Duncan Flanagan

Duncan Cornelius Flanagan (born April 9, 1953) is an American Presbyterian pastor, public speaker, and political activist from Rome, Georgia. Flanagan has been highly active in American conservatism, beginning in the 1980s when he changed his church's affiliation from the liberal PCUSA to the conservative PCA. In recent years, Duncan has become highly supportive of President Wolf and his policies, and is seen as a key figure in the Christian right.

Duncan is the second son of Elijah Flanagan and Mae Flanagan, and a member of the larger Flanagan family, which consists primarily of politicians, businesspeople, and ministers. Duncan graduated from Mercer University with a B.A. in 1975, and then attended Harvard Divinity School from 1975 to 1978 where he received his Master of Divinity from. Flanagan became ordained in 1979, and became the leading elder of the Seven Hills Fellowship church in 1984. Concurrently, he started up his involvement in conservatism and began building up his prominence among the Christian right, reaching a national level of recognition by the mid-90s.

Duncan is a member of the ACU, Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Citizens for Community Values, ARF, and UCDN. He is especially prominent int he FRC, CCV, and the ARF and UCDN as the latter two's co-founder, and has raised millions and supported numerous state and federal conservative candidates through them over their years of existence. After President Wolf became the Republican forerunner in mid-2016, Duncan became a key supporter of his in the South and among the Christian right, believing to have garnered hundreds of thousands of votes for him within those voting blocs by the time of the Novermber election. Since February of 2019, Duncan has interviewed and spoken with a few Republican candidates for President in 2020, with his final endorsement being seen as a key to determinig who'll the evangelical vote will flock to.

Family
The Flangan family is an old and well-established family in North Georgia. According to Flangan himself, the Flanagan family crossed over to America in the 1760s from Scotland, which is also where the Presbyterian roots of the family comes from. The oldest known patrilineal ancestor of Flanagan's is Eustace Flanagan (1793-1862), who was an early leader of the Floyd County Presbyterian community during the Antebellum era. More recently, the Flanagan family has found itself the source of several major Georgian figures, such as Flanagan's uncle Taylor Flanagan (1919-2005), who was a State Senator and later Governor, Patrick Flanagan (tb. 1924), who was a WW2 veteran and retired senior military officer. Duncan's great-grandfather, Jeremiah Flanagan (1863-1944), was the common ancestor of the Flanagan and Talmadgefamilies. Flanagan's matrilineal ancestry is less prominent. However, Mae Flanagan (nee Savannah), is a prominent retired actress who was active from 1946 to 1997 and rose through Hollywood through her appearances in numerous roles with figure such as George Burns, Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, and others.

Early life and education
Duncan, along with his brothers, were all educated at Darlington School (save his sisters, who attended Thornwood School for Girls), from 1957 to 1969. While at Darlington, primarily from 1964 to his graduation, Duncan participated in the Darlington football team, the Darlington newspaper “Darlingtonian”, and the school’s DECA chapter from 1966 to 1969. He was salutatorian of his class and was easily accepted into Mercer University afterwards, and pursued a Bachelor of Arts from there over the following four year period, and during the same period, Duncan was ordained and was made a deacon of his hometown church. He graduated from Mercer University in 1973 magna cum laude and fifth overall in his class; Duncan became involved in junior politics during college, joining Mercer’s College Republicans chapter in 1971 (and becoming its Vice President in his senior year), and then founding and leading the chapter at his graduate college from 1973 to 1976. Duncan went on to attend Harvard Divinity School to pursue a Master of Divinity, and he graduated summa cum laude from it.

Early religious career and politics
After college, Duncan returned to Rome, Georgia to begin his proper religious career. He was made a Teaching Elder of his church, Seven Hills Fellowship, soon after returning and became locally recognized (or, among his Presbytery) for being a traditionalist who stringently rejected and spoke against the increasing affiliation with “Liberal Christianity” in the PCUSA, which the Seven Hills Fellowship was affiliated with. Outside his ideological services, Duncan was a dedicated and professional minister and theologian who was famous among his congregation and an exalted member of the church’s Session, serving as its Stated Clerk several times.

