A Nation Under God

[Guest guest]

A Nation Under God

 

News: Let others worry about the rapture: For the increasingly powerful

Christian Reconstruction movement, the task is to establish the Kingdom

of God right now—from the courthouse to the White House.

 

By John Sugg

December/January 2006 Issue

 

TRINITY CHAPEL in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County is hardly the picture

of a revolutionary outpost. It’s a stylishly modern Church of God—a

denomination that, though conservative, is certainly mainstream.

Parishioners are drawn from a community whose average income is a

comfortable 35 percent above the national norm, whose tree-lined

country roads intersect McMansion subdivisions. If Norman Rockwell were

painting suburban sprawl, he’d likely pick Cobb County.

 

On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs and

luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered inside the sanctuary. The

church was host to Restore America, a rally to “celebrate faith and

patriotism” sponsored by Christian publisher American Vision. In the

lobby, neatly blue-blazered youths were hawking So Help Me God, Roy

Moore’s account of his dethroning as chief justice of the Alabama

Supreme Court. Tables were piled with textbooks for homeschoolers,

tomes denouncing evolution, booklets waxing nostalgic for the

antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants, who’d come to the

conference from conservative churches around the region, would hear

from Sadie Fields, president of Georgia’s Christian Coalition, and

they’d sway in rhythm as country crooner Steve Vaus sang “We Must Take

America Back.”

 

But the marquee pitchman of the day was Moore. Ruggedly handsome, with

the military bearing he acquired at West Point, Moore has gained a

rock-star following on the Christian right—a Moses to lead the chosen

from a godless society. The judge has a stunning memory for long

literary passages and judicial opinions, and he chants them in the

singsongy, down-home style of Southern demagogues from Theo Bilbo to

George Wallace—“God” is “Gawud,” with an upward lilt. When he

proclaimed that “God is still sovereign, no matter what federal judges

say,” the crowd tittered and applauded. When he intoned that “there is

no right to sodomy in the Constitution,” they cheered. When he roared

that unless judges “acknowledge God,” they “should be impeached,” the

righteous noise shook the rafters.

 

It could have been nothing more than a half-hour rebel yell—except that

Moore is more than the latest prophet of the religious right. He stands

a good chance of being the next governor of Alabama; he’s also arguably

the single most significant politician to owe his ascendancy to

Christian Reconstruction—an obscure but increasingly potent theology

whose top exponents hold that Christian crusaders must conquer and

convert the world, by the sword if necessary, before Jesus will return.

 

 

Moore has never declared himself a Reconstructionist. But he is a

frequent orator at gatherings whose organizers are part of the

movement. The primary theologians, activists, and websites of

Reconstruction laud him as a hero. Moore’s lawyer in the Ten

Commandments fight, Herb Titus, is a Reconstructionist, as are many of

his most vocal supporters, including Gary DeMar, the organizer of the

Restore America rally and the head of American Vision, one of the most

prolific publishers of the movement.

 

Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over

religion in politics today. The movement’s founder, theologian Rousas

John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers—a number that includes

many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any

organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their

influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades,

from abortion to homeschooling.

 

Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front

organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists;

Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with

the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in

groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has

slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative

Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive

Presbyterian Church [uSA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably

the Southern Baptists.

 

George W. Bush has called Reconstruction-influenced theoretician Marvin

Olasky “compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker,” and Olasky

served as one of the president’s key advisers on the creation of the

Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bush also invited

Reconstructionist Jack Hayford, a key figure in the Promise Keepers

men’s group, to give the benediction at his first inaugural. Deposed

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, though his office won’t comment on his

religious views, governs with what he calls a “biblical worldview”—one

of Reconstruction’s signature phrases. And, for conspiracy buffs, two

heavy contributors to the Chalcedon Foundation—Reconstruction’s main

think tank—are Howard Ahmanson and Nelson Bunker Hunt, both of whose

families played key roles in financing electronic voting machine

manufacturer Election Systems & Software. Ahmanson is also a major

sponsor of ultraconservative politicians, including California state

legislator and 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.

 

Yet for all its influence, Reconstruction is almost invisible to the

media and secular society. Atlanta is ground zero for most

Reconstruction activity—home office to DeMar’s publishing house and

home district to movement prophet Larry McDonald, who served four terms

in Congress in the 1970s and 1980s—but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

has done only one major article on the movement. The entire Lexis-Nexis

database includes only 43 articles from all of the U.S. media that make

reference to Reconstruction, and only a handful of those explore the

movement. “A hundred years ago, newspapers published the sermons

preachers preached on Sunday,” notes Ed Larson, a University of Georgia

historian. “Everyone knew what the Baptists believed, or the Lutherans

or the Presbyterians. That’s no longer the case. And it has worked to

the benefit of Reconstructionists as they doggedly pursued their goal.”

