Weekend warriors: house leader Tom DeLay's `biblical' agenda draws amens from worldview weekend activists who are seeking `Christian dominion' in America.

For U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, the answer to all of life's thorny questions and vexing moral dilemmas can be found only by embracing his fundamentalist version of Christianity.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the Texas Republican and House of Representatives majority whip told a Religious Right gathering April 12, "Christianity offers the only viable, reasonable, definitive answer to the questions of `Where did I come from?', `Why am I here?', `Where am I going?', `Does life have any meaningful purpose?' Only Christianity offers a way to understand that physical and that moral border. Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought--every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world--only Christianity."

Speaking at a "Worldview Weekend" conference at the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas, DeLay told a crowd of about 300 that God had brought him to the U.S. Congress. As for his accomplishments, "The Lord deserves the credit, not me," DeLay said.

With the Christian Coalition struggling and other groups jockeying for leadership of the Religious Right, many far-right fundamentalists are looking for a new vehicle for political activism, Some have turned to the Worldview Weekend, and in doing so have actually latched on to a group more extreme than the Coalition and other better-known Religious Right groups.

Most Religious Right leaders these days at least give lip service to religious pluralism. They talk of "Judeo-Christian" values and sometimes labor to bring traditionalist Catholics, conservative Mormons and others into the fold in the hope of achieving common political goals.

Not Worldview Weekend. These events are run by far-right fundamentalist Christians for far-right fundamentalist Christians. The whole point of the conference is to learn how fundamentalists can win greater political influence, overturn the separation of church and state and bring government under religious control. The goal is "dominion," not a corner of a believers. Worldview Weekend organizers and attendees don't want a place at the table--they want the whole table.

Although a relatively new entry on the Religious Right scene, Worldview Weekend, if its backers are to be believed, is gaining rapidly in popularity. While organizers in Pearland admitted that the turnout there was a disappointment, other cities, they said, have boasted much higher figures.

Brannon Howse, president of the American Family Policy Institute, the St. Paul-based group that runs the Worldview Weekend conferences, told attendees in Pearland that a recent event in Milwaukee attracted 1,000 attendees, and a seminar in Minneapolis drew nearly 2,000.

Kicking off the Pearland seminar, Howse told the crowd that the philosophy behind Worldview Weekend is that no realm of human activity is outside the scope of the Bible--especially politics and civil government.

"We can have a biblical worldview for our government as well--our civil government," Howse said. "That's what this is all about."

DeLay, who led things off on Friday night, echoed that view. Tracing his career in politics, the House majority whip, who is in line to become majority leader if the GOP retains control of the House after the November elections, noted that he got interested in running for state office in Texas because he was fed up with government interference in his pest extermination business. His wife prodded him to attend a local Republican Party meeting, where someone suggested he run for the legislature.

"It was the first time the Lord talked to me in very meaningful terms," DeLay said. He said he became "obsessed" with running for the office and worked so hard he successfully defeated a Democrat at a time when Republicans were weak in Texas.

DeLay, a Baptist, spent six years in the Texas legislature and ran for Congress successfully in 1984. Despite the divine intervention in his earlier campaigns, DeLay told the crowd that he was still not a committed believer when he went to Washington.

"I was into the other worldview like you wouldn't believe," he said, noting that in the nation's capital he drank too much, stayed out late and ignored his family.

Invited to a Bible study by U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), DeLay soon "found Christ again," He has spent time promoting Religious Right views in Congress since then.

"He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey, and it all comes down to worldview," DeLay told the crowd. "He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me."

DeLay decried the notion that churches are not for politics, asserting that he was motivated to "get out of the church and into the streets and standing for [God's] worldview" by Chuck Colson's book How Now Shall We Live? (Colson, the ex-Watergate figure, found God in prison and is now a Religious Right activist.)

