When Scott Roeder, the murderer of Wichita Kansas abortion
clinic provider Dr. George Tiller, had his day in court, he spent much
of his rambling self-defense quoting the words of another abortion
clinic assassin,
Reverend Paul Hill.
In the 1990s my own research had brought me into conversation with
others in the inner circle in which Hill and Roeder were at that time
involved. So it was a chilling experience for me to realize that this
awful mood of American Christian terrorism—culminating in the
catastrophic attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Builiding—has now
returned.
Christian terrorism has returned to America with a
vengeance. And it is not just Roeder. When members of the Hutaree
militia in Michigan and Ohio recently were arrested with plans to kill a
random policeman and then plant Improvised Explosive Devices in the
area where the funeral would be held to kill hundreds more, this was a
terrorist plot of the sort that would impress Shi’ite militia and al
Qaeda activists in Iraq. The
Southern Poverty Law Center,
founded by Morris Dees, which has closely watched the rise of
right-wing extremism in this country for many decades, declares that
threats and incidents of right-wing violence have risen 200% in this
past year—unfortunately coinciding with the tenure of the first
African-American president in US history. When Chip Berlet, one of this
country’s best monitors of right-wing extremism, warned in
a perceptive essay
last week on RD that the hostile right-wing political climate in this
country has created the groundwork for a demonic new form of violence
and terrorism, I fear that he is correct.
Christian Warrior, Sacred Battle
Though these new forms of violence are undoubtedly political
and probably racist, they also have a religious dimension. And this
brings me back to what I know about Rev. Paul Hill, the assassin who
the similarly misguided assassin, Scott Roeder, quoted at length in
that Wichita court room last week. In 1994, Hill, a Presbyterian pastor
at the extreme fringe of the anti-abortion activist movement, came
armed to a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. He aimed at Dr. John Britton,
who was entering the clinic along with his bodyguard, James Barrett.
The shots killed both men and wounded Barrett’s wife, Joan. Hill
immediately put down his weapon and was arrested; presenting an image
of someone who knew that he would be arrested, convicted, and executed
by the State of Florida for his actions, which he was in 2003. This
would make Hill something of a Christian suicide attacker.
What is interesting about Hill and his supporters is not
just his political views, but also his religious ones. As I reported in
my book,
Terror in the Mind of God, and in
an essay
for RD several months ago, Hill framed his actions as those of a
Christian warrior engaged in sacred battle. “My eyes were opened to the
enormous impact” such an event would have, he wrote, adding that “the
effect would be incalculable.” Hill said that he opened his Bible and
found sustenance in Psalms 91: “You will not be afraid of the terror by
night, or of the arrow that flies by day.” Hill interpreted this as an
affirmation that his act was biblically approved.
One of the supporters that Paul Hill had written these words
to was Rev. Michael Bray, a Lutheran pastor in Bowie, Maryland, who
had served prison time for his conviction of fire-bombing
abortion-related clinics on the Eastern seaboard. Bray published a
newsletter and then a Web site for his Christian anti-abortion
movement, and published a book theologically justifying violence
against abortion service providers,
A Time to Kill. He is also alleged to be the author of the
Army of God manual that provides details on how to conduct terrorist acts against abortion-related clinics.
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Recently
Bray has publicly defended Paul Roeder, the Wichita assassin, saying
that he acted with “righteousness and mercy.” Several years earlier,
another member of Bray’s network of associates, Rachelle (“Shelly”)
Shannon, a housewife from rural Oregon, had also attacked Dr. George
Tiller as he drove away from his clinic in Wichita. She was arrested
for attempted murder.
When I interviewed Bray on several occasions in the 1990s,
he provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two
different Christian perspectives. In the remainder of this essay, I’ll
summarize from
Terror in the Mind of Godsome of my
observations about these theological strands behind their terrorism in
the 1990s—and which, amazingly, are surfacing again today.
