Another Journalist Revels in Ignorance about Dominionism

Finally, I would ordinarily be glad to join Pinsky in criticizing people who make sweeping, factually unsupported generalizations about evangelicals. Good reporting and scholarship requires using fair terms, making reasonable distinctions, and drawing well-founded conclusions based on facts. But I cannot join Pinsky in this case, because none of the writers he names engage in the behavior he complains about. In fact, he does not cite a single example in support of his inflammatory charge. Yet Pinsky would have us believe that these writers are trying to smear all evangelical Christians by using an unfair “caricature” of evangelicals as “dark conspirators trying to worm their way back into political power at the highest levels.”

He claims it all began in 2006

“and every two years since in the run-up to the presidential and off-year congressional elections, books and articles suddenly appear — often written by Jews — about the menace and weirdness of evangelical Christianity.”

He further claims:

The thrust of the writing is that these exotic wackos — some escaped from a theological and ideological freak show — are coming to take our rights and freedom.

He goes so far as to call all this “demonization” and compares the work of the aforementioned writers with anti-semitic smears suffered by Jews over the centuries.

“We didn’t like it, when people said we had horns and tails, ate the blood of Christian children and poisoned the wells of Europe with plague, much less conspired to rule the world through our Protocols.”

But Pinsky is engaging in a false equivalence to hype a case he has not made. Again, he offers not a single fact in support of his charges.

Perhaps most remarkably, he writes all this in the service of an article headlined “The Truth About Evangelicals.”

If truth was Pinsky’s aim, he missed by a mile.

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