That Very Scary Word Again

Thanks to Jeff at Clack, I’m now thoroughly creeped out on the subject of this season’s Scary Word, “Dominionism.” I got here via Theocracy Watch.

Epitomizing the Reconstructionist idea of Biblical “warfare” is the centrality of capital punishment under Biblical Law. Doctrinal leaders (notably Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen) call for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes in addition to such contemporary capital crimes as rape, kidnapping, and murder. Death is also the punishment for apostasy (abandonment of the faith), heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, “sodomy or homosexuality,” incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, “unchastity before marriage.”

According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, “along with those who advised them to abort their children.” Rushdoony concludes: “God’s government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.” Reconstructionists insist that “the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty.” However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be “happy” places, to which people would flock because “capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society.”

This article is 10 years old. It reads like the run up to one of any number of bad dystopic SF novels and stories (and one good one, but I’ve mentioned The Handmaid’s Tale before).

If these people ever get into power, I’m dead about 6 different ways, and so’s David. Fortunately, it will either never happen, or it will happen far enough in the future that we’ll be too old and decrepit to bother with (stoning is hard work).

David wonders why I’m so easily freaked out about this stuff, and my only answer is “I grew up as a ‘non-Mo’ in Utah.”

This answer is not usually enough for someone that didn’t also grow up a ‘non-Mo’ in Utah. Let’s just say that I know about being bullied by religious extremists (or at least by their children, who were raised in a culture of intolerance). This is why the current political situation gives me the same sinking ache of fear in the pit of my stomach. When an article on Salon or somewhere compared the recent Triumph of the Rove in the national elections as losing one’s lunch money yet again to the schoolyard bully, I could fully (and ruefully) relate.

Strangely enough, Rove himself also grew up a non-Mo in Utah… and he went to a rival high school. Usually the experience of being socially isolated and no-so-subtly shunned drives a person either into lippy, fuzzy liberalism (me), or straight into the Charch in order to “fit in” (one or two folks dear to me come to mind). Rove took the third road somehow.

One last thing: that quote pretty much ruins the phrase “go to my happy place” for me now.