The Emergence of Modern Dominion Theology
Rushdoony and the Proto-Conservative Movement
It was at once the crisis within humanism and the collapse of evangelical Christian cultural philosophy that provided the moral imperative for the dominion theology movement first seen in the critique and works of Rousas Rushdoony. An insider charting the development of the dominion theology movement was to write,
In 1962, there was no Christian Reconstruction movement. There was not even an outline of it. Over the next decade Rushdoony developed the fundamental theological and sociological principles of what later was to become a movement.[1]
The political context of Rushdoony’s early work was the coalescing of diverse political and big-business reactions into a proto-conservative movement in post-Second World War America; it was as a response to the rise of American statism during Roosevelt’s New Deal era (c. 1933). This had asserted the central federal authority against the individual states and fundamentally changed the relationship of the American citizen to the state.[2] This development of the American statism had subsequently accelerated greatly during the so-called “Warren Court” period of 1953–1969.[3] Federal and judicial power was increased dramatically over the elected legislature at state level:
To many people, the idea of judicial deference to the elected branches lost much of its theoretical appeal in the 1950s and 1960s.[4]
In other words, the will of the community being expressed through its representatives was set aside for ideological reasons prioritized by the federal government agencies. The enormous moral imperative of the statist movement that lent it apparent legitimacy was the racial conflict within the Southern states that enabled the legitimization of aggressive centrist and federalist imposition on the individual legislatures who had resisted normalization of race relations. The actions were frequently sponsored or initiated by radical “progressive” lawyers of the ACLU, who rose in ascendancy through the equality and race struggles of this period.[5] The philosophical motivation of the ACLU was that of its first patron, John Dewey (d. 1952), an advocate of “intelligent social control or social action . . . as a requirement of positive liberty or individuality, in modern industrial conditions.”[6] This was thinly disguised socialist elitism, a call for the enlightened social progressives to radical state action to address social problems at the federal level, rather than with individual community initiatives that had been peculiar to the American way.[7] The radical leftism of the federalists and the anti-Christian rhetoric of the ACLU was viewed by Rushdoony as evidence of their desire to marginalize Christians and an unconstitutional attack on First Amendment rights.8[8]
For these reasons, Rushdoony had made common cause with the proto-conservative movement that began to coalesce after the Second World War around a pro-capitalist, libertarian agenda against the federalists. He initially worked during the 1950s with emerging voices of conservatism, such as Spiritual Mobilization publishing articles in their journal Faith and Freedom. SM warned that statism with its bureaucracy and social action usurped the “Christian principle [duty] of love [to your neighbor]” and replaced it with the collectivist principle of compulsion . . . clergy and laity needed to focus on the spiritual causes of poverty rather than on the social and political programs advocated by secular social reformers . . . and the . . . advocates of the Social Gospel.[9]
Fundamentally, these were organizations set on building a “big tent” conservative caucus around “traditional” Judeo-Christian values: individual liberty under a constitutional order and anticommunism.[10] It was the first attempt at a Christian response to the moral energy borne out of the New Deal era and the socialism of the social gospel movement, juxtapositioning it against individual liberty and a positive vision of capitalism as a legitimate means of building a Christian social order.
