Ted Cruz Displays his Dominionist Roots at CPAC 2021

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke on February 26th, 2021 at the Orlando CPAC meeting. The topic of his roughly 16-minute talk was “The Bill of Rights, Liberty, and the Cancel Culture.” Included in his bizarre, rambling, and otherwise incoherent speech were, among other things: a tone-deaf joke about his recent trip to Cancun while most of Texas froze without water or power; mocking AOC for her very real terror of being murdered during the Capitol Riots; adding in a jumble of obscure science-fiction analogies and jokes that ultimately fell flat; and finally, concluding the speech by screaming out “Freedom” (allegedly quoting the immortal words of William Wallace from the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart).

Incoherent ramblings aside, what struck me in particular were two phrases that Cruz — an evangelical Christian — used in his speech. In my understanding, the use of such keywords betrays his roots in dominion theology. Frederick Clarkson of the Political Research Associates established the connections between Cruz and dominion theology in a 2016 article.

Clarkson noted back then — when Cruz was a hopeful Republican presidential candidate — that “The rise of Ted Cruz is a singular event in American political history. The son of a Cuban refugee and evangelical pastor, Cruz was raised in the kind of evangelicalism-with-a-theocratic-bent that…