Robin Burk is a West Point instructor and wife of a retired Air Force officer. She’s one of the excellent writers of the collaborative blog Winds of Change and recently launched her own blog, Random Probabilities.

Robin hosted the MSNBC segment, “Connected” today. Jackson’s Junction has streaming video. Good on yer, Robin!

BTW, Robin is hosting a panel discussion on milblogging at the BlogNashville conference that begins Friday evening, May 6. The discussion takes place Saturday, May 7, from 10:30-11:45. Robin graciously invited me to be a panelist, so come on by!

I added to my comments policy, included above the comment box for every post. I thought I’d post them here since some of the policy is new:

A. No - means no - profanity!

B. No personal attacks on me or any other commenter or author.

C. No commercial commenting, but links to your own blog site or relevant other web pages are fine. If you include more than two links in your comment, Wordpress automatically slides it into the “awaiting moderation” file. Eventually I will notice but probably not quickly.

D. I rarely answer comments - I just don’t have the time - and when I do it is on a whim. So if you leave a comment challenging or commending my post, thank you, but don’t get bent when I appear to take no notice.

E. Please do not email me something you left in a comment - Wordpress emails me every comment so I do see it.

F. Remember Rule No. 6!

When my daughter was little I used to play and joke with her a lot. One of little rituals I had with her was to tell her at special moments, “You make me very happy,” which was completely true.

In 2000, Mel Gibson’s Revolutionary War epic, The Patriot, was released. Mel plays an American officer named Benjamin Martin who has a small daughter named Susan, played by Skye McCole Bartusiak and who, at the time, bore a passing resemblance to my own daughter.

There’s a scene in the movie when Martin visits his family, who have taken refuge on the Georgia coast, hiding from the British army. Susan had been struck mute by a personal trauma that took place before the time of the movie’s opening, but had recovered her ability to speak. Thing is, she won’t speak to dad, upset with him for leaving her for war and apparently blaming him for her mother’s death from natural causes.

As Martin closes his visit at the coast and starts to return to the war, he begs Susan to say something, anything, to him. She purses her lips and glares at him. But as he mounts his horse and rides away, her need to love her daddy overwhelms her and she runs after him, calling, “Daddy! I’ll say anything! Just don’t leave me!”

Martin instantly wheels his horse about, jumps off, runs to her and holds her tight. She cries and begs him not to go back to war, promising to speak to him if he won’t. But Martin must go, for duty calls. As he pulls her arms from around his neck, he promises to return and tells her, “You make me very happy.”

And right there in the movie theater I just lost it.

There is a bitterness for soldiers to leave their children to go to war that is harder than leaving their parents, siblings or even their wives or husbands. The bitter bile of farwell is matched - nay, overwhelmed - by the glorious sweetness of returning, for those blessed to return alive, precisely because they do return alive. No one in recent memeory has described this glorious sweetness better than Staff Sgt. Greg Moore of the New York National Guard’s Second Battalion, 108th Infantry. He wrote of returning from combat and being released from Fort Drum, NY, earlier than anticipated. He went home in midday to find his wife and two sons gone, as he knew they would be.

I dropped my bags inside and walked alone through the rooms, soaking in the images and smells that had been only a memory during ten months in Iraq.

My older son’s first-grade teacher had been wonderful to me while I was away. She sent school updates and pictures via e-mail almost weekly. So when I popped my head into her classroom she came running and gave me a “welcome home” hug.

“Easton is practicing a song. Why don’t you surprise him?”

My heart was racing. I followed the sound of the piano and the little voices singing, then stood and watched. Trickles of love and pride started involuntarily down my cheeks as I listened to my son. He has gotten so big. The anticipation built as I waited for him to see me.

The little girl next to him was the first to notice the uniformed man standing in the doorway. The image she saw and the facts she had been told were doing battle in her brain. Then her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell open.

“Easton! Easton . . . your Daddy’s here!” she said in an electrified whisper.

My son’s head snapped around. The excitement and disbelief on his face is something I will never forget. I motioned him to me and he ran into my open arms. There was no hiding my tears, and I didn’t care to. This was the day I had waited for.

I choked out my words of love and hung on to this boy who had cried so many nights, who said he didn’t care if he got any other presents for Christmas, he only wanted his Daddy to come home. This boy who had used all his wishes on me. He kept pulling his head back from my shoulder to look at my face. Cheers rose from the other kids and teachers.

Hand-in-hand, Easton and I stepped outside and drove to the other side of town. I had another little boy to catch up with. When I went inside he was napping. “Marshal, wake up. I have a surprise for you,” I heard his day-care provider say.

