Militant Theocrats Rallying

The Southern Poverty Law Center's latest Intelligence Report has published a story about some militant theocrats enlisting in what they call "Joel's Army" and "'Arming' For Armageddon."

Members of the group have been influenced by the racist Christian Identity movement that scapegoats blacks and hispanics as an outlet for a long simmering rage over the unrelenting decline of economic conditions in rural America.

Here's a quote from the SPLC's report:

Those sounding the alarm about Joel's Army are not secular foes of the Christian Right, few of whom are even aware of the movement or how widespread it's become in the past decade. Instead, Joel's Army critics are mostly conservative Christians, either neo-Pentecostals who left the movement in disgust or evangelical Christians who fear that Joel's Army preachers are stealing their flocks, even sending spies to infiltrate their own congregations and sway their young people to heresy. And they say the movement is becoming frightening.

"The pitch and intensity of the military rhetoric of this branch of the global Dominionist movement has substantially increased since the beginning of 2008," writes The Discernment Research Group, a Christian watchdog group that tracks what they call heresies or cults within Christianity. "One can only wonder how long before this transforms into real warfare with actual warriors."

Falwell, Baptist Press Perpetuate Moral Majority Myth

Baptist Press is quoting Jonathan Falwell perpetuating a myth about the origins of the Moral Majority. Jonathan says,

When Dad started the Moral Majority back in the late '70s, he had a vision, he had a plan to bring our country to the point where abortion on demand would no longer be legal.

The truth is that the Moral Majority began with a conversation between Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Moral Majority. Weyrich was encouraging Falwell to lead a movement of evangelicals into secular politics. Here's what Weyrich said according to Rice University Sociologist William Martin, author of With God and Our Side and the companion PBS documentary series by the same name:

Paul Weyrich emphatically asserted that, "what galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation." Weyrich explained that while Christians were troubled about abortion, school prayer, and the ERA, they felt able to deal with those on a private basis. They could avoid having abortions, put their children in Christian schools, and run their families the way they wanted to, all without having to be concerned about public policy. But the IRS threat, "enraged the Christian community and they looked upon it as interference from government, and suddenly it dawned on them that they were not going to be able to be left alone to teach their children as they pleased. It was at that moment that conservatives made the linkage between their opposition to government interference and the interests of the evangelical movement, which now saw itself on the defensive and under attack by the government. That was what brought those people into the political process. It was not the other things." (With God on Our Side, p. 173)