Some of this is my latest paper in preparation. Comments and criticisms are, if not welcomed, useful…
Dominionism and dominion theology
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels[1], and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. [Psalm 8:3–8, Authorised (King James) Version of 1611]
Christian human exceptionalism has a long history, but the foundational text for the notion that humans (and in particular those chosen by God) are to have control over the living world is Psalm 8. Here there is a strong hierarchy in the scheme of the world, and while God dominates (rules) humanity, humanity dominates the rest of the living world. This is one of those passages in the Bible where a natural taxonomy is used to justify some state of things as “right”.[2]
There is a form of Christian evangelical theology that has come to be known as Dominionism (McVicar 2013). This is an outgrowth of a theological tradition in the US, known as Christian Reconstructionism. Associated with the ideas of R. J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), it broadly holds the view that it is mandated by Genesis 1:26-28 that Christians (and only Christians) should rule the earth and its peoples. An eschatological movement outgrowth of Presbyterianism, it is a “post-millennial” movement in which the Rapture and Christ’s return will occur after a thousand years of a Golden Age of Christian dominance. Rushdoony called this theonomy, since the rules of society will be Christian, due to educational, legal, and political control of secular institutions. Dominionism is broadly opposed to ecological concerns. Maltby notes
Evidently, Dominionist philosophy does not recognize natural entities and species as autonomous life forms; rather, it perceives them as artifacts designed to satisfy human needs. Indeed, ac- cording to fundamentalist economist E. Calvin Beisner, to put the Earth before human needs is to be guilty of “idolatry of nature” (Maltby 2008, p. 120)
Maltby goes on to say
not only is conservation seen as irrelevant, insofar as the planet is thought to have no future (in the words of the 19th-century premillennialist Dwight Moody, “You don't polish the brass of a sinking ship” …), but environmental catastrophe is positively welcomed by Pat Robertson and other fundamentalist leaders as presaging the Rapture and the Second Coming.
As Maltby documents, these movements have deep pocket conservative funders. The Acton Institute, which is home to this antienvironment movement, is funded by, among others, Exxon-Mobil. Many resource-based companies funded a fake grassroots (“astroturf”[3]) movement known as the “Wise Use” movement: Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Marathon Oil, as well as the American Farm Bureau, Dupont, Yamaha, General Electric, General Motors, National Cattlemen’s Association, and the National Rifle Association. The phrase “wise use”, like “sustainable development”, is a subtle cue (a “dog whistle”) to the political ecology underlying that ideas of a writer or institution.
The obvious capitalist nature of the dominionist and wise use movements, along with other movements like “property rights” (using public lands for private purposes) in the United States, appears to be largely driven by corporate interests (Luke 1998). However, there is also an ideological base known as “Traditionalism”. A cross-religion eclectic philosophy, Traditionalism has influenced oligarchs in Russia, industrialists in the US, and many other elite groups (Sedgwick 2004). The core tenets of Traditionalism are basically hyper-conservative: as society moves away from traditional metaphysics, ethics and politics, it degrades. The originators of Traditionalism, René Guénot, Julius Evola (a racist fascist occultist), Frithjof Schuon (Hindu influenced), and Mircea Eliade (a scholar of religion) were Muslim or Catholic or influenced by Hinduism, but the philosophy itself is more Platonic, and involves both a view of a lost “Golden Age” and an eternal return of history . It claims to understand both a perennial religion and a perennial wisdom, both of which are included in every religion. In principle, Traditionalism, or Perennial or Esoteric Wisdom, opposes modernist societies and modernism.
It is an open question whether Traditionalism has been adopted by corporatist thinkers because it suits the interests of the corporations believers own, or they are influenced by the ideology. I tend to think the former is more correct. However, Dominionism, while it may be funded by Traditionalist corporations, is nevertheless an evangelical Christian creation, and it stands on its own.
