[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

 Here's something to make your hair stand on end....MD> 
> America's Religious Right - Saints or Subversives? 
> By Steve Weissman 
> t r u t h o u t | Investigation 
> Part V: "The Ayatollah of Holy Rollers" 
> 
> 
> Tuesday 31 May 2005 
> Death by stoning for atheists, adulterers, and practicing male homosexuals. 
> Stoning - or possibly burning at the stake - for atheists, heretics, 
> religious apostates, followers of other religions who proselytize, unmarried females 
> who are unchaste, incorrigible juvenile delinquents, and children who curse 
> or strike their parents. 
> And, oh yes, death to witches, Satanists, and those who commit blasphemy. 
> Does this sound like a radical Islamist nightmare, a replay of Afghanistan 
> under the Taliban? 
> Welcome to the United States of America as Christian Reconstructionists hope 
> to run it. Not as a democracy, which they see as secular heresy. But as a 
> reconstructed Christian nation, complete with biblically sanctioned flogging 
> and slavery. 
> The Bible rules, OK? And, in its name, a small elect of true believers are 
> now seeking capital-D Dominion over every aspects of our government, laws, 
> education, and personal lives. 
> An Unlikely Prophet 
> Reconstructionists have become the extremists to watch, and the key to 
> understanding the current political zing of everyone on the religious right from 
> Sunday-go-to-church Southern Baptists to neo-Nazis in Christian identity 
> militias. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rev. Rousas J. Rushdoony, founder of the Christian Reconstuctions, who would 
> replace the US Constitution with "Biblical Law." 
> (Photo: NNDB.com) 
> 
> 
> The movement and its "Dominion Theology" are relatively new, dating from the 
> publication in 1973 of The Institutes of Biblical Law by the late Rousas 
> John Rushdoony. A man of widely acclaimed brilliance and near-encyclopedic 
> knowledge, Rushdoony claimed to descend from a long line of aristocratic Armenian 
> clerics reaching back to the year 315. He himself was an ordained minister in 
> the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, not be confused with the generally liberal 
> Presbyterian Church (USA). 
> Rev. Rushdoony was no liberal. Though gentle in his personal demeanor, he 
> and his Chalcedon Foundation preached nothing less than a holy war "to demolish 
> every kind of theory, humanistic, evolutionary, idolatrous, or otherwise, 
> and every kind of rampart or opposition to the dominion of God in Christ." 
> As early as 1963, Rushdoony wrote a "Christian revisionist" historical 
> account called The Nature of the American System , in which he rejected the 
> separation of church and state. The authors of the Constitution, he wrote, intended 
> "to perpetuate a Christian order." 
> He similarly opposed the secular bent of American public schools, becoming 
> an early proponent of Christian home-schooling, which he defended as a First 
> Amendment right of their parents. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dr. Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law and a major figure among Christian 
> Reconstructionists. 
> (Photo: NNDB.com) 
> 
> 
> "We must use the doctrine of religious liberty ... until we train up a 
> generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral 
> law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government," explained his 
> son-in-law Gary North. "Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based 
> social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of 
> the enemies of God." 
> Rushdoony opposed labor unions, women's equality, and civil rights laws. He 
> favored racial segregation and slavery, which he felt had benefited black 
> people because it introduced them to Christianity. He largely denied the 
> Holocaust. And he made it kosher for Christian leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry 
> Falwell openly to despise democracy. 
> "Supernatural Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies," wrote 
> Rushdoony, "Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life." 
> In the highly divided world of Christian denominations, Rushdoony was - in 
> journalist Marghe Covino's exquisite phrase - the most unlikely "Ayatollah of 
> Holy Rollers." Few members of the Assembly of God or other evangelical, 
> Pentecostal, or charismatic churches even know his name, and they are only now 
> becoming comfortable with some of his ideas. 
> Evangelicals, who provide most of the foot soldiers for the religious right, 
> have long stressed a personal relationship with God and the importance of 
> having a born-again religious experience. Rushdoony, as an Orthodox 
> Presbyterian, focused less on how they felt their inner faith than on how they lived 
> their lives and obeyed "God's law." 
> Evangelicals immerse themselves in the New Testament and some of their 
> mega-churches at times seem almost New Age. Rushdoony was an Old Testament 
> patriarch, following in the more austere tradition of Puritan rule in the 
> Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Calvin's theocratic governance of early 16th Century 
> Geneva, and the Mosaic law of the ancient Israelites. 
> Evangelicals - or at least most of them at present - believe that Christ 
> will return to establish a Millennium of biblical rule, and many take as gospel 
> the End Time stories of the Rapture that the Rev. Tim LaHaye has popularized 
> in his "Left Behind" novels. Rushdoony saw LaHaye's dispensational prophecies 
> as "cheap grace" and "escapist theology," preaching instead that Christ 
> would return only after virtuous Christians created "a world order under God's 
> law." 
> Nor are Evangelical leaders rushing to proclaim their adherence to the 
> terrifying Christian theocracy that Rushdoony's Reconstructionists now seek. Few 
> Americans want to live like Puritans or die at the stake for committing a sin. 
> "Dominion Theology" is not an easy revolution to sell, at least not yet. 
> In the November 1998 issue of Reason , Walter Olson told of two of 
> televangelist Jerry Falwell's associates who wrote an article in which they criticized 
> the Reconstructionists for advocating ideas that even they, as biblical 
> fundamentalists, found "scary." As an example, the authors mentioned "mandating 
