Some residents in South Carolina say they found bags of candy on their street containing a piece of paper asking them to join the Ku Klux Klan.

Residents in Oconee County found the bags Saturday night or Sunday morning.

The paper said “Save Our Land, Join the Klan.” It had a phone number that led to an automated message discussing KKK efforts against illegal immigration.

Robert Jones told WHNS-TV that he’s the imperial klaliff of the Loyal White Knights and said the effort was part of a recruiting event they hold three times a year.

Shameless efforts to dress up bigotry in religious garb go back to the very beginnings of the religious right, which is younger than a lot of people think. The modern politicized religious right movement was born in the 1970s in a battle over whether all-white "Christian schools" could exclude black students while maintaining tax-exempt status as religious organizations. In the subsequent years, the religious right’s strategists grew savvier, recasting their agenda as a defense of “family values” and of “unborn babies.” And backed by deep-pocketed conservative donors, they set about building a powerful political, legal, and communications empire — largely bypassing existing church and denominational structures and relying instead on creative use of then-new communications technologies like direct mail, cable television, and talk radio.

Meanwhile, after playing a leading role in the social movements of the 1960s, mainline protestant denominations have since been devastated by generational decline, bureaucratic dysfunction, and internal battles, especially over the inclusion of LGBT people in church life and ministry. (Sensing weakness, outside religious-right organizations have contributed much of the money and infrastructure on the conservative side of these fights.)

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But while business and religious conservatives have consistently made common cause, secular progressives have grown increasingly disinterested in, or even hostile to, Christian faith. In reaction to the religious right, too many progressive leaders have adopted unhelpful keep-your-bibles-out-of-our-bedrooms rhetoric — and too many progressive foundations and donors have ruled out investing in anything religious. (One wonders how many checkbooks would open up today for a Baptist pastor from Montgomery, Alabama who gives sermons about how America must be born again.)

So today’s debates about birth control (which nearly all Christians support using) or anti-gay discrimination (which most Christians oppose) are thus a byproduct of four decades of institutional religious history. And even before Hobby Lobby, the right’s best strategists have been planning to spend the next decade in a fight to redefine “religious freedom” so as to create a backdoor for all kinds of noxious and discriminatory practices, not just in private employment but in the provision of healthcare and social services. In a country where over 70 percent of people continue to identify as Christians, progressives simply cannot afford to continue ceding Christianity to the right.

Last week, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) wrote a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with a dire warning: Some of the child refugees streaming across the southern border into the United States might carry deadly diseases. "Reports of illegal immigrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning," Gingrey wrote. "Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles."

Gingrey's analysis carried an aura of credibility among conservatives, because, as Judicial Watch noted, the congressman is "also [a] medical doctor." But his two-page letter is filled with false charges—there's no evidence that migrants carry Ebola or that they're less likely to be vaccinated—from an inconvenient messenger: The congressman has himself pushed legislation to discourage some kinds of mandatory vaccinations in the United States.

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Gingrey's misdiagnoses aren't confined to Ebola. As the Texas Observer points out, when it comes to measles, children in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are more likely to be vaccinated than children in the United States. None of those countries have recorded an outbreak of measles in 24 years. Kids in Marin County are more at risk.

Gingrey has long-standing ties to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a far-right medical group that opposes all mandatory vaccines. The organization touts access to Gingrey as one of its membership perks. (The AAPS has, incidentally, taken the lead in pushing the idea that migrant children are disease carriers.) In 2007, he wrote an amendment that would allow parents to block their children from receiving HPV vaccines, which are designed to combat cervical cancer.