Rushdoony and the Social Gospel
The conservative movement as it emerged directed a sustained polemic at the Social Gospel movement. Yet, from the perspective of a vision for the entire transformation of society in Christian terms (which, as we shall see, gradually became distinctive of Rushdoony’s program), it might be argued that there was substantial idiomatic and “common cause” between both movements to establish the kingdom of God on Earth. Rushdoony, early in his career, apparently had left-leaning views, and for these reasons, it is necessary to identify what is in fact the fundamental distinction between these movements despite starting from this similar idiomatic base.[11]
Walter Rauschenbusch was the father of the Social Gospel movement and had come “face to face with oppressive poverty” during his pastorate in New York (1886–1897).[12] He argued for a theology with the intention of reshaping Christian belief and praxis such that “a clear-eyed and continuous reconstruction of society” might take place.[13] On that basis, his emphasis on a kingdom gospel that was relevant to every sphere of life is shared with Rushdoony. However, Rauschenbusch, taking his philosophical presuppositions from Dewey,[14] saw the state and church inextricably linked in a symbiotic relationship for the wider salvation of society.[15] Rauschenbusch even followed Hegel and assigned a divine quality to the state: “The State is the outer court of the moral law; within stands the sanctuary of the Spirit.”[16] He explicitly embraced socialism, believing it represented the inevitable evolutionary track of human progress:
Here enters socialism. . . . Private ownership is not a higher stage of social organization which has finally and forever superseded communism, but an intermediate and necessary stage of social evolution between two forms of communism.[17]
This is where there is a radical divergence with Rushdoony, who writes to address this embrace of socialism directly:
It is customary among ecclesiastical socialists to deny there is biblical warrant for private property. . . . Scripture . . . places property in the hands of the family, not the state. It gives property to man an aspect of his dominion, as part of his godly subduing of the earth.[18]
For Rushdoony, it was the family, rather than the church or the state, that represented the fundamental organism of society and where the authority and prerogative for change must come.
This difference became even more evident as the movement that Rauschenbusch spawned did not maintain the Christian nuances and commitment, to some degree, of Christian orthodoxy that were clearly in his work.[19] It became aggressively concerned with “social action” in the form of using the apparatus of the state preemptively. A modern social gospel defense that would recast “salvation” and “sin” as applying to a society rather than to the individual—the individual is more often considered as “sinned against” by the oppressive and alienating power relations of capitalism, rather than needing to repent for their “sin” as a matter of divine order. Stated this way, it was thus straightforward to see why an alliance was to develop between political “progressives,” such as the Marxists and the liberals with the social gospel movement on an operational level, and this was reason enough for Rushdoony to reject it. As I have noted elsewhere, the bloody experience of the Russian revolution had an arresting effect, at least for a period, for those advocating for communism as societal salvation, and any defense of communism was conspicuous by its absence in the later work of Rauschenbusch.
The parallel is almost exact with the liberation theology movement of Gustavo Gutiérrez, which was a Latin American movement beginning during the 1960s. It explicitly employed Marxist hermeneutics emphasizing that “God was undeniably on the side of the poor.” Iterations of the liberation theology movement, as its influence grew during the 1970s and the 1980s, meant it became far less Christian and much more Marxist, to the degree that the WCC was alleged to have sponsored the purchase of arms for “liberation movements” around the world.[20] As its radicalism and Marxism grew untenable, the movement was partially censored by the Vatican under Pope John Paul II in the early 1990s; this marked the waning of its influence, but it exerted a lasting influence on Roman Catholic social teaching.[21] From this perspective, it is rather ironic that dominion theologians were once accused by the famous televangelist Jimmy Swaggart of “being liberation theologians in disguise.”[22] It was precisely the rejection of “big government” statism and socialism that was one of the main distinctives of Rushdoony’s reconstructionism.[23]
Rushdoony and Anti-Statism
Thus, for the social gospel and liberation theology movements, the state had become the primary means of institutional and social change; for Rushdoony, the legitimate sphere was a narrow judicial one, ensuring the just interpretation and application of God’s law.[24] The state only legitimately exists as the agency of the application and not the source of law:
For a state to claim total jurisdiction as the modern state does, is to claim to be as God, to be the total governor of man and the world. Instead of limited law and limited jurisdiction [over] welfare, education, worship, the family, business and farming, capital and labor . . . the modern antichristian state claims jurisdiction from cradle to grave, from womb to tomb.[25]
For Rushdoony, taking philosophical inspiration from Kuyper’s concept of “sphere sovereignty,” sociological reality was separated into distinct spheres or domains, each of which had clearly defined boundaries and jurisdictions:
The church, in terms of Scripture, has no jurisdiction and control over other institutions and spheres of life except a “spiritual” one, i.e., the proclamation and application of God’s word and authority to every realm . . . the church must declare that every sphere of life must be under the rule of God’s word and under the authority of Christ the King.[26]
The church was to declare the authority of God in every realm but not to govern directly. Rushdoony viewed the reformation of society in the “social service” of one another within the redeemed members of a reformed community of empowered “trustee families” aside from the state. This sociological approach was based on his experience during the 1940s when still in his twenties as a missionary on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. To Rushdoony, government intervention and “welfare,” with its culture of dependency on Indian reservations, had “destroyed Native American Culture.”[27] He concluded that nothing short of a “broad Christian communal program” was required to facilitate the spiritual redemption and regeneration of the Indian peoples and the culture of the entire reservation.[28] This was to start with Indians on the School Board but was to embrace every facet of life on the reservation as they took responsibility for themselves. In other words, even at this early stage of his ministry, he had concluded that a complete and Christian reconstruction of society was necessary.
