It’s Time to Start Calling Evangelicals What They Are: The American Taliban
This is an excellent piece on the theocratic trend in the US. The author slightly (I think) misinterprets some of the casual signs; he says ‘I’ll pray for you’ is a hallmark of theocratic theology, whereas I tend to think that’s more a universal sort of evangelical smugness. But he is very much correct that there are a whole array of ‘coded’ phrases that do indeed denote dominionist or reconstructionist leanings. He also misses that a lot of people repeat these ideas without really knowing what they signify. There is a documented practice, known as ‘steeple-jacking,’ by which dominionists join a mainstream church, and over time try to sway it towards their own views (yet another topic on which I plan to post a longer & more detailed piece). But the result is that church members often don’t realize that the phrases they hear on Sunday are meant literally, rather in the sense that any Christian might talk about the kingdom of God as a metaphor for the faithful or for heaven. Nevertheless, his core point stands.
The other pieces it links to, in particular, this piece in the Washington Post offer some good background on the Council for National Policy, a secretive neo-con Christian group that has urged the administration to eliminate the Dep’t of Education (HR 899 has already been proposed and can be viewed at Congress.gov.) and turn schools over to private entities in order to ‘advance the Kingdom of God.’
Also of interest are the videos at the end of the article dealing with the Seven Mountains Mandate, a theological structure that provides a plan of action for taking over all of society beginning with seven core areas (the metaphorical ‘Mountains’), of culture, including government arts & media, education, and of course, business! I’ll be doing a more detailed piece on Seven Mountains or 7M theology soon, but the videos there are an excellent overview.
I will say that I am thrilled to see these issues seemingly coming back into journalistic awareness; the more voices amplifying this information, the better. These groups succeed because they hide and because we *want* to dismiss them as fringe. We want to say ‘oh, surely they don’t mean that literally!’ But they do, and the more people talking about it, the better chance we have of stopping this
