As Pat Robertson, Leader of the Christian Coalition put it, “Our aim is to gain dominion over society.” Exactly how that was to be accomplished was revealed when he told the Denver Post in 1992 that his goal was to “take working control of the Republican Party.” Robertson’s Christian Coalition has 1.7 million members and his television program, 700 Club, boasts 7 million viewers each week. He wields a $27 million annual budget with which to work to try elect “Christian candidates” to public office (though he would lose his tax-exempt status if he were to explicitly endorse any particular candidates.) Another example is D. James Kennedy, pastor of the 9,000 member Coral Ridge Ministries. Until he died of a heart attack in 2007, he reached a weekly viewing and listening audience of over 3 million people every Sunday. At a “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference in February, 2005, Kennedy stated the duty of every Christian is as follows:
“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.”
Kennedy preached a theocratic vision where Christians dominate everyone else as God’s representatives on earth. In his 1994 book, Character & Destiny: A Nation In Search of Its Soul, Kennedy specifically attacks the notion of secularism and its church-state separation:
“If we are committed and involved in taking back the nation for Christian moral values, and if we are willing to risk the scorn of the secular media and the bureaucracy that stand against us, there is no doubt we can witness the dismantling of not just the Berlin Wall but the even more diabolical ‘wall of separation’ that has led to increasing secularization, godlessness, immorality, and corruption in our country.”
Note the implicit claim of victim status in the Kenedy quote above. Christians are risking “scorn” from “those who stand against us” merely for being committed to “Christian moral values.” In a country where the vast majority of Americans are Christians, it is a wonder that anyone would try to take the tack of playing the persecuted martyr, but it is a common maneuver.
In a speech for a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Darien, Connecticut in 2005 Bush’s controversial Federal Judicial nominee (later confirmed) Janice Rogers Brown said:
“These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”
Who are the persecutors? As you can probably guess, it is the subscribers to “atheistic humanism,” who have “handed human destiny over to the great god, autonomy, and this is quite a different idea of freedom. Freedom then becomes willfulness.”
Former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay helped raise money for an organization called the Traditional Values Coalition to fight back against the “war on Christianity” and “stop the all-out assault on Christians being waged by our government, by America’s educational institutions, by the media and throughout popular culture and, according to a fundraising letter,” to help [TVC founder Reverend Lou Sheldon] show America how the liberal Democrats have hijacked America’s courts to push a radical anti-God, anti-family agenda on America.”
Delay’s home state is Texas, where the State of Texas GOP platform of 2004 stated that, “The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of America is a Christian nation.” Lest anyone think that theocracy is merely an extremist concern that we need not worry about, let’s read on:
“Our Founders expected that Christianity—and no other religion–would receive support from the government as long as that support did not violate peoples’ consciences and their right to worship. They would have found utterly incredible the idea that all religions, including paganism, be treated with equal deference.”
I think that last sentence is probably true and that the one preceding it then is probably false for that very reason. The Founding Fathers would not have sought any governmental favor for Christianity, if only because no other religion was on their radar any more than radars were on their radar. They didn’t imagine a country where Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and atheists resided together any more than they could fathom blacks and whites on equal social footing. That last sentence is only true in the way that it is true that most of the Founding Fathers apparently thought of “all men are created equal” as applying only to land-owning white males. Nevertheless, we now take the Constitution as ensuring that all people regardless of sex, race, or land-owning status are all deserving of the same protection under the law, and of course we all agree that we should. Likewise, we ought to regard all religions and the lack of religious belief as equally respected in terms of the establishment clause.
