The drive toward an authoritarian theocracy
“Ladies and Gentlemen, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.” I clearly remember this call from a pulpit decades ago because it seemed so odd to hear such a thing in church. Rev. D. James Kennedy, a ballroom dancing instructor in the 1950s who became senior pastor of Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., grandly announced: “The Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible!”
Down from the rafters, hanging on wires above the pulpit descended a huge Bible seemingly ablaze. Accompanied by old time miracle-riffs on an organ, Kennedy’s congregants stood with hand over heart to recite a chilling pledge of allegiance to The Word: “I pledge allegiance to the Bible….”. I went to Coral Ridge to see for myself how Kennedy preached about “the infamous men of Sodom who have moved into our churches.” I was one of those men. In the 1980s, when visiting my hometown Dallas, I attended what is still considered the largest LGBTQ church in the world, the Cathedral of Hope. I had helped this church raise money for a chapel to be designed by gay architect Philip Johnson (1906-2005). I had not experienced Christian Nationalists warning about the “men of Sodom moving into our churches” until I saw that giant hanging Bible in Fort Lauderdale.
A pledge of allegiance to a flying Bible seems quaint compared to today’s Christian Nationalist movement, now a pillar of the new Trump presidency, which evangelical leaders liken to a “Red Sea moment in America.” One leader recently compared Donald Trump to Moses parting the Red Sea allowing his people safe passage into a new Promised Land. Amanda Tyler, the lead organizer of the Christians Against Christian Nationalism Campaign of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C., warns in her new book the U.S. is now at “a high tide of Christian Nationalism.”
Charles Francis 