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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Invitation to a Stoning: Getting cozy with theocrats Invitation to a Stoning Getting cozy with theocrats Walter Olson | November 1998 Print Edition For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death. Ah, yes, accuracy does count. In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment--which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or "betrothed virgins." Adulterers, among others, might meet their doom by being publicly stoned--a rather abrupt way for the Clinton presidency to end. Mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are finally starting to take note of the influence Rushdoony and his followers have exerted for years in American conservative circles. But a second part of the story, of particular interest to readers of this magazine, is the degree to which Reconstructionists have gained prominence in libertarian causes, ranging from hard-money economics to the defense of home schooling. "Christian economist" Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law and star polemicist of the Reconstructionist movement, is widely cited as a spokesman for free markets, if not exactly free minds; he even served for a brief time on the House staff of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988, when Paul was a member of Congress in the '70s. For his part, Rushdoony has blandly described himself to the press as a critic of "statism" and even as a "Christian libertarian." Say what? An outgrowth of Calvinism, modern Reconstructionism can be traced to Rushdoony's 1973 magnum opus, Institutes of Biblical Law. (Many leading Reconstructionists emerged from conservative Presbyterianism, but as with so much of today's religious ferment, the movement cuts across denominational lines.) Not one to pursue a high public profile, Rushdoony has set up his Chalcedon Institute in off-the-beaten-path Vallecito, California, while North runs his Institute for Christian Economics out of Tyler, Texas. As a "post-millennialist" school of thought, Reconstructionism holds that believers should work toward achieving God's kingdom on earth in the here and now, rather than expect its advent only after a second coming of Christ. Some are in a bit of a hurry about it, too. "World conquest," proclaims George Grant, in what by Reconstructionist standards is not an especially breathless formulation. "It is dominion we are after. Not just a voice... not just influence...not just equal time. It is dominion we are after." Well, OK, it's easy to laugh. Yet grandiosity does sometimes get results, especially when combined with an all-out conviction that one is historically predestined to win (the Communist Party in the '30s comes to mind). Reconstructionism has a record of turning out hugely prolific writers, tireless organizers who stay at meetings until the last chair is folded up, and driven activists willing to undergo arrest (Reconstructionist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, the lawbreaking anti-abortion campaign) to make their point. Politically, Reconstructionists have been active both in the GOP and in the splinter U.S. Taxpayers Party; but their greater influence, as they themselves would doubtless agree, has been felt in the sphere of ideas, in helping change the terms of discourse on the traditionalist right. One of their effects has been to allow everyone else to feel moderate. To wit: Almost any anti-abortion stance seems nuanced when compared with Gary North's advocacy of public execution not just for women who undergo abortions but for those who advised them to do so. And with the Rushdoony faction proposing the actual judicial murder of gays, fewer blink at the position of a Gary Bauer or a Janet Folger, who support laws exposing them to mere imprisonment. Among other ideas Reconstructionists have helped popularize is that state neutrality on the subject of religion is meaningless. Any legal order is bound to "establish" one religious order or another, the argument runs, and the only question is whose. Put the question that way, and watch your polemical troubles disappear. If we're getting a religious establishment anyway, why not mine? "The Christian goal for the world," Recon theologian David Chilton has explained, is "the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics." Scripturally based law would be enforced by the state with a stern rod in these republics. And not just any scriptural law, either, but a hardline-originalist version of Old Testament law--the point at which even most fundamentalists agree things start to get "scary." American evangelicals have tended to hold that the bloodthirsty pre-Talmudic Mosaic code, with its quick resort to capital punishment, its flogging and stoning and countenancing of slavery, was mostly if not entirely superseded by the milder precepts of the New Testament (the "dispensationalist" view, as it's called). Not so, say the Reconstructionists. They reckon only a relative few dietary and ritualistic observances were overthrown. So when Exodus 21:15-17 prescribes that cursing or striking a parent is to be punished by execution, that's fine with Gary North. "When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime," he writes. "The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death." Likewise with blasphemy, dealt with summarily in Leviticus 24:16: "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him." Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. "Why stoning?" asks North. "There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Thrift and ubiquity aside, "executions are community projects--not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his' duty, but rather with actual participants." You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. "That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes," North continues, "indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians." And he may be right about that last point, you know. The Recons are keenly aware of the P.R. difficulties such views pose as they become more widely known. Brian Abshire writes in the January Chalcedon Report, the official magazine of Rushdoony's institute, that the "judicial sanctions" are "at the root" of the antipathy most evangelicals still show towards Reconstruction. Indeed, as the press spotlight has intensified, prominent religious conservatives have edged away. For a while the Coalition on Revival (COR), an umbrella group set up to "bring America back to its biblical foundations" by identifying common ground among Christian right activists of differing theological backgrounds, allowed leading Reconstructionists to chum around with such figures as televangelist D. James Kennedy (whose Coral Ridge Ministries also employed militant Reconstructionist George Grant as a vice president) and National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Robert Dugan. In recent years, however, the COR has lost many of its best-known members; former Virginia lieutenant governor candidate Mike Farris, for example, told The Washington Post that he left the group because "it started heading to a theocracy...and I don't believe in a theocracy." John Whitehead, a Rushdoony protégé who, with Chalcedon assistance, launched the Rutherford Institute to pursue religious litigation, has moved with some vigor to disavow his old mentor's views. Prominent California philanthropist Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., who has given Rushdoony's operations more than $700,000 over the years, may also be loosening his ties. According to the June 30, 1996, Orange County Register, Ahmanson has departed the Chalcedon board and says he "does not embrace all of Rushdoony's teachings." An heir of the Home Savings bank fortune, Ahmanson has also been an important donor to numerous other groups, including the Claremont Institute, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and--just to show how complicated life gets--the Reason Foundation, the publisher of this magazine (for projects not associated with its publication). The continuing, extensive Reconstructionist presence in fields like the home schooling movement poses for libertarians an obvious question: How serious do differences have to become before it becomes inappropriate to overlook them in an otherwise good cause? The printed program of last year's Separation of School & State Alliance convention constituted an odd ideological mix in which certified good guys such as Sheldon Richman, Jim Bovard, and Don Boudreaux alternated with Chalcedon stalwarts like Samuel Blumenfeld, Howard Phillips, and Rushdoony himself. Lest such relations become unduly frictionless, here's a clip-and-save sampler of Reconstructionist quotes to keep on hand: On the link between reason and liberty: "Reason itself is not an objective `given' but is itself a divinely created instrument employed by the unregenerate to further their attack on God." The "appeal to reason as final arbiter" must be rejected; "if man is permitted autonomy in one sphere he will soon claim autonomy in all spheres....We therefore deny every expression of human autonomy--liberal, conservative or libertarian." Thus affirmed Andrew Sandlin, in the January Chalcedon Report. Intellectual liberty (other religions department): Hindus, Muslims, and the like would still be free to practice their rites "in the privacy of your own home....But you would not be allowed to proselytize and undermine the order of the state....every civil order protects its foundations," wrote the late Recon theologian Greg Bahnsen. Bahnsen added that the interdiction applies to "someone [who] comes and proselytizes for another god or another final authority (and by the way, that god may be man)." Intellectual liberty (where secularists fit in department): "All sides of the humanistic spectrum are now, in principle, demonic; communists and conservatives, anarchists and socialists, fascists and republicans," explains Rushdoony. "When someone tries to undermine the commitment to Jehovah which is fundamental to the civil order of a godly state--then that person needs to be restrained by the magistrate...those who will not acknowledge Jehovah as the ultimate authority behind the civil law code which the magistrate is enforcing would be punished and repressed," wrote Bahnsen. On ultimate goals: "So let us be blunt about it," says Gary North. "We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."
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#1. To: gargantuton (#0)
I wonder how stoning would comply with Jesus' commandment to do no violence to any man. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mat 11:12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. Luk 3:14 And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse [any] falsely; and be content with your wages. http://www.blueletterb ible.org/tsk_b/Luk/3/14.html Isa 11:9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. http://www.bluelette rbible.org/kjv/Isa/Isa011.html#9 http://www.blueletterb ible.org/tsk_b/Isa/11/9.html Maybe we're just supposed to leave the killing up to God and his avenging angels. One day, there will only be left those people who know the LORD, or want to.
These sorts of people are the reason the founding fathers, in their wisdom, gave us the First Amendment. An amendment that Thomas Jefferson explained notes was specifically put in place to errect a "wall" between church and state. There were no shortage of religious kooks in the early colonies and the founding fathers forsaw an effort to convert the secular government, that served everyone, into a theocracy that served only the particular cult that manaaged to worm its way to the top.
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I fear these people more than I fear any external enemy...
Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later. --Allan Bloom "The disgusting stink of a too loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time." -- Frank Zappa
Their deliberately covert nature makes them scary to me. Anytime something like this is exposed the fundie types will rush in and tell you that this is only a small minority. I had people doing this to me wrt to Ted Haggards 30 million subjects. Going on my own personal experience, I've yet to meed a fundie who didn't buy into this philosophie to some degree. Most at least buy into the weird ideas that the types above implant to further their memes. For example, most fundies will tell you that an absence of religion is just another type of religion - and do it with a straight face. They will then continue to reason that because the State favors this supposed absence of religion religion, then the fundies deserve equal time for their silly cult - or something equally innane. The logic doesn't have to be that tight as the types they are trying to manipulate usually arn't that smart.
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Must be the case. I've had Evangelicals tell me that their group *and preacher* predates the Catholic Church.
Press 1 to proceed in English. Press 2 for Deportation.
Can't believe I didn't mention Jesus' own words on stoning: Jhn 8:7 — So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. http://www.bluelette rbible.org/kjv/Jhn/Jhn008.html#7 [more:] http://www.blueletterbi ble.org/tsk_b/Jhn/8/7.html Possibly, wolves in sheep's clothing are at work here, using Christians to advance another agenda.
Act 7:37 ¶ This is that Moses, which said unto the children of Israel, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear. Act 7:38 This is he, that was in the church in the wilderness with the angel which spake to him in the mount Sina, and [with] our fathers: who received the lively oracles to give unto us: http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Act/Act007.html#38 My church and High Priest predates the Catholic Church by a long shot. ".....VI. The eminent services which Moses continued to do to the people of Israel, after he had been instrumental to bring them out of Egypt, v. 38. And herein also he was a type of Christ, who yet so far exceeds him that it is no blasphemy to say, "He has authority to change the customs that Moses delivered.’’ It was the honour of Moses, 1. That he was in the church in the wilderness; he presided in all the affairs of it for forty years, was king in Jeshurun, Deu. 33:5. The camp of Israel is here called the church in the wilderness; for it was a sacred society, incorporated by a divine charter under a divine government, and blessed with divine revelation. The church in the wilderness was a church, though it was not yet perfectly formed, as it was to be when they came to Canaan, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes, Deu. 12:8, 9. It was the honour of Moses that he was in that church, and many a time it had been destroyed if Moses had not been in it to intercede for it. But Christ is the president and guide of a more excellent and glorious church than that in the wilderness was, and is more in it, as the life and soul of it, than Moses could be in that. 2. That he was with the angel that spoke to him in the mount Sinai, and with our fathers—was with him in the holy mount twice forty days, with the angel of the covenant, Michael, our prince. Moses was immediately conversant with God, but never lay in his bosom as Christ did from eternity. Or these words may be taken thus: Moses was in the church in the wilderness, but it was with the angel that spoke to him in mount Sinai, that is, at the burning bush; for that was said to be at mount Sinai (v. 30); that angel went before him, and was guide to him, else he could not have been a guide to Israel; of this God speaks (Ex. 23:20), I send an angel before thee, [note: "and my name is in Him"] and Ex. 33:2. And see Num. 20:16. He was in the church with the angel, without whom he could have done no service to the church; but Christ is himself that angel which was with the church in the wilderness, and therefore has an authority above Moses. 3. That he received the lively oracles to give unto them; not only the ten commandments, but the other instructions which the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, Speak them to the children of Israel. (1.) The words of God are oracles, certain and infallible, and of unquestionable authority and obligation; they are to be consulted as oracles, and by them all controversies must be determined. (2.) They are lively oracles, for they are the oracles of the living God, not of the dumb and dead idols of the heathens: the word that God speaks is spirit and life; not that the law of Moses could give life, but it showed the way to life: If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. (3.) Moses received them from God, and delivered nothing as an oracle to the people but what he had first received from God. (4.) The lively oracles which he received from God he faithfully gave to the people, to be observed and preserved. It was the principal privilege of the Jews that to them were committed the oracles of God; and it was by the hand of Moses that they were committed. As Moses gave them not that bread, so neither did he give them that law from heaven (Jn. 6:32), but God gave it to them; and he that gave them those customs by his servant Moses might, no doubt, when he pleased, change the customs by his Son Jesus, who received more lively oracles to give unto us than Moses did........." Matthew Henry - http://www.bluele tterbible.org/Comm/mhc/Act/Act007.html The Catholic Church broke from Judaism [not Hebrewism, but JUDAISM, which is the religion of the Pharisees] in name only: http://www.watch.pair.com/mystery-babylon.html
Whatever you wish to believe.
Press 1 to proceed in English. Press 2 for Deportation.
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