Democracy is, if not killed, at least exiled in the US. With the PATRIOT Act, the suspension of habeus corpus and ever wider powers to the presidency (legally attained or just usurped), America is moving into a dangerous direction. Which one? The unlikely answer may be: that of a theocracy, in which the president believes he is fulfilling God's Mission. That's the ambition some Americans are pursuing.

American Vision, a ministry that has been toiling away since 1978 to "help Christians build a truly Biblical worldview", is based in Powder Springs, Ga. It produces reams of material that push Christian Reconstructionism, a form of fundamentalism that argues for a re-writing of American history, dismantling secular democracy and constructing an America governed by "biblical law." Reconstructionists seek to impose the criminal code of the Old Testament, applying the death penalty for homosexuals, adulterers, fornicators, witches, incorrigible juvenile delinquents and those who spread false religions.
Despite its overtly radical theocratic agenda, American Vision is allied with some of the Religious Right's most powerful outfits. They work together with the Alliance Defense Fund, a well-funded Religious Right lawyers' outfit that James Dobson and other religious broadcasters helped create; Michael Farris's Home School Legal Defense Association; the late TV preacher Jerry Falwell's Liberty University School of Law; and World Magazine, Marvin Olasky's influential evangelical Christian periodical.

American Vision President Gary DeMar is the ringleader of a new wave of organisations that want to transform America. One such person, Gary Cass, believes the country is doomed unless it embraces a rigid form of government led by fundamentalist Christian edicts.
"We need a new American vision," says Cass, former head of TV preacher D. James Kennedy's now-defunct Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, "because we've lost our biblical heritage, our Christian birthright, which has been given to us by our founders, we have squandered for a poisonous bowl of atheistic humanism and political correctness. And now our culture is experiencing its deadly effects," he continued. "The putrid stench of the culture of death fills our living rooms, coming to us every night on the evening news."
Others attack the public school system and promote home schooling and private Christian education. The Rev. Voddie Baucham Jr., pastor at Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, Texas and founder of Voddie Baucham ministries, is indignant that so many "blood-washed" Christians choose to send their children to public schools. He boasts about his involvement in pushing a resolution before the Southern Baptists' annual convention that calls on church members to yank their kids from public schools. "If we continue to send our children to Caesar for their education, we need to stop being surprised when they come home as Romans," Baucham says.
All the railing against public schools and other state-supported institutions has long been a focal point for Christian Reconstructionists, whose goal is a society where their harsh version of biblical law permeates everything. DeMar provided a platform for some of the movement's most radical voices.

Doug Phillips, oldest son of long-time right-wing activist Howard Phillips, declares that God created the universe and the Bible is a history book for understanding God's design. Phillips heads up a San Antonio-based group called Vision Forum that advocates for the "Biblical family." The organization is also a staunch supporter of home schooling and families where the men take precedence.
"If we encourage our daughters to pursue a careerist philosophy," the Vision Forum's mission statement reads, "if we fail to make our homes economically vital, hospitable centres for love and learning, we are hypocrites." Phillips too promotes removing kids from public schools and immersing them in fundamentalist Christian training.

Gary North is a son-in-law of the late Rousas J. Rushdoony, who is widely touted as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. North has written boatloads of books and articles about the need to establish "Christendom." His plentiful material has left a track record of extremism. North has called for the death penalty, like Rushdoony did, for youngsters who curse their parents, gays and others who violate his interpretation of biblical law. He has argued that stoning is the preferred means of capital punishment, noting that it is a communal activity and "the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Writing for Reason magazine in 1998, Walter Olson observed that Reconstructionists like North "provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul."
According to North, the universe is ordered by an all-powerful God who will ultimately dispose of all the "covenant-breakers." The so-called "covenant-keepers," on the other hand, will inherit the riches of the heavens. Citing the Book of Genesis, North argues that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, that establishes God as the absolute authority, since he is the creator; since he is the creator, he is the owner of all of creation. And, therefore, absolutely sovereign over that creation."