Theological Illogic
The more traditional Christian justification that Bray used
for his violence was just-war theory. He was fond of quoting two of my
own heroes,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and Reinhold Niebuhr, in what I regard as perverse ways. Bray thought
that their justification of military action against the Nazis (and an
attempted assassination plot on Hitler’s life Bonhoeffer was involved
in) was an appropriate parallel to his terrorism against the US
government’s sanctioning of legal abortions. It seemed highly unlikely
to me that Bray’s positions would have been accepted by these or any
other theologian within mainstream Protestant thought. Bonhoeffer and
Niebuhr, like most modern theologians, supported the principle of the
separation of church and state, and were wary of what Niebuhr called
“moralism”—the intrusion of religious or other ideological values into
the political calculations of statecraft. Moreover, Bray did not rely on
mainstream theologians for his most earnest theological justification.
The more significant Christian position that Bray and Hill
advanced is related to the End-Time theology of the Rapture as thought
to be envisaged by the New Testament book of Revelation. These are
ideas related, in turn, to Dominion Theology, the position that
Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things,
including secular politics and society. This point of view, articulated
by such right-wing Protestant spokespersons as Rev. Jerry Falwell and
Pat Robertson, have been part of the ideology of the Christian Right
since at least the 1980s and 1990s.
At its hardest edge, the movement requires the creation of a
kind of Christian politics to set the stage for America’s acceptance
of the second coming of Christ. In this context, it is significant
today that in some parts of the United States, over one-third of the
opponents of the policies of President Barack Obama believe he is the
Antichrist as characterized in the End-Times Rapture scenario.
The Christian anti-abortion movement is permeated with ideas from Dominion Theology.
Randall Terry (founder of the militant anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue and a writer for the Dominion magazine
Crosswinds)
signed the magazine’s “Manifesto for the Christian Church,” which
asserted that America should “function as a Christian nation.” The
Manifesto said that America should therefore oppose “social moral
evils” of secular society such as “abortion on demand, fornication,
homosexuality, sexual entertainment, state usurpation of parental
rights and God-given liberties, statist-collectivist theft from
citizens through devaluation of their money and redistribution of their
wealth, and evolutionism taught as a monopoly viewpoint in the public
schools.”
At the extreme right wing of Dominion Theology is a
relatively obscure theological movement that Mike Bray found
particularly appealing: Reconstruction Theology, whose exponents long
to create a Christian theocratic state. Bray had studied their writings
extensively and possessed a shelf of books written by Reconstruction
authors. The convicted anti-abortion killer Paul Hill cited
Reconstruction theologians in his own writings and once studied with a
founder of the movement, Greg Bahnsen, at Reformed Theological Seminary
in Jackson, Mississippi.
Leaders of the Reconstruction movement trace their ideas, which they sometimes called “
theonomy,”
to Cornelius Van Til, a twentieth-century Presbyterian professor of
theology at Princeton Seminary who took seriously the sixteenth-century
ideas of the Reformation theologian John Calvin regarding the
necessity for presupposing the authority of God in all worldly matters.
Followers of Van Til (including his former students Bahnsen and Rousas
John Rushdoony, and Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North) adopted this
“presuppositionalism” as a doctrine, with all its implications for the
role of religion in political life.
Recapturing Institutions for Jesus
Reconstruction writers regard the history of Protestant
politics since the early years of the Reformation as having taken a bad
turn, and they are especially unhappy with the Enlightenment
formulation of church-state separation. They feel it necessary to
“reconstruct” Christian society by turning to the Bible as the basis
for a nation’s law and social order. To propagate these views, the
Reconstructionists established the Institute for Christian Economics in
Tyler, Texas, and the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California.
They have published a journal and a steady stream of books and booklets
on the theological justification for interjecting Christian ideas into
economic, legal, and political life.
According to the most prolific Reconstruction writer,
Gary North,
it is “the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every
institution for Jesus Christ." He feels this to be especially so in the
United States, where secular law as construed by the Supreme Court and
defended by liberal politicians is moving in what Rushdoony and others
regard as a decidedly un-Christian direction; particularly in matters
regarding abortion and homosexuality. What the Reconstructionists
ultimately want, however, is more than the rejection of secularism. Like
other theologians who utilize the biblical concept of “dominion,” they
reason that Christians, as the new chosen people of God, are destined
to dominate the world.
