LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hi out there! I'm two months along now in the tagging project over here, and I have a new disambiguation question for everyone. Currently there are three tags that overlap (christian zionism, israel, israel and lebanon). It occurs to me that we not only need to decide which of these terms to use, but whether or not the concept of dominionism and zionism really should apply to all posts regarding the middle east. Please vote!

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For those of you new here, this is the third tagging poll associated with this project. You can see the last poll by clicking here. The last poll also links to the first poll.

As always, you can help with the tagging process! Just tag up your entries as you post them - the best way to do so is to hit the "edit tags" button after your entry has been posted, and choose tag terms from the drop-down list provided. To pick multiple terms, just hold down the control key while you click. Thanks Again!

( more details on project )

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY catvincent)

A small point, but one that keeps tripping me up...

I've noticed a term being used for Dominionists in some posts - 'doms'.
The problem with this is the term already has a quite different meaning - that of Dominant in the BDSM community. Since the group takes pains to avoid insult and show respect to all members (and I know that several DC members are part of that community), I think it would be a good idea to find an alternative term.

My suggestion - 'Dominos'. Apt since they are small, dark, straight-edged and we hope to topple them...

If someone can come up with a better word, that would be fine.
(I'm fine with 'Dommies' instead, for example.)

Disclaimer - yes, I do happen to be a Dominant. I have a problem with the word being used to describe people whose attitude to others' rights, sexual and otherwise, is pretty much the opposite of 'safe, sane and consensual'. It's about as annoying to me as I imagine calling Dominionists 'Christians' is to those of that faith... and yes, I *do* consider BDSM as part of my spiritual practice!




[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY catvincent)

Via Signs of Witness; a report states what is obvious to us here but seems to elude so many others - that religious fanaticism is the problem, not the particular religion espoused. Hopefully this might get the point across to a few more folk, especially those who feel the True Evils of the world are the *other* fanatics, not the ones who use their preferred symbol-set.

'Violent Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremists invoke the same rhetoric of “good” and “evil” and the best way to fight them is to tackle the problems that drive people to extremism, according to a report obtained by Reuters.

( Continued under cut. )

Like we Discordians are fond of saying... Death to all Fanatics!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hi regular readers and new! This is an update on the ongoing tagging project here I started a month ago. Since then we've had a couple of polls on how people want to find things; you can read the questions and see the results for the first one here, and for the second one here.

As a result of these polls, the media tag was abolished and entires sorted by format of media (books, movies, news, video, radio, podcast). Establishment clause was supplanted by church-state issues as a search term. Terri Schiavo gained her own tag and was taken out of women's health and congress, but kept in with politics. Marantha, Every Nation, and Campus Crusade are all cross-referenced.

Next up: pulling Christian Marketing out of the Culture Wars category. My question for y'all this week is just - Have I missed anything? I know we're still tagging up the backlog - I'm just now starting July of 2005 - but have I missed any good tags that would be useful? Are there redundancies that have been overlooked in our tag list? Feel free to click around on the 'explore community tags" link there on the side and let me know what you think.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hello all! This week I'm still tagging away, and I'm only about two years behind the current entries now. Last week we had a great poll where over 150 readers let me know how they would like to find things. Most of the questions had strong results, but unsurprisingly the last question - about categorizing the Marantha, Every Nation, and Campus Crusade folks - was a close one, with the most popular choice getting only 42.9% of the vote. The reason the answer to this question was a close run was because it was really a question about disambiguation, or how to agree on the specific meaning and use of related terms.

I expect this week's poll to also produce close-run results, because it is all about disambiguating some terms. I know some of the questions below may seem picky, but they are important - knowing how the community answers these questions will help me catalog things correctly, and ultimately that can help us all find the information we need. I will implement the results of that last poll into the tagging process as soon as y'all can help me with these interesting little questions...

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As always, you can help with the tagging process! Just tag up your entries as you post them - the best way to do so is to hit the "edit tags" button after your entry has been posted, and choose tag terms from the drop-down list provided. To pick multiple terms, just hold down the control key while you click. Thanks Again!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY einatlanta)

Hi folks! I've been tagging away for the past week. I started with the very first post in 2003, and now I'm about halfway through February of 2005; this is when the volume of posts here really started to pick up, so I have some questions about how y'all would like to find things here.

Remember, if you'd like to help out, the best thing you can do is tag up your entries as you post them. To do this, hit the "edit tags" button after you post, and choose tags from the drop down menu. To choose more than one tag, hold down your control key as you click away. I plan on keeping this poll up for a week to get a good sample of replies.

