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Media and Rightist Distortions about Dominionism: Take the Refresher Quiz!
Charlotte Allen, op-ed columnist, Los Angeles Times Daniel Burke, reporter, Religion News Service Jack Cafferty, commentator, CNN Joe Carter, Web Editor, First Things (a neoconservative journal) Ross Douthat, op-ed columnist, The New York Times Michael Gerson, op-ed columnist, The Washington Post John Hawkins, proprietor, Right Wing News blog Lisa Miller, religion columnist, The Washington Post Ralph Reed, Christian Right political operative Michael A. Walsh, columnist, New York Post
Every time a Republican candidate for high office surfaces who is also a dedicated Christian, the left warns in apocalyptic tones that if you vote for him, America will sink into a "theocracy." Long ago these fear-mongers warned us about Ronald Reagan. Then it was George W. Bush, and after that, Sarah Palin. Now it's Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Elect Perry or Bachmann, this year's warnings go, and make way for "Jesusland" -- a country in which adulterers will be stoned, creationism taught in the schools and gay people sent to reorientation therapy.
Charlotte Allen
the fear of theocracy has suddenly returned. Beginning with Ryan Lizza's profile of Bachmann in The New Yorker, a spate of recent articles have linked the Republican presidential candidates to scary-sounding political theologies like "Dominionism" and "Christian Reconstructionism," and used these links to suggest that Christian extremism is once more on the march... But it's easy to succumb to a paranoid six-degrees-of-separation game, in which the most radical figure in a particular community is always the most important one, or the most extreme passage in a particular writer's work always defines his real-world influence.
Ross Douthat
...if you listen to liberal newspapers, you'd think every other GOP presidential contender is a theocratic dominionist even though I've never met a single conservative in my entire life who favors turning the United States into a theocracy.
Charlotte Allen
The notion that Bachmann, Perry or other candidates secretly harbor "dominionist" theology is a conspiracy theory largely confined to university faculty lounges and MSNBC studios.
Joe Carter
The Dominionist goal is the imposition of a Christian version of sharia law in which adulterers, homosexuals and perhaps recalcitrant children would be subject to capital punishment. It is enough to spoil the sleep of any New Yorker subscriber. But there is a problem: Dominionism, though possessing cosmic ambitions, is a movement that could fit in a phone booth.
This dominionism nonsense is about the stupidiest [sic] trend to come along since Birtherism.... [Michelle] Goldberg is the equivalent of Jerome "Where's the Birth Certificate?" Corsi. She doesn't really care about the truth, she just wants to frighten some gullible liberals and sell more copies of her book.
Evangelicals generally do not want to take over the world. "Dominionism" is the paranoid mot du jour.... Certain journalists use "dominionist" the way some folks on Fox News use the word "sharia." Its strangeness scares people. Without history or context, the word creates a siege mentality in which"we" need to guard against "them."
For those of you who haven't heard of this before - and I was one of those, I hadn't heard of it either - stand by, 'cause this stuff is really out there.
The article questioned Bachmann's and Rick Perry's "ties" to something called Dominionism. Never heard of it? Me neither,
In recent weeks, an arcane and scary-sounding religious term has crept into the lexicon of the 2012 campaign, tripping from the tongue of everyone from MSNBC broadcaster Rachel Maddow to conservative Christian leader Ralph Reed.
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