The quiet rise of Christian dominionism

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.