God and Alabama
Alabama’s Sept. 26 election of former judge Roy Moore in its GOP primary for U.S. Senate should give everyone pause, believers and unbelievers alike. He beat incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, roughly 55 percent to 45 percent.
Twice suspended (in 2003 and 2016) from his post as chief justice of his state’s supreme court for defying U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Moore has long contended that “God’s law” (i.e., the Bible) supersedes human law and that that the end of the world is nigh. He routinely opened Alabama high court sessions with a prayer invoking divine guidance in jurists’ deliberations.
Moore’s judicial suspensions were for ignoring a federal court order to remove from his courthouse an unconstitutionally placed Ten Commandments monument, and for defying a Supreme Court decision establishing same-sex marriages as legal nationwide. He resigned in 2017. Although he won the state Senate primary race this month, he was beaten badly in two GOP primary runs for governor, in 2006 and 2010.
A darling of evangelicals, as is Donald Trump, Moore is an aggressively doctrinaire Christian as well as a former professional kickboxer. He has been quoted as believing that Christianity’s declining influence in America in recent decades inversely “corresponded directly with school violence, homosexuality, and crime.” When first sworn in as chief justice in Alabama, in 2001, Moore declared, “My mind had been opened to the spiritual war occurring in our state and our nation that was slowly removing the knowledge of that relationship between God and law.” Moore said the preamble to the state’s Constitution codified a sacred, indivisible connection between God and secular law—and the “sovereignty” of the divine—saying justice was established by “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
He believes secular laws may be arbitrarily deemed unlawful if they are seen to contradict God’s laws. In other words, that people should legally be able to ignore laws that offend their personal faith.
Moore is also not a proponent of the American ideal of religious freedom and toleration, opining in the conservative conspiracy webswite WorldNetDaily in 2006 that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to sit in Congress because Islam only recognizes itself, and because the U.S. was then at war with Islamic terrorism.
As the establishment GOP appears to be hemorrhaging power and influence—the GOP establishment and President Trump backed Moore’s primary opponent—the writing may be on the wall for future elections skewed by evangelicals.
When Moore competes in the general election in December, Alabama voters should note that endorsing religious sovereignty would not negate the same theocratic effects if another religious zealot of a non-Christian faith were elected.
