From Ben Domenech’s excellent Transom, I found out some news I did not have when I wrote yesterday about Ryan Lizza’s The New Yorker article where he got major, substantive facts wrong.One of the things Lizza did was tie Michele Bachmann to Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey, who Lizza opined are “dominionists.” Well, Schaeffer may be dead, but Nancy Pearcey is very much alive and has her own website. She has responded to Lizza’s piece.

The take-away from Ryan Lizza’s hit piece on Michele Bachmann in the New Yorker is this: “Dominionist” is the new “fundamentalist” — the preferred term of abuse, intended to arouse fear and contempt, and downgrade the status of targeted groups of people. Never mind that most of those people have never heard the term — including me. Bachmann told Lizza that a major influence on her thinking was my book Total Truth (“Bachmann told me [it] was a ‘wonderful’ book”), along with the work of Francis Schaeffer, who I studied under. Lizza labeled the two of us Dominionists. Dozens of liberal websites have picked up the story and repeated the charge. I had to Google the term to discover whether there really is such a group.

Will Lizza and The New Yorker bother to correct what increasingly looks like an intentional smear as opposed to a wholesale misunderstanding of Christian theology and terminology?