 

 

Reconstructionists aren’t shy about what exactly it is they are

pursuing: “The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to

gain exclusive control over the franchise,” Gary North, a top

Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism:

The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be

denied citizenship.”

 

 

 

WITH HIS KHAKI PANTS and checkered shirts, Gary DeMar could be one of a

million guys meeting weekly in men’s groups at churches around the

country. Bright and articulate, he’s soft-spoken until he gets in front

of a crowd. His publishing house distributes hundreds of tracts, more

than 20 of them written by DeMar himself, with titles such as The

Politically Incorrect Guides to Islam (and the Crusades), which

promises “all the disturbing facts about Islam and its murderous

hostility to the West,” and The Marketing of Evil, which covers

everything “from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to

extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers.”

 

I first met DeMar 18 months ago at his church, Midway Presbyterian, in

the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs, where he was teaching a class on

government. During the session, a teenage homeschooler talked about how

he had tried in a paper to prove that the family is a form of

“Christian government.” “You don’t have to prove that,” DeMar gently

chided, and then added, with more heat: “That’s established—established

by God!” DeMar’s lecture focused on the “three governments”—family,

church, and state—all of which, he told me, should be ruled by

God-fearing men.

 

The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible

guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision.

Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they

are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a

preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community

projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for

the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about

their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their

parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no

specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses). DeMar

told me that among Reconstructionists he is considered something of a

liberal, because he’d execute gays only if they were caught indulging

in sodomy. “I’m happy to just drive them back into the closet,” he

said.

 

In introducing Moore at the Trinity Chapel rally, DeMar told the crowd

that he supports a “jurisdictional separation of church and state.” But

he was not mounting a defense of the First Amendment so much as

outlining an organizational distinction. In his book Liberty at Risk,

DeMar writes that “the State cannot be neutral towards the Christian

faith. Any obstacle that would jeopardize the preaching of the Word of

God…must be opposed by civil government.”

 

Besides facilitating evangelism, Reconstructionists believe, government

should largely be limited to building and maintaining roads, enforcing

land-use contracts, and ensuring just weights and measures. Unions

would not exist, and neither would unemployment benefits, Social

Security, and environmental protection laws. Public schools would

disappear; one of the movement’s great successes has been promoting

homeschooling programs and publishing texts used by tens of thousands

of homeschooling families. And, perhaps most importantly, the state is

“God’s minister,” as DeMar puts it in Liberty at Risk, “taking

vengeance out on those who do evil.” A major task for the government

key Reconstructionists envision is fielding armies for conquest in the

name of Jesus.

 

Reconstruction’s premises may fly in the face of mainstream

Christianity, and some of its leaders’ beliefs would probably surprise

even the movement’s own foot soldiers. But what has made the theology

such an explosive addition to public life is not its dogma on

individual issues so much as its trumpet call to action. This is a

faith in which religion is not an influence on politics; it is

politics.

 

 

 

FOR DECADES AFTER the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, Christian

fundamentalists were almost invisible in civic discourse. Then, in

1981, a book by scholar Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto,

heralded a counterattack. America, Schaeffer argued, was careening into

the abyss of humanistic secularism. Christians needed to take bold

action to restore biblical principles and erase divisions between

religion and civic life. To ignite the movement, Schaeffer mapped out a

battle campaign—a crusade against abortion, which, he said, “would be

worth spending much of our lifetimes to fight against.”

 

For years, the antiabortion movement had been mostly Catholic.

Schaeffer understood that the cause had the potential to galvanize

broad masses of Protestants. “Schaeffer made abortion an issue for

Christians more than anyone else, and he commanded Christian soldiers

to start marching,” says the University of Georgia’s Larson. Manifesto

sold almost 250,000 copies the year after Ronald Reagan became

president—a period when the nation was veering to the right after

becoming exhausted from the social movements of the previous two

decades.

 

If Schaeffer was Reconstruction’s John the Baptist, Rushdoony was its

pope. Born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants, Rushdoony graduated from the

University of California-Berkeley before becoming an ardent foe of

secular education and the author of a series of texts that redefined

conservative theology.

 

Rushdoony, who died in 2001, articulated a doctrine called

“presuppositionalism.” All issues are religious in nature, he posited,

and people don’t have the right or the ability to define for themselves

what’s true; for that they must turn to a literal reading of the Bible.

His defining tome, the 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, was

published in 1973. But because of its extremism and overt

racism—Rushdoony denied the Holocaust and defended segregation and

slavery—Institutes and its author were largely ignored in mainstream

circles until the movement launched by Schaeffer found its intellectual

grounding in Rushdoony’s writings.

 

At the heart of Rushdoony’s argument were two biblical passages.

Genesis 1:28 commands men to have “dominion” over “every living thing.”

