The Marxist Gamaliel Network is All About Manipulating Churches & Creating Division

NOTE: The following is protected by federal copyright law and is an excerpt from the book Marxianity written by Brannon Howse and is not to be published online. The footnotes that document the content in this article are found in the book Marxianity or the eBook.

The disturbances created in society by the Gamaliel Network are a natural outgrowth of the organization’s tumultuous culture. Workers at the Gamaliel Foundation, the organization behind the network, are schooled in disruption, according to an article from the Capital Research Center. Entitled “The Gamaliel Foundation, Alinsky-Inspired Group Uses Stealth Tactics to Manipulate Church Congregations,” the article notes that:

[quote] Former Gamaliel organizer, Rey Lopez-Calderon, recalls that he had “never seen such a strange and warped culture.” Writing in the online journal Blogcritics, Lopez-Calderon notes that Galluzzo and Gonzalez would pit Gamaliel staff against each other. “Galluzzo told me that he wanted organizers to be tough” ‘blanks’— (starts with a B … illegitimate child is another word for it) — “who could build power like the Conquistadors.” [end quote]

The article also reports that Galluzzo led a seminar for organizers called, “The Courage to Create,” and one segment of the seminar was called, “Walking the Edge of Immorality.” The Capital Research article explains:

[quote] “In this particular part it was more about willing to be ruthless–they actually used the word “ruthless,’” said Lopez-Calderon. “It talked about how, if people are getting in the way of what you want to achieve as an organizer, you should be willing to push those people out of your way.”

“The idea was that’s how power works. It’s dirty. You have to get your hands dirty. But at the end, when you have enough power, you’ll be able to do the right thing.”

“And Galluzzo would talk about the Conquistadors and how they were willing to take risks and not worry about what other people thought of them in order to build power. The idea was to get people to make shady decisions in order to build power.” [end quote]

This is typical Marxist fare: ‘the end justifies the means; be ruthless; accomplish the agenda at any cost.’

Tactics like this are why I warned a few years ago that we would see mounting civil unrest in America. Now, we’ve witnessed the Ferguson situation, ANTIFA protests, and the gross mistreatment of conservatives since Donald Trump became president. It is part of the climate of hate that has caused me to rethink the strategy for Worldview Weekend rallies.

As always, though, this is not all bad news. God turns the results of evil back on itself. In the case of Worldview Weekend, for instance, every time we are attacked, we grow. We now see record numbers streaming our radio and TV shows. We’ve had to dramatically increase our bandwidth and the allotment of streams to handle our traffic. In God’s providence, the attacks have ended up giving us the ability to reach far more people through our new-and-improved studio than we could ever have reached through in-person rallies. When opponents come against us, we grow and get more creative with the technology available to us.

Nevertheless, the Gamaliel strategy is unrelenting. According to its website:

[quote] Gamaliel’s organizing work draws on struggles for justice by people of faith, spanning many nations, faiths, and cultures. Our work draws on Biblical scripture, Christ’s life and teaching, the Torah, the Qur’an, Catholic social teaching, the founding principles of American democracy, the US civil rights movement, and many other sources. [end qutoe]

The inclusion of “Catholic social teaching” is a reference to the social justice concept started by Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in 1840—not that it represents all of Roman Catholicism. There is a war between left and right factions within the Church of Rome in which the left now has the upper hand because of Marxist Pope Francis.

In the “organizing work” of the Gamaliel Network, the affiliate names I mentioned earlier are part of the manipulative strategy. Biblical-sounding names are actually part of the “means justifies the ends” approach in that they are cleverly crafted acronyms for Marxist ideology. “Isaac,” for instance, stands for ‘Interfaith Strategy for Advancing and Action in the Community.’ On its website, the Isaac affiliate describes itself this way:

[quote] We are Isaac. We are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Unitarians and nonreligious. We’re black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islanders, indigenous, Middle Eastern and white. We’re immigrants. We’re suburban, inner-city and rural. We are haves, have-nots and have-a-little, want mores. We’re bold, tenacious and we don’t back down. We are Kalamazoo County. [end quote]

Notice the reference to “haves, have-nots and have-a-little, want mores.” It’s straight Alinsky-speak. And to give you a taste of a few other affiliate acronyms:

• Esther is Equality, Solidarity, Truth, Hope, Empowerment, Reform.
• Amos is Advocating Mobilizing and Organizing in Solidarity.
• Joshua is Justice Organization Sharing Hope and United for Action.
• Jonah is Joining Our Neighbors Advancing Hope.
• Micah is Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope.
• And in a meaningful deviation from biblical references, Expo is Ex-Prisoners Organizing.

