Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"

Across the United States, religious activists are organizing to
establish an American theocracy. A frightening look inside the
growing right-wing movement.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from senior writer Michelle
Goldberg's new book, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian
Nationalism. "

By Michelle Goldberg

05/12/06 "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, Alabama. 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 that seemed to be 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.

[...]

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. White-
bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament
patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- 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."

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?

[...]

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. They say they're the
victims in the culture wars. 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."

-=<->=-

Full article at Information Clearing House http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13017.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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* Origin: Xaragmata / Adelaide SA telnet://xaragmata.thebbs.org (3:800/432)