The Vancouver (Canada) Jewish Western Bulletin; Steve Lequire and Terry O'Neil of The British Columbia Report Magazine; Rosebianca Starr, Vancouver, British Columbia; Lon Mabon, Chairman of Oregon Citizens Alliance and Pat Smith of the OCA Research Department; Trevor Lautens, columnist for the Vancouver Sun, Paul Schratz, editor, The Province Newspaper, Vancouver; David, Avraham and Israel Feld, Maccabi Mossad, Israel; David Bedien, Director of Beit Agron Press Center, Jerusalem; Len Butcher, editor of the Canadian B'nai B'rith Covenant; Mrs. Irene Klass, Women's Editor, The Jewish Press, Brooklyn New York; Rabbi Micha and Bracha Peled, Moshav Netiv HaShaiara; Michael Elkins of the Jerusalem Report; Professor William Woodruff, Campbell University, North Carolina; David Bar Illan, editor of the Jerusalem Post; Kevin Tebedo, Executive Director of Colorado for Family Values; Pastor Mary Rogers, Reverend Bernice Gerard of Sunday Line Radio and Television Ministries, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Director for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem; David Luchins, Senior Assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, Jerusalem; Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, Member of Knesset; Rabbi Schlomo Beneziri, Member of Knesset; Phil Chernovsky, Israel Centre; Rena Cohen, Sefat, Israel; Toby Klein Greenwald, columnist for Washington Jewish Week; Paul deParrie and Andrew Burnett of Life Advocate magazine; Paul Hoerauf of Shelton-Turnbull Printers; Herman Bauer; and Pastor Larry Dill, Sheridan Assembly of God Church.

Special thanks to Bill and Irene Bennett (and Anne L.) For their willingness to lend their considerable editorial talents to task {sic} of cleaning up the manuscript, to D.E. and to Alan Abe for digging out countless familiar and obscure sources that document the truth of Nazi history, to Pat Gunnip for his generosity in underwriting research and other costs, and to Carol P. at OCA's research department who got us started on this endeavor by introducing us to each other.

(Emphasis mine. ICEJ is an Assemblies frontgroup that also may have links to the Campus Crusade frontgroup Christian Embassy (notably linked to the scandal surrounding attempted military steeplejacking); the second is obvious.)

The Annotated Pink Swastika has been compiled, largely debunking the claims presented in the book; Lively's publisher, Abiding Truth Ministries, also has the entire text online (warning: material may constitute hate speech in certain jurisdictions).

I am afraid that I do have a fair amount of familiarity with this work and its promotion in Assemblies congregations--among other things, it was regularly promoted in the church I escaped from, and a deacon from the Assemblies church I left and whom is the head of the state affiliate of the American Family Association--and who is incredibly virulent against LGBT people--regularly promoted it as well with church support. It is also not exaggeration to call The Pink Swastika bona fide Holocaust revisionism (as in a variant of the same crap that Stormfront et al excrete on the Internet)--the Nizkor Project, which dedicates itself to debunking Holocaust revisionist claims and noting primary promoters of Holocaust revisionism online, has multiple references to the book and Southern Poverty Law Center has also discussed this particular work of revisionism--a work which claims that LGBT people not only did not die en masse in the Holocaust but were its primary architects, were the ones shoveling Jewish people into the ovens, are inherently criminal, and are in a plot with the entire Moslem population of the world to exterminate neopentes and Jewish people.

(Yes, you're reading this right. This stuff is being taught in large megachurches in the Assemblies with explicit approval.)

And Lively's works--The Pink Swastika as well as another fun bit of historical revisionism called The Poisoned Stream which is also promoted by Abiding Truth--are being actively promoted in the very churches linked to these hate crimes:

(from the Los Angeles Times article, courtesy Jews on First)

"Sacramento is the No. 1 gathering place for non-Jewish, non-Russian Orthodox, fundamentalist Russian and Ukrainian immigrants," said University of Oregon geographer Susan W. Hardwick, an expert on the Russian immigrant community. Similar but smaller communities, Hardwick said, have established themselves in Portland and Seattle, where they also are beginning to flex their political muscle.

