Chicago Sun Times
May 21, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
The rise of Christian Nationalism: Across the United States,
religious activists aim to establish an American theocracy. A new
book offers an inside look at this growing right-wing movement.
by Michelle Goldberg, Salon
A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their places
on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove, a suburb
of Birmingham, Ala. Two dancers, donning black overcoats, crossed
their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled on the
speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding a Ten
Commandments tablet made of cardboard, he was playing former Alabama
Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. The trench-coated thugs approached
him, miming a violent rebuke and forcing him to the other end of the
stage, sans Commandments.
There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal activists waved
signs with slogans like “No Moore!” and “No God in Court.” The boy
Moore danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and
then cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to
lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats — agents of
atheism — got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him abject
on the floor. As the song’s uplifting chorus played — “After you’ve
done all you can, you just stand” — a dancer in a white robe,
playing either an angel or God himself, came forward and helped the
Moore character to his feet.
‘A CHRISTIAN NATION’
The performance ended to enthusiastic applause from a crowd that
included many Alabama judges and politicians, as well as Roy Moore
himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner and the wrath of Leviticus
in his eyes. Moore has become a hero to those determined to remake
the United States into an explicitly Christian nation. That
reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot center of our current
culture wars, investing the symbolic fight over the Ten Commandments
— a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant to most peoples’ lives —
with an apocalyptic urgency.
On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief
justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge’s order
to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he installed in the
Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous
figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms.
After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision, awarding
custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over
their lesbian mother, called homosexuality “abhorrent, immoral,
detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of
nature and of nature’s God upon which this Nation and our laws are
predicated,” and argued, “The State carries the power of the sword,
that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such
as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent
the subversion of children toward this lifestyle.”
To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a
martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God’s truth.
Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on Aug. 1,
2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up
the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral
Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the
monument was mounted, and on October 14, televangelist D. James
Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore’s brave, covert
installation on his show.
As the controversy over the statue ignited, Moore’s fame grew. At
rallies across the country, he summoned the faithful to an ideal that
sounded very much like theocracy. “For 40 years we have wandered like
the children of Israel,” he told supporters in Tennessee. “It’s time
for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on
the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we
follow is not the Quran but the Bible. This is a Christian nation.”
By the time he was removed as chief justice, Moore had sparked a
movement, and his monument was an icon. In the days before officials
came to cart the Commandments away, hundreds flocked to Montgomery to
rally on the courtroom steps. Some slept there and imagined
themselves the nucleus of a new civil rights movement.
Thomas Bowman, a bearded Christian folk singer from Kentucky, wrote
an anthem called “Montgomery Fire” celebrating the demonstrations:
“We had love in our hearts that no man could ever remove/but with the
whole world we watched as they hauled the Commandments away.” When I
met Bowman a year later at First Baptist, he referred to the
protesters, romantically, as the “ragamuffin warriors” fighting for
God against the atheist state.
“The opposing side, the anti-God side, the do-whatever-you-want side,
the judicial side, just kept pushing and pushing and pushing for the
last 40 years,” Bowman said. And finally, he said, God called on
Christians to defend themselves.
After the Commandments were removed, a group of retired military men
from Texas who called themselves American Veterans in Domestic
Defense spent months taking the monument — now affectionately called
“Roy’s Rock” — on tour all over the country, holding more than 150
viewings and rallies in churches, at state capitols, even in Wal-Mart
parking lots. Moore also found powerful supporters in statehouses and
in Congress who proposed laws to radically restrict the power of
federal courts to enforce the separation of church and state. In
solidarity, another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, had the Ten
Commandments embroidered onto his robe. Christian home-school
catalogs offered copies of a video titled “Roy Moore’s Message to
America.” When Moore suggested he might run for Alabama governor,
state polls showed him with a double-digit lead.
PARALLELS WITH NAZIS
A few days before Bush’s second inauguration, the New York Times
carried a story headlined “Warning from a Student of Democracy’s
Collapse,” about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor
emeritus of history at Columbia and scholar of fascism. It quoted a
speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and
the American religious right. “Some people recognized the moral
perils of mixing religion and politics,” he was quoted saying of
prewar Germany, “but many more were seduced by it. It was the
pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured
[Hitler’s] success, notably in Protestant areas.”
It’s not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his 45-year-old
book, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the
Germanic Ideology, I shivered at its contemporary resonance. “The
ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of
national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture
and with the loss of authoritative faith,” he wrote. “They posed as
the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for
their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their
indifference to national greatness.”
Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics
are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History
professor Roger Griffin described the “mobilizing vision” of fascist
movements as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a
period of encroaching decadence.” Moore’s Ten Commandments has become
a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American
right.
True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem
harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense,
the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group
says it exists to “neutralize the destructiveness” of America’s
“domestic enemies,” which include “biased liberal, socialist news
media,” “the ACLU,” and “the conspiracy of an immoral film industry.”
To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. “AVIDD reminds
all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United
States against all enemies, ‘both foreign and domestic,’ ” its Web
site says. “In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend
the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you
to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on
the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies.”
According to Jim Cabaniss, the 72-year-old Korean War veteran who
founded the group, it now has 33 chapters across the country. It’s
entirely likely that some of these chapters represent one or two men,
and as of 2005, the group didn’t seem large enough to be much of a
danger to anyone.
