Falwell wanted to prepare America for the end of the world. Now evangelical backers want to take America over.
By Dr. Keri Ladner
Scholar of Religious Studies
In 2015, Ted Cruz went to Liberty University to announce his run for president. Liberty had long been a bastion of dispensationalism, an evangelical worldview with a premillennial eschatology and a separatist attitude toward society. But the senator from Texas stayed away from such topics in his speech. Instead he focused on government deregulation as essential to protecting the God-given rights of individuals. Against the failures of supposed socialist policies like Obamacare, Cruz asked his audience to
imagine abolishing the IRS. . . . Imagine a federal government that stands for the First Amendment rights of every American. . . . From the dawn of this country, at every stage, America has enjoyed God’s providential blessing. Over and over again, when we faced impossible odds, the American people rose to the challenge. You know, compared to that, repealing Obamacare and abolishing the IRS ain’t all that tough!
This message was well-received at Liberty—in part because the school’s founder, Jerry Falwell Sr., had made some important changes to the dispensationalism he inherited. Falwell believed that, although the world would soon face the Rapture and the wrath of God, Christians should still try to influence their society and so perhaps avoid the worst of what was to come. These more public-facing dispensationalists got involved in political arenas; they attempted to reform American society rather than avoid it. Their goals came to include severe reductions in government regulations, as Cruz proposed.
Cruz, who has suggested he might run again in 2024, represents a more recently ascendant evangelical worldview quite different from dispensationalism: Christian dominionism. Dominionism is the belief that Christians should take moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control over society. It has risen rather quietly in American society, and it has had no major public battles with dispensationalism. Instead, the two have come to overlap in interesting ways, as indicated by Cruz’s warm reception at Liberty. Individual evangelicals do not necessarily ascribe to one or the other.
So it is difficult to gauge how many Americans today are specifically dominionist in their belief or practice. We can see, however, that dominionism has made significant inroads in American evangelicalism over the last two decades—and shaped the political engagement of the religious right.
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