Following the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling that frozen embryos are essentially children, Chief Justice Tom Parker has been under scrutiny for his ties with fringe Christian Nationalism, particularly his seeming espousal of "Seven Mountains" theology, reports NPR. Parker, a Republican who joined the court in 2005, wrote a concurring opinion that quoted at length from sources such as the Book of Genesis, the Ten Commandments and Christian thinkers of centuries ago, such as Thomas Aquinas. But in other writings, his beliefs and their effect on his legal scholarship have raised more questions.
Parker said on a recent podcast that "God created government" and "He is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains," the mountains being a reference to the areas of life that the Seven Mountains Mandate urges its followers to take control of in order to restore God's kingdom on earth. Those areas include government, education, commerce and media. His remarks came out the same day as the IVF ruling, and his ties to this once-fringe and now more mainstream Christian movement go back decades. "The Seven Mountains is a structured outline for Christian supremacy," said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. "It is a real Christian Nationalist threat to our judicial system to have Supreme Court justices who understand theologically and think of themselves theologically as above precedent and the rule of law." Parker's position as a chief justice and as an influential member of a Christian Nationalist movement raises questions about the separation of church and state, Taylor said.