Christian Violence in America

Abstract

As the millennium approaches, the wave of antimodernism that has brought violent movements of religious nationalism in its wake around the world has arrived at America's shores. In the United States, attacks on abortion clinics, the killing of abortion clinic staff, and the destructive acts of members of Christian militia movements are chilling examples of assaults on the legitimacy of modern social and political institutions, based on the theological frameworks of reconstruction theology and Christian Identity thinking. These examples of Christian militancy present a religious perception of warfare and struggle in what is perhaps the most modern of twentieth-century societies. The secular political order of America is imagined to be trapped in vast satanic conspiracies involving spiritual and personal control. This perception provides Christian activists with both the justification and the obligation to use violent means to fulfill their understanding of the country's Christian mission—and at the same time offers a formidable critique of Enlightenment society and a reassertion of the primacy of religion in public life.