Jax
Everybody must have read Michelle Goldberg's "Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism" by now, right? This quote from George Grant, one of the big guys with televangelist D. James Kennedy, is simply chilling:
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.
George Grant is a Christian Reconstructionist, one of those nice theocrats who admire the tactics, if not the superstitions, of Islamic extremists: he wrote a book called The Family Under Siege, for instance, that admires the idea of returning to the death penalty for homosexuality. For a glimpse of the kind of sewer rat that finds Grant to be a paragon, you can take a look at this review (warning: National Vanguard site. Don't click if you are at all squeamish about explicit hatred and repugnant stupidity).
A lot of the article is getting into David Neiwert's territory, the rise of a potential American fascism.
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 forty-five-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 in the introduction. "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."
These goose-stepping bible-thumpers have an enemy, too. Jews are a prominent part of that foe, but guess where the real problem lies? Godless humanists.
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.
There's a long list of names in the article—in addition to D. James Kennedy and LaHaye, there's the laughable Kirk Cameron, David Limbaugh, Charles Colson, Tom DeLay, Duane Gish, Donald Wildmon, etc.—a whole kook's parade of characters. It's easy to dismiss them as jokes, but then you realize that these people are all regularly in the news, and not at all unfavorably; their ideas are ridiculous, but when was the last time you saw the mainstream media point out that these people are deranged and dangerously influential? They just keep plugging along, taking advantage of their religious façade to deflect criticism, spreading their rot throughout the country.
By the way, quite a few of the names mentioned are in that "America, Return to God!" glossy that I mentioned before. These people have money and access to power, and they are working hard to gain more. Know of any secular institutions that are working to oppose them?
