Dominion Theology and the United States
Those who believe in Christian Dominion Theology for the United States are no different than Islamic clerics that demand Sharia law be followed in everything from banking to personal relationships. The ability for social institutions, such as education and business, to exist separate from religious institutions is one of the reasons the past 150 years have seen the greatest rise in education and the standard of living humanity has seen in its entire existence. A middle class person lives better today than the nobility did hundreds of years ago with access to hot, running water, electricity, furnaces, air conditioning, automobiles, and a rule of law that provides due process.
A few weeks ago, I was reading a political message board where some commentators espoused their sincere belief that all of humanity’s problems will be solved when they succeed in implementing dominion theology. Intrigued, I began to research the concept. What I found was frightening. The only good news is that all mainline Christian religions have rejected dominion theology, although some, such as Focus on the Family, are accused of practicing a “soft” form if it.
In a nutshell, dominion theology is the Christian version of Islamic Sharia law where a group of delusional fanatics takes over the secular government and governs it exclusively by “the law of God”. The problem is, most of these people have woefully inadequate knowledge of history and fail to realize that one of the reasons the United States has been successful is because we avoided centuries of bloodshed over questions such as whether or not the bread in communion becomes the literal body of Christ or merely represents the body of Christ.
For example, if we were to introduce prayer into public schools, the Christian denominations can’t even agree on what is appropriate or proper. You’d have Catholics wanting to say a Hail Mary, born again Christians speaking tongues, and Orthodox Christians praying in Latin. Instead of learning literature, mathematics, history, and philosophy, students would spend all day in fights over whether or not the end times were near. That’s what families are for – to decide how (and in what) religion to raise their children, ensure that they get what they believe is a “good” foundational understanding of their theology, and then “train them up” in the way they should go. That is not the purpose of school. That’s like demanding people memorize the beatitudes at the DMV. That institution has a specific function that works best if left alone.
In its purest form, dominion theology holds that Christians should own the television networks, elect the government, and write the laws so that Biblical laws are identical to political laws. Thus, an unfaithful husband would be stoned, as would a gay teenager, rebellious children, and someone who had “heretical” beliefs and dared to question the wisdom of killing productive members of society.
Dominion theology, if it were to ever gain hold in the nation, would lead, unquestionably and inevitably, to some sort of genocide, just as it has in virtually every country where religion has been used as the basis of the court system. We would have, rather quickly I should think, our own version of “Saint” Thomas Moore, the revered “man of God” who burned English peasants in the public square for daring to possess a Bible in English so they could read and understand scripture for themselves.
I am more and more convinced that horsehoe political theory is the most accurate model that has yet to be developed in understanding the role of individuals and institutions in a society.
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