Don Swift : Dominionists and the ‘Kingdom of God’

Image from The Last Crisis.

A threat to American liberties:
Dominionists and the ‘Kingdom of God’

They want to take over government and create a theocracy. No wonder they see nothing wrong in playing politics from the pulpit.

By Don Swift / The Rag Blog / September 21, 2011

[This is the second in a series on Dominionism by Don Swift. See Part I here.]

Dominionists refuse to accept the separation of church and state. They want to take over government and other areas of society and create a theocracy. No wonder they see nothing wrong in playing politics from the pulpit.

Reverend Ed Kalnins, once Sarah Palin’s pastor at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church, has consigned critics of George W. Bush to hell. He even denounced those who criticized Bush’s handling of Katrina. He doubted that people who voted for John Kerry in 2004 would be welcomed to heaven.

He said: “I’m not going tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation. I’m sorry.” Kalnins added: “If every Christian will vote righteously, it would be a landslide every time.

There are different forms of Dominionism. Christian Reconstructionism is one important form. These people believe that the Kingdom of God was established on earth at the time of the Resurrection and that it is their job to complete its work by taking control of society. Then Christ can return in the Second Coming. Scholars concerned with technicalities say this view is rooted in pre-suppositionism, meaning the kingdom must be in place before the Second Coming.

Calvinist theologian J.Rousas Rushdoony founded the movement Christian Reconstructionism back in the 1960s. Author of the three volume Institutes of Biblical Law, Rushdoony was a prolific writer, and he was a founder of the Christian home-schooling movement. He also defended American slavery. He appeared often on Pat Robertson’s television program in the 1980s, but Robertson claims he does not understand what Dominionism is.

Rushdoomy hated the Federal Reserve and was revered by gold hoarders. He thought that American law should be replaced with the Old Testament. The irony is that some of his followers today are vociferous in denouncing shariah law. He wrote in 1982, “With the coming collapse of the humanistic state, the Christian must be prepared to take over…”

This rightist prophet led the Chalcedon Foundation, which carries on his work and is known for its virulent homophobia. His followers are bent on reconstructing “our fallen society,” and the recent efforts of the Tea Baggers to bring down the financial system is an indication of how far they will go.

They take seriously the extreme and harsh punishments in the Old Testament and would apply the death penalty to apostasy, homosexuality, and abortion. Many believe the Bible requires physical punishment of children. Some believe that seven years of slavery would be an acceptable punishment for some offenses today, but none believe that slavery now should be based on race.

The Christian Reconstructionists or Theonomists have influenced numerous Protestant leaders without necessarily making them Dominionists. Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy have supported Dominionist books.

They have a “kingdom-now theology.” In the George W. Bush White House, Marvin Olasky, a Christian Reconstructionist, had great influence.

George Grant, former executive director of Coral Ridge Ministry, said that “it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice … It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time … World conquest.” That organization is now called Truth in Action Ministries, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann has close ties to it.

She appeared in one of its documentaries that attacks socialism, and she has espoused the Dominionist position that government has no right to collect more than 10% of a person’s earnings in taxes. She has also promoted Grant’s book on Robert E. Lee, in which the godly Confederacy battled the godless North. It is a pro-slavery book, and Bachmann recommended it on her web site for some time.

Michelle Bachmann has admitted being strongly influenced by a Reconstructionist, John Eidsmore, a Dominionist teaching at Oral Roberts University, a Pentecostal school. Eidsmore spoke to Alabama secessionists last year and defended the right of a state to secede and explicitly endorsed the constitutional views of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.

Bachmann has also said that she was influenced by the writings of Dominionist Francis Schaeffer. Bachmann said she decided to become a politician after watching one of his films Three years before his death, Schaeffer warned that America would descend into a tyrannical state and that an authoritarian elite would scheme to bring about this terrible result. He believed that only true Christians should rule.

Bachmann has also had good things to say about Dominionist historian David Barton, whose website is WallBuilders. He had followed Rushdoony in defending American slavery. Barton teaches that the Bible provides clear guidance on all public policy matters.

[Don Swift, a retired history professor, also writes under the name Sherman DeBrosse. Read more articles by Don Swift on The Rag Blog.]

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2 Responses to Don Swift : Dominionists and the ‘Kingdom of God’

  1. Brother Jonah says:

    Behold I lay a stumbling stone in Zion.

    If they want real Old Testament law they’d have to be judged by it, and redemption wouldn’t qualify them as judges.George Bush would be stoned (not like the way he usually got stoned) for building a temple to himself on Methodist Church property.
    Also there’s that little business he does with a Satanic (although probably not Satanist but I ain’t gonna quibble) ritual his Rich Bitch buddies do with the stolen body of Geronimo.

    Abortion, sez they? Aerial bombardment causes involuntary abortion in pregnant women sez I. And so does the U.S. Air Force and the RAF. The days before the bombing of Iraq began obstetricians were accelerating labor under controlled conditions to avoid major complications under conditions of no water, electric and under constant threat of violent death. Every Iraqi kid stillborn (spontaneous abortion) would be a capital offense against all those in the chain of command from Bush on down, because they knew since the Battle of Britain exactly what kind of havoc bombing wreaks on civilians.

    Before that, actually. The painting Picasso did “Guernica” which is often loudly denounced as ugly and “surrealist” with for one part shows a man with his foot up his nose… that’s what a human body looks like that after being near an explosion.

    Picasso prettied it up a bit but other than sparing the sentiments of the viewer (slightly) that’s what people look like when they’re torn to pieces by bombs and he painted what he saw.

    All the Law of Moses they babble about so learnedly, the entire bible shows people using it wrongly, focusing on the notion that God gave them license to break the 6th commandment whenever they pleased. Not So. It wound up to be a millennia long Jew-on-Jew crime spree and if you do the math in the book of Judges, there were more Hebrews killed by Hebrews than by Gentiles and more Hebrews killed than the number of Gentiles they killed.

    God came down among us, lived three and thirty years, told everybody that they got the formula wrong, showed them the right way and they had Him killed. The death penalty cases the priesthood dumped onto Him, He decided without anybody dying. The adultress is famous, but paying Taxes to Caesar and the priest having in his possession a graven image (the penny) of Caesar who had himself declared to be a god, the priest had taken that penny with him into the Temple. Several counts of Death Penalty. They neglect to teach that in Sunday school and the book of Judges is limited in what we were taught to abbreviated accounts of Samson and Gideon. When I learned the phrase “Say Shibboleth” it wasn’t in church and for that matter, I never heard it in church. That was another Jew-on-Jew mass murder. They definitely don’t tell us about the slaughter of the tribe of Benjamin.

    They didn’t tell us that King David danced in the streets with his soldiers, holding sticks with thousands of severed Philistine penises on them.
    “and Michal the daughter of Saul looked upon her husband and hated him”

    They should be really careful what they wish for. Their preachers aren’t telling them about how they’ll be automatically judged with the same measure with which they mete judgment. Eye for an eye is a statute of limitations and they should have left it alone.

  2. And yeah, I made a bunch of grammatical errors in there. I also didn’t separate the slaughter of Ephraim from the later slaughter of Benjamin, adequately at least.

    There are many silver tongued liars who would never make such errors but they’re neither morally nor intellectually superior. They’re just good at flapping their tater holes.

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