The Devil You Know by Elicka Peterson Sparks

Author:Elicka Peterson Sparks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633881518
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2016-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

While Christian nationalists very much want to see the Ten Commandments play a larger role in the United States, they—and the majority of Americans (60 percent)—cannot name even five of the Ten Commandments.28 Surprisingly, research revealed that only 60 percent of American adults could even identify “thou shalt not kill” as a commandment.29 Given this, it should not be surprising that most people do not realize the number of commandments that would create an exclusively Judeo-Christian orientation for the government, and that they constitute almost half of God's decrees from the Mount, making the wish for a biblical justice system less than promising for religious freedom in the United States. The goal of Christian nationalism is not religious freedom, however: It is Christian supremacy, as specified in the first commandment.

The fight over a 2.6-ton Ten Commandments statue installed in the Montgomery, Alabama, judicial building highlights the symbolic value of Christianity's hold over public life to the Christian nationalist movement. The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore, had installed the statue, and was dismissed from his position after defying a judge's order to remove it. He instantly became a martyr and hero in the Christian nationalist movement, for his defense of the Christian faith. The irony of the battle in light of the second commandment was, apparently, lost on Moore and his supporters.

Roy Moore is an excellent example of Christian nationalist values, having fought against teaching evolution and removing segregationist language from the state constitution (aside from the deeds I will discuss here), so I will use him as something of a poster child for the movement in order to highlight some of its features. Moore's Ten Commandment statue fight was not his first foray into the Christian nationalist spotlight. In 1995, Moore was sued by the ACLU when he was still a circuit judge for both a Ten Commandments plaque he hung in his courtroom and for leading his juries in prayer prior to hearing cases. Things heated up when then governor Fob James announced that he would call in “the National Guard, state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Moore's tablets on the wall.”30 Michelle Goldberg, author of Kingdom Coming, described what happened next:

That case reached an ambiguous conclusion in 1998, when the state supreme court threw out the lawsuit on technical grounds. By then, Moore had become a star of the right. Televangelist D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries raised more than $100,000 for his legal defense fund, and Moore spoke at a series of rallies that drew thousands. His right-wing fame helped catapult him to victory in the 2000 race for chief justice of the state supreme court.31

Moore then used his new platform to take three children from their lesbian mother and award custody to their allegedly abusive father. In his decision, he made the following statements about homosexuality and the power of the state:

[Homosexuality is] abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated.

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