According to the town criers of liberal American journalism, readers must wake up and do something. Hide your children—there is a movement afoot among conservative Christians to take over our country and give America a theocratic makeover. A slew of magazine articles and books—with apocalyptic titles such as American Theocracy and The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us Footnote ¹— announced conservative Christians' backward views on social and political issues, insidious webs of government influence, and intentions to return America to its supposedly Christian roots. Most of these authors devoted at least a few pages to an obscure religious movement and a man with a curious name: Christian reconstructionism and R. J. Rushdoony.

In the late 1960s, Rousas John Rushdoony was a retired Orthodox Presbyterian pastor who ran a little-known organization called the Chalcedon Foundation in a tiny town in central California. He and a handful of disgruntled Ph.D.s and ex-seminarians churned out books and articles that sold few copies and were probably read by even fewer. Forty years later, secular journalists are calling Rushdoony's movement “the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today.”Footnote ² If his followers have their way, these writers warn, America will become a patriarchal society with zero religious tolerance for any faith other than fundamentalist Christianity, where church and state are effectively one and Mosaic code is the law of the land, where homosexuals, adulterers, and disrespectful teenagers are executed by public stoning.Footnote ³ This most virulent form of Christian reconstructionism never claimed more than a handful of adherents. However, while journalists have made too much of reconstructionism's grip on mainstream evangelicalism, they have also overlooked its real significance in the development of conservative Christian thought. For a brief moment in the late twentieth century, Rushdoony challenged anyone who would call himself or herself a conservative Christian to take the whole Bible seriously—including inconvenient verses in the Old Testament that most Christians, even biblical literalists, politely ignore. He pushed a mutant strain of Calvinist theology to its logical conclusions.

Before the recent rash of pop analyses of the Christian Right, literature on Christian reconstructionism was almost nonexistent. Frederick Clarkson, a journalist who began to sound the theocracy warning siren earlier than most, published the somewhat sloppy and sensational Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1997). The most insightful and responsible analysis of the movement is a brief article published by Catholic neoconservative writer Richard John Neuhaus in the May 1990 issue of First Things, when Christian reconstructionist writers were just coming down from the height of their publishing fury, but his analysis is ultimately dismissive.Footnote ⁴ Neuhaus saw nothing in the thought of Rushdoony or his disciples that he deemed worth taking seriously.

The reconstructionists themselves have been prolific, publishing dozens of books since the founding of the movement. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a few of their opponents within conservative Christian circles undertook book-length responses to the reconstructionist case, and here and there a book review appeared in a church journal.Footnote ⁵ None of this limited critical literature addresses the thought of the movement's founder or his relationship to theological tradition or contemporary ideas and politics, settling instead for caricaturing Rushdoony as a kind of American “ayatollah”Footnote ⁶ who wanted to reinstate the tithe and execute blasphemers.

There is some truth to this assessment. Rushdoony did envision a society in which non-Christians who practiced their faith would be executed.Footnote ⁷ Yet he was also a strange brand of theological genius whose ideas proved robust enough to sustain an intellectual movement. Any serious appraisal of Christian reconstructionism must begin with a thorough examination of the mind of its founder. Only then can we begin to assess the course that the movement has taken in the hands of Rushdoony's disciples. My hope is that this study lays the groundwork for an assessment of Christian reconstructionism's ultimate importance that is less melodramatic and more complex than that offered by recent ominous exposés of America's Bible thumpers.

I. The Intellectual Context of Christian Reconstructionism

Advocates of Christian reconstructionism—also known as theonomy (“God's law”)—defined the movement in terms of five theological tenets: a Calvinistic notion of regeneration, or salvation by God-given grace; a postmillennial eschatology predicting that Jesus Christ's second coming will occur after a thousand-year reign of the saints, thus requiring Christians to act now to bring about that reign; presuppositional apologetics; an anti-statist worldview requiring “decentralized social order where civil government is only one legitimate government among many”; and finally, “continuing validity and applicability of the whole law of God.”Footnote ⁸ This last principle means that most of the more than six hundred rules and regulations of ancient Israelite society laid down in the Pentateuch, which most Christians consider abrogated by Christ, apply to modern society today. While none of these beliefs is unknown in the history of Protestant Christianity—nor are many of his inclinations wholly alien to British and American political conservatism—Rushdoony reformulated them in a creative critique of late-twentieth-century American society.

Rousas John Rushdoony was born in New York on April 25, 1916, to Armenian immigrants who fled to America when the Turks threatened their town with genocide shortly after World War I broke out.Footnote ⁹ Rushdoony's father, Y. K. Rushdoony, moved the family to Kingsburg, California, where he founded an Orthodox Presbyterian church. Rushdoony later claimed that he could trace his genealogy along a continuous line of Armenian Christian pastors all the way back to the fifth century. During his undergraduate years at the University of California at Berkeley, Rushdoony first encountered what he later called “humanistic statist paganism” and developed “contempt for the university as a degenerate institution.” After graduating with a B.A. in education in 1938 and earning a master's degree in English literature in 1940, Rushdoony deliberately sought out a liberal seminary, the Pacific School of Religion, where he could gain further acquaintance with the enemy. He graduated in 1944 and served as a missionary pastor to Indians in Nevada for more than eight years. He read deeply in philosophy and theology, and his personal beliefs hardened into a conservative postmillennialism viciously opposed to premillennial dispensationalism,Footnote ¹⁰ the dominant eschatological view among evangelical and fundamentalist Christians at the time.

In 1953 Rushdoony became pastor of an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Santa Cruz and began publishing critiques of American public education. He soon left his pulpit to focus on scholarship. In the early 1960s Rushdoony accepted a position as staff researcher and writer at the William Volker Fund,Footnote ¹¹ a shadowy conservative charities fund founded by a devout Kansas City businessman in 1932.Footnote ¹² He kept mostly to books and writing—the Volker Fund financed his early publications—and began accepting occasional speaking engagements at local churches and parent-teacher organizations, invitations that would continue throughout his career.

In 1965, Rushdoony founded the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California, as an “educational organization devoted to research, publishing, and promoting Christian reconstruction in all areas of life.”Footnote ¹³ He wrote prolifically. According to his son, Mark, he also kept up with a steady stream of speaking invitations from churches and political groups. Vallecito was a fairly isolated community—halfway between Sacramento and Yosemite National Park—but Rushdoony traveled around the state to speak on the decay of American society.Footnote ¹⁴ These were the years of conservative disappointment following Barry Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign. Southern California was home to packed rallies of Fred Schwarz's School of Anti-Communism, the Los Angeles Free Enterprise Association, and countless neighborhood coffee klatches where suburbanites passed around right-wing ideas and grassroots political strategies as eagerly as the bundt cake and tea.Footnote ¹⁵ “Many of his early supporters were in the John Birch Society and the Goldwater movement, and they were disillusioned with the loss of Goldwater,” Mark Rushdoony remembered. “My father was trying to turn their attention to a different focus, to a more theological view, a moral view of culture, civilization.”Footnote ¹⁶

Rushdoony did not consider himself a political activist. He was deeply skeptical of Christian political involvement and viewed politics as epiphenomenal. To Rushdoony, the desire to take over Washington had corrupted grassroots conservatives. Each audience “would mine him for his view of American history, where we've gone wrong, but their strategy was far different than his,” said Mark Rushdoony:

Rushdoony may not have viewed himself as a political activist, but his message had profound political implications. He was a good Calvinist and put personal regeneration by God's grace first above all else. But elimination of the state and imposition of biblical law are deeply political propositions, and taken as a whole, his theology proposed nothing short of the total transformation of society. Rushdoony's son is in the midst of organizing his father's papers, and as of this writing there is no public record of all of the lectures he gave at churches and civic organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. However, some of those lectures became the basis for books, and an examination of several of Rushdoony's early books yields a portrait of a thinker who radicalized trends of thought long present in the Presbyterian and libertarian traditions in response to the crisis he perceived in American society.

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Rushdoony's denomination, was founded in the 1930s by conservative Presbyterians in revolt against modernist theology. Led by a theologian named J. Gresham Machen, they believed that liberals had taken over the Presbyterian Church and departed from the basic tenets of the Reformed tradition, if not from the essence of Christianity itself. Machen led an exodus of conservative theologians from Princeton Theological Seminary—the bastion of nineteenth-century Presbyterianism—south to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. This schism was the culmination of the long battle that Machen's forefathers fought against the rise of Deism and Kantian ideas about the relationship between knowledge and experience, a battle that forced conservative Calvinists to face the challenge that religion is not “true” in the way that science is. Late in the nineteenth century, the rise of Darwinian science and German historical critics—who parsed the Bible mercilessly and found more evidence for human myth than divine revelation—further undermined the literal interpretation of scripture. Machen and his followers viewed themselves as the only pure remnant in a community infected with secular humanism.