Thus, importantly, Rushdoony did not possess a high view of the church behaving as the papal state had in Roman Catholicism but saw the church as “one agency among many.”[29] Each sphere was to be directed by the church to the law of God as revealed in the commandments of Scripture regarding that sphere. Each sphere would interpret and develop its own case law from the principles of the Mosaic prescriptive law. Only in that sense would a man’s life be authentically Christian and the society submitted to God:
A man must be a Christian in church, home, school, state, vocation, and all of life. In going from one sphere to another, a man does not move from the realm of Christ, to that of Mammon, Baal, Molech, or any other “god.” Similarly, neither the school, state, nor any other order of life can exempt itself from the catholic or universal sway of God’s rule and law.[30]
This position was in radical contrast to how he viewed the total ineffectiveness of the church in dealing with the political, social, and religious challenges of the twentieth century. In the decades of mass evangelism that had seen the number of American Christians more than double, to the place they were a numerical majority in the country, their influence within society had virtually disappeared. This was evidenced by the unrestrained humanism seen in the stream of Supreme Court rulings culminating in the removal of prayer from public schools in 1962 and the de facto establishment of a federal “abortion on demand” precedent in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade judgment.[31] He described modern Christianity’s relationship to the state as merely tolerated on the fringes of society, with no significance for public life. Churches were quiet and subservient, that they might not lose their tax-exempt status granted to them at the behest of the state.[32] The separation of church and state was no longer interpreted in the founders’ terms of ensuring the church was free from political interference but rather as the state’s grant to the church:
Religious liberty is . . . replaced by religious toleration. . . . Religious liberty has meant, historically, the freedom . . . from state control and jurisdiction. . . . Religious toleration has meant that the state claims the right to govern and control . . . to declare which . . . church has the right to exist. Religious toleration places the power in the hands of the State.[33]
The “Broad Social Program” and the Split with Mainline Conservatism
Although Rushdoony made a fundamental contribution postwar to the emerging conservative consensus, he was soon criticizing it for its lack of coherent philosophical vision.[34] Its ethos was only generally Christian. In contrast, Rushdoony was to assert that a Christian people must attain “[Christian] epistemological self-consciousness.”[35] In other words, a comprehensive, distinctly Christian way of understanding, constructing, and living in the world.[36] This obviously went far beyond the simple libertarian vision of being able to live a life free from state interference in community and business affairs. This clarity of vision caught the attention of some wealthy patrons and in the period from 1957–62, he developed his distinctive program.
Such was the cogency of his formulation that he was hired as the effective leader of a major conservative organization known as the Volker Fund (which became the Center for American Studies in 1961) and attempted to move the entire organization to his explicit Christian program. However, amidst battles with non-Christians and the more moderate Christians on staff, he was fired by the new patron in September 1963. Though he had strong individual supporters within CAS, the consensus amongst staff regarding his program was that his entire . . . project . . . was a . . . religious exclusive [Calvinist] form of conservatism. . . . It would be “catastrophic for big tent conservatism and [its] pro-business agenda.”[37]
Thus, the consequence of Rushdoony’s uncompromising, distinctively Christian theological approach was his effective excommunication from the mainline conservative political and Christian organizations. It was to be about twenty years before mainline conservatism paid attention again to Rushdoony, as the Reconstructionist movement he built in his absence forced itself to prominence, and it is to the philosophical foundations of his distinctive movement that we now turn.