RESENTMENT TOWARD JEWS
Still, it’s worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have
flocked to rallies at which military men pledge to seize the reins of
power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, religious
leaders and politicians lend their support to Cabaniss’ cause. And at
least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething
resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America’s Christian
majority.
“People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of
our people,” Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin.
“Christians represent a huge percent, and we don’t believe that a
small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage.”
I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a
red, white and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was
saying that American Jews have too much power. “It appears that way,”
he replied. “They’re a driving force behind trying to take everything
to do with Christianity out of our system. That’s the part that makes
us very upset.”
We were standing outside the Texas Capitol building on a sunny
Saturday morning. A few hundred people from across the state had
turned out for the rally, which began at 10 a.m. Three or four men in
military uniforms sat with their wives on chairs at the top of the
Capitol steps. Four other men supported tall, coffin-shaped signs
labeled with the names of objectionable Supreme Court rulings.
The crowd was full of teenagers who had come on church buses and
families with young children. A white-bearded man in a leather biker
vest dragged a ten-foot-tall cedar crucifix painted red, white, and
blue. One woman wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Moore’s monument.
Another held a handwritten sign reading: “Ban Judges Not God/God
Rules.”
‘STAND UP, SPEAK UP’
Rick Scarborough, one of the headline speakers, called for a “million
Roy Moores” who will “stand up, speak up, and refuse to give up.” A
former football player at Stephen F. Austin State University,
Scarborough in recent years has positioned himself as a comer in the
Christian nationalist movement, riding church/state controversies to
ever higher prominence. In 2002, he left his post as pastor of
Pearland First Baptist Church — where he had mobilized members of
his flock in that Houston suburb to try to take over the city council
and school board — to form Vision America, a group dedicated to
organizing “patriot pastors” for political action. The same year,
Jerry Falwell christened him as one of the new leaders of the
Christian right.
Also speaking was John Eidsmoe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the
Air Force who wore full military dress. A professor at Thomas Goode
Jones School of Law, a Christian school in Montgomery, Ala., Eidsmoe
has written a number of Christian nationalist books including
Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers,
which argues that Calvinism inspired America’s founding document.
He’s a proponent of a Confederate doctrine called interposition,
which holds that states have the right to reject federal government
mandates they deem unconstitutional. “Implementation of the doctrine
may be peaceable, as by resolution, remonstrance or legislation, or
may proceed ultimately to nullification with forcible resistance,” he
wrote in a manifesto titled “A Call to Stand with Chief Justice Roy
Moore.”
DOMINION THEOLOGY
Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a
fundamentalist Presbyterian and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of
them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts
that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have
the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.
Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a
fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John
“R.J.” Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York
City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the
genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of
California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian
missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer,
churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools
and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical
law. He called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers and
unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy
and “the great love of the failures and cowards of life.”
‘A CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO’
Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers
believe Jesus won’t return until after Christians establish a
thousand-year reign on Earth. While other Christians wait for the
messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves.
Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists.
They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ’s
return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the
tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to
a certain apathy — why worry if the world is about to end and you’ll
be safe from the carnage?
Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious
right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in
this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an
American who founded L’Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps
where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as
the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on
his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential
books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian
Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest
between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying,
“These two worldviews stand as totals in complete antithesis to each
other in content and also in their natural results — including
sociological and government results, and specifically including law.”
Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas
of America as an originally Christian nation. In A Christian
Manifesto, he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American
flag, but added, “None of this, however, changes the fact that the
United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we
today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to
government.”
Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply
involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil
disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. “It is time we
consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to
God’s Law it abrogates its authority,” he wrote.
Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on
premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he
co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to
whom he dedicated his book The Battle for the Mind. That book married
Schaeffer’s theories to a conspiratorial view of history and
politics, arguing, “Most people today do not realize what humanism
really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country —
and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today
can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the
UN, education, TV and most of the other influential things of life.
“We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them
with pro-moral political leaders,” LaHaye wrote.
As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made
alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple
of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists
together to form the Coalition on Revival in order to lay a blueprint
for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of
the coalition’s steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North,
creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy and the Reverend Donald
Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.
Between 1984 and 1986, the coalition developed 17 “worldview”
documents, which elucidate the “Christian” position on most aspects
of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to
differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the
ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The
documents outline a complete political program, with a “biblically
correct” position on issues such as taxes (God favors a flat rate);
public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts
(“We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as
art or ‘free speech’ “).
In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of
a high school curriculum “using the COR Worldview Documents as
textbooks.” Since then, there has been a proliferation of schools,
books and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian
worldview in students and activists.
‘WORLD CONQUEST’
Those who don’t have a year to spare can attend one of more than a
dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches
nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian
nationalist historian David Barton; David Limbaugh (Rush’s born-again
brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003,
Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick
Scarborough’s former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd,
“Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all
areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only
Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that
we find in this world. Only Christianity.”
Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply
responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is
itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. But Christian
nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance. In
his book The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political
Action, George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy’s
Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:
“Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy
responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have
dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life
and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It
is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are
after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World
conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We
must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never
settle for anything less. . . . Thus, Christian politics has as its
primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families,
institutions, bureaucracies, courts and governments for the Kingdom
of Christ.”
Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon. Her book Kingdom
Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism has just been published by
W.W. Norton.