Our political ideologies are the product of people who simultaneously reflect and distort God’s glory—and no creation is greater than the people who created it. Our goal in the public square therefore should not be merely to champion our political tribes, because that would mean working to empower their sin as much as it would mean empowering their glory. Instead, we should seek to witness to our political tribes, even critiquing our own groups when necessary, and we often must do that by contrasting ourselves against them.

Is it not amazing how men and women who profess the same Christian faith can end up coming to such different political conclusions when we vote? How is it that two people who confess Christ as Lord and the Bible as his infallible word end up in such anxious and even vitriolic disagreement? Of course, the causes are many: where they get their news, where they live, where they socialize… For all the new round of stories about “evangelical Christians vote this way,” zip code, it turns out, may be a better predictor of the vote in modern America. Evangelicals in Manhattan in New York City weren’t huge fans of Trump, and non-Christians in Montana weren’t loving Biden.

Something else is going on, too, though. We Christians also have, whether we recognize it or not, differing political theologies. A political theology is a system for envisioning, understanding, and navigating the public square in light of our faith. (People looking at the church from the outside often call these “Christian political ideologies.”) Such approaches go back as far as the New Testament itself. The gospel of Luke and especially the book of Acts, for instance, work to show the reader that Christians are good members of society, no threat whatsoever to the Roman Empire, and even good citizens of it.

Even though the biblical authors were considering these issues, they were hardly considering them in the same societal context as we do. The biblical authors never considered shared responsibility for government, and so the Bible does not lay out the appropriate relationship in a representative democracy between an individual believer’s vision and the mechanisms of the state. That does not mean that our approach to political power and governmental systems cannot be informed by our faith. Indeed, as people of the cross, we are called to take every thought captive for Christ, even the thoughts we have about public life, and even when public life is structured very differently for us than it was for any of the biblical authors. But it does mean we require a little more work to figure out our vision for the relationship between our faith and our government in the US today than Paul did under house arrest in the first century CE.

Once Christianity became a legal religion in the Roman Empire, such thinking became more explicit, especially with church fathers such as Augustine. This thinking continued through the Reformation and continues still today. This is the third article in an occasional TWI series trying to bring these foundational theologies into the light, so they can be considered. Over the course of our history as a country, Christians have felt the influence of many specific political theologies, whether we know it or not, that inform the way we think about faith and civic life, and here we consider three: Dominionism, Kuyperianism, and Christian Realism.

I’m describing each of these traditions from the outside, and none of them comprehensively. They were each either developed or innovated by extremely accomplished thinkers who took the task of loving God with all their mind seriously, and an approach to political theology was only one of the fruits of each of their labors. Think of these descriptions as a rough sketch, helping give a sense of each tradition. Or think of these descriptions as a brief introduction, helping you find an entry point to understanding how to interact with it.

Dominionism

“Dominionism,” or “dominion theology,” has become a loaded term in political debate over the past few years. Some believe the phrase describes a conspiracy to infiltrate the US government and institute an oppressive theocracy. Others consider it an unfair attack their opponents use to assassinate their character. And still others think it a fringe belief system that gets more attention than it deserves. Ultimately, the phrase “dominionism” describes a narrow but diverse range of visions for how Christians should relate to government – visions unified in the idea of using the state to protect people from spiritually harming themselves.

The dispositions that get lumped together under dominionism place an emphasis on Genesis 1:28—God’s command that humanity fill the earth and exercise authority over it. If Christians are the people with the clearest view of how we are supposed to live, the thinking goes, and if we’re the people who will get to inherit the restored earth when it’s made new, then it makes sense that we should be the ones to exercise authority now. If we use the laws of the state to help the lost people around us avoid the self-destructive, sinful behaviors to which they are prone, we might be able to help them live lives that are more pleasing to Christ AND better for themselves, even if they do not know Jesus yet.

The broad strains of what we call dominionism today took form starting in the middle of the 20th century, in part as a reaction to the west transitioning away from a nominally Christianized society. Before the Cold War, the culture in most western countries incentivized personal conduct that could be considered at least broadly “Christian.” The church’s job in such a culture was not necessarily to teach Christians how to live counterculturally but rather to teach people the faith that made sense of their lifestyle and gave it meaning. In the wake of World War I and World War II, however, western social norms began to change, and an increasing portion of society no longer considered “Christianized” lifestyles necessary for a respectable or successful life.

The dominionist framework appeals easily to a cultural majority which has felt itself slide into being a cultural minority, and many of us are, to some degree, influenced by a dominionist framework, even if we explicitly reject it. We have absorbed dominionist thinking because it has been a major way political campaigns in the US have messaged themselves to Christian voters for the past 50 years. We live in an individualistic culture, so when it looks like other people are trying to make decisions for us, it is easy to assume the worst about those people. Maybe we are progressives and do not like the decisions they are trying to make for us. Or maybe we are libertarians and we do not like the fact that they are making decisions for us at all. And if we are operating out of the Reformed tradition, it is easy to dismiss dominionism outright as a failure to understand leadership in light of Christ or as a misunderstanding of where we are in the biblical story compared to Genesis 1.

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