Sermon: Dominion’s Contents

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

January 22, 2023

 

First Reading: Psalm 40: 1-11

I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me & heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, & set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see & fear, & put their trust in the LORD. Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods. You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds & your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. Were I to proclaim & tell of them, they would be more than can be counted. Sacrifice & offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering & sin offering you have not required. Then I said, “Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD. I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness & your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love & your faithfulness from the great congregation. Do not, O LORD, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love & your faithfulness keep me safe forever. For evils have encompassed me without number; my iniquities have overtaken me, until I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head, & my heart fails me. Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; O LORD, make haste to help me. Let all those be put to shame & confusion who seek to snatch away my life; let those be turned back & brought to dishonor who desire my hurt. Let those be appalled because of their shame who say to me, “Aha, Aha!” But may all who seek you rejoice & be glad in you; may those who love your salvation say continually, “Great is the LORD!” As for me, I am poor & needy, but the Lord takes thought for me. You are my help & my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.

NT Reading Ephesians 6:10–12 

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord & in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood & flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

 

We recently marked the 2 year anniversary of an insurrection at the US Capitol. We are increasingly learning that the impetus for such did not originate only from militant militias or radical politicians, but with reactionary religious actors.

My sermon this morning will unpack two linked concepts held by a core of these religious reactionaries: dominionism as a top-down authoritarian theology that seeks political control; and Spiritual Warfare as a church mission of so-called “power evangelism and transformation.” These concepts and movements are harmful to the communities Christians serve. All Christians committed to peace, virtue, and the shalom of their communities should recognize dominionism that seeks compliance with its favored social order, that seeks to exercise political control as a diversion from the bottom-up practice of Gospel virtues. And to recognize that “transformation”—the rebranding of Spiritual Warfare and Mapping-- is a radically misplaced focus on demons rather than neighbors.

Presbyterians have traditionally been suspicious of charismatic revival institutionalization. There has been since the 1980s a Pentecostal revival of the idea that God is doing “something new” to lead the Church by sending new, independent, and self-verifying prophets and apostles to bypass denominations based on established systems of oversight and historical confessions. These self-claimed prophets and apostles are unaccountable to denominations instead to act as charismatic entrepreneurs, actualizing the visions and dreams they claim God is sending to them as individuals to redirect and lead whole churches, whole societies.

This revival of charisma has been institutionalized, of sorts, in a continually shifting alliance of obscured networks and names under the influence of the now deceased C. Peter Wagner, a professor at Fuller Seminary who started as an academic theorist of church growth. He concluded that the way to church growth and opening the world to universal evangelization was through channeling charismatic energy especially institutionalized in Pentecostal circles. While many church growth initiatives based on charismatic leadership (too often narcissistic leadership) flame out after a while, Wagner’s so-called New Apostolic movement is designed to continually recruit the ambitious: new prophets and apostles to renew the direction and outworkings of charismatic energy. This movement, built for longevity, has rapidly moved into political spheres, accelerating since 2000 as the contested election of Al Gore and George W. Bush escalated simmering religious tensions over race and abortion into more open social and political conflict. Now extending toward destabilizing U.S. Constitutional governing institutions.

As we saw up to and including J6, some charismatic and fundamentalist religious networks organized their followers to interfere in elections and, on J6, the operation of Constitutional assemblies. Top NAR leaders were in the White House on January 5th, 2021, holding secret hours-long meetings with top White House officials. Prior they led a national campaign to whip up violent rhetoric at NAR-aligned churches. They mobilized their followers to converge on WDC, holding a series of rallies culminating in the march on the Capitol that turned seditious.[1]

So WHY? why this charismatic fury: and the What? what is the religion behind this anti-Constitutional insurrection?

In my understanding, this amalgam of institutionalized charismatic fury and the insurrection impulse is grounded in 1) a profound misreading of the Biblical idea of “dominion”; 2) a mistaken Christology—who Christ is, how he serves, and what he intends; 3) and a wrong focus on evil spirits and disembodied demons instead of a loving orientation toward flesh and blood neighbors. The first error is primarily about the “what” of God, and the third error, the focus on demonology, is practical—a mistaken knowledge of the “how” of God. The Christological error is a blend of both: it mistakes the “what” of Christ and the “how” of Christ.

