Leaders on the Christian right have been giving such speeches for decades, but the two-day Rock Church conference was not business as usual. Rather, it showcased the rapid reconfiguration of the Christian right around the rising, highly militant but poorly understood charismatic wing of the new Christian right, a movement which includes both Ted Haggard and Sarah Palin .)

One point of the spear for the new Christian right is an intense, raspy-voiced man who presided over the June 5, 2009 Rock Church event, layed hands on Mike Huckabee, and pledged the commitment of his prayer warriors to Huckabee and Gingrich was Lou Engle, founder of TheCall - which played a significant role in the push to pass the anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight in the lead up to the November 4, 2008 presidential election.

Only days before Huckabee and Gingrich received Lou Engle's endorsement at Rock Church, on Sunday May 31, 2009, late-term abortion doctor George Tiller was gunned down in the lobby of his Wichita, Kansas church. The next morning CBS's Jeff Glor reported, "We did speak with the accused shooters' ex-wife yesterday. She said she was not surprised this happened and that she believed Roeder wanted to be a martyr for the cause."

The November 1, 2008 TheCall San Diego event was the capstone event for the pro-Proposition Eight, anti-gay marriage push in California prior to the November 4, 2008 presidential election. Towards the end of the event, which attracted an estimated 30,000 attendees to San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium despite sweltering heat, TheCall founder Lou Engle, and his disciple Eddie Brown, as captured in footage taken at TheCall San Diego by documentary film-maker Michael W. Wilson made calls, from onstage before thousands of impassioned followers, for acts of Christian martyrdom. Engle has in the recent past declared that decades of legalized abortion since Roe v. Wade have incurred a blood debt which demands to be paid in blood.

Lou Engle's TheCall promotes both opposition to gay marriage and also legalized abortion. At a TheCall Kansas City event held in Kansas City December 3, 2007, [ video of event ] Engle told an audience - that included young children sitting up with him onstage as he preached,

"One of the names of God is 'avenger of blood'. Have you ever worshiped that aspect of God lately ?"

Lou Engle was outlining to his young audience a doctrine he'd just recently written, "The Doctrine of The Shedding of Innocent Blood," in which Engle declared,

"The most 'dangerous terrorist' is not Islam but God. One of God's names is avenger of blood. Have you worshiped that God yet ?"

As I detailed in June 2, 2009 in Anti-Gay Marriage Pro-Prop 8 Leader Called For Antiabortion Martyrs,

"Lou Engle appeared in the Heidi Ewing / Rachel Grady runaway hit documentary Jesus Camp. The Official documentary website states that at Becky Fischer's "Jesus Camp" summer camp, "kids are taught to become dedicated soldiers in God's army and are schooled in how to take America back for Christ." In the film, Fischer states her desire to indoctrinate the children at her camp so that they have the same level of dedication as Hamas suicide bombers.... Engle serves on C. Peter Wagner's elite Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, part of Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. The Call focuses on opposition to gay right and abortion rights, and Engle has repeatedly forecast that conflict over abortion rights may lead to a second American civil war. Lou Engle operates outside of the spheres of the militia movement and traditional antiabortion movement, which journalist Frederick Clarkson described in a Southern Poverty Law Center special report, from 1998, as in the process of merging. Through TheCall, and the studied "rainbow" New Apostolic movement embrace of most ethnic and societal groups except Jews, gays, and non-Apostolic Christians, Lou Engle is broadening the appeal of a core, non-negotiable raft of fundamentalist bigotries. This broad-tent approach to Christian supremacy is often mistaken as moderate or even progressive."

Engle's TheCall events typically draw twenty to eighty thousand attendees but in some cases attract hundreds thousands of participants. TheCall events have been held in many countries around the globe since Lou Engle founded his organization in 1999.

As long-time antiabortion violence and militia movement observer Clarkson asks, in a story entitled Inflammatory Rhetoric as the Context of Assassination,

inflammatory antiabortion rhetoric that contributes to the threat and climate of violence is not limited to professional sound bite provocateurs like Randall Terry. Such rhetoric and the underlying ideology it expresses is so ingrained in the culture of the antiabortion movement, that someone like Rick Warren busily packaging himself as a moderate thinks nothing of calling abortion a Holocaust and prochoice pols as holocaust deniers. And hardly a media ripple results.

But, Engle's antiabortion militancy comes within the context of an emerging strategy which Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich, two of the GOP's more astute politicians, appear to have understood to be a potentially winning formula for the new Christian right and a resurgent GOP. As I wrote in Proposition 8 : A Proving Ground For The New 'Rainbow' Right,

The [pro-Proposition Eight] effort in California represented the emerging face of a new type of fundamentalism in America that is multiethnic, multiracial and, because of that, can appear pseudo-progressive but which is in many ways farther right than traditional fundamentalism. The new axis of bigotry is no longer defined by racial and ethnic distinctions. It is religious supremacy.