The Scary Religious Ideology Behind Michele Bachmann's Anti-Gay Crusade

People who don't like LGBT people often cite a range of reasons for their disdain. Take GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and her husband, Marcus. Gay people are "barbarians," Marcus Bachmann told a radio interviewer for a Christian program last year. LGBT people practice "sexual anarchy," Michele Bachmann told a conference of Minnesota educators in 2004, and could wind up recruiting 8-year-old boys to their way of life if openly gay teachers are permitted in the classroom.

And then there's the Bible, which calls for the death penalty for men who have sex with each other. While Bachmann has never made that call herself, her religious views appear to be heavily influenced by a theological strain known as Christian Reconstructionism, which in matters of sexuality and gender relations places great emphasis on the draconian law of the Old Testament Book of Leviticus.

Writing for Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner this week exposed the Reconstructionist roots of the law school Bachmann attended at Oral Roberts University. The language and theory of Christian Reconstructionism turns up frequently in Bachmann's speeches.

In the 1970s, as Posner tells it, Oral Roberts University, founded by the famous Pentecostal faith healer, wanted to launch a law school, but at that time, no real model existed for such a school of jurisprudence designed to serve an evangelical student body. Roberts brought in Harvard Law School graduate Herb Titus, a student of the work of John Rousas Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism, to build the law school's program.

Titus would go on to become the 1996 presidential candidate for Howard Phillips’ Constitution Party (then called the U.S. Taxpayers Party). Despite its secular-sounding name, the party's mission was, according to Posner, “restor[ing] American jurisprudence to its biblical foundations and limit[ing] the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.”

That merging of ideas and sensibilities -- the expressive Pentacostal with the stern and austere Reconstructionist -- was truly radical at the time. To the liberal mind, all Christian evangelism tends to look the same. But it wasn’t until politics mandated a union of convenience that one would find the likes of Herb Titus, or, for that matter, the fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell and the charismatic dominionist Pat Robertson, playing on the same team.

The logic in bringing Titus to ORU was likely this: Pentacostalism, though rooted in Christian theology, has more emphasis on the spiritual expression of the divine through the human body than on codification. Yes, the mores are conservative and gender-bound, but Pentacostalism is about the visceral experience of the power of that conservative, male God as a transformative force. Christian Reconstructionism is based on a text, the Institutes of Biblical Law, that reads like one long legal and philosophical argument for the law of the ancient Hebrew Bible.

If you listen closely to the rhetoric of both Michele and Marcus Bachmann, particularly on the subject of “homosexuality,” you find the Reconstructionist worldview in their word choices. Marcus Bachmann’s use of the term “barbaric” to describe gay people comes from the Reconstructionist notion that societies that permit practices -- especially sexual practices -- that are proscribed by the Bible are inherently pagan. John Rushdoony did not allow for the absence of religion or a secular society: whatever law governed a society, he writes in Institutes of Biblical Law, constituted its “religion.” Because homosexuality was practiced in pre-Christian, non-Jewish societies, those who practice it today are inherently “pagan.” For images of such pagan societies, Rushdoony turns to those cultures that truly had barbaric practices, such as the Romans.