The fields of honor: Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is "martyred" for planting the Ten Commandments on public soil. President George Bush charges to the right in a flanking maneuver on Democratic rivals by embracing a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Southern states, led by Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush, attempt to open prisons and social service agencies to proselytizing disguised as privatization. Georgia School Superintendent Kathy Cox snips mentions of evolution and the big-bang theory from school curriculum guidelines. Abortion is supplanted by anti-gay "defense of marriage" legislation as the cudgel-of-choice swung by state GOP legislators.
The faithful, as seldom before, are mobilized and militant, protesting the removal of the Ten Commandments, and urging in strong 55 percent-plus majority numbers that governments erect an impenetrable barrier between gays and the marriage altar.
There is a clear direction to the movement — a government more in tune with religion. Beyond that, but not far, awaits the grail for Christian Reconstruction and its allies: a theocracy ruling America.Proverbs 2About 300 members of Heritage Baptist Church in Zebulon, N.C., are gathered two evenings before Valentine's Day to hear a traveling superstar of their creed, the Rev. Don Boys, tell them how to make marriage work. Before the sermon, he's out in a hallway staffing a table displaying his 13 books (special deal: Get them all for $67). And, he's very excited."I heard it on the way in," Boys says with evident glee. "(Sen. John) Kerry got caught having sex with an intern. It's all over Europe today, and will be in our papers by tomorrow. He's a goner. We got him!"
The story would turn out to be bogus, a fiction spread by Washington, D.C., scandalmonger Matt Drudge. But for that night, it was milk and honey for Boys.
A little later, he talks to the church audience about building the family. Zebulon, about 40 miles from Charlotte, is a good place to preach on the subject. With its attractive 1920s and 1930s homes, the town is anchored by a family restaurant and a few churches. Urban problems seem a century away from this Norman Rockwell village.
Boys' story and that of his wife, Ellen, who punctuates her recollections with gently powerful singing, are ones of painful loss and redemption. The audience is moved. Even the journalist/ Doubting Thomas in the audience is choked up.
The culture/political wars are never far away, however. The audience laughs when Boys recounts that when courting Ellen — a recent marriage after both lost spouses to illnesses — he sent her a copy of his AIDS: Silent Killer, a denunciation of the gay lifestyle. "A lot of people wouldn't call that real romantic," Boys quips.
Boys runs his publishing house, Common Sense Today, from Ringgold, Ga., a Chattanooga suburb. Along with his books, he churns out newspaper columns (he's a former USA Today regular), videos and tapes. The titles are potboilers: Liberalism: A Rope of Sand, Homosexuality: The High Cost of Low Living and Is God a Right-Winger? (The answer, you might guess, is "yes," according to the book.)
Denying that he's a Reconstructionist ("They're mostly Presbyterians," he says), Boys nonetheless told me last fall, "I agree with just about all they say." Boys, when asked who would get his vote for president, mentioned two names: U.S. Sen. Zell Miller (who isn't running) and Howard Phillips, candidate of the Constitution Party, a group founded by Reconstructionists.
And, Boys takes his pro-Reconstruction message on the road. For four decades, he has been on the revival circuit, speaking mostly to scores of smaller, independent Baptist churches across the South and Midwest.
On issues of church and state, Boys is succinct. "What we are saying is, God is over government."
GenesisMost churchgoers have never heard of Christian Reconstruction or theonomy. Believers would be hard-pressed to define "dominion theology," "covenant theology," "pre-millennial," "post-millennial" or, for the wishy-washy, the neither pre nor post "a-millennial."Nor would most Americans reflexively embrace a "theology" that denounced all government social programs, public schools, environmental protections — a religion that promoted mass executions for sins as minor as swearing at parents, decried democracy as heretical, relegated women to subservience, or that endorsed segregation and even the return of slavery to the United States.
And, Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, his brother Mark, Gary North and Gary DeMar are names unlikely to spark widespread recognition.
Yet, these men, their theology and the secretive groups they have founded are like an invisible black hole whose gravity inexorably pulls the religious debate toward a theocracy with its closest parallel in Iran's government-by-mullahs.
Reconstructionists, who don't hesitate at casting the first stone, are behind-the-scenes strategists for much of the religious right. They and their fellow travelers established a beachhead in the White House (although the Bush administration is rapidly falling from grace because of its failure to unequivocally condemn Islam as a religion of the devil). Many in Congress pay tribute, and they're backing Reconstruction-inspired legislation.