Rushdoony's Orthodox Presbyterian Church had its origins in the theology of conservative nineteenth-century Calvinists at Princeton Theological Seminary before its “infiltration and conquest” by theologically liberal Presbyterians.Footnote ¹⁸ Occasionally these theologians appear in reconstructionist literature, credited with hazy postmillennial quotations predicting a triumphant church that will usher in the second coming of Christ.Footnote ¹⁹ But for the most part, Rushdoony and his disciples found little in the writings of the conservatives at Princeton to buttress their radical understanding of law and the Christian mandate to take dominion over society.Footnote ²⁰ Instead, they turned most often to a conservative Presbyterian theologian named Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987), founder of a school of apologetics known as presuppositionalism. Van Til, whose writings Rushdoony first encountered while he was a university student, left Princeton in the wake of the liberal takeover to teach apologetics at Westminster for more than four decades. His central innovation was his challenge to the premise that it is possible for Christians to reason with non-Christians from a set of neutral assumptions. Van Til believed that no assumptions are neutral, and that the human mind can accurately comprehend reality only if proceeding from the truth of biblical revelation. This was a direct challenge to evidentialist apologetics—which sought to demonstrate the truth of scripture through archaeological and scientific evidence—as well as to Thomist (classical) apologetics, which attempted to prove the existence of God by logical proof based on Aristotelian metaphysics.

Van Til's claim was a radically anti-modern assertion in an age when many scholars accepted Max Weber's distinction between facts and values, as well as William James's pragmatic argument that humans should do their best to communicate with one another despite the irreconcilability of basic assumptions. For Van Til, the sovereignty of God was an epistemological principle: “The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth is presupposed there is no proof of anything. Christianity is proved as being the very foundation of the idea of proof itself.”Footnote ²¹ Yet presuppositionalists often sound strangely postmodern: they deny the possibility of objective, unbiased perception—though not the existence of absolute truth, which belongs to Christians alone.

A later reconstructionist writer called Van Til the “demolitions expert”Footnote ²² who exposed the foolishness of Christians who believed that natural law or empirical experience were valid means of understanding the world apart from the Bible, and who tried to live in peace with non-Christians. In declaring war on worldviews that explained reality on the basis of evidence and human reason, Rushdoony and his followers hewed to a classic conservative principle that extends back at least to Edmund Burke, who even before the French Revolution always “made clear his distaste for the typical rationalist mind of the French Enlightenment.”Footnote ²³ However, as a strict Calvinist, Rushdoony differed mightily from the British conservatives of the Burkeian school—Burke, Coleridge, Southey, Disraeli, and their ilk—on what should replace human reason as the foundation of society. The Burkeians understood religion's social force in terms of tradition, hierarchy, and public institutions, and perceived God's revelation in natural law. For Rushdoony, their view was little more than human artifice dressed up in bishop's vestments.

He was also influenced by—or at least agreed with—the classic libertarian texts that permeated post-war conservatism. Throughout their careers, Rushdoony and his disciples drew on Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and other writers in the Austrian school of economics.Footnote ²⁴ Rushdoony found much to admire in Hayek, whose bombshell The Road to Serfdom (1944) protested the state's encroachment on individual liberty and proposed binding the state with a fixed “Rule of Law.”Footnote ²⁵ But Hayek's critique of the modern state was limited and unbiblical. Rushdoony refashioned this web of Reformed Christian and conservative libertarian principles into a massive cultural indictment of twentieth-century America on biblical grounds. He put forward an unprecedentedFootnote ²⁶ vision of society governed by every jot and tittle of scriptural law, stripped of non-Christian cultural accretions. Van Til's writings gave intellectual ballast to his conviction that the Bible is the basis for all reality. However, Van Til offered nothing to replace the philosophies he had demolished—no biblical outline of society or comprehensive substitute for natural law. Rushdoony devoted himself to filling this gap.

II. Chalcedon and the Rushdoony Thesis

Rushdoony based his critique of modern culture and his prescription for change on the Christian doctrine affirmed at the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, in 451 c.e. Responding to a surge of heresies that either tried to separate entirely Christ's divine nature from his human nature (Nestorianism) or join them into a single nature (Monophysitism), the bishops at Chalcedon definitively split Christ's divine and human natures while balancing them in perfect union:

The creed enunciated at Chalcedon had crucial implications. By barring the possibility that Christ's two natures mixed in any way, the Church made the barrier between human and divine insurmountable. Christian prophets could still claim to be the mouthpiece of God, and Christian sovereigns could claim divine authority as his servant, but Chalcedon ended forever the ancient tradition of the divinity of kings (popular among Roman, Egyptian, and Asian monarchs) and rejected the pagan Greek notion of salvation through self-deification. God was now wholly distinct from his creation, separated from humanity by a chasm bridged only by revelation and by the Incarnation. By stamping out the theological possibility of divine kingship on one hand and monismFootnote ²⁸ on the other, Rushdoony believed that “Chalcedon made possible Western liberty. … When unity and particularity (or individuality) are in their ultimate source transcendental and firmly grounded in the triune God, man's realization of unity and individuality is freed from the oppressive presence of the state as the realized order.”Footnote ²⁹

Rushdoony's interpretation of the Chalcedonian formula may seem eccentric. Modern historians usually understand the council not in terms of its precedent for modern political liberty, but as a product of intellectual currents particular to late Roman Christianity and the rivalry between theological schools at Alexandria (which tended toward Monophysitism and represented the East) and Antioch (which adamantly defended Christ's dual nature, and usually allied with Rome and the West). However, in some ways Rushdoony's reading is closer to the understanding of the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christology was not an abstruse debate among churchmen, but a matter of immediate political concern. One's view of Christ shaped one's views of Caesar.

During the earlier Nicene controversies, Arian Christians, who viewed Christ as a lesser creature, a demigod who mediated between God the Father and creation, often embraced a similar view of the emperor (unsurprisingly, many fourth- and fifth-century Roman emperors favored Arianism). Catholics who rejected the subordination of the Son also resisted imperial domination of the Church; only a “fully understood Trinitarianism proved itself capable of resisting the exploitation of Christian monotheism as a means of sanctioning political unity and social cohesion.”Footnote ³⁰ The Council of Chalcedon left behind the Nicene problem of the Son's relationship to the Father to address the connection between the human and divine natures within Christ. But the fundamental question of how to articulate Christ's humanity remained.

Easterners, allied with Alexandria, rejected the idea that God joined fully with Jesus' human nature, preferring the Monophysite view that the divine obliterated his humanity. The Alexandrian view of Christ as God in human disguise accommodated the average believer's desire for a God who walked magically on earth,Footnote ³¹ and appealed to sovereigns who occasionally might find it convenient to blur the distinction between divine and human. There was little room in the popular imagination for precise parsing of Christ's dual nature, and the Chalcedonian formula was unpopular. The council provoked schism by several eastern churches (including, ironically, Rushdoony's ancestral Armenian Orthodox Church) that has never fully healed. Though one is hard-pressed to imagine a stranger bedfellow for Rushdoony than socialist-existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, in his lectures on Christian theology he echoed Rushdoony's conclusions about the importance of Chalcedon's rejection of the Alexandrian position in favor of Antioch's historical and “ethical-personalistic” view of Christ: “Without Antioch the church would probably have lost entirely the human picture [of Christ], and the historical consciousness of the West would not have been able to develop. Antioch defended the church against the Monophysites for whom the human character of Christ was swallowed up in divinity and who also gave rise to numerous magical and superstitious ideas. Thus, Antioch paved the way for the Christological emphasis of the West … in the United States … your heritage is indebted to the Antiochean school and to Rome which, in alliance with this school, saved the kind of attitude which is natural to you.”Footnote ³²

In Rushdoony's view, Tillich's remark was well-meant but too sanguine. Americans had forgotten the lesson of Chalcedon: the fundamental division of the divine from the human. They had forgotten their status as mere creatures and their utter dependency on a sovereign God. The State now claimed sovereignty for itself, and humans believed themselves sovereign over reality by their powers of logic and experience. Society had fatally mixed divine with human and set up two false idols: human reason and the State.

