I Helped Start the Religious Right: Here's How We Tried to Undermine Secular America -- and Build a Theocracy

I have read this article five times now trying to get a feel as to what to highlight.  It is packed with a lot of pertinent information for those of us trying to get a handle on exactly what the Reich's game-plan is and what the fuel behind the movement may be.

So as I read this again, some thoughts that come to mind,,,

Schaeffer begins with the primary method of "Christian" indoctrination outside the church, education or the Christian Homeschool Movement.  "[Y]ou can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means." 

Although Schaeffer lumps the entire GOP into this mix, I wouldn't go quite that far.  There are some within the party who I believe have not bought into Dominionism and Reconstructionist ideology (what I call the Reich) but are to weak and/or too scared politically to have an impact. (Rob Portman comes to mind, specifically after lending his support to Marriage Equality.  Touted as a potential running mate of Romney in 2012, I will be interested to see just how much clout he has left in 2016.)

For those that don't follow Dominionism and Reconstructionist ideology, this statement may sound over-inflated, "believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy."

"This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of “separation” from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be “compromising” with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents."

Now bare in mind, one of the spheres of control in Dominionist ideology (via the 7 Mountains Mandate) is education.  One of the pillars of education is science, which leads us to (que the music from Jaws) the foundation of biological science, the Theory of Evolution.  At a glance one may pass "the controversy" off as just a bunch of hyper-literal Bible nuts, but it goes much deeper.

First is the Wedge Strategy or Wedge Document which appeared in 1998/99,

The wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to defeat materialism, naturalism, evolution, and "reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." The strategy also aims to affirm what it calls "God's reality." Its goal is to change American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values. The wedge metaphor is attributed to Phillip E. Johnson and depicts a metal wedge splitting a log to represent an aggressive public relations program to create an opening for the supernatural in the public's understanding of science.

[Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross delve into the Wedge Strategy in their book Creationism's Trojan Horse:  The Wedge of Intelligent Design.  A book I just recently started to read and why Schaeffer's article has hit a nerve.]

Couple that with a 2002 statement made by Ken Ham that I have highlighted before,

Many Christians, including most Christian leaders, don’t understand the connection of evolution to the social ills of our culture and the difficulties in getting people interested in Christianity. They see evolution as something totally separate from such issues. I think the main reason for this misunderstanding is because many Christians have been indoctrinated to believe that evolution is factual science,,,.  What I am saying is that the more a culture abandons God’s Word as the absolute authority, and the more a culture accepts an evolutionary philosophy, then the way people think, and their attitudes, will also change.

A point re-iterated by Ham and his lackey Terry Mortenson's in 2014:

Sitting with Ken Ham and Terry Mortenson, a historian of geology and a theologian on staff, I asked why it is so important to convince their visitors—more than 2 million since the museum opened seven years ago—that Genesis is a book of history. "There’s a slippery slope in regard to authority,” Ham replied. “If you say that the history in Genesis is not true, then you can just take man’s ideas as true. When you go outside of Scripture, why shouldn’t you just reinterpret what marriage means? So our emphasis is on the slippery slope regarding authority.”
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Mortenson stayed on the subject of gay marriage. “The homosexual issue flows from this. Genesis says that God created marriage between one man and one woman. He didn’t create it between two men, or two women, or two men and one woman, or three men and one woman, or two women and one man, or three women and one man. If other parts of Genesis aren’t true, then how could this idea of marriage be true? If there were no Adam and Eve and we’re all evolved from apelike ancestors and there’s homosexuality in the animal world and if Genesis is mythology, then you can justify any behavior you want.”

Which brings me to a point made by Wayne Besen, "[f]ind inflammatory wedge issues and scapegoats to divide people and force them to choose sides." The topic of homosexuality in all its iterations is a prime example of the "Evil Secular World" that Schaeffer mentions; transgender issues are a close second.

Schaeffer continues, touching on two prominent foundational leaders in the movement whose influence is still felt today.

The Evangelical home school movement was really founded by two people: Rousas Rushdoony, the extremist theologian, and Mary Pride, the “mother” of fundamentalist home-schoolers. I knew them both well.
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By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings—on everything from capital punishment for gays to the virtues of child beating—were still valid because they were the inerrant Word and Will of God and therefore should be enforced. Not only that, they said that biblical law should be imposed even on nonbelievers. This theology was the American version of the attempt in some Muslim countries to impose Shariah (Islamic law) on all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

And a third Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Prides' successor in the Patriarchy Movement and instrumental in the formation of the Quiverfull Movement which piggy-backs on the writings of Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.