Epistemological Self-Consciousness[38]
The State as a Religious Institution
We have seen that for Rushdoony, anti-statism was fundamental to the sociological aspect of his program. Yet, this distinguished him little from libertarians and many conservatives. It is the particular claim that the state is a religious institution and the battle between church and state is between “rival religions”[39] of humanism and Christianity that provides us with the hermeneutic key to the philosophical underpinnings of Rushdoony’s dominionism. The distinctiveness and strength of his program was that it was a coherent philosophical and theological program that he had described as “epistemological self-consciousness.”[40] To understand this term is, in my opinion, to understand authentic dominion theology, and it is to an analysis of this concept that we must now turn.
Van Tillianism
The basis of Rushdoony’s “epistemological self-consciousness” is Van Tillian apologetics. Van Til (1895–1987) became the first professor of apologetics at Machen’s breakaway Westminster Theological Seminary and is generally accepted to have originated a distinctive apologetic method during his career.[41] Van Til broke with the evidentialism and rationalism of Enlightenment apologetics that had come to be identified with Protestant orthodoxy, even within the conservative schools. Traditionally, evidentialism and rationalism had come to treat theology as a “science” and was concerned with the “facts” of apologetics, i.e., the unaided reason of a man or woman should be able to evaluate “evidences” for God’s operation in the world and by the shared, common human rational process be convinced by argumentation to a place of belief, vis-a-vis the “theistic proofs.”[42] Such an approach was based on a natural theology and assumed a common (intellectual) ground was available to believers and unbelievers. In other words, facts could be considered “objective reality,” which are equally available between men and between men and God; their meaning is in themselves—they are “brute [uninterpreted] facts.”[43]
Van Til followed Kuyper by uncovering the assumptions and fallaciousness of this reasoning, which had, at its heart, the presumption of an objective and detached human reason capable of a complete and unbiased evaluation of the facts of the world. Kuyper had reasserted the position of one stream of Reformation thought that an unregenerate reason was fundamentally faulty. Luther had written in reply to Erasmus, “Lady Reason . . . a whore of sophistry . . . her babblings are folly and absurdity.”[44] Yet, lest we then conclude that Calvin and Luther were anti-intellectual in some way, the key qualifier here is unregenerate.
Both Luther and Calvin argued and reasoned that the Catholic church was degenerate and had ceased to be faithful to the Scriptures and the apostolic tradition. Specifically, it was the persuasiveness and cogency of their reasoning that brought many to their side. Both Calvin and Luther argued that the unregenerate reason could never come to a revelation of God apart from his grace and intervention; the Reformation principle was a rejection of the natural theology of Aquinas. This commitment was strengthened in Calvin: it was an impossibility that the reason of fallen humankind might reach God.[45] It was always the sovereign act of God that revealed himself to humankind, and apologetic philosophy was thus subject to scriptural theology.
Kuyper, in the nineteenth century, had recapitulated and modernized this Reformation position by asserting that there was a fundamental “antithesis between belief and unbelief.”[46] Knowledge and logic in their very form are structured differently, with the result that there is, in principle, no “common ground” possible for argumentation between the believer and unbeliever. Van Til was seen to assent to Kuyper’s basic epistemological proposition, expressing it thus:
There are two and only two classes of men. . . . There are covenant keepers and covenant breakers. In all of men’s activities, in their philosophic and scientific enterprises as well as in their worship, men are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers.[47]
However, Van Til differed from Kuyper in that he permitted a conversation, the apologetic task, to communicate and create this self-conscious awareness. This important and subtle nuance, which I consider further in my Foundations, is that although, in principle, we develop two separate sciences, which would seem to suggest no common ground exists (as was argued by Kuyper), in practice, the nonbeliever unavoidably imports in a Christian conception of the world, which then permits a conversation to be had because of the inconsistency within the unbeliever’s worldview.
