Once upon a time, I lived in an alternate reality. I was raised Fundagelical and lived in a Fundagelical reality. Every effort was made to keep me in that reality. I attended church several times a week, went to church-run schools, and my information intake was limited to church-approved sources. I was raised to believe that only Fundagelicals had the TRUTH.
To prevent any defections from the Fundagelical world, I was told that I was to train up as a culture warrior. We “True Christians” must battle the demonic forces of evil. Liberals, scientists, and every secular institution had declared war against Christianity and I must do everything to fight against them. The first and most important thing I must do was to “hold on to the TRUTH.” Anything that disagreed with what my church taught was a demonic lie.
Little did I know my generation was at the forefront of the Religious Right. The mythology of the Religious Right is that it was founded in response to the Roe v. Wade abortion decision. This is a lie. The Religious Right was founded to prevent school integration and to preserve segregation. The Religious Right lost the segregation battle but saw the power of voting as a block. Paul Weyrich joined together with Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority. This group needed an issue to create a voting block. They chose abortion. Previously abortion was thought of as “a Catholic issue,” and prominent Fundamentalist/Evangelicals actually supported abortion. However, abortion became the wedge issue that united a new powerful voting block made of Catholics, Mormons, Fundamentalist, and Evangelicals.
Ever since their founding, the Religious Right has been obsessed with imposing their belief system on the world. At first, they chose to become political activists. However, the U.S. Constitution with its system of checks and balances prevented the imposition of their religious views. In 1999, everything changed.
Paul Weyrich started his career as a political reporter. He would go on to found or co-found some of the most influential conservative think tanks. He was involved with the Heritage Foundation, funded by Joseph Coors of beer fame, to fight against liberal taxation of the wealthy. The Committee for the Survival of Free Congress a group dedicated to training political activists and supporting conservative candidates.
Weyrich took his conservative ideal to Evangelicals and was originally part of an influential group known as the Christian Voice. He left that organization to found the Moral Majority. It was Weyrich who suggested abortion be used as a wedge issue. When the Moral Majority fell apart, a new strategy was developed.
In 1999, Weyrich wrote an open letter called A Moral Minority? In that letter, Weyrich calls for separation and construction or parallel institutions.
Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word “holy” means “set apart”, and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, “set apart”. You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.
What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead “condition” students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.
This was the first step in the creation of an alternate reality filled with alternate facts. Those who live in this alternate reality find it hard to leave. Those who live in this world of parallel institutions have been trained only to believe what their leaders tell them and to dismiss anything that questions their predetermined TRUTH automatically. The first seeds of mudslinging and demonization were being planted. Lies about a false “traditional culture” were sown. Public institutions “conditioned” students. (I suppose this in opposition to the indoctrination offered by Fundagelical institutions.) A holy war had been declared and a twisted kingdom would be built in an effort to replace the secular kingdom of democracy.
Christians have been called to the Kingdom of God. We are to build that Kingdom. That Kingdom is to be founded on Christ and His character. The Kingdom of God is to demonstrate the love of Christ and woo non-believers to the Kingdom. However, Weyrich and the religious Right have created a Kingdom based on an angry god who will aid them in their holy war to impose Christianity, or at least their version of it, onto the world. They won’t build and win people by love; they will destroy the secular and force non-believers to bend the knee.
The United States is divided. The religious and political right can no longer dialogue with the religious and political left. These two groups live in separate realities. The religious Right has indoctrinated their army to fight for a twisted world of alternative facts and reason has been replaced by blind faith in what they have been brainwashed to believe.
Weyrich is the architect of this division. His influence has brought us to the current political conflict. Stay tuned for a look at his training manual for political activism written in 2001. This training manual will reveal how we lost civil discourse and explain how Religious Right political activist have destroyed Evangelical Christianity.
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