All of us have a stake in preserving the religious freedom that is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Whatever our religion or lack thereof, we are all protected by the State keeping its distance from religion. The Founding Fathers knew their history, and they knew that Europe had been torn apart by endless wars between religious sects. They sought to create a nation where people of differing religious beliefs could live in harmony, none dominating the others. For that reason, the First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law establishing a state religion. Religious minorities have flourished (for the most part) because of the protection afforded by separation of church and state.
But now this principle is threatened by a new and powerful ideology of dominionism. This is the tie that binds the evangelicals.
Although this article focuses on Texas, it has clear national implications. Read it and think “DeVos,” “Trump.” Even devout Christians should fear these influential leaders’ refusal to separate church and state.
“Though it’s seldom mentioned by name, it’s one of the major forces in Texas politics today: dominion theology, or dominionism. What began as a fringe evangelical sect in the 1970s has seen its influence mushroom — so much so that sociologist Sara Diamond has called dominionism “the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right.” (Italics hers.) That’s especially true here in Texas, where dominionist beliefs have, over the last decade, become part and parcel of right-wing politics at the highest levels of government.
“So, what is it? Dominionism fundamentally opposes America’s venerable tradition of church-state separation — in fact, dominionists deny the Founders ever intended that separation in the first place. According to Frederick Clarkson, senior fellow for religious liberty at the non-profit social justice think tank Political Research Associates, dominionists believe that Christians “have a biblical mandate to control all earthly institutions — including government — until the second coming of Jesus.” And that should worry all Texans — Christians and non-Christians alike.
“Dominionism comes in “soft” and “hard” varieties. “Hard” dominionism (sometimes called Christian Reconstructionism), as Clarkson describes it, explicitly seeks to replace secular government, and the U.S. Constitution, with a system based on Old Testament law.
“The father of hard dominionism, the late Presbyterian theologian R.J. Rushdoony, called for his followers to “take back government … and put it in the hands of Christians.”
“Rushdoony’s legacy has been carried on by his son-in-law, Tyler-based economist Gary North, an unapologetic theocrat who in 1982 called for Christians to “get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
Dominionists are so eager to win control that they are willing to use the deeply immoral Trump as their instrument.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Peter Greene is on fire. We need to listen carefully to DeVos because she’s telling us what she’s going to do. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2018/03/devos-made-up-of-individuals.html#comment-form
If you go back to her initial hearings, DeVos reiterated the same mantra of individualism. It is better than saying that she plans to defund public education. It is another way of saying that she does not believe in the common good, but, of course, billionaires have no need for the common good, If they destroy this country, they can go anywhere in the world.
The line that caught my eye:
“Yes, her attempts to reframe the issues of education are clumsy, partly because, stripped of her checkbook powers, she is a terrible, terrible persuader.”
About all one needs to know about Betsy the Rich Ditz.
As I commented on Peter’s site, well, to be fair, it really is hard to eloquently persuade people to let you punch their children in the face.
Amen, Sister!
Max Blumenthal’s book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party puts all the pieces of this movement together. In the 1960s Rushdoony proselytized a doctrine he called “Reconstructionism.” As Blumenthal wrote:
“According to Frederick Clarkson, a pioneering researcher of the Christian Right, ‘Reconstructionism seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical law.’ Recontructionism would eliminate not only democracy but many of its manifestations, such as labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed.'”
Blumenthal expertly connects the threads of this to 60s free thinker Francis Schaeffer’s obsession with abortion and how it was fused to Reconstructionism. From that flowed Falwell, Robertson, and reclusive billionaire Howard Ahmanson, whose neurosis about gay marriage led to his funding of the Institute for Religion and Democracy and its mission, at the end of the Cold War, of “replacing Communism with homosexuality as its wedge issue.” The person who fused all these threads together seamlessly was James Dobson and his pseudo-cult, Focus on the Family.
The last one to fill out the ideology was John Hagee, “a Christian Zionist who preaches that the prophecies of the Book of Revelations will unfold as soon as the Jewish diaspora resettles in ‘Biblical Israel,’ meaning all of Israel and the West Bank…According to Hagee’s reading of the Book of Revelations, the lodestar of End Times theology, when Jesus returns to Jerusalem, the Jews must convert to evangelical Christianity or suffer eternal torment in ‘an everlasting lake of fire.’ And liberals had better seek cover as well.”
Their crowning achievement—until our Dear Leader—was forcing McCain to put Palin on his ticket, with the tactical goal of attracting women to support the ticket. But, “Instead of the suburban hockey moms the GOP hoped to attract by selecting Palin, those who filled swing-state fairgrounds and arenas to cheer the VP candidate were focused obsessively on issues and were sometimes openly racist. Not only was this not the portrait of a winning coalition—it was not much of a coalition at all—it became politically combustible. A few words of incitement were all it would take to turn the party base in a virtual lynch mob.”
The lesson for us is that we need to quit whining about who is the most perfect Democrat and start doing the hard work of reshaping the party—starting with education as the core principle. The Dominionists, in a perverse way, created the blueprint of how to do it.
“The lesson for us is that we need to quit whining about who is the most perfect Democrat. . . ”
Can’t quite agree with you on this one, GregB. What you are calling “whining” many of us would call “pointing out how the Dims have sold out to the neoliberal/neocon cabal who blindly (well maybe not blindly but with eyes open to who is filling their pockets) support Wall Street, permanent warmongering and the myth of the “shining light on the hill”.
