Dominionist hues and tones
I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists' fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President "was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God's master plan." ~ Bill Moyers, Welcome to Doomsday
And, another commentary:
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Who is America's Top Theocrat?
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the biggest theocrat of all? There sure are a lot of candidates for top theocrat these days. Two major contenders emerged this past week.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, in anticipation of two cases about public displays of the Ten Commandments in public spaces, declared, "I hope the Supreme Court will finally read the Constitution and see there's no such thing, or no mention, of separation of church and state in the Constitution."
It certainly true that those words do not appear in the Constitution or any of the amendments. But the idea of church state separation is present in the clear intentions of the framers. As I noted in December, the Framers did their damndest to disestablish what were then called "established churches" in the states -- which had had mini-theocracies to varying degrees for some 150 years. One had to have been a member of the correct sect to vote and hold public office. Here, as in Europe, there was often state funding of the church in power. The Framers not only wanted to put a stop to that, but they wanted to enshrine the notion of religious equality, which meant the right of individual citizens to believe as they will, or not. This idea is present in Article Six, Clause Three of the Constitution, which states:
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http://www.frederickclarkson.com/2005/03/who-is-americas-top-theocrat.htmlAnd this is a little dated, but may prove useful as background
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"Jesus Feaks" and Dominion Theology
Who is Francis Schaeffer? Sara Diamond writes:
An earlier source of dominion theology was an evangelical philosopher named Fracis Schaeffer, who died of cancer in 1984. Schaeffer's 1981 book A Christian Manifesto sold 290,000 copies in its first year, and remained one of the Christian Right's most important texts into the 1990's. The book's argument was simple: America began as a nation rooted in Biblical principles. But as society became more pluralistic, proponenets of a new philosophy of secular humanism gradually came to dominate debate on policy issues. Since humanists place human progress, not God, at the center of their considerations, they pushed American culture in all manner of ungodly directions, the visible results of which included abortion and the secularization of the public schools. At the end of A Christian Manifesto, Schaeffer advocated the use by Christians of civil disobedience to restore Biblical morality, which explains Schaeffer's popularity among activists. Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry credited Schaeffer as a major influence in his own life and among fellow "rescuers." In the 1960s and 1970s, Schaeffer and his wife Edith ran a retreat center called L'Abri (Hebrew for "the shelter") in Switzerland. There young converts to Christ came to study with Schaeffer and learn how to apply his teachings to the political process back home. ~ Source: Roads To Dominion, by Sara Diamond; page 246; The Guilford Press, 1995.
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http://www.publiceye.org/diamond/sd_domin.html