In his first book, By What Standard? (1958), Rushdoony critiqued modern society by way of Van Til's presuppositionalist philosophy. His central aim was to make Christians aware of their epistemology and to reject autonomous human reason as a contradiction in terms—for there could be no reason without God. The modern deification of reason, he wrote, was an outgrowth of the “hybrid worldview” that emerged when Christians allowed themselves to be contaminated by Greek philosophy, Cartesianism, rationalism, and Kantian and existential thought. They had become as idolatrous as atheistic humanists: “To the Christian all such non-theistic morality is immoral, in that it makes man, the race, or the group the source of value rather than God.”Footnote ³³

The foundation of Christian reconstructionism is typically dated to the publication of Rushdoony's opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law, in 1973. However, in his first book fifteen years earlier he had already articulated the essence of reconstructionist theology. The truth of biblical revelation is the only guiding presumption that will yield true conclusions, and the law of biblical revelation is the only viable framework for organizing a society: “All facts being created facts, factuality can only be understood in subordination to God. But to understand factuality, man needs a norm, and this Scripture provides.”Footnote ³⁴ This was Christian reconstructionism in a nutshell.

III. The Idolatry of Reason

Throughout his career, Rushdoony was deeply concerned with education as the cornerstone of society—one rightly belonging to parents, but usurped by the State. He believed that education ought to teach children to recognize their God-given presuppositions rather than treat them as blank slates on which the State may imprint concoctions of human reason. In Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961), the first of many diatribes against public education, Rushdoony attacked John Locke as “educational theorist, and as the founder of modern psychology … zealous champion of the Enlightenment and a forerunner of Empiricism.” Echoing Burke,Footnote ³⁵ Rushdoony warned of the hubris of tabula rasa, the myth that “man was able to remake man and the educator to play the role of a god.”Footnote ³⁶

Rushdoony also feared that conceiving of the individual as a blank slate to be stamped by teachers and environment degraded humanity by denying personal responsibility. In the modern conception, a criminal's “heredity, environment, parental background have all conditioned him; instead of punishment, he needs reconditioning in order that desired results may follow. Punishment, which assumes guilt and responsibility, is barbaric, capital punishment most of all. Suddenly we find that knowledge has abdicated to conditioning as a means of power!”Footnote ³⁷ The result, to Rushdoony, was an ethical system that abolished the notion of individual sin—thereby undermining the very reason for the most fundamental truth of Christianity, the incarnation of Christ as humanity's redeemer. Here he shared the concern of other contemporary conservative thinkers who viewed the horrors of World War II as definitive proof of original sin—in the words of Richard Weaver, a “subtle, pervasive, protean force,” the “immemorial tendency of man to do the wrong thing when he knows the right thing,”Footnote ³⁸ no matter how liberal humanists tried to deny it.

To Rushdoony, modern denial of individual sin reflected society's rejection of the creed enunciated at Chalcedon: the separation of humanity from God. Empiricist science, proceeding from man-made presuppositions, led to a sloppy monism, an equation of human with divine and evil with good:

The observer who sought to collect data and assign it man-made meaning—rather than understanding the evidence on God's terms—was, in Rushdoony's conception, using reason to break down God's law. The result may be a false sense of dominion, but in reality the faculty of reason had done nothing more than acquiesce to sin. The above reference to Alfred Kinsey's studies of sexual behavior is one of many in Rushdoony's writings. Kinsey's work, to Rushdoony, was a prime example of how modern society had misapplied human reason and turned God's law upside down in the name of science.

Intellectual Schizophrenia emerged from a set of lectures that Rushdoony delivered in Washington state to the Christian Teachers' Association of the Northwest in October of 1959. He believed that education was the central social structure shaping the minds of individuals. Bad education corrupts Christians' capacity for dominion; good education reinforces correct presuppositions and empowers dominion.Footnote ⁴⁰ He continued his crusade for epistemological awareness, and a central theme that runs through his writings on religion is that all education is inherently religious, whether it overtly speaks of God or not. In the spirit of the Old Testament patriarchs, he emphasized the role of parents (particularly the father) in the education and government of children. One observer familiar with Rushdoony's work suggested that his view of the family as a primary means of grace grew from his Armenian roots, “the genocide of his people etched on his conscience.”Footnote ⁴¹ All of this was a fairly radical message in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, when politicians upheld American public schools as bastions of freedom and democracy. Implicit in Rushdoony's critique of public education was that Christians could not isolate themselves from non-Christian cultural structures as thoroughly as they believed—a message that challenged the cultural isolationism of mid-century Christian fundamentalism. As much as he claimed to distance himself from politics, his career embodied the quintessential fundamentalist paradox: the attempt to reject the world while making a life within it.

Rushdoony's role in the burgeoning homeschool and evangelical private-school movements of the 1970s and 1980s is not totally clear. In the decades after the Scopes trial in 1925, conservative Christians suffered an ongoing defeat in the gradual secularization of American public schools. For conservative Christians then and today, the collapse of the Protestant ethos in American education was embodied by educational reformer John Dewey, “his credentials as an agent of demonic powers sufficiently established by his leadership of the American Humanist Association,”Footnote ⁴² which released the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.Footnote ⁴³ Then came the onslaught of cultural change in the 1960s—including desegregation of public schools and increasing government obstacles to Christian schools seeking certification. A growing consensus emerged, particularly in fundamentalist circles, that action was necessary to preserve Christian parents' control over their children's exposure to “risky” knowledge and social situations that might challenge the Christian world-and-life view. Between 1960 and 1975, enrollment at public and private secular schools declined by 40 percent, while conservative Protestant school enrollments quadrupled. By the peak of Rushdoony's career at the end of the 1980s, conservative Protestants represented one of the largest segments of private education, second only to Roman Catholics.Footnote ⁴⁴

Rushdoony's books offered intellectual ballast to parents' frustration. There is no way of knowing how many people in the homeschooling and Christian school movement read his books, though it is telling that the record of a large class-action suit by homeschooling parents in Texas, in which he participated as an expert witness toward the end of his career, identifies him as “Dr. Rousas John Rushdoony, author of more than thirty published books in the field of education.”Footnote ⁴⁵ His name also appears in dockets from state cases in Georgia, Michigan, North Dakota, and Ohio, though not until the 1980s. Anecdotal evidence—in the form of my own correspondence with homeschooling parents and curriculum companies—suggests that before this time he probably gave expert testimony in cases in lower courts and played the role of a moderately well-known intellectual guru of the movement, churning out books and sending encouraging letters to disheartened Christian parents. His son claims that his court testimony earned him a reputation in conservative Christian circles nationwide. Though explicit references to Rushdoony are few, today's Christian homeschooling literature is rife with Rushdoonyian language (based largely on his reading of Van Til) about the absence of neutral ground between Christians and non-Christians, the governing role of parents, and the inherent religiosity of all education.Footnote ⁴⁶

Rushdoony took for his role model the nineteenth-century Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), to whom he credited the “modern Calvinist re-awakening … [Kuyper was] very definitely a man actively linked with the problems and life of his day.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1878, Kuyper established a nationwide society to promote Calvinist day schools; in 1880 he helped create the Free University of Amsterdam; twelve years later he founded a new Reformed denomination, the Gereformeerde Kerken in the Netherlands. He ran his own newspaper; started the first mass political party in the Netherlands, the Anti-Revolutionary Party; and crowned his career in parliament with a stint as prime minister from 1901 to 1905.Footnote ⁴⁸ Despite Rushdoony's claim to reject political means to theonomic ends, he envied Abraham Kuyper's career.

Kuyper was only of limited use to him, however, due to the small problem that this avowedly Calvinist theologian was not very Calvinist at all. He believed that Calvinism was best described not as doctrine, but in terms of Weltanschauung, a world-and-life view that should inform every aspect of life and society. While many reconstructionists after Rushdoony adopted the term “world-and-life view,” they preferred the phrase for its totalizing implications, rather than for the flexibility and accommodation that it implied to Kuyper. Kuyper believed in “principled pluralism”: his vision of ideal human society was not exclusively Christian. God had endowed all humans with common grace, a “temporal restraining grace”Footnote ⁴⁹ that does not save the soul but ameliorates the effect of sin. Common grace and the Christian Weltanschauung—not eschatology or divine mandate to convert the globe—motivated his political action.