She came out with his head on her shoulder. When he looked up his eyes grew wide and all signs of sleepiness disappeared. “Daddy!” he exclaimed in pure excitement as he fell forward into my arms. My heart ached with love, and pure joy soaked my cheeks.

I was complete again. I had my boys. And there have never been more perfect words spoken to me than “I love you, Dad.”

All dads and moms who have served their country in places where there flies the angry iron of war know what this means. The tears his account brings come from remembering our own moments of this glorious sweetness, but also from the bitter leavening that some of our comrades did not make it home to do so. More than anything, I think, this is why soldiers hate war more intenesely than anyone else: war robs us not only of family we love, it robs our comrades whom we also love of the ones they love, too.

I have openly ripped off the title of this post from Gilles Kepel, head of the post-graduate program on the Arab and Muslim worlds at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, who published an excellent essay on the rise of Islamism called, “The Trail of Political Islam.”

What brings this to mind in relation to Christianity is Glenn Reynold’s entry this morning about Tennessee Senator Bill Frist (the Senate majority leader) inviting one David Barton “to lead interested senators and their families around the Capitol this evening,” according to The Washington Post. Observes Glenn,

Barton, I believe, is a Christian Reconstructionist — I don’t know if he’s as extreme as, say, Gary North — but I think it’s a mistake for Frist to get too close to him.

UPDATE: More on Barton, here.

I’ll not repeat here what the links about North and Barton say about them except to draw a necessary distinction between Christian evangelicalism, Christian reconstructionism (aka, “dominionism”) and Christian theonomy - sorry for the vocabulary lesson, but to understand present-day political Christianity you need to have it.

– Evangelicalism is a theology that holds the greatest imperative for a Christian is to lead others to confess personal faith in Jesus Christ as risen Lord and savior. Its primary fealty is to Christ personally rather to his ethical propositions or moral examples. Evangelicalism insists that human sins have been fully and eternally remitted by the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross and his resurrection by the power of God. Hence, all persons who “believe in their hearts that Jesus was raised from the dead and confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord will be saved,” to slightly paraphrase Saint Paul’s teaching in Romans 10.

Although some Christian denominations in America are more inclined toward evangelicalism than others, evangelicals are found in most all denominations from Roman Catholicism to Assemblies of God - even United Methodists! Historically, evangelicalism has not been very political because evangelicals focused on one’s eternal destiny rather than temporal circumstances. Evangelism (hence the name) is the supremely overriding priority. This is not to say that evangelical groups or individuals have never acted in the political realm, it is that saving of souls and leading others to conversion have always been the main task, not the reforming of temporal politics.

– Christian dominionism is the idea that human institutions of every stripe should be brought under the umbrella of Christian teaching and practice. Some dominionists have not necessarily included the political organs of a country, state of local government under the umbrella, believing that the civil organs of society, if managed and membered by Christians, would inevitably lead to political processes and results that mostly reflected Christian virtue, even if not perfectly. Other dominionists - of whom Barton seems one - insist that every social, civil and government body must be brought under the control of Christians without exception.

Hence, dominionists see their primary role not in saving souls but in saving society’s operating organs at every level. I probably am belaboring the obvious that not just any kind of Christianity is suitable for dominion over society; you’ll have a hard time finding a dominionist among the United Methodist Church, for example (my denomination) or finding a dominionist who would include the UMC or its Wesleyan tradition as valid foundations for proper Christian dominion.

– Theonomy is a very strict form of dominionism that hold that the Mosaic, Deuteronomic and Levitical codes of the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures are ideal models for the civil code of the United States, suitably modified for 21st-century circumstances in their mode of application but not their imperatives of application.

Now, back to political Islam for a moment. About 80 years ago there arose in the Arab countries an Islamic revivalist movement that has come to be called Islamism, which Kepel called “political Islam.” Islamism was originally a reform movement calling secularized Arab governments and societies to return to the basics of pure Islam - as the reformers defined it. Islamism began in Egypt in the early 1920s. It was and still is fundamentally religious in nature. It was not originally violent but became violent fairly soon; Islamists believed that they were obligated to strike those who defied Islam as Islamists perceived it. For many decades afterward, and still significantly today, the focus of Islamists was Arab governments. Islamism’s goal was the institution of strict Islamic law, sharia, in Muslim countries and the rooting out of all non-Muslim influences in the ordering of societies.

Not all Islamists are terrorists by a long shot, but all Islamists (by definition) share a common goal whether they condone or use violence: the total control of society according to the dictates of Quran and the practices of Mohammedan Islam in its early decades.