The Cornwall Alliance
The pre-eminent “think-tank” of dominion-style theology is the Cornwall Alliance. Their statement of intent has changed somewhat but in emphasis over the years, but not its conceptual content.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.[4]
The politicisation of science (Mooney 2005) has led to a devaluation of biological diversity in favour of social and economic goals. This has been adopted quite enthusiastically by the protestant evangelical Pentecostal movement. Evangelicals who oppose ecological conservation treat it as a secular “worldview” that opposes the gospel. Their motivation, however, is not theological: it is the Prosperity Gospel. Berger (2008) notes:
Weber believed (correctly, I think) that the socio-economic consequences of Protestantism were unintended. Luther, Calvin, and Wesley did not intend their moral teachings to make their followers rich (though at least the last of the three noticed, with considerable discomfort, that many of his followers did become rich--the "method" of Methodism turned out to have an economic result along with its religious one). The purveyors of the prosperity gospel are, as it were, intentional Weberians: They consciously intend the consequences that earlier Protestants brought about unintentionally. Sociologists will have a hard time quarreling with this program, whatever the qualms of theologians.
The idea that God favours those who are wealthy, or rather that those who are wealthy are favoured by God, is an old view (as Weber argued), but this “intentional Weberianism” was made popular in the United States by Andrew Carnegie’s “Wealth” (Carnegie 1889, later retitled ‘The Gospel of Wealth’ in 1901) but in its religious form Prosperity Theology was settled in the 1950s onwards, and became the guiding view of the Pentacostal, and later more broadly the Charismatic, movements of the 1980s. Many Dominionists, such as Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland and Pat Robertson either promote the theology or are connected to it in various ways. It has become the heresy du jour of the popular church. The use of nature to gain wealth is therefore a very popular idea, which ties closely to the belief in the uniqueness of human beings, separate from nature. As Cornwall states:
Environmentalism sees human beings principally as consumers and polluters who are only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from other species. The Bible sees people as made in God’s image, qualitatively different from all other species, and designed to be producers and stewards who, within a just and free social order, can create more resources than they consume and ensure a clean, healthful, and beautiful environment.
Dominionism, when post-millenarian, also harkens to a Golden Age, only it is not one we return to but one we will encounter once Christianity rules the world.
Notes
[1] The word for angels in Hebrew used here is mê·’ĕ·lō·hîm [מֵאֱלֹהִ֑ים]. Early in the history of the religion of the Israelites, they were henotheists (adherents of a tribal, or national, god, one among many others), but by the time the Tanakh was translated into Greek – the Septuagint – exclusive monotheism had taken hold and elohim had become “God” rather than “the gods” (Smith 2001, 2002), or else it was used for angels and prophets. The Christian tradition followed this early rabbinic interpretation, as it did with Psalm 82:1 (with Jesus’ authority; see John 10:34ff where Jesus states that “the gods” are those to whom God’s message has been given).
[2] Although interestingly and to the point, the taxonomy here is focused on domesticated animals, rather than wild ones, which makes the dominion primarily over cattle and so forth, and only secondarily over wild creatures. See (Whitekettle 2006).
[3] This utilised the playbook of the public relations programs of tobacco companies, often with the same PR firms and players. See (Oreskes and Conway 2010).
[4]Cornwall Alliance accessed May 2013. This has now been replaced by a much longer and less overt set of documents expressing total dominion over the environment – https://cornwallalliance.org/landmark-documents/, accessed 25 July 2020.
References
Berger, Peter L. 2008. “‘You Can Do It!’; Another Look at the Prosperity Gospel.” Books and Culture, Christianity Today, 2008.
Carnegie, Andrew. 1889. “Wealth.” The North American Review 148 (391): 653–64.
Luke, Timothy W. 1998. “The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized Consumerism.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 23 (2): 175–212.
Maltby, Paul. 2008. “Fundamentalist Dominion, Postmodern Ecology.” Ethics and the Environment 13 (2): 119–41.
McVicar, Michael J. 2013. “‘Let Them Have Dominion’: ‘Dominion Theology’ and the Construction of Religious Extremism in the US Media.” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 25 (1): 120–45. https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.25.1.120.
Mooney, Chris. 2005. The Republican War on Science. New York: Basic Books.
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury.
Sedgwick, Mark. 2004. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Against the Modern World. Oxford UK; New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195152972.001.0001/acprof-9780195152975.
Smith, Mark S. 2001. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0725/99058180-b.html.
———. 2002. The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2nd ed. The Biblical Resource Series. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.
Whitekettle, Richard. 2006. “Taming the Shrew, Shrike, and Shrimp: The Form and Function of Zoological Classification in Psalm 8.” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (4): 749–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/27638403.