American Dominion

Evangelical influence has been prominent in American politics since at least 1976, with the rise of Jimmy Carter in the year Time magazine proclaimed the “Year of the Evangelical.” For decades, the politics of the evangelical movement were predictable: they were pro-life, concerned about public morality, and advocates for traditional “family values.” So how did they become so closely aligned with Donald Trump, a man who never embodied any of these values?

The answer, according to Keri Ladner, is about more than political expediency. In this new book she describes how a few strains of evangelical belief with deep roots in American history came together to create a potent form of radical evangelicalism known as dominionism. Dominionists have a troubling relationship to democracy, one that is rooted in their understanding of the Bible. Dominionist pastors were among the earliest Trump allies in the Republican primaries of 2016. And now, after Trump’s 2024 election, they have unprecedented access to power—and an unprecedented disregard for democracy that is rooted in their religious beliefs. The movement’s most prominent leaders include some of Donald Trump’s most trusted advisors, as well as the current Speaker of the House of Representatives. Their understanding of the role of demonic forces dovetails easily with the conspiracy theories of QAnon and others; in their worldview, words like demonization become literal—and thus more powerful and more polarizing than ever before. They provide a strong and growing religious rationalization for the radicalization of the Republican Party.

In American Dominion, Ladner traces the long history of dominionism to its roots at the beginning of the Pentecostal-charismatic movement that began in the early twentieth century and is now the fastest-growing religious movement in the world. She shows how a once-obscure fringe of American Christianity gained followers through dramatic faith-healing revivals and through a steady drumbeat of appeal to the angels-and-demons language of the Bible and the idea that America is God’s chosen nation. She documents the rise of a religiously radical— masquerading as “conservative”—religious counterculture that equipped believers with a worldview shaped by a curriculum that moved from homeschooling into more and more public-school systems. She explores the world in which this ideology now lives: a network of vibrant and growing megachurches that promise a closer connection to God in ways that promise to tap into the power of Pentecost—but threaten to upend America’s traditional relationship to democratic norms in the process.

Author Biography

Keri Ladner, PhD, is an expert on fundamentalist politics in America and the radicalization of the conservative movement. She specializes in the religious beliefs of the American right wing, and her work illuminates how those beliefs have become part of American power structures. She is the author of End Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to Qanon (2024) and her publications have been featured in a number of media outlets, including Christian Century, Religion Dispatches, and Good Faith Media.