Voice told the "Family" founder to bust unions. And Jesus said minister to members of "elite:...
instead of to the down and out to minister to the up and out.
When I read these two paragraphs my very first thought was that this movement that started in the 1930s was relevant to how the 1% have come into power.
It appears to be relevant to the constant efforts to cut programs to the poor, needy, and elderly while all the while enriching the coffers of the very rich.
From The Week:
DC's 'invisible army' for Christ
What does the Family believe?
Its theology is vague, elastic, and focused on power. The basic precepts came to Vereide in a vision in 1935, according to the group’s literature. Living in Seattle, he came to believe that union organizing in the city was communist-inspired. Jesus appeared to him in the form of the president of U.S. Steel, who told him to gather “key men”—prominent businessmen and political leaders—to beat back the unions in His name. Vereide’s recruiting efforts spread eastward, and in 1941 he arrived in Washington, where he began cultivating friendships with powerful people and setting up prayer groups. By then, Vereide was convinced that conventional Christianity had it backwards: Instead of ministering to the down-and-out, Jesus wanted believers to tend to the “up-and-out”—members of America’s elite who lacked intimacy with Jesus. In Vereide’s worldview, free-market capitalism is divinely ordained, and unions and regulations are a form of blasphemy.
There's more from In These Times:
Scandal-linked “The Family” Says: Jesus Wants You to Bust Unions
One night, while lying in bed fretting about socialists, Wobblies, and a Swedish Communist who, he was sure, planned to bring Seattle under the control of Moscow, Vereide received a visitation: a voice, and a light in the dark, bright and blinding. The next day he met a friend, a wealthy businessman and former major, and the two men agreed upon a spiritual plan. They enlisted nineteen business executives in a weekly breakfast meeting and together they prayed, convinced that Jesus alone could redeem Seattle and crush the radical unions. They wanted to give Jesus a vessel, and so they asked God to raise up a leader. One of their number, a city councilman named Arthur Langlie, stood and said, “I am ready to let God use me.” Langlie was made first mayor and later governor, backed in both campaigns by money and muscle from his prayer-breakfast friends, whose number had rapidly multiplied.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm terrible at remembering whom I reply to 
Duh.
This shit is never ending.
that this is what Jesus believed. Forget all that "Sermon on the Mount stuff." 
Yeah, I know what you mean. 
Just much more than a theory.
But yeah, say those words and people run.
Always found it weird that some people don't understand that conspiracies actually happen. The entire plan to start the war in Iraq was a conspiracy. But I digress
[URL=
.html][IMG]
[/IMG][/URL]
Vereide and Ayn Rand have made a monster. 
That made me chuckle. 
or Jesus - it was Satan. 
