“Christian nation” advocate David Lane is organizing pastors in more than a dozen states in order to elect like-minded candidates, and hopes to get conservative evangelicals to coalesce around a presidential candidate in 2016 (it’s early, but Ted Cruz seems to have an inside track). On Thanksgiving, Lane urged American Christians to ask God for mercy and forgiveness for “what we Christians have allowed to happen to America in our lifetime.”

Lane argues that the pilgrims, who believed that their undertaking was “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” created a covenant with God that America must renew in order to survive. Of course the United States of America was created when the U.S. Constitution was adopted, more than a century and a half after the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. Lane argues that “the Founders established America legally as a Christian nation at the state level, rather than the Federal” – and he approvingly cites state constitutions at the time that required officeholders to be Protestant Christians.

“To argue that America’s Founders were not Christians — and the foundation laid was not upon Christ Jesus — is at best ignorant, and at worst dishonest,” he says.

Lane, who has been demanding the return of the Bible as a primary textbook in America’s public schools, says, “Restoring Christian education is a matter of life-and-death.” The last three or four generations of American students, he says, have been failed by secularism. “Instead of developing Christian character, secularism has dispersed the sacraments of that pagan religion and indoctrinated America’s children and culture with a false, dead religion.”

Lane finished his Thanksiving column – distributed through the right-wing Western Journalism Center – as he frequently does, with a call for “a Gideon or Rahab the Harlot” to stand. Both are biblical characters who according to the Old Testament were used by God to help destroy enemies of the Israelites.