Tuesday, voters in Oklahoma's 32d Senate District went to the polls in a special election to replace former senator John Montgomery, a moderate Republican, who resigned earlier in the year to run the Lawton Fort Sill Chamber of Commerce. The winner was Elgin, OK, businessman and pastor of the Southern Baptist Convention affiliated Grace Community Church Dusty Deevers. What makes the election of Deevers noteworthy is that he swept to an 11-point win over Democrat Larry Bush, a Lawton insurance agent running on a platform of applying Christian moral principles to governance. In contrast, Bush ran on education, crime control, criminal justice reform, access to health care, and the economy.
Yes, Dusty Deever is a self-identified "Christian Nationalist," and is probably on some FBI or DHS watch list with paid informers taping his sermons so the feds can link him to a conspiracy to overthrow the government.
From there, there is a straight line to the Founders. The First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion only applied to the federal government, with several states maintaining religious tests to hold office. Some state constitutions still require officeholders to profess a belief in God. It wasn't until Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) that religious tests were struck down. The purpose of the First Amendment was to prevent any Christian denomination — the target was explicitly the Anglican Church because of its close ties to England, which had served as a quasi-governmental agency for the Crown before independence — from achieving national church status.
From a Christian Nationalist viewpoint, many of the pathologies facing society today stem from an embrace of a libertine or libertarian philosophy that places individual and unordered liberty at the apex of cultural values. From that, we get abortion, no-fault divorce, rampant adultery and out-of-wedlock childbirths, the collapse of the nuclear family, drag queen story hours, homosexual marriage, the surgical mutilation of children, and on and on.
Deevers won on a campaign that was very much in this tradition, and he didn't sugarcoat what he stood for.
A constitutional conservative, Deevers has campaigned on abolishing abortion and vowed to support legislation that would allow prosecutors to charge women who undergo the procedure. Many anti-abortion Republicans in the GOP-led Legislature oppose changing state law to punish women for seeking an abortion.
An advocate for “traditional marriage,” Deevers has decried “LGBTQ indoctrination.” He opposes no-fault divorce and drag queen story hours and aims to abolish pornography.
Deevers said he plans to champion “biblical economic principles” of limited government, free market competition and lower taxes. He supports eliminating state income taxes and wants to reduce the 7% gross production tax oil and gas companies pay.
He also said he hopes to increase job opportunities and mental health resources for veterans.
His principled stances haven't won him any friends with the Southern Baptist Convention. When he ran for first vice president of the SBC, SBC President Ray Barber lambasted him for his views.
Deevers holds extreme anti-abortion views, known as abolitionist, and last year drew sharp critique from SBC President Bart Barber, who later apologized for his angry tone.
Barber had written: “Unless you 100% agree with every jot and tittle of Deevers’s obsession with sending 16-year-old girls to prison for succumbing to the coercion of their parents to have an abortion, he will label you ‘against the innocent preborn.’”
Christian liberty only happens within the context of a correctly formed conscience. Doing what you want because it feels good is not liberty; it is licentiousness and anarchy. Over the last 60 years, we've discovered that the glue holding America together was not individualism but our common Christian heritage. Without that glue, we see our culture disintegrating before our eyes. It is only by viewing the Constitution and the rights stemming from it through the lens of our Christian founding that we will survive.