Then start doing something about it. Marginalize the neoliberal/neocon cabal. The right wing marginalized and kicked out the liberals and moderates in their party. There’s room in the Democratic for more voices, who you and I think are the majority. Quit whining.
Again, tain’t whining, just pointing out the realities.
I’ll never understand why ed reformers support vouchers. They support sending public money to entities who fire gay people? How do Democrats possibly square this with civil rights? We had a Catholic high school here who expelled pregnant girls. “Liberals” support this?
It is AMAZING how far Right they have gone. This is further Right than Barry Goldwater’s wildest dreams.
Barry Goldwater would be considered a wild-eyed liberal by today’s Republicans. He was all in favor of our using our military might, even going so far as using nukes. But he was not a social conservative.
As for the ed reformers, the ones who profess to be Democrats have drunk the Gates Foundation, Broad, etc Kool-Aid. Some of them may actually believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that charters (and even vouchers) will “save” poor children, especially children of color. They ignore any statistics that contradict this. The others are either megalomaniacs who think they know everything, or are consumed by wanting to sell computers and computer programs and curricula to the schools in order to make more money.
Sadly, the word “some” might more effectively be changed to “most.” MOST of them actually believe that charters will “save” poor children…”
Yes, they refuse to believe, or even look at, the evidence of the efficacy of charter schools. 😦
And for those who might misconstrue my comment, I am talking about the statistics that show the lack of efficacy of the charters.
I get the posts of one of these brainwashed souls on my Facebook feed, not because I friended him, because I “liked” one of his beach photographs. I never engage with this man, who I believe, is a very religious evangelical Christian. There is no point to arguing with him as he has clearly “drunk the Kool-Aid. I also don’t block him because I am trying to understand how he can believe the garbage from The Blaze or Breitbart. Some of these posts allude to the “fact” that the rise of Trump can be found in the scripture. He has never made a negative comment about my pro-public education posts or called me a “libtard,” a favorite term of internet trolls. This is my mini-sociological experiment. We should try to understand how these so called good people can have such a blind spot.
The moral of the story: Never “like” a beach photograph of someone you don’t know! 🤣
Actually, retired teacher did learn the lesson and many on any side of the issue would be better served by dialogue with whom they disagree.
Duane, you do realize you just contradicted the comment you made above? And I was joking. That was what the laughing face meant.
Sorry, GregB. Went over my head.
How are these people that much different from the Taliban or ISIS? Or the Saudis, for that matter. Those all believe in fundamentalist Islam and strict sharia law.
Dominionists believe in what is essentially Christian (their interpretation of Christian) sharia law.
Oy!
Agreed. They keep twisting the laws to suit them. It is OK to justify discriminating against same sex couples or including birth control insurance coverage if it offends your religion. My mother’s family are Mennonites that go back almost three hundred years in Pennsylvania. Maybe I should rejoin the flock. https://themennonite.org/feature/mennonites-say-war-taxes-mennonites-say-war-taxes/
An interesting contrast is the history of the Menonites who migrated to Pennsylvania in the colonial period to the Menonites who migrated to the Great Plains, mostly from the German Russian areas.
The difference is they are white.
Methodist founder John Wesley once stated that belief in Christianity had a problem. Once people believe, it has a stabilizing effect on their lives and they do better materially. This moves them away from God in their behavior. All the while they see themselves blessed, taking credit for what God has Done for themselves.
If there is an omniscient view of life by the departed, Wesley must be wagging his head at modern American religionists, who as the prophet Isaiah put it, punish the poor and call darkness light.
These modern theocrats are afraid to live in a world where they have to convince people that their ideas are legitimate without state backing.
Wesley may have noticed the problem, but it’s the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians that may actually believe it.
“Dumbinionism” would be more apt
Dominionism is rooted in this Bible verse (with emphasis added): “And God said, Let us make MAN in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and OVER ALL THE EARTH, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” This verse justifies the right’s emphasis on patriarchy and the exploitation of the earth’s resources and serves as their basis for opposition to equal rights for women and the fanciful belief that climate change is a problem that can ultimately be mitigated by men who will surely develop a technological fix to the problems created by global warming.
The DeVos and Prince families are directly attached to this. I wrote about it recently:
“It would not be a stretch to say that [Marshall Tuck supporter Howard] Ahmanson and members of the Prince and DeVos families are part of a Dominionist kabal, using extreme wealth to reorient American government toward extremist Christian doctrine. They regularly attend The Gathering, a ‘shadowy, powerful network’ of hard-right Christian funders, according to an investigation published in the Daily Beast.
“‘The Gathering is as close to a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ as you’re likely to find,’ Jay Michaelson reported. Attendees are the ‘wealthiest conservative to hard-right evangelical philanthropists in America, and have led the campaigns to privatize public schools, redefine ‘religious liberty,’ fight same-sex marriage, [and] fight evolution…’ he wrote. It was at The Gathering where Betsy DeVos said she wants to ‘advance God’s Kingdom’ through public schools. It was there that she and her husband said that school choice was a way to reverse the history of public schools displacing the Church as the center of communities.
“DeVos and Ahmanson are each doing their part as religious warriors in the crusade. With the help of a compliant Congress, DeVos is exploding the barrier that historically separated American public education from religion. She has promoted school vouchers to pay for religious schools, withdrawn Obama Administration guidance that protected transgender students, and is trying to give churches the chance to reclaim their place at the center of communities by expanding school choice.
“Ahmanson is doing his part by contributing to candidates like Marshall Tuck who will make this extreme agenda seem palatable even to California progressives.”
https://www.laprogressive.com/marshall-tuck/