“Christian political action is necessary, towards making the state again a Christian state, and its actions conform with the law of God.”
— RJ Rushdoony, God’s Plan for Victory
“Dominion theology” is a much-misunderstood term that has often been applied inaccurately to various aspects of the Christian Right, Christian Reconstructionists, and other iterations of aggressive, militant streams of politically active evangelicals in America. According to Chip Berlet, it was sociologist Sara Diamond who was one of the first to use and popularize the term “dominionism.” Diamond made it clear that in general terms that dominionism describes “a growing political tendency in the Christian Right.” Berlet goes on to clarify that “Dominionism is therefore a tendency among Protestant Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists that encourages them to not only be active political participants in civic society, but also seek to dominate the political process as part of a divine mandate.”
Moreover, according to Peter Montgomery of the Right Wing Watch, what we are seeing currently is that the “language of dominion” has become the lingua franca of a great many garden-variety evangelicals–whether or not they understand it completely, or completely buy into its ideology.
