Imprecator Steven L. Anderson Back in the News

[Joanne98]

Rev. Steven V. Anderson is back in the news. Readers may remember that last year Anderson collaborated with a parishioner who protested an appearance by president Obama by openly carrying guns. Prior to Obama's arrival in town, Anderson devoted his Sunday sermon to denouncing Obama for his views on abortion and homosexuality and prayed for his death.
This time, controversy broke out following news that Anderson and his Word of Faith Baptist Church had made the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent list of antigay hate groups. In a radio interview Anderson agreed that he hates gay people, thinks they should be executed, and that vigilante machine gunning might be ok:


Signorile: You want all gay people to be executed, correct?
Anderson: That is correct.
Signorile: Yes. And that, you would like to see as the law of the land. So, under the American law right now, if somebody were to go out with a machine gun and spray down a crowd of gay and lesbian people, would you think that was okay?
Anderson: No, I would not think it's okay because I believe in due process.
Signorile: Would that person be a murderer?
Anderson: I would not judge them as a murderer, no.

All this is well presented in a diary at Daily Kos. All, except for all the other stuff.



As good as that diary is in detailing Anderson's anti-gay extremism, it misses the wider context of Anderson's comprehensive world view -- on everything from the need to pray for the death of president Obama because he is prochoice to his involvement in the theocratic Constitution Party and his claim to be a gun dealer operating in several states. Anderson like many of his Constitution Party colleagues becomes quite unhinged when preaching against not only homosexuality, but abortion. He is also passionate about guns and immigration, having involved himself in border vigilantism. It is in this sense that Anderson's antigay politics are part of a comprehensive worldview that unifies and informs his attitudes and actions on a wide range of things.
Single issue politics can provide an intense and laser like focus on people, events and ideas that merit exposure. But sometimes, such intensive focus can obscure things that also urgently need to be known about someone like Anderson, whose significance extends far beyond his antigay views.

I wrote last year:



The night before Broughton's fifteen minutes of fame, he attended a fiery Sunday sermon by his pastor, Rev. Steven L. Anderson, at Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Rev. Anderson, also 28, explained not only "Why I Hate Barack Obama," but also why he and God both want the president dead. "When I go to bed tonight," Broughton's pastor declared, "Steven L. Anderson is going to pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell." He even goes so far as to claim that:
"God appointed to destroy this country for the wickedness of the United States of America. God appointed him because that's what our country has turned into. That's who we deserve as a president."

At a teabagger rally in Arizona, Anderson denounced both the Republican and Democratic Parties, declaring without a hint of irony that Obama, the "worst president" in American history, is "selling us into slavery and serfdom." Further research revealed Anderson's involvement in the Constitution Party, the third largest "third party" in the U.S. In a June speech to the state convention of the Arizona Constitution Party he introduced himself (in addition to being pastor of ) as owner of a "firearms business" operating in "several states" and closed with a plea for an American government based on God's laws as set out in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy.

The Constitution Party, which has tended to be the political home for people with views strikingly similar to Anderson's, is frequently dismissed as a fringe party of little electoral consequence, even though its significance lies elsewhere. It is in fact a steaming hotbed of far right factions with theocratic, vigilante, and sometimes revolutionary ideas whose like-minded members get together to make their plans, just like any other organized faction in American public life. The party says it is 100% pro-life and pro-gun.

Many of the party's early leaders were Christian Reconstructionists, or heavily influenced by Reconstructionism, including party founder and three-time presidential candidate Howard Phillips. Reconstructionism is a theocratic systematic theology whose seminal thinker, the late R.J. Rushdoony, spoke at the Constitution Party's founding convention and was a longtime advisor to Phillips. Reconstructionism was one of the significant theological catalysts for the modern Religious Right--a movement, like other social and political movements throughout history, that has transcended party identification.

The Constitution Party has also been a political home to a wide array of militia proponents, including one of the movement's leading theorists, Larry Pratt, head of Gun Owners of America, Rev. Matthew Trewhella, founder of Missionaries to the Preborn who has urged parents to buy each of their children "an SKS rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition" for their church militia; Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, (who ran as a Constitution Party candidate for Congress in 1998, but who has since become a Republican); and even Rev. Michael Bray, a convicted felon and longtime leader in the Army of God.

I suspect that further digging would turn up much more eyebrow, if not hair raising material about Anderson that would help us to understand how to best understand his antigay views, along with all the rest of his demagogic approaches to the hot button issues of the day.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/12/3/223958/687