Dominion Theology and the Christian Right's Bid for Power
The Christian Right's recent role in delivering
Congress to the Republicans raises the question of just
how much power the movement hopes to amass.
Ralph Reed of
the Christian Coalition says repeatedly that his
organization wants nothing more than a representative
voice in government, "a place at the table," as
he puts its.
Other movement leaders are more sweeping in
their calls to make ours a Christian nation, a Kingdom of
God on earth.
As we assess the Christian Right's future prospects,
the movement's political theology is one big piece of the
puzzle.
Included in the movement are people with diverse
viewpoints on the degree and means through which
Christians ought to "take dominion" over every
aspect of society.
The motto of the secular Heritage
Foundation, taken from the title of an influential
conservative book of the 1940s, is "ideas have
consequences."
Yet in the past few years, with the
growth in public awareness of the Christian Right, the
movement's variant forms of dominion theology have
attracted only scant attention.
Most of the attention has come from a new crop of
researchers working on the Christian Right. Most of these
people are political liberals who seek to shore up the
prevailing "two-party" system by portraying
their opponents--in this case, those of the Right--as
aberrations on the U.S. political landscape.
Liberals'
writing about the Christian Right's take-over plans has
generally taken the form of conspiracy theory. Instead of
analyzing the subtle ways in which political ideas take
hold within movements and why, the liberal conspiracy
theorists use a guilt-by-association technique that goes
like this:
We know that a particular Christian Right
author or activist has advocated bad ideas, like killing
queers or forming armed militias.
Then we look to see who
else appears in proximity to the offender on
organizational letterhead stationary or on the speakers
list at movement conferences.
This approach may indicate
the degree of tolerance of extremist views within a given
network of the broader Christian Right movement. But the
approach implies that ideas are somehow contagious: If
someone serves on a board of advisors with someone else,
they must think similarly and therefore be likely to
behave similarly.
This is the approach the Right has used
to red-bait the civil rights movement, the New Left and,
recently, the environmental movement.
Conspiracy theorizing about the Christian Right's
supposedly "secret" agenda involves
highlighting the hate-mongering and bizarre ideas of a
handful of Christian Right players while neglecting the
broad popularity of dominion theology.
There are a
variety of ideological tendencies within the Christian
Right. At the truly extreme end of the spectrum is a set
of ideas proponents call reconstructionism, associated
with only a small number of think tanks and book
publishers.
Many Christian Right activists have never
even heard of reconstructionism, whose advocates call for
the imposition of an Old Testament style theocracy,
complete with capital punishment for offenses including
adultery, homosexuality, and blasphemy.
Sects and Schisms
More prevalent on the Christian Right is the
Dominionist idea, shared by Reconstructionists, that
Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all
secular institutions until Christ returns--and there is
no consensus on when that might be.
Dominionist thinking
precludes coalitions between believers and unbelievers,
which is why many Christian rightists will have a hard
time compromising with some of the very same Republicans
they recently helped elect.
The idea of taking dominion
over secular society gained widespread currency with the
1981 publication of evangelical philosopher Francis
Schaeffer's book A Christian Manifesto.
The book sold
290,000 copies in its first year, and it remains one of
the movement's most frequently cited texts. Schaeffer,
who died of cancer in 1984, was a product of the
internecine conflicts that split the Presbyterian church
during the 1930s and 1940s.
Schaeffer was allied with the
strident anti-Communist leader Rev. Carl McIntire who
headed the fundamentalist American Council of Christian
Churches.
Later Schaeffer joined an anti-McIntire faction
that, after several name changes, merged into the
Presbyterian Church in America.
(A related denomination,
the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is the milieu out of
which convicted killer Paul Hill developed his
justifications for killing abortionists.)
In the 1960s
and 1970s, Schaeffer and his wife Edith ran a retreat
center in Switzerland, where young American "Jesus
freaks" came to study the Bible and learn how to
apply Schaeffer's dominion theology to the political
scene back home.
In A Christian Manifesto, Schaeffer's argument is
simple. The United States began as a nation rooted in
Biblical principles. But as society became more
pluralistic, with each new wave of immigrants, proponents
of a new philosophy of secular humanism gradually came to
dominate debate on policy issues.