The Gamaliel website promotes clergy training which provides what it says are tools, concepts, and methodologies for becoming effective in balancing the demands of their own institutions, with issues of justice and community concerns. A spin-off service of the training is the supportive network of clergy who are working through similar demands in their own settings.

David Horowitz, a former Marxist who has now spent years as a serious American conservative fighting Marxist and Muslim ideology, keeps a close eye on the Gamaliel Network. On his web page discoverthenetworks.org, he presents this background of the Gamaliel Network:

[quote] In 2001, Dennis Jacobsen, director of Gamaliel’s National Clergy Caucus, published Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing, a handbook/ideological guide for Gamaliel Foundation’s religious organizers. Depicting the U.S. as a “sick society” in need of radical transformation, this text derides America’s free-market system for allegedly harming the poor. The author affirms that GF’s goal is to foment public anger and “shake the foundations of the society.” Though he never mentions socialism explicitly, Jacobsen praises the communal property arrangements of the early Christians, the ‘radical sharing’ practiced by various African groups. A self-described ‘radical Christian,’ Jacobsen acknowledges that he has ‘deep prejudices . . . against wealthy people.’ He contends that Christians who view America as a just society are plagued by ‘false consciousness.’” [end quote]

The “communal property arrangements of the early Christians” is simply the tired argument made from the Acts 2 practice of Christians selling what they had to share with those in need. But this was not socialism. These people were eating in their houses and meeting house to house, so obviously, they owned property. The text merely points out that they voluntarily sold assets to raise money for new believers who had come to Jerusalem to study and learn more about God. I devote a whole chapter to exegeting this in my book Religious Trojan Horse and also discuss it thoroughly in a section of Twisted Scripture, Twisted Theology. Suffice it to say, the early Christians were not involved in communism or communal living.

Rutgers political scientist Heidi Schwarz has also studied the Gamaliel Foundation extensively and notes that the private and public faces of the organization differ greatly. Gamaliel’s organizers engage freely in ideological talk when speaking privately among themselves, but they meticulously avoid such talk during training sessions so as not to alienate American working-class people. In public settings, organizers present their ideas as pragmatic “common sense solutions” for “working families.”

They know that many working-class Americans oppose communism. So, to appeal to them, they avoid using communist phrases, terminology, and buzzwords. It’s part of the strategy to be “ruthless” and “to walk the line of immorality.” In true communist fashion, the end justifies the means. They lie to people to get them to follow.

For anyone who does even a little internet research, though, the true nature of the organization is not a secret. The Gamaliel Foundation trumpets its real goals:

[quote] Our New Long Term Agenda: As a faith-based community organizing network we, the people of Gamaliel, build power to transform the world as it is into the new world envisioned by people of faith. We recognize the historic and present violations of and systemic sins against our people and our values. And in response we commit to a long-term agenda that creates structural, racial equity. Builds people’s control of government. Builds community control of the economy. And expands the public sphere. Together we act boldly and defiantly to call out “empire,” to dismantle structural racism and poverty and to establish the “beloved community.” [end quote]

Of course, when they say “build people’s control of government,” they mean socialism. And when they speak of the “empire,” they mean America. They want to bring it down and restructure it. And when they talk about dismantling structural racism and poverty, they’re talking about dismantling the capitalist system.

Gamaliel Network also claims to want to deregulate, but in Gamaliel-speak, that means to take control of the economy from capitalists. Their plan to “privatize” is Marxist gibberish for nationalization of industry, which, of course, is one of the Communist Manifesto’s ten planks of communism. So, Gamaliel uses these words—deregulate, privatize—in order to sound good to conservative audiences. It’s part of the strategy to keep the working class from being turned off.

Other plans include using tax policy to consolidate wealth. They want a progressive income tax system to confiscate wealth and redistribute it so that they—the Marxists—run the government and have everybody’s money.

In my book Grave Influence, I examine a key component of the Marxist—and therefore, Gamaliel—strategy called the “Cloward Pivens” strategy. In a nutshell, it means to get as many people into the welfare system as possible. The intent is to eventually collapse the system to undermine confidence in existing public programs and then to replace them with “new alternatives.”

Another point of attack on the “empire” is to weaken democratic centers of power—two key examples being the church and law enforcement agencies. Not surprisingly, interfaith ideology has infiltrated churches, as well as many police and sheriff departments.

The Gamaliel Network even invokes miracles of Jesus and the Apostles in order to support its socialistic views of healthcare. The Gamaliel Foundation contends that government-financed healthcare is a God-given right that should be guaranteed to everyone living in the United States.