In God We Trust
by John Sugg
Reprint from Mother Jones Magazine
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 main-stream. 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.
On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs
and luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered. The church was
host to Restore America, a rally to “celebrate faith and patriotism” sponsored
by Christian publisher, American Vision. 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 home-schoolers, tomes denouncing evolution, booklets
waxing nostalgic for the antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants
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.”
Ruggedly handsome, with the military bearing he acquired at West
Point, Moore has gained a rock-star following on the Christian right.
The judge has a stunning memory for long literary passages and judicial
opinions, and he chants them in a singsongy, down-home style—“God” is “Gawud”.
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.
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.
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
the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused
with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced
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.
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. The entire Lexis-Nexis database includes only 43
articles from all of the U.S. media that make reference to Reconstruction.
“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.”
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 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.”
The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the
inflexible guide for the society Reconstructionists envision. Government
posts would be reserved for righteous males. 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.
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.”
Unions would not exist, and neither would unemployment benefits,
Social Security, and environmental protection laws. Public schools
would disappear. 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.” Reconstructionists envision
government’s key task as fielding armies for conquest in the
name of Jesus.
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.”
Schaeffer understood that the cause had the potential to galvanize
broad masses of Protestants. Manifesto sold almost 250,000 copies
in 1981 - 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.
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.
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. (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. 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 Communist Party 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 and 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.”
“All governments are theocracies,” says DeMar “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. He is at work on a book on the history of the antievolution
movement in Georgia.
Condensed and Reprinted with permission from Mother Jones Magazine.
Winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, Mother
Jones produces revelatory journalism that in its power and reach
seeks to inform and inspire a more just and democratic world. To
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visit www.motherjones.com
