Lisa Miller’s column in the Washington Post about dominionism has gotten a lot of comment in secular circles. Let me add my voice to the mix. She writes:
Here we go again. The Republican primaries are six months away, and already news stories are raising fears on the left about “crazy Christians.” One piece connects Texas Gov. Rick Perry with a previously unknown Christian group called “The New Apostolic Reformation,” whose main objective is to “infiltrate government.” Another highlights whacko-sounding Christian influences on Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. A third cautions readers to be afraid, very afraid, of “dominionists.”
She continues:
The stories raise real concerns about the world views of two prospective Republican nominees. But their echo-chamber effect reignites old anxieties among liberals about evangelical Christians. Some on the left seem suspicious that a firm belief in Jesus equals a desire to take over the world. (Some extremist Christians leveled a similar charge against Barack Obama in 2008, that he was the antichrist aiming to take over world governments.) …
This isn’t a defense of the religious beliefs of Bachmann or Perry, whatever they are. It’s a plea, given the acrimonious tone of our political discourse, for a certain amount of dispassionate care in the coverage of religion. Nearly 80 percent of Americans say they’re Christian. One-third of Americans call themselves “evangelical.” When millions of voters get lumped together and associated with the fringe views of a few, divisions will grow. Here, then, are some clarifying points.
Evangelicals generally do not want to take over the world. “Dominionism” is the paranoid mot du jour. In its broadest sense, the term describes a Christian’s obligation to be active in the world, including in politics and government. More narrowly, some view it as Christian nationalism. You could argue that the 19th- and early 20th-century reformers – abolitionists, suffragists and temperance activists, for example – were dominionists, says Molly Worthen, who teaches religious history at the University of Toronto.
Extremist dominionists do exist, as theocrats who hope to transform our democracy into something that looks like ancient Israel, complete with stoning as punishment. But “it’s a pretty small world,” says Worthen, who studies these groups.
Is she right? Kind of. When she says that most evangelical Christians are not dominionists who want to take over the world, she is right. When she says that the term “dominionist” is being overused, she’s right; it has a specific meaning and it should be used narrowly, not broadly. But at the same time, she’s beating up a straw man. It just isn’t true that those who are criticizing some of those crazy Christians are referring to all evangelicals; rather, they’re talking about the particular type of evangelicals who were behind Perry’s prayer rally and with whom Michele Bachmann is closely associated.
Let me defend my first argument first. I think the term “dominionist” should be reserved for a relatively narrow subset of hardcore Christians, particularly Christian Reconstructionists and others who want to institute the full Mosaic law from the Old Testament as the civil and criminal law to govern society. And I don’t believe that the vast majority of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians (and those terms are not interchangeable) would favor such a thing. In fact, I think a very small percentage of them would.
I do think that the majority of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians want to see some aspects of Bible-based policies instituted in the United States. They generally favor restrictions on abortion, for example, and they often cite the Bible to support that position. And they often — thought not as often these days — support restrictions on gay rights, again citing the Bible for support.
But you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that the average evangelical is going to support stoning gays, women who aren’t virgins on their wedding day or unruly children. I simply don’t believe that the average evangelical would support requiring rapists to pay their victims’ fathers and marry her or require the brothers of a deceased husband to impregnate his widow. I don’t even think the average evangelical would support outlawing blasphemy or heresy, both of which would be illegal under a real Christian theocracy. That doesn’t mean those limited policies advocated by the average evangelical aren’t plenty dangerous and liberty-destroying in and of themselves; they certainly are. But I don’t think they would turn the US into a theocracy as the really hardcore dominionists want to do.
Perhaps we should describe them with old political labels: authoritarian and totalitarian. The average evangelical is certainly authoritarian, but they wouldn’t be on board for the totalitarian society favored by reconstructionists and real dominionists. And I think we should be clear on the distinction.
Having said that, I think Miller is doing exactly what she accuses others of doing — not making clear distinctions. The dominant discussion about dominionists lately has revolved not around evangelicals as a whole but around the Christian leaders that Perry and Bachmann have associated themselves with — and if those people don’t qualify as “crazy Christians,” no one would.
If you think Oprah is paving the way for the anti-christ, as one of the principals behind the Perry prayer rally does, you’re crazy. If you think the Japanese stock market went down because the emperor had sex with a demon, you’re crazy. If you think RJ Rushdoony’s vision of a Christian society is a good idea, as Bachmann’s primary mentor John Eidsmoe does, you’re both crazy and dangerous.
If you think prayer is a rational public policy to solve natural disasters and economic problems, as Rick Perry has said many times, you are unfit for any office and the proper response to you should be limited to pointing and laughter. If you believe that public education leads to Nazism, as Bachmann has argued in the past, you’ve left this planet and landed on Wingnuttia. I don’t care what you label those people, they’re stark raving nuts. And extraordinarily dangerous.
24 comments
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deen
August 26, 2011 at 9:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Actually, we are counting on the fact that most Republicans and/or Christians and/or Evangelicals aren’t Dominionists, and don’t want a Dominionist government. That’s why it’s important to make them aware of the Dominionist ties of Bachmann and Perry.
raven
August 26, 2011 at 10:12 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You wouldn’t have a hard time convincing me. I already know they would.