Taking up the third point first: the movement of Spiritual Warfare and Spiritual Mapping intensified around 1997, when C. Peter Wagner became interested in "Spiritual Mapping" that was developing in local prayer warfare networks nationwide and in Canada. After being culturally dormant since the Civil War, the terms “Spiritual Warfare” and “Spiritual Mapping” began appearing again in published literature during the Reagan Administration for reasons we will get to later. Since then, the published frequency of these phrases has increased 10-fold, indicating their spread and cultural adoptions.[2]

Researcher Bruce Wilson explains  

the cosmology [of Spiritual warriors and mappers has] demon powers hold[ing] sway over the Earth, and it's the task of believers to identify & defeat the demons. There are several dimensions to this. Wagner & his core NAR cohort developed methods by which they could defeat "territorial spirits"—[the] major demons that controlled large areas, even whole regions of the world. They did this through elaborate ceremonies, by filling a whole stadium with believe[r]s literally shouting out their spiritual warfare; [by learning the names of the demons in order to control them.]

You can do it on the cosmic level, the city level, even in your neighborhood. In the Spiritual Mapping part, you identify the demonic influences that hold sway at whatever scale you're working at. AND you identify institutions, businesses, locales, and - crucially *people* who are associated with the demon spirits/influences. Idea being that the demons need to be invited in [by people] to do their evil mischief - demons need points of intersection with "the natural".[3]

Spiritual mapping and warfare [because of adverse publicity now being called “transformation”]  is done by walking the streets, praying, and feeding geographical data into databases.

Businesses, mosques, or Unitarian Church, a Masonic Lodge, a porn shop... or even, as a public school playground frequented by high school drama students. The "spiritual mappers" from [these networks] would pray for people too, but all the while they were compiling data - and an ideological enemies list - which might one day be turned to uglier ends.

Transformation is the process of how charismatic Christians, through collective acts of Spiritual Mapping/Spiritual Warfare, have claimed to have "transformed" their cities & towns. Crime all but vanishes, people lose their addictions, vegetables grow to enormous size, and everyone becomes a born-again charismatic Christian.[4]

Soon, not just businesses but individuals are located and identified as possessed by demons. To be harassed and sometimes, in Africa, to be evicted from their towns as witches.

 It's quite a crafty method for the mass-distribution of an eliminationist ideology - there exist evil individuals impeding the collective progress of humanity. And, we don't … need to kill them! Drumming them out of town will suffice. Subsequent "Transformations" … become increasingly malevolent… We see the wholesale destruction of native religious practice, city police forces are enlisted for the "transformation" project.[5]

The function of these mapping and warfare exercises is to wrest dominion that these religious warriors believe demons are exercising over geographical areas. They claim local victories that justify expanding the war for spiritual dominion.

Guatemala in the early 80s under Efrain Ríos Montt, a proclaimed “Born Again Evangelical,” pursued an program of “social cleansing” of Marxists.

Ríos believed that religious morality was more important than civil rights, he could dismiss people who do not subordinate themselves to his religious ideals… in December 1982, a group of North Americans interviewed [the pastor of California evangelical-supported church Ríos attended:] El Verbo…, who told them: “The Army doesn’t massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demon possessed: they are communists.”[6]

 After his mobilization of death squads in the 1980s, Ríos was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. American nationals enabled by Reagan administration policy contributed the ideological foundation for such eliminationalist religion and politics.

One of Reagan’s initiatives was to “privatize” foreign affairs, opening up unaccountable-to-the-Constitution private missions in overseas realms. American and foreign Spiritual Warfare networks entered into the foreign policy domain under this aegis of “discipling nations” by expelling/eliminating demons. While the phrase “territorial spirits” seems to have entered published books around the end of WWII, its published frequency has exploded nearly 8-fold from 1984 to now.[7]

An important aside here: “go and make disciples of nations” [per Matt 28:19] is of the “ethnos,” a territorial people not a government, so that “discipling nations” is about creating, by bottom-up practices of virtue, a multi-ethnic Christian worshipping and shalom-spreading, missionary community. Discipling nations is not a top-down sequence to expel demons above and install religious strong men as governing autocrats only then to purify an ethnic order through evangelization.

