Disruptive of Dichotomous Definitions: Things you can expect from my book

About a week ago, I started a short series of posts on things potential readers can expect from my book due to be published this month, entitled No Love in War: A story of Christian Nationalism, with Mayfly Books. In this post, I’ll talk a little bit about my use of certain terminology, like Christian nationalism, Christian Dominionism and the like.

Even though this is an obscure movement that most people have never heard of, the fact is they had a 200-year plan to transform all of culture and bring it under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, as they would say, and the lynchpin of that plan was to undermine public education and to replace it initially with Christian schools and then secondarily with home-schools. And so now, you have a whole subculture of people who are educated in a particular curriculum that comes out of this world and is still really shaped by this world.

Julie Ingersoll, Professor of Religious Studies

Conspiracy theorizing about the Christian Right’s supposedly “secret” agenda involves highlighting the hate-mongering and bizarre ideas of a handful of Christian Right players while neglecting the broad popularity of dominion theology.

Sarah Diamond, American sociologist and attorney

Full disclosure:
For the purposes of my book, I’m not really interested in whether a person calls themselves a Christian nationalist, a Christian Reconstructionist or a Christian Dominionist. It’s not that this isn’t a worthwhile thing to talk about. It’s just that, as far as my book is concerned, I don’t especially care if the people I am writing about explicitly associate themselves with a movement like the New Apostolic Reformation or whether or not they’ve heard of the Seven Mountains Mandate. In fact, in many cases, Christians are oblivious as to the ways their lives have been significantly affected (or, more accurately, damaged) by these movements specifically.

Further, I’ve found over the years that some of the people calling for precise, dichotomous definitions and/or careful nuance in discussions of white male supremacy, Christian nationalism, Dominionism, the Christian Right and evangelicalism, are at times invested in defining these terms in ways that allow these same people to distance themselves from one or more of these points of intersection.

My use of certain terms -like Christian Dominionism – in my book is based on these assumptions:

• That Christian Dominionism is in essence an overtly sacralised version of human (especially white male) supremacy.
• That like all forms of supremacy, Christian Dominionism engenders one-up (domineering) and one-down (submitting) binary social relations, black-and-white thinking and rigid ideology/dogmatism.
• As a form of (especially white male) human supremacy, Christian Dominionism is by nature evangelical and contains significant overlap with Christian nationalism and a slew of similar “kingdom building” ideological movements involving corporate activities for cities and regions.
• That Christian Dominionism in its various forms has powerfully shaped the face of evangelicalism in the United States and globally.
• Following on from the previous points, the subtitle of my book, with its use of the term ‘Christian Nationalism,’ reflects the flavours of Christian Dominionism I grew up in, particularly the efforts of Christians to claim moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control/influence over the United States specifically.
• That the natural consequence of every kind of Christian Dominionism – as with all forms of supremacy – is everyday violence.

It is this everyday violence that I have written about, in this intensely personal book.