A Nation Under
God
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.
John Sugg
November/December 2005 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.
[This article has been
made possible by the Foundation
for National Progress, the Investigative
Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you. ]
© 2005 The Foundation for
National Progress
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