In 1984, Pastor Maurice Horseleg (1922-2004) retired from his post, after fifteen years, and as the Presbytery convened to choose a replacement, Duncan used his status as the de facto highest ranking member of the congregation to leverage a “vote of independence”, backed by the PCA Presbytery. The vote was convened a week after Horseleg’s resignation, and the results were announced, 314-32, two days later. The event attained statewide recognition, the first major news coverage Duncan received, and was received negatively by its former Presbytery. Duncan began to rise in prominence meanwhile due to his other involvements, namely his contributions to the ACU, Family Research Council, World Concern, and the Heritage Foundation. Duncan began donating 7.50% of his congregations quarterly donations (around $5,000) to the World Concern, which has increased over the years from 10% to 15% (and $6,000 to $10,000), and - overall - donates 25% of his church's quarterly funds (~$80,000 per year) to several specific groups. He became a respected member of each group, beginning in the mid-80s, and began attracting his first bits of national attention because of it. He announced his - individual - support of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, and while he was barred from making any collective financial contributions, he followed Reagan around his campaigning in the South to entice Southern Evangelical voters. After attending the 1987 and 1994 National Prayer Breakfasts, attending five National Prayer Days at the Washington National Cathedral from 1988 to 1996, after being made a Guest Chaplain of the Senate and House numerous times, and after being elected for the first and several times thereafter as a Delegate to the PCA General Assembly, Duncan became nationally recognized as a prominent Presbyterian figure, and his media coverage intensified. However, with his rising fame and attention came increasing scrutiny and criticism from liberal factions who opposed his notably and strictly conservative stances, and he began to be labeled by certain groups as a homophobe, racist, fundamentalist, and - more radically, less commonly - a White supremacist. However, Duncan was mostly resilient to any attacks, especially due to his connections, such as word in the late-90s that he had been inducted into The Fellowship and was quickly making allies with prominent members of it.

TO BE FORMATTED

Still barred to support politicians as a church, Duncan founded the PCR Political Action Committee (Proper Christian Representative; a nonprofit 527 organization) in October of 1999 to independently raise funds to endorse Christian Right political candidates; the PCR was co-founded by several other Christian Right leaders, and started off with a five-digit membership that raised nearly a million dollars in its first year. The first endorsement made by the PCR was to John Burke in 2000, it was worth $350,000 and came with a $100,000 purchase of airtime in several regions in the Deep South to run ads made by the PCR. Duncan was hired by Burke’s campaign manager on July 18 and given the semi-official role of “Evangelical Outreach Liaison”, assisting with the field department of the campaign in formulating and enacting GOTV campaigns and general campaigning geared towards the Evangelical Protestant voting bloc. Following his contribution to Burke’s campaign, and Burke’s election, Duncan saw his second burst in notoriety, culminating in his appointment to board positions within World Concern, the Heritage Foundation, and Citizens for Community Values. In July of 2005, Duncan founded the Alliance for Religious Freedom, an interfaith non-profit advocacy group with conservative leans that advocated for the defense of a broad definition of the Freedom of Religion clause of the Constitution (i.e., an interpretation that would lessen secularism and permit more religiosity in the public sector). The ARF started off with several hundred (entirely Christian) members, and then boomed to over 20,000 by 2010, and has since gained some Conservative/Orthodox Jewish and non-Abrahamic members. The ARF primarily lobbies Congress, state legislators, and federal judges in order to achieve its goals, and contributes an average of $2,500,000 in donations per year since 2010.

