Extremist Christians Aim to Create Armed Militias Against "Godless" Federal Government

The following is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. You can sign up for their free daily newsletter here.

Herb Titus, a lawyer for the far-right Gun Owners of America, is jubilant over last week’s Supreme Court decision in the case McDonald v. City of Chicago, finding that state and local regulation of gun ownership must comport with the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The decision has also pleased the National Rifle Association, which sees it as ammunition for challenging gun control laws across the country. But for Titus, who thinks the NRA “compromises” on gun rights, the Second Amendment isn’t solely about “firepower,” he says. “You have to see it in its spiritual and providential perspective.”

That perspective is about far more than hunting and self-defense. For Titus, the Court’s 2008 recognition of an individual right to bear arms, and its application of that principle to the states in the McDonald case, are crucial steps toward arming Americans against their own government. Titus cites the “totalitarian threat” posed by “Obamacare” and “what Sarah Palin said about death panels.” People need to be armed, he said, “because ultimately it may come to the point where it’s a life and death situation.”

Titus, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the GOA, an organization which claims 300,000 members, told RD that “the ultimate authority is God.”

“[I]f you have a people that has basically been disarmed by the civil government,” he added, “then there really isn’t any effectual means available to the people to restore law and liberty and that’s really the purpose of the right keep and bear arms—is to defend yourself against a tyrant.”

If this sounds like standard-issue Tea Party fodder, it’s because the Tea Party movement emerges out of the confluence of different strands of the far right, including Christian Reconstructionism. Titus has long been a player at the intersection of Christian Reconstructionism, the standard religious right, and other far-right groups in which the Tea Party finds its roots. He was a speaker at the Reconstructionist American Vision’s annual “Worldview Conference” in 2009, has been a member of the Council for National Policy, and is a longtime homeschooling advocate from a Reconstructionist perspective. In 1996 he was the running mate of conservative icon (and Christian Reconstructionist) Howard Phillips for the far-right US Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party) whose platform included the restoration of “American jurisprudence to its biblical premises” and, notably, opposition to every gun law in the United States.

Now a lawyer with the firm William J. Olson, P.C., Titus was a founding dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School, where he was the chair of a three-member committee that supervised Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s now-notorious graduate thesis. In it, a recitation of the religious right’s agenda, McDonnell called working women and feminists "detrimental" to the family, argued for policy favoring married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators,” and called the 1972 legalization of contraception by married couples “illogical.” During his 2009 campaign, McDonnell tried to distance himself from his own work, but Titus told the Washington Post that McDonnell’s thesis was “right.”

In 2004, after Judge Roy Moore, another Titus client, was stripped of his position for defying a federal court order to remove his 2.6-ton monument to the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court, he joined Titus in drafting the Constitution Restoration Act. The bill, had it passed, would have deprived federal courts of jurisdiction to hear cases challenging a government entity’s or official’s “acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”