Specificially, dominion theology (again, I am speaking largely from where the stuff stems from in pentecostal churches, you folks in the SBC who are largely getting this second and third hand may find your mileage may differ) in pente groups encompasses word-faith or "name it and claim it" theology.

"Name it and Claim it", aka "prosperity gospel", actually pretty explicitly teaches that if you are poor you, or one of your ancestors, has done Something Really Bad and Sinful and either you or your ancestors have let "demons of poverty oppress you".  Their theology also teaches pretty explicitly that "there is no reason that a child of God should be poor".

If you are poor, you are generally very strongly encouraged to spend almost all your waking hours in the church or a church-promoted political dominionist group, go often to "deliverance services" where faith-healers "exorcise the generational curse of poverty" from a family, and donate not only your mandatory regular tithes of ten percent but "seed-faith offerings" of anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of pre-tax income, with claims that "God will increase this tenfold".

(Yes, you read that right.  A lot of the name-it-and-claim-it preachers popular in pente dominionist circles, like Jesse Duplantis and Kenneth Hagin and Creflo Dollar, actually promote God as a divine pyramid scheme.  I couldn't make this up if I tried.)

If you're still poor after all that, you're usually accused of having some "secret sin" in your life, or of having something innocuous (like a peace symbol, or Nike shoes, or your kids are playing with Pokemon or Cabbage Patch Kids) that is a demon-infested "doorway for Satan", and you have to get rid of it and devote even more of your time and money to the church.

Or, of course, you're also often accused of not having enough faith, or not "naming and claiming" enough.

(Does it show that I grew up in a dominionist church that was really, really heavy into the "name it and claim it" BS?  Or that this was about the only thing my mother and father would regularly fight about (when my mom was wanting to give over 50 percent of our pre-tax income when we were so poor we were running up our credit cards at salvage stores because that was the only place we could afford to buy groceries)?  Or that they'd promote this stuff to poor people in the soup kitchen they ran?)

Anyways, yeah.  Dominion theology in pente churches does some interesting bits of scripture-twisting (and sometimes not even that--more often than not it's based on "rhema", "revelations from God" that are not in the Bible per se but are still seen as a new gospel by pente groups, especially by the AoG and neopentecostal groups) to essentially have a "Biblical" policy of "Screw the poor, they're all sinners anyways".

There are times I am quite convinced that, if there is anything to the Second Coming at all, Jesus would throw the lot of them out again.  

I am also, sadly, convinced that if there is anything to the Second Coming at all that Jesus would end up being killed all over again and we'd be wearing little nooses or M-16's around our necks 2000 years from now. :(

by dogemperor on Sat Jan 21, 2006 at 03:50:52 PM EST
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