Many blast civil liberties organisations for supposedly waging an ongoing, aggressive effort to remove religion, Christianity in particular, from the public square. That is not necessarily a groundless accusation, but as Christianity is a dogma, the specific task of a civil liberties organisation is indeed to remove that dogma from society.
DeMar specifically targets the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, claiming that if those groups had their way, God would be excised from "everything" in America. But thankfully, DeMar maintains, "there's a new sheriff" in town. "The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State really have a battle on their hands with organizations like the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF)."
DeMar praises ADF, a $25 million operation based in Scottsdale, Ariz., for training young lawyers to fight for a "biblical worldview" - that is bring the legal system under Christian control, so that stoning and executions of the non-Christian ways is allowed. Ken Fletcher, an ADF development director, insists that America was "started on a biblical worldview," but has been wrenched from its religious moorings by secularists and "activist courts."
"Our Christian liberties are under attack in our nation," Fletcher maintains. "I guess back in the '60s it really got under attack, where the secular agenda really started replacing the Christian worldview that we had in our nation."
ADF Senior Vice President Jeff Ventrella also bemoans the secularization of society, claiming Christian children from coast to coast face harassment from public school teachers and officials and that the legal system must be used to fight back.

Besides home schooling and trying to convert people to their religious principles, Fletcher also argues that the courts "cannot be left out of the equation." "The right to abort a baby came through the courts; prayer and the Bible taken out of the public schools, that all came through the courts," he maintains. "Homosexual marriage," Fletcher added also came through the courts.
So in 1994, an array of powerful fundamentalist broadcasters, such as James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Bill Bright, got together to form the ADF, because "if we don't start showing up in the courts, our religious liberty is going to be lost in this country." It is a rather interesting definition of "religious liberty".

Janet Folger, a former executive director of Kennedy's disbanded Center for Reclaiming America for Christ. Folger, who now heads a Religious Right lobbying group dubbed "Faith2Action", is especially ticked off at the new make-up of Congress, blasting it for supporting hate-crimes legislation. She is also seriously convinced that fundamentalist Christians are in danger of persecution in America - something for which perhaps there is little evidence.
Folger, author of a book titled "The Criminalization of Christianity", repeatedly attacks the "homosexual agenda" as one of the main driving forces against fundamentalist Christianity. Aping comments from Kennedy, she tags gays as plotting to criminalize the Christian religion. Folger says gays want to use hate-crimes legislation to "do away" with terms applied to homosexuality such as "abomination," which she notes is a word from Leviticus. The gays want to ban the Bible, according to Folger. "If they can silence the truth," Folger says referring to gay lobbying groups like the Human Rights Campaign, "make no mistake, they will silence the gospel."

She makes the rather tall claim that Canada, Sweden, England and France are already persecuting Christians who cite Bible passages in demonizing gays. America, she claims, is following those nations' lead. (In fact, the hate-crimes legislation pending in Congress specifically protects speech and penalizes only hate-motivated violence.)
Folger says she sobbed and felt almost defeated when the US House of Representatives passed hate-crimes legislation in early 2007. We just need to bring "God back into this debate," Folger maintains. She argues that when large numbers of fundamentalist Christians get to the voting booth, good things will transpire and points to the election and re-election of President George W. Bush as evidence. Folger urges people to be especially politically active in 2008, saying that they should not be lulled into believing that a "values voter" candidate cannot retain control of the White House.
Lauding the US Supreme Court for upholding a federal ban on so-called "partial-birth" abortion, Folger maintains that Christians are "so close to winning this thing, of overturning Roe v. Wade." "We are one judge away," she says.

This groups have a specific following; their compounds seem carbon copies of those of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; their religious zeal is... like that of the ancient zealots. The problem is: their rhetoric is convincing a lot of people, despite the absence of all logic - or a lack of evidence underpinning their arguments.
Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn argues that "American public policy cannot be based solely on the Bible, any more than it could be based solely on the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita. The laws that govern our daily lives," Lynn continues, "need to be based on commonly shared secular values, including those found in the Bill of Rights. Lawmakers take an oath, sometimes on a holy book even, to uphold the Constitution. They do not put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." And that, for these organisations, is precisely the problem: they feel it should be the other way around.