How do we know there are many people who believe this? Their books are best sellers. And they go to Barbra Streisand concerts (just kidding about the last one).
In The Baptizing of America, Rabbi James Rudin—the American Jewish Committee’s “senior interreligious adviser”—offers a sketch of what America will look like if the theocrats get their way. “All government employees—federal, state and local—would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions,” as would employees of any company or institution receiving federal funds. There would be a national ID card, identifying everyone by their religious beliefs, or lack thereof—and “such cards would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education.” Non-Christian faiths would be tolerated, “but younger members . . .would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity.” Gay sex would be prosecuted, and “known homosexuals and lesbians would have to successfully undergo government-sponsored reeducation sessions if they applied for any public-sector jobs.” Political dissent would be squashed, religious censors would keep watch over the popular culture, and “the mainstream press and the electronic media would be beaten into submission.”
Sadly, Rudin’s book is thin on examples of significant political actors who are proposing taking any of these steps, let alone all of them. What he has instead are the Christian Reconstructionists—the acolytes of the late R.J. Rushdoony—who are genuine theocrats, of a sort, and who also rank somewhere between the Free Mumia movement and the Spartacist Youth League on the totem pole of political influence in America. Yet this doesn’t prevent them from figuring prominently in nearly all the anti-theocrat anthropologies, playing the same role that international communism played for right-wing paranoiacs in the 1950s: the puppet master working from the shadows and the hidden hand behind every secular setback.
Like a diehard John Bircher poring over Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speeches in search of the Supreme Soviet’s marching orders, Rudin scans the utterances of evangelicals and their allies for Reconstructionist language. Did Billy Graham once advise evangelicals to run for public office and take “control” of the various branches for government? Then he must believe, with the Reconstructionists, that “all adversaries must be completely eliminated from positions of authority” and that “to achieve a divine end by any means—including cruelty, deception, and brute force—is justified.” Did Antonin Scalia suggest that government “derives its moral authority from God”? Well, he doubtless intended to issue “a legal green light” to theocrats seeking “to destroy all existing political systems . . . and replace them with their own religion-soaked political regimes.”
Perhaps most religious conservatives, Rudin generously allows, “are unaware of the potent ideology that calls for the dismantling of American democracy . . . and its replacement by an authoritarian Christian commonwealth.” But then, of course, most Eisenhower voters were unaware, in the 1950s, that Ike’s administration was infiltrated and controlled by Communist agents—and more fool they.
Similarly, Kevin Phillips announces that “for all practical purposes, Pat Robertson is a Christian Reconstructionist”—not because Robertson has ever identified himself as such but because his start-up university bears the sinister sobriquet Regent, an obvious reference to the Rushdoonian notion of Christians as God’s viceroys on Earth. Phillips doesn’t precisely accuse President Bush of being a Reconstructionist, but he notes that Bush’s GOP gets an awful lot of votes from the Mormons—who have created “a de-facto establishment of religion in the inner mountain West”—and that the Bush family “has been close” to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his cultish Unification Church. And then there’s Bush’s habit of encoding “private scriptural invocations” into his speeches. Not only did the president use the biblically loaded phrases “hills to climb” and “seeing the valley below” in his 2004 convention acceptance speech, but he also mentioned the “resurrection of New York City.” The resurrection. Clearly something sinister is afoot.
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