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What a difference a few weeks make.
About three weeks ago, I added this comment to a forum post on the then-breaking Mark Sanford scandal:
I don't care who these people are carrying on with--their affairs are each private hells, and it feels ghoulish to delight in them. As a factor in my vote, it's a low-priority.
I’m still convinced that, from a sex scandal angle, this is pretty hum-drum stuff—southern Lothario writes a few steamy e-mails to his Argentine mistress, everyone laughs at the bodice-ripping sensibilities of those e-mails, we all take a good shower and eyewash and call it a week.
This was a reasonable take, before the connection with John Ensign’s similar fall from grace, the C Street house they shared, and a more troubling relationship with the religious outfit known darkly as “The Family” came to light. I suddenly care--very much.
Under the leadership of Doug Coe, “The Family” is the ultra-secretive religious coven that owns John Ensign’s 133 C Street SE home (classified, for tax purposes, as a “church”), as well as a substantial part of their members’ free association. Sanford called C Street’s operations “a Christian bible study,” and outlined the group’s mentoring efforts in his post-adultery mea culpa. C Street residents have been sworn to secrecy, and The Family’s ties to “biblical capitalism” are as good a reason as any for confidentiality.
Democratic heresies cloaked in shared religious heritage are nothing new in today’s political culture—the Christian Nationalism/Christian Reconstructionism/Biblical America movement broke ground here. As Walter Olson wrote in a 1998 article for reasononline:
As a “post-millennialist "school of thought,” Reconstruction 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."
Strident “this is a Christian nation” arguments are usually founded—unwittingly by the people promulgating them—in the by-definition anti-democratic notions of Christian Nationalism. But biblical capitalism—the theory of the bible as masterpiece of free-market apologetics, and fruit of the poisoned Christian Nationalism tree—lends itself particularly well to dictatorial politics. Several media outlets have chronicled Coe’s ties to Angola’s Jonas Savimbi and Indonesia’s Suharto. Coe defends these ties to brutality, saying, "I do what Jesus did: I don't turn my back to anyone. You know the Bible is full of mass murderers."
This is a radical doctrine by any objective standard—informed by power theory, rationalizations of gross wealth disparities, and a whiff of antisemitism. Take this biblical commentary written by Gary North (whose father-in-law, Rousas John [R.J.] Rushdoony, is often cited as the patriarch of Christian Reconstructionism), and published on his website “Gary North’s Specific Answers”:
What Bible commentators have failed to understand is that the conflict between Moses and Pharaoh was at heart a conflict between the two major religions in man's history, dominion religion and power religion, with the third religion - escapist religion -represented by the Hebrew slaves. What they have also failed to point out is that there is an implicit alliance between the power religion and the escapist religion. This alliance still exists.
North’s role as one of the chief heralds of the Y2K global meltdown should have been enough to dent Christian Reconstructionism. Couple it with North’s calls to execute, often by stoning, women who undergo abortion, the people who advised them to undergo the abortion, homosexuals, blasphemers, heretics, people who struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, and adulterers, and it is the kind of religion that western audiences are used to seeing “practiced” in largely empty soccer stadiums.
Accommodation with a group whose stated objective is dominion is clearly not possible. In this political movement are shades of the secretive and often violent freemasonry movement of the 19th century–a movement cracked-open to wider public scrutiny only after the abduction and murder of freemason turned-tell-all publisher William Morgan.
If Christian Reconstructionism/Nationalism is one of the subspecies revealed by lifting up the Mark Sanford/John Ensign rock, sex scandals become the least of the Republican rehabilitation’s worries.