But nowhere approaches Sacramento, which has a 24-hour Russian-language cable television station, two radio stations and several newspapers, all of which push a conservative message marked by strident opposition to homosexuality. A recent edition of the Speaker, for example, promoted a book, "The Pink Swastika," that contends that the extermination of Jews during World War II was the work of homosexuals inside the Nazi Party.

(from Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report article)

'Masculine Christianity'

Last April in Salem, Ore., more than 700 Russian-speaking teenagers rallied outside the state Capitol against a pair of gay rights bills. It was the largest anti-gay protest to take place in Oregon's sleepy capital city since 1992, when the anti-gay Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) pushed a ballot initiative that came within a few percentage points of rewording the state constitution to declare gay people "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse" and requiring the state to fire all openly gay or lesbian public school teachers.

The executive director of the OCA at that time was Scott Lively, a longtime anti-gay activist who is now the chief international envoy for the Watchmen movement. Lively also is the former director of the California chapter of the anti-gay American Family Association and the founder of both Defend the Family Ministries and the Pro-Family Law Center, which claims to be the country's "only legal organization devoted exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda."

The Watchmen movement's strategy for combating the "disease" of homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue."

Lively identifies "the enemy" as not only homosexuals, but also what he terms "homosexualists," a category that includes anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, who "actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy."

When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.

The Pink Passport

Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their parents, on the United States.) But he's most famous as the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.

Published in 1995, the book is a breathtaking work of Holocaust revisionism. It asserts that Hitler was gay -- a claim no serious historian supports -- and that Hitler and other evil gay fascists were central in forming the Nazi Party, operating the Third Reich and orchestrating the Holocaust. (Lively's most recent book, The Poisoned Stream, similarly details "a dark and powerful homosexual presence" through "the Spanish Inquisition, the French 'Reign of Terror,' the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American Slavery.")

The Pink Swastika -- whose cover has a swastika in place of the "x" in "homosexuality" in the book's subtitle -- has been roundly discredited by legitimate historians and was thoroughly debunked in a 2005 Intelligence Report article. Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, said the book was "produced by a right-wing Christian cult and is as correct as flat earth theory."

Lively declined to answer several E-mails seeking comment.

Nevertheless, The Pink Swastika has become Lively's passport to fame among anti-gay church leaders and their followers in Eastern Europe, as well as Russian-speaking anti-gay activists in America. Lively frequently speaks about the book and his broader anti-gay agenda in churches, police academies and television news studios throughout the former Soviet Union.

Lively credits the popularity of Russian-language translations of The Pink Swastika to the support of Pastor Alexey Ledyaev, the head of the New Generation Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch based in Riga, the capital city of Latvia. New Generation has more than 200 satellite churches spread throughout Eastern Europe, Argentina, Israel and the United States.

"One of my supporters gave him [Ledyaev] a copy of The Pink Swastika. He was very impressed by it," Lively said in a December 2006 radio show on WTTT-AM, based in Salem, Mass. "The European press was bashing them [Ledyaev and his church] for being Nazis. He was finally thrilled that he had something to counter the media with." Ledyaev did not respond to E-mails seeking comment.

Since then, Lively said, "I've been deluged by media speaking offers all over the former Soviet Union."

In Sacramento, editorials in The Speaker urge readers to buy The Pink Swastika. Even right-wing legislators in the California Assembly are said to audibly groan when Slavic evangelicals wave a copy of the pink volume during testimony.

Oh, about that "New Generation Church". There is a very interesting article in the Baltic Times that discusses the group. Among other things, it is explicitly neopente (in fact, it can be argued to be an "Assemblies daughter"), and is known for hate crimes both here and abroad:

The church, located in a plain building near some auto repair shops in Zasulauks, has been discussed rather widely of late. According to the organizers of the gay pride day in Riga on July 22, members of New Generation’s congregation met them outside the Anglican Church after a service held by the openly gay priest, Maris Sants, where they proceeded to throw excrement at parishioners. “People in my group recognized them,” Juris Calvitis, the Anglican minister who oversaw the service, says. A report released by the Interior Ministry confirmed the claim, though it also noted other groups, including the ultra-right National Force Union.

