(RNS) A decade ago, a critic accused me of writing a book about a “nonexistent” threat from the religious right. One reviewer called my work a “paranoid rant” while another detractor wrote my “alarmist” views were “exaggerated and implausible.”
In “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans For The Rest Of Us,” published in 2006, I had warned that a well-financed and highly organized group of religious and political leaders was seeking to impose their narrow extremist beliefs and harsh public policies on the United States, even as our nation’s population was increasingly multireligious, multiethnic, and multiracial.
The intention of that group, whom I labeled “Christocrats,” was to establish a white-dominated nationalistic “Christian America” officially buttressed and ruled by judicial, presidential and congressional law.