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Peter Montgomery at PFAW's RWW:

A pastor aligned with the hard-right Reformed theology of influential Christian nationalist Doug Wilson is promoting and pursuing a plan to fulfill the “dominion mandate” by moving like-minded people into sparsely populated rural counties, colonizing and discipling “Christian settlements,” and building miniature civilizations based on their religious worldview. Raymond Simmons, a pastor and podcaster based in Red Oak, Iowa, is the author of “The Confessional County: Realizing the Kingdom through Local Christendom, which was published in 2021. Simmons talked about the book and his current colonizing project in a podcast interview posted on June 2 by Kevin Swanson, a promoter of Christian-right homeschooling curricula who spreads his ideas via a newsletter and radio show. Simmons promotes his own religious and political ideology at “The Confessionalists” website. Here’s the basic idea behind Simmons’ plan: The U.S. is under a “land curse” from God because it has allowed abortion, sexual immorality, sabbath-breaking, and idolatry to go unpunished. The nation as a whole is not going to make sufficient repentance to get out from under the curse, but Christians can receive God’s blessing by carving out smaller societies that officially repent and commit themselves to living in accordance with God’s law. “Spiritual warfare can be leveraged geographically,” Simmons writes. "Demons are not omnipresent and can be forced out of geographical areas through spiritual warfare.”

Quoting the late Christian Reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony, Simmons told Swanson the best way to do that in the U.S. is at the county level, specifically in rural counties, where a small but committed group of people can shape the culture and elect county officials who share their worldview. Simmons’ plan has some similarities with moves in Tennessee and elsewhere to create new conservative Christian communities. Simmons also makes reference to right-wing “Benedict Option” author Rod Dreher, who argues that Christians have so completely lost the culture war that they should focus on building their own communities. But Simmons argues that his own plan goes further in advancing Christendom. Many of Simmons’ ideas about what a Christian society should look like are similar to those expressed by Pete Hegseth’s spiritual mentor Doug Wilson, who Simmons cites repeatedly. But there’s one big difference. In response to criticism of his extremist goals, Wilson has tried to allay people’s fears by suggesting that the patriarchal Protestant republic of his dreams might be centuries in the making. Simmons believes his vision can be achieved at the local level far sooner.

[...]

The Plan: Colonizing Rural Counties

“According to the US Census Bureau, 97 percent of the country’s landmass is rural, but only 19.3 percent of the population lives there,” Simmons writes, creating an opportunity for Christian settlement. He refers admiringly to a Mennonite project of “Colonizing Rural America” and calls on people with Reformed theology to do the same. Simmons, who is a military veteran, repeatedly refers to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s strategy of the “oblique”—something other than a head-on attack. “Flanking maneuvers are usually done by a small unit, hopefully undetected until the strike,” he writes. “This book’s stratagems are best suited for a low population county without a strong culture.” [...] Simmons’ book gets practical, offering a set of conditions and characteristics of a county that might be successfully colonized into a “confessional county.” Among his criteria for an ideal settlement opportunity:

Good (i.e. lax) homeschool laws

A state with home rule but not Dillon Rule (which gives states authority to limit local powers)

High land freedom: low taxes, few and lightly enforced zoning restrictions and building codes

Rural with population under 10,000 that has a small town but is not growing via transplants or part of a larger city’s urban sprawl

Within daily driving distance of the state capital

No major college or university since they are “a primary source of pluralism and anti-Christian philosophy"

No well-respected “government schools” or county welfare and housing programs

No national retail chains that would fight sabbath laws

No state or federal agencies that employ more than a few people

No rich “God-hating families”

[...]

 Simmons considers the idea of human autonomy to be a core cultural problem, and his book reveals just how drastically autonomy and individual freedom would be restricted in societies built on his vision of Christendom.  Here are some quotes from the book’s suggested language for social confessions, with citations to Bible passages removed:

 Only Christian men in good standing in an evangelical church are qualified to hold public office. We repent of electing and supporting men who are not qualified according to Your standards. We repent of electing and supporting women to civil offices.

 The Christian faith is a public faith and makes claims upon all areas of life. We repent of laws and interpretations of laws that contravene Your command for us to proclaim Your name throughout the land. We repent of not calling men to repent and to obey the gospel.

 Abortion is murder and therefore breaks the Sixth Commandment and is a capital crime. We repent of any abortion in our country, state, and county. We repent of not punishing abortion according to Your law, and we ask that You heal our county and forgive us. We resolve that no abortion will be allowed to take place in our county. Please help us.

 Homosexuality is listed in multiple areas of the Bible as being a capital crime. We repent for allowing deliberate, public, unrepentant homosexuality in our nation, state, and county. Please heal the land of our county and forgive us.

 Adultery is a capital crime, and our failure to punish this crime has defiled the land. We repent of this sin and our lack of punishing it. Please, Lord, heal the land of our county and forgive us.

In small conservative rural counties it’s not hard for an organized group to sway elections for positions like county commissioner, sheriff, or auditor, says Simmons. He writes that in his county, with a population of just over 10,000, people can carry county elections with fewer than 400 votes in a GOP primary. When the right kind of people take political power, they can move to the next phase and begin to eliminate unbiblical property taxes, “government schools,” “government housing,” and “unbiblical funding of social programs.” Those are jobs for civil magistrates, but other goals are left to families and “general culture,” like the need to “make it undesirable for homosexuals to move in and defile the land.”

[...]

