Secularist McCarthyism: Bachmann, Perry and the 'Dominionism' smear

Here we go again. The Republican primaries are six months away, and already news stories are raising fears on the left about “crazy Christians.”-- Lisa Miller, The Washington Post, August 18, 2011

Folks, when the Washington Post comes to the rescue of conservatives being libeled by the secularist Left, you know that the charges in question are nutty.

But when the author of the article in question is Lisa Miller- the  über-secularist religion editor of Newsweek, responsible for the magazine's notoriously eisogetical piece purporting to build a biblical case for same-sex "marriage-" is the author of the defense, you know that the charges spring from more than the ordinary amount of ignorance and/or malice.

Miller wrote precisely such a piece for the Post in the wake of a bizarre meme on the far Left of the blogosphere charging Minnesota Congressman Michele Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry- both candidates for the Republican presidential nomination- with association with a movement in the of Evangelical church called dominionism. As presented by the secularists, it is nothing more or less than an attempt to turn the United States into a theocracy governed by a Christian version of sharia.

The trouble is that while everybody agrees that "dominionism" has to do with the relationship between Christian faith and public policy, the term is defined differently by different people.  Many of those definitions- and certainly any of them which are applicable to Bachmann or Perry on the basis of things which they themselves have said or written- are very much in the tradition of Martin Luther King, the abolitionists, the religiously motivated crusaders against child labor, and various other religiously-motivated individuals from American history ranging from the innocuous to the illustrious. No sharia here; just the application of the principles of their religion to their personal political agendas, much in the fashion endorsed by Barack Obama in his eloquent speech on the relationship between religious faith and public policy made while he was stil a senator. Some thoughts of my own on that remarkable speech can be found here.

I'll say it again: the meme does not cite positions taken by Bachmann or Perry themselves. The extreme positions identified with Bachmann and Perry are in every case cited merely because one or the other has had contact of some kind with people who hold them. The "dominionist" charge is entirely a matter of guilt by association. It kind of makes you think that Joe McCarthy has risen from the dead, and switched parties.

The meme seems to have originated with the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza,  who did hit pieces on Bachmann for his magazine and for NPR. Among other things, Lizza smears  Francis Schaeffer- the late "theosopher" cited by Bachmann as one of the main influences on her thinking- as an extremist crackpot, and actually accuses him of advocating the violent overthrow of the government!

While it's true that late in his life Schaeffer did advocate civil disobedience in situations in which one's religious faith and the demands of the government conflict, this is no more  than the apostles themselves advocated in Acts 4:19 and Acts 5: 29, and which is also embraced in the writings of various abolitionists and crusaders for women's sufferage and against child labor, as well as by Martin Luther King. Jr. in his  Letters from a Birmingham Jail). Otherwise, Schaefer's writings- including How, Then, Shall We Live?,  the specific document Bachmann says was so influential in forming her own thought- fall clearly within foul lines traditional among religiously motivated reformers like those in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and abolitionists movements.

Richard Weikart, a history professor at Cal State-Stanislaus, pretty much demolishes Lizza's outright lies about Schaeffer here

The theme was expanded on by liberal journalist Sarah Posner, who supported Lizza's thesis and expanded on it. She charged Bachmann with a second crime: attending O.W. Coburn School of Law, at which the ideas of crackpots Herb Titus and R.J. Rushdoony figured in the curriculum. Nowhere did Posner establish that Bachmann herself has ever held such views, or anything like them.

In Perry's case, Posner- without attribution- claimed that his autobiography is "steeped" in influences from Schaeffer (gasp!) and Rushdoony. A third source- Forrest Wilder, writing in leftist Texas Observer, shockingly reports that Perry asked a pair of Dominionist ministers to pray for him at an event at which he appeared on the same stage. It's worth nothing that nowhere does the libelous article in question relate anything which would lead a reasonable person to conclude that Perry endorsed their beliefs. In fact, he has made it very clear that he does not.

Contrast Perry's behavior with that of Barack Obama, who attended a church whose minister hates America and damns it from the pulpit for twenty-five years and had him baptize his children, but cannot even be properly criticized for this. When the Right did nothing more or less in Obama's case than Lizza, Posner and Wilder have done with Perry and Obama- implyng that Obama must therefore share Jeremiah Wright's anti-Americanism- the Left quite rightly cried foul.

In his book, On My Honor (published in 1998), Perry wrote,  "Let's be clear: I don't believe government, which taxes people regardless of their faith, should espouse a specific faith. I also don't think we should allow a small minority of atheists to sanitize our civil dialogue on religious references." And on  August 2011, at a prayer event in Houston, Perry observed that "God is wise enough not to be affiliated with any political party."

A veritable arsenal of clips from various extreme secularist sources supporting the libel can be found here. Notably lacking from all of them is any form of documentation that Perry or Bachmann in fact hold the views attributed to them. They are nevertheless remarkable for the way several of them simply assume that Perry or Bachmann are indeed guilty by association, and run with the idea.

I am, as recent readers of this blog are aware, no fan of either Bachmann or Perry. But the hypocrisy and journalistic shoddiness of these attacks cry out for response. Only three years ago, the Left was up in arms when John McCain and Bachmann dared raise a rhetorical eyebrow at the fact that President Obama had attended a church for a quarter century whose minister hates America and all its works. "McCarthyism!," they cried. "Guilt by association!"

But apparently it's OK to leap to all sorts of conclusions on the basis of what law school a person attended, or whom he has asked to pray for him.

Once.