Report of an Execution From a Future Christian Nationalist State

Idaho carries out first known execution in Christian Commonwealth amid ongoing protests

12/08/2030

Boise, ID – The Christian Commonwealth of Idaho announced on Thursday that it had executed a man arrested during the state-wide protests that have shaken the commonwealth for several months.

The protester, identified as David Hunter by the Idaho news service, is thought to be the first person executed by Idaho’s Christian Commonwealth since the former American state gained independence in 2028.

Idaho’s Constitution specifically makes blasphemy and disturbance of the religious order of the Commonwealth capital offenses for the most serious offenses. Hunter is the first person to be executed under the regime’s new Christian Constitution.

Hunter was convicted of devising, organizing, and leading protests against Idaho’s Christian state. Protesters want a return to religious freedom in Idaho. According to a spokesperson for Free Idaho, the group has no position on independence from the U.S., but they believe religious freedom is a “God-given right.”

Hunter had appealed his conviction to Idaho’s Court of Holy Magistrates, but his appeal was denied.

Governor says laws applied fairly

Idaho’s Governing Magistrate Douglas Wolfe issued a statement saying that “While we regret Mr. Hunter’s decision to violate the laws of God, we applied the law fairly in his case.”

Wolfe’s spokesman, Stephen Wilson, added, “Freedom of religious belief is the law of the land in Idaho. On the other hand, externalized false religion is the object of punishment and sadly Mr. Hunter led many souls astray with his blasphemous and scandalous actions.”

DeSantis calls for ‘restraint’

U.S. President Ron DeSantis’ responded to the execution calling for Idaho’s leaders to “show restraint.” DeSantis, a supporter of Idaho’s independence during his first term, recently told GOP leaders in Congress that he is less favorable toward similar proposals from Oklahoma and Texas.

“Even a Christian Commonwealth must respect democratic values,” said Press Secretary Joel Turnipseed. “As the president said, we expect Idaho to show restraint.”

More executions expected

However, restraint does not appear to be the policy of Idaho’s Christian government.

Rights watchdog Amnesty International has said that more people have been detained and are potentially facing the death penalty following the protests in the former U.S. state.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Obviously, this isn’t a real news report. Note the date and the fact that Idaho is still an American state. However, the outcome isn’t too far fetched if the Christian Nationalist vision of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism is ever allowed to come to pass in the nation or an American state.

In his book, Wolfe calls for governors to lead the way in bringing about this Christian nationalist vision.

State governors are deputies of God, not deputies of the federal government, and their power from God is for good, not for evil. Thus, they must resist and nullify unjust and tyrannical laws imposed on the people by the federal government. No unjust federal law is an ordinance of God, and so it is not backed by a power of God. Therefore, a state governor resisting an unjust law of the federal government is not resisting God but the tyranny of men. Resistance to such tyrannical laws—which are not laws at all—is obedience to God, for they harm the people, and the state governors have the power of God to eliminate what harms the people. State governors must recall their duties to God and fight against injustices of the federal government. (p. 472)

This dramatized parody was inspired by the news report of an execution of a protester in Iran just a few days ago.  My parody above follows the framework of that news report.

I had been thinking about dramatizing how awful it would be to have a government such as envisioned by Wolfe’s book when I read a short opinion piece in the Carolina Journal by David Larson titled, “Making Space for Heretics.” Indeed, a free society must make space for heretics of all sorts.

In my view, any approach to government which allows for the murder, banishment or imprisonment of people for deviating from Protestant orthodoxy is a non-starter. No need for book reviews or debates or consideration. Such an approach isn’t a serious proposal. It is a death wish.

Here is a thread with quotes from The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe on these points.

All of this is in chapter nine of the book.

Photo credit: Florida Department of Corrections/Doug Smith

Blog Theme: Civil Rights and Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill – Interview with Jeff Sharlet

Interview with author Jeff Sharlet

In this interview, we discuss our shared recollections of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, the Netflix documentary The Family, liberty of conscience, and evangelicals in relationship to Donald Trump.

This is second in a series of interviews marking 15 years of blogging. I started blogging in July 2005. The first interview with Michael Coulter is here.

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009

On March 2, 2009 I posted a article about an ex-gay conference in Kampala, Uganda. Three Americans, Scott Lively, Don Schmierer, and Caleb Brundidge, had been invited by Stephen Langa of the Family Life Network to speak on the topic of homosexuality. Scott Lively told the crowd that gays were behind the Nazi takeover of Germany and subsequent Holocaust. Don Schmierer told them that homosexuals were disturbed by poor parenting and that they needed therapy, and Caleb Brundidge, a client of reparative therapist Richard Cohen was there to show that the ex-gay therapy worked.

