It seems that there are more nutball Leftists than there are grains of sand at Myrtle Beach. One of the kookiest is Michelle Goldberg. Here’s her latest “journalistic” screed: “Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren’t just devout — both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.” Here’s a little known secret: It’s liberal Dominionists like Michele Goldberg who want to rule the world. She’ll tell you otherwise, but it’s Liberals who use the power of the State to implement their worldview and force everyone to live under their draconian laws. It’s Liberals who want to centralize political power in a national system. It’s Liberals who want to control education, the media, healthcare, financial institutions, oil companies, and business and make us pay for their hair-brained schemes.
I met Miss Goldberg at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church at a creation conference a few years ago. I was one of the speakers. She was there doing research for her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. Here’s some hyped jargon from the site promoting it:
Journalist Michelle Goldberg has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism — the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers — is threatening the foundations of democracy.
I’m sure you noticed what I noticed. Change a few words here and there, and you would swear that Miss Goldberg was describing liberalism in general and the Obama administration in particular. You see, dominion is an inescapable concept. Every ideology is about dominion. But unlike the Dominionists on the Left, who want to increase the power of the State, tax the productive into poverty, and remove all limits from government spending, Dominionists on the right want to decrease the power of the State, shrink the onerous tax burden on productive Americans, and force the federal government to live and spend within its constitutional boundaries.
As I mentioned, Miss Goldberg was at a conference where I was speaking. I don’t remember if I approached her (unlikely) or she approached me (more likely). I do know that we spoke for a long time on the subject of her book and the topic of Dominion. It didn’t matter. She had no intention of getting the story straight. But this didn’t stop her publicist from writing the following:
“With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture.”
Really? Not once did she take a note or record a word of anything I said. Why? Because what she was hearing from me did not fit what she was already planning to write. My explanation of what dominion was all about didn’t fit her preconceived paradigm.
True to form, Miss Goldberg is using her straw-man approach to journalism in an attempt to burn the reputations of two Republican presidential candidates who are no more Dominionists than Mickey Mouse. She and her fellow-leftists want to radicalize them so no one will notice how radical their worldview is.
Keep in mind, that the radicals control the schools where the majority of Americans send their children. In addition to all the nonsense that goes on there, California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Leftist Democrat Dominionist, signed a bill that requires “public schools to include the contributions of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender in social studies curriculum.” “History should be honest,” the governor said. “This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.”
Do you remember the California case where a high school history teacher from the Cupertino Union School District was prohibited from providing supplemental handouts to students about American history because the historical documents contain some references to God and religion?
This talk about Dominionism goes back a ways. Essentially, anybody who does not agree with a Leftist agenda is a radical Dominionist. Rush Limbaugh spotted the tactic when he discussed the conspiratorial fear of the Left on the topic of Dominionism during his May 2, 2005 show. The discussion was prompted by a series of articles that appeared in the June 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It seems that anyone who believes that Christians should actually take their faith seriously enough to want to see cultural and moral changes occur in America is a Dominionist.
The way the Harper’s articles explain Dominionism is so extreme as to be laughable. Christians are linked to Adolf Hitler and fascism. Dominionists want to reinstate slavery and rule by genocide. Where do they get this stuff? For historical accuracy, Nazism and fascism are Leftist ideologies. They were Leftist Dominionists. A Nazi is a “national socialist.” Today’s Leftist Dominionists are socialists.
As long as Christians only talked about their faith, they were ignored by the radical Dominionists on the Left. Now that Christians are actively exercising their faith — theologically, legally, and constitutionally — Leftist Dominionists are frantic. They now have competition, and they don’t like it. Prior to 1976, there was no identifiable Christian voting block, and thus no political competition. There were three major television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, controlled mostly by liberals. National talk radio was unheard of unless you could tune into the late-night broadcast hosted by Long John Nebel (John Zimmerman), a late-night show originating from New York and reached half way across the United States. Conservative talk radio did not impact America until the early 1990s when in 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was dropped. (Walter Martin, Christian writer and expert on the cults, often appeared on his show. You can listen to his debates with famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Hugh Schonfield, author of The Passover Plot.) The monopoly is over, and the gate keepers can’t stop competing opinions, so they demonize their opponents. We saw this recently when Democrats described members of the Tea Party as “terrorists.” It’s no wonder that Leftist Dominionists like Sen. John Kerry wants the media not to “give equal time or equal balance to” what he believes are “absurd notion[s] just because somebody asserts [them] or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.” His “absurd notions” are things he disagrees with. Cutting spending and stopping deficit spending are to him “absurd notions,” and he wants the media to cut off all debate on the subjects. The same is true with Leftist Dominionist Al Gore who wants the Global Warming debate to stop so the government can start controlling every facet of our lives.
