“Let them have Dominion”: “Dominion Theology” and the Construction of Religious Extremism in the US Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In the last decade, media coverage of “dominionism” and “dominion theology” and their supposed influence on conservative politicians has become increasingly visible in the US news press. Popular exposés using “dominionism” to frame the religio-political convictions of everyone from President George W. Bush to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann have proliferated even as journalists, pundits, and preachers have struggled to define the concept of dominion. This essay offers a critical history of dominion discourse as it has evolved over the last three decades in the evangelical and secular presses in the United States. It situates the emergence of dominion discourse within evangelical efforts to define the proper limits of their political activism during the 1980s and the progressive backlash against the Christian Right in the 1990s. Through close readings of material produced in the evangelical and secular presses this essay argues that dominion discourse reflects certain normative but unexplored assumptions about the nature and meaning of the place of religion in the American public sphere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".