Ledyaev was not at the Anglican Church that morning, but his presence – he is a dynamic man of 50 – was particularly noticeable in front of the Reval Hotel Latvija where the same group of protesters met to disrupt a meeting held by the gay rights group Mozaika that was occurring on the second floor.
Many of those who witnessed the events of that afternoon recall four hours of a tense confrontation between an irate crowd shouting things like “No to sodomy!” and a line of stoical, generally non-responsive policemen, punctuated by sudden moments of banal violence. One protester pelted an LNT cameraman with eggs. When a member of Mozaika attempted to leave the hotel by the front door, one protester ran up to squirt water in her face.

Igors Maslakovs directed the members of his group, No Pride, to go to other exits of the hotel in order to harass gay pride participants as they were leaving, and many of the children, some as young as eight, under his stead, all dressed in particularly graphic T-shirts that suggested a ban on sodomy, jumped up to follow orders, as if they were playing a game of “capture the flag.”

Disturbingly, it's not just Lively who seems to be "farming Russian dominionists" in Sacramento.

Dominionist "horticulture" by others

Lively wasn't the only one farming bitter fruit--there are indications that dominionists have been promoting this stuff in the Russian neopente community for a while, and that Sacramento in particular seems to have been targeted due to its being home to a neopente shortwave broadcaster:

For Sacramento gay leaders, the sudden appearance of organized demonstrators was a major shock after years of building support in the state capital.

"We've been accepted and were just perking along," said Sloan, a 69-year-old church pastor and co-founder of Lambda Community Center, which serves the gay community. "That's why this Russian thing was such a jolt to people."

Leaders of the religious right, however, celebrate the Russian efforts as a revival.

"My hope and my prayer," said Mark Matta, a former legislative aide who heads the Christian Public Awareness Ministries, "is that they will become a voice in the wilderness for the rest of the country."

Many credit the Slavic Christian immigrant community with filling a void left by the traditional American church and providing reinforcements in the ongoing culture wars over what should define family, acceptable sexual relationships and marriage.

"Russian Christians bring a fresh faith and uncorrupted family values to this country. They are a shining model for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families.
. . .
Before emigrating, many of the refugees learned about Sacramento from two sources: a short-wave fundamentalist religious radio program, "Word to Russia," that originated here, and a Russian-language newspaper, Our Days, that was printed in Sacramento and distributed to underground churches in the Soviet Union. A local Russian Baptist church persuaded several Sacramento evangelical churches to sponsor the refugees.

As it turns out, Word to Russia still exists--it is a program that was, and still is, carried by Far East Broadcasting Corporation station KGEI--and their programming includes explicit attempts to convert Russian Jews in Israel to "Messianic Jews", a hallmark of neopentecostal groups. Far East Broadcasting (now operating under the name Voice of Friendship) is connected to the FGBMFI--and (much to the winging consternation of FEBC) is also rather explicitly mentioned in Sara Diamond's Spiritual Warfare as a major conduit for export of neopentecostal dominionism worldwide.

Ledyaev's church itself is widely acknowledged to be an "American-style" church, per the Baltic Times:

RIGA - New Generation, a 5,000-strong non-denominational church primarily consisting of Russians, combines some of the stranger practices of the major religions. Anyone who has seen a big tent revival in America will know what it means when pastor Alexey Ledyaev says that New Generation “heals sick people.” Not a common site in Latvia. “We also take things from the ecumenical tradition, which is not very typical of the American church,” Ledyaev says. They perform exorcisms.
. . .
Ledyaev founded New Generation, a charismatic church, in 1989. The charismatic line, according to Calitis, who is also the dean of the theology faculty at Latvia University, is about “working on people emotionally, altar calls, talking in tongues.” It’s about rock groups and pop groups performing Christian music. “It’s entertainment. I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

And it’s about a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The church has a branch in the Springfield, Massachussetts and Ledyaev attended a National Prayer Breakfast hosted by President Bush in February. But the pastor disagrees with the characterization of his church as being particularly “American.”