Why it Matters: The Christian Nationalist Threat to Freedom and Democracy

Whether or not Ray Simmons’ project to turn his Iowa county into a “confessional county” is successful, his effort reflects the threat that increasingly aggressive white Christian nationalism poses to personal freedom, religious liberty, peaceful pluralism, and democracy itself. The hard-right Reformed theology embraced by Simmons and people like Doug Wilson is just one aspect of the threat that right-wing Christian nationalism poses in the U.S. The fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and once a defender of church-state separation, has recently continued its long rightward shift with the election of new leadership by forces who decried a supposed drift toward “wokeness” within the denomination. Its new leadership is backed by MAGA Christian nationalist William Wolfe.  In addition, the dominionist religious and political ideology promoted by the Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation movement and its apostles and prophets has gained unprecedented influence during the Trump era. The language of Seven Mountains Dominionism has been adopted across the religious right as a means of mobilizing conservative Christians to greater political engagement. Democratic values are also threatened by “integralist” and “post-liberal” Catholic intellectuals who have given up on democracy, the secretive power-building of the far-right Catholic group Opus Dei, and the massively funded dark-money networks overseen by Leonard Leo, which played a major role in bringing us the reactionary Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, empowered Trump’s lawbreaking with an invented doctrine of presidential immunity, and has systematically dismantled the protections of the Voting Rights Act. While these movements are grounded in conservative forms of Christianity that differ theologically in significant ways, they have often set aside those differences to work in concert and in parallel to oppose legal access to abortion, reject feminism, resist legal protections for LGBTQ+ people, disparage and undermine the principle of church-state separation, and elect right-wing politicians, including President Donald Trump.

236 years ago today, the most extraordinary American who ever lived died in his bed in Philadelphia at the age of 84. He had been a candle maker's apprentice, a runaway teenager, a printer, a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, a philosopher, a Founding Father, and the man who talked France into helping America win its independence. Twenty thousand people came to his funeral. The French National Assembly went into mourning for three days. 🎖️🇺🇸

His name was Benjamin Franklin.

Born January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts — the fifteenth of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker who had emigrated from England, and Abiah Folger, a woman of Nantucket. The family was poor. Benjamin had two years of formal schooling — just two years — before his father pulled him out because he could not afford the fees.

At ten years old he was working in his father's candle shop. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer. At fifteen he was secretly writing essays for his brother's newspaper under the pseudonym Silence Dogood — a sharp-tongued, witty, fiercely independent widow who became one of the most popular voices in Boston without anyone knowing she was a twelve-year-old boy.

At seventeen he ran away.

He walked into Philadelphia on a Sunday morning in 1723 carrying everything he owned — hungry, tired, with three rolls of bread, one under each arm and one in his mouth. A girl named Deborah Read watched him from her front doorstep and thought he looked ridiculous. He noticed her. Seven years later they were married.

He spent the next sixty years building one of the most remarkable lives in the history of civilization.

As a printer and publisher he became one of the most influential voices in colonial America. The Pennsylvania Gazette — his newspaper — was the most widely read in the colonies. Poor Richard's Almanack — published every year from 1732 to 1757 under the pen name Richard Saunders — sold nearly ten thousand copies a year and filled American homes with the wit and practical wisdom that still echo in American culture. A penny saved is a penny earned. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise. These were not folk sayings. They were Franklin's.

As a scientist he was the most celebrated in the world. He proved that lightning was electricity — through the kite experiment in 1752, flying a kite with a metal key in a thunderstorm and drawing the electrical charge down a wet string into a Leyden jar. He invented the lightning rod that protected buildings across the world. He invented bifocals. He invented the flexible urinary catheter. He invented the Franklin stove. He invented swim fins. He discovered the Gulf Stream. He invented a musical instrument — the glass armonica — for which Mozart and Beethoven both composed pieces. He did all of this with two years of formal schooling.

He was elected to the Royal Society of London — the most prestigious scientific body in the world — on the strength of his electrical experiments. The French philosopher Kant called him the Prometheus of modern times. David Hume called him America's first great man of letters.

But his greatest work was political.

When the American Revolution came he was already 70 years old — an age at which most men of his era were dead. He had spent years in London arguing the colonies' case to the British Parliament. He had helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He had signed it. Then Congress sent him to France — the most important diplomatic assignment in American history.

He spent nine years in Paris as America's minister to France. He was the most famous American alive and one of the most famous people in the world. The French adored him. He played the role perfectly — the plain Quaker hat, the simple clothes, the wit, the warmth, the total absence of European court pretension. He secured the military alliance with France in 1778 that was absolutely essential to American victory. Without French troops and the French fleet, Washington almost certainly could not have won at Yorktown in 1781.

Without Benjamin Franklin there is no Treaty of Paris. Without the Treaty of Paris there is no United States.

He came home in 1785. He was 79 years old. He served as president of Pennsylvania. At 81 he was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention — carried to the sessions in a sedan chair because he was too frail to walk. He used his enormous prestige to broker the compromises that got the Constitution signed.

His very last public act — signed two months before he died — was a petition to Congress calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.

He died on April 17, 1790, at eleven o'clock at night. His last words, spoken to his daughter who had asked him to shift position in bed so he could breathe more easily, were: A dying man can do nothing easy.

Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. The French National Assembly went into three days of official mourning. George Washington wore black.

In his will he left money to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia — to be held in trust for two hundred years and then used for the public good. When the trusts matured in 1990 they were worth more than six million dollars. They funded trade schools, science museums, scholarships and community projects. He had planned it all before he died. Of course he had.

The candle maker's son who taught the world about lightning. The runaway teenager who helped create a nation. The old man in the sedan chair who used his last breath to say that all men deserved to be free.

Born with nothing. Built everything.