The apologetic task then becomes this task of bringing the unbeliever to that place of realization of the implicit dependence of their worldview on Christian presuppositions, of coming to “epistemological self-consciousness.” His view of Scripture and natural revelation as “perspicuous” and “meaningless without one another” at once legitimizes philosophy and science but, at the same time, constrains it.[48] It is important to make the historical observation that, in context, Van Til’s criticism was also directed at Barth and neoorthodoxy. He was the first within the evangelical community to expose neoorthodoxy’s inability to argue coherently for an objective Christian conception of knowledge, for it placed the Christian conversion in a subjective, existential “crisis experience.”[49] As Edgar commented in his introduction to Van Til’s Christian Apologetics, this is no safer an epistemological basis to build an apologetic strategy than what it intends to replace because of the import of the Kantian separation between realms, which is traditionally understood as denying the faculty of reason entry into the realm of faith, thus denying the possibility of any objective proof for the existence of God and severely limits what, of faith, might be articulated using reason.
In contrast, for Van Til, although natural and theological “facts” both have no meaning in or of themselves, they become propositional when interpreted in terms of the framework of the covenant of God with the world:
The Bible is thought of as authoritative on everything of which it speaks. Moreover, it speaks of everything . . . either directly or by implication. . . . It gives us a philosophy of history as well as history. . . . [T]here is nothing in this universe on which human beings can have full and true information unless they take the Bible into account. . . . [I]f one goes only to the laboratory . . . one will not have a full or even true interpretation.[50]
Thus, Van Til does not locate truth as an abstract concept that exists in a realm above both God and humankind, to which each is equally bound as in Hellenic Western philosophy (after Plato), but as to something that has its origin in and dwells in the creature of God:
[If it is assumed] that God and man stand in exactly the same sort of relation to the law of contradiction . . . it is assumed [to think truly that] both must think in accordance with that law as an abstraction from the nature of either [God or Man]. . . . The consequences are . . . fatal.[51]
What is “fatal” here for the apologetic task for Van Til is asserting that if you admit the principle that “truth” is somehow abstracted into its own realm apart from God, “the basic principle of the non-Christian conception of truth cannot be challenged.”[52] In other words, if the Christian accepts the concept that truth is apart from God rather than something God has as part of his ontology, there can be no discovery of final objective truth but rather, at best, claims of warrant, probable truth, or of reasonable verisimilitude.[53] The best the Christian could hope for is an admission from non-Christians that there is sufficient warrant for Christian belief.[54]
Van Til refuses to accept this principle and is aiming to demonstrate we can most certainly know what truth is because truth is resident in God and is revealed to us via the means of his self-revelation in Scripture and in a revelation of our own selves to ourselves through our willful obedience. Humanity’s very constitution and desire to dominion is there because it is there within us as a “law,” in the sense of a principle of correct and innate operation, i.e., in accordance with its design. God has placed his law in the human will, and the human personality, to a greater or lesser degree, chooses to embrace the leadings of God’s will within itself according to God’s purpose, grace, and choosing. The will of God is established through the agency of the human will, but “it is the ultimate will or plan of the self-determinate God that gives determinate character to anything that is done by the human will.”[55]
This is a supremely Reformed apologetic, where God works through the agency of human free will. As I write in my Foundations, human will is free but never independent of its creator; God can always invade the will of his creature for his purposes.[56] In contrast, the Arminian position would argue that it can be wholly independent, and it is the position maintained by most evangelical Christians outside of the orthodox Reformed churches. The logical problem of the Arminian position was made clear by Van Til, if salvation was but a possibility and dependent on the will of men, all men could have chosen to reject the salvation of God, forever separating God from creation, an untenable position. The question the Christian is then confronted with is do we choose God, or does God choose us? I am constrained to believe the latter, however uncomfortable the implications of that is for me.
In light of this logic of salvation, for Van Til, dominion theology is the only theology possible because God’s first intention for the created humanity was dominion:
[T]he will of man . . . depends for what it is ultimately upon a creative and sustaining act of God. . .. [M]an is bound to act, God has set his program [what we should want]. God gave this program by way of self-conscious communication at the beginning of history. Man’s summum bonum (the supreme good, from which all others are derived) was set before him. . .. He was to subdue the earth and bring out its latent powers to the glory of God.[57]
Here, we arrive at the principle that was to form the foundation of Rushdoony’s dominion theology.