The Reconstructionists possess a “postmillennial” view of
history. That is, they believe that Christ will return to earth only
after the thousand years of religious rule that characterizes the
Christian idea of the millennium, and therefore Christians have an
obligation to provide the political and social conditions that will
make Christ’s return possible. “Premillennialists,” on the other hand,
hold the view that the thousand years of Christendom will come only
after Christ returns, an event that will occur in a cataclysmic moment
of world history. Therefore they tend to be much less active
politically.
Rev. Paul Hill, Rev. Michael Bray, and other
Reconstructionists—along with Dominion theologians such as the American
politician and television host Pat Robertson and many other right-wing
Christian activists today—are postmillenialists. Hence they believe
that a Christian kingdom must be established on Earth before Christ’s
return. They take seriously the idea of a Christian society and a form
of religious politics that will make biblical code the law of the
United States.
These activists are quite serious about bringing Christian
politics into power. Bray said that it is possible, under the right
conditions, for a Christian revolution to sweep across the United
States and bring in its wake Constitutional changes that would allow
for biblical law to be the basis of social legislation. Failing that,
Bray envisaged a new federalism that would allow individual states to
experiment with religious politics on their own. When I asked Bray what
state might be ready for such an experiment, he hesitated and then
suggested Louisiana and Mississippi, or, he added, “maybe one of the
Dakotas.”
Not all Reconstruction thinkers have endorsed the use of
violence, especially the kind that Bray and Hill have justified. As
Reconstruction author Gary North admitted, “there is a division in the
theonomic camp” over violence, especially with regard to anti-abortion
activities. Some months before Paul Hill killed Dr. Britton and his
escort, Hill (apparently hoping for Gary North’s approval in advance)
sent a letter to North along with a draft of an essay he had written
justifying the possibility of such killings in part on theonomic
grounds. North ultimately responded, but only after the murders had
been committed.
North regretted that he was too late to deter Hill from his
“terrible direction” and chastised Hill in an open letter, published as
a booklet, denouncing Hill’s views as “vigilante theology.” According
to North, biblical law provides exceptions to the commandment “Thou
shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13), but in terms similar to just-war doctrine:
when one is authorized to do so by “a covenantal agent” in wartime, to
defend one’s household, to execute a convicted criminal, to avenge the
death of one’s kin, to save an entire nation, or to stop moral
transgressors from bringing bloodguilt on an entire community.
Hill, joined by Bray, responded to North’s letter. They
argued that many of those conditions applied to the abortion situation
in the United States. Writing from his prison cell in Starke, Florida,
Paul Hill said that the biblical commandment against murder also
“requires using the means necessary to defend against murder—including
lethal force.” He went on to say that he regarded “the cutting edge of
Satan’s current attack” to be “the abortionist’s knife,” and therefore
his actions had ultimate theological significance.
Bray, in his book,
A Time to Kill, spoke to North’s
concern about the authorization of violence by a legitimate authority
or “a covenental agent,” as North put it. Bray raised the possibility
of a “righteous rebellion.” Just as liberation theologians justify the
use of unauthorized force for the sake of their vision of a moral
order, Bray saw the legitimacy of using violence not only to resist
what he regarded as murder—abortion—but also to help bring about the
Christian political order envisioned by the radical dominion theology
thinkers. In Bray’s mind, a little violence was a small price to pay
for the possibility of fulfilling God’s law and establishing His
kingdom on earth.
For most of the rest of us, even a little violence is a
price too high to pay for these fantastic visions of Christian politics
and for America’s recent return to Christian terrorism.
Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology and Director of Global and
International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He
is the winner of the Grawemeyer Award for his book Terror in the Mind
of God (UC Press). He is the editor of Global Religions: An Introduction
and is also the author of The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism
Confronts the Secular State and Gandhi's Way: A Handbook of Conflict
Resolution, both from UC Press.
