It’s a war that has been long in the making, a war fought by the most extreme elements of the religious right to radically alter the shape of our government and the very nature of our democracy and it’s attendant civil liberties. And at the moment, they are well on their way to winning it.
I know that isn’t what these so-called “Christians” would have you believe. They insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Christians are under attack in their own country from the nebulous forces of radical secularism. At a two day conference held this week in Washington D.C., hosted by televangelist Rick Scarborough of Vision America, representatives of many prominent Religious Right groups were in attendance, including the Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, Liberty Counsel, Alliance Defense Fund, William Donohue of the Catholic League, as well as many other conservative religious activists such as Phyllis Schlafly, Ohio’s “Patriot Pastors” leader Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes. Here’s a few snippets of what speakers at this conference told this group of religious zealots this week:
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“You guys have become the Jews of the 21st century,” said [Michael] Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington . . .
Gary Bauer, a Christian activist and former presidential candidate, argued in a speech that the “War on Christians” in America was even emboldening al-Qaeda. “They believe they can win, because they believe you and I are decadent; they think our civilization is fat and lazy,” he said. “I believe they’re wrong, but I understand why they’re confused.”
And why are they confused? Because American Christians are attacked by “elites” who think America is “a country of unbridled liberty, different strokes for different folks.”
In addition, major leaders of the Republican establishment groveled at the feet of these fundamentalist nutcases gave speeches that cheered on their peculiarly paranoid vision of Christianity under siege. Appearing at the conference were such GOP stalwarts as Senators John Cornyn of Texas, Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Tom DeLay, serial money launderer and Lobbyist whore:
“Our faith has always been in direct conflict with the values of the world,” Rep. Tom DeLay told his audience.
He added that Christians are looked down on in the U.S. as well. “We are, after all, a society that provides abortion on demand, has killed millions of innocent children, degrades the institution of marriage and all but treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition.” […]
DeLay said, “we have been chosen to live as Christians at a time when our culture is being poisoned. … God made us specifically for it. … Jesus Christ himself made us just so that we could live in this nation at this time.”
Now it would be easy to mock such self-aggrandizing remarks, and the entire mantle of martyrdom which has been taken up by “Christians” such as these. Easy, but not particularly constructive.
Because, friends, these are dangerous people, despite all their inane and pompous hypocrisy, despite their outsized persecution complex, and despite their outrageous and fringe beliefs. Because they mean what they say about a war, though it isn’t a war on Christians which they are defending against, but a war they are waging against anyone who doesn’t believe as they believe, act as they want you to act or live as they demand that you live.
These people are diverse only in terms of minor points of religious dogma. They agree on far more issues than they disagree. And they have a specific agenda: to break down the wall separating Church and State set forth in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and erect in its place their version of Biblical law.
Don’t believe me? Let me quote to you then someone far more eloquent and learned than I regarding the nature of these “Christian Warriors” and their plan to remake America, Bill Moyers (excerpted from a speech he gave at Union Theological Seminary in New York in September, 2005):
You could see this pathology play out in General William Boykin. A professional soldier, General Boykin had taken up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning warriors “to the spiritual warfare for souls.” After Boykin had led Americans in a battle against a Somalian warlord he announced: “I know my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his God was an idol.” Now Boykin was going about evangelical revivals preaching that America was in a holy war as “a Christian nation” battling Satan and that America’s Muslim adversaries will be defeated “only if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” For such an hour, America surely needed a godly leader. So General Boykin explained how it was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, “was not elected by a majority of the voters—he was appointed by God.” Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General Boykin is now the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. (Just as it isn’t surprising that despite his public call for the assassination of a foreign head of state, Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from the President’s Faith-Based Initiative for “relief work” on the Gulf Coast.)
We can’t wiggle out of this, people. Alvin Hawkins states it frankly: “This is a problem we can’t walk away from.” We’re talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what’s on God’s mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.
Let me re-emphasize Mr. Moyers’ point: the Bible (and here we are talking about the Old Testament far more than the New) “has become the foundational text for a political movement.” Not the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights. The Bible. Consider the implications of that for a moment. What would the Bible require if these people are ever permitted to implement their interpretation of its mandates?
