Why Should We Care About What Happens in Texas?

CNN did what?  CNN had on Tony Perkins to give the “Christian” perspective on the Supreme Court’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act.  CNN producers obviously haven’t a clue about Christianity or the religious right.  And that cluelessness probably applies to Judaism and Islam as well.

According to an article in The Huffington Post, 8/18/2011, Why The Mainstream Media are Clueless About The Religious Right, a “2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, among white self-identified evangelicals, 62 percent told Pew in 2006 that they believe the Bible to be the literal word of God”.  According to the article, more than one-quarter of the U.S. population identify as evangelicals.

OK.  But that means that three-quarters of the U.S. population do not identify as evangelicals.  Which, I believe, is why the circus in the Texas Legislature this past week had so many thousands of Americans staying up until all hours of the night glued to their television screens.  This wasn’t just about abortion.  It was about a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.  According to Wikipedia, which generally is not an accurate source but in this case is pretty good, defines Dominionism as follows: 

“Dominion Theology is a grouping of theological systems^[2] with the common belief that the law of God, as codified in the Bible, should exclusively govern society, to the exclusion of secular law, a view also known as theonomy. The most prominent modern formulation of Dominion Theology is Christian Reconstructionism, founded by R. J. Rushdoony in the 1970s. Reconstructionists themselves use the word dominionism to refer to their belief that Christians alone should control civil government, conducting it according to Biblical law.” 

The reason this definition is important is because Rick Perry, according to an article on Reader Supported News, 8/13/11, by Forrest Wilder, The Texas Observer, titled Rick Perry’s Army of God, is a member, or at least an adherent of this movement.  The following is from the article:

“On September 28, 2009, at 1:40 p.m., God’s messengers visited Rick Perry.

On this day, the Lord’s messengers arrived in the form of two Texas pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, who called on Perry in the governor’s office inside the state Capitol.  Schlueter and Long both oversee small congregations, but they are more than just pastors.  They consider themselves modern-day apostles and prophets, blessed with the same gifts as Old Testament prophets or New Testament apostles.

The pastors told Perry of God’s grand plan for Texas.  A chain of powerful prophecies had proclaimed that Texas was ‘The Prophet State,’ anointed by God to lead the United States into revival and Godly government.  And the governor would have a special role.”

What makes this all the more frightening for both women and people of color are some of the extreme views of the founder of Dominionism, R.J. Rushdoony.  An article in The Daily Beast by Michelle Goldberg, A Christian Plot for Domination?, 8/14/2011, stated:  “Rushdoony pioneered the Christian homeschooling movement, as well as the revisionist history, ubiquitous on the religious right, that paints the U.S. as a Christian nation founded on biblical principles.  He consistently defended Southern slavery and contrasted it with the greater evils of socialism: ‘The law here is humane and also unsentimental,’ he wrote. ‘It recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so … Socialism, on the contrary, tries to give the slave all the advantages of his security together with the benefits of freedom, and in the process, destroys both the free and the enslaved.”

I can’t help but correlate this belief with what happened in so many Republican states, and with the decision of the Supreme Court this past Tuesday in reference to the Voting Rights Act, restricting the ability, and thus the rights, of people who tend to vote Democratic.  This would include women and people of color in the main, although young and old are included.  Within two hours after the Supreme Court decision was announced, Texas’ Rick Perry announced that Texas would proceed with its restrictive voter ID law.  Since Democrats mainly do not subscribe to the tenets of the religious right, then their votes must be restricted as much as possible because Democrats are not only preventing the establishment of a “Christian Nation”, but they are promoting the equality of women and people of color.

The sadness, in my mind, is that any member of the more mainstream Christian churches, including my own Catholic Church’s more conservative Bishops, have given in to this extremism.  And in President Barack Obama they have an even worse horror than Bill Clinton.  Not only a Democrat in the Presidency, but a black one, who by their standards, ought not to be eating the soup in the White House dining room, but should be serving it.  And the women should only be in the kitchen cooking it.  Barefoot and pregnant.

Shame on CNN.