Note well that I am not implying a moral equivalence between Islamism and Christian dominionism or theonomy. The latter are not violent and do not seek the overthrow of what they claim is the ungodly or apostate American government; they seek instead to use established American political processes to gain control through elections, political activism and (as Glenn’s cite points out) ejection of office holders they perceive as especially egregious. Islamism, OTOH, readily uses violence to try to topple un-Islamic regimes and holds that to do so is actually a form of righteous worship of the deity, a point of view no Christian dominionist I know of takes.

However, dominionists share elements of a certain kind of religious world view with Islamists. Alike they believe that the present ordering of society and civil government is corrupt, ungodly and contrary to the will of God as revealed in their respective scriptures, and that the duty of the true faithful is to bring society and government into conformance with the divine will.

Islamism and Christian dominionism also are absolutist in nature; only the form of their “resistance” differs. They operate from the basis of apprehending divine, revealed truth that cannot be rationally denied or righteously opposed. In this mindset, they each fall into what Charles Kimball, Wake Forest University religion professor and internationally-known expert on Islam and the intersection of religion and politics, describes in his book, When Religion Becomes Evil. Kimball suggests are the five major warning signs that a religion is being used for corrupt reasons, and offers steps to overcoming them. The warning signs are:

1. claims of absolute truth;

2. blind obedience;

3. establishing the “ideal” time, especially with Armageddon scenarios;

4. when the end justifies any means;

5. declaring holy war.

Of these five signs, Islamism scores on all and Christian dominionism on numbers one and three (absent Armageddon). Dominionist are hardly “blindly obedient” even to figures like Barton or North. Nor, as I said, have they declared holy war against their own government even though they see their campaign as a divine imperative. As dominionists score positive on only two of the five signs, and the second only weakly, dominionism isn’t evil. I do think it is badly mistaken in its understanding of Christian practice and should it achieve, well, dominion, would almost certainly be oppressive. ReligiousTolerance.org says,

They intend to achieve this by using the freedom of religion in the US to train a generation of children in private Christian religious schools. Later, their graduates will be charged with the responsibility of creating a new Bible-based political, religious and social order. One of the first tasks of this order will be to eliminate religious choice and freedom. Their eventual goal is to achieve the “Kingdom of God” in which much of the world is converted to Christianity. They feel that the power of God’s word will bring about this conversion. No armed force or insurrection will be needed; in fact, they believe that there will be little opposition to their plan. People will willingly accept it. All that needs to be done is to properly explain it to them.

All religious organizations, congregations etc. other than strictly Fundamentalist Christianity would be suppressed. Nonconforming Evangelical, main line and liberal Christian religious institutions would no longer be allowed to hold services, organize, proselytize, etc. Society would revert to the laws and punishments of the Hebrew Scriptures. Any person who advocated or practiced other religious beliefs outside of their home would be tried for idolatry and executed.

Their means to achieve their objective might be termed “peaceful infiltration,” and it is a critical distinction from Islamism that must be kept in mind. However, the religious oppression postulated once dominion is established is indeed violent and should be recognized as such. “Nonconforming” Christians would live under a form of Christian-based dhimmitude not much different from that imposed by Mohammed upon all Christians and Jews in Muslim lands.

Dominionist absolutism is clearly unacceptable, especially since I am no fundamentalist and would thus be a future target of dominionism’s ideology. As I pointed out near the end of this post,

Absolutism in any field can be frightening, and never more so than religious absolutism. There is a critical difference between Christian absolutism and Christian certainty. Absolutism claims that an assertion is absolutely true. Absolute truth leaves no room for doubt or dissent; you disagree at peril of suffering at the hands of true believers.

Religious absolutists have been found in every tradition, even Buddhism has experienced the same kind of violent adherents that Islam now suffers from, and so has Christianity.

But Christian certainty is different. Christian certainty makes room for doubt or dissent, if for no other reason than we have Thomas’ example in John 20.

The Christian call is not to claim an absolute truth. To say one knows an absolute truth is an astonishingly arrogant claim. It says much more about what one thinks about oneself than what one knows about truth. Can any of us really claim, “I and I alone know what is true. The rest of you are in darkness”? Surely not!

Phil Snyder commented at that post,

C.S. Lewis called this “Christianity and …” where Christ is a means to an end and not the end himself. For example, “I am a Christian because Christianity provides the best framework for the pro-life (or pro-abortion) movement.” You can substitute the environmental movement, racial/social justice, peace, freedom, conservative, liberal or any other idea. The problem is that we use God as a means to an end and not an end in Himself.