Theocratic private mercenaries in Guatemala became death squads under the rubric of “low intensity conflicts” so that SWSM networks aligned with USG policy for ongoing struggles against “Marxism.”[8] Marxism has become a dog whistle in certain circles for post-cold war operations domestically and abroad that private networks of SWSM have involved themselves.

Guatemala became a violently dysfunctional society with religious reactionaries working for constituting it on terms of “Christian citizenship.” In this way, Guatamala has been a laboratory of charismatic authoritarianism pushing the frontiers of cultural and ethnic genocide. These are radically contrary to Jesus’ command to disciple all ethnic peoples by leading them to green pastures in the peace-making church.

The Reagan administration initiative to privatize foreign affairs continues to this day to promote the private expression and export, in deadly fashion, of popular American folk fundamentalism that translates inner experience to the outer condition.[9] If one is battling demons within oneself, one is tempted to universalize that battle in American manifest destiny, the preeminent American folk ideology. Many of us remember Reagan’s religious framing of his Dominionist political vision: America was “a shining city on a hill,” a meme written by slaveholder and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, in 1630. The eliminationist ideology of American exceptionalism has deep roots in toxic Dominionism powered by slaves. It’s not a huge leap from considering neighbors in bondage to sin to making bondage a reality—making heathen bodies into corpses or into chattel slaves to save their souls. Toxic theology has real world effects.

Dominionism undergirds an imperial, power-seeking branch of charismatic and theocratic American religion working to “disciple the nations” by conquering and displacing their territorial spirits. The dominionist doctrine of American Manifest destiny and policies of anti-Marxism and “anti-terrorism” have become in certain circles categories of demonology. The next step is to call out witches and then eliminate them. This is where hyper-Calvinist white nationalism fits with imperial power-seeking charismatic Pentecostalism. Spiritual Warriors see demons controlling politics; congruently doctrines of “total depravity” often attribute a radical Manichaean dichotomy of evil or good, retrobate or saved to categories of political human actors. These are your neighbors. The blend of American Manifest Destiny as dominionism with Manichaean demonology applied to real people is the most pernicious of toxic theologies.

Toxic theology undergirding political violence and eliminational “social cleansing” is tragically mistaken in focus, in how God intends us to practice dominion, and in Christology—what Christ revealed to us about God and humanity—how God is incarnated in humanity to bring shalom from the bottom up, in virtues. Christology reveals how disciples in union in Christ are to be in the world.  And it isn’t to cleanse our politics by demonizing and eliminating our neighbor or enslaving them to our values. Or subverting Constitutional policy-making assemblies justified in and by the moral will of We the People because the misled, on J6, saw We the People corrupted by sin and demons both individual and systemic.

Up to now, my sermon has posed three questions:

·         What is biblical dominion? 

·         Are we Christians directed to battle against demons on the ground or in other nations?

·         And how does Christ—how does having an authentic Christology—a true understanding of Christ person and ministry--direct us to live in a political world?

First, Biblical dominion is gentling “grace pressure,” not hard power--antagonistic domination and compliance seeking by means of pagan imperial norms. I can’t take the time to present the voluminous Biblical witness on this point, but suffice Torah of the King Deut 17 and the peaceful images of Gen 1 as the world is formed and dominion granted to humanity. The domineering cruelty of ANE monarchs, esp. when it was mimicked in Israel and Judah, was Biblically and prophetically condemned. Dominion is gently encountering creation, taming its beastly agonistic strife by the practice of virtues, the pattern and grace pressure exemplified by Christ.

The pagans saw the chaos of creation exemplified in the sea. One of its myths has the Persian emperor Xerxes whipping the tides after a storm destroyed his fleet.  Isa. 45:19 I did not create the world to be a chaos.  How does Jesus encounter and tame the waters? By calmly walking on them: Dominion in the way of Jesus grace pressure, not whipping. Gentling the horse, not breaking it.

