Americans tend to brush off the possibility of theocracy in the United States. Theocracy always happens somewhere else. In Iran, for example, where you can only run for office if the ayatollahs say you can,where gays are executed, and where stoning for adultery is legal because all law is religious law. Or in Saudi Arabia, where women who are immodestly dressed (that is, not completely covered by an abayeh, head veil and face veil are beaten by the religious police, where even a princess can be stoned for fornication, and where no other religion can exist. Or in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where not wearing a burqa could get you killed, where rape victims are murdered for their "crimes", and all law is, again, religious law. But not in America, land of the free, where the first amendment guarantees religious freedom for all and demands separation of church and state.
But there are mini-theocracies here, and the Warren Jeffs trial gave us an in-depth look into one of them.
In Colorado City, the FLDS owns 75% of the town under a charitable trust. FLDS members, with permission, can build houses on that land—but the family owns neither the house nor the land. If the occupant is excommunicated, the house reverts to the ownership of the FLDS trust. Warren Jeffs, as the current prophet, has final say on all matters. The police and mayor exist to execute those orders—their loyalty is not to the enforcement of state and federal and county law, but to the FLDS church as led by Jeffs. And Jeffs runs this town with an iron hand. He dictates the dress code (long-sleeved shirts for men; no jeans; long dresses with high necklines and long sleeves for women, and no pants ever), what entertainment is acceptable (football and baseball, music other than church music, and TV and movies are banned) and the rituals of courtship (there aren’t any; dating or even talking with the opposite sex is forbidden). Contact with non-FLDS people is discouraged, and the isolation of the town makes it very easy to enforce this rule.
Sex outside marriage is strictly forbidden. Jeff decides what man will marry what woman, and can, with no explanation necessary, reassign a man’s wives and children to other, more worthy men. If a bride doesn’t wish to marry or a teenage boy shows too much independence, they can be excommunicated, which means being handed a suitcase and being driven to the next town to survive on their own (in some cases the girls and boys are as young as 13).
He can do all of this in the name of God because his version of God speaks though him. To disobey Warren Jeffs is to disobey God and to be damned forever. This is what theocracy looks like in America.
For more information on the Jeffs case and the Fundamnetalist Latter Day Saints, try these diaries:
Theology and Power
http://www.dailykos.com/... The CHild Brides ]
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/9/132954/157 Savinm the Lost Boys}
But what has this to do with the rest of us? The FLDS is a comparatively small sect, with only about 10,000 followers. It’s regarded as a cult by most people, even mainstream Mormons, because of its emphasis on internal and external controls of behavior, its rigid dogma, its sexual manipulation of members (Jeffs gives wives and takes them away at whim), its paranoia, its isolation and its grimness (see Isaac Bobnweitz’s [ Cult Danger Evaluation Scale .
Most conservative religious groups aren’t like that, after all.
Or are they?
A quick glance at the Religious Right shows a disquieting similarity to the FLDS church in many ways. Dominionism, a right wing Christian movement that aims to bring the U.S. under Biblical law, has increasingly infiltrated conservative Christian denominations. They’ve created a movement best called Christian Nationalism I’ve written at length about that movement
here, here and here. Traciong its origins in Christian Reconstructionism through its seepage into Baptist groups like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s churches and its success in steeplejacking less conservative churches. I, like moiv, tend to concentrate on the effects on women’s issues as I did in this diary.
Of late, the Christian Right has been moving further and further away from the rest of us. Some of you see that as a good thing, hoping it means evangelicals and fundamentalists will stop trying to runt he GOP and control everyone else’s lives. I disagree. I view this as a very negative development becasue it drives these right-wing churches closer to FLDS territory.
dogemperor a Kossack who escaped the imprisoning clutches of an Assembly of God church and family has written extensively on the way that members of these groups are pulling father and further away from the Real World the rest of us live in, where diversity exists, not everyone is their kind of Christian, and contact with those who aren’t clones of us is part of the joy of living in America. They have withdrawn children from public schools either to be educated at home with Christian curricula like ABaka or in Christian schools which use very similar materials. Kids are learning creationism, not evolution, and the version of history being taught has little to do with the facts. They read Christian novels like the Left Behind series and Christian nonfiction which is often somewhat fact-challenged , as T4routfishing has shown in his diaries on the way the Religious Right distorts history and even science.
Many of these denominations view themselves as at war with secularism, non-Christians and even liberal and mainstream Christians. They are anti-choice, anti-feminism, anti-poverty programs (they believe churches should provide for the poor—but only the deserving poor who belong to those churches) and public education. They want vouchers for private schools for all children, enforced prayer and Bible reading in public schools if they cant’ get vouchers, women back in the home fulfilling their God-given roles as wives and mothers rather than having careers as doctors and lawyers and teachers, birth control banned unless the couple is married, and abortion criminalized. If they can’t get their way, and so far they haven’t succeeded even under Bush, they show an increasing willingness to withdraw from what they consider a hostile secular world, buy creating their own parallel structures.
Again, dogemperor has written at length about the parallel economy these folks have created. There are Christian bookstores which sell only Christian books, so your children won’t be tempted to ask for Harry Potter. For women, there are Christian romances in which the godly hero and heroine long for each other but never exchange more than a chaste kiss because Christians don’t have sex outside marriage. They attempt to conviunce secular bookstores and schools ystems to not carry books they dislike, like Harry Potter, a form of censorship. They do the same to movies. They threaten boycotts of TV shows and companies that advertise on them. But heaven forbid others react negatively ot one of their precious shows or films!