Since humanists place
human progress, not God, at the center of their
considerations, they pushed American culture in all
manner of ungodly directions, the most visible results of
which included legalized abortion and the secularization
of the public schools.
At the end of A Christian
Manifesto, Schaeffer calls for Christians to use civil
disobedience to restore Biblical morality, which explains
Schaeffer's popularity with groups like Operation Rescue.
Randall Terry has credited Schaeffer as a major influence
in his life.
In the 1980s, some of the younger men Schaeffer
influenced joined a group called the Coalition on Revival
(COR), founded by Jay Grimstead. Grimstead, a veteran of
the old Young Life missionary group, had decided that
evangelicals were insufficiently literalist in their
reading of the Bible.
Grimstead founded COR with two
purposes. One was to unify pastors who differed on
questions of "eschatology," which is the study
of the end-times and the question of when Christ will
return.
Most evangelicals have held the pre-millennial
belief that Christ will return before a 1,000 year reign
by believers. Grimstead and others in COR are
post-millennialists who believe their job is establish
the kingdom of God on earth now; Christ will return only
after Christians have been in charge for 1,000 years.
COR's second purpose, consistent with post-millennialism,
was the development of position papers, called
"world view documents," on how to apply
dominion theology to Christian Right activism in more
than a dozen spheres of social life, including education,
economics, law, and even entertainment.
Much of the liberal writing on dominion theology and
Reconstructionism has focused on COR as headquarters for
a conspiracy to take over society. Grimstead and his
colleagues advocated running stealth candidates in
selected counties as early as 1986.
But in recent years,
COR has served as little more than a clearinghouse for
Grimstead's position papers. As an organization, COR is
largely inactive. Like the Moral Majority of the early
1980s, COR was a network of pastors, all busy with their
own projects.
If COR had any effect, though, it was in reinforcing
ideas about taking dominion. The 100 or so movement
leaders in COR each signed a "covenant"
statement affirming their commitment to the idea that
Christians should take dominion over all fields of
secular society.
Only a few of COR's steering committee
members were hard core Reconstructionists. Most of the
Reconstructionists are too hair-splittingly sectarian to
want to associate with COR's diverse crew of pentecostal
charismatics and fundamental Baptists.
The Reconstructionists are theologically committed to
Calvinism. They shy away from the Baptists' loud
preaching and the Pentecostals' wild practices of
speaking in tongues, healing and delivering prophecies.
To secular readers, the minutiae of who believes what--or
which group of characters likes to dance on one
foot--might seem trivial. But some of the details and
divisions of Christian Right theology are politically
relevant.
As Above, So Below
Reconstructionism is the most intellectually grounded,
though esoteric, brand of dominion theology. Its leading
proponent has been Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, an
obscure figure within the Christian Right.
Born in 1916,
the son of Armenian immigrants to the U.S., Rushdoony
looks like an Old Testament patriarch with his white hair
and beard.
At a young age Rushdoony was strongly
influenced by Westminster Theological Seminary professor
Cornelius Van Til, a Dutch theologian who emphasized the
inerrant authority of the Bible and the irreconcilability
between believers and unbelievers.
A recent issue of
Rushdoony's monthly Chalcedon Report noted his Armenian
background. Since the year 320, every generation of the
Rushdoony family has produced a Christian priest or
minister.
"There was Armenian royalty in the
Rushdoony blood, and a heritage of defending the faith,
often by sword and gun, against Godless foes bent on
destroying a people of faith and works."
With that auspicious heritage, Rushdoony founded the
Chalcedon Foundation in California in the mid-1960s. One
of the Foundation's early associates was Gary North who
eventually married Rushdoony's daughter.
North had been
active within secular libertarian and anti-Communist
organizations, particularly those with an anti-statist
bent.
Rushdoony and North had a falling out and ceased
collaboration years ago. North started his own think
tank, the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler,
Texas.
Rushdoony, North, and about a half dozen other
reconstructionist writers have published countless books
and journals advocating post-millennialism and
"theonomy" or the application of God's law to
all spheres of everyday life.
