The Right Wing Envelops Us as We Sleep

In the late 1990’s, as I researched my Ph.D. dissertation, Sexes, Gods, and Southern Christians, I came across a group that was unfamiliar to me in name only.  As a minister’s daughter from the Bible belt of Texas, I chose the topic of religion and the right wing in an attempt to understand my own confusing upbringing involving the intersection between professions of faith that swam around us and the pervasive behaviors of racism, discrimination and the male fascination with guns and domination of women’s bodies.

My departure from Texas was immediate upon high school graduation.  I left the state for college and never looked back.  I often quipped that “I left Texas to escape the Christians.”  Ironically, I later found myself in Colorado Springs during the influx of the very Christians I had once left behind.  Moreover, having established one of the largest relocation companies in Southern Colorado, our task became one of assisting with the movement into the city of various organizations, including the International Bible Society, Christian & Missionary Alliance, and numerous small organizations that followed.  My interface with James Dobson and Focus on the Family is the topic of another installment on this blog titled “Oh, James, We Hardly Know Ye.”  The experiences of those years once again baptized me into the thought system that left me spinning with the paradox it contained.

As the landscape of religion, culture, and politics in Colorado Springs began to shift like a tidal wave, we sold our companies and moved to California, where I entered graduate work in psychology, cultural mythology and religion — specializing in the intersection between the Christian Conservative movements and their impact on politics, culture and law in our country.

Seven years of graduate school led to my dissertation, where I focused on exposing the revisions of the Biblical stories and theological philosophy in order to foster dominion– specifically over women and children.   During the journey toward completion of the work, the path led to a movement that was founded in the heart of my homeland, Waco, Texas.  That Dominionist group was called Christian Reconstructionism.

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