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New Religious Right Video: Secularism Means Doom For America

Submitted by Peter Montgomery on October 13, 2011 - 9:53am

One of the sessions at the recent Values Voter Summit featured a showing of a new half-hour video produced by the American Family Association called “Divorcing God: Secularism and the Republic.” (Back in the summer it was being promoted as "Divorcing God: Secularism, Sexual Anarchy, and the Future of the Republic.") The video features an array of Religious Right leaders and academics, whose argument can be summarized this way:  America, whose greatness is decaying because the country has turned its back on the God who inspired the founding fathers, is doomed if it continues to allow secularists to push religion into the closet.  It's time for Christians to fight back.

And just to be clear, the God in “one nation under God” isn’t any old generic God, but the same Christian God who made western civilization possible.  It’s familiar to anyone who has followed the Religious Right’s “Christian nation” rhetoric, filled with founders’ quotes about religion and  attacks on the Supreme Court’s rulings on church-state separation.

Among the stars of the video is Princeton University’s Robert George, the Religious Right’s favorite intellectual. George, a leader of the National Organization for Marriage, is one of the authors of the Manhattan Declaration, whose signers fancy themselves potential martyrs for opposing abortion and LGBT equality in America. Others include Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute; Michael Farris, homeschooling advocate and chancellor of Patrick Henry College; and Matthew Spalding, of the Heritage Foundation. The founders clearly believed that God punishes nations, says Dacus, and when countries allow their societies to become amoral, there’s a price to be paid, not just by those individuals but society as a whole.  The video suggests that the current fight between secularists and those who want to preserve the country’s divine foundation is the last stand for the future of freedom on planet earth.

Another DVD being handed out at the Values Voter Summit hit similar themes about the importance of the nation’s foundation on biblical principles.  It features a 2010 “State of the Nation” speech delivered by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis at the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  Ham argues that the nation is threatened by the teaching of evolution and by the Supreme Court. “There really is no such thing as separation of church and state,” says Ham, who warns that “Christianity in this nation is becoming outlawed more and more in various quarters.”  Ham blames the decline more on church leaders than on secularists.  The Bible is the “absolute authority,” he says, but too many Christians have undermined the authority of scripture by compromising on the truth of the 6,000 year-old earth and great flood described in Genesis.  And that means quoting the Bible in policy debates on abortion and gay marriage has lost its effectiveness.

Meanwhile, French scholar Denis Lacorne has just published Religion in America: A Political History (Columbia University Press, 2011), in which he examines two competing narratives about American identity.  One derives from the secular values of the Enlightenment and reflects a desire to preserve liberty by freeing it from the power of an established church.  The second ties American identity to the Puritans and Protestantism.  These two narratives are reflected in competing notions of church-state separation evident today in our politics and on our Supreme Court.  At a presentation at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. this week, Lacorne suggested that what he calls the neopuritan narrative was developed in the first half of the 19th century by historians who wanted to resurrect the influence of the Puritans, who he says were generally ignored by the founding fathers in their debates over religious liberty and whether or not to make the Constitution an explicitly Christian document.  (They chose not to.)

 

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Getting To Know Brad Dacus

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on September 17, 2009 - 2:46pm

You may recall Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute for his activism on Prop 8 in California and especially for this video in which he proclaimed that failure to pass the measure was akin to failing to stop the Nazis:

Well, Rin Kelly profiles Dacus and PJI, which has opened a new satellite office in Oakland, for the East Bay Express:

The Oakland office represents an expansion of the institute's efforts to fight what Dacus calls "intolerance" in the region. "The increase in requests for assistance that continue to come into our office is such that a Bay Area office we found was very warranted and needed," he said in an interview. This could mean increased headaches for school districts — a favorite target in Dacus's war for "parents' rights" — and more lawsuits like the ongoing case in which the institute's client, Faith Fellowship Church, alleges that the city of San Leandro is breaking the law by not rezoning to accommodate church expansion plans.

Religious convictions have compelled Dacus to take on such cases as a fight to allow Bakersfield students to opt out of a homosexual teacher's class, a tussle with a Utah public school that he claims was peddling a book "promoting witchcraft" via the Scholastic Book Club catalog, and — while employed by the conservative Rutherford Institute — the defense of the family of a teenage Nebraska boy who, with his parents' help, had his girlfriend arrested for seeking an abortion. For the courts to find in favor of the girl, Dacus told Time in 1994, would have had "a chilling effect" on free speech.

...

