While we’re on the subject of fundamentalism, have you ever heard of Christian Reconstructionism? Well, I hadn’t either, until just now. In a nutshell, CR is a movement to institute literal Biblical law in all nations and societies throughout the world. ReligiousTolerance.org, which usually has accurate and even-handed information about religious & spiritual traditions throughout the world has the following to say about Christian Reconstructionism:

Its most common form, Theonomic Reconstructionism, represents one of the most extreme forms of Fundamentalist Christianity thought. The followers are attempting to peacefully convert the laws of United States so that they match those in the Hebrew Scriptures. They intend to achieve this by using the freedom of religion in the US to train a generation of children in private Christian religious schools. Later, their graduates will be charged with the responsibility of creating a new Bible-based political, religious and social order. One of the first tasks of this order will be to eliminate religious freedom. Their eventual goal is to achieve the “Kingdom of God” in which much of the world is converted to Christianity. They feel that the power of God’s word will bring about this conversion. No armed force or insurrection will be needed; in fact, they believe that there will be little opposition to their plan. People will willingly accept it if it is properly presented to them.

Oh right, and I almost forgot, if you don’t accept it willingly, you’re to be executed, which will make the whole thing go a lot smoother. Once all societies on earth are transformed to strictly follow ancient Hebraic laws, all kinds of things will become punishable by execution:

1. Blasphemy, heresy, idolatry & witchcraft - in other words anything not strictly part of their faith
2. Homosexuality, Prostitution, adultery, pre-marital sex & any act of non-ordinary married sex
3. Abortion

Of course, there is some debate as to the preferred method of execution - stoning to death or being burned alive. I’m sure they’ll sort it out when the time comes though. On top of all that, there are some Reconstructionists who advocate return to slavery, since it’s in the Bible. And the status of women would be reduced to virtually slavery as well. Fun fucking stuff. Wow.

Before you wipe your brow, thanking Jesus that these people don’t have any impact on the culture, think again! Check out the Chalcedon Foundation, which was run by RJ Rushdoony, considered to be the prime architect of Christian Reconstructionism. From what I’ve been able to put together so far, the Chalcedon Foundation was identified back in 1981 by Newsweek as the think tank behind the Religious Right, and a major source of inspiration for people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, not to mention Ronald Reagan himself (found in that article about Rushdoony above).

I have yet to trace what they did during the intervening years, but the next major impact I found that the Reconstructionists seem to have had was under Clinton. Rushdoony - who is quoted as saying, “Democracy is a heresy against God!” - also helped either co-found or inspire the founder of the conservative legal foundation, the Rutherford Institute. One of the Rutherford Institute’s key cases was the Paula Jones sexual harrassment suit against Bill Clinton, in which the President was caught in his infamous lie about “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. (Although, the Rutherford Institute is involved in other civil liberties issues as well.)

At the time, Hillary Clinton made her famous statement about there being a “vast right wing conspiracy” out to get her and her husband. I don’t know if this is a conspiracy, but it’s certainly not a well-known series of connections. An somewhat meandering article exploring the possibility of there being an organized movement of the Religious Right against Clinton has the following worthwhile points to add:

As a result of the Democratic Party’s disastrous rout in the 1994 election, Clinton began to successfully re-position the party back to the center and away from the ultra-liberal, special interest group politics of the 1980s which had made the Democrats unable to win the White House. In doing so, he was shamelessly poaching Republican issues. If he succeeded - and the results of the 1996 presidential election seemed to indicate that he was - Republicans could lose both the House and the Senate in 2000 and be shut out of the presidency for another eight years by Vice President Al Gore, the man Clinton was grooming to take over his new centrist Democratic Party. To Republicans who thought long-term, this meant the Supreme Court would be gone along with the entire federal judiciary; and it also meant a resurgence of the hated leftish-tinged federal bureaucracy and its related regulatory agencies.

…

…[A]ll this tended to reveal what the Religious Right and the Secular Right were really up to: preventing at whatever price Clinton’s re-positioning of the Democratic Party in the center. Religious Right activists were not interested in the specifics of the charges against Clinton; they weren’t even interested in necessarily finding out the truth of the charges against the president. They wouldn’t have even been pleased (or relieved) to find out that the president was genuinely innocent of the charges. Their purpose was to remove him from office or to so cripple him (and the Democratic Party) politically that they could successfully install themselves in power in the year 2000 - and by their control of the presidency and both houses of Congress re-institute America as a “Christian nation.”

I don’t know about anybody else, but this is all making my head spin furiously around and around in circles. Pretty soon, it’s gonna pop right off. I really need to look into all this in more depth, and hope others of you reading this will as well. I’d be delighted to read what you come up with - assuming, of course, my head doesn’t explode before then.