The Curious Case of Dominative Christianism: When Faith Becomes a Political Technology
How Christianity gets instrumentalized for power while maintaining the appearance of orthodoxy
There's something wonderfully ironic about a religion founded by a man who explicitly rejected worldly dominion becoming the preferred theological technology for securing exactly that. When Satan offered Jesus "all the kingdoms of the world and their glory," our Lord's response was unequivocal: "Away with you!" (Luke 4:5-8). Yet somehow, two millennia later, we've managed to create entire theological systems that would make that original tempter blush with admiration.
Welcome to what I'm calling Dominative Christianism—a fascinating specimen of theological innovation that manages to baptize political domination while maintaining all the liturgical furniture of orthodox faith. It's rather like watching someone perform surgery with a crucifix: technically possible, but one can't help wondering if they've missed the point entirely.
Beyond Left and Right: The Framework Problem
Before proceeding, we must dispose of a conceptual framework that has proven not merely inadequate but actively destructive to theological analysis: the left-right political binary. This framework completely obscures what's actually happening in contemporary American Christianity and must be discarded if we are to find our way forward.
The persistent temptation is to analyze Dominative Christianism as a "conservative" problem requiring "progressive" solutions, or conversely, to dismiss progressive Christianity as theologically compromised while defending conservative orthodoxy. Both approaches miss the deeper reality: we're witnessing parallel theological mutations that emerge from shared cultural soil and represent different responses to the same underlying crisis of religious imagination.
Political categories prevent us from recognizing what Charles Taylor's analysis of the nova effect helps us understand: the explosive proliferation of spiritual options following the breakdown of traditional cosmic frameworks.^[1] In American Christianity, this manifests as what Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch documented—the continuous religious diversification following cultural traumas that repeatedly reframes theological imagination.^[2] Both contemporary formations represent reactive dialectical mutations within this broader pattern of theological metamorphosis.
KEY INSIGHT: Dominative Christianism represents not a political ideology using Christian language, but a comprehensive mutation of religious imagination that manifests across supposed political boundaries—a theological virus that hijacks authentic Christian concepts while inverting their essential meaning.
The Cultural Substrate: Why Geography Matters More Than Denomination
"But this doesn't apply to me," the astute reader might object, "I'm not from that tradition—I'm Catholic/Jewish/Methodist/secular." This response, while understandable, reveals a crucial misunderstanding about how Dominative Christianism actually operates. The mutation doesn't spread through denominational channels but through what David Hackett Fischer and Wilbur Zelinsky's research reveals: inherited cultural reasoning patterns that persist across denominational boundaries and even religious identification.^[3]
Fischer's analysis of four British folk ways (Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker, Scotch-Irish) that transplanted to specific American regions reveals how these patterns shaped not just early settlements but continue to influence theological reasoning centuries later. Colin Woodard's mapping shows how these folk ways evolved into distinct regional "nations" that persist today: Yankeedom (spreading from New England across the upper Midwest to the West Coast through Yankee migration), Greater Appalachia (extending from Pennsylvania backcountry through the rural South and Southwest and lower Midwest), the Midlands (Quaker-influenced regions from Pennsylvania westward and northward, including Ontario and much of the upper Midwest), and the Deep South (Cavalier-influenced plantation regions).^[4]
American cultural geography creates what we might call "theological language games"—inherited ways of reasoning about faith, authority, and community that operate below the level of conscious religious choice.^[5] These patterns explain why theological mutations cluster geographically rather than denominationally, and why responses like "I'm not Presbyterian" actually confirm rather than refute the analysis of how these distortions persist across folk way boundaries.
This cultural persistence means that the theological mutations we're examining affect not only explicit Christians but anyone operating within American institutional and social frameworks. The structural logic persists in secularized forms across religious boundaries, which explains why secular progressive movements often exhibit providential thinking about historical progress, and secular conservative movements maintain providential narratives about national destiny.
The Anatomy of a Mutation
What makes Dominative Christianism so intriguing—and so dangerous—is its sophisticated ability to mimic authentic Christianity while inverting its essential DNA. Like a theological virus, it hijacks the host's cellular machinery (Scripture, tradition, worship) to reproduce something entirely alien to the original organism.
Consider the exquisite reversal at work here. Christ's kenotic pattern—the divine self-emptying that Paul describes in Philippians 2:5-11—becomes a template not for vulnerable service but for justified domination. The One who "did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited" gets conscripted as the patron saint of exploiting divine authority for cultural hegemony. It's breathtaking, really, in its audacity.
The mutation operates through what I term two primary species emerging from the nova effect's theological fragmentation:
MAGA Christianism represents the authoritarian populist synthesis of theocratic impulses with "Make America Great Again" politics, often characterizing political leaders as divinely appointed and current events as apocalyptically significant. This variety explicitly fuses Christian identity with nationalist politics while maintaining the language of biblical orthodoxy.