,,,the wealthy author/guru Nancy Leigh DeMoss, was also one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do best-selling career women doing high-paid speaking gigs while encouraging other women to stay home and submit to their men.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss happened to be the daughter of a former friend of my mother’s, Nancy DeMoss, who was instrumental in my parents’ rise to Evangelical superstardom. Nancy DeMoss was also pivotal in the role of facilitator and financier when it came to seamlessly merging Reconstructionist ideology with the “respectable” mainstream Evangelical community.
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But unlike the Schaeffers, the DeMoss clan had tens of millions of dollars with which to back its pet far-right schemes, one of which would be the Quiverfull Movement– a group dedicated to early marriage and huge families.

Are you confused yet? Have you figured out why I don't sleep?

You now know why it has taken me five readings of this article.  To an outsider, it sounds as if Schaeffer is a name-dropping, raging lunatic with a conspiratorial mind-set.

,,,Good minds by themselves, however, are no guarantee against obsessions, rants, and angry vendettas. I have no idea why Frankie Schaeffer is so hostile. This article impresses mostly by name-dropping, by assigning dark motives to most of the Christians that Schaeffer once knew, and by grand conspiracy theories,,,.  They simply wish to pass down perspectives and values that are important to them. 95% of American Christians are not involved in the kind of right-wing politics that has Schaeffer so upset. It would be well for all of us to practice some civility.

And the above comment is correct, "Not all Christians are Dominionist, but all Dominionist claim Christianity."  It was aptly stated by Leah Burton. But as Michelle Goldberg points out, (and an ideology I highlighted here),

For believers in Dominionism, rule by non-Christians is a sort of sacrilege—which explains, in part, the theological fury that has accompanied the election of our last two Democratic presidents. “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,” wrote George Grant, the former executive director of Coral Ridge Ministries, which has since changed its name to Truth in Action Ministries. “But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice ... It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time ... World conquest.”

To remain silent is to condone.  What Schaeffer is offering, a behind-the-scenes history lesson.

Back to the name-dropping,,,

Antonin Scalia because of his friendship with, Robert George; a name I was not familiar with prior to Schaeffer's article.  A name we all should get to know.  As David Kirkpatrick writes in a 2009 piece for the New York Times:

FOR 20 YEARS, George has operated largely out of public view at the intersection of academia, religion and politics. In the past 12 months, however, he has stepped into a more prominent role. With the death of the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister turned Roman Catholic priest who helped bring evangelicals and Catholics together into a political movement, George has assumed his mantle as the reigning brain of the Christian right. And he is in many ways the public face of the conservative side in the most urgent culture-war battle of the day. The National Organization for Marriage, the advocacy group fighting same-sex marriage in Albany and Trenton, Maine and California, has made him its chairman. Before the 2004 election, he helped a coalition of Christian conservative groups write their proposed amendment to the federal Constitution defining marriage as heterosexual. More than any other scholar, George has staked his reputation on the claim that same-sex marriage violates not only tradition but also human reason.

[,,,]
In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.

George's list of friends reads like a who's who in America politics and jurisprudence.  Not only is he (very) smart but connected and not necessarily in a "bad" way.  George is founder of the American Principles Project, a past chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, and co-founder of the Renewal Forum.  He is also the originator of a document called the Manhattan Declaration, "a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage."

Not only is George a friend of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but Justice Clarence Thomas as well:

Good As You founder Jeremy Hooper just published an article with this image he found on Twitter. In the center is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. On the left is Ryan T. Anderson of the very anti-gay Heritage Foundation. On the right is none other than Robert P. George.
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But it's Robert P. George that the LGBT community and all on the left really should know better.

My introduction to Peter Kreeft came via my unusual interest in C.S. Lewis.  After listening to a few of his lectures concerning Lewis (and Tolkien), I decided to explore some of his philosophy-minded talks when I realized I was listening to the Catholic version of William Lane Craig.  It wasn't until two years later that I discovered he really was a Roman Catholic apologist.  What I didn't know at the time was just how entrenched and active in the Reich's warfare against us common folk he was.

According to Schaeffer, Kreeft sounded a rallying cry for a "jihad against the secular West" writing a book titled, Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War in which he envisioned Christians, Jews and Muslims joining together, "[t]hese groups did not share each other’s theology, but had a deeper link: anger at the “victimhood” imposed on them by modernity."

Kreeft and Neuhaus were calling abortion murder. Thus, the logic of their argument was that of my father’s, too: The U.S. government was enabling murder and was thus disparaged as a “regime,” even a “counterfeit state,” that needed to be overthrown. George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the “Manhattan Declaration” (like Kreeft) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from doing its worst—in other words, to pass laws that did not comply with their religious “values.”

Buried in this section concerning Kreeft's influence are two more names.  One should be familiar to those of my generation, Charles Colson of Watergate fame and founder of Prison Fellowship.  The other, Richard John Neuhaus, may not be familiar to anyone not following the Reich but he came on my radar way back in 2005 when Time magazine published The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.  I was an angry atheist back then and did not understand the ramifications of what I was reading, or what I was posting.  Many of the current power brokers where on that list:  Rick Warren, James Dobson, Billy and Franklin Graham, Richard Land, Joyce Meyer, Rick Santorum to name a few.