Such issues are of special interest to the institute and Dacus, who with his wife Susanne is the author of a book informing public-school teachers, students, and parents of "strategies to practically and legally evangelize your school." Titled Reclaim Your School, the book calls separation of church and state "the big lie" and covers everything from pastor visitations to special school-hours Bible study through which, Dacus writes, "a large number of students ... make commitments to receive Christ by the end of the year." Another passage states, "because public school employees are cautious not to display their faith inappropriately or in a manner that might violate the law, it may take a few visits or conversations before you can determine the religious or non-religious views of the staff at your public school."

Dacus is a man with strong religious convictions. "I'm a Christian," he said in an interview. "My wife was in full-time youth ministry for ten years working with high-school kids. That book goes right along with my personal convictions and desire not just for religious freedom but ideally for people, for kids, to be able to come to Christ. So it's evangelical. It's a book with a definite evangelical perspective. I don't have to apologize for that because we have a society where we have religious freedom."

Kelly asked Dacus about his infamous "Nazi" statement, to which he replied that instead of criticizing him, the Anti-Defamation League ought to be thanking him for it: 

One group that has recently taken notice of the institute is the Anti-Defamation League, which released a statement last year condemning the Third Reich analogy he used in his Proposition 8 speech. "We are outraged and deeply offended that a spokesman for the Pacific Justice Institute has chosen to invoke images of Hitler and Nazi Germany as part of that organization's campaign on behalf of Proposition 8," read the press release.

Asked about his comments, Dacus told the Express, "Obviously I wasn't trying to infer that anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area was akin to the Third Reich or in favor of any cause of the Nazis. That would be a ludicrous understanding of the point that was being made." Instead, he argued, the speech was an exhortation that today's church not be "silent on an issue they had a strong theological and moral conviction about." But he added: "If the purpose of that organization is to stand up to anti-Semitism, they should be glad that I was once again reminding people of the importance of people to stand up to tyranny."

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Warren Taps Right-Wing Lawyer for Inaugural Defense

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on January 15, 2009 - 11:32am

We've written a few posts about the lawsuit brought by Michael Newdow, the American Humanist Association, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and others seeking to remove the phrase "so help me God" from the oath of office during the Inauguration. Among the defendants in the case are Chief Justice John Roberts, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Major General Richard J. Rowe Jr., the Reverend Rick Warren and the Reverend Joe Lowery. 

Now it looks like Warren has tapped a lawyer to represent him in court - a lawyer from the right-wing Pacific Justice Institute:

Kevin Snider, Chief Counsel of Pacific Justice Institute, will appear in federal court Thursday in Washington, D.C. to defend Pastor Rick Warren against a lawsuit seeking to halt prayers at the inauguration of Barack Obama ... At his request, PJI Chief Counsel Kevin Snider will appear in court tomorrow and ask a federal judge to allow the time-honored inaugural prayer to proceed.

If you are not familiar with the Pacific Justice Institute, maybe you are familiar with this video of PJI President Brad Dacus proclaiming that failure to pass Prop 8 was akin to failing to stand up to the Nazis:

There was another time in history when people, when the bell tolled. And the question was whether or not they were going to hear it. The time was during Nazi Germany with Adolf Hitler. You see he brought crowds of clergy together to assure them that he was going to look after the church. And one of the members, bold and courageous, Reverend Niemoller made his way to the front and boldly said "Hitler, we are not concerned about the church. Jesus Christ will take care of the church. We are concerned about the soul of Germany." Embarrassed and chagrined, his peers quickly shuffled him to the back. And as they did Adolf Hitler said, "The soul of Germany, you can leave that to me." And they did, and because they did bombs did not only fall upon the nation of Germany, but also upon the church and their testimony to this very day. Let us not make that mistake folks. Let us hear the bell! Vote on Proposition 8!

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Defeating Prop 8 Like Not Defeating Hitler

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on October 30, 2008 - 10:13am

Via OpenLeft we get this video of Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute telling a rally of Prop 8 supporters that failure to pass Prop 8 is akin to failing to stop Hitler:

There was another time in history when people, when the bell tolled. And the question was whether or not they were going to hear it. The time was during Nazi Germany with Adolf Hitler. You see he brought crowds of clergy together to assure them that he was going to look after the church. And one of the members, bold and courageous, Reverend Niemoller made his way to the front and boldly said "Hitler, we are not concerned about the church. Jesus Christ will take care of the church. We are concerned about the soul of Germany." Embarrassed and chagrined, his peers quickly shuffled him to the back. And as they did Adolf Hitler said, "The soul of Germany, you can leave that to me." And they did, and because they did bombs did not only fall upon the nation of Germany, but also upon the church and their testimony to this very day. Let us not make that mistake folks. Let us hear the bell! Vote on Proposition 8!

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