...what would a religious right conference be without a book table featuring a book by one time advertised male prostitute and faux White House correspondent, Jeff Gannon... and another selling R.J. Rushdoony's seminal theocratic text the Institutes of Biblical Law?

Somehow, these are appropriate bookends of the religious right, representing the absolute corruption of the Bush era, and the resolutely theocratic intentions of much of the religious right, and how they have lived in an ever-turbulent mix of harmony and tension.

There is a lot of silly dismissiveness about the role of Christian Reconstuctionism in the religious right.  But as Max has shown -- you don't have to look far to find it, even in its purer forms. It's always in the mix.

A few months ago, I wrote a bit about how Christian Reconstructionism is filtering into the mainstream of the religious right. Exhibit A was a

conference, titled "Preparing This Generation to Capture the Future," was organized by the Powder Springs, Georgia-based American Vision, a Christian Reconstructionist think tank and publishing house founded in 1978 and headed by Gary DeMar. The event was sponsored, which is to say, bankrolled by such major organizations as the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal strategy organization which was created by top evangelical broadcasters including James Dobson (Focus on the Family political honcho Tom Minnery is on the board ; Liberty University Schoool of Law (where Newt Gingrich recent gave the commencement address), Home School Legal Defense Association, Summit Minisitries and World magazine, edited by former Bush advisor Marvin Olasky. Time was, when leaders of the religious right, including the Falwell empire, were afraid to too publicly associate with Reconstructionists like American Vision honcho Gary DeMar and Gary North. But apparently, the days of worrying about associating with overt advocates of Biblical theocracy are over. Jeremy reports on the Worldview Super Conference, organized by Reconstructionist Gary DeMar, in the current issue of Church and State magazine. Writes Leaming: The event was promoted heavily by the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, and it was held in a facility owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination and a religious body closely aligned with the Bush administration.

I continued:

Back in 1994, I wrote a multi-part article on the Christian Reconstructionist movement for the scholarly Public Eye magazine. Obscure to most Americans, even many conservative evangelicals, it is neverthless and important ideological engine that has animated the religious right political movement for several decades. I wrote at the time, that Reconstructionism is a movement of ideas, comprising a number of scholars and publishing houses and a few small organizations. Then as now, relatively few people call themselves Reconstructionists, and many flee the label, largely because the ideas of the explicitly theocratic Reconstructionist writers are considered too controversial, even in conservative Christian circles. There were and are many reasons for this. One of the main reasons is that the Biblically-based criminal code they advocate, has a long list of capital crimes, as derived from the books of the Old Testament. These are mostly religious and sex crimes, such as heresy, apostacy, blasphemy, and propagation of false doctrines; as well as adultery and homosexuality, and in the case of women, unchastity before marriage. Approved methods of execution are burning, stoning and "the sword." Neverthless, I wrote at the time:

For much of Reconstructionism's short history it has been an ideology in search of a constituency. But its influence has grown far beyond the founders' expectations. As Reconstructionist author Gary North observes, "We once were shepherds without sheep. No longer."

But other than Max ( as far as I know) there was no other reporter present who noticed the signficance of these things.