From The Power Worshippers (Katherine Stewart, 2019) pp13-5
Unionville Baptist Church is a solid brick building on a country road surrounded by farmland. We enter the spacious fellowship hall on the ground floor and take our seats at one of the round tables with a clear view of the podium. Purple-and-white floral arrangements adorn the tables, and the walls are lined with colorful booths displaying promotional materials from the various right-wing policy groups in attendance.
From the flyer publicizing the event, which is sponsored by the Watchmen on the Wall, an affiliate of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC), a passerby might have formed the impression that this would be a nonpartisan occasion involving discussion of policy issues of interest to church members and their leaders. The FRC, one of the most powerful and politically connected lobbying organizations of the Christian right, has organized dozens of similar “Pastors Brietng” through its network of “Watchmen,” which claims to have nearly 25,000 members. According to its promotional material, the brienngs are focused on shaping public policy and informed civic activism.” The organization’s website boasts an endorsement by Vice President Mike Pence: Keep being a ‘Watchman on the Wall.’ Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s making a difference.
With the approach of the 2018 midterms, the rhetoric on the Watchmen’s website took a turn to the apocalyptic. “Do you not already hear the warnings of God? Do you not see that the enemy is coming in like a flood? And God is trying to raise up a standard against it. And you and 1 are that standard,” read one quote on the home page from the influential pastor Dr. Henry Blackaby.
If there was any pretense of neutrality at Unionville, in any case, it didn’t survive more than a few sentences into the opening remarks by FRC president Tony Perkins. “I believe this last election, 2016, was the result of prayer,” said Perkins. “We’ve seen our nation begin to move back to a nation that respects the sanctity of life.” Perkins speaks in the calm, mid-Atlantic voice of a Beltway operator, but his words are all sulphur and rage. The host of a weekly radio show to which he invites prominent guests, he is a practiced and effective speaker and knows the anger buttons of his audience well.
“Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand the wiles of the devil, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual host of wickedness in heavenly places,” he says, quoting a Bible verse from the book of Ephesians. “If we don’t know that to be true after what we’ve seen in the last three weeks, I don’t know what it will take,” he adds, referring to the recent fight to place Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
A woman seated to my left wearing a conservatively cut red-and-black suit is nodding intently. Perkins is speaking to his people, and the room is punctuated by spontaneous encouragements from members of the crowd: “Preach, brother,” and “Amen!”
“Folks, we’re headed in a new direction as a nation. And that’s what this battle over the court is all about,” Perkins continues. “This battle over the court is not about Brett Kavanaugh.” He runs through a familiar litany of how “the Court has been used to impose a godless set of values on America” tapping all the well-worn talking points about how the Bible was “taken out of school” and replaced with “calls for abortion on demand.” “It was the Court that imposed it on America and made all of us complicit with the taking of innocent human life,” he inveighs. “Folks, is this an evil day?“
Then he gets to the point of the gathering. “Christians need to vote,” he says. “The members of your congregations need to vote. As pastors, you need to — I’m not going to say ‘challenge them’; you need to tell them to vote.”
Although Perkins never says the word “Republican,” there isn’t the slightest doubt about which way he expects pastors to tell their congregants to vote. One party is “the party of life,” he suggests, and supporting it is a matter of eternal salvation. “We are a divided nation, and someone’s values will dominate,” he warns, leaving little doubt that in his view “the rulers of the darkness” and “the spiritual host of wickedness” are to be found on the Democratic Party’s side of the aisle. “We will be held accountable for what we do with this moment,” he tells the assembled pastors. “My question to you this morning is: What will you do? What will you do with this moment that God has entrusted to us?”
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