GOP Representative and Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin has a long history of extremism, particularly with respect to the role of religion in public life. As it turns out, that shouldn’t be much of a suprise: one of Akin’s principal political influences appears to be Reverend D. James Kennedy, a minister who spent his life organizing a movement dedicated to reorganizing the American government along radically conservative evangelical lines.

Kennedy is widely believed to be a leading advocate for a variant of dominionism, (roughly) the idea that the American government should be run according to Christian, biblical lines. “It must be remembered that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of ‘Christian Supremacists’ who seek to ‘reclaim America for Christ’ and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law,” Abraham Foxman, the President of the Anti-Defamation League, explains.

Indeed, the Reverend has called the US a Christian nation that should be governed by Christians, sought to “rebuild America based on the Bible,” and suggested that Darwinism was responsible for the Holocaust.