The theocrats are on the march, and they won’t rest until they have overthrown the Founding Fathers’ vision of a secular republic. We used to call them “Fundamentalists,” but now they are known as “Christian nationalists” or Dominionists. Different name. Same game. Make America a Christian nation, but their kind of Christian.

The Founding Fathers had studied history. They knew that Europe had been torn apart by religious wars and religious persecution. They wanted their new nation to be free of sectarian strife. Their Constitution foot the action protected free exercise of religion while assuring that government neither favored nor disfavored any religion.

Frederick Clarkson wrote a frightening article for Salon about the determination of the evangelical right to conquer the nation for their religious views.

Their target right now, he writes, is Pennsylvania, but they are active in every state. This is ironic because Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers, who were committed to religious freedom, and Quakers would not be welcome in the society envisioned by these militant evangelicals.

Clarkson begins:

“You’ve got a friend in Pennsylvania!” was the theme of the state’s ad campaign to promote tourism in the 1980s. That was a veiled historical reference to the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, the liberal Christian sect to which William Penn, for whom Pennsylvania is named, belonged. But since the early 2000s there has been a quiet campaign in the Keystone State and beyond to unfriend anyone outside certain precincts of Christianity — and most Quakers would almost certainly be among the outcasts.

That campaign got a lot less quiet this April, as many leaders of the neo-charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, who have been hiding in plain sight for a generation, began ramping up a contest for theocratic power in the nation and the world. Their first target is Pennsylvania.

On April 30, Sean Feucht, a musician and evangelist for conservative Christian dominion, spoke at Life Center Ministries, the Harrisburg megachurch of Apostle Charles Stock. (The honorific “Apostle” designates a leading church office in the NAR. That said, there are many apostles in the movement, and not all of them pastor churches.) During his appearance, Feucht highlighted his national tour of state capitals, called Kingdom to the Capitol, that he was conducting along with Turning Point USA, the far-right youth group led by Charlie Kirk. “[W]e are going to end this 50-state tour here in Harrisburg,” he announced….

Feucht’s effort to connect young people with what his movement considers William Penn’s ancient vision for Pennsylvania is part of the wider, epochal campaign of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a movement at the cutting edge of Pentecostal and Charismatic evangelicalism, which is now the second largest Christian faction in the world after the Roman Catholic Church and the largest growth sector in American and global Christianity…

The NAR seeks to consolidate those Christians it recognizes as “the Church” in what it believes to be the End Times. Although many NAR leaders have been closely aligned with Donald Trump, they insist that they aim for a utopian biblical kingdom where only God’s laws are enforced. Most therefore hold to a vision of Christian dominion over what they call the “seven mountains“: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. (This is what is meant by Dominionism.)

This aggressive movement is in conflict with the republic created by the Founding Fathers. It seeks control, power, for its faith only.

Educate yourself.