That was the first of hundreds of articles about Uganda and the effort of that nation’s Parliament to make homosexuality a capital offense (The Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009). I don’t think it is too far fetched to say that Box Turtle Bulletin and this blog became key thorns in the side of Ugandan and American proponents of the bill. Jim Burroway and I (incidentally both originally from Portsmouth, OH) wrote nearly every day about some aspect of the bill and kept the story alive.

Because of my strong opposition to the bill and the kindness of Bob Hunter (as well as other Fellowship members), I attended the National Prayer Breakfast in 2010. There, I interviewed Fellowship Foundation leader Doug Coe. That was one of a handful of interviews he granted over the course of his life. A summary of it was published in Christianity Today later that year. Coe put the Fellowship on record as opposing the bill in Uganda.

When the Ugandan members of the Prayer Breakfast movement learned of American opposition, they felt betrayed by Coe and the Americans. They persisted with their efforts to pass the bill. As Jeff and I discuss in the interview above, the Ugandan members seemed to believe American evangelicals were afraid to really speak their minds. The Ugandan proponents of the bill seemed convinced that American Christians really supported their efforts, and it was their Christian duty to set a tone the world could follow.

Despite the Ugandan’s belief, I don’t believe the American Fellowship supported the bill. At the time (December, 2009), Jeff wrote a guest post for my blog which outlined his belief that the American Fellowship opposed it. In my rare interview with Doug Coe, he made it clear that he and the Fellowship opposed the bill and criminalization for homosexuality anywhere. Furthermore, at the National Prayer Breakfast, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke directly to the Ugandan people and by name opposed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. I don’t think the opposition could get any clearer than that.

I was in the African suite watching Obama’s and Clinton’s speeches on television when they condemned the bill at the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast. It was silent in the suite as the African delegation watched. Afterwards, some were stunned, some were angry. Some still believed that some Americans had to say those things in public, but may privately support them. However, they could not deny that the American Fellowship opposed the bill.

Through years of parliamentary maneuvering, the bill moved and then stalled. Sessions ended without action, but finally it passed at the end of 2013 session. The President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni proclaimed that he would not sign the bill if scientists could convince him that being gay was innate. He claimed to want to know if being gay was a choice.

At that point, at the request of others lobbying against the bill, Jack Drescher and I wrote a letter summarizing the research on sexual orientation in layman’s terms. The letter was signed by over 200 scholars and researchers from all over the world. Museveni acknowledge the effort but also convened his own panel of “experts.” They returned a letter which allowed him to sign the bill.

In August 2014, the bill was struck down as unconstitutional by Uganda’s Constitutional court due to the fact that the Parliament did not have a quorum in place when the bill was passed. A five year story of ups and downs came to an end with that decision.

Jeff Sharlet

Jeff and I became friends as we compared notes over what American interests and influences might be at work in this Ugandan mess. As I noted in the interview, he went to Uganda on one occasion (I think he asked me to go along but I can’t be sure of my recollection on that). His report of that trip was a lengthy write up in Harper’s.

In the interview, we discussed the background of the Netflix documentary, The Family. I had the good fortune to be included in three of the five episodes of that series.

Jeff has an inspiring sense of fairness and is a captivating writer. I don’t know of anyone outside of Uganda who worked harder to expose the truth relating to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill than Jeff. I am grateful and humbled by the kind and overly generous remarks from him in this interview. Thanks to Jeff for doing it. I hope you benefit from our discussion as much as I did.

Additional Reading

Scientific Consensus Statement

History of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill – NPR

My Salon series about a Nevada church who dropped support of a Uganda missionary over the bill

Straight Man’s Burden – Harpers

The Bill Inspired by American Evangelicals – The Atlantic

All of my posts about Uganda

All of my post about the Fellowship Foundation (aka The Family) and the National Prayer Breakfast

All 15 Years of Blogging Interviews

 