Rushdoony and Theonomy
At this point, it should be clear as to why Rushdoony seeking a theological basis for any reformation of society insisted on a Van Tillian epistemology. What is distinctive in Rushdoony is that he applies Van Til by insisting that societal reformation must be theonomical (Greek: Theo [God] + nomos [law]). Culture is derived from the law of God as revealed in Scripture and not subject to the premises and prejudices derived from the autonomous (Greek: autos [self] + nomos [law]) reasonings of the human will. So, Rushdoony developed Van Til’s apologetic in a very important way, and the novel character of this development is captured by North:
Van Til was analogous to a demolitions expert. He placed explosive charges at the bottom of every modern edifice [and] detonated them. But he left no blueprints for the reconstruction of society. . .. This was not good enough for Rushdoony . . . he concluded that the source of the missing blueprints is Old Testament law.[58]
Rushdoony extended Van Til’s philosophical theonomy into the sociological realm.[59] He posited government of the self and society by God’s law in contrast to autonomy, which, as we see in our analysis above, is government of the self and society by the judgments of human reason alone. Theonomy to Rushdoony is in the interpretation and application of biblical law, and he seeded the Reconstructionist movement with it as the first modern dominion theology movement:
It is a modern heresy that holds that the law of God has no meaning nor any binding force for man today. . . . To attempt to understand Western civilization apart from the impact of biblical law within it and upon it is to seek a fictitious history and to reject [biblical law] . . . the historic power and vitality of the West has been in Biblical faith and law.[60]
Reconstructionism reflects the purpose to reconstruct every sphere of society according to God’s law:
What is our standard; by what standards shall we approach the problems of philosophy and the problems of everyday life? If we begin with anything other than the ontological Trinity, with the sovereignty of God as intellectually applied and systematically delineated in every aspect and avenue of human thought, we end with the destruction of Christian theology and the deterioration of Christian life.[61]
He sees no discontinuity or contradiction between law as expressed in the Mosaic Law and the law of Christ for the believer in the church era. They are part of the same theological concept of divine law:
Man as covenant-breaker is in “enmity against God” (Rom 8:7) and is subject to “the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2), whereas the believer is under “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ” (Rom 8:2). The law is one law, the law of God.[62]
Thereunto, it is crucial to recognize that for Rushdoony, theonomy is not a reversion to legalism; he is not claiming a man is saved by keeping the law. Rushdoony is rather emphasizing the sanctifying work of the law after the redemptive work of grace:
Christ’s atoning work was to restore man to a position of covenant-keeping instead of covenant-breaking, to enable man to keep the law by freeing man “from the law of sin and death.” . . . The law has a position of centrality . . . in man’s sanctification (in that he grows in grace as he grows in law-keeping, for the law is the way of sanctification).[63]
That is, there are not separate dispensations of “law” and “grace” but a coherent continuity, which can be directly and explicitly applied. Rushdoony’s Institutes presents the thesis that the Ten Commandments are the statutory aspects of the law and that the detail of the law found in the books provides a source of case law to illustrate the principles of interpretation and, thus, the basis of civil governance in any era. It is conceived as an explicit template for every sphere and aspect of human existence. Anyone who reads the Pentateuch will be struck with how many times the phrase “I am the LORD” appears after the giving of a statute or a commandment; this is not inviting a debate but is a declaration: “I am the boss, and this is the way it is going to be.”
It follows that any Christian sociological order must necessarily be based upon the same principles and, sometimes, the details of God’s law, where they are not peculiar to the cultural situation of ancient Israel. This is the moderate theonomical position argued by Cope in both her Old Testament Template and her God and Political Justice. This would also appear to be the New Testament position, as the apostles did not expect the gentiles to be bound by Jewish custom.[64] A clear distinction in Christian Scripture was made between the timeless moral content of the law and the specific cultural applications of it. The promulgation of biblical law in terms of the dominion mandate is thus the fulfillment of the original intent of God:
The purpose of Christ’s coming was in terms of this same creation mandate. . .. Christ died to make atonement for their sins. . .. The redeemed are recalled to the original purpose of man to exercise dominion under God . . . to “fulfil the righteousness of the law” (Rom 8:4). The law remains central to God’s purpose.[65]
One of the most important qualifications Christians needed to apply is that we do not live in a theocracy where the Lord rules over us directly; the book of Acts gives numerous instances of the difficulties and challenges of dealing with rulers.