And in Matthew 28:18-20, the “Great Commission,” Jesus commands his

followers to proselytize to the world. Thus was born dominion theology.

(Not all dominionists are Reconstruction apostles—but the differences

are a matter of theological finesse, and political strategies are

largely indistinguishable.) Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God,

and Satan seized dominion. Christian Reconstruction claims it has a

reconstituted covenant with God and the right to a new dominion in his

name.

 

In this worldview, the mandate for Christians is not just to live right

or to help their neighbors: They are called upon to take over or

eliminate the institutions of secular government.

 

This is what sets Reconstruction apart from the conventional Christian

right and gives it a key advantage in organizing.

 

Traditionally, groups like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority were

“premillennial”: They believed that humanity was inevitably headed for

Armageddon, which would most likely arrive with a nuclear blast,

whereupon Christ would appear in the Second Coming and set things

right. “The debate was over whether Brezhnev was the Antichrist,” says

the University of Georgia’s Larson.

 

Reconstruction’s alternative was “postmillennialism”: Christ would not

return until the church had claimed dominion over government, and most

of the world’s population had accepted the Reconstruction brand of

Christianity. The postmillennial twist offered hope to the pious that

they could change things—as long as they got organized.

(Reconstructionists angrily denounce end-times visions like those of

Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series: If these are the Last Days, American

Vision’s website points out, “then why bother trying to fix a broken

world that is about to be thrown on the ash heap of history? Why

concern ourselves with education, healthcare, the economy, or peace in

the Mideast? Why polish brass on a sinking ship?”)

 

For premillennialists, Reconstruction’s revolutionary philosophy

offered an opportunity to turbocharge the religious right. Most

conservative churches opposed abortion, for example, but

Reconstruction-influenced groups such as Randall Terry’s Operation

Rescue were willing to field soldiers and take the fight to the enemy.

This not only emboldened activists, it gave Reconstructionists a chance

to spread their organizing message: If you want to do God’s work, this

needs to be God’s nation.

 

Similarly, Baptist morality focused on personal choices, such as

avoiding drinking. But Reconstructionists didn’t tell believers to shun

sin. They said to conquer it, even if the price was jail or martyrdom.

Paul Hill, the antiabortion activist executed two years ago for the

1994 murders of abortion clinic workers in Pensacola, Florida, had been

a minister in the Reconstruction-dominated Presbyterian Church in

America.

 

The old left—the Communist Party and its many splinters—used organizing

tactics called popular fronts, in which people were recruited through

specific causes into a

 

movement tacitly guided by the Party. Reconstruction has married those

Leninist tactics to the causes of the right—abortion, evolution, gay

marriage, school prayer. Gary North wrote in 1982, in an effort to

reach Baptists,“We must use the doctrine of religious liberty…until we

train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious

neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil

government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social,

political, and religious order which finally denies the religious

liberty of the enemies of God.” Nowhere at the Restore America rally

did anyone hoist a banner for Reconstruction; those attending came to

develop a united front supporting such things as displaying the Ten

Commandments in public buildings. But they were also introduced—and

recruited—to the broader program.

 

Reconstruction’s major impact has been through helping to found and

guide cross-denominational and secular political organ-izations. The

Council for National Policy—a group that holds meetings for right-wing

leaders, once dubbed “the most powerful conservative group you’ve never

heard of”—was founded in 1981 as a project of top John Birch Society

figures (see “The Fountainhead”). Its members included Rushdoony, Gary

North, Tim LaHaye, former Reagan aide Gary Bauer, and activist Paul

Weyrich, who famously aimed to “overturn the present power structure of

this country.”

 

Another group, the Coalition on Revival, brings together influential

evangelicals to produce joint statements and theological white papers.

North and DeMar are among the coalition’s most influential members; one

of its founding documents is signed by 116 Christian right activists,

including Rushdoony, mega-evangelist D. James Kennedy, and Roy Jones, a

top staffer at the Republican Senatorial Committee.

 

When I last saw Gary DeMar, he was shepherding Roy Moore through a

crowd of true believers at the Restore America rally. As they walked

by, I asked Moore, “Do you favor a theocracy?” The judge turned and

looked at me, shook his head, frowned, and walked away. But DeMar, in

our interview, had already answered the question.

 

“All governments are theocracies,” he said. “We now live in a secular

humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at

its head.”

 

 

John Sugg is senior editor for the Creative Loafing group of

alternative newsweeklies. Before joining Tampa's Weekly Planet in 1995,

he wrote and edited for the Miami Herald, Atlanta Constitution, Palm

Beach Post, and American Lawyer. He is at work on a book on the history

of the antievolution movement in Georgia.

 

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/12/a_nation_under_god.html

 

 

" The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of

private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State

itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an

individual, by a group or by any controlling private power. " -Franklin Delano

Roosevelt

 

" I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the

people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and

sudden usurpations. " -James Madison