Second: fundamentalist Manichaeism--Either you’re with us or you’re evil-- is contra Ephesians 6:12.

It behooves us to recognize the combinatorial role of evangelical/charismatic Protestants in fascist, reactionary political uprisings in Guatemala, the U.S., and now in Brazil, and to hold them accountable.

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood.” I can say much more, but I’ll let the Apostle Paul originate that meme for our age: “Our battle is not against flesh and blood.” Focusing on gaining power over demons and what is occult is both a misplaced focus from loving our neighbors, but psychically most dangerous as well.

For Christ’s disciples: There can be NO domination in "dominionism." "Subduing" the land (Gen. 1:28) involves Christ's gentling presence, not control and compliance through "breaking" as of a horse. I titled this Sermon, “Dominion’s Contents.” Both its CON-tents and Dominion’s con-TENTS. Dominion has a content that brings contentment to others. Dominion is messianic, at a minimum fulfilling Deut. 17. It is pictured in the watchful and light presence of a kestrel aloft not the soaring of eagles. By contrast, dominionism as a religion is dis-contenting. It is a miss-content. It misses what dominion is meant to contain.

Dominion is the fold of the lamb of God incarnated as a baby born in a manger where outside is the howling wolf lair of imperial Rome. Dominion is re-learning to walk with a gentling and virtuous presence in a world of chaotic rage. “Grace pressure” is exercising dominion that subdues chaos. Any dominion absent the centrality of the Sermon on the Mount so to hybridize with non-Christlike strife brings about false mission, false Christology, and toxic theology. I call it metaphysical mud (the "miry bog" from this morning's reading of Ps. 40:2): the idea that violence an forceful compulsion can bring in the conditions of God’s peace and bottom-up order.

Unlike Sermon on the Mount theology originating from a manger, Dominionist theology is an expedient tower to check into to plan and launch conflict. That transient hotel tower turns into a mirrored prison of our own violent making from which only God can release.

Dominion is walking in the way of Jesus in the world. Bringing the divine attributes to the earth from heaven. It is not an imperial destiny for a nation.

“Our battle is not against flesh and blood.” If something bleeds, they are not our enemy. Let God control what is unseen, both demons and hidden conspiracies. When you think of kingdom faith as a war to be won—religion seeking dominion without Christian virtue-- you will focus on demons and see people as enemies to be conquered by compulsion and strife. When you think of kingdom faith as a world to be explored and gentled, a local community with which to dance and paint and sup, you will see neighbors to be virtuously encountered and loved. May Christ’s way be so for you and me:

AMEN.

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NOTES

[1]Coulter, Dale M. “Neocharismatic Christianity and the Rise of the New Apostolic Reformation.” Firebrand Magazine. Last modified January 18, 2021. Accessed January 11, 2023. https://firebrandmag.com/articles/neocharismatic-christianity-and-the-rise-of-the-new-apostolic-reformation. 

Taylor, Matthew D., and Bradley Onishi. “Evidence Strongly Suggests Trump Was Collaborating with Christian Nationalist Leaders Before January 6th.” Religion Dispatches, January 6, 2023. https://religiondispatches.org/evidence-strongly-suggests-trump-was-collaborating-with-christian-nationalist-leaders-before-january-6th/.

Onishi, Bradley and Daniel Miller, “Charismatic Revival Fury: Dutch Sheets and NAR Go To Battle on J6." Straight White American Jesus. Podcast, January 2, 2023.

[2]books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spiritual+mapping%2C+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

[3] @brucewilson, Twitter, 1/4/23.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Egoshi, Miho. 2018. “Evangelical Dictatorship Driving the Guatemalan Civil War: Reconsidering Ríos Montt, the ‘Savior of La Nueva Guatemala.’” https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1780&context=cc_etds_theses. https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/julaug/spiritualwarfare.html?paging=off

[7] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=territorial+spirits&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

[8] @brucewilson, Twitter, 1/4/23.

[9] R. Holvast (2008), Spiritual Mapping: The Turbulent Career of a Contested American Missionary Paradigm, 1989-2005.  https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/29340