Kuyper earned his spot as an honorary (if unwilling) reconstructionist patron saint because his concept of the Christian world-and-life view gave Rushdoony and later reconstructionists a framework for talking about religious engagement with the world. Reconstructionists also applauded his low view of the secular state. Kuyper wrote that state authority originates from the sovereignty of God, and hoped “the State may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life. It must occupy its own place, on its own root, among all the other trees of the forest, and thus it has to honor and maintain every form of life, which grows independently, in its own sacred autonomy.”Footnote ⁵⁰ He summed up his political philosophy in a term that Christian reconstructionists would find useful: “sphere sovereignty.” This meant that every realm of human society—church, academia, et cetera—ought to be sovereign within its own sphere of influence, brooking government intrusion only to resolve disputes or in the case of one sphere's failure to meet its social responsibilities.

Kuyper developed his theology in the context of nineteenth-century Dutch verzuiling, or “vertical pluralism”: the premise that society is grounded on its citizens' religious and philosophical beliefs, and that social organizations and activities should be divided among these different ideological systems. The principle of verzuiling gained support largely because churches viewed it as a defense against the secularizing effect of industrialization and liberal ideology. Verzuiling, by delegating to each religious group the administration of its own educational and welfare systems, granted churches more power over their members and increased their ability to block pernicious influences.Footnote ⁵¹ However, based on the principle of sphere sovereignty, parents claimed jurisdiction over education. After a fraught period of church schism, competing organizations, and a “monstrous alliance” with Roman Catholics, Dutch Protestants won equal government subsidies for all schools.Footnote ⁵² In Holland, sphere sovereignty was a means for securing religious pluralism and freedom of conscience for all citizens. Rushdoony stripped Kuyper's concept of the tolerance inherent in its original Dutch context.

Rushdoony also echoed many of the arguments that J. Gresham Machen, founding father of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, made in his own lectures against the secularization of education in the 1920s and 1930s. Machen bemoaned the newfangled child-centered notion of education that excused students from learning “facts” and instead encouraged creativity and range of thought. He criticized fundamentalist Christians' disengagement with intellectual life and urged that “as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.”Footnote ⁵³ He granted the “necessary evil” of secularized public education, but he advocated limiting its functions.

Rushdoony, therefore, was not the first conservative Calvinist to lecture and write about the evils of state-run education. Nor was he the first conservative to decry “leveling in the name of equality or nihilism in the name of liberty”Footnote ⁵⁴—the heart of Burke's criticism of the revolution in France. His criticism of modern man's flaccid empiricist reason as an abdication of judgment and justice echoes Richard Weaver's critique of liberalism in Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).Footnote ⁵⁵ But Rushdoony reframed these arguments in terms of God's sovereignty and updated them for the 1960s and 1970s. In an age of the United Nations and Cold War expansion of government, he warned that one of the primary dangers of state-run education is that it yields a false universalism. The claim that all individuals are born equal as blank slates to be stamped by a standardized education leads logically to a cosmopolitan tolerance of difference (like that espoused by Kuyper's Holland) that, for Rushdoony, is intellectually dishonest and ethically invalid. Here Rushdoony introduced the strains of isolationism and anti-globalism that were to become hallmarks of Christian reconstructionist thought.

For the Puritans, he wrote, “cosmopolitanism was not an ideal; rather, it was a major sin, in that it involved the offence of the tower of Babel, a commonality in which the covenant of grace was destroyed in favor of an indifference to good and evil … a rebellion against the primacy of faith in favor of a meaningless and dangerous unity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The basic Calvinist premise here is that individuals are born with God-given differences. Under the covenant of grace and Calvin's doctrine of double predestination, some are elected for heaven and others predestined to hell. To ignore these differences, to attempt to erase the barriers between individuals, is a foolish denial of what makes us human as well as a step toward the pagan monistic worldview. Liberal education reformers, in the throes of the superstition of progress, believed they were perfecting human nature when they were, in truth, denigrating it. In Rushdoony's view, he was the true pluralist, not the disciples of Horace Mann and John Dewey:

Despite his derogatory comparison of public education with the totalitarian medieval Catholic Church, Rushdoony's pedagogical ideal resembled nothing so much as the model of medieval monasteries: the study of a set body of knowledge, approved by religious authorities, as the spiritual armor necessary to further God's cause. In his conception, “pluralism” meant not religious toleration by the state—he explicitly warns against such policies elsewhere in his writingsFootnote ⁵⁸—but education of children by good Christian parents, and the flourishing of many points of view that, if they inevitably include non-Christian vantage points at the outset, will whittle down to an acceptable range of conservative Protestant opinion. When Rushdoony and his disciples argued against accusations of theocracy by claiming that they believed education, government, and church should be separate, they used terms borrowed from Kuyper's notion of sphere sovereignty. Kuyper would have been appalled by their distortion of his meaning.

It was the message of modern public education to which he objected, more than the means—though in Rushdoony's extreme libertarian view, any message promulgated by means of the noxious State was by definition corrupt. That message was as vacuous as it was blasphemous: he bemoaned the substitution of the term “college experience” for an old-fashioned “education.” To Rushdoony, the phrase implied a feel-good mysticism that “strives for union and absorption into the divine whole. This union is the highest goal of life … because it is held that there is a common substance in the individual and the divine whole, not salvation but self-realization is the means to the religious goal.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Again, here was evidence of modern society's denial of the creed promulgated at Chalcedon: an attempt to mingle human and divine, the eternal with the temporal.Footnote ⁶⁰

IV. The Idolatry of the State

Public education was so important to Rushdoony because it represented the nexus point of modern society's twin sins of idolatry: the worship of autonomous human reason, and the worship of the state. In The Politics of Guilt and Pity (1970), Rushdoony argued that the state had lured its citizens' loyalty for itself, away from God, by creating a false notion of sin and guilt that binds the populace as true sin binds them to God. The state had replaced God's doctrines of election and the divine distinction between truth and error with a false pluralism that blurred the line between elect and damned, citizen and outlaw. He cited some of the social and historical narratives that the State “invented” in order to prey on its citizens' consciences:

Rushdoony was known among his critics as a racist and a Holocaust denier. But to see only garden-variety prejudice in the quotation above is to miss Rushdoony's meaning entirely. He shared the view—common to many Christian conservatives—that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that its history is the story of divinely ordained success and prosperity. Over the past two centuries, the country had deviated widely from its New England Calvinist origins. As liberalism permeated American religion and Pelagianism ran rampant, the federal government invaded private life and began a campaign to replace the true fear and guilt that every sinner in the hands of an angry God ought to feel with a new narrative of guilt meant to emasculate its noblest citizens: Christian white men. God had elected America as a new Israel, but advocates of the megalomaniacal government in Washington demanded that Americans ignore the special status God gave them and equate their nation with other countries in the League of Nations—a policy of manipulation that culminated when America joined the United Nations after World War II.

Rushdoony was radically anti-cosmopolitan. He viewed the United Nations as the outgrowth of a “theology of the world super-state” intended by its proponents to replace the theology of God. This attempt to create a new God—like the building of the Tower of Babel—was proof that even atheists who denied biblical presuppositions found that they needed a logic of divine authority in order to function: “The attributes of God are the inescapable substrata of human existence and thought, the necessary categories of meaning and order.”Footnote ⁶² But any man-made substitute was bound to fail. Rushdoony had too little respect for the U.N. theological experiment to spill much ink on the subject. He focused his critique of the state on the domestic scene, which he found muddied by the same principle of “identification” that encouraged public school students to view themselves as equal and identical to all their peers. The State urged productive, taxpaying citizens to “identify” with those too lazy to work in order to justify social welfare programs and to “identify” with criminals in order to justify rehabilitation, rather than punishment. Society as a whole was expected to suffer for the sins of individuals:Footnote ⁶³ Rushdoony called this the “heresy of love”Footnote ⁶⁴ because it implied that human compassion—rather than God's grace—provides salvation. In another reference to the Kinsey Report, he wrote that society's tolerance for criminal deviations such as homosexuality implies that “liberty means total tolerance, and, some would add, total love. It also means a hostility to law, because law rests on truth: something is illegal because it is wrong.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Prejudice—based on God's law—was for Rushdoony not only a valid way of knowing and feeling, but the only true way. Edmund Burke addressed this point:

Beneath Burke's sentimentality lies a confidence in the truth of God-given partiality. But for him, prejudice was an instinctive faculty anterior to intellect—a notion that, for Rushdoony, veered too close to an endorsement of natural law derived apart from biblical revelation. Rushdoony's diagnosis of modern religious relativism under a regime of political absolutism laid the groundwork for his magnum opus: a renovation of society according to God's law.

