Excerpt #106 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Just weeks before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, the evangelical group Focus on the Family released “a must-read election message” signed by its influential founder James C. Dobson and more than 80 prominent evangelical Protestants.
The piece argued that the Bible teaches lessons about proper government including not only opposition to abortion and same-sex-marriage, but also support for pre-emptive military action against suspected terrorists and looser environmental regulations.
A day before the election, Focus on the Family’s popular radio program broadcasted a message that compared failing to vote with allowing the rise of Nazi Germany.
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and a host of other religious leaders have worked for 20 years to establish a theocratic kingdom in the United States, where secular laws would be illegitimate and only Biblical law, including stoning for a variety of offenses, is allowable.
They believe in an elite handful of religious leaders controlling the population through draconian law.
They believe it’s their religious mandate to take over the US on behalf of Dominionist Christianity, and after that, to take over the world and enforce conversion to Christianity on the world’s population.
They also believe in Biblical economics.
According to the Dominionists, God rewards the Godly here on earth by making them wealthy, and punishes the Ungodly by making them poor or striking them with disabilities and illness.
God also believes in unfettered free markets and restricts taxation on the rich, according to this convenient version of Christianity that meshes so handily with free market ideology.
This group is responsible for the myth that the US was established as a Christian nation and that it’s only “liberals and atheists” who have “taken God out of the schools and public life.”
(From “The New Road to Serfdom” by M. J. Parrish)
The Rev. Jerry Falwell said evangelical Christians are now “by far the largest constituency” within the Republican Party, their route to dominance beginning in 1979 with his founding of the Moral
Majority, a precursor to the Christian Coalition.
He said that evangelical Christians, after nearly 25 years of increasing political activism, now control the Republican Party.
“The Republican Party does not have the headcount to elect a president without the support of religious conservatives,” Falwell said.