There are at least two major strands of Christian supremacy operating in the U.S. today: the highbrow Calvinists and the populist charismatics. Both groups are Protestant, and both have theological roots in an obscure group of Reformed (Calvinist) American theologians called the “Christian Reconstructionists,” who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Reconstructionists draw inspiration from 16th-century theologian John Calvin’s Geneva, a theocratic city-state where unrepentant heretics could be executed by a government that enforced orthodoxy.
Though certainly not representative of all Calvinists, today’s Reconstructionists have embraced a vision of what they call “dominion theology.” They interpret certain Bible passages to mean that Christians must “take dominion” over every society and remake it into the kingdom of God. Today, they hold conferences with titles such as “Blueprints for Christendom 2.0” and talk about how they will help Jesus the “warrior-king” to “dominion-ize” this world.
These theological intellectuals of the Christian far right are radicalizing more run-of-the-mill Christian nationalists. Reconstructionist luminaries today include people like Stephen Wolfe, a scholar with a Ph.D. in political theory who argues full-throatedly in his book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” that “Non-Christians … are not entitled to political equality.”
Like good Calvinists, the Reconstructionists are intellectual and systematic, imagining detailed programs by which Christians can re-Christianize America and, ultimately, the world. They hope their heady ideas will help trigger such a global crusade, while recognizing that their high-octane Calvinist theology will never be everyone’s cup of tea.
So beginning in the 1980s, the Reconstructionist theologians intentionally spread their ideas into other Christian communities and networks, sometimes with the more rigid Calvinist casing shaved off. They especially cross-pollinated with a rapidly growing segment of American Christianity that gets little media coverage: nondenominational charismatic Christians.
Charismatic Christians are those who are trying to restore the more supernatural dimensions of early Christianity — speaking in tongues, performing miracles and believing in modern prophecies. This is the world of next-gen televangelism, ecstatic megachurches and itinerant prophets. Nondenominational charismatics are the energetic, tech-savvy, insurgent populists of American Christianity.