Journalist Frederick Clarkson (who posts here at Booman Tribune as well as elsewhere on the liberal side of the blogosphere) gives us an idea of what Biblical Law might entail if it were ever put into practice, in his 1994 essay, Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence:
Epitomizing the Reconstructionist idea of Biblical “warfare” is the centrality of capital punishment under Biblical Law. Doctrinal leaders (notably Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen) call for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes in addition to such contemporary capital crimes as rape, kidnapping, and murder. Death is also the punishment for apostasy (abandonment of the faith), heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, “sodomy or homosexuality,” incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, “unchastity before marriage.”
According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, “along with those who advised them to abort their children.” Rushdoony concludes: “God’s government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.” Reconstructionists insist that “the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty.” However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be “happy” places, to which people would flock because “capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society.“
The Biblically approved methods of execution include burning (at the stake for example), stoning, hanging, and “the sword.” Gary North, the self-described economist of Reconstructionism, prefers stoning because, among other things, stones are cheap, plentiful, and convenient. Punishments for non-capital crimes generally involve whipping, restitution in the form of indentured servitude, or slavery. Prisons would likely be only temporary holding tanks, prior to imposition of the actual sentence.
In short, if you are a homosexual: they kill you. An adulterer: they kill you. An apostate (like the man who converted from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan): they kill you. Have an abortion (or perhaps just experience a “suspicious” miscarriage): they kill you. An atheist: they kill you. Write or publish a book that mocks the divinity of Jesus (blasphemy): they kill you.
Now, maybe you’re thinking that I’m the one who’s paranoid. Let me ask you this then: when before now was it ever acceptable for prominent politicians to openly support religious extremists? To demand a Constitutional Amendment to prohibit people from marrying? To funnel huge sums of government largesse to “faith based” organizations? Or to propose a law (The Constitution Restoration Act) that would prevent the US Supreme Court from having jurisdiction over any matter . . .
“. . .to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element’s or officer’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”
Let me remind you that in Iran, which is a theocracy, they do, in fact, execute homosexuals and “loose women.” Are our fundamentalist Christians any less dogmatic or any less insistent on following “God’s Law” than those Shi’ite Imams who impose Shariah on the people of Iran? I don’t think so.
And its not just their desire to extend capital punishment that distinguishes these radical Christian Fundamentalists. They have a number of other policy aims that most Americans would find alarming if they were ever made broadly known to the public. Policies like the elimination of public schools, the elimination of government welfare and entitlement programs (e.g., social security, medicare and medicaid), the eradication of women’s rights and the supremacy of the Church in everyday life. Again, quoting Frederick Clarkson:
[They] believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God’s covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are “in submission” to him. In turn, the husband “submits” to Jesus and to God’s laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God’s laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called “theonomy.”
This is a world in which women and children would be second and even third class citizens, and husbands and fathers would rule over their families with impunity, knowing that whatever physical abuse they administered would not be deemed a crime. A society where basic civil liberties would be held hostage to the demands of God’s Law, as interpreted by religious leaders. Where capital punishment would extend far beyond its current bounds, and where any deviation from the norm, sexual, religious or otherwise, would not be tolerated. In brief, it would be a fascism under the guise of Christianity.
If you think these people are going to back down simply because Bush has low poll numbers, think again. These people are in this struggle for the long haul. If anything, the possible loss of political power in 2006 and/or 2008 will make them even more desperate.
Even now, in Ohio they are gearing up to elect the openly religious conservative Ken Blackwell as their governor. They are pushing state legislatures to make abortion (and eventually contraception) illegal. They have control of many state and local branches of the Republican Party, and despite the setbacks Bush and Company have experienced, they are likely to retain that control, which means the continued nomination of GOP candidates who owe their primary loyalty to the radical religious right.
And they will continue to push for legislation like the Constitution Restoration Act (an oxymoron if there ever was one) to permit state legislatures and judges to implement their ideal of Biblical Law without fear that their “Biblical judgments” would be appealed to the federal courts. They mean to win this fight, and then turn our country into a theocratic despotism.
And you and I, those of us who believe in civil liberties and tolerance for all creeds and beliefs, are the enemy they have in their sights.