Here is what Time had to say about Neuhaus:

When Bush met with journalists from religious publications last year, the living authority he cited most often was not a fellow Evangelical but a man he calls Father Richard, who, he explained, "helps me articulate these [religious] things." A senior Administration official confirms that Neuhaus "does have a fair amount of under-the-radar influence" on such policies as abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and the defense-of-marriage amendment.

Neuhaus, 68, is well-prepared for that role. As founder of the religion-and-policy journal First Things, he has for years articulated toughly conservative yet nuanced positions on a wide range of civic issues. A Lutheran turned Catholic priest, he can translate conservative Protestant arguments couched tightly in Scripture into Catholicism's broader language of moral reasoning, more accessible to a general public that does not regard chapter and verse as final proof. And there is one last reason for Bush to cherish Neuhaus, who has worked tirelessly to persuade conservative Catholics and Evangelicals to make common cause. It's called the conservative Catholic vote, and it played a key role last November.

So why are Kreeft, George, Neuhaus and Colson important?  It goes back to the Manhattan Declaration and what David Badash said in regards to the Thomas photo-op with George, "But it's Robert P. George that the LGBT community and all on the left really should know better."  As Schaeffer explains,

So if the U.S. government legalizes gay marriage and thus “compels” all Americans (including church groups) to recognize gay men and women’s civil rights, the government need no longer be obeyed when those laws affect religious people who disagree with them. The “Manhattan Declaration” called believers to “not comply.” And just as Neuhaus dismissed the U.S. government as a “regime”—and my father did the same when saying the government was a “counterfeit state”—George and his co-signers also used dismissive and demeaning language about the U.S. government.

The “Manhattan Declaration” called laws with which its signers disagreed “edicts,” thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the right loses in the democratic process, “other means,” like civil disobedience, are encouraged. In fact, George, who authored the “declaration,” then headed up the group that successfully won on the Hobby Lobby case and also won the Evangelical Wheaton College suit to allow them to not cover contraception for women.

I'm not going to dig too deep in the Manhattan Declaration and what it is or isn't.  What is surprising, not all within Christendom are on board with its tenets and their reason may surprise you.  From Matt Slick of CARM:

However, it is with sadness that CARM cannot sign the declaration for one significant reason:  it includes Roman Catholics as Christians. If CARM were to sign the declaration, it would be inadvertently supporting the anti-Christian teachings within the Roman Catholic Church by implying that Roman Catholicism is Christian when it is not.  Does this sound harsh?  I suppose it does.  But, more important than Christian unity is the truth of God's word.  We must not sacrifice "the faith once and for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3) for a can't-we-just-all-get-along type of sentiment even if the the intent is truly noble.

CARM stands for orthodoxy and fidelity to the word of God.  Therefore, we could no more sign a declaration that included Mormons as Christians any more than we could sign the Manhattan Declaration which calls Roman Catholicism Christian.

Even those of the Catholic persuasion are not convinced and leery.  From Frank Cocozzelli writing over at Talk To Action in his piece The Madness of Robert P. George:

As an American Catholic I find the religious and secular views of Robert P. George maddening. While giving lip service to religious freedom in the Manhattan Declaration, the statement's content actually promotes religious supremacy.

Reading between the lines of Kirkpatrick's The New York Times piece, George is saying that American law must be based upon an unyieldingly orthodox form of Catholicism. Other faiths may be tolerated provided they cede to his subjective interpretation of Christianity on issues of life and death. Catholics who, like me, view dissent as healthy and the Gospels as an on-going journey of understanding appear to have no place at all in the theoconservative world according to George.

While George claim's that his view of natural law "... disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture - or even history and anthropology" it all-too-subjectively draws upon a thirteenth century version, one where the state and Catholic Church were intertwined. Nowhere in this calculation is any reliance upon Richard Hooker, the sixteenth century Anglican theologian whose views on natural law, latitudinarianism and religious tolerance greatly influenced John Locke and in turn, the Founding Fathers.

For shits-and-giggles, I may have to devote a posting just to George and his masterpiece.

What Scaheffer has done is provide, as he calls it, "the ideological background noise" that has set the stage for the Quiverfull and Patriarchy movements. "They gave a gloss of intellectual respectability to what was nothing more than a theocratic, far right wish list."

As Schaeffer notes, "we lashed out at 'godless America' and demanded political change,,,yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and home-school them."  Schaeffer then goes on to highlight Evangelical Protestant efforts that support(ed) that bizarre dichotomy.

In the minds of Evangelicals, they were re-creating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical “place” but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts. Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having “dropped out” (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding “moral” and “family” matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

To be continued in part 2,,,
I Helped Start the Religious Right: Here's How We Tried to Undermine Secular America -- and Build a Theocracy