As Brian reported this morning, the Republican National Committee continues to partner with the American Renewal Project, which is run by Christian Nationalist and anti-gay extremist David Lane and is affiliated with the far-right American Family Association.
Lane is a busy guy these days. In addition to leading a training session at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, his American Renewal Project is gearing up for its next political prayer rally, this time hosted by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the important early primary state. Previous Response rallies were hosted by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
All the events push David Lane’s divisive and exclusionary view of America as a nation founded by and for Christians — a view on display in an email alert Lane sent to his supporters last night.
Lane’s letter opens with a typically distorted view of American history:
Did you realize that America’s Founders established Christianity as the official religion of America in the 13 Original state Constitutions? … Then suddenly, following three and half centuries of meteoric rise and cultural distinction, a secular U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 pronounced that the Bible would no longer be the fixed point in which to structure and judge community.
Lane’s opening misses a few minor historical points: the adoption of the Constitution, First Amendment, and Bill of Rights, and the fact that states with established official churches had disestablished them in the 18th and 19th centuries, long before the Supreme Court ruling Lane is complaining about.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, Lane declares, “God defines marriage, not secularist crusaders of the superior court.” And in order to be “completely transparent and unclouded on God’s position on homosexuality,” he quotes several Bible verses, including one from Leviticus that a man who sleeps with another man “shall surely be put to death.”
Lane denounces the American church for its “submission to secularists.”
Egregious and scandalous is the Church’s submission to secularists, and the resignation of America’s Founder’s mission, “We do hereby Dedicate this Land, and ourselves, to reach the People within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to raise up Godly generations after us, and with these generations take the Kingdom of God to all the earth.”
That’s another historical sleight-of-hand. In common usage, terms like “founders” and “founding fathers” typically refer to men involved in the Declaration of Independence and the writing and ratification of the Constitution. Lane’s quote comes from Robert Hunt, a leader of the British settlement at Jamestown nearly two centuries earlier.
Republicans who attend Lane’s candidate forums, invite him to conduct trainings, or join him on all-expenses-paid trips to Israel, can’t really claim ignorance of his agenda, which is crystal clear, as he states in this week’s email alert:
The American church has lost its commission in the public square, its purpose for being. Ultimately, unless we find the chart and compass used by Colonial America to establish Christianity as the official religion of America, America will no longer be.