I know exactly what fundies think of me and people like me. They want to kill me. They tell me so in those words often and have for over a decade now. Like a lot of scientists I’ve been getting death threats for a long time.
It probably won’t happen though. It’s estimated that under biblical law, 99% of the US population, 297 million people would end up dead. Including 99% of the fundie xians, who are statistically worse than the general population except ahead in hypocrisy.
A religion that involves mass murder on that scale isn’t going to be too popular among normal people.
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort
August 26, 2011 at 10:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
They may not want to actively stone gays, but they have no problems beating them up. Same with children, beat them until they behave.
MikeMa
August 26, 2011 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I do hope deen is correct. The pandering is so pervasive that it is often difficult to tell where the handshaking separates from the crazy.
idragosani
August 26, 2011 at 10:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Dominionism isn’t something new, although it’s being mentioned more and more in the mainstream media. There have been watchdog groups around for a while, like “Theocracy Watch” (http://theocracywatch.org/) And I agree, it’s a very specific movement heavily influenced by guys like Rousas John Rushdoony. It’s easy to fall into the conspiracy theory paranoia and see Dominionism in everything the way a lot of right-wingers see ‘creeping Sharia’ in everything.
Pierce R. Butler
August 26, 2011 at 10:19 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
… I think Miller is doing exactly what she accuses others of doing …
Any time you see a corporate media flack use the words, “Some on the left…”, you can bet on that.
You can even place a nice little side wager on no names getting named, never mind quotes quoted, and pick up enough to cover your taxi ride – with a big tip for the cabbie.
raven
August 26, 2011 at 10:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The founder of xian Dominionism/Reconstructionism was Rushdoony. He was an influential theologian, one of the few the fundies ever produced.
He was also a crazy psycopath whose plan would involve stoning to death 297 million Americans.
Got to say it illustrates nicely the absolute intellectual and moral bankruptcy of fundie xianity when your main theologian is a psycopathic mass murderer wannabe.
raven
August 26, 2011 at 10:28 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Especially when they flat out tell you themselves what they are and what they want.
Dominionists like Perry, Bachmann, Huckabee, and Palin aren’t hiding anything. You just have to pay attention to what they say. What do you think they mean when they claim that their god told them to run for president?
Occam's Blunt Instrument
August 26, 2011 at 10:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If crazy christians like Perry bother the rest of them so badly, it’s their responsibility to shout him down, because otherwise they will – rightly – get tarred with the same brush.
Occam's Blunt Instrument
August 26, 2011 at 10:42 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That god wants them to look like total asses in the political arena?
(Apologies to Sam Kinison, from ‘breaking all the rules’ 15:05sec)
MikeMa
August 26, 2011 at 10:43 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It means they hear voices. Those voices are in their tiny pointed heads. The voice of the sky fairy, specially speaking to them. Only them. Oh, wait…
Calling the run an honest desire for power would be refreshing compared to these nitwits.
Michael Heath
August 26, 2011 at 11:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Lisa Miller
Strawman of the month?
Chiroptera
August 26, 2011 at 11:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t even think the average evangelical would support outlawing blasphemy or heresy, both of which would be illegal under a real Christian theocracy.
Right. But in the end, when it comes down to it, that is who they will vote for. The may not be in favor of a theocracy, but they are less in favor of a nation based on principles they find “too liberal.”
They may not want to see all Catholics deported, but they basically find that less frightening than someone who will not force kids to pray in school.
I would very much like to be wrong on this. But I would also like to see a whole lot of conservative evangelical Protestants stand up in front of a TV camera and say, “I will vote for the Mormon Huntsman before I vote for Bachmann, because at least Huntsman is sane and rational and agrees more with what I want to see in a democratic government. I will vote for that liberal [sic] Obama before I would vote for Bachmann, because, frankly, she’s a lunatic would would destroy everything I stand for!”
lofgren
August 26, 2011 at 12:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think we can distinguish between those evangelicals who merely demand that their president be at least as really truly Christian as they are vs. those evangelicals who truly want a cleric-in-chief who will rewrite our laws based on the sermons they hear on Sunday.
Determining a clear line between the dominionists and the non-dominionist who merely has church-inspired opinions of how the world should be run is probably impossible. How many of the latter group would just tell you that when the bible says we should stone gays to death, what it really means is that we should use reparative therapy to make them straight again? In my opinion those stances are equally dominitive because one is merely a modification of the latter, but they are both predicated on the assumption that our public policy should be designed to appease an iron age fairy tale character.
But there are plenty of Christians who don’t want to actually rewrite the laws to make them more Christian but do want their representative to be loudly and publicly Christiany, which means at least nominally sharing their views on what is bad (homosex) and what is good (forced pregnancies). Even if the laws on abortion don’t change, it is imperative that our leaders maintain the pose that it is Very Very Bad. The two views of government and religion are different in their impact on our elections, although they do often work to the same ends. But deen @1 has the right of it that the latter group probably views the former as extremists, which presents an opportunity to prize one’s votes away from the other.