Back in 2007, when the Great Recession started, Duncan regarded the event as an opportunity to proselytize. Though Ducan had no media platform, just media coverage, he was able to garner enough attention through a series of enticing sermons to gain the spotlight and launch and indirect campaign promoting churchgoing and faith as a viable escape from financial and materialistic strain. He contracted both Rasmussen Reports and Vanderbilt University’s Statistics and Methodology Service to run national and congregational polls and analyses to collect hard evidence that churchgoing and church charities provided emotional and empirical relief for individuals. The data from either group, after being analyzed by an independent third party (the University of Georgia’s Statistical Consulting Center), were determined as showing “a moderate but undeniable trend and pattern of both emotional and mental plus empirical and real positive effects among the analyzed and tested subjects”. These results received nationwide attention, and were further analyzed by several other independent and partisan agencies, with the consensuses among them being mostly the same. While empirical data for the effect on churchgoing after the release of the report does not exist, and the credibility of a Pew Research survey on religiosity put together during a concurrent timeframe is still debated, Duncan and his allies among the a Christian Right fervently believe there was a noticeable upward trend afterwards in churchgoing. Furthermore, in 2008, Duncan - along with several other Christian Right leaders - formed the Union for the Defense of the Christian Nation (UDCN), with an initial endowment of $7,500,000 and approximately 5,000 members; the UDCN is a conservative Christian lobbying group, generally considered to be a front group of the Fellowship, and endorses conservative Christian political candidates, funds smear campaigns geared towards Democratic candidates, has been accused of using media outlets influenced by its members to affect media coverage of Democratic or non-Christian liberal candidates, and is generally considered one of the most powerful - and controversial - lobbying groups in the United States. The UDCN works, somewhat scandalously, with the ACLU on religious freedom cases, and sponsors with the Traditional Values Coalition, the ACU, the Eagle Forum, and the Liberty Counsel.

Duncan received some national media coverage for a 2012 WSJ article that labeled him as “a modern American renaissance man—minister, activist, and lobbyist”. In 2013, after a few months of debate between conservative and liberal Congressional factions, Duncan was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by the Speaker of the House for his “decades of notable religious, political, and miscellaneous contribution to the American nation, and serving as a major figure in American society”. This text was used, pejoratively, by liberal opponents to label Duncan as the “Poster Pastor of the Christian Right”, which was accepted by members of the Christian Right, who began referring to Duncan, endearingly, as “The Pastor”. Duncan took more exalted roles in successive conventions held by the political groups he was apart of, most notably the CPAC held by the ACU, and began taking use of the rise in social media to “modernize the pulpit” and began using Twitter to expand his recognition, and he also began associating with rising conservative Internet personalities. In 2014, he created - with the help of friend Rush Limbaugh - the radio talk show From The Pulpit, By Father Flanagan, a twice a week conservative radio talk show that Duncan intended to use as a way to establish a media presence. From The Pulpit is affiliated with the Cartersville-based WTAN radio station, and ran for a year before receiving national syndication through the American Family Radio which (which is owned and operated by the American Family Association, which Duncan has allies in), and then further (in 2016) by several dozen Fox affiliates and Townsquare Media. As of 2019, From The Pulpit has nearly 100,000 weekly listeners, which jumped considerably in 2018 when it launched a website that provided live recordings of the show that drew in younger, tech-savvy, and/or non-commuting audiences.

Since 2017, Duncan has spoken of the “demoralization of America”, the “perversion of the First Amendment to facilitate the ironic deconstruction of its provisions through ‘political correctness’ and ‘open borders’”, the “sociopolitical cancer of progressivism”, and “a need for a national rebirth”. These fiery words and their associated actions have led to decent controversy and rumors of a possible political campaign. Duncan has stated he might have political ambitions, but nothing is certain yet, and several Republican figures - including Executive Assistant Director of the NRCC, Simeon Bolton - have stated that they would endorse Duncan should he run for office. These rumors have been met with severe opposition from the Left, and the DCCC’s leadership has stated - in response to Republican endorsements - that it would nominate powerful opponents or compose strong campaigns to oppose such a move by Duncan. However, everything remains uncertain, and it is unknown exactly what might set Duncan to confirm or deny a campaign.