V. The Institutes of Biblical Law

Despite his anti-Semitism, Rushdoony's philosophy of law reflects an unexpectedly accurate understanding of original Israelite intention. The authors of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy—which contain the vast majority of moral and case law in the Hebrew Bible—intended law as a device to separate, not equalize. The definition of holiness is that which is separated to God. While many of his Protestant forebears saw in Old Testament law the trappings of degenerate cultic worship, Rushdoony got it right: in the Bible, law is separation of holy from profane. Moreover, the only legitimate law is that laid down by God: humans are to be ministers, not legislators.Footnote ⁶⁷

The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) is a 900-page application of the philosophy that Rushdoony developed in earlier books, self-consciously titled after John Calvin's The Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). His claim to such esteemed intellectual ancestry is audacious but not unreasonable. Calvin's writings contain some precedent for Rushdoony's totalizing attitude toward Mosaic code. The Geneva giant of Reformed thought had an essentially Augustinian notion of law. He believed law was a schoolmaster ordained by God to restrain unregenerate humans from sin and preserve social order from the threats of evildoers.Footnote ⁶⁸ He was a postmillennialist who saw the final millennium as a time when the church would be kept “toiling on earth,”Footnote ⁶⁹ and his Sermons on Deuteronomy include extensive exegesis of Deuteronomy's case laws.Footnote ⁷⁰ In one of his early books, Rushdoony wrote that modern humankind found Calvinism revolting and intolerant because it “exacted so heavy a legal penalty in matters of religious aberration, which liberalism regards as the realm of the purely personal. But religion is the realm of purely personal faith only to modern man.”Footnote ⁷¹

Rushdoony identified with Calvin, whom he saw as “primarily a scholar, summoned unwillingly from his studies to apply his theories regarding the social order to a concrete situation.”Footnote ⁷² Yet Calvin's attempt to govern Geneva according to his reading of the Bible is considered a failure by many—because, reconstructionists believed, he overlooked the fact that political transformation can only begin when citizens are personally regenerate. Calvin did not explicitly endorse the radical distinctives of Christian reconstructionism, but as the godfather of the Reformed tradition and mastermind of the Geneva theocratic experiment, he is their spiritual and theological role model.

The Puritans—Calvin's progeny on the British Isles—were the ancestors to whom Rushdoony and his followers paid most frequent obeisance. Once they fled the Anglican yoke imposed by the English Crown and established colonies at Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and later New Haven, the Puritans eschewed religious tolerance in favor of the most successful experiment in theocracy that the modern West has ever seen.Footnote ⁷³ Mosaic law was the basis for law codes in the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies,Footnote ⁷⁴ and Puritans believed that there was little to be learned beyond biblical revelation. From the 1620s until nearly the end of the century, New England Puritans built societies that functioned as totalitarian city-states ruled by God's law. In his Institutes, Rushdoony aimed to resurrect the vision of Calvin and the Puritans.

His criticisms of modern society also had antecedents in the writings of Burkeian conservatives and Christian libertarians. These thinkers typically prescribed a return to society governed by tradition, intuition, and natural law in the medieval understanding.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Russell Kirk elegantly expressed it, the conservative's “duty is to reconcile innovation and prescriptive truth, to lead the waters of novelty into the canals of custom.”Footnote ⁷⁶ To Rushdoony, natural law and human custom apart from biblical revelation smacked of humanism. Here he departed substantially from the main current of conservative Christian philosophy. Fundamental to most conservative schools of thought is a priority on historical experience and tradition over abstract deductive thought or social change by fiat. Rushdoony's philosophy, on the other hand, originated in a high view of revelation and divine sovereignty, which led him to a somewhat abstract portrait of a society based on his reading of Old Testament law—law whose application in the daily life of ancient Israel is debated by scholars to this day. He did not believe that society is a contract between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born, as Burke would have it, but between God and the living—who, if they uphold their end of this covenant, will fulfill their obligations to past and future generations. Revelation, not tradition, is the source of legitimacy.

He devoted a chapter of Institutes to each commandment in the Decalogue. He explicated each one in terms of its multivalent meaning and how it shaped social relationships in ancient Israel while also describing the ways in which the modern idolatry of human reason and the state violate God's law. If Van Til provided the philosophical tools for tearing down modern humanist misconceptions, Rushdoony took responsibility for the blueprints for rebuilding society on God's terms.

In the Institutes, Rushdoony continues his running theme of modern apostasy from the creed of Chalcedon and idolatry of human reason and the state. He also adds two additional theses. The first is that God's grace justifies humanity, but his law is our means of sanctification.Footnote ⁷⁷ The second is more provocative: law is a form of warfare. He writes: “Every law declares that certain offenders are enemies of the law-order and must be arrested … Law is a state of war; it is the organization of the powers of civil government to bring the enemies of the law-order to justice.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In other words, God's covenant is restrictive. The function of the law is to maintain holiness within the bounds of that covenant, to separate citizens from outlaws.Footnote ⁷⁹ “This aspect of the law is usually overlooked, because it is embarrassing to modern man.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, the most controversial aspect of Christian reconstructionism is its call for the public execution of individuals who commit acts that, while considered by some to be immoral, are no longer considered criminal offenses—let alone capital crimes—by modern western society, such as homosexual acts, adultery, and filial disrespect.

At the root of most serious political disagreements is a more fundamental conflict over what it means to be human. Liberals who are horrified by Christian reconstructionism believe in a common duty to protect the dignity of human life—which means social inclusion, and a public obligation to create opportunity for dignified life where that opportunity does not exist. In Rushdoony's view, blanket tolerance and the welfare state undermine human dignity, rather than safeguard it: “The state then becomes a nursemaid to a citizenry whose basic character is childish and immature. The theory that law must have a positive function assumes thus that people are essentially childish … Biblical faith, on the contrary, holds to the original creation of a mature and good man. The human problem is not a primitive nature, not childishness, but irresponsibility, a rebellion against maturity and responsibility.”Footnote ⁸¹ This is essentially a Burkeian argument. Burke believed that the price of eroding natural authority and tradition (Rushdoony would say the authority of God) is increasing domination by the state. There is no alternative, he wrote,

In his discussion of the first commandment, Rushdoony is preoccupied with the state. He writes that property taxes enslave citizens to this false idol. Conversely, “the immunity of land from taxation by the state means liberty. A man then cannot be dispossessed of his land; every man has a basic security in his property.”Footnote ⁸³ A historic point of difference between liberal and conservative political philosophies is the view of personal property. Since at least the New Deal era, American liberals have typically viewed property rights—claimed by the wealthy few—as a barrier to universal rights of free men. Conservatives, on the other hand, have always equated the right to property with the right to individual liberty. From the French Revolution forward, conservatives in the Burkeian tradition have abhorred the Jacobin mission to individualize society, to break down the patriarchal family unit by severing each family from its ancestral property and obliterating the tradition of primogeniture. Owning property, they believed, was critical to being human. Many of the great conservative intellectuals of the nineteenth century—Coleridge, Disraeli, and Hegel, among others—loathed government interference with private property, and looked back admiringly at the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁸⁴ John Morley, the biographer of William Gladstone, wrote that the early British conservatives glorified medieval feudalism as the system that had restored order to Europe after the barbarians toppled Rome.Footnote ⁸⁵ Rushdoony believed that we live in a new Rome that long ago allowed Goths through the gates.

While it is not hard to criticize these writers for romanticizing a period when all human lives but those of a wealthy few were nasty and short, they were reacting to a very real sense of alienation in the wake of the industrial revolution. Capitalism “turned the world inside out. Personal loyalties gave way to financial relationships.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Rushdoony viewed his mission as an attempt to restore in humankind a personal loyalty to God—a relationship characterized in the Bible by a suzerain treaty between the Israelite vassals and their lord.Footnote ⁸⁷ He viewed modern “contempt for property and for material things” as “contempt for God and for his creation … a rejection of the dominion mandate,”Footnote ⁸⁸ humanity's obligation under the terms of the treaty.

