The Crusader

Roy Moore has been talking with God. It’s a brilliant October afternoon in downtown Montgomery, Ala., and inside the weathered brick home serving as the headquarters for Moore’s Senate campaign, the twice-removed former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court leans back in his chair and shares what the Lord has told him.

“Our rights come from God,” the 70-year-old Baptist says. “The Constitution was founded upon God. It was made for moral and religious people. It is the fallen nature of man that the Constitution meant to restrain.”

Moore is favored to win the Dec. 12 election to fill the Senate seat that was vacated when Jeff Sessions stepped down to become the nation’s Attorney General. And while several conservative rabble-rousers have joined the Senate in recent years—both Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas come to mind—there is nobody in Washington quite like Moore: a judge who recites anti-abortion poetry, rejects the theory of evolution, doesn’t think Muslims should be allowed to serve in Congress, fought to keep antiquated wording in the Alabama constitution requiring school segregation and suggested the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were God’s punishment for America’s sins. His first priority in the Senate, he says, will be to fight to impeach the five Supreme Court Justices who voted in 2015 to give same-sex couples the right to wed from coast to coast. (Such a move would make history: the last attempt to remove a Supreme Court Justice began in 1804, and proved a failure.)

Moore is not only a culture warrior. He is a populist Christian and a soldier in the larger