Analysis
The recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling declaring that frozen embryos must be treated as persons under the state’s wrongful death law could have devastating consequences for Alabama couples using in-vitro fertilization to help them have children. Beyond that, if Chief Justice Tom Parker’s hopes are realized, the decision could push the entire nation’s legal system in the direction of a complete criminalization of abortion. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” Parker wrote in a concurring opinion that quoted extensively from the Bible.
In addition, the ruling and Parker’s opinions provide a “terrifying preview of another Trump presidency,” in the words of journalist Sarah Posner, because MAGA movement political operatives are openly planning the implementation of a Christian nationalist agenda if Trump returns to power, including the criminalization of providing abortion medication and the use of government power to enforce “traditional” and “biblical” views on family, sexuality, gender, and more.
There may be a kind of silver lining to the ruling and Parker’s theocratic opinion: they have made it much harder to ignore the danger of dominionist Christians using positions of power to force law and society into alignment with their “biblical worldview.” Right Wing Watch recently reviewed a book by religion scholar André Gagné which “explores the theological underpinnings of the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of predominantly Charismatic Christians that views politics as spiritual warfare and opposition to former President Donald Trump as demonic,” and a new documentary about Christian nationalism produced by Rob Reiner.
Not long ago, some religious-right leaders and journalists charged that those of us sounding the alarm about the rising political power of right-wing Christian dominionist groups were engaged in undue fearmongering. Recently, as the New Apostolic Reformation and its ardently Trump-supporting “apostles” and “prophets” have been getting needed attention from scholars and journalists, some leading figures in the movement have publicly pretended that they aren’t part of the movement or don’t even know what it is.
But the movement is all too real. As Media Matters reported, on the same day of the Alabama IVR ruling, Parker appeared on the online broadcast of “prophet” Johnny Enlow, a promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories and Seven Mountains Dominionism. Parker declared that “God created government” and that Christians should take it back from the “possession” of others. And in the wake of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s declaration that God had called him to be a “Moses” leading America through a “Red Sea Moment,” reporters have documented Johnson’s own ties to the NAR.
Who is Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker?
Tom Parker was a protégé and supporter of former Alabama Chief Justice and failed Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was twice removed from office after defying federal courts. Parker has always shared Moore’s Christian nationalist views, and he speaks openly about his desire to use his power as a judge to bring about religious revival, end legal abortion, and reverse progress toward legal equality for LGBTQ Americans.
Posner, who has covered Parker for years, wrote recently:
Parker, like Moore, holds Christian reconstructionist beliefs; in a dissent in a 2005 child custody case, for example, he asserted that only God is “the ultimate source of all legitimate authority” for government. When I saw him speak at a neo-Confederate gathering in 2011, he told the crowd, “When judges don’t rule in fear of the Lord, all the foundations of the earth are shaken.”
As Right Wing Watch reported in 2016, Parker’s career, like Moore’s, has been supported and bankrolled by Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who has used his wealth to promote the Institute on the Constitution, its far-right interpretation of the Constitution, and its Christian Reconstructionist training materials to activists and lawmakers. Before running for the Supreme Court, Parker worked at another Peroutka-funded project, Moore’s Foundation for Moral Law. From Pro Publica:
It promoted the far-right strain of Christianity known as Reconstructionism — supporters believe that the Bible should be the governing text for all areas of civil and political life; that America’s Christian founders intended it to be a Christian land; that there is no law without God; that the law and the Constitution don’t evolve any more than humans do, but are fixed and immutable. The Foundation was also a champion of the newly revived personhood movement — indeed, it claimed the group Personhood Alabama as one of its projects.
In 2004, when Parker was running for the state supreme court, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented Parker’s ties to neo-Confederates and white supremacists. After he won, Parker traveled to Washington, D.C. to be sworn in by far-right U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Parker was only a few months into his term on the state Supreme Court when he declared at a religious-right conference, “The very God of Holy Scriptures, the Creator, is the source of law, life, and liberty.” He railed against judges “who have legalized abortion and homosexuality,” charging that they were “shaking the very foundation of our society.”
In 2006 he excoriated his fellow justices for not defying a Supreme Court decision against applying the death penalty to people who were minors at the time they committed their crimes:
After all, the liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court already look down on the pro-family policies, Southern heritage, evangelical Christianity and other blessings of our great state. We Alabamians will never be able to sufficiently appease such establishment liberals, so we should stop trying and instead stand up for what we believe without apology.