Rushdoony objected to state tax on property because he believed that redistribution of wealth abrogated the terms of God's covenant. Law is a form of warfare against outlaws; it is not meant to create equality. In the following criticism of the civil rights movement as a bald-faced grab for power rather than freedom, Rushdoony sounds a bit like Burke writing on 1789, though by the end his Burkeian eloquence disintegrates into paranoid racist fantasy:

In Rushdoony's view, these “revolutionary groups” are rightly outlaws. He does not go so far as to call for the execution of the Black Panthers, but perhaps he assumes it—the Mosaic code calls for capital punishment in cases of blasphemy, and that is the essence of his charge here. His advocacy of capital punishment for a range of activities that most moderns in the West view as only moral misdemeanors or deviations from the social norm is one of the most startling features of Christian reconstructionism, but Rushdoony reasons through it carefully. His basic premise is that life is not sacred. All life belongs to God, and only his will is sacred. To believe that life must be preserved at all times—even in violation of God's law—is to make a golden calf out of human life and commit idolatry: “if man is his own god, then man and man's life are the highest value. The greatest sin then becomes the taking of life.”Footnote ⁹⁰

In this line of reasoning, capital punishment ought to be associated with the first commandment—“thou shalt have no other gods before me”—rather than the sixth, “thou shalt not kill,” which is better translated as “thou shalt not murder.” To link capital punishment with the latter not only misunderstands the meaning of the sixth commandment but “also deprives capital punishment of its profound theological foundation. If capital punishment is not basic to God's law, then Christ died in vain, for some easier way of satisfying God's justice could have been found.”Footnote ⁹¹ Here again, Rushdoony is true to the intended meaning of the Deuteronomistic authors: there are some crimes for which it is beyond human capacity to atone, either by repentance or restitution. In these cases, God requires death. By virtue of our sins, all humanity is sentenced to death, and “the Biblical doctrine of atonement declares plainly that man's salvation is by Christ's works of law, His perfect obedience as our representative and federal head, and His substitutionary acceptance of our sentence of death.”Footnote ⁹² The modern substitution of imprisonment and rehabilitation for capital punishment is yet another “humanistic device” that attempts to ignore the reality of sin by implying “humanistic environmentalism”: “Man can be and is determined by his environment and by acquired characteristics rather than by his own inner being. Not man's sin but the world around him determines man's will.”Footnote ⁹³

Despite the extremity of Rushdoony's vision, throughout his career he insisted that he did not propose to implement Mosaic law by theocratic coup d'etat. Theocracy “is commonly assumed to be a dictatorial rule by self-appointed men who claim to rule for God. In reality, theocracy in Biblical law is the closest thing to a radical libertarianism that can be had,” he wrote.Footnote ⁹⁴ The social reformation he envisioned was a slow process based on individual regeneration before all else. After personal self-government is brought into line with God's law, then each family unit will adhere, and only then will broader social change begin, culminating in the peaceful implementation of God's law by churches, schools, and a limited state, each within their respective spheres. He urged that reconstructed Christians must never choose violence, as their misguided ancestors had done in the past: the moral cleavage between the unregenerate and the redeemed “cannot be bridged by revolution but only by regeneration. A resort to arms is thus not the answer.”Footnote ⁹⁵ This apolitical plea—echoed by Rushdoony's disciples—has offered little comfort to those who believe that the Christian reconstructionist agenda has seeped into the political Christian right.

VI. Rushdoony's Legacy and the Next Generation

Rushdoony's writings echoed many traditional conservative criticisms of modern Western society: the infringement of a bloated government on individual liberty; the erosion of moral absolutes and social hierarchies; the trembling state of the status quo. He read many of the same books as his peers in the American conservative movement, and like them he glorified a Christian arcadia that probably never existed. His central innovation was to indict civilization's ills and errors in the language of a fifteen-hundred-year-old heresy, the obfuscation of the barrier between human and divine condemned at the Council of Chalcedon—a theme that, it is important to note, his disciples often gave short shrift. He advocated a total realization of Old Testament law even more radical than the colonial experiments of the Puritans. Most important, he created a new theological vocabulary: a way of talking about Christian “dominion” in this life that claimed full responsibility for enacting the Kingdom of God, and had the blueprints to prove it. It is this last achievement that has led some observers to call him “the most influential theologian affecting the Christian Right today.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The primary subject of this essay has been the origins and implications of Rushdoony's thought. The question of how the movement he founded has affected America's conservative Christian mainstream is beyond its scope. I can only offer a brief sketch of reconstructionism's trajectory since Rushdoony, and suggest some ways in which his ideas have filtered out of obscurity and into the secular journalist's field of vision.

Rushdoony's most prolific disciple is his son-in-law, Gary North. After stints at the Volker Fund, Westminster Theological Seminary, and in graduate school in economic history, North became estranged from his father-in-law during a quarrel over an article that one or the other wanted to publish in the Chalcedon Foundation's academic journal. The nature of the dispute is now obscure. John Whitehead—who now runs a Christian libertarian organization called the Rutherford InstituteFootnote ⁹⁷ and knew Rushdoony personally—pointed out that he was known for “exiling people” after the smallest disagreement. For years afterward, when North and his wife came to the Rushdoony home for a visit, his wife stayed in her father's house while North slept in a motel.Footnote ⁹⁸

After his rift with Rushdoony, North founded the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler, Texas, a now-defunct organization that served as his base for self-publishing scores of books. Independently wealthy, North moved his family over the course of the 1990s to increasingly remote locations in the South—ostensibly so that he could be off the grid when his apocalyptic predictions of the aftermath of Y2K came true. These opinions earned him some media attention at the time; according to Mark Rushdoony, North was surprised and humbled when the power grid held and society did not collapse on January 1, 2000.Footnote ⁹⁹

North would not disclose his current location to me. His brother-in-law believes it is rural Arkansas, while other sources said he recently moved to Memphis. He has published books ranging from an account of the liberal takeover of the Presbyterian church to exegeses of Deuteronomy and Leviticus that run over a thousand pages to short paperbacks on conspiracy theory and strategies for using the Bible in personal finances and economics. He runs his own economic advice site, garynorth.com, which he calls “a mutual assistance community forum for contrarians” that offers “specific answers, wealth-building strategies, plus Q&A forums” and a link to the content of dozens of his books, published for free online. When I asked the media relations coordinator at the Chalcedon Foundation for advice on how to approach North, I was told that reaching him requires “a team of hound dogs, and the Bat Signal in the sky”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and that the best way to provoke an email response would be to use the subject heading “Dr. North, You're The Only One On the Planet That Can Answer This.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This strategy worked, within hours provoking a string of responses from North detailing the history of the Volker Fund, chiding me for my “humanist mindset,” and warning that I would uncover a groundbreaking story of political influence if I had the wherewithal to “follow the money.”Footnote ¹⁰²

By virtue of his confrontational writing style and his taste for bad jokes,Footnote ¹⁰³ North's version of Christian reconstructionism is highly polemical. His work is less philosophically sophisticated than Rushdoony's, and more concerned with rebutting criticisms and planning a secret Christian reconstructionist takeover of society.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His books have provided much fodder for secular journalists seeking evidence of the sinister Christian reconstructionist agenda, for North truly believes that he and his colleagues are covertly engineering a social revolution. In the foreword to Christian Reconstruction: What It Is and What It Isn't, he describes Christian reconstructionists as a new generation of Protestant Reformers and cites the collapse of European Communist economies, the first Iraq war, and the AIDS crisis as proof that the secular West is falling apart:

Many of his books contain detailed exegesis of Mosaic law as applied to modern life; despite Rushdoony's lengthy Institutes, the founder's vision remained rather abstract. Most infamously, he elaborates on Rushdoony's argument for slavery as a means of restitution. Secular commentators often misunderstand this point as an argument for the reinstatement of race-based chattel slavery. Rather, North and other strict reconstructionists view temporary slavery—better labeled as indentured servitude—as an alternative to prison for non-violent crimes.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As to the capital crimes mentioned earlier, North advocates public stoning as the “most covenantally valid form of execution,” for it avoids the immoral privatization and depersonalization of punishment, allows the condemned to confront his executioners, and reminds us of the crushing of Satan's head by the “promised Seed” mentioned in Genesis 3:15. Besides, stones are cheap and plentiful.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Most other advocates of Christian reconstructionism disagree with North on this point. Christian reconstructionist writers—while united in their cardinal principles of postmillennial eschatology, strict Calvinist soteriology, and the modern application of all Mosaic law not explicitly abrogated by the New Testament—differ on how exactly to apply Old Testament law to the present day. In addition to North's controversial belief in stoning, theonomist writer Greg Bahnsen cites other points of disagreement, including Rushdoony's belief that Christians ought to observe dietary laws today.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To refute the charge that Christian reconstructionists are “arrogant and unteachable souls,” Bahnsen points out that sometimes they change their minds on obscure matters of exegesis—such as North's generous decision to stop insisting that home mortgages be limited to seven years.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ There are also some writers and activists associated with reconstructionism who reject the catastrophic view of social change that emerges from the writings of Rushdoony and North, as well as their elevation of the family over the church as a means of grace.Footnote ¹¹⁰

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Rushdoony's small group of disciples occupied much of its time with biblical exegesis—sometimes to clarify the implications of Levitical code for modern life, but more often with the aim of refuting their opponents and defending the principles of Christian reconstruction against charges of faulty biblical interpretation. The early 1990s witnessed a spate of polemical books and public debates at evangelical seminaries. For every amillennialist or premillennial dispensationalist Christian who criticized reconstructionists in print—no one outside a small circle of conservative evangelicals paid attention to them back then—the reconstructionists responded, within months, with self-published tomes defending their theology and ridiculing opponents.

