Preparing to wreck the constitution to save it
What is the difference between armed “patriots” and armed Taliban? Choice of personal weapon, perhaps? Laura Jedeed attended the Patriot Academy’s “Constitutional Defense” training camp last summer in New Mexico and writes about it for The New Republic. “The handgun course is a loss leader,” she came to see. “The ideology is the product.”
Founder Rick Green’s trainees are not preparing so much for armed insurrection as for getting 34 state legislatures to petition for an Article V convention of the states to rewrite the Constitution to better align with biblical principles. Many familiar conservative names and organizations back the efforts of Convention of States Action (COSA): the Mercer family, former Senator Jim DeMint, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), David Barton, and more.
In 2016, COSA organized a mock convention of the states in Virginia. The results delivered “the libertarian goods“:
After three days, the delegates emerged with six proposed amendments that abolished the federal income tax, imposed congressional term limits, and made it more difficult for the federal government to take on debt. They closed the commerce clause loophole and passed something Feingold described as the “John C. Calhoun amendment”: nullification of any federal law or regulation if 30 state legislatures vote to overturn it.
Underlying the effort, for the foot soldiers, if not for the funders, is the belief that the country must return to an imagined 18th-century utopia. They believe they are engaged in an existential struggle against evil. Only Christian principles, however defined, can save the U.S. from destruction. Yes, the Seven Mountains mandate is in there, too. Plus a staggeringly brazen claim that freedom is not possible without Christianity, a shoddy syllogism trainers expect inductees to accept without question:
“Benjamin Rush said if you don’t teach the Bible in every generation to the children, a constitutional republic will not survive,” Rick Green told my Constitutional Defense course in his opening lecture. “Because, without religion, you don’t have morality. And without morality, you don’t have liberty.”
“Biblical principles are what produce freedom of society,” Barton proclaims in Patriot Academy’s Biblical Citizenship class. “But you won’t have biblical principles in society in which you don’t have citizens with a biblical worldview.”
COSA means to ensure they do via a convention of the states:
This may sound like a theocracy to the untrained ear. Green wants you to know that it is not. “I don’t know a single person in our movement that wants a theocracy or wants a nation where everybody’s got to be a Christian,” he tells me. “Whether you’re atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish … everybody benefits from the freedom principles that came from a Christian society.”
I am beginning to get the picture. You will not be forced to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior in Biblical America. You will not be forced to attend church. But there will be prayer in school, and our history will be highly sanitized. Trans people will not have access to gender-affirming care, and marriage will be between a man and a woman. No one will force you to be a Christian in Rick Green’s America. But you will largely need to live like one.
Green hopes to construct a sprawling compound for year-round constitutional training,
… a combination of education facility and vacation destination that, for lack of a better phrase, he describes as “Disneyland for Patriots.” The campus will feature a full-scale replica of Independence Hall, where visitors can take constitutional classes (“without having to go to Philadelphia and get shot,” Green tells the class during his introductory lecture), and a mock-up of the Rotunda, where visitors can look at replica art (“without going to D.C. and getting arrested and having to spend a year and a half at the gulag”).
Once they finish retooling the Constitution, that dripping paranoia will turn to bliss.
Their remade America will not be like the Taliban’s Afghanistan, no. The Taliban carry AK-47s. Christian America carries AR-15s.