Over the past week,
Bruce Prescott's eye-opening series on Christian Reconstructionism and it's relationship to the fundamentalist takeover the Southern Baptist Convention, (the nation's largest protestant denomination) has been featured on the front page at
Talk to Action. Today,
Ethics Daily, takes up the discussion, and links to one of Prescott's
Talk to Action posts.
I don't think it's an overstatement by a start-up blog site to say that Talk to Action has in just one week become the premier web site in the country for reporting on and discussion of the role of dominionism, Christian Reconstructionism, and the religious right political movement.
Mainstream Baptist (Bruce Prescott) got the ball rolling with his series (in chronological order).
On Restoring America
Learning to be Patient Revolutionaries
From Reconstructionism to Dominionism, Part I
From Reconstructionism to Dominionism, Part II
Another Reconstructionist/Dominionist Distinction
SBC Takeover Leaders and the CNP
Then we had John Sugg over for a visit, fresh from having just published a major report on Christian Reconstructionism in Mother Jones magazine.
Chip Berlet has also started a series on dominionism, to which I am looking forward.
I have written a great deal about Christian Reconstructionism and dominionism over the years, although not yet on Talk to Action. I am delighted that my colleagues are zeroing in on this area. In the interests of moving the discussion forward, in the context of the recent swirl of events, here are a few observations drawn from my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy -- in which I detailed my view that Reconstructionism has been central to the development of the Christian Right over the past few decades -- even as it shrewdly avoided public attention.
But Reconstructionist leaders have made occaisional forays into the spotlight that revealed how the influence of Reconstructionism is far wider than was -- and is -- generally known.
One important Chrstian Reconstructionist leader, Rev. Joseph Morecraft told television journalist Bill Moyers in 1987 that
"the groups we've touched" go far beyond anyone who would call themselves Reconstructionists -- including Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians and Catholics. "Denominational affiliation means very little to this whole movement today... our influence goes into many of the leading conservative organizations of the New right today...[and] its has become one of the most influential and one of the fastest growing movements in American Christendom." Robert Billings, one of the founders of the Moral Majority and later a director of the Free Congress Foundation, has said that "if weren't for [Rushdoony's] books, none of us would be here." (page 107)
So. Are the theocrats on the march? Here is more from Eternal Hostility:
The struggle between democracy and theocracy, which seems to have been settled when the U.S. constitution was ratified, is far from over. As Christian Right theorist Gary North writes: "For the first time in over 300 years, a growing number of Christians are starting to view themselves as an army of the move. This army will grow." Taking the metaphor a step further, North declared that, "We are self consciously firing the first shot." (page 2)
Does this mean that dominionist militias are about to jump out of the bushes and start shooting at anyone who looks like an agent of the Enlightenment?
Not hardly.
Christian Reconstructionism and the broader dominionist movement is primarily a movement of ideas. its leaders are writers, thinkers and ministers. It has no one institutional home. Not every adherent, nor everyone influenced by this body of theocratic thought agrees with one another. Most Reconstructionist writers do not publicly call for revolution -- even as they understand their ideas to be in fact, revolutionary, and intended to catalyze a growing confrontation with the rest of society and principally, the secular state. But they are a movement nevertheless. And a powerful one at that.
Some, such as such advocates and practitioners of antiabortion violence as convicted murder Paul Hill and clinic bomber Michael Bray, have gone the route of martyrdom and guerrilla warfare in the cause of theocratic revolution. Gary North and the late R.J. Rushdoony (the seminal thinker of Reconstructionism) have publicly opposed such actions. Still, the ideas of North, Rushdoony and a generation of Reconstructionist thinkers and writers are nevertheless potent -- and ultimately revolutionary -- even if their intention is a slow motion revolution -- and influence the likes of Hill and Bray who considered themselves Reconstructionists. What the bookish thinkers of slo-mo Reconstructionist revolution cannot do is control what others do with their ideas. That is currently a problem for them as they rush to distance themselves from the Christian Right leaders like Pat Robertson who, influenced by the ideas of dominionism and Reconstructionism, have catalyzed a political movement of which they don't quite approve.
Reconstructionist writer and activist Gary DeMar, offered a vigorous response to John Sugg's article, as Carlos noted on Talk to Action today :
The people at Mother Jones are running scared. They don't know how bad off they really are. The ministries they mention are the tip of a very large iceberg. Hundreds of Christian ministries, legal defense organizations, websites, organizations, publishing houses, magazines, homeschool conventions, and worldview conferences are operating worldwide. It won't be long before there is a worldview tipping point ... In time the Christian worldview will ripple through America, and Mother Jones will be what Indiana calls his mother.
DeMar's threat not withstanding, society has no reason to run scared -- but it is long past time to start running smart. Increasingly, the various sectors of society that should be aware of the dominionist movement and its various constituent parts, are recognizing it's anti-democratic intentions, and its growing power and influence in American society and government. And that can only be a good thing.