Lisa Miller brings some necessary perspective to Progressives’ bashing of Perry, Bachmann, and “Dominionism.”

Among her arguments, the “dominionism” that has received so much attention is relatively unknown among conservative Christians, that Evangelicals have not united between a single candidate, and that “Christian conservatives are not more militant than ever.”

But the most trenchant piece of her essay is her observation that for many on the left, anyone who confesses faith in Jesus Christ and identifies themselves as Evangelical, is bent on political hegemony in the US.

There have been responses to Miller’s essay. Here’s one from Peter Montgomery on Religion Dispatches.

In the midst of the name-calling back and forth is this thoughtful piece by David Sessions on Patrol. Sessions writes:

Here’s the reality: Dominionism as a term or a school of thought is virtually unknown even to conservative evangelicals of the type who adore Bachmann and Palin. There is no widely-agreed-upon definition of what constitutes “dominionism”; it is used describe everything from garden-variety religious right (“soft dominionism”) to the insane, totalitarian Christianism of Rushdoony (“hard dominionism”). It is difficult to overstate how fringe it is in its purest forms, how tiny the number of people who are aware of and embrace its arguments.

Sessions goes on to say that, yes, many Evangelical Christians believe that America is a Christian nation and that a return to traditional values is necessary. Moreover,

But, and this is the most important thing, most of their political concerns arise organically from their relatively orthodox Christian views, and have nothing to do with ideological movements like dominionism . Far fewer evangelicals are the red-meat voting machines than certain members of the media imagine. And most of them, even if they have a revisionist, whitewashed, Christianized understanding of the American founding, still accept that they live in a multicultural nation that is not and will never be a theocracy.

Well said.