Conservative judges today are on the front lines of the war against political correctness and judicial tyranny. Happily, Alabama’s Supreme Court has a reputation of being one of the most conservative in the nation.
Parker has for years been a leading strategist of the personhood movement, once considered to be on the fringes of the anti-abortion movement. Years before the right wing fully captured the Supreme Court, Parker was scheming to overturn Roe v. Wade with a legal strategy designed to define legal “personhood” to include fertilized eggs, leading Nina Martin to write 10 years ago in The New Republic that Parker’s writings “fuel the biggest threat to abortion rights in a generation.”
Notably, Martin noted that Parker “has developed the decidedly unusual habit of authoring concurring opinions to his own majority rulings in cases that hold particular interest for him,” a habit on full display in the recent frozen embryo ruling. It is also a strategy that Parker’s mentor U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas deployed for years when he was a lonelier far-right voice on the Court.
Parker at the Mountaintop
When Parker was running for chief justice in 2018, he made it clear that he would use the position as a means to bring about the reversal of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell, the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling. Parker told anti-LGBTQ radio host Bryan Fischer that states should resist Obergefell to “start a revival of what we need in this country to return to our founding principles.”
In an appearance on Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton’s Wallbuilders show that year, Parker said:
I’m running for chief justice because I just believe that we are at a pivotal point in American history right now. President Trump is just one appointment away from giving us a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and they are going to need cases that they can use to reverse those horrible decisions of the liberal majority in the past that have undermined the Constitution and really just abused our own personal rights.
Those types of decisions are really only going to come from state supreme courts because the federal courts have to follow that federal precedent, whereas I, as a state judge, am sworn to uphold the [state] constitution. We have written decisions that are contrary to Roe v. Wade, or I’ve written extensively about the judicial overreach in the Obergefell decision, and it is going to be writings like that that the new majority can use to restore what our Founding Fathers intended for America to be.
Last year, Parker appeared on a prayer call with dominionist apostles and prophets where he prayed for the “restoration of judges” in Alabama and across the country “so that they can play their forecast role in revival in this nation.” Also last year, Parker invited dominionist musician-politician Sean Feucht to pray and worship in the state Supreme Court chambers when the Trump-promoting Feucht was in Alabama as part of the 50-state Kingdom to the Capitol tour he is undertaking in partnership with religious organizing arm of Turning Point USA.
Subjecting Americans to Rule by a ‘Righteous Remnant’
Most Americans do not embrace the backward-looking agenda of religious-right leaders and activists like Tom Parker. A recent survey by PRRI found that about 30 percent of Americans, and about 55 percent of Trump supporters, could be classified as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers.
A majority of Americans opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most situations. More than two-thirds of Americans support marriage equality for same-sex couples and anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people. A large majority of Americans rejects Christian nationalism.
The same is true for the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on IVF. “Parker may have presented his policy position as rooted in an authoritative Christian view, but he may be in the minority when it comes to his fellow religious Americans — including Christians,” noted Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service. That explains why Republicans who have long embraced the religious-right’s rhetoric about the government needing to protect fertilized eggs from the moment of conception are scrambling to distance themselves from the application of that position in the real world.
Religious right leaders have often declared that they don’t need majority support to accomplish their goal of bringing American law and society into alignment with their “biblical worldview”—they just need a sufficiently mobilized “remnant” that is devoted to the cause. Promoters of Seven Mountains Dominionism like Lance Wallnau promote “prophetic” claims about Donald Trump being divinely “anointed” to “bring America “back to God”—and that his election and leadership can spark a religious revival.
Trump, of course, relied on massive turnout and lopsided support from conservative evangelicals to win the White House in 2016. They rallied around him in 2020, and after he lost that election by millions of votes, he turned to his “righteous remnant” to try to stay in power. They waged nonstop “spiritual warfare” to keep him in office, backed his behind-the-scenes efforts to stop the peaceful transfer of power, and fired up the supporters who descended on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump knows that maximum mobilization from Christian nationalists, dominionists, and other conservative evangelicals is essential to his ability to return to power. In February, Trump spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters conference, where he mixed fascist rhetoric about the country’s internal enemies with pledges to give conservative more power than ever before. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told them, showing that he knows how to speak their language, however cynically: “With your help and God’s grace, the revival of America begins on Nov. 5.”
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