Thoughts in a Haystack

Here is a post from the past that is very appropriate for Blog Against Theocracy weekend:

We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders. - Tim LaHaye, author of the "Left Behind" series of books

Time for another scary bit from Michelle Goldberg's book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, this time taken from an excerpt appearing at Salon.com.

In this section, she gives some of the history of "Dominion theology," which first arose out of the "Christian Reconstructionism" movement championed by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Rushdoony advocated the replacement of all civil law with "biblical law," based on such strictures as the punishments set forth in Leviticus 20. Furthermore, he held that democracy is a both a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."

Reconstructionism is "postmillennial," which is a view of eschatology (the theology of the "end times") that holds that the Second Coming of Christ won't occur until after a thousand year reign of the Kingdom of God by his servants on Earth. Naturally, this makes it incumbent on a believer to help bring about such a kingdom. Most American evangelicals, however, are premillennialists, a position that tended in the past to result in some measure of apathy because the timing is all God's choice and, at least in some versions, the believers are "taken up" in the "Rapture" so they even miss the seven years "Tribulation" before the establishment of the Kingdom.

Francis Schaeffer, the American founder of L'Abri, a Christian community in Switzerland, has been influential in creating the view that modern history is to be understood as a battle between the "worldviews" of Christians and "materialists." Drawing on Rushdoony's ideas, he wrote in his 1981 book, A Christian Manifesto, after warning about wrapping Christianity in American patriotism:

None of this, however, changes the fact that the United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to government.

Schaeffer was an early leader of the antiabortion movement among evangelicals and came out in favor of civil disobedience and even the use of force to end it, though he isn't a theocrat himself.

Thus, by mostly different routes, premillennialists and postmillennialists came to share the goal of dominion over the civil state and began to make alliances. One of these, the Coalition on Revival, brought together Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association and the above-mentioned LaHaye. Other familiar names associated with the movement are David Limbaugh (Rush's brother), former sitcom star Kirk Cameron, Chuck Colson and Tom DeLay. Howard Ahmanson, savings and loan heir and major funder of the Discovery Institute, the primary advocate for the Intelligent Design movement, has also been linked to Christian Reconstructionism.

The Right has come to learn the value of victimhood, as recently set out in the essay, "Right-Wing P.C.: How conservatives learned to stop worrying and love political correctness," by Jesse Walker. The Christian nationalists have absorbed the lesson too, resulting in the many claims of anti-Christian persecution we have heard of late, even if they ring hollow in a country where at least 76% of the populace identifies itself as Christian. Of course, many of those might discover, if the Christian nationalists get their way, that the nationalists' definition is different than theirs.

Just in case anyone might miss their real agenda, however, George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote in his book The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action:

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...

Sleep tight.
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Oh, and you might want to visit First Freedom First.

Labels: Blog Against Theocracy

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 6:09 AM