Charles E. Carlson
History and Statement of Purpose:
Charles E. Carlson, a onetime Denver and Phoenix businessman. After many years of disappointing volunteer efforts in political, educational, and pro-life movements he, with several close friends, organized We Hold These Truths in 1997.
Carlson's March 21, 1994, New American magazine article, "Attacking Islam," stated that the Desert Storm Iraq was the beginning of a third world war that had become official in 1991, supplanting the former Cold War against the communist ideology with a War on Muslims. Mr. Carlson noticed that many "evangelical" churches were benignly, and in some cases knowingly, fostering a thinly veneered policy of serial Warmaking when the war suited the politics of the State of Israel. Otherwise, they were largely "pro-life." Churches were thus rendered ineffective in their often-stated social objectives to preserve life, curb divorce, promiscuity, and eliminate abortion among their members. Carlson's observations resulted in founding We Hold These Truths as a response.
Project Strait Gate had its official beginning fourteen months after Day 911 and only months after Charles Carlson's one-man fact-finding trip into the Gaza Strip. He returned convinced that direct confrontation with Christian Zionist church leaders offered the only path to lasting peace. These were the churches, he noted, that were both supporting and hiding the Israeli occupation and systematic genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, dashing any hope for a solution. We Hold These Truths defined Christian Zionism as "the belief that the political State of Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy." * (Why At A Church)
Project Strait Gate has held peaceful interventions, called "Vigils" at some 65 churches and national religious conventions. Others have picked up on this theme and demonstrations for peace at churches and synagogues are no longer a novelty. Carlson has written some 250 articles called Pharisee Watch, most reflecting upon the failure of churchmen to carry out Jesus Christ's mandate to be peacemakers in the face of a warring world.
We Hold These Truth will soon release its second educational DVD:
