Jennifer Fielder
After I published my column Sunday, many readers asked which legislators were responsible for bringing in Matt Trewhella to speak in the Capitol rotunda.
Trewhella, you will recall, is the Wisconsin minister who is on a crusade—yeah, let’s call it a crusade—to establish a theocracy in the United States. He delivered an “Election Sermon” in the Capitol on Jan. 4, the day before the opening of the 2015 Montana Legislature.
Alan Doane
I wrote that he was “invited” to the Capitol by far-right Republican legislators, but that was probably the wrong word. The sermon, the fifth in a series that began in 2007, was sponsored by the Covenant Community Church in Whitehall. (The website lists the sermons according to the election year they addressed, not the year in which they were delivered.)
The Helena Independent Record reported that Sen. Jennifer Fielder, R-Thompson Falls, was “one of the host legislators.” And a news outlet called Examiner.com identified two other host legislators as Reps. Alan Doane, R-Bloomfield, and Wendy McKamey, R-Great Falls.
I’m not sure what it means to “host,” such a gathering, but there you are. Examiner.com, which is a network of localized websites that uses paid-by-the-click freelance writers, reported that Trewhella “encouraged 40 to 50 of Montana’s incoming legislators to take their responsibility as lesser magistrates seriously.”
Trewhella has written a book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” which basically argues that lower-ranking civil authority “has both the right and duty to refuse obedience” to superior authority when it makes an unjust or immoral decree.
On its website, the Covenant Community Church expands on that idea, saying:
One of the greatest errors, or downright perversions, of our day is the return to that pernicious doctrine that the Christian owes unqualified obedience to the civil government… . We are shameful wimps that disgrace the memories of our faithful fathers who stood boldly in the face of Kings and Potentates who dared to usurp the prerogatives of God and his people.
Apparently, according to Examiner.com, Trewhella’s message was well received in Helena:
“I had many [legislators] come up to me and tell me, ‘This is something we need to look into more and learn more about,’” he explained. “When people are taught for the word of God regarding civil government, they are able to see the purpose, functions and limits of civil government,” he said, adding that when citizens remain ignorant of these matters “it makes it much easier for the state to do things beyond its biblical or constitutional limits or restraints.”
Wendy McKamey
So, at least according to this article, we have state legislators who believe that civil authorities operate under biblical limits or restraints. Normally, the debate over the separation of church and state deals with fairly nuanced arguments, such as whether a clerk’s duty to issue a marriage license to a gay couple can be characterized as interference with the practice of the clerk’s religion.
With Trewhella and his believers, we enter into a whole new realm of frank theocracy, of unapologetic promotion of the idea that civil authorities operate solely under the authority granted to them by Jesus Christ.
Here is yet more of the Examiner.com’s coverage of Trewhella’s sermon:
It was made clear that all civil magistrates are “ministers of God” (Roms. 13:4), and that when a higher magistrate manifests a rejection of the authority of Jesus Christ it is up to the lesser magistrate to employ authority to first, bring the higher magistrate back under the authority of Jesus Christ, and that being unsuccessful, to protect the people in their jurisdiction from the tyranny which emotes from a rogue government.
According to the same article, we Montanans have an unhappy distinction as a result of having allowed Trewhella to speak in our Capitol: “The Election Day Sermon has a long history on the North American Continent yet Montana is the only state in the union to hold an Election Day Sermon in the capitol building directed especially at elected officials today.”
It is more than a little disconcerting to think that as many as third of our 150 state legislators would attend a sermon by a man whose principles are so bizarrely unconstitutional, and whose calls to action border on treasonous.
And you will not be surprised to learn that Trewhella preemptively dismissed such criticism. From Examiner.com again:
While some media outlets demonized Trewhella for the content of his speech and his stance on biblical morality, he states that God used the negative publicity for good.
“[The mainstream media is] at war with Christ. They promote everything evil and licentious, and they actually make evil look good and good look evil,” he stated. “So, I’m not surprised by them attacking what we’re doing. I pay very little attention to it.”