Providential Identitarianism operates more subtly, positing that God has providentially established distinct cultural identities that should be preserved and privileged through sophisticated theological justification. This manifests as progressive movements becoming vehicles of salvation, "the arc of justice" becoming secularized providence, and political activism becoming the primary form of spiritual practice. Academic institutions function as secular seminaries ordaining prophets of progress—ministers to the "nones" who've rejected traditional religion while embracing its moral structure—while policy frameworks become instruments of societal salvation. Unlike crude authoritarianism, this variety maintains democratic forms while asserting cultural supremacy through academic respectability and appeals to divine justice.
The Genealogical Pattern: Nova Effect as Theological Metamorphosis
These are not separate phenomena but counter-mutations within a shared theological ecosystem. Both trace their genealogy to what I call the original providential imagination of Calvinist theology—the robust framework that understood history as the unfolding of God's deliberate plan. The nova effect transformed this theological inheritance through successive cultural traumas:
Post-Revolutionary Religious Populism democratized spiritual authority and proliferated competing religious narratives. The Darwinian Moment created conservative retrenchment alongside liberal reinterpretation. World Wars and pandemic collapsed progressive narratives of human improvement. Civil Rights movements functioned as theological laboratories generating competing providential narratives.
Each trauma generated new mutations of the spirit—attempts to preserve religious meaning while adapting to cultural disruption. The consistent pattern shows how:
Divine agency becomes group agency
Transcendent purpose becomes immanent identity
Moral imperative from divine obedience becomes group vindication
Chosenness structure is preserved while content is secularized
Both contemporary formations represent the latest manifestation of this pattern: comprehensive attempts to recover coherence—theological, cultural, personal—through secularized theological impulses that maintain providential structure while removing explicit divine agency.
The Two Species: A Taxonomic Analysis
Species One: MAGA Christianism
This variety represents the marriage of authoritarian populism with providential nationalism. Key characteristics include binary apocalyptic worldview dividing politics into cosmic warfare, instrumental use of Christian language to justify authoritarian measures, and platform capitalism's algorithmic amplification of polarizing content. Political opponents become cosmic enemies, compromise becomes spiritual betrayal, and elections become ultimate spiritual battles.
The theological mechanism operates through what I call Practical Atheism—maintaining orthodox theological language while functionally operating as if God were absent from practical affairs. Jesus saves us from our sins (the afterlife transaction), but when it comes to actual behavior, politics, and power, "wisdom" and "pragmatism" take over. Christ becomes a heavenly insurance policy rather than a way of life.
Regional Expression: This species draws particularly from what Fischer identified as Scotch-Irish borderlands cultural patterns—militant resistance, tribal loyalty, and warrior culture—which Woodard shows spread from Pennsylvania backcountry through Greater Appalachia into rural areas of the South, Southwest, and lower Midwest, explaining why it clusters geographically in these regions regardless of denominational identity.
Species Two: Providential Identitarianism
This more sophisticated variety operates through what might be called academic respectability combined with identity-based providential thinking. Rather than crude theocracy, it uses divine providence to justify cultural supremacy through appeals to sophisticated hermeneutics, social justice language, and progressive institutional positioning.
The theological mechanism operates through secularized eschatology—maintaining the structural logic of divine historical purpose while replacing divine agency with identity-group agency. Progressive movements become vehicles of salvation, "the arc of justice" becomes secularized providence, and political activism becomes the primary form of spiritual practice.
Regional Expression: This species draws particularly from what Fischer identified as Puritan systematic thinking and Quaker social reform patterns—intellectual authority and moral improvement—which Woodard shows evolved into Yankeedom (spreading from New England across the upper Midwest to the West Coast) and the Midlands (extending from Pennsylvania westward and northward, including Ontario and much of the upper Midwest), explaining why it clusters in these regions' academic and institutional contexts.
Critically, this pattern extends beyond church boundaries into secular contexts where people have explicitly rejected religious identity but retained the structural logic of providential thinking. Academic institutions, activist organizations, and policy frameworks often exhibit this mutation regardless of their participants' personal religious beliefs.
The Christological Problem
What makes this mutation particularly pernicious is how it handles the inconvenient figure of Jesus himself. After all, a man who insisted that "whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all" (Mark 9:35) poses obvious problems for any theology of Christian dominance—whether conservative or progressive.
Both species solve this through sophisticated theological surgery: separate the Savior from the Exemplar. Jesus saves us from our sins (securing our ultimate destiny), but when it comes to actual political engagement, cultural strategy, and power dynamics, that's where "realism" takes over. Christ becomes a symbolic reference point rather than a transformative pattern of life.