Here’s how I defined dominion in the 1988 book The Reduction of Christianity:
The exercise of this dominion is ethical. It does not come automatically, nor is it imposed top-down by a political regime or by an army of Christians working frantically to overthrow the governments of the world. Such a concept to dominion is rather the essence of secular humanism: the religion of revolution. God’s people exercise dominion in the same way that Jesus exercised dominion — through sacrificial obedience and faithfulness to the commandments. Dominion comes through service. ((Gary DeMar and Peter Leithart, The Reduction of Christianity: A Biblical Response to Dave Hunt (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1988), 24–25.))
More Christians are beginning to believe that when civil government is doing something evil (e.g., legalizing abortion, redefining marriage and the family, spending our hard-earned money like there’s no tomorrow, and printing money, thus, making the money we hold less valuable), Christians have a duty and a right to act on that belief and work for change as they did to abolish the slave trade. William Wilberforce wrote in his diary on October 28, 1787: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of society.” ((Quoted in Peter Hammond, Slavery, Terrorism, and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat (Cape Town, South Africa: Christian Liberty Books, 2005), 12-13.)) Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement were about “dominion,” dominion over the evil of slavery. I know, it was a horrible thing to exercise such peaceful dominion. Leftists are enamored with the war our nation fought to abolish slavery. More than 625,000 Americans died in that exercise of dominion and set back race relations a hundred years.
The theology of dominionism has been a part of Christian thought for a good part of the twentieth century. The concept is based on the “dominion mandate” of Genesis 1:26–28. It is interesting that in 1988 Henry Morris, certainly not known as a Dominionist as the Left uses the term, set forth a theology of dominion in his book The Biblical Basis for Modern Science. According to Morris, the “dominion mandate” (his usage) includes science, technology, the humanities, commerce, law, civil government, and education, in short, every facet of human culture. Morris notes:
[L]ong before [the Great Commission] another great commission was given to all men, whether saved or unsaved, merely by virtue of being men created by God in His image. It also had worldwide scope, and has never been rescinded. It had to do with implementing God’s purpose in His work of creation, just as Christ’s commission was for implementing His work of salvation and reconciliation. ((Henry M. Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), 41. “The responsibility of administering capital punishment is the greatest responsibility of human government. It implicitly entails the obligation also to control those human actions which, if unchecked, could easily (and often do) lead to murder (e.g., robbery, adultery, slander, greed). The dual role of government is that of both protection and punishment–protection of the lives, property, and freedoms of its citizens, and just retribution on those citizens who deprive other citizens of life, possessions, or liberty” (45–46).))
Morris says that the command to subdue the earth means “bringing all earth’s systems and processes into a state of optimum productivity and utility, offering the greatest glory to God and benefit to mankind.” ((Morris, The Biblical Basis for Modern Science, 41.)) So then, there is nothing unusual about advocating dominion based on Genesis 1:26–28. Dominion is not all about politics. In fact, politics plays a small part in those who hold dominion theology.
There is a theological and logical relationship between the “dominion mandate” of Genesis and the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, in his Introduction to Carl F. H. Henry’s 1947 (notice the date) watershed book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, writes:
A Christian world- and life-view embracing world questions, societal needs, personal education ought to rise out of Matt. 28:18-21 [sic] as much as evangelism does. Culture depends on such a view, and Fundamentalism is prodigally dissipating the Christian culture accretion of centuries, a serious sin. A sorry answer lies in the abandonment of social fields to the secularist. ((Harold J. Ockenga, “Introduction,” in Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1947), 14.))
Dominion is an inescapable concept. Liberals have been practicing their brand of Dominion for quite some time. They claim that Christian Dominionists want to reinstate slavery and rule by genocide. This is nonsense. Leftist Dominionists have used the force of law to allow women, with the help of their doctors, to kill more than 60 million pre-born babies since 1973. Yes, Christian Dominionists believe its evil to kill preborn babies!
The modern welfare state is a sophisticated form of slavery. Consider the subtitle to Star Parker’s book Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It. She understands the nature of government-sponsored slavery since she lived as a slave on Uncle Sam’s plantation and experienced its dehumanizing effects. ((Star Parker, Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It (Nashville: WND Books, 2003).))
Instead of attacking Christian Dominionists, the hyperventilating attack dogs on the Left should police their own junkyard. And while they’re at it, they might want to spend more time on the real threat to America and the world — Muslim extremists who want us all dead.