There’s a Christian yellowpages where you can make certain that the guy who fixes your leaky pipes is on the right side of the Lord, because you wouldn’t want a secular plumber messing with your plumbing, would you? You can buy from Amway which is dominionist-owned, and get your craft supplies from Hobby Lobby where part of the profits goes to dominionist causes. You can find Christian car dealers there, and doctors and lawyers. The doctors are especially important, because if you follow James Dobson’s instructions to beat the hell out of your kids, you don’t want a secular M.D. who is required by law to report abuse to the authorities, to mistake godly discipline for secular child abuse. There are Christian pharmacies that won’t carry Plan B, as well, because people can opt out of all sorts of things based on religious exemptions. Why, doctors can even refuse to see a sick child if her mother doesn’t meet his Christian ban on tattoos.
What’s wrong with that? Quite a lot, actually. If you look at the Bonewitz Scale I linked to, isolation is one of the key factors in evaluating the dangerousness of a cult. No, they don’t quite rank as a cult yet—but they’re getting closer. They are high in internal control (the control over members) and desire a lot of external control of the behavior of others. The latter is clearly shown in their desire to prevent abortions, comprehensive sex education, availability of birth control and Plan B, and any form of entertainment that doesn’t jibe with their beliefs. There is a strong emphasis on personal revelation, particularly when expressed by church leaders (I give you Pat Robertson, and John Hagee as examples). Anything which contradicts that personal revelation is ignored or declared false. Any church which doesn’t meet their standards is dismissed as false. Their dogma is based on a literal, fundamentalist interpretation of the bible, ignoring completely context and historical information that may affect the meaning of verses—such as the one in Leviticus condemning homosexuality, which some scholars think has more to do with banning sex with gay male prostitutes than with homosexuality itself.
They place an enormous emphasis on recruiting new members and preventing old ones from leaving—and they use front groups to do this . Troutfishing has written extensively on the recruiting in the military and dogemperor has diaried about the way these front groups work on college campuses. The attempt to hijack the military is particularly troublesome because many of these right-wing Christians have a strong belief in the Rapture and long for Armageddon and regard the Iraq War as leading up to it. This isn’t a religious war—but they seem to want to turn it in one. And, frankly, I don’t much like the idea of neo-apocalyptic generals with their fingers on the missile button. More importantly, they’re giving non-Christians or Christians of the wrong type a hard time.
They are isolating themselves from reality.
The wall between church and state has been eroding steadily under the Bush administration, and the Religious Reich has been growing increasingly restive. They didn’t get everything they wanted out of "God’s President." No constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, No overturning of Roe v. Wade. No enforced prayers in public schools and no required teaching of Intelligent Design as the equal of evolutionary theory. Sure, they got faith-based initiatives and abstinence only sex education, but that was barely a start. They aren’t happy with the current crop of Republican candidates,\ even if McCain did say he was a Baptist (conservative and therefore good), not an Episcopalian (either liberal or wishy-washy which is bad) and that this is a Christian Nation (which is precisely what they want to make it).Even Huckabee, a Baptist minister who marches strongly with them, doesn’t cut it because he actually wants to do a few things to help the poor and middle class—treason .. And the only one who is really, really tough on security and defense is Giuliani, who has flip-flopped on abortion and doesn’t hate guys and is, well, a Catholic, even if he has been divorced twice, which practically makes him an honorary Southern pol since he married this cousin this last time ( Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr reference—they’ve racked up enough divorces for a couple of people and I wouldn’t’ be surprised to find they married a relative or two along the way).
They are unhappy and making their wrath apparent. And that’s not good for the rest of us.
Why? You have only to look at their activities under the Clinton administration, an administration that actually understood the meaning of the first amendment. We saw the bombing of the Federal Building, which wasn’t a particularly religious act, though McVeigh had ties ot militias, which in turn are often related to right-wing Christianity. Eric Rudolph bombed an abortion clinic and a gay night club and Olympic Park—and he was affiliated with Christian Identity, a particularly racist sect of the dominionist movement. Clinic bombings and the murder of clinic staff peaked under Clinton who was staunchly pro-choice and attempted to protect clinics from anti-choice picketers and attackers. Under the first four years Bush, bombings and murders are down to a mere handful—thought he number of clinic invasions, stalkings, death threats, and assaults and batteries, still remain high. Here is a full report on clinic violence. It makes for scary reading. If the past is any predictor of future behavior, I expect the number of serious attacks on clinics and staff to rise enormously with a pro-choice Dem in office and a larger number of Dems in Congress. I also expect their to be violence against gays, TG people, and other sexual minorities. And if Congress passes Boxer’s act protecting abortion or the new version of the ERA, I expect the lid to blow off completely.
The most important thing I gleaned after watching the three-part series God’s Warriors on CNN is that religion isn’t going away. And that the right-wing fanatics of all faiths, including Christianity, have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us, who may more liberal Christians, believers of the non-Christian sort, agnostics or atheists. With a few word changes, some of bin Laden’s diatribes sound remarkably like John Hagee’s or Pat Robertson’s rantings, particularly when they call down God’s wrath on nay who disagree with them. Tim McVeigh was the only domestic terrorist who didn’t act out of religious beliefs . The clinic bombers and shooters Eric Rudolph—all acted from religious fanaticism. I will not be surprised if we seen an upsurge of violence against secular target and pro-choice targets once again with a Dem in office.
So, next time you hear someone lamenting that this isn’t a Christian Nation any more, remind them that a Christian Nation is a Christian theocracy—and theocracy tends to look a lotlike Colorado City. The clothes may be different. Some of the dogma is vastly different. But the attitudes behind the beliefs are the same.