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Tucked away a few miles off Interstate 40 just outside Asheville, N.C., the LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center provides Southern Baptists with a remote place to facilitate the nurturing of "Biblical Solutions for Life."
The sprawling 1,300-acre compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains is made up of chapels, a book store, café, guest housing, drab-colored brick buildings, fences topped with barbed wire and plenty of wooded grounds for religious contemplation or recreation. It is not easily or quickly located; its address cannot be found via a Google Maps search or traced on a Global Positioning System (GPS).
Despite its isolated location, during the last week of May hundreds of Religious Right activists and their families made their way there for a four-day "Worldview Super Conference." They came to hear fundamentalist Christian speakers rail about the nation's moral confusion, claim the public schools are bastions of secular humanism and warn that Christians, especially their type of Christians, are in danger of being persecuted by America.
The gathering, dubbed "Preparing This Generation to Capture the Future," was hosted by American Vision, a ministry that has been toiling away since 1978 to "help Christians build a truly Biblical worldview." In a conference handout, American Vision states that "By God's grace, we will work together to make America a truly Christian nation for our children's children."
Based in Powder Springs, Ga., American Vision also produces reams of material that push Christian Reconstructionism, a form of fundamentalism that argues for a re-writing of American history, dismantling secular democracy and constructing an America governed by "biblical law." Reconstructionists seek to impose the criminal code of the Old Testament, applying the death penalty for homosexuals, adulterers, fornicators, witches, incorrigible juvenile delinquents and those who spread false religions.
Despite its overtly radical theocratic agenda, American Vision is allied with some of the Religious Right's most powerful outfits. This year's conference was cosponsored by the Alliance Defense Fund, a well-funded Religious Right lawyers' outfit that James Dobson and other religious broadcasters helped create; Michael Farris's Home School Legal Defense Association; the late TV preacher Jerry Falwell's Liberty University School of Law; and World Magazine, Marvin Olasky's influential evangelical Christian periodical.
The event was promoted heavily by the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, and it was held in a facility owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination and a religious body closely aligned with the Bush administration.
In an opening prayer, American Vision President Gary DeMar set the stage for what would be a major theme running through the gathering: restoring the sovereignty of God and God's people -- namely, folks like those at the conference.
"We know," said DeMar, "that you are a sovereign and omniscient God.... We know that you have called us to be responsible servants in the advancement of your kingdom through the proclamation of the gospel and the application of your word in every area of life."
Worldview speaker after speaker vacillated between decrying the nation as wildly secular and ready for a radical makeover led by fundamentalist Christians.
One of the first speakers, Gary Cass, offered a dire picture of a country that is doomed unless it embraces a rigid form of government led by fundamentalist Christian edicts.
"We need a new American vision," said Cass, former head of TV preacher D. James Kennedy's now-defunct Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, "because we've lost our biblical heritage, our Christian birthright, which has been given to us by our founders, we have squandered for a poisonous bowl of atheistic humanism and political correctness.
"And now our culture is experiencing its deadly effects," he continued. "The putrid stench of the culture of death fills our living rooms, coming to us every night on the evening news. And this Worldview weekend, I believe, is the antidote for the culture of death."
He continued, "By God's grace you are here to reclaim our godly heritage and to reassert, without apology to the atheists and the neo-pagans of our day, that this was and is a Christian nation, built on Christian ideals."
Cass's stark call for a fundamentalist Christian takeover of America was later followed by claims that the nation is increasingly hostile to religious people. To some chuckles from the audience, he insisted that the United States is in "great need of a Christian anti-defamation league."
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