The Exodus Society

There was an article in this past Sunday's Boston Globe (hereinafter just the Globe) about the Exodus Society, a bunch of far out Evangelicals, who want to make northern South Carolina, their version of God's Kingdom On Earth. The idea is to have 6000 or so like minded thinkers more there so they can have enough political power to their members on school committees, city councils and such so they can eventually control the politics of South Carolina.

They take their cue from a Biblical verse that says 'separate yourself from them', ie non-believers and drop out from the society around them. They want to separate themselves from outside culture that they disdain like Hollywood, gays, liberals, and the evil teaching of evolution as well as the government in Washington. They want a government, by Evangelicals and for Evangelicals and they think that the Federal Government oversteps its bounds in too many areas.

The irony of all this is the Federal Government is made up of their kind of people: a conservative President, a conservative party controlling all three branches of government which wants to pack the Supreme Court with right-wing ideologues. Even funnier, South Carolina is one of the most conservative states in the Union, so what are hoping to change exactly? They want a theocracy that excludes gays and where government out of the way of their form of Christianity. And, if they don't get it, they'll seceed from the Union.

Their idea is not to co-exist with people who don't share their extrmist views, to simply wall themselves from ideas they don't like...

So why don't we ALL do that kind of thing? The United States is almost the size of the continent of Europe, made up of 50 individual countries. So why don't we all go our separate ways? Lets have a 'gay' state - where marriage will be legal, a 'womens' state with abortion on demand, a 'New Africa' state for blacks where they won't have to deal with white racism, a 'Mexican' state where Spanish only is spoken and a 'WASP' state where the only news is from Clear Channel, Fox and Sinclair Broadcasting. Should make everybody happy, right? Let's all go our individual ways, become our own little countries where no one will have to tolerate anybody else.

But all this has been tried before. If these people knew their history, other than Creationism. There was New Harmony, Indiana, George Pullman's Railroad Company Town, Moonies in Oregon and of course, the state of Utah, which was created to be a theocracy. It is because of Mormon unwillingness to deal with people who didn't share their views that led to the Mormon Wars with the US Army in the 1850s. And then there was the issue of secession in the 1860s and you know what that led to...