A "shill" is a person who stands in the crowd, appearing to have no relation to the one selling something (but who is really connected, and receives instruction from such) who bids or otherwise acts in a way to promote the product being sold.

A common charge I hear from the media and left is that non-liberal Christian churches are being "corrupted" by politics, that they are "involved", that they "violate the separation of church and state." To read some narratives, you'd believe our churches received regular marching orders from the Republican National Committe (RNC), telling them exactly what positions to take and preach. Charges like these come from Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Bill Moyers, and, around election time, the mainstream news media in general.

I'm fairly conservative, and attend fairly conservative churches, and I've never seen anything of the sort. At most, abortion gets mentioned on occasion. (In most churches, not from the pulpit.) And once in a while, I end up in a church whose pastor inveighs against "corporate greed" and "polluting the oceans" -- talking points that probably did not come from the RNC. ;-)

I've been keeping an eye on Sojourners for a while. Their leader, Jim Wallis, is deeply into Democratic politics and is famous for trying to involve churches in promoting what he feels are "God's politics". Here's what they sent me yesterday:

Dear Tim,

Give your pastor the perfect gift this Christmas season!

Now, for a limited time, Sojourners/Call to Renewal is offering a gift membership in our new church network, Faith & Justice Churches. The network provides tools and resources created especially for local church leaders.

A gift membership in Faith & Justice Churches makes a great gift for clergy, small group leaders, Sunday school teachers, and seminary students.

A gift membership includes:

* An one-year charter membership in Faith & Justice Churches
* A subscription to Sojourners magazine, including 15 years of archived content
* A subscription to "Preaching the Word," our online sermon preparation resources
* Ready-to-use small group resources
* Downloadable bulletin inserts on current issues
* Organizing toolkits
* Discussion boards
* Exclusive commentary from Jim Wallis and Sojourners/Call to Renewal staff
* And much more...

In addition to all of this, we’ll send your gift recipient a free copy of Living God’s Politics, the paperback companion guide to Jim Wallis' New York Times best-seller, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

Here we have an appeal to get churches to join an explicitly political organization. Here we have a set of talking points, distributed from some central point of control, for my pastor to speak from the pulpit each week. Here we have bulletin inserts, and guides which tell small group leaders which issues to raise, and how to think about them, in their "bible studies".

Do they also include finger puppets for the kids, so they can learn, for example the importance favoring "civil unions" or "single payer" medical system? (Perhaps they have a neat re-working of the good samaritan parable which features a state-run hospital instead of an innkeeper! But I digress...)

I'm apparently supposed to get my pastor, and thus church, involved in all this as a "gift".

In light of this, it would seem that such charges, from what I call "the left", are mere projection. Every aspect of a mainstream journalist's fever dream of Karl Rove manipulating the churches is here: centralized control, detailed religio-political talking points (perhaps timed to co-incide with national campaigns and protests), papers telling pastors and small group leaders how to think about and frame controversial issues, and a man at the top who is clear on his overt intent to use religion to advance his idea of "God's politics".

Perhaps they think conservative churches act this way because this it is, in fact, what their own peers would do in the same situation.

I want to be clear: I'm not one of these people who believe religion should never impact one's political beliefs of actions: if it didn't, we'd still have slavery and child labor. But I find it just a tad creepy how centralized and detailed this system appears to be, and how ironic that it comes from the same end of the spectrum as those who make the most noise about the spectre of churches being taken over by politics.