Who changed the country while I was away?

On a high school alumni email list someone posted an email about how the United States is a Christian nation and that the Ten Commandments are rightly posted in public places. I was blowing it off until I got to the end (I was curious about how the email would conclude): "It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, it is very hard to understand why there is such a mess about having the Ten Commandments on display or "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the other 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!! "

Underdog was a favorite cartoon when I was a (big) kid, so, of course, I had to squeak up with stuff like freedom of speech, but what developed as my main point as the discussion continued is the change in religious attitude in the country. I first noticed it overseas in the social makeup of the military -- rough, tough fighting men were a lot more religious than they used to be, which should have been an interesting development since the religion I noticed them practicing a lot more is based on loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek, but that wasn't the message I got.

As time passed the indirect message I got was that I am target, I was someone to either be converted or avoided. A neighbor's visiting teenage niece brought a Bible to our house to show to my daughter. The niece told my daughter she would show her a book the girl was sure my daughter had never seen. We had seven Bibles of various sorts in the house, including a New Testament in ancient Greek accompanied by a literal English translation, so that kind of fell flat. Face to face with adults the message usually wasn't this blunt, but one can tell when one is at odds with one's close colleagues and neighbors. The population was changing around me. What happened?

As I told my listmembers in an email:

• In November of 1994 when I was homeschooling my kids in Heidelberg, I gotinto a mail-discussion (this was pre-email in Europe) with a homeschoolingdad at Ramstein concerning whether the NATO Status of Forces Agreement was renegotiated each year and how that would affect homeschoolers. He said theSOFA was renegotiated, I said it wasn't. (I was right and provided him with a reference phone number to the SOFA specialist at the American embassy inBonn)
  
  In the course of the discussion this man sent me a packet of papers from a group called Chalcedon which he used to justify the religious underpinnings for homeschooling. I disagreed with that, too, because I wasn't homeschooling for religious reasons and, if that was the reason put forth to the authorities as our legal reason, then I'd be up a creek without a paddle.
  
  What I remember from that packet concerned the patriarchal structure of families, the return to 'Biblical' law in America, and how the US is to become a 'Christian nation.' The Biblical law to which America was to be 'returned' wasn't Jesus' laws of loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek, it was of putting people to death for not being the'right' sort of Christian, among other things. I'm pretty sure that as a lapsed-Catholic-turned-Episcopalian, I wasn't the right sort.
  
  It didn't matter that I was a lay-reader, was in charge of the altar guild (me and two other ladies), and that I attended yearly European Convocation meetings where my kids helped me with altar guild responsibilities for the conference (not that I told him all this); we still weren't the 'right sort.' Punishments for 'not the right sort' include death by fire, sword and stoning. Btw, stoning is preferred because rocks are plentiful and cheap. Gotta keep economics in mind. I kind of objected to that and put those papers into the trash. Now I wish I had saved them (as I saved my reply to him) because the ideas contained in them are far stronger than what is now at Chalcedon's web site.
  
  This is why I object so strongly to emails with ideas that weasel their way into our thinking through appeals to our sense of decency, our patriotism, and our emotions by using iconic names and images to cloak a different agenda. Our concerns are used as wedges into our thinking, and then to inch-by-inch agreement with Dominionist positions.

The email that was forwarded, I think in all innocence, to the list had a distinctly Reconstructionist flavor. Slowly the ideas are permeating our society and America's progress is slowly being reversed.

America The Theocracy

• At the heart of dominion beliefs -- whether Boys' gut-punching invective or Rushdoony's and North's complex theological contemplations -- are two biblical passages. Genesis 1:28 commands men to have "dominion" over "every living thing." Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God, and Satan seized dominion. The church -- the church sanctioned by the Reconstructionists, that is -- claims it has a reconstituted covenant with God, and the right to a new dominion in his name.
  
  Then, in Matthew 28:19-20, the "Great Commission," Jesus commands his followers to proselytize to the world.
  
  Put another way, for the dominion theologians, the motto is: We rule!
  

Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence

• The significance of the Reconstructionist movement is not its numbers, but the power of its ideas and their surprisingly rapid acceptance. Many on the Christian Right are unaware that they hold Reconstructionist ideas. Because as a theology it is controversial, even among evangelicals, many who are consciously influenced by it avoid the label. This furtiveness is not, however, as significant as the potency of the ideology itself.

Operation Potomac

• Although Reconstructionism may seem so far out as to be easily dismissed, the philosophy has in fact provided the intellectual basis for much of the Religious Right's thinking and political activism. Stripped of its more extreme features, watered-down versions of Reconstructionism are the driving force behind groups like the Christian Coalition, whose leaders, during the group's early years, talked openly of the need for far-right Christians to take control of government from local school boards all the way to the White House.

On the Road to Political Power and Theocracy

• In places where fascism has taken hold, it has been through a convergence of state and corporate power with a mass base of reaction. We saw this vividly in Chile in the 1970s. I am not suggesting that our country will face a military coup. In the era of "democracy," from Nicaragua to the former Soviet republics, elections are the primary means through which the right takes power.

Dominion Theology

• Barton's bottom line is that only "the righteous" should occupy public office. This is music to the ears of Christian Right audiences. To grasp Barton's brand of dominion theology, unlike reconstructionism, one does not need a seminary degree. Barton's pseudo history fills a need most Americans have, to know more about our country's past. His direct linkage of the deified Founding Fathers with contemporary social problems cuts through the evangelicals' theological sectarianism and unites them in a feasible project. They may not be able to take dominion over the whole earth or even agree about when Jesus will return, but they sure can go home and back a godly candidate for city council, or run themselves.

And that's where the email on my alumni list 'came from' -- someone using pseudo history dressed up with pictures.