WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of Christians prayed for peace at an anti-war service Friday night at the Washington National Cathedral, kicking off a weekend of protests around the country to mark the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Afterward, participants marched with battery-operated faux candles through snow and wind toward the White House, where police began arresting protesters shortly before midnight. Protest guidelines require demonstrators to continue moving while on the White House sidewalk.

[...]

About 100 people crossed the street from Lafayette Park — where thousands of protesters were gathered — to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk late Friday. Police began cuffing them and putting them on buses to be taken for processing.

… 222 people had been arrested by Saturday morning.

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“A lot of the rhetoric that we hear coming from Christians has been dominated by the religious right and has been strong advocacy for the war,” Pattison said. “That’s just not the way I read my Gospel.”

[...]

“Mr. Bush, my Christian brother, we do need a surge in troops. We need a surge in the nonviolent army of the Lord,” he said. “We need a surge in conscience and a surge in activism and a surge in truth-telling.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Christian evangelicals, a key component in President Bush’s Republican Party, believe the case of brain-damaged Florida woman Terri Schiavo may help inject new life into their long campaign against abortion.

“The right-to-life issue has been with us for over 30 years but never has it dominated the news headlines day after day as it is doing now,” said Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition.

Republican leaders and President Bush had little choice other than to respond to Christian evangelical demands on the Schiavo case or risk alienating a crucial part of their political base, political analysts said.

[...]

Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Christian Family Research Council, said the furor over Schiavo was the direct result of years of campaigning against abortion.

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, conservative columnist and former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan set out the stakes for Republicans.

“The Republican Party controls the Senate, the House and the White House. The Republicans are in charge. They have the power. If they can’t save this woman’s life, they will face a reckoning from a sizable portion of their own base. And they will of course deserve it,” Noonan wrote.

In campaigning for Schiavo to live, some Christian conservatives, including Sheldon and James Dobson who heads the influential Focus on the Family organization, also argue against the notion of a “right to die,” even in cases when an individual clearly states his own wish not to prolong life.

“I don’t believe in a right to die. I think that God is in control of our destiny,” Dobson said recently.

• 34% of those polled (and, thereby, of the U.S. population) belive that “the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.”
• 25% of those polled (and, thereby, of the U.S. population) is considered to be biblical literalists and believe that humans were created in present form 10,000 years ago.

These two percentages are simply incredible to me. The presence of such significant percentages of the U.S. population that hold such an alternate and un-factually based understanding of the natural and modern world creates conditions that ripe for exploitation.