by Chris Hedges
Dominionism, born out of a theology known as Christian reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict one another. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language,” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”10
“Fascism is . . . a kind of colonization,” the Reverend Davidson Loehr noted. “A simple definition of ‘colonization’ is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense.”11 The dominionist movement, like all totalitarian movements, seeks to appropriate not only our religious and patriotic language but also our stories, to deny the validity of stories other than their own, to deny that there are other acceptable ways of living and being. There becomes, in their rhetoric, only one way to be a Christian and only one way to be an American.
Dominionism is a theocratic sect with its roots in a radical Calvinism. It looks to the theocracy John Calvin implanted in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 1500s as its political model. It teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the 1925 Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and eventually over the earth itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on Christians to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan. Under Christian dominion, America will be no longer a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security. Some dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies and all schools. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.
The racist and brutal intolerance of the intellectual godfathers of today’s Christian Reconstructionism is a chilling reminder of the movement’s lust for repression. The Institutes of Biblical Law by R. J. Rushdoony, written in 1973, is the most important book for the dominionist movement. Rushdoony calls for a Christian society that is harsh, unforgiving and violent. His work draws heavily on the calls for a repressive theocratic society laid out by Calvin in Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536 and one of the most important works of the Protestant Reformation. Christians are, Rushdoony argues, the new chosen people of God and are called to do what Adam and Eve failed to do: create a godly, Christian state. The Jews, who neglected to fulfill God’s commands in the Hebrew scriptures, have, in this belief system, forfeited their place as God’s chosen people and have been replaced by Christians. The death penalty is to be imposed not only for offenses such as rape, kidnapping and murder, but also for adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, astrology, incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, “unchastity before marriage.” The world is to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States. Rushdoony dismissed the widely accepted estimate of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as an inflated figure, and his theories on race often echo those found in Nazi eugenics, in which there are higher and lower forms of human beings. Those considered by the Christian state to be immoral and incapable of reform are to be exterminated.12
Rushdoony was deeply antagonistic toward the federal government. He believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology, made more palatable for the mainstream by later disciples such as Francis Schaeffer and Pat Robertson, remains at the heart of the movement. Many of its tenets are being enacted through the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, currently channeling billions in federal funds to groups such as National Right to Life and Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing, as well as to innumerable Christian charities and organizations that do everything from running drug and pregnancy clinics to promoting sexual abstinence-only programs in schools.13
While traditional fundamentalism shares many of the darker traits of the new movement—such as a blind obedience to a male hierarchy that often claims to speak for God, intolerance toward nonbelievers, and disdain for rational, intellectual inquiry—it has never attempted to impose its belief system on the rest of the nation. And it has not tried to transform government, as well as all other secular institutions, into an extension of the church. The new radical fundamentalisms amount to a huge and disastrous mutation. Dominionists and their wealthy, right-wing sponsors speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past. They engage in a slow process of “logocide,” the killing of words. The old definitions of words are replaced by new ones. Code words of the old belief system are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Words such as “truth,” “wisdom,” “death,” “liberty,” “life,” and “love” no longer mean what they mean in the secular world. “Life” and “death” mean life in Christ or death to Christ, and are used to signal belief or unbelief in the risen Lord. “Wisdom” has little to do with human wisdom but refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the system of belief. “Liberty” is not about freedom, but the “liberty” found when one accepts Jesus Christ and is liberated from the world to obey Him. But perhaps the most pernicious distortion comes with the word “love,” the word used to lure into the movement many who seek a warm, loving community to counter their isolation and alienation. “Love” is distorted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those who claim to speak for God in return for the promise of everlasting life. The blind, human love, the acceptance of the other, is attacked as an inferior love, dangerous and untrustworthy.14
“The goal must be God’s law-order in which alone is true liberty,” wrote Rushdoony in Institutes of Biblical Law:
Whenever freedom is made into the absolute, the result is not freedom but anarchism. Freedom must be under law or it is not freedom. . . . Only a law-order which holds to the primacy of God’s law can bring forth true freedom, freedom for justice, truth, and godly life.
