LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This is the second article within the span of a week I found on the subject of the burgeoning theocratic movement in the US. Could it be that the mainstream is close to discovering the snake in its bed? Is this meme now emerging from its carefully crafted obscurity and finally close to being covered by the major media outlets?

It would be good if it was, because it isn't too late.

Here's the latest article, listed on Wren's Nest, a Pagan news blog:

America the Theocracy

America The Theocracy
A band of influential preachers is praying for the power to rule America. For those who disagree, they have a solution -- stoning.

BY JOHN F. SUGG


Proverbs 1

Gary DeMar makes a disconcerting impression for a firebrand revolutionary who wants to overthrow the established order in the United States. No camouflage, and he carries a Bible instead of an assault rifle. Sporting khaki pants with razor creases, tassel loafers and, most of all, a warm smile, he looks like your neighbor. He might be.DeMar runs American Vision, a prolific publishing house of mostly his own books in Powder Springs, a suburb of Marietta, Ga. He's a churchgoer -- nothing radical there. His church is Midway Presbyterian -- and Presbyterians are pretty mainstream, aren't they?

Look again.

It's a Wednesday night in February and about 40 Midway parishioners are gathered for a class. They're bedrock, anytown Americans -- other than their monochrome white complexion.

DeMar is talking to a teenage boy about an assignment for a high school course. Well, not exactly a traditional high school. The lad is being home-schooled, as are many of Midway's young members. The youth says he is trying to prove an issue of "family government."

"You don't have to prove that," DeMar gently chides. "That's established -- established by God!"

A little earlier, DeMar had lectured the group on three "governments" created, he says, by God: the family, the state and the church. But this is more than just a pep talk on a trinity of subjects dear to most Americans.

Rather, DeMar, a relentlessly logical (if you accept his assumptions) speaker, excitedly describes a new order, one in which God's trusted servants reign supreme over the three governments. It's a society in which only the faithful are citizens, democracy is a distasteful memory, and the state's primary purpose is assisting in the conquest of the Planet Earth for Christ.

Um, can't Christ do his own, much gentler, much more subtle work?

Secular America fooled itself by assuming it had won. "The media subjected the fundamentalists to such ridicule that they slunk away," says Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God. "But these fundamentalists were simply withdrawing in the time-honored way, leaving the mainstream denominations and founding their own churches, Bible colleges, broadcasting stations and publishing houses."

Today, a new cultural civil war rages, with political skirmishes as far flung as Massachusetts and San Francisco, but with most of the major battlefields in the South. For Southerners aggrieved at what they see as Northern liberalism, the New Cause is just one more campaign for the Lost Cause.

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.

Wake up, America- there's a viper in your bed, trying to pretend it's a Christian. Wake up and act before you wake up in "New Gilead".

Sunfell