Calitis disagrees. Though New Generation, like a few other churches in Riga, may not get their funding or pastoral support directly from Americans (which is the case with the Good News Christian Congregation, founded by the American pastor Rick Renner in 1993), all of them take their cues from certain American churches, he says.

“Everyone is watching television,” Calitis says. And in taking their cues, New Generation not only copies the style but often the substance of the message. “I don’t know where the shit-throwing comes from,” says Calitis. “I don’t know where that fits into their theology.”

One would assume the appeal of the New Generation’s essential weirdness may attract Latvians, who are accustomed to a long tradition of pagan mysticism, but Calitis says he understands the attraction for Russians, who are culturally more extroverted and may relate more to the emotive aspect of the church. Russians were also robbed of having a church tradition for a much longer time. “They may be more naive about religion.”

The dissident
Ledyaev was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan and grew up in the Baptist Church, which throughout the former Soviet Union was known for dissident activity. He still, apparently, bears the scars of that time. “It was especially bad in school in the fourth or fifth grade. [Baptist children] were made to stand in front of the class, as the teacher said, ‘Look at what a strange thing we have here,’ and all the students laughed at us.”

Ledyaev remembers his file in the army covered in a word written in red ink, “Baptist,” which meant the best job he could obtain would be that of a brick-layer. He eventually moved to the Pentecostal Church, and the relatively more celebratory nature of these two churches helped inform the manner of New Generation. That said, Calitis points out that traditional Baptists would not approve of New Generation’s theatrics.

Ledyaev is, at the moment, unwary of taking political stands that may embarrass some of the other churches in Riga. He has a way of speaking his id. “I think there are a lot of gays in the media,” he says. “You can tell it by the questions they ask and the articles they write.”

This, here, is proof Ledyaev's church is definitely among the "bitter fruit" of the orchard the Assemblies "planted" by steeplejacking Reform Baptist churches in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Another major player is Seattle-area neopente preacher Ken Hutcherson, head of Antioch Bible Church near Seattle, WA. Antioch is an "independent" neopente church, which has cell church groups and is well known for being virulently anti-LGBT--up to and including illegal electioneering for anti-LGBT initiatives:

The fine folks at Northwest Progressive Institute are reporting tonight that Antioch Bible Church -- which meets at an Eastside public high school -- was passing out petitions for Tim Eyman's latest, and most divisive yet, intiative: a proposal to overturn the recent state legislation that expanded anti-discrimination law to include sexual orientation:

Ken Hutcherson's Antioch Bible Church was a participant in this morning's "Referendum Sunday" petition drive to legalize discrimination against people of different sexual orientation, NPI has learned.

Sources demonstrated to NPI (see the images below) that a large folding table was set up outside of the Lake Washington High School gymnasium, where the Antioch Bible Church meets for Sunday services, to allow members of Hutcherson's congregation to sign petitions for Referendum 65 as they exited the building.

[The report includes photos of the petitions and the table where they were being distributed.]

An organizer was also distributing petitions to congregation members for circulation, along with instructions. According to our sources, the organizer made a point of asking congregation members to sign the back of the petition, and when asked when they were due back by, was quoted as saying "We'd prefer to have them back by June 1st". (June 6th is the deadline for Eyman to collect signatures to be turned into the Secretary of State's office).

Northwest Progressive also has further info on this bit of electioneering, including pictures.

Among other things, Antioch operates its own "parallel economy" business directory--one where members must attend the megachurch and must donate tithes from profits to be listed, as well as signing an explicitly dominionist statement of faith.

And Hutcherson, at least according to the SPLC Intelligence Report, has noted Hutcherson's partnership and promotion of those folks who literally beat a man to death for being gay...including, as we'll see tomorrow, actively promoting himself as a representative of the US government.
Tomorrow--the crowd of American dominionists supporting "Watchers on the Walls"--including, notably, a major Assemblies of God leader who has called for the denaturalisation of all non-dominionists in the US.