What would a Christian Right America look like?

Okay, so my last post was a bit light on the political content. Well, maybe in a kind of Wilhelm Reich sense it was political.

But here's an article that focuses more on the political aspects of the Christian Right.

One benefit of a group blog is that we have been able to combine our respective research staffs into a large research division. :) Marigolds2 alerted me to this article that one of our experienced researchers came across: The Crusaders by Bob Moser Rolling Stone 04/07/05.

It's a report about a February conference called "Reclaiming America for Christ." But they weren't focused on handing out pamphlets on street corners about how you will go to Hell if you don't get saved. Moser notes that they were meeting at a time in which the political clout of the Christian Right was at an unprecedented level nationwide.

But despite their unprecedented power, fundamentalists still see themselves as a persecuted minority, waging a holy war against the godless forces of secularism. To rouse themselves, they kick off the festivities with "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise," the bloodthirstiest tune in all of Christendom...

On the bloodthirstiest tune front, apparently Moser hasn't experienced "There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood." Which is actually one of my favorite hymns, thanks to Kate Campbell's rock version (!?) on her Wandering Strange album. But Moser shares some of the lyrics of "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise":

Seize your armor, gird it on
Now the battle will be won
Soon, your enemies all slain
Crowns of glory you shall gain.

Yeesh. This was a conference of Christian Dominionists. If you haven't encountered the concept, Moser's article gives an introductory glance. In this passage, he refers to James Kennedy, who I quoted in my previous post about how sex before marriage is "an uprising [sic] against God."

The godfather of the Dominionists is D. James Kennedy, the most influential evangelical you've never heard of. A former Arthur Murray dance instructor, he launched his Florida ministry in 1959, when most evangelicals still followed Billy Graham's gospel of nonpartisan soul-saving. Kennedy built Coral Ridge Ministries into a $37-million-a-year empire, with a TV-and-radio audience of 3 million, by preaching that it was time to save America - not soul by soul but election by election. After helping found the Moral Majority in 1979, Kennedy became a five-star general in the Christian army. Bush sought his blessing before running for president - and continues to consult top Dominionists on matters of federal policy.

"Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost," Kennedy says. "As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors - in short, over every aspect and institution of human society." (my emphasis)

At least he didn't include the blogosphere in his list!

Moser makes a distinction between Billy Graham's brand of evangelical Christianity and the Christian Right/Dominionist version. It's an important distinction, although Graham has not always been so "nonpartisan."

As the fight over the Supreme Court takes place over the next three and a half years, this is an image worth remembering:

Activist judges, of course, are precisely what the Dominionists want. Their model is Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who installed a 5,300-pound granite memorial to the Ten Commandments, complete with an open Bible carved in its top, in the state judicial building. At Reclaiming America, Roy's Rock sits out front, fresh off a tour of twenty-one states, perched on the flag-festooned flatbed of a diesel truck, a potent symbol of the "faith-based" justice the Dominionists are bent on imposing. Activists at the conference pose for photographs beside the rock and have circulated a petition urging President Bush to appoint Moore - who once penned an opinion calling for the state to execute "practicing homosexuals" - to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And the following is notable, since it involves the spokesman on social policy of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States:

It helps that Dominionists have a direct line to the White House: The Rev. Richard Land, top lobbyist for the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, enjoys a weekly conference call with top Bush advisers including Karl Rove. "We've got the Holy Spirit's wind at our backs!" Land declares in an arm-waving, red-faced speech. He takes particular aim at the threat posed by John Lennon, denouncing "Imagine" as a "secular anthem" that envisions a future of "clone plantations, child sacrifice, legalized polygamy and hard-core porn."

I think the Rev. Land may be confusing Karl Rove with the Holy Spirit.

David Neiwert is one of the best contemporary writers on radical-right movements in America. And he has written quite a bit in his Orcinus blog about Christian Dominionist thinking and activity. In this post, The undertow of totalism Orcinus blog 05/11/05, he quotes author and former war correspondent (and serious student of religion) Chris Hedges on the Christian Right (my emphasis):

If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement, Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave man - this is a very patriarchal movement - dominion over the land. And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence is a very powerful component within this movement. The ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote ... selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist. I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible, and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging Christ.

At some point here, I hope to talk more about alternatives ways of understanding the Book of Revelations. Which is one of my favorite books of the Bible. (Maybe I shouldn't be naming my favorites like this.) For one thing, it's a great story! It's also a Christian "power vision" that does not have to be understood in terms of warfare in the physical world, as the Christian Right insists on doing.

Speaking of the Christian Right/dominionist vision of the kind of America they want (see Rev. Kennedy's quotation above), Hedges says with particular reference to the "Justice Sunday" hatefest of earlier this year (my emphasis):

And this is an America where people like you and me have no place. And you don't have to take my word for it, turn on Christian broadcasting, listen to Christian radio. Listen to what they say about people like us. It's not a matter that we have an opinion they disagree with. It's not a matter of them de-legitimizing us, which they are. It's a matter of them demonizing us, of talking us - describing us as militant secular humanists, moral relativists, both of which terms I would not use to describe myself, as a kind of counter-militant ideology that is anti-Christian and that [is] essentially propelled by Satan that they must destroy. Listen to their own language. You know, when in "Justice Sunday," listen - you know, I urge everyone to go back and look closely at what James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, said. He talked about Roe v. Wade causing the biggest holocaust in the 20th century. There is a frightening kind of revisionism and a kind of moral equation of a magnitude that, you know, having lived through disintegrating states in Yugoslavia and other places, essentially divides - destroys the center, divides the American public, and creates a very dangerous and frightening culture war. And that's what these people are about.

The Hodges quotations are taken from a 05/05/05 "Democracy Now!" program, The Christian Right and the Rising Power of the Evangelical Political Movement.

Tags: chris hedges, christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, dave neiwert, james kennedy, richard land, roy moore

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