Reconstructionist writers of the early 1990s sometimes titled their books with puns on the titles of their opponents: Gary DeMar wrote The Reduction of Christianity to rebut premillennialist Dave Hunt's Seduction of Christianity, and Gary North's laboriously titled Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators was a response to Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. North's books are remarkable for their self-congratulatory prefaces that emphasize the speed with which he generated several hundred pages to respond to a debate or a book review. He often points out that a draft was sent to the opponent, who invariably refuses to comment: when offered the chance to respond to The Reduction of Christianity before the manuscript went into print, Dave Hunt wrote in a letter to North, “I was not aware that I had written ‘books against Dominion theology’ … I doubt that it would require an entire volume to respond to what I have said.”Footnote ¹¹¹

“I am trying to break the seminaries' academic black-out by exasperating them,”Footnote ¹¹² North writes, explaining his preference for confrontational language and his disdain for academics (despite, or perhaps because of, his own Ph.D.). He views himself as modern-day Luther, and accuses academics of mimicking Erasmus and collaborating with the humanists: “We should not be surprised to learn that the same undergraduate Christian academic institutions and publishing houses support both forms of this ideological sell-out. I call this the Wheaton-Westchester-Downers Grove-Grand Rapids-Wenham-Toronto complex.”Footnote ¹¹³ North awaits the day when smug academics will get their just deserts, for “if the Reconstructionists' version of theocracy were to be voted into operation, the tenured, subsidized intellectual class to which our academic critics belong would experience the end of its taxpayer-financed bonanza.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

The cumulative effect of these tirades is that a disinterested reader is not inclined to take Christian reconstructionists very seriously. In general, Rushdoony's disciples lack his intellectual confidence. They beat upon his favorite themes—North avows that there is “no such thing as neutrality” and manages to quote Cornelius Van Til in nearly every book—but without Rushdoony's philosophical insight. Greg Bahnsen, considered one of the leading intellectual lights of the second generation of Christian reconstructionists before his untimely death in 1995, padded his books with footnotes that sometimes occupied half a page. In one book preface that lends credence to Richard Hofstadter's thesis on evangelical status anxiety,Footnote ¹¹⁵ Bahnsen admonished his reconstructionist and dispensationalist colleagues for failing to conduct their debate according to scholarly ethics: “Our ‘scholarship’ is justly ridiculed by those who have been educated in institutions which have no commitment to Christ or His Word, but who have ethical integrity to demand as a prerequisite to acceptable scholarship that a student represent his opponent fairly … To use a Pauline expression, ‘even the Gentiles’ know better than to permit imprecision and erroneous portrayals in serious intellectual discussion. Yet Christians (I include all of us) often seem to care little for that minimal standard of scholarly respectability. How, then, can we be taken seriously? How can we take ourselves seriously?”Footnote ¹¹⁶

In the mid-1990s—curiously, just when the Religious Right stepped into the Washington spotlight with the Gingrich revolution—Christian reconstructionist publications trailed off. Yet there is evidence that some of Rushdoony's ideas, in subtler, more moderate form, have seeped into the bloodstream of American evangelicalism.

Rushdoony remains a familiar name in many conservative Christian circles. While few evangelical leaders were willing to link themselves with him in public, occasionally he had their ear. In the mid-1980s, he was at the height of his career as writer and expert witness in the Christian school and homeschool movement. These were the years of the Christian activist movement, associated in the public mind with Randall Terry's Operation Rescue and Christian protesters lying on their backs in front of abortion clinics.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But Christian activism began to peter out in Ronald Reagan's second term in office, and “people thought things were crumbling,” said John Whitehead. “The [Christian activism] movement failed, and people were scared to death of Roe v. Wade … Rushdoony gave them a plan to take over.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Mark Rushdoony is quick to assert that his father was “not the godfather of the political right. But he had contact with a lot of these people. His influence was more often peripheral. He talked to people in the know, and some were probably reading his books.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ He spent little time in Washington, but he did speak twice to congressmen at the Capital Club, and according to John Whitehead he was an early member of the Council for National Policy, a secretive political organization founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, the author of the popular Left Behind series and a powerful force in the Christian Right.Footnote ¹²⁰

While Rushdoony's direct contact with conservative Christian leadership was minimal, the rise of political activism among evangelicals opened the way for reconstructionist ideas and language to gain traction. Pat Robertson's evolution from his early days as a charismatic Baptist preacher and premillennial dispensationalist to host of the increasingly political television show The 700 Club, 1988 presidential candidate, and founder of the Christian Coalition is a case in point: proof that contrary eschatology is not necessarily a bar to reconstructionism's empowering language of Christian action. Early on, Robertson's premillennial views were evident in his misgivings about political involvement. In 1966 he refused to use his growing clout among conservative voters to aid his father's congressional reelection campaign; in 1980, he participated in a “Washington for Jesus” rally but immediately retreated and denounced evangelical political involvement.Footnote ¹²¹ Judging by appearances, his misgivings faded rapidly: by 1985, he was organizing to run for president and speaking like a postmillennial Christian reconstructionist, assuring audiences that “God's plan, ladies and gentlemen, is for his people to take dominion.”Footnote ¹²²

Has Robertson abandoned his theology? Today he still quotes the book of Revelation to explain national disasters and the spread of liberal secularism, and rallies donors with predictions of the apocalypse.Footnote ¹²³ Like most celebrity evangelists throughout American history, Robertson is a theological opportunist. From Dwight Moody to Billy Graham, many great American preachers have played fast and loose with theology in the interest of saving souls and advancing their influence. Their audiences rarely mind. Evangelicals—and perhaps Americans in general—are usually more interested in experience and action than intellectual consistency.

Robertson owes his dominionist language partly to the influence of a particular Rushdoonyite: a reconstructionist lawyer and preacher named Herb Titus.Footnote ¹²⁴ Titus recently made headlines as Judge Roy Moore's defense lawyer in the Alabama Ten Commandments courthouse case. Before that, Robertson chose him to help establish his law school at Regent University (though they have since had a falling-out). “I'd say Pat Robertson got Rushdoony by way of Titus,” Whitehead said.Footnote ¹²⁵ Titus's direct influence likely combined with propitious political circumstances to encourage Robertson to adopt a moderate form of Christian reconstructionism, often called “soft dominionism.” Premillennial convictions continue to “form the core of personal piety”Footnote ¹²⁶ for Robertson and many evangelical Americans, and premillennial dispensationalism's particular place for Israel in the end times strongly influences their views on foreign policy. But Robertson's example suggests the appeal of reconstructionism's postmillennial, “take dominion” message to American evangelicals frustrated by the secular political process, increasingly aware of their numbers and influence, and eager to organize on their own.

Even a theology as radical as reconstructionism requires only a handful of well-placed and tactful advocates to make its way from the fringe to the mainstream. Jeffrey Ventrella, the senior vice president of the Alliance Defense Fund, is one of a more practically minded and politically active generation of Christians, well read in the Christian reconstructionist writers, who picks and chooses from their ideas and diffuses those ideas for a wider audience. The ADF is the powerful legal arm of the Christian Right that underwrites legal fights and often handles litigation to challenge same-sex marriage licenses, defend Christian monuments and decorations on public property, protect the right of high-school students to wear anti-gay T-shirts or pray in school, and also “monitors the expression of Christmas” to ensure that the holiday retains its Christian meaning. The organization considers itself an antidote to the American Civil Liberties Union.Footnote ¹²⁷ In addition to overseeing the training and recruitment of lawyers, Ventrella runs the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a training camp for Christian law students seeking to better integrate their faith and their profession. He is affiliated with Bahnsen Theological Seminary, a theonomist institution in California named after the late Christian reconstructionist thinker. He has known many of the central reconstructionist writers personally; Gary North's parents gave him and his wife wedding presents.

