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Category Archives: Religious Right
When the Fringe Becomes the Fur: Dominionism and Politics
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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Evangelical Protestant Men Make Great Dads
Mission Statement for “Concerned Women for American” — Beverly LeHaye, Founder:
CWA’s Mission Statement:
“The mission of CWA is to protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens – first through prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society – thereby reversing the decline in moral values in our nation.”
Beverly LeHaye, wife of Tim LeHaye, co-author of the Apocalyptic “Left Behind” book series
I could not resist including an article from the Concerned Women For America website. I accessed the site to check out the "Barbie Doll causes Gender Confusion" wondering what might be the confusion -- the breasts, tight butt or the thin legs -- all male visions of the perfect female. But I found this, and wanted to share! You will note that Concerned Women for America was begun by Beverly LeHaye The bad news is, this is not a joke. These people are serious.
By the way, the active banner on Concerned Women for America today reads, “A + for Alito”
And the first 2005 Top Evangelical Women is the female director of the Ministerial Alliance in Midland, Texas — George W. Bush’s home town. My own Methodist preacher father helped to found that chapter of the Ministerial Alliance in the early 1950′s. How it must have changed over the years. Or maybe not.
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Let Ye Who are Without Sin Cast the First Stone
I have been doing a little more discovery on Dr. Dobson. We actually had much in common.
I wish that he and I could feel a bit more kin-ship, as we both descended from ministers, although his was a long line of evangelists, but then you were born just around the corner in Shreveport, La. and I entered the earth plane in Wichita Falls, Tx. We both grew up with Southern Bible Belt values, shared by Texas and Oklahoma, although I never left the Lone Star State as a child.
I did spend time in Midland with the Bushes, but I know that you have been skeptical of them for an age, so I guess that doesn’t help us find much common ground either.
I was even a Girl Scout, but you found reason to attack the Girl Scouts for promoting “humanism and radical feminism” when they voted to allow the Christian “God” in the Girl Scout promise, to be optionally replaced with other spiritual traditions’ monikers for the Divine, so as to be inclusive for all the Girl citizens of the world. I reprint it below, for I feel the depth of what it means for our girl-children, today as always:
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Crude, Cotton and Killin’: The Black and White World of George W. Bush
Article First Published in The Mississippi Review, 2004
Local BBQ Hut dating from the 1950′s and still in downtown Midland, TX
George W. Bush has planted our world into a deep hole of black and white – evil versus good, sinner versus saved, them versus us. In his abhorrence of all things gray or nuanced, George has created a narrow-framed world that is both small and dangerous. To catch a glimpse into the roots of his mind view, we must travel back in time to 1952, Midland, Texas, for there we all found ourselves –
George W. with his family and me with mine.
Midland was a flat, dusty landscape with nothing on the surface to recommend it, but harboring a dark underground as promising as any in the world. There, in the barren cotton bowl of West Texas, men flocked to pierce the soil and harvest the black gold that lay beneath. And my Daddy arrived to save their souls and bring them to the Lord. He set out to build a new White congregation in this stronghold of conservative America, rigidly segregated by both race and gender.
And I, a 3 year old female, first encountered the enduring contradiction between the lightness of Texas hospitality and the dark undercurrent of violence that lingered just below the surface – a dangerous brew that simmered between the roots of the above-ground white cotton crops and the black rivers that snaked beneath.
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