Dominion

I know that I'm overusing the word "scary" when it comes to the Religious Right, but I just can't come up with a better word for it. Harpers Magazine sends a reporter to a Christian media convention.

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan.

One the other hand, maybe they're overextending themselves, says Joel Achenbach

The question the Republicans have to ask themselves is: Is this 1798, the height of Federalist power, and a prelude to total political oblivion? (Is the Patriot Act the second coming of the Alien and Sedition Acts? And so on...)

Hey, it might not be right but it makes me feel better.



Other odds & ends gathered over the long weekend:

The other war

The 20-minute tabloids