Ventrella has written on eschatology for the journal produced by Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation, though he wrote the article only upon the foundation's request and prefers not to tell people about it.Footnote ¹²⁸ In the past he has traveled in reconstructionist circles, but he made a point of keeping his distance from Rushdoony. Rushdoony's name has long been a curse for those working in mainstream evangelicalism, and Ventrella objects to his racism, catastrophic view of culture and history, and “almost tribal”Footnote ¹²⁹ priority on the family as the means of grace. Ventrella also hedges on thornier problems in modern application of Mosaic law, explaining that “I don't think the church has spoken on those issues.”Footnote ¹³⁰ However, he takes Rushdoony's legacy seriously, and he is in a position to influence the Christian Right's approach to legislative reform and the relationship between church and state.

Gary DeMar collaborated closely with Gary North on several books in earlier years of the movement but has since moved in a direction very different from that of the economist-hermit. DeMar's career is another illustration of how the extreme Christian reconstructionist thought of fifteen years ago has tempered itself for popular appeal. He runs a “biblical worldview ministry” called American Vision that considers itself “a think tank, national training center, book publisher and speaker's bureau” poised at “the front lines of the culture war.”Footnote ¹³¹ In 2005 DeMar organized a rally in Cobb County around Judge Roy Moore's appeal to Christians to “take back America.”Footnote ¹³² American Vision is an active publisher of “soft theonomist” literature: books like DeMar's God and Government textbook series emphasize America's Christian heritage rather than call for public stonings. DeMar is one of several writers who, after beginning their careers in the high tide of reconstructionist publishing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, have now softened their tone and transitioned into the education sector. Some have founded Reformed Christian colleges with a postmillennial bent, teach at private academies, and run homeschooling programs.Footnote ¹³³

Gary North would not be satisfied with these individual examples of his movement's influence. He cites the pentecostal “Kingdom Now” movement and other forms of soft dominionism whose adherents push for increased Christian influence in society, though in more palatable, less Mosaic terms. “The vast majority of today's implicitly antinomian Christian activists possess no biblical blueprint for building a comprehensive alternative to the kingdom of humanism,” he writes in Tools of Dominion. Footnote ¹³⁴ Christian reconstructionism offers that blueprint and fills an intellectual vacuum, whether its “foot soldiers” know it or not. The trouble with the writers who have published visions of a looming theocracy is not that they suggest that Christian reconstructionism has had some influence—for that is undeniable—but that they tend to take Gary North at his word. His books are a journalist's manna, rife with incendiary and outrageous quotations that lend urgency to one's thesis. And it is easy to interpret the spread of reconstructionist language—“dominionism”; “a Christian nation”; “there is no such thing as neutrality”—as evidence that the movement has recruited new members. However, the power of language lies in its flexibility: to take only two obvious examples from the history of American conservatism, “states' rights” and “law and order” have meant very different things to different people over the course of American history.

The power of Rushdoony's writings lay less in his strict imposition of Mosaic law on modern life than in the fact that he had a blueprint in the first place, and a philosophy of history to support it. Moreover, he spoke to the tough questions that American evangelical Christians faced. His answers were thought-provoking, to say the least. To ignore the moral complexities of the Old Testament is to commit the heresy of Marcion and deprive Christianity of its foundations; to set aside Christianity's exclusive claims to truth and salvation may be polite, but it is intellectually dishonest. One evangelical observer admitted: “Whether Christians agree with their answers or not … the Reconstructionists are certainly asking the right questions. What is the proper relationship between church and state? Is a Christian culture possible? If a culture were converted to faith in Christ, how would their institutions change? What would be the basis of such a culture's laws? Does the Bible have the answers to society's problems, and if so, what are those answers?”Footnote ¹³⁵

The Christian reconstructionist movement—defined by theologians who explicitly assent to reconstructionism's distinctives and are actively publishing and debating—is largely dead. Riven by internal schism, a distaste for politics or compromise, and an utter disdain for anyone who dared disagree, the movement imploded in the mid-1990s. In Ventrella's view, this was the best thing that could have happened for Christian reconstructionism—for now that no one is worried about keeping to the party line or claiming credit, its ideas are at liberty to filter into America's cultural bloodstream. “The ideas get diffused, and the better ones get traction,” he said. “It's like Francis Schaeffer said: worldviews are more often caught than taught. And you see the evidence of Rushdoony's influence everywhere, from the homeschooling movement to proponents of Intelligent Design.”Footnote ¹³⁶

When Rushdoony identified an intellectual crisis afoot in American Protestantism, he was right. That sense of intellectual erosion is at the heart of Rushdoony's call to “epistemological self-awareness” and the troubling social changes he proposes, including his fundamental claim that religious toleration is un-Christian. When Rushdoony wrote of epistemological awareness and cited Van Til to demonstrate that “there is no such thing as neutrality,” this is precisely what he meant. He was criticizing the fundamentalist retreat from culture and politics that followed the 1925 Scopes trial, but he also sought to impose upon conservative Christianity an intellectual consistency that it lacked.

Strict Christian reconstructionists have long known that this, their most profound critique of American culture, is also the hardest for most people to swallow. Even North—hardly a shrinking violet—clings to the word “pluralism” because it has become inseparable from the very idea of America: “There is no doubt that Christianity teaches pluralism, but a very special kind of pluralism: plural institutions under God's single comprehensive law system. It does not teach a pluralism of law structures, or a pluralism of moralities, for this sort of hypothetical legal pluralism … is always either polytheistic or humanistic.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Greg Bahnsen asserted that Mosaic law punishes only “public idolatry,” not the private sin of unbelief,Footnote ¹³⁸ and assured readers that a reconstructed America would still permit “denominational pluralism,” which, he believed, was the Founding Fathers' original intention.Footnote ¹³⁹ But he did not shy away from the underlying problem: pluralism that includes non-Christian religions is not “logically cogent” for Bible-believing Christians.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In attempting to circumvent the accusation that a theonomic regime would result in a “Christian holocaust” when common behaviors suddenly become capital crimes, in the end, Bahnsen could only suggest that the new law will act as a deterrent. There will be no ex post facto judgment of crimes committed before Mosaic law is reinstated, so predictions of a holocaust are “pure speculation—speculation which, as it happens, contradicts the expectation revealed in God's word that the proper application of the law's penal sanctions will actually diminish the instances of capital crimes because the society will ‘hear and fear.’”Footnote ¹⁴¹

The real trouble with Rushdoony's influence today is not the specter of Mosaic law. The theonomic conspiracy afoot is greatly exaggerated. The tragedy, rather, is that too many Christians have picked up Rushdoony's language without reading his books or understanding his fundamental challenge: that evangelical Christians must find a way to reconcile the Bible with true pluralism. Rushdoony's disciples hold up Abraham Kuyper as a model Christian statesman without grasping or seeking to emulate his most profound achievement: the reinvention of biblical Calvinist doctrine as a worldview that respects human difference without shying from God's command to take dominion and change society for the better.

Believing Christians and secular observers alike have the responsibility to see Christian reconstructionism for what it is: a diagnosis of an acute illness in American religious culture, a strain of virulent intolerance that has been mistaken for intellectual consistency. But we can reject Rushdoony's proposed solution while still granting that the crisis he perceived was real. Those few scholars who have read his work typically categorize him as a fringe character of the radical Christian right. In the context of the Reformed Calvinist and conservative intellectual traditions that shaped him, Rushdoony took what was, for him, only the logical next step.

Rushdoony's thesis is that we moderns are guilty of the heresies condemned in the fifth century at Chalcedon: we blur human and divine and worship man and his creations. This argument, too often lost in the shadows of his provocative proposals for social change, is the crux of his value for today's readers. Every religious tradition must broker a compromise with the society it inhabits. In America, that compromise has broken down. If Christians reject Mosaic law, they still must seriously consider the relationship between the Bible and the pluralist public square. The trouble is not that a few believers favor radical, intolerant ideas, but that frequently it seems that they are the only ones with any ideas at all.