Summary and Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, we traced the development of the different themes that eventually formed Rushdoony’s sociological program. We began by considering Rushdoony’s involvement in the post-WWII conservative movement that proceeded on a big-tent, libertarian basis in response to the statism of Roosevelt’s New Deal era and the federally driven imposition of legal precedents that reduced the power of the states in favor of the government. With Rushdoony’s additional experience within the Duck Valley Indian Reservation and the destruction of Native American culture by welfare dependence, he came to believe in a total reform of the different layers of society on a Christian basis. This separated him from mainline conservatism and began the development in earnest of his own distinctive program of societal reform on a Christian basis.
The Christians of the social gospel movement were also arguing for total societal reconstruction in the interests of social justice, but Rushdoony viewed its promotion of socialism, its emphasis on government driven action, and a deification of the state as ungodly and destructive. For Rushdoony, the appropriate form of Christian thought was where the community had thought through the implications of its Christianity to the place of explicit understanding of how Scripture applied to the spheres of culture. It was the families of the community that drove the reform, and the philosophical framework of that reform was taken from Van Tillian thought, the theonomical imperative. Within theonomy, the Ten Commandments of the law of God are seen as eternal principles, and the books of the law provide a source of case law and examples of their application. This is then viewed as a template for national reform.
So, Rushdoony’s final position was that we would do well to pay attention to the principles, details, and practice of the law within our governments, but this needs to be argued for by our Christian community, its political organizations, and associations of professionals, that consent might be gained, rather than an imposition by a religious hegemony or by government fiat. This was envisaged as a bottom-up movement, not a top-down one. This meant literature, organization, legal advocacy, and a broad cultural engagement. How Rushdoony attempted to put these principles into practice to build that Christian social movement, how he transformed evangelical politics, and how he inspired the formation of other Reconstructionist movements is the subject of the next chapter.
[1] North and DeMar, Christian Reconstruction, xiii.
[2] History.com, “New Deal.”
[3] After the chief justice of the American Supreme Court Earl Warren.
[4] Sunstein, “Justice Breyer’s Democratic Pragmatism,” 3–4. Emphasis added.
[5] Such was the perceived hostility to Christianity of this organization that the initials ACLU even today are known in some conservative American Christian communities to stand for Anti-Christ Lawyers Union; Ito, “Demanding Respect.”
[6] Festenstein, “Dewey’s Political Philosophy.”
[7] Missler, “America’s Challenge.” This may now be unavailable but updated versions are available from https://resources.khouse.org/, specifically the “Strategic Perspectives” series.
[8] The First Amendment of the American constitution is perceived to guarantee religious liberty and to prohibit state interference in the practice of religion, see Legal Information Institute, “First Amendment” for a detailed but accessible summary.
[9] Toy, “Spiritual Mobilization,” 80n9; Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 271.
[10] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 48.
[11] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 23. McVicar works from the assumption that Rushdoony was central to the development of American conservatism, and particularly the American Christian right. His work was robust and scholarly. Chalcedon had collaborated with McVicar on this his doctoral work and had a general positive response to the book at the time it was published. Although Chalcedon’s in-house scholar Selbrede did write a lengthy section in his review of “what was wrong with the book,” it seemed to concentrate on details rather than substance. One clear point of disagreement was addressed in the review in conjunction with McVicar where some excised material was republished in the Chalcedon magazine.
Interestingly, his son Mark Rushdoony, now the president of Rushdoony’s Chalcedon foundation, felt more still needed to be said and has now published (2025) a biography of his father where he seeks to re-center an understanding of his primary motivation. This was based on extended articles he had previously published as early as 2016 to establish the record regarding his father, so he clearly felt McVicar’s account needed some supplementation or correction.
My own feeling is taking McVicar with the review article and Mark’s biography helps complete the picture of Rushdoony. As Mark himself writes in the preface, he really has a different interest and motivation to McVicar, and rather than refuting McVicar in any substantive sense, he provides some excellent new biographical material to help us understand his father better beyond his influence on the conservative and Christian reconstruction movements. See Rushdoony, Rousas John Rushdoony; Selbrede, “First Major Book.”