Image: Jeff Sharlet’s Twitter Page

Why the Mental Health Professions Want to Ban Conversion Therapy

While there are several reasons why mental health advocates want to ban sexual orientation change efforts, I want to focus on the recent push to legislate bans on the practice by licensed professionals.
Historically, therapists who treat gays with an aim to change them have viewed homosexuality as a developmental disorder. Some may also think same-sex sexual behavior is immoral, but principally the use of therapeutic techniques is driven by a belief that there is something psychologically wrong with someone who is attracted to the same sex. If the right techniques can be applied, eventually the GLB person will experience a shift in psychological perspective and find the opposite sex attractive. In short, homosexuality is an illness to be cured.
As most readers know, this view of same-sex orientation isn’t held by any medical or mental health professional organization today. Only a tiny group of practitioners hold to this view and they are among those who are fighting legislative efforts to ban sexual orientation change efforts. When legislators craft bills to stop treatment of same-sex orientation, they are hoping to stop efforts to cure something that isn’t a disorder.
To me, this is a sensible stance. No disorder, no need for treatment.
On the other hand, many religious traditions disagree with same-sex sexual behavior. They discourage such behavior as inconsistent with their moral teachings. Churches and religious groups have the right to teach this and advise their members in keeping with their principles. When people ask for their advice or opinion, churches can teach their views. In fact, anyone can teach and speak any view about homosexuality.
However, when a person joins a learned profession and gets a state license to practice that profession, there are certain restrictions that come along with that choice.  Mental health professionals are not clergy. We have a role to enhance the mental health of our clients and curing non-existent diseases doesn’t seem to me to be a part of that mandate. If clergy need to speak against certain behaviors, that is their right and the state’s regulation of mental health professionals cannot stop them.
I do have sympathy for those clients who believe that their same-sex attractions result from some historical trauma. In fact, there is a very small subset of people for whom those factors might be relevant to an understanding of their overall personality, including their sexual interests. I also believe that those people can continue to receive therapy, under these laws, if the treatment is not framed as a direct effort to change orientation.
Ultimately, I believe this is an issue of regulation of mental health professionals and not one of religious liberty. Since there is no universe in which sexual orientation change efforts are effective, why would mental health professionals make space for them? The rare exceptions can be accommodated via other frameworks (e.g., identity exploration, trauma recovery). Religious views will continue to be shared and any challenge to them will not succeed. We can coexist.

For more information on helping non-affirming same-sex attracted people live in keeping with traditional sexual ethics without engaging in sexual orientation change efforts, see the following articles and websites:

Sexual Identity Therapy Framework
Institute for the Study of Sexual Identity
A New Therapy on Faith and Sexual Identity (WSJ)
Living the Good Lie (NYT)
 

Yesterday, Liberty Counsel Celebrated Christian Freedom Day

Yesterday, like presidents before him, President Trump issued a proclamation commemorating Thomas Jefferson’s work in writing Virginia’s

Cover of Getting Jefferson Right, used by permission
Cover of Getting Jefferson Right, used by permission

Statute for Religious Freedom (full text here) which was adopted by the Virginia legislature on January 16, 1786. The law ended the establishment of the Anglican church in Virginia and recognized freedom of conscience in the state.
Jefferson meant for that freedom of conscience to extend beyond Christian denominations to all religions or none. However, ultra-conservative Liberty Counsel does not appear to recognize the breadth of Jefferson’s work. In their press release, the Statute on Religious Freedom is described as follows:

Religious Freedom Day is celebrated in America each year on January 16 to commemorate the 232nd anniversary of the passing of the 1786 passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom that ended the state-established church in Virginia, finally protecting religious rights for all denominations. The Anglicans had fined, persecuted, jailed and murdered Christians who were not part of the state-established church. However, Jefferson, a lifelong fervent advocate for the rights of religious liberty and religious conscience, worked hard to protect and defend those Christians. (emphasis added)

Liberty Counsel’s presser refers to denominations of Christianity and to Jefferson’s work to defend Christians. In the past, Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver has questioned the status of Islam as a religious worthy of First Amendment protection. Staver is also of the David Barton school of thought regarding the First Amendment — that the purpose of it was to prevent a Christian denomination from being established. In other words, when the First Amendment says religion, it means Christianity.

What Did Jefferson Mean?

In fact, there was an effort in the Virginia legislature to limit the scope of Virginia’s statute to Christians during debate on the bill. Jefferson wrote about it in his autobiography:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally past; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Islam], the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

According to Jefferson, the effort did not succeed. He meant his religious freedom bill to cover all people, of all religious ideas or no religious ideas.

What Religious Freedom Really Means Now

Ultimately, religious freedom at this particular time for this particular group means the freedom to discriminate against people, usually GLBT people in providing public services. In general, I think those who provide services to the public should provide them to GLBT people, even if they personally disagree with some aspect of those they serve.
But that’s just me and my beliefs. I know others believe differently, and the beauty of this nation is that they are free to believe it. What we will find out over the next few years is if they are free to discriminate based on that belief.

Supreme Court Decision: Should Public Funds Help Build Church Playgrounds?

photo-1473261912432-55081882c1fb_optThe Supreme Court today said yes: if other nonprofits are eligible for state funds to refurbish a playground, a church shouldn’t be denied the same funds on account of being a church. In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia MO v. Comer, the Court decided 7-2 that states may not discriminate when awarding such funds (read decision).
At issue was a ministry of Trinity Lutheran — their daycare — and funds which they wanted from MO for placing a rubber surface on the space. MO had a rule which eliminated churches on antiestablishment grounds. The court said the state could not refuse to provide funds to a nonprofit just because it was a church.
On the surface, this may seem like a win for churches, but I am not so sure what strings may be attached, nor does it seem wise for tax dollars to go to a church, even if the church uses those funds for playground resurfacing. Eventually, those dollars aid the church in religious purposes, it seems to me, which might not seem so bad when it is your church but might seem to be a problem when it isn’t.