"Unfortunately, for many years--many, many years--people have been forced into what I call the ghettoes of the church ...," DeLay said. "Christians have been pushed and pushed into that ghetto, and they're told, `You can go in the church, but if you stick your head out and you say anything that reflects your worldview, we're going to knock your head off.' And they do. And they come after me like you wouldn't believe."

His political enemies, DeLay told the crowd, pursued him aggressively during the effort to remove President Bill Clinton from office, but the Lord protected him. To wild cheers and applause, DeLay denounced Clinton and said of impeachment, "That was an unbelievable year, and if I wasn't walking in the Lord, I would have been destroyed. I was walking in his protection...."

DeLay told attendees he was "totally consumed" with holding Clinton accountable because the president was "undermining everything that I believed in and everything that I had worked for and he was standing for the wrong worldview."

Now, with President George W. Bush in office, DeLay said God "is giving us this opportunity to change our culture.... He is giving us grand and great opportunities to stand up for him, and he's giving it from the top, the president of the United States, all the way to Pearland."

Continued DeLay, "If we stay inside this church, the culture won't change."

The parade of speakers who followed reiterated DeLay's call for church-based political action. The idea that the Bible speaks to all areas of life and is authoritative in all that it says was a constant theme.

At times, this assertion was taken to extraordinary lengths. David Barton, an Aledo, Texas-based "Christian nation" advocate who followed DeLay (and who was responsible for bringing the majority whip to the event), told attendees to adopt a "biblical worldview" even when "you're getting ready for your carpool or doing yardwork."

Barton went on to assert that the Bible can answer any political or social question. He said the Bible addresses the progressive income tax, the capital gains tax ("There are clear, unequivocal verses on it."), the estate ("death") tax, zoning, the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek.

(Barton declined to say what position the Bible takes on these issues, urging attendees to read it and find out for themselves. But the next day, speaker Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries lectured on the Bible's view of economics, asserting the Old Testament mandates a flat tax over a progressive income tax. According to Anderson, both the progressive income tax and the estate tax come from the Communist Manifesto. "We have an economic system that is more Marxist than it is Christian" he said.)

Barton also insisted that most Christians in America do not "have a biblical worldview," noting that surveys show that self-professed born-again Christians get divorced and engage in premarital sex at the same rate as the rest of the population. Surveys also show that young born-again Christians are skeptical of key Christian doctrines like the existence of Satan and the belief that Jesus died without sin, he said.

This situation has come about, Barton insisted, because many pastors are too afraid to give sermons on political topics or social issues. Barton asserted that throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, many church leaders delivered sermons on the events of the day. He noted that in 1755 a New England pastor lectured on the "biblical" view of earthquakes after a powerful quake struck the region.

Today, Barton asserted, pastors are cowed into submission by the Internal Revenue Service and even members of their own congregations, who insist that politics does not belong in the pulpit.

Barton is wont to freely rewrite American history, and his speech at this conference was no exception. According to his account, the United States was "Christian" until Robert Ingersoll, a famous 19th-century skeptic, launched a campaign of secularization. As Barton tells it, the Supreme Court adopted Ingersoll's view in 1947's Everson v. Board of Education, a landmark church-state case.

"They adopted the secularizing philosophy," Barton said. "They said, `We'll call it separation of church and state. It's not in the Constitution, but that's what we'll call it.'"

As a result, Barton said, "We have a legal prohibition about getting outside that box.... Quite frankly, we are letting non-Christians tell Christians what the role of the church should be."

According to Barton, the only way for fundamentalists to gain the upper hand is through the courts. He asserted that Bush wants to appoint "God-fearing judges" but said Senate Democrats are blocking them.

"Judges are the basis of the land's righteousness," said Barton. "We have a Senate election here in Texas. The only issue that should matter is judges."

Barton then flashed on a large screen a giant photograph of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist praying at a religious service in Washington, D.C. He said Scalia, Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas are the type of justices who will reverse rulings upholding church-state separation if they can get a working majority on the high court.

