The real agenda of the American Taliban

In a very scary article in Mother Jones, A Nation Under God, John Sugg explains what the real agenda of the radical Christian right, the powerful Christian Reconstruction movement, really is. The goal is no less than to replace the US Constitution with the Ten Commandments.

Let others worry about the rapture: For the increasingly powerful Christian Reconstruction movement, the task is to establish the Kingdom of God right now—from the courthouse to the White House.

And the wingnut in chief is none other than Roy Moore of Ten Commandments fame who has developed a cult following.

TRINITY CHAPEL in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County is hardly the picture of a revolutionary outpost. It’s a stylishly modern Church of God—a denomination that, though conservative, is certainly mainstream. Parishioners are drawn from a community whose average income is a comfortable 35 percent above the national norm, whose tree-lined country roads intersect McMansion subdivisions. If Norman Rockwell were painting suburban sprawl, he’d likely pick Cobb County.

On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs and luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered inside the sanctuary. The church was host to Restore America, a rally to “celebrate faith and patriotism” sponsored by Christian publisher American Vision. In the lobby, neatly blue-blazered youths were hawking So Help Me God, Roy Moore’s account of his dethroning as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Tables were piled with textbooks for homeschoolers, tomes denouncing evolution, booklets waxing nostalgic for the antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants, who’d come to the conference from conservative churches around the region, would hear from Sadie Fields, president of Georgia’s Christian Coalition, and they’d sway in rhythm as country crooner Steve Vaus sang “We Must Take America Back.”

But the marquee pitchman of the day was Moore. Ruggedly handsome, with the military bearing he acquired at West Point, Moore has gained a rock-star following on the Christian right—a Moses to lead the chosen from a godless society. The judge has a stunning memory for long literary passages and judicial opinions, and he chants them in the singsongy, down-home style of Southern demagogues from Theo Bilbo to George Wallace—“God” is “Gawud,” with an upward lilt. When he proclaimed that “God is still sovereign, no matter what federal judges say,” the crowd tittered and applauded. When he intoned that “there is no right to sodomy in the Constitution,” they cheered. When he roared that unless judges “acknowledge God,” they “should be impeached,” the righteous noise shook the rafters.

As you can see Judge Mullah Roy Moore is indeed a leader in a radical Christian movement that is a far greater threat to the United States than Mullah Omar hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan or Usama bin Laden hiding with him. Roy Moore and his followers represent an increasingly powerful internal threat.

The cult of the Reconstructionists should sound familiar as their beliefs have the same source and are nearly identical to the Taliban and make the Mullahs in Iran look like progressives.

The Old Testament—with its 600 or so Mosaic laws—is the inflexible guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision. Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a preferred method because it would turn the deaths into “community projects,” as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses). DeMar told me that among Reconstructionists he is considered something of a liberal, because he’d execute gays only if they were caught indulging in sodomy. “I’m happy to just drive them back into the closet,” he said.

In introducing Moore at the Trinity Chapel rally, DeMar told the crowd that he supports a “jurisdictional separation of church and state.” But he was not mounting a defense of the First Amendment so much as outlining an organizational distinction. In his book Liberty at Risk, DeMar writes that “the State cannot be neutral towards the Christian faith. Any obstacle that would jeopardize the preaching of the Word of God…must be opposed by civil government.”