Freedom as an absolute is simply an assertion of man’s “right” to be his own god; this means a radical denial of God’s law-order. “Freedom” thus is another name for the claim by man to divinity and autonomy. It means that man becomes his own absolute. The word “freedom” is thus a pretext used by humanists of every variety . . . to disguise man’s claim to be his own absolute. . . . If men have unrestricted free speech and free press, then there is no freedom for truth, in that no standard is permitted whereby the promulgation or publication of a lie can be judged and punished.15
As the process gains momentum—with some justices on the Supreme Court such as Ant
onin Scalia steeped in this ideology—America starts to speak a new language. There is a slow and inexorable hijacking of religious and political terminology. Terms such as “liberty” and “freedom” no longer mean what they meant in the past. Those in the movement speak of “liberty,” but they do not speak about the traditional concepts of American liberty—the liberty to express divergent opinions, to respect other ways of believing and being, the liberty of individuals to seek and pursue their own goals and forms of happiness. When used by the Christian Right, the term “liberty” means the liberty that comes with accepting a very narrowly conceived Christ and the binary world-view that acceptance promotes.
America’s Providential History, by Mark A. Beliles and Stephen K. McDowell, published in 1989, is the standard textbook on American history used in many Christian schools. It is also a staple of the home-schooling movement. In this book, authors Beliles and McDowell define the term “liberty” as fealty to “the Spirit of the Lord.” The work of “liberty” is an ongoing process, one mounted by Christians, to free a society from the slavery imposed by “secular humanists.” This process frees, or eradicates, different moral codes and belief systems, to introduce a single, uniform and unquestioned “Christian” orientation. Liberty, in a linguistic twist worthy of George Orwell, means theocratic tyranny:
The Bible reveals that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17). . . . When the Spirit of the Lord comes into a nation, that nation is liberated. The degree to which the Spirit of the Lord is infused into a society (through its people, laws and institutions) is the degree to which that society will experience liberty in every realm (civil, religious, economic, etc.).16
The Global Recordings Network, a missionary group striving to bring “the Name of Jesus” to “every tribe and tongue and nation,”17 gives close attention to the meaning of “liberty” in their teachings. A tape of a missionary lesson plays: “I want to make you understand this word ‘liberty.’ It is written in God’s book: ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ Some say there is not enough liberty in this land, but if that is true, it is because there is not enough of the Spirit of the Lord. What do you think yourselves? Do people do as God commands them? Do they love each other? Do they help each other? Do they speak the truth? Do they flee from fornication and adultery? You know there are those who steal, who lie, who kill, and who worship things that are not God. These things are not of the Spirit of God, but of the spirit of Satan. Then how can there be true liberty?”18
The “infusion” of “the Spirit of the Lord” into society includes its infusion into society’s legal system. Liberty is defined as the extent to which America obeys Christian law. When America is a Christian nation, liberty becomes, in this view, liberation from Satan. This slow, gradual and often imperceptible strangulation of thought—the corruption of democratic concepts and ideas—infects the society until the new, totalitarian vision is articulated by the old vocabulary. This cannibalization of language occurs subtly and stealthily. The ghoulish process leaves those leading the movement mouthing platitudes little different from the bromides spoken by those who sincerely champion the open, democratic state.
These tactics, familiar and effective, have often been used by movements that assault democracies. This seemingly innocent hijacking of language mollifies opponents, the mainstream and supporters within the movement who fail to grasp the radical agenda. It gives believers a sense of continuity and tradition. Radical logocides paint themselves as the defenders of an idealized and more virtuous past. Most revolutionary movements, from those in Latin America to those shaped by Islamic militancy in the Middle East, root their radical ideas in what they claim are older, purer traditions.
