LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kisekileia)

I posted this originally in my own journal, but then I saw bloodandsalsa's post here questioning whether we've been using the title of "dominionist" too broadly. I'm a 23-year-old Christian who was evangelical in my teens, but after some spiritual abuse started to shift left theologically. It's really in the past year or so that I've completely stopped using the "evangelical" label for myself. I'm rethinking various issues from my own perspective rather than the one I was taught as a teenager, and it's very freeing. However, even though I'm not an evangelical anymore, I can still relate to evangelical perspectives enough that I see them in a more nuanced way than someone with a different background might. So I think that sometimes in dark_christian we tar widely varying people and groups with the same "dominionist" brush. In this post, I reflected on that.

I recently joined the dark_christian LJ community, and it's provided a lot of food for thought.

The Dark Christianity community is devoted to discussing "the right-wing theocratic elements of the Christian faith, and how these religious supremacists are actively eroding the foundations of the separation of church and state in the US". The movement in question is referred to as "dominionism". (Source: the community profile.) It's really interesting and rather disturbing, because the groups and activities discussed include the very scariest stuff, but they also include groups and people that I once respected and saw as relatively aligned with my own faith, along with groups/people/ideas that I was exposed to but never really bought into.

On the one hand, I think some dark_christian people go too far in condemning any group as dominionist if it has any connection to people, groups or ideas that have a scary side. In evangelicalism, groups and people have tons of links to each other because it's such a cohesive subculture. Some of these groups and people are scary, while some are not; it's a continuum. Just because an organization has some sort of link to someone scary doesn't mean they themselves are scary. One person associated with dark_christian, in response to reading my history, said he was "pretty sure that the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship is connected with dominionism, through a series of cover organizations". As someone who was involved with Inter-Varsity for a long time, went to their retreats, and read many books from their publishing house, I can assure anyone that (unless a lot has changed in just the last few years) Inter-Varsity is into social justice, community, discussing the moral failures of capitalism and individualism, and the like--a far cry from dominionism's exaltation the free market and emphasis on sexual politics.

Evangelical Christianity exists on a wide spectrum. At the left end there's the Sojourners/Inter-Varsity variety, which doesn't advocate government policies that restrict sexuality (preferring the "safe, legal and rare" ideal for abortion) and focuses political teaching/activism around social justice and fighting poverty. At the extreme right end, there's full-blown Christian Reconstructionism that really does aim to establish Old Testament law in the U.S. There are also a whole lot of people in the middle, some of whom are kind of scary themselves and many of whom have some sort of tie to some sort of person or group that is a little scarier than them. Those are the people who support the separation of church and state in principle, but also honestly believe that a lot of conservative Christian ideas are factually true regardless of one's theology ("abortion is murder" or "evolution from nothing does not adequately account for the complexity of life") and that it is therefore reasonable for secular governments to set policy based on those ideas. These people also often have the sense that their faith is under siege, which is really hard for most non-evangelicals to understand because of the U.S. Christian right's recent ascendance under George W. Bush, but which I think is based heavily on the abortion issue--they believe that because of Roe vs. Wade, millions of legal murders have occurred and they are powerless to stop them.

So I think it's necessary to be a little more discerning and less paranoid than simply labelling any organization dominionist and 100% bad if they have some sort of link to a scary organization. Even among people and groups that genuinely have some dominionist ideas and spiritually abusive practices, there's a lot of variation in just how bad they are. James Dobson has become more associated with the hard right than I remember him being during my teens, but he's not as scary as Ron Luce. (From my recollection of Focus on the Family vs. Teen Mania literature, the former did not have nearly the heavily emotionally manipulative, spiritually abusive content of the latter.) Likewise, Ron Luce (who is most definitely dominionist) is not as scary as Fred Phelps (who even most conservative evangelicals abhor).

On the other hand, some stuff that's going on really is scarier than I realized. Today I followed a link about Chuck Colson from a comment on a entry, and I honestly didn't realize the extent to which his organization, Prison Fellowship Ministries, was involved in coercing prisoners to be involved with it unless they wanted harsher treatment from the prison system. I remember liking a book of his for the most part, while taking exception to certain parts, when I was maybe 15 or so and much more conservative--I wasn't aware he used coercive tactics on prisoners. I think I'm also very sheltered from the extremes of American Christian fundamentalism because I live in Toronto, which is very socially liberal--conservative Christian activity that would be socially mainstream in parts of the U.S. would be considered completely unacceptable by most people here.

So I'm trying to work out, from my more mature and more liberal perspective now, how scary various parts of the evangelical subculture I got tangled up with as a teenager really are. It's interesting, and kind of frightening. However, I really want to keep it balanced with fleshing out a healthier vision of Christian faith now, so I don't become soured on Christianity altogether. I want to maintain a Christian faith that helps me be happy (when it's justified), healthy, moral, and free.

Thoughts?