(DV) Baker: Dominionist Dementia

(DV) Baker: Dominionist Dementia: "What's Jesus Got to Do With It? | by Carolyn Baker | www.dissidentvoice.org | December 20, 2004

... I thought it might be appropriate to examine this fellow Jesus whom the Dominionists of the religious right claim to follow. In doing so, one will notice that the historical Jesus bears almost no resemblance to the Jesus of Dominionism. For a thorough examination of the Dominionist ideology see Kathleen Yurica’s expose.

... even a superficial understanding of the Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ time reveals stunning similarities between first-century Pharisees and twenty-first century Domionionists.
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Were Jesus with us today, he would be an enormous problem for the Dominionists, and we can be certain that he would be perceived by them not unlike a homeless street person or an antiwar protestor. Jesus and his followers would be marginalized, arrested, and imprisoned. Contrary to the Jesus contrived by the Dominionists, the historical Jesus did not perceive himself as a savior of anyone. Whereas today’s fundamentalist Christian insists that one must accept Jesus as one’s “personal savior,” Jesus never taught this concept. Rather, he was a spiritual mystic and an activist on behalf of human rights and social justice.
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Christian fundamentalism, a byproduct of Western industrialism and free market capitalism, offers a “product.” Not unlike the promotion of term life insurance or membership in an exclusive club, it “sells” eternal salvation in heaven and a “guarantee” that all sins prior to being born again are forgiven and that one becomes privy to its “infallible” interpretation of the bible and Christian doctrine. Thus, Dominionists assert that they possess the ultimate truths of the universe and on the basis of their “personal relationship with Christ” have every right to establish a Christian theocracy in the United States. After all, those stuffy intellectual founding fathers were Deists who essentially believed that a Supreme Being had created the universe, walked away and left it to humankind to manage. The principles on which they founded the American republic need to be reworked, say the Dominionists, so that the United States can be a fundamentalist Christian theocracy ruled by the born-again elite. And, it is crucial to understand that if one is “born again,” one is “in”, and if one is not “born again”, one will remain “out” until one has the born-again experience.

When I read the Gospels, I see a Jesus irreconcilable with the one portrayed by the Dominionists. That Jesus knows no “in” or “out” in terms of divine acceptance of human beings.
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Living the compassion Jesus taught would preclude the mean-spiritedness of the Dominionist who champions the so-called self-made man pulling himself up by the bootstraps, and Dominionism’s vicious crusade to eliminate funding for services for children, the poor, the marginalized and all who cannot advocate for themselves. The compassion Jesus lived deplores the intentional bankrupting of public services so that individuals and corporations can wax fat and powerful from their privatization. Against this kind of abuse of the common good, Jesus railed vehemently. ...
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Contrary to Dominionist designs, Jesus would not promote the establishment of a theocracy. He was born into an empire and spoke unambiguously against it. Railing against abuses of religion, he brashly threw the religious elite out of the temple because they were charging the poor for worshipping there. Constantly throwing the plight of the poor in the faces of the exploitative Pharisees, he blatantly argued that in God’s eyes, the poor were more valued than the rich—a spectacular inversion of Dominionist ideology which like the dogma of seventeenth-century American Puritanism holds that wealth is an indication of God’s blessing. ...