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LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY helenangel)

Has anyone else visited the Wikipedia entry on Dominionism and realized that a dominionist came in and changed the article to make it appear like it's just a term used by a bunch of leftist liberal crazies?

If someone on here has a Wikipedia log-in, they should correct the article. It's about as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY wyldraven)

One area that we opened late, of which you may not be aware, is the Glossary. It was opened at the request of deedop, and was initially populated (by me) with the phrase deedop was trying to remember.

That's all that is in the glossary right now. I know I can dig through all the past posts looking for the wonderfully informative posts and replicating the keyword content. Or some of you who know this stuff off the top of your head can help. It is a collaborative environment, you know?

Consider this a gentle nudge. Go, update, please.

EDIT: I do intend this to be the last time I directly mention the Wiki for its own sake. I do reserve the right to direct folks to it as appropriate for specific needs.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY lasarina)

What are the Religious Reich calling themselves these days? I'm looking for terms that the dominionist/AoG etc. would use to describe themselves/their movement. Not the terms which we know them (Dominionist, Theocratic, etc.)

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY neadods)

I've made a statement that I can't back up on my LJ, so I'm coming here. The question is - is the Prosperity Gospel mostly an outgrowth of the African American evangelist community or is it economically instead of racially based? I need cites, and googling didn't get the answer for me.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This Talk To Action essay by Chip Berlet goes into some detail about the 'types' of Dominionism, and how we can distinguish them and find people who have not been poisoned by it to work with:

Who is a dominionist?

Barron argued that "in the context of American evangelical efforts to penetrate and transform public life, the distinguishing mark of a dominionist is a commitment to defining and carrying out an approach to building society that is self-consciously defined as exclusively Christian, and dependent specifically on the work of Christians, rather than based on a broader consensus."

Around World War II it was the sentiment of many evangelical Protestants in the United States that they needed to find a way to co-exist with an increasingly pluralistic society, and thus they began to self-identify as "evangelicals" to distinguish themselves from the more doctrinaire and intolerant wing of "fundamentalism."

Barron believes that the "all-encompassing agenda" of the dominionists "puts them at odds with those more moderate evangelicals who work for social change yet still affirm the pluralistic nature of a society in which all ideas--be they Christian or anti-Christian, derived from or opposed to biblical law--have an equal right to be heard and to compete for public acceptance."

So evangelicals can work for conservative social change without being "dominionist," and some can be our allies in building broad opposition to dominionism as an impulse in the Christian Right. This is aided in part by an intractable contradiction among practitioners of hard forms of dominion theology.

As Sara Diamond explains, ultimately, "Dominionist thinking precludes coalitions between believers and unbelievers...." This creates an irresolvable contradictory tension. "The Christian Right wants to take dominion," notes Diamond, but it also wants to work within "the existing political-economic system, at the same time." The broader the Christian Right stretches as an electoral coalition, the more obvious it becomes that some of its key leaders want a theocracy rather than a democracy. Hard-line dominionists want to overthrow the existing political-economic system and replace it with a theocracy. That's a real hard sell to most of our neighbors.

In the United States today, there is a struggle between democracy and theocracy--as Fred Clarkson so aptly puts it in the title of his book. This is obvious to many of us, perhaps, but it is largely being ignored by the mainstream media and most Christian evangelicals. This is a wedge issue that can only be effective if we learn how to distinguish among the many different theological, political, organizational, and other aspects of Christian belief and political participation. Using terms such as "dominionism" and "theocracy" in a cautious and careful way allows us to broaden the conversation, and broaden the coalition that seeks to defend the dream of democracy against the nightmare of theocracy.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY whumpdotcom)

Recently spammed by an outfit calling themselves “Safe Ministries,” advertising materials based on “Scripture saturation.”

No idea what that is, but it fired off a whole bank of alarms.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY gleef)

[This was originally intended to be a reply to this post by thornewilder, but I got interrupted halfway through writing it, and I realized it was of more general use, so I decided to make it a separate post.]

Many churches and other religious organizations put forward a "Statement of Beliefs" or similar document. Many of us are trying to figure out which churches and other religious organizations are Dominionist, which are scary but not Dominionist, and which can be either safely ignored or safely worked with. It would be very useful to know more about these Statements of Belief and what they do and don't tell us about the group we want to know more about. This post explores this issue, using the Statement of Beliefs of the Nazarene group linked to in an earlier post.

I'd say, chances are they aren't Dominionist (but don't expect sweetness and light out of them), but don't count 100% on that.

