Exodus executive director Alan Chambers will speak at the Center for Reclaiming America’s 2003 political conference.
The Center for Reclaiming America is a part of Coral Ridge Ministries, a Christian Reconstructionist organization headed by D. James Kennedy. (Google search of Kennedy’s involvement in Christian Reconstruction.)
Of the 25 scheduled speakers, 24 are white and 20 are male. Chambers, Kennedy and several other speakers are on record in favor of discrimination against gays in employment and in family, government and religious services.
The conference web site promotes a rather small morality consisting solely of sexual issues — abortion, abstinence, and homosexuality — and allegiance to a secular American political deity. This blend of sexual preoccupation and patriotic spirituality seems to be channeled ever-so-slightly toward Coral Ridge Ministries’ goal: to replace existing Constitutional law with priority material from the Old Testament.
On the ministry’s web site, Biblical passages defining morality in economic, racial, gender and social terms are treated as though they did not exist. A conservative Protestant America is viewed as central to God’s universe. And religious pluralism is assumed to be wicked. When the site refers generically to “Christians,” it seems to be referring narrowly to an underdog minority within Christianity that shares the religious right’s sex-dominated political objectives.
One potential inference gathered from this: If you don’t share the conference organizers’ faith in an Americanized deity, or their heavily abridged morality, then you aren’t a Christian.
This finger-pointing by the ministry and its allies at the majority of Christians would be ironic, because many mainstream Christian leaders view Christian Reconstruction, otherwise known as dominion theology, as a heresy.