In his rhetorical crusades
against secular humanists and against most other
Christians, North is fond of saying "You can't beat
something with nothing."
North has geared his writing for popular audiences;
some of his books are available in Christian book stores.
Rushdoony's writing is more turgid and also more
controversial.
It was Rushdoony's seminal 1973 tome The
Institutes of Biblical Law that articulated
Reconstructionists' vision of a theocracy in which Old
Testament law would be reinstated in modern society.
Old Testament law classified a wide range of sins as
punishable by death; these included not only murder and
rape but also adultery, incest, homosexuality,
witchcraft, incorrigible delinquency by youth, and even
blasphemy.
In the Reconstructionists' vision of a
millennial or "kingdom" society, there would be
only local governments; there would be no central
administrative state to collect property taxes, nor to
provide education or other welfare services.
Aside from Rushdoony and North, Reconstructionism
boasts only a few other prolific writers.
These include
Dr. Greg Bahnsen, Rev. Joseph Morecraft, David Chilton,
Gary DeMar, and Kenneth Gentry, none of whom are major
figures within the Christian Right.
They are quoted more
often in liberal reports than in the Christian Right's
own literature.
The unabashed advocacy of a Christian theocracy has
insured a limited following for the most explicit of the
Reconstructionists, who have also been sectarian in their
sharp criticism of evangelicals.
North, for example, has
published a series of attacks on believers in the
pre-millennial version of when Christ will come back.
Perhaps even more than the punitive legal code they
propose, it is the Reconstructionists' religion of
Calvinism that makes them unlikely to appeal to most
evangelicals.
Calvinism is the by now almost archaic
belief that God has already preordained every single
thing that happens in the world.
Most importantly, even
one's own salvation or condemnation to hell is already a
done deal as far as God is concerned. By this
philosophical scheme, human will is not involved in
changing the course of history.
All that is left for the
"righteous" to do is to play out their pre-
ordained role, including their God-given right to
dominate everyone else.
Calvinism arose in Europe centuries ago in part as a
reaction to Roman Catholicism's heavy emphasis on
priestly authority and on salvation through acts of
penance.
One of the classic works of sociology, Max
Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
links the rise of Calvinism to the needs of budding
capitalists to judge their own economic success as a sign
of their preordained salvation.
The rising popularity of
Calvinism coincided with the consolidation of the
capitalist economic system. Calvinists justified their
accumulation of wealth, even at the expense of others, on
the grounds that they were somehow destined to prosper.
It is no surprise that such notions still find resonance
within the Christian Right which champions capitalism and
all its attendant inequalities.
The hitch comes in the Calvinists' unyielding
predestinarianism, the cornerstone of Reconstructionism
and something at odds with the world view of evangelical
Christians.
Last fall in Sacramento some of the local
Reconstructionists held their annual Reformation Bible
Conference, co-sponsored by the Covenant Reformed Church
and the Chalcedon Foundation.
The theme of the weekend
was Christian "apologetics," meaning defense of
the faith against heretical enemies of all stripes.
The problem is that evangelicals (a category including
pentecostal charismatics and fundamental Baptists)
believe that God's will works in conjunction with free
human will.
They believe that salvation is not by the
grace of God only but by the faith of individual
believers who freely choose to surrender to Jesus.
In fact, the cornerstone of the Western religions is the
view that God's will and human will work together.
Evangelicals believe strongly that humans freely choose
sin or salvation and that those already converted have
the duty to go out and offer the choice they have made to
others.
Calvinism, in contrast, undercuts the whole
motivation for missionary work, and it is the missionary
zeal to redeem sinners that motivates much of the
Christian Right's political activism. Calvinism is an
essentially reckless doctrine.
If God has already decided
what's going to happen, then the Dominionists do not have
to take responsibility for their actions. (They can kill
abortion doctors "knowing" it is the right
thing to do.)
Evangelicals, even those on the Right,
still believe they as individuals are capable of error.
Furthermore, the Calvinist Reconstructionists look
askance at the other key draw of evangelical churches,
the experiential dimension.
The Calvinists sing staid
songs, read the Bible and weighty theological treatises.
What's going on, especially in the charismatic churche,
is something else.