From a more general viewpoint, I hope I've better illustrated how these Statements can be used as part of an exploration of a group.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Mother Jones has a great illustration of the various Dominionist organizations and their relationship to one another here.

You can click on the pictures to be taken to their websites.

Check it out!

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I found a new word in "Kos" that eclipses our previous favorite, "Avengelical" for sheer deliciously ironic truth:

"Tablibangelist"

It's a collision of "Taliban" and "Evangelist", and brilliantly describes the aspirations of the Dominionists without busting too hard on genuine Evangelists. Plus, it doesn't look like a typo. "Talibangelical" can also be used.

"Pat Robertson displayed his Talibangelical bias when he condemned Dover PA for voting out the ID-iots from their school board."

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY lihan161051)

I'm noticing an increase in the usage of the term "dominionism" in a number of places. It's occurred to me that while I was seeing potential enemies in just about every Christian denomination, it made the effort both to find out more about this movement and speak out against what was wrong with it very frustrating, because it was hidden so successfully behind Christianity. I knew what I was looking for wasn't Christian at all, but didn't know what to call it.

When I started thinking about that Scripture verse that says "you shall have dominion.." and started thinking of it as "dominion theology" (about the same time the term came into official use, but my usage was somewhat spontaneously independent) it became much easier to focus on more likely targets and differentiate them from the innocent Christians behind whom they were hiding.

I think this has begun to happen at more mainstream levels now; it seems more and more people even in conservative Christian circles are starting to wake up and realize that there is something dark and sinister in our midst that has nothing to do with the Christianity most of us grew up with. Does it seem to anyone else here that that's what's happening, that this battle is getting somewhat easier because we have a better description of who we're actually fighting against, and can use that to single them out from the innocent bystanders? Are we being taken more seriously because there's a lot less collateral damage going up against dominionists than there was going up against "conservative Christians"? Personally, I think it's definitely a concept that sells better and describes the problems much more accurately, and as a result, I think more people are listening now. The Witchvox link from the last post shows that word is getting out at least to sympathetic audiences .. are we reaching the more conservative echelons yet?

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY jehovahsfitness)

I feel like I'm missing something when people in this community mention a church is non-denominational. As far as I can tell, most of the non-denominational churches in the area I live in are small with black members. Not the kind of people I usually associate with dominionism.

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY shaunathan)

When we talk of Dominionist denominations, our mind instantly turns to the Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God and so on. But would you place such groups as the Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and the such in there?

I had originally intended this as a reply to this post but due to the length of the post I am actually going to set up a dedicated post for this (also so, hopefully, it doesn't get lost in the clutter).

Dominionism, both in and of itself and in the religious and other groups associated with dominionism, share enough characteristics with groups traditionally considered coercive groups (or "cults", in the case of coercive religious groups) that the groups associated with dominionism, and likely the entire dominionist movement itself, are better seen as a coercive religious group *in and of itself* rather than as a strictly political movement. It is my belief (as a walkaway and as an informal researcher) that it is likely impossible to fully understand dominionism (as a political movement) unless one sees the political aspects of dominionism in a larger context of a general coercive mindset existing in the "parent" groups of the dominionist movement.

In this post, I will directly compare lists of coercive tactics used by four groups active in research of coercive groups (FACTnet's summary of research by Dr Margaret Thaler Singer, info from Rick Ross Institute, info from Steven Hassan's "Freedom of Mind", and lists from the International Cultic Studies Association (a group, ironically, that had to change its original name, the American Family Foundation, due to confusion with the dominionist group American Family Association)) in comparison with coercive tactics used in the dominionist community at large and with specific aspects of the dominionist community in particular.

( Comparison 1: Coercive tactics of dominionist groups as evaluated per Dr Margaret Thaler Singer's checklists )

( Comparison 2: Coerciveness of dominionist groups per Robert Lifton's models of thought reform )

( Comparison 3: Rick Ross's list of coerciveness as compared to dominionist groups )

Well, as the next two lists are fairly long, there'll be a part 2 to this. Part 2 will actually focus entirely on the BITE model (due to the fact the BITE model is a *very* extensive checklist).

(EDIT: Cleaned up the formatting. And hoooo boy, did the formatting need a cleaning!)

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY kalibex)

'"They are joiners," said William Strauss, co-author of the book "Millennials Rising."

'"They are prepared to listen to leaders -- whether from the pulpit or the White House -- in ways that their parents, the boomers, did not, and that is a very new phenomenon. They believe in security rather than radicalism, political order rather than social emancipation, collective responsibility rather than personal expression."'