(Barton resurfaced during day two of the event with a lecture about the "Christian" roots of higher education in America. During his remarks, Barton lamented the fact that public universities no longer require students to attend daily prayer meetings or church services.)

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, pastor of First Baptist, Pearland, followed Barton on Friday night. Scarborough, who runs a fledgling Religious Right group called Vision America, spoke for less than 10 minutes. He lauded DeLay as a man "anchored in Christ" and said the majority whip's critics "don't tell the truth about those who are advancing the kingdom."

Scarborough reiterated the theme that the Bible mandates political action. He called American culture "exceedingly sinful" and said it is that way "because you and I have abandoned it."

Conference materials issued in advance of the event indicated that Scarborough would discuss his successful effort in electing church members to the Pearland School Board and city council. But Scarborough, who says he was motivated to intervene in local politics because he did not like the sex education program at his daughter's high school, never mentioned the political situation in Pearland during his remarks.

There's a good reason for that: Scarborough-backed officials have been soundly rejected at the polls recently, and one of his cronies, Pearland City Manager Paul Grohman, was fired in 1998 under a cloud of scandal. Scarborough currently has no representation on the city council or school board. One Scarborough critic in Pearland told Church & State flatly, "That church will never, ever have any influence in this city again. That's over."

Nevertheless, Scarborough continues to promote his experiment in theocracy as a model for local activists. At the event, copies of his manifesto Enough Is Enough were for sale along with his monograph In Defense of Mixing Church and State.

Other materials being hawked in the lobby took an even more extreme line. Among them were books by Gary DeMar, a "Christian Reconstructionist" who advocates imposing the Old Testament's legal code on America. DeMar, who has stated that the Bible mandates the death penalty for gay people, frequently speaks at Worldview Weekend events, though he was not on the program in Pearland.

Similar Reconstructionist-oriented themes were put forth by Marshall Foster, president and founder of the Mayflower Institute. Foster, whose Institute sells books by Reconstructionists DeMar and George Grant, blasted modern-day "feel good" theologies and philosophies.

Foster's central idea is that those who keep "covenant" with God ultimately triumph, while those who break the covenant suffer horrible fates.

"Covenant keepers win, and covenant breakers lose," he said. "You just have to stick around long enough to see the end of the story.... That isn't theory. It has been proven time and again. Stick your finger in God's eye and you and your family will suffer the consequences for generations."

Proudly noting that he has been involved in what he called the "New Right" since "the days of Jerry Falwell," Foster asserted that all the "great blessings of Western Civilization came from the Protestant Reformation."

Foster also took a hard swipe at Islam. Stressing the need to raise up children as Christian believers, he advised the audience to tell their children about the power of Christianity.

"He [God] is not some moon god some camel driver thought up in 625 A.D. and called it Allah," Foster said.

According to Foster, a true biblical worldview will only come about if fathers take control of families and establish a "family dynasty."

"That's what the children need--they need a biblical worldview from dad," he said. "Do you want political dominion over America? I do.... If that's going to take place, it will be when the Christian families of America know God, so we elect only those who know God, are godly and will rule according to the word of God."

Continued Foster, "Civil government must return to its relationship under God and only doing what God tells it to.... So don't tell me we shouldn't be involved in politics! ... We can take dominion over America through godly service. If we would only do it right, the church of Jesus Christ is the most powerful force in America."

Exiting to wild applause, Foster then yielded the stage to Anderson for his "biblical economics" lesson. Anderson blasted the United States for its social safety net, dismissing government programs designed to help the poor as socialism.

"We have socialism in the United States of America," he said. "It's never called socialism, it's called compassion."

Anderson went on to cite an unspecified survey purporting to show that U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) votes for tax increases more than any other senator. He said Clinton does this because she studied under Marxists in college. Anderson insisted that the Bible promotes free-market economics, telling the crowd that the concept of private property rights grew out of the Eighth and Tenth Commandments.