There, Christians by the thousands are
flocking to wild faith healing extravaganzas where people
shout and cry and fall on the floor because they are
"slain in the spirit."
The latest trend is
called "holy laughter" whereby the Holy Spirit
supposedly leads crowds to roll on the floor laughing
uncontrollably, sometimes for hours.
This kind of stuff
is happening in churches all over the country--often
televised for the Christian TV networks--with the backing
of prominent evangelical leaders.
Some critics have
condemned the eccentric antics but they miss the point
that people go to church not to read books but to
experience something extraordinary. Many get a similar
high from joining a political crusade.
Large numbers of
politically active evangelicals are not going to want to
sit still for boring philosophical lectures on how their
personal experiences don't matter in the face of
pre-ordained reality.
The Founding Fathers Said So
They do sit still, by the thousands, for David Barton
of WallBuilders, Inc.
From a place called Aledo, Texas,
Barton has successfully mass marketed a version of
dominion theology that has made his lectures, books, and
tapes among the hottest properties in the born-again
business.
With titles like The Myth of Separation and
America: to Pray or Not to Pray, Barton's pitch is that,
with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin, the
Founding Fathers were all evangelicals who intended to
make this a Christian nation.
Crowds of home schoolers and the Christian Coalition
go wild with applause for Barton's performances. With an
overhead projector, he flashes slides of the Founding
Fathers and reels off selected quotes from them saying
things like "only the righteous shall rule."
For the years following the Supreme Court's 1962 and 1963
decisions against public school prayer, his charts and
graphs show statistical declines in SAT scores and rising
rates of teenage promiscuity, drug abuse, and other bad
behavior.
Apparently no one has ever explained to Barton
that a sequence of unrelated events does not add up to a
cause and effect relationship.
Barton's bottom line is that only "the
righteous" should occupy public office. This is
music to the ears of Christian Right audiences.
To grasp Barton's brand of dominion theology, unlike
reconstructionism, one does not need a seminary degree.
Barton's pseudo history fills a need most Americans have,
to know more about our country's past.
His direct linkage
of the deified Founding Fathers with contemporary social
problems cuts through the evangelicals' theological
sectarianism and unites them in a feasible project.
They may not be able to take dominion over the whole earth or
even agree about when Jesus will return, but they sure
can go home and back a godly candidate for city council,
or run themselves.
Barton tells his audiences that they
personally have an important role to play in history, and
that is what makes his dominion theology popular.
To Rule and Reign
But Barton's message flies in the face of the
Christian Coalition's public claims about wanting only
its fair share of political power.
In his new book
Politically Incorrect, Coalition director Ralph Reed
writes: "What do religious conservatives really
want? They want a place at the table in the conversation
we call democracy.
Their commitment to pluralism includes
a place for faith among the many other competing
interests in society."
Yet the Coalition's own
national convention last September opened with a plenary
speech by Rev. D. James Kennedy who echoed the
Reconstructionist line when he said that "true
Christian citizenship" includes a cultural mandate
to "take dominion over all things as vice-regents of
God."
Who is telling the truth about the Christian Right's
bid for power, Ralph Reed, or the popular Dominionists
who speak at Christian Coalition gatherings?
Liberal
critics of the Christian Right would have us believe that
Reed and Pat Robertson are just plain lying when they say
they want to work hand-in-hand, like good pluralists,
with non-Christians in government.
To bolster the
"stealth" thesis, liberals have to resort to
conspiracy theory: Barton and Kennedy spoke at the
conference, so Reed must secretly agree with them.
A better explanation is that the Christian Right, like
other mass movements, is a bundle of internal
contradictions which work themselves out in the course of
real political activism.
Ideas have consequences, but
ideas also have causes, rooted in interests and desires.
The Christian Right is in a state of tension and flux
over its own mission. Part movement to resist and roll
back even moderate change, part reactionary wing of
prevailing Republicanism.
The Christian Right wants to
take dominion and collaborate with the existing
political-economic system, at the same time. Liberal
critics, who also endorse the ruling system, can
recognize only the Christian Right's takeover dimension.
Radicals can see that the dominion project is dangerous
because it is, in part, business as usual.
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