If somebody says “God told me to run for president,” and you hear “I’m going to kill the gays,” I think that is on you, not the speaker. Personally I hear “Talking like Jesus is more appealing to my base than talking like Caesar.”
Of course, undoubtedly some members of that base DO hear “I’ll kill all the gays” when Michelle Bachmann says that God told her to run. Others hear that she’ll lower taxes and privatize public schools and police departments. Others just hear that she goes to church on Sunday, so she talks like they do and she thinks like they do and that is enough for them. That’s the great thing about talking about what God wants. It’s not like we can just ask him to clarify, so everybody can have their own interpretation.
D. C. Sessions
August 26, 2011 at 12:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It doesn’t have to be, because they don’t think [1] it will apply to them.
$HERSELF tells the story of her grandparents. Her grandmother, recently given the vote, voted for a candidate on a Prohibition platform. When the Volsted Act went into effect, she returned from celebrating the end of demon rum and asked her husband to go out and get her a pail of beer to celebrate.
Face it: we’re all Niemöller.
[1] ObQuirk.
Sastra
August 26, 2011 at 12:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I would say that a firm belief in Jesus probably equals a desire for Jesus to take over the world. And, probably, a firm conviction that Jesus will take over the world. Eventually.
After that, it’s going to come down to exactly how you think Jesus is going to achieve His world-domination goal. Now normally the more conservative Christians are the ones who believe Jesus regularly performs direct miracles and the more liberal Christians are the ones who think that Jesus usually performs His work indirectly, by “working through” people and nature (for example, think of sudden supernatural cancer remission due to prayer vs. God using the skilled doctors to remove the cancer naturally.)
But in this case, you’d see it the other way around. The more liberal, reasonable, tolerant evangelicals are going to expect Jesus to take control of the planet by coming down Himself on a cloud and performing numerous kick-ass miracles; the more conservative, fanatical, extremist evangelicals think that God must needs work through His followers. They have a mandate from God to change the country to something He more approves of.
Context is important. Sometimes you want people to wait for the supernatural instead of getting all impatient and rationalizing that no, maybe God is supposed to work through nature using the willing tools at hand.
Aquaria
August 26, 2011 at 1:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I don’t even think the average evangelical would support outlawing blasphemy or heresy, both of which would be illegal under a real Christian theocracy.
I think they would. Most of the anti-gay groups are evangelicals, and they will definitely go after gays, sooner or later–the Ugandan hate bill they were behind attests to that. Once they take care of them, they’ll go after the other people/behaviors they hate. That would include the heretics and blasphemers. It’s inevitable.
Just like the majority of the woman-hating anti-abortion scumbags won’t be satisfied with taking out Roe v Wade–they also want to take down Griswold v. Connecticut, which would end the access to contraception and conveniently overturn Lawrence v. Texas and a host of other liberal decisions as well.
raven
August 26, 2011 at 1:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The central message of the NT bible, is the coming Kingdom of god. Jesus is the king, he will rule, and everyone will bow down to him.
After that it gets uglier. Jesus will judge everyone and most people will get sent to hell and be tortured for eternity.
According to the polls, 40% of the US population thinks this will happen within 50 years at the Second Coming.
A lot of modern and moderate xians wouldn’t quite put it this way. Not because it isn’t in the magic book. But because the whole idea is so silly and evil they find it repulsive.
Wes
August 26, 2011 at 2:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
She doesn’t know? So Lisa Miller can’t be bothered to do this little thing called “research”. Some journalist.
Dennis N
August 26, 2011 at 2:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
On top of possible concern trolling, I think Ms. Miller still thinks the current crop of candidates are in the same zone as the GOP fielded in 200 or even 2008. They’re not. They’re so far gone it’s astonishing. Gay-correction therapy. Dismantling Medicare. Scapegoating the poor to an unprecedented degree. This cycle is a whole new beast, and you can’t draw lessons from Bush and co’s evangelicality and apply them to a Bachmann.
lofgren
August 26, 2011 at 2:53 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
They sound about on par with candidates who would get elected in 200.
pita
August 27, 2011 at 6:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I had always thought that “Dominionist” referred to those who believed in the “7 Mountains Dominion” theory, or whatever it’s properly called. Namely that Christians have to be at the top of 7 different societal spheres (like politics or entertainment or somesuch) in order to help usher in the rapture and apocalypse. At the very least, that was the understanding of the term that was communicated to me. I seem to recall Perry and Bachmann having ties to such groups, though they’re probably a little tenuous and I certainly couldn’t produce links on demand.
I feel like if someone believes in the 7 Mountains theory, or at the very least has believable ties to such organizations, then it’s more than fair to call that person a “Dominionist.”
democommie
August 28, 2011 at 7:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Namely that Christians have to be at the top of 7 different societal spheres (like politics or entertainment or somesuch)”
Entertainment?
pita
August 29, 2011 at 7:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I would imagine so that they can stop Hollywood from homosexifyin the childruns.