The following is a long excerpt of an article written by Michelle Goldberg, who has written a lot about The Family, and a book about the Christian Right called
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. I watched a discussion she was in where it was mentioned that Ron Paul (and apparently Rand) have deep connections to the radical Christian Reconstructionist Movement. Gary North is mentioned, a fellow Reconstructionist and he is a fellow of the Austrian Economic School's Ludwig von Mises Institute. North had come to my attention, back in the day, as he wrote a popular newsletter guiding people on how to navigate the financial turmoils of the day.
Back in the day we all thought the libertarian movement was almost completely secular. The following is more than enough to warm the hearts of the crypto-monarchists of the Mont Pelerin Society. "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do, or who they do it for."
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Nevertheless, Paul’s support among the country’s most committed theocrats is deep and longstanding, something that’s poorly understood among those who simply see him as a libertarian. That’s why it wasn’t surprising when the Paul campaign touted the endorsement of Phil Kayser, a Nebraska pastor with an Iowa following who calls for the execution of homosexuals. Nor was it shocking to learn that Mike Heath, Paul’s Iowa state director, is a former board chairman of “Americans for Truth About Homosexuality,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Should Paul win the Iowa caucuses, it will actually be a triumph for a fundamentalist faction that has until now been considered a fringe even on the Christian right.
To understand Paul’s religious-right support, it’s necessary to wade a bit into the theological weeds. Most American evangelicals are premillennial dispensationalists. They believe that God has a special plan for the nation of Israel, which will play a key role in the end of days and the return of Christ. A smaller segment of evangelicals hews to what’s called reformed or covenant theology, which, as Deace explains, “tends to teach that in this day the church is what Israel was in the Old Testament.” In other words, Christians are the new chosen people. Covenant theologians aren’t necessarily anti-Israel, but they don’t give it any special religious significance.
Covenant theologians, it’s important to stress, aren’t more liberal than mainstream evangelicals. In fact, they’re often much further to the right. While dispensationalists believe that Christ will return imminently and establish a biblical reign on earth, covenant theologians tend to believe its man’s job to create Christ’s kingdom before he comes back. The most radical faction of covenant theology is called Christian Reconstructionism, a movement founded by R. J. Rushdoony that seeks to turn the book of Leviticus into law, imposing the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, unchaste women, and myriad other sinners.
Mainstream figures in the religious right have typically recoiled from Reconstructionists, even as they’ve incorporated ideas that originated in the movement. In 1981, for example, Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law and a key theorist of Christian Reconstructionism, wrote of the need to “smooth the transition to Christian political leadership … Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing political order.” That’s exactly what Ralph Reed did when he set out to capture the Republican Party for the Christian Coalition. Nevertheless, writing in his 1996 book, Active Faith, Reed denounced Reconstructionism as “an authoritarian ideology that threatens the most basic civil liberties of a free and democratic society.”
Ron Paul has long been a favorite politician of Christian Reconstructionists. North was a Paul staffer during the Texas congressman’s first term and has called him the “mahatma of self-government.” As Adele Stan reported on Alternet, in 2008, Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist who founded the Constitution Party, was the keynote speaker at the rally Paul convened in the shadow of the Republican convention. (That year, Paul endorsed the Constitution Party candidate for president over John McCain.) “The people who I know who are big Ron Paul guys are old school Reconstructionists,” says Paul supporter Brian D. Nolder, the pastor of Christ the Redeemer Church in Pella, Iowa.
It might seem that Paul’s libertarianism is the very opposite of theocracy, but that’s true only if you want to impose theocracy at the federal level. In general, Christian Reconstructionists favor a radically decentralized society, with communities ruled by male religious patriarchs. Freed from the power of the Supreme Court and the federal government, they believe that local governments could adopt official religions and enforce biblical law.
“One of the things we forget is that when the Constitution was passed, even though the Bill of Rights said there was going to be no federal religions, every state in the union had basically a state religion and the Constitution was not designed to overturn that,” says Nolder. Among Reconstructionists, he says, “there’s a desire for a theocracy, but it has to be one from the bottom up, not from the top down.” ...
It is true that every American colony was essentially uniquely theocratic in nature (as separate cults), as the colonies were established by Crown (also the head of the Church of England) permission to be this way. For instance, Mary-land was the Catholic colony.