This enables remarkable theological flexibility. One can affirm orthodox Christology while pursuing thoroughly un-Christlike policies, whether that's prosperity gospel celebration of wealth accumulation or progressive instrumentalization of religious language for political mobilization.
The Binary Vision
Perhaps most troubling is how both species transform the gospel's reconciling vision into technologies for division. The good news that "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28) gets conscripted into service for precisely the opposite project: creating and maintaining boundaries between "us" and "them."
Binary Apocalypticism provides the narrative framework that makes dominance feel like divine mission. Political opponents aren't merely wrong—they're forces of darkness in cosmic warfare. This framework appears in both species: MAGA Christianism's "spiritual warfare" against liberal forces, and progressive Christianity's "moral warfare" against systems of oppression. Both reduce complex political differences to cosmic battles with ultimate stakes.
Carl Schmitt's analysis of politics as fundamentally constituted by the "friend-enemy distinction" finds its theological expression here.^[5] It's a remarkably effective mobilization strategy, but it makes actual democracy nearly impossible. Democracy requires what I call "the capacity to receive the other as gift and to become gift ourselves"—the ability to live with disagreement without needing to destroy the disagreer.
The Research Challenge to Binary Thinking
My analysis challenges the dominant scholarly approach that treats these as separate phenomena requiring different analytical frameworks. The Quantitative Christian Nationalism (QCN) approach developed by Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, for instance, conflates distinct species into a single "Christian nationalism" category, creating methodological errors with serious pastoral consequences.^[6]
The Problem: Treating culturally conservative Christians as equivalent to theocratic authoritarians radicalizes them by confirming their sense of elite disrespect, driving democratic Christians toward authoritarian populism through scholarly malpractice.
The Solution: Recognizing these as distinct species requiring different analytical approaches. Ruth Braunstein's analysis of "Colorblind Judeo-Christian Nationalism" and Jesse Smith and Gary J. Adler's work on "conceptual splitting" provide superior frameworks for understanding these phenomena without creating the very polarization they study.^[7]
More fundamentally, the left-right framework prevents recognition of the shared theological problems underlying both formations. Progressive critiques of conservative Christianity often embody parallel mutations, while conservative defenses of orthodox Christianity often miss how their own contexts distort fundamental theological relationships.
Living Beyond the Nova Effect
In our age of binary certainties and tribal loyalties, perhaps the most radical Christian witness is learning to live with questions. To embrace what John Keats called "negative capability"—"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."^[8]
Not because truth doesn't matter, but because Truth is a person rather than a proposition. Not because theology is unimportant, but because God is always larger than our theology. Not because politics is irrelevant, but because the kingdom of God relativizes every earthly kingdom while simultaneously making us more engaged citizens of both.
The curious case of Dominative Christianism reminds us that the greatest threat to authentic faith often comes not from outside opposition but from inside accommodation. From theologies that promise us everything we already wanted while baptizing it in holy water—whether that's conservative promises of cultural victory or progressive promises of moral vindication.
The antidote isn't more sophisticated arguments—though careful thinking certainly helps. The antidote is more faithful presence. More incarnational witness. More patient love that refuses to be co-opted by any earthly agenda while remaining passionately engaged with earthly concerns.
Luke Bretherton's concept of hospitality offers a theological framework for encountering difference without either erasing it (liberalism) or treating it as an absolute barrier (nationalism).^[9] Hospitality creates space for meaningful encounter across difference while maintaining distinctive identities. It's less like building walls to keep others out and more like setting a table where all can be fed—which happens to align rather nicely with Jesus's preferred social activity.
After all, the Word became flesh not to dominate Creation but to be with it—to participate in our journey "from Trinity to eternity." Samuel Wells' insight that God's purpose and means are identical reveals the profound theological alternative: God is one with us not by overpowering us but by inviting us to become part of Christ's body.^[10] And if we're truly his body, perhaps it's time we started acting like it.
Notes
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 299-321.
[2] Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
[3] David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
[4] David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973); Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). For detailed analysis of how inherited cultural patterns shape theological reasoning beyond denominational boundaries, see my forthcoming analysis, "Cultural Geography and Theological Language Games: Beyond Individual Choice."
[5] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §23; Robert B. Pippin, "Practical Reason and Community," in The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185-206.
[6] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26-27.
[7] Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
[8] Ruth Braunstein, "The 'Right' History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 60, no. 2 (2021): 323-349; Jesse Smith and Gary J. Adler, "What Isn't Christian Nationalism? A Call for Conceptual and Empirical Splitting," Sociological Forum 37, no. 4 (2022): 1323-1344.
[9] John Keats, Letter to George and Tom Keats, December 21, 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1931).
[10] Luke Bretherton, Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 132-156.
[11] Samuel Wells, Constructing an Incarnational Theology (London: SPCK, 2022), 290.