Chris Hayes recently wrote on Truthdig.com that “U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.”
Wikipedia has this to say about Dominionism “Dominionism (sometimes used interchangeably with Christian Reconstructionism and theonomy, see below) is a political and religious philosophy that seeks to make the United States government a Christian theocracy. (Most Dominionists try to avoid using this name. Regardless, it is usually applied to any Christian movement with these explicit or implicit goals.)
“Dominionists believe that the civil laws laid down by the Old Testament (as distinct from the moral laws such as the Ten Commandments) should be enforced by reforming the U.S. legal system along theocratic lines, which would entail a substantial increase in the use of capital punishment. They also believe that that biblical injunctions regarding slavery should be followed.”
These people don’t want to post the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, they want to bring back slavery (as recommended by the Bible, of course, which has regulations involving slavery and God directing the enslaving of men, women, and children, but no injunctions that I can find).
Conservatives railed against President Obama because of his association with Reverend Wright. I just gotta hope Ted Cruz runs for President to see if he will disavow his own father.
