Thanks to the presidential campaigns of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, there has been a lot of attention focused lately on dominion theology and its role within the Religious Right political movement.
This, in turn, has led to a number of pieces asserting that there is no such thing as “dominionism” and claiming that it is nothing more than a conspiracy-theory/scare-tactic dreamed up by the Left.
Our colleague Peter Montgomery addressed this effort to downplay dominionism in an excellent piece he wrote for Religion Dispatches yesterday, but Religious Right activists continue to claim that there is no cause for alarm whatsoever.
Today, John Aman, Director of Communications at Truth in Action Ministries, went a step further, writing a piece for the Christian Post claiming that dominionism doesn’t even exist:
I had never even heard the term until 2005 when a Christian Science Monitor reporter asked me about it in connection with our Reclaiming America for Christ conference.
The reason I was so clueless is because, as Joe Carter explains in First Things, it’s a label used exclusively on the left. Berkeley-educated sociologist Sara Diamond, the author of several critiques of Christian civic engagement, including Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, invented the term in the 1980s.
Dominionism, Carter explains, is a term “never used outside liberal blogs and websites. No reputable scholars use the term for it is a meaningless neologism that Diamond concocted for her dissertation.”
It is, however, a handy way to smear evangelicals like Bachmann and Perry who bring biblically informed moral convictions into public debate.
…
The truth is that dominionism is a sham charge-one reserved for Christians on the right.
Really? Maybe someone ought to tell that to all the dominionists who have suddenly started downplaying their dominionism.
And I guess someone ought to really tell C. Peter Wagner to change the name of his book:
And perhaps Aman ought to talk to Janet Porter, since she lost her radio program because of her well–documented dominionism.
As it happens, Porter was once the National Director for the Center for Reclaiming America, the sister organization to Coral Ridge Ministries … which just so happens to be the former name of Truth in Action Ministries, where none other than John Aman serves as the Director of Communications.
