The March Of Christian Nationalism 4: How Dominionists Are Trying To Undermine Our Country

The final part of our series on Christian Dominionism is now out. In this installment we look at Christian Nationalist's war on American democracy.

Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

This is part 4 of a 4 article series I wrote in 2011 for a website that no longer exists. You should probably start with Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Considering the media has finally noticed that Christian Nationalism is a problem, we here at The Banter thought it might be interesting to republish these old articles and then take a look at how relevant they are a decade later to what is happening in America now. They have been lightly edited for formatting and typos. The content remains mostly unchanged. - Justin

We know what Christian Dominionism is (if you don’t, go back and read parts 1, 2, and 3. No skipping!). We know what they want and we know why they want it. Now the question becomes: how are they doing it and what are the signs of their influence in politics?

Again, we find there to be some overlap between your standard, right-wing, anti-government rhetoric and the goals of Christian Dominionists. But some of it is purely a creature of religious zealotry.

There are many fronts to the Dominionist attack on our way of life; one of them is the ongoing assault on the social safety nets that have been in place for decades. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are under constant threat of being extinguished so we’ll start there.

Social Security: Technically, the right hates Social Security because it’s “Big Government” and costs too much money. That is, of course, garbage. The amount of money and resources consumed by our bloated military dwarfs SS but that’s never an issue. No. The “problem” with Social Security is that it represents the country pulling together (the “social”) to ensure that no one is left to die in poverty and hunger (the “security”). This reliance on others goes against the right’s creed of “personal responsibility” which is code for “everyone for themselves”.

The Dominionists, however, have a slightly different take on SS. This collective pooling of resources for the betterment of all means that fewer people have to turn to them for their needs. Thus, Social Security deprives religious organizations of power in the form of less desperate people. Privatization is a good way to end it (and make Wall St. untold billions in profit in the process) but for Dominionists, the goal is simply to make it go away altogether.

Medicare and Medicaid: The objection to these stunningly popular and useful programs is similar to the objections against Social Security but the attack against them is far more insidious.