Thread by @dianabutlerbass

Interesting: Glenn Youngkin's campaign is, in part, about his skill as a business leader. But one of the organizations he runs - Meadowkirk - has a failing score on Charity Navigator due solely to poor financial health and bad governance. charitynavigator.org/ein/262213179

This whole story about the retreat center and the church are, well, weird. Is Youngkin using two religious organizations to reduce tax liability? (I don't know - and they aren't saying)

forbes.com/sites/giacomot…

A couple paragraphs deep in this piece about Youngkin's religious views. He literally started a church in his basement founded on the Alpha program - and then bought them a building (which they rent from him for $1 a year). apnews.com/article/busine…

The church posted a doc on Faith & Politics - quite UNLIKE anything I've ever seen on a church website. FWIW, it seems more like it was written by lawyers than a pastor.

Also: screen shot it (I did) because the church has a habit of scrubbing things:

htc.us/vestryupdates/…

I'm serious. I've never seen a church post anything like this. It is almost as if they expected journalists to be poking around looking for some sort of less-than-ethical involvement in someone's campaign or something....

Also vaguely interesting that Paul Ryan (yes, the former VP candidate and House Speaker) is also on the board of directors of Youngkin's Meadowkirk charity.

One of the former pastors of Youngkin's church was affiliated clergy at Truro Church - which was once an Episcopal Church but broke away - Truro was a center of right-wing Episcopal anti-LGBTQ movements, anti-abortion activism. Clarence & Ginny Thomas attended Truro.

Youngkin has tried to be suburban moderate GOP, but the religious associations are, if nothing else, suggestive of engagement (entanglement?) with the most elite levels of religious right theo-politics in Virginia.

Also worth noting: two of the current pastors of Youngkin's church (on which he served on the board, aka, "vestry" until recently) are both graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University divinity programs.

That's unusual for a church claiming "Anglican roots."

Really unusual.

Youngkin is also the chair of the finance committee at the National Cathedral School, the elite Episcopal girls school. His daughter went there.

And two of his sons (from what I can gather) went to St Alban's, also at the Cathedral.

Hardly an experience of Virginia schools.

But it does show that he maintained financial ties with elite Episcopal institutions even after the church he founded in his basement went a very different way.

I'm not some secular person attacking Youngkin's church. I'm a VA Episcopalian who has spent 30 yrs writing about religion & politics.

In all that time, I've never seen a cluster of threads quite like this - Alpha course, church planter, odd religion non-profits, elite ties...

And I'm not even to the part yet about how he acquired Meadowkirk - in a very conflicted deal with the National Capital Presbytery - that created a tremendous amount of ill will. It isn't clear how Youngkin entered the picture and made the real estate deal.

A brief (and very Youngkin-friendly) piece on the Presbyterian angle:

pres-outlook.org/2015/02/lesson…

His church also posted a "racial unity" statement & is hosting anti-racism reading groups. But in recent days, Youngkin has claimed that MLK would support him banning CRT and has disingenuously attacked Toni Morrison's "Beloved."

Guess that anti-racism program isn't working.

OMG - This was a 74 rating YESTERDAY. After we called attention to this bad ranking, somehow the rating was mysterious raised to 94!!! I'm flabbergasted. How in the world......?

Here's the only screen shot I have. I don't know how to access this on the WayBack Machine.

Some screen shots of the older page (not the new page with the raised score):

Yesterday (when this thread was originally posted), Youngkin's Meadowkirk had a 74 rating. This morning - just 8 hours later - the score was raised to 94.

Someone somewhere changed it for some reason. But the original clearly gave Meadowkirk a failing rank.

Here's the cached page (until someone scrubs it, too) and a screen shot: webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…