"Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"

Across the United States, religious activists are organizing to establish an American theocracy. A frightening look inside the growing right-wing movement.

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from senior writer Michelle Goldberg's new book, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism."

By Michelle Goldberg

Read more: Books, Christian Right, Michelle Goldberg, Books Features

May 12, 2006 | A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their places on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. Two dancers, donning black overcoats, crossed their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled on the speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding a Ten Commandments tablet that seemed to be made of cardboard, he was playing former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. The trench-coated thugs approached him, miming a violent rebuke and forcing him to the other end of the stage, sans Commandments.

There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal activists waved signs with slogans like "No Moore!" and "Keep God Out!! No God in Court." The boy Moore danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and then cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats -- agents of atheism -- got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him abject on the floor. As the song's uplifting chorus played -- "After you've done all you can, you just stand" -- a dancer in a white robe, playing either an angel or God himself, came forward and helped the Moore character to his feet.

The performance ended to enthusiastic applause from a crowd that included many Alabama judges and politicians, as well as Roy Moore himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner and the wrath of Leviticus in his eyes. Moore has become a hero to those determined to remake the United States into an explicitly Christian nation. That reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot center of our current culture wars, investing the symbolic fight over the Ten Commandments -- a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant to most peoples' lives -- with an apocalyptic urgency.

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On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge's order to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he'd installed in the Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms. After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision awarding custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over their lesbian mother, called homosexuality "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," and argued, "The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle." He's a man who writes rhyming poetry decrying the teaching of evolution and who fought against the Alabama ballot measure to remove segregationist language from the state constitution.

To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God's truth.

It's a role he seems to love. The battle that cost Moore his job wasn't his first Ten Commandments fight. In 1995, the ACLU sued Moore, then a county circuit judge, for hanging a Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom and leading juries in prayer. As Matt Labash recalled in an adulatory Weekly Standard article, "The conflict's natural drama was compounded when the governor, Fob James, announced that he would deploy the National Guard, state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams to keep Moore's tablets on the wall."

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.

Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on August 1, 2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the monument was mounted, and on October 14, D. James Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore's brave, covert installation on his television show.

As the controversy over the statue ignited, Moore's fame grew. At rallies across the country, he summoned the faithful to an ideal that sounded very much like theocracy. "For forty years we have wandered like the children of Israel," he told a crowd of three thousand supporters in Tennessee. "In homes and schools across our land, it's time for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Koran but the Bible.This is a Christian nation."

By the time he was removed as chief justice, Moore had sparked a movement, and his monument was an icon. In the days before officials came to cart the Commandments away, hundreds flocked to Montgomery to rally on the courtroom steps. Some slept there and imagined themselves the nucleus of a new civil rights movement.

Thomas Bowman, a bearded Christian folk singer from Kentucky who wears a knit Rasta hat, wrote an anthem called "Montgomery Fire" celebrating the demonstrations: "We had love in our hearts that no man could ever remove / but with the whole world we watched as they hauled the Commandments away." When I met him a year later at First Baptist, he referred to the protesters, romantically, as the "ragamuffin warriors" fighting for God against the atheist state. During the controversy, he said, he'd felt the Lord's call, and driven six and a half hours from Louisville. In Montgomery, he met others like him, who'd felt compelled to take a stand against secularism.

"The opposing side, the anti-God side, the do-whatever-you-want side, the judicial side, just kept pushing and pushing and pushing for the last forty years," Bowman said. "They keep moving that line back." Finally, he said, God called on Christians to defend themselves.

After the Commandments were removed, a group of retired military men from Texas who called themselves American Veterans in Domestic Defense spent months taking the monument -- now affectionately called "Roys Rock" -- on tour all over the country, holding more than 150 viewings and rallies in churches, at state capitols, even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Moore also found powerful supporters in statehouses and in Congress who proposed laws to radically restrict the power of federal courts to enforce the separation of church and state. In solidarity, another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, had the Ten Commandments embroidered onto his robe. Christian homeschool catalogues offered copies of a video titled "Roy Moores Message to America." When Moore suggested he might run for Alabama governor, state polls showed him with a double-digit lead.

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