While the radical Christian movement’s leaders pay lip service to traditional justice, they call among their own for a legal system that promotes what they define as “Christian principles.” The movement thus is able to preserve the appearance of law and respect for democracy even as its leaders condemn all opponents—dismissed as “atheists,” “nonbelievers” or “secular humanists”—to moral and legal oblivion. Justice, under this process of logocide, is perverted to carry out injustice and becomes a mirage of law and order. The moral calculus no longer revolves around the concept of universal human rights. Its center is the well-being, protection and promotion of “Bible-believing Christians.” Logocide slowly and stealthily removes whole segments of society from the moral map. As Joseph Goebbels wrote: “The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.”19
Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, wrote what may have been the first literary critique of National Socialism. He noted that the Nazis also “changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittel], at once the most public and the most secret.”20
And while all this took place, he points out, most Germans never noticed.
“The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models,” Robert O. Paxton wrote in Anatomy of Fascism:
They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.21
There are at least 70 million evangelicals in the United States—about 25 percent of the population—attending more than 200,000 evangelical churches. Polls indicate that about 40 percent of respondents believe in the Bible as the “actual word of God” and that it is “to be taken literally, word for word.” Applied to the country’s total population, this proportion would place the number of believers at about 100 million. These polls also suggest that about 84 percent of Americans accept that Jesus is the son of God; 80 percent of respondents say that they believe they will stand before God on the Day of Judgment. The same percentage of respondents say God works miracles, and half say they think angels exist. Almost a third of all respondents say they believe in the Rapture.22
American fundamentalists and evangelicals, however, are sharply divided between strict fundamentalists—those who refuse to grant legitimacy to alternative views of the Christian tradition—and the many evangelicals who concede that there are other legitimate ways to worship and serve Christ. Evangelicals, while they often embrace fundamentalist doctrine, do not always share the intolerance of the radical fundamentalists. While a majority of Christian Americans embrace a literal interpretation of the Bible, only a tiny minority—among them the Christian dominionists—are comfortable with this darker vision of an intolerant, theocratic America. Unfortunately, it is this minority that is taking over the machinery of U.S. state and religious institutions.
In a 2004 study, the political scientist John Green identifies those he calls “traditional evangelicals.” This group, which Green estimates at 12.6 percent of the population, comes “closest to the ‘religious right’ widely discussed in the media.” It is overwhelmingly Republican. It is openly hostile to democratic pluralism, and it champions totalitarian policies, such as denying homosexuals the same rights as other Americans and amending the Constitution to
make America a “Christian nation.” Green’s “traditional evangelicals” can probably be called true dominionists. There are signs that this militant core may be smaller than even Green suggests, dipping to around 7 percent of the population in other polls, such as those conducted by George Barna.23 But the potency of this radical movement far exceeds its numbers. Radical social movements, as Crane Brinton wrote in The Anatomy of Revolution, are almost always tiny, although they use the tools of modern propaganda to create the illusion of a mass following. As Brinton noted, “the impressive demonstrations the camera has recorded in Germany, Italy, Russia and China ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Communist, Nazi, nor Fascist victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; all were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.”24 These radicals, Brinton went on, “combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men as ideals.” They are, he said, “practical men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the Beautiful and the Good.”25 And once they are in power, “there is no more finicky regard for the liberties of the individual or for the forms of legality. The extremists, after clamoring for liberty and toleration while they were in opposition, turn very authoritarian when they reach power.”26
Traditional evangelicals, those who come out of Billy Graham’s mold, are not necessarily comfortable with the direction taken by the dominionists. And the multitude of churches, denominations and groups that do lend their support in varying degrees to this new movement are diverse and often antagonistic. While right-wing Catholics have joined forces with the movement, many of the movement’s Protestant leaders, including D. James Kennedy, disdainfully label the Catholic Church a “cult.”27 These variances are held in check by the shared drive for political control, but the disputes simmer beneath the surface, threatening to tear apart the fragile coalitions. And those few evangelicals who challenge the dominionist drive for power are ruthlessly thrust aside, as the purges of the old guard within the Southern Baptist Convention three decades ago illustrate.