I would agree that the social and political reality of America today is that it is far from the Kingdom of God, but like the Hebrew prophets I maintain we should put no trust in princes anyway. Even the best government, peopled by the best men and women possible, is fallen.

Related thoughts here.

Update: I think another difference between Islamism (and Islam generally) and Christian dominionism is what undergirds the rationale for the religious domination of society. As Prof. Mark Gould points out,

Islam contrasts Dar al-Islam, lands ruled by shari’ah [Islamic law], and Dar al-harb, the “abode of warfare,” lands ruled by non-Muslims. “‘Warfare’ refers,” Denny writes, “both to the presumed quality of such places from the perspective of Muslims (namely, that they lack the security and order of the Shari’a and are therefore lands where everyone is at war with everyone else) and to the necessity for jihad — ‘exertion’ in spreading the true faith, an activity that may include armed conflict. It is one thing to force conversion, which the Koran forbids; but it is another to conquer territory in the name of God and — from the Muslim vantage point — for the welfare of people who stand to benefit from imposition of the holy law.”

The blanketing of Islamic law upon all of a society is held to be a positive good for its inhabitants, even those who do not become Muslim but choose instead to live in dhimmitude, a right accorded by Mohammed only to Christians and Jews; all other religions’ adherents must convert to Islam or accept exile or even suffer death.

If anything, Christian dominionism seems to me to be more corrupt because Muslims at least think that even non-Muslims will benefit from living in an Islamic society; the rule of Islam is established so that all persons may prosper, especially Muslims but not only them. Dominionism, though, seems not to care a whit whether anyone prospers but its own adherents: dominionists seek domination not for my good but for their own.

Oh, wait -

When US President George W. Bush visited Germany last February, tens-of-thousands of angry demonstrators turned out in Mainz and all across Germany to vent their outrage at the Iraq war and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Now, less than two months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Germany. And a whopping 30 protesters showed up to demonstrate the bloody Russian war and widespread human rights violations in Chechnya. Putin and Schroeder were all smiles as they tipped champagne glasses and signed multi-billion dollar business deals for everything from Russian natural gas imports to German bullet train exports in Schroeder’s hometown of Hannover. Naturally, with the cash registers busily ringing away, Chechnya never came up and the German media has all but ignored the topic.

Business as usual, indeed.

Joe Gandelman has already compiled it, so see his “Around The ‘Sphere” post today.

Okay, see also:

— Chuck Simmins doesn’t exactly name the next pope, but he does name the names the next pope is “(almost) sure not to pick” for his nom de papacy.

— Speaking of things papal, Joseph Braude has a piece entitled, “Power Failure: John Paul II’s flawed record in the Middle East,” over at The New Republic.

— Colored, rubber bracelets are all the rage among the kids today, each bearing the name of a cause of some kind. You or your youngster can get a GI Bracelet in purple honoring those who have died or suffered wounds. All of the purchase price - you decide how much, from $1 to $5 - is donated to troop support:

Here are the funds currently being donated to by these purchases:

Fisher House Foundation - Builds “comfort homes” on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers. These homes enable family members to be close to a loved one during hospitalization for an unexpected illness, disease, or injury. Highest priority is supporting service men and women wounded or injured in Iraq or Afghanistan, and their families.

Homes For Our Troops - Builds homes and adapts existing homes for injured veterans and their immediate families.

Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund - Provides supplemental assistance to our Marines, sailors, and their families.

Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund - Provides grants to the families of servicemen and women who died in Iraq. 100% of contributions go to support military families.

Wounded Warrior Project- Provides free assistance and/or representation in the following areas: benefits, legislative issues, employment, and connecting with programs and services that address the needs of veterans.

The Fisher House project, btw, is that which Denzel Washington heavily contributed to when he visited wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. All these organizations are highly worthy - so go buy a bracelet!

— Joe Comer ponder just who or what exactly is an evangelical Christian.

— If you’re into discussion boards, then Volconvo may be your cup of tea, being an index of many different topics and their board.

Joe Gandelman, scribe of The Moderate Voice, did a bangup job yesterday on MSNBC’s “Connected” segment. The Politcal Teen has streaming video.

Topics include:

Bull Moose Blog - Tom DeLay’s wrongdoings
Thoughts Online - A conservative blogger calling for DeLay to resign
Betsy’s Page - More on the wrong doing
Salon -Pultzer [sic] Prize Winner Controversey

Powerline - Idological [sic] Part
Pandagon -Pultzer [sic] Prize
Doc Searls - Pod Casting

Good on yer, Joe!