This is part 3 of a 5-part series.

Part I: The Lure of Christian Nationalism
Part II: Hang Ten and Fight!
Part III: A Deadly Culture of Life
Part IV: Pie in the Sky
Part V: "The Ayatollah of Holy Rollers"

James Kopp, anti-abortion activist convicted of murdering Dr. Barnett A. Slepian. (Photo: http://www.jameskopp.com)

    One of Terry's closest co-workers - James Kopp - shot and killed Dr. Barnett A. Slepian, 52, a Buffalo obstetrician and gynecologist who performed abortions. Another of Terry's cohorts - Pastor Matt Trewhella, founder of Missionaries to the Preborn - openly called for the formation of armed militias.

    Terry himself spent five months in prison for sending one of his people to show a fetus to presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992, violating a federal court order. "If a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God," said Terry. "It's that simple."

    More mouth than muscle, Terry generally restricted himself to justifying the killing of "abortion doctors" and promising their legal execution.

    "When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee," he warned, "because we will find you, we will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."

    Talking here to an August 1995 banquet of Howard Phillip's Taxpayers Alliance, Terry announced a new leadership institute that would provide "three days of intense training on vision, courage, biblical ethics, raising up a cadre of people who are militant, who are fierce, who are unmerciful to the deeds of darkness, unmerciful to the ideologies of hell."

Randall Terry, anti-abortion activist and one of America's most outspoken Christian Nationalists. (Photo: nndb.com)

    "If we're going to have true reformation in America," he declared, "it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of contempt for their contemporaries. They are not even here to get along. They are here to take over."

    With Terry's view in mind, the Tax Payers Alliance has now become the Constitution Party, which promises "to restore our government to its Constitutional limits and our law to its Biblical foundation." Roy Moore, the "Ten Commandments Judge," is one of the party favorites, and has spoken at their events.

    The party also continues to work closely with "the Patriot Movement" and its right-wing militias, including a number of groups that are virulently anti-Semitic, deny the Holocaust, and speak longingly of Der Fuhrer.

    Far more troubling, Randall Terry's vision seems to have also taken over much of the Republican Party, many of whose leading figures now openly pursue the same Christian Nationalism, deny the separation of church and state, and attack "unelected" federal and state judges.

    "Mrs. Schiavo's death is a moral poverty and a legal tragedy," proclaimed the GOP's Tom DeLay, Majority Leader of the US House of Representatives.

    "This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."

    Republican Senator John Cornyn, of Texas, went even further, appearing to justify violent attacks against judges.

    "We seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news," he said, "and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence."

    And now Bill Frist, the Senate Majority Leader and a leading contender for the GOP presidential bid in 2008, has joined with right-wing evangelicals in a TV extravaganza to portray the Democratic defense of traditional Senate filibuster rules as a radical attack on "People of Faith."

    "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the ACLU, have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms," declared Tony Perkins, the chief lobbyist for one of the sponsoring groups, the Family Research Council.

    "We must stop this unprecedented filibuster of people of faith."

    When so many Republican leaders and their evangelical allies sound so much like Randall Terry, we can only wonder whether the Grand Old Party will ever again find the voice of reason.

---

    A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.