Foster then returned for a lesson billed as the "Christian" history of the world. Careening wildly through 2,000 years of Western history, Foster insisted that the Founding Fathers established "the first biblically based Constitution in the history of mankind." (Foster did not explain why, if this is so, the Constitution is a secular document with no references to God, Jesus Christ, the Bible or Christianity.)

The United States, Foster told attendees, was a biblical society until the 1850s. As he tells it, the rise of public education and the spread of Unitarianism, coupled with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, upset the existing Christian order. This led, ultimately, to "New Age thinking."

He asserted that God judges nations, remarking, "If you don't see a divine order in the world, then you are a fool--an absolute fool.... Christ is the Lord of all, and He calls on us to exercise Lordship over all. Jesus is Lord of history."

Like other speakers, Foster also admonished conference attendees for not being engaged politically. While Christians sit back, he said, "the tyrants and the miserable slobs take over our government and our money and use it for projects we don't want.... America was not lost because the humanists, the socialists and the communists took America. It was us. It was the lazy people in the church."

Foster advised attendees not to pin their hopes on any one leader--even Bush. He asserted that during the last time of great economic distress in the country--the Depression--people put their faith in government instead of God. The nation should have had another Great Awakening, Foster said, but got the New Deal and larger government instead.

But all hope is not lost, Foster remarked. He told the crowd that during the 17th and 18th centuries, England returned to Christianity. (Although Foster did not say so directly, he apparently equates England's drift away from Christianity with the periods it officially favored Catholicism.) In the United States, he cited the Puritans as a model, saying they established the proper lineup of family, church and government.

When speakers at this event talked about "Christians" exercising dominion or rebuilding America, it was clear the reference was to ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Christians. No lip service was given to "Judeo-Christian" values. This crowd wanted exclusively Christian values, and only a certain type of Christian values--fundamentalist ones.

The idea that the Bible speaks to all areas of life and is infallible in what it addresses was the companion theme of the event. Bob Cornuke, a would-be archaeologist who describes himself as a type of Christian Indiana Jones, regaled the crowd with tales of his efforts to find Noah's Ark and the real location of Mt. Sinai in the Holy Land. Cornuke insisted that the Bible can be read like a history book and an archaeology text, remarking, "The Bible is always historically accurate--always. It is never proven to be wrong."

Conference organizers also believe the Bible is a science book. While no speakers addressed evolution specifically during the Pearland meeting, other Worldview events have featured Ken Ham, a prominent "young Earth" creationist. A number of anti-evolution books were available for sale in the church lobby--which was pressed into service as an exhibit hall--and during breaks in the meeting a cartoon of Charles Darwin's head on a monkey's body appeared frequently on two huge screens behind the pulpit. The caption read, "Is this Charles Darwin's ancestor? Evolutionists think so!"

The Watchman Fellowship, an "anti-cult" organization, also advertised its books and videos on the screens. Watchman materials, the ads promised, would help you fend off conversion efforts by "Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Masonic Lodge and the New Age Movement."

During an interval between speakers, a Watchman staffer took the microphone to personally promote the group's materials.

Aside from equipping attendees with the proper "biblical worldview" Worldview Weekend organizers were clearly very interested in selling books, audio-tapes, videos and other paraphernalia. Several times during the event, Howse and co-emcee Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association turned into temporary pitchmen.

Howse reports that in 2002, Worldview Weekend seminars will be held in 14 cities, reaching an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people.

Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn said that the extremist views uncovered at the Worldview Weekend seminar and the ensuing hubbub over controversial statements DeLay made about Texas A&M and Baylor Universities (see "Texas Toast" page 10.) only underscore how important it is for AU to continue monitoring the Religious Right.

"Worldview Weekend is so extreme it makes the Christian Coalition look moderate," said Lynn. "Exposing the theocratic views of dangerous Religious Right organizations is an important part of Americans United's mission. We intend to keep bringing this information to light."