> the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." 
> Rushdoony dashed off a letter to the editor complaining. Reconstructionists, 
> he wrote, had no intention of putting drunkards to death. 
> With denials like this, the Reconstuctions "allow everyone else to feel 
> moderate," Olson concluded. "Almost any anti-abortion stance seems nuanced when 
> compared with Gary North's advocacy of public execution not just for women who 
> undergo abortions but for those who advised them to do so. And with the 
> Rushdoony faction proposing the actual judicial murder of gays, fewer blink at 
> the position of a Gary Bauer or a Janet Folger, who support laws exposing them 
> to mere imprisonment." 
> But the gap between the Biblical "moderates" and Reconstructions is getting 
> shorter every day. As an Evangelical Southern Baptist, Falwell still 
> distances himself from Rushdoony over questions of theology. But, he increasingly 
> talks of Christians exercising dominion over America's secular institutions. 
> So does the charismatic Pat Robertson. ""There is no way that government can 
> operate successfully unless led by godly men and women operating under the 
> laws of the God of Jacob," he wrote in The New World Order. 
> So do evangelical preachers like James Dobson, Don Wildmon, D. James 
> Kennedy, and Tim LaHaye. Whatever they might believe about the End Times, and no 
> matter how often they deny that they've become Reconstructionists, today's 
> evangelical leaders no longer leave the future to the power of prayer while 
> waiting passively for Christ to return. 
> "Christian Reconstructionism is a stealth theology, spreading its influence 
> throughout the Religious Right," explains journalist Frederick Clarkson, who 
> closely follows the field. As he sees it, the Reconstructionists gave 
> evangelicals a new set of ideological tools. These included Rushdoony's apocalyptic 
> vision of rule by biblical law, his analysis of America as a Christian 
> nation, the prospect of complete control, intellectual self-confidence, and a 
> positive program for political involvement. 
> All of these the evangelicals had historically lacked, while the 
> Reconstructionists wanted the one thing the evangelicals had - a huge army of followers 
> they could mobilize with their churches, Bible colleges, publishing houses, 
> and broadcasting stations. 
> "As recently as the early 1990s, most evangelicals viewed Reconstructionists 
> as a band of theological misfits without a following," says Clarkson. "All 
> that has changed, along with the numbers and character of the Christian Right. 
> The world of evangelicalism and, arguably, American politics generally will 
> not be the same." 
> If Clarkson is right, and the evidence suggests that he is, Rushdoony has 
> inspired a major revolution in American religious thought, one that now 
> threatens to provoke a political revolution as well. But before taking to the 
> barricades with Bible in hand, his troops would do well to realize that Rushdoony 
> has smuggled into their kit some very un-Christlike politics. 
> Witch Hunting 
> No surprise to those who track the religious right, Rushdoony enjoyed a long 
> friendship with Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society and the 
> man who accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being a knowing Communist 
> agent. Rushdoony took great interest in how the Birchers worked and even 
> mentioned them admiringly in his epic Institutes of Biblical Law. "The key to the 
> John Birch Society's effectiveness has been a plan of operation which has a 
> strong resemblance to the early church," he wrote. Rushdoony denied ever becoming 
> a Bircher himself, but not because of any political disagreement. As he told 
> Marghe Covino of the Sacramento News &Review, "Welch always saw things in 
> terms of conspiracy and I always see things in terms of sin." A witty bon mot , 
> Rushdoony's response overstated the divergence. He, too, found conspiracies 
> everywhere. But where his friend Welch saw Reds, Rushdoony saw Satan and his 
> modern-day hellhounds, the followers not only of Karl Marx, but also of 
> Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, and - of course - the Unitarians. 
> "All sides of the humanistic spectrum are now, in principle, demonic; 
> communists and conservatives, anarchists and socialists, fascists and republicans," 
> he explained. 
> Pushing his rightwing politics, Rushdoony was one of the first members of 
> the secretive Council for National Policy, which the Rev. Tim LaHaye and others 
> started to bring right-wing Christians, other conservative activists, and 
> John Birchers together with wealthy patrons willing to fund them. He also 
> served on the board of Dr. Jay Grimstead's Coalition on Revival (COR), an umbrella 
> group that attempted to bridge the theological differences of competing 
> sects within an increasing emphasis on dominating secular institutions. 
> Characteristically, Rushdoony soon found fault with both the Council and 
> Coalition, as he did with most religious and political organizations. But both 
> succeeded in selling his far right politics and theocratic religious ideas to 
> millions of unsuspecting evangelicals, who had once led America's fight to 
> keep church and state forever separate. 
> They should have known better, and so should we all. "The purpose of 
> regeneration is that man reconstruct all things in conformity to God's order, not in 
> terms of man's desire for peace," Rushdoony warned in his Institutes of 
> Biblical Law. "This purpose and mission involves law and coercion." 
> A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly 
> Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine 
> writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he 
> writes for t r u t h o u t. 
> ------- 
> Jump to today's TO Features:                                                 
>                                                                              
>             Print This Story E-mail This Story
> 
    
    
        
    
© : t r u t h o u t 2005 | t r u t h o u t | town meeting | issues | 
environment | labor | women | health | voter rights | multimedia | donate | contact | 
subscribe |

    


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050531/62ee5659/attachment.htm