Christian Patriot movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (October 2007)
The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.(December 2007)
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.
The neutrality or factuality of this article or section may be compromised by unattributed statements.
You can help Wikipedia by removing weasel worded statements.
This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2006)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

The Christian Patriot movement is a term for a loose association of groups of people in the United States, mainly by its critics. Many of these groups are claimed to share common views including militia or self defense, conspiracy theories, a Christian theology which places special emphasis on eschatology or covenant eschatology and apocalyptic matters, and heterodox interpretations of law, economics, and the United States Constitution. The movement is often characterized by critics as being part of the political far right in the United States, and is also characterized by some as a movement which bridges the gap between the more mainstream evangelical Christianity and the racialist Christian Identity movement.

Contents

[edit] History

The origins of the movement are debated. Some researchers believe the movement is rooted in a wide array of American populist and xenophobic movements, including the Know-Nothing movement, the John Birch Society, Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communism, America First, and George Wallace's segregationism.

Other researchers more specifically locate the movement's origins in the rural economic depression and overwhelming debt in the 1980s combined with a feeling of disenfranchisement and anger among white males and private property natural rights advocates in response to rapid inflation and rise of federalised departments of education, the Civil Rights movement, and Feminism. The movement proper is thought to begin in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with especially strong followings in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest, with the foundation of the Christian Patriot Association in Oregon and book publishers such as Emissary Publications. Posse Comitatus was a somewhat related albeit more radical movement which was also active at the time.

The movement came to public attention in 1992 when the U.S. Federal Government besieged Randy Weaver at his home in Northern Idaho, and in 1993 during a 51-day standoff between the U.S. Federal Government and the Branch Davidians outside of Waco, Texas, which ended in the deaths of 85 men, women and children.[1] The Branch Davidians were not connected to the Christian Patriot movement at all, but supporters of the Christian Patriot movement were among the most vocal sympathizers of the Branch Davidians during the siege. The siege of the Montana Freemen, a Christian Patriot group, also brought continued attention. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the resulting War on Terror, the movement has fallen from public attention.

The term Christian Patriot came into "official" use by the current movement during the late 1970s or early 1980s following the establishment of the Christian Patriot Association of Boring, Oregon. There was a previous usage of the term during the Great Depression by at least one small group with similar political leanings.

Christian Patriots generally do not gather in large self-identifying groups, but exist in and associate with a wide variety of groups. Such groups include tax protester groups, homeschool groups, and conservative Christian churches. Christian Patriots oppose, among other things, government funded social assistance including many health, education, and welfare programs. The Patriots believe that public facilities should be funded with accurate user fees rather than individual income taxes which they view as an unconstitutional infringement on rights. Christian Patriot literature is sometimes available at gun shows and at "preparedness expos" which were held in some cities during the 1990s.

[edit] Views

Some views commonly associated with The Christian Patriot movement have sometimes been shared with adherents of the Militia movement or constitutional militia movement, but they should not be considered synonymous.

The views of many adherents are organized around a belief that world events are secretly controlled by some group such as the Illuminati, the Council of Foreign Relations, international banking families, Communists, Jews, the United Nations, or some combination of the above, and that conspiracy will culminate in a new world order conspiracy, which is either present or impending.

Christian Patriots hold to a strict constructionist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and are closely associated with the tax protester movement. They may encourage people to get rid of their Social Security number, believing it to be an unconstitutional national identity card, and to stop paying income taxes, based on their belief that the 16th Amendment is illegitimate (see Tax protester constitutional arguments). The Christian Patriot movement wants to abolish the Federal Reserve System in the United States, which they believe is part of the conspiracy. Christian Patriots are often hostile to banks and bankers in general, accusing them of usury. Some Christian Patriots may support a state citizenship theory. They generally support gun rights and other conservative causes, along with causes such as jury nullification which also have support from the left and libertarians.

Their Christian theology is Protestant and mostly fundamentalist. Some segments of the movement - notably those overlapping with Christian Identity and the Aryan Nations espouse anti-Semitism, lionize Adolf Hitler and call Christianity a White religion, but this is not a universal tenet of Christian Patriots. There are other Christian Patriots who reject white supremacism and whose views run closer to standard fundamentalist Christianity, albeit with a heavy emphasis on the "Illuminati" conspiracy theory.

Some Christian Patriots espouse anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic views as well. Christian Patriots are apocalyptic, though there are various versions of apocalypse, ranging from the Christian Dispensationalist doctrine of the impending second coming of Jesus to the impending imposition of martial law and revocation of the U.S. Constitution.

Some Christian Patriot views have crept into evangelical Christianity, most notably through evangelical Christian writers citing Christian Patriot works as references. Examples include Pat Robertson, whose book The New World Order used the writings of Eustace Mullins as a source; Jack Chick, who cites Christian Patriot writer Des Griffin's book The Fourth Reich of the Rich in several of his Chick Publications tracts; and John Todd, who caused a brief stir in the late 1970s claiming to have been a reformed member of the Illuminati. During the late 1990s, Hank Hanegraaff and Richard Abanes wrote articles for the Christian Research Institute warning of the increasing popularity of Christian Patriot views among evangelicals, and urging evangelicals to avoid buying into these theories.

[edit] Legal claims

See also: Sovereign Citizen Movement

Christian Patriots advance a variety of positions about constitutional, statutory law, common law, maritime law, and equity law. They assert that the De jure republic has been replaced by a De facto democracy. They claim that the legal reality that most people believe is an illusion obscuring a deeper legal reality.

Christian Patriots make the following legal claims:

An example is the case of McCann v. Greenway.[2] In this case, Daniel J. McCann sued various individuals in the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri. The individuals McCann sued included juvenile officers and employees of the Missouri Division of Family Services, and others, in connection with McCann's response to having lost custody of a child or children in a state court matter.

McCann alleged, in federal court, that the state court did not have jurisdiction over the custody case because the state court room in which the custody dispute was decided displayed a "maritime flag of war." (The flag was actually the flag of the United States of America.) McCann contended that the display of this flag in the court room invested the state court with "admiralty jurisdiction" and that this display defeated the "lawful jurisdiction" of the state court. McCann claimed that the various defendants were engaged in a fraud and conspiracy to deny him his constitutional rights. In particular, McCann objected to the gold or yellow rope, braid or fringe on the flag and the "gold eagle on top of the flag pole, placed in the bar to deprive the proper parties in the bar".

In its decision, the federal court in the McCann case stated that the issue presented was "whether action taken by a state court during a child custody hearing while the court's flag is adorned with gold fringe idly hanging or a gold eagle vigilantly peering atop the flagpole somehow violates a litigant's rights under the United States Constitution, and whether the Defendants, various child welfare workers, the state child welfare agency, the adverse litigant's counsel and his law firm, are liable for sitting mute without protest or action to cure." The court ruled against McCann, referring to his arguments as "frivolous" and "preposterous." The court ruled that the display of a flag is irrelevant to a court's subject matter jurisdiction, stating: "Jurisdiction is a matter of law, statute and constitution, not a child's game wherein one's power is magnified or diminished by the display of some magic talisman."[2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Morris Dees, Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat. Harper Perennial (April 23, 1997) ISBN 0060927895
  2. ^ a b McCann v. Greenway, 952 F. Supp. 647 (W.D. Mo. 1997).

[edit] External links

[edit] See also