[12] Stott, Involvement, 25.
[13] Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, loc. 2986. Rauschenbusch would have been familiar with the postmillennialism of Augustus Strong (he had dedicated his own Theology of the Social Gospel to him), which perhaps explains some of the idiomatic similarity with Rushdoony in the expression of his program for societal reformation. However, Strong emphasized the “Church militant” and not, as in Rauschenbusch, the “State militant.” See also Stott, Involvement.
[14] It should be noted, though, that Dewey’s relationship to Christianity is an interesting one; he grew up in an evangelical home and worked for a decade (1884–94) under the auspices of the church in Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan Christian Association, attempting to wrestle with the social and political challenges within a Christian framework. By the turn of the century, he had departed, literally and figuratively, from the church, becoming probably the most influential humanist and intellect, within the US, of the first half of the twentieth century, known for his philosophical pragmatism, instrumentalism, theory of education, political activism, and being the first patron of the ACLU. Many consider his pragmatism as defining the overall tenor of American culture; though I would say many of the great industrialists within the West generally were operationally pragmatic, if not philosophically so. I discuss the wide-ranging influence of Dewey in Foundations, §2.6.6.
[15] Of course, it might be argued that the Eusebian theology emerging from the fourth-century merging of church and state after the accommodation of Constantine would be the historical and philosophical precursor of such a view. It was periodically attractive to Christian theologians until the state asserted its supremacy over the church.
[16] Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, loc. 5418.
[17] Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, loc. 5678, 5850.
[18] Rushdoony, Institutes, 450–51.
[19] Rauschenbusch attempted an exposition of his views in A Theology for the Social Gospel, which reads as a respectable attempt after the pattern of systematic theology. The dedication in that work was to Augustus Hopkins Strong, an influential Baptist theologian who was struggling to evolve Baptist theology in the light of Darwinism, whilst attempting to defend orthodox doctrines, such as the virgin birth. Strong was also described by Berkhof as a postmillennialist, which is particularly relevant to our discussion here.
[20] A colorful look at this support is found at Rhodesia and South Africa, “Terrorist Sponsorship.” The WCC itself officially denied that such aid was made, specifying any allocated funds were for “humanitarian” purposes only. However, its moral endorsement provided an enormous incentive and stimulus for direct support of “liberation struggles” around the world by various member bodies; those members were free to do what they wish, and the WCC had “plausible deniability.” The WCC was one of the strongest early supporters and embracers of Gutiérrez’s liberation theology.
[21] Pope Francis (pope, 2013–2025) as a Latin American native was far more amenable to liberation theology and was known for his social activism. The present Catholic bishops of the USA are similarly very “liberal,” issuing a public condemnation of the immigration policies of the second Trump administration and advocating for operationally “open” borders in the name of social justice. Big columns of migrants were seen marching behind crosses on their way to the US border under Biden.
Most controversially, some Catholic NGOs during the same period had allegedly facilitated the movement of “undocumented” Catholic immigrants into the US and most certainly supported such immigration. Francis was notable in that he rolled back some of John Paul’s censuring of the movement, but by this point it, is fair to say that it has lost its cohesiveness and distinctiveness; today, many activists claim allegiance to “liberation theology” with little understanding of the nuanced theology of Gutiérrez.
[22] North, Unholy Spirits, 392.
[23] The irony was compounded when Swaggart had recommended Gary DeMar’s God and Government at a time when many Pentecostals and charismatics were reacting to Rushdoony’s Reconstructionism in a negative and critical manner, only for him to later discover that DeMar was reconstructionist and an associate of Rushdoony.
[24] Rushdoony, Institutes, 1–14.
[25] Rushdoony, Institutes, 34. The creation of the British welfare state followed WWII and the election in 1948 of the first explicitly socialist British Labor Party government under Attlee; the motto was “from the cradle to the grave,” the state was there to take care of you. The establishment of the British “National Health Service” occurred during this period with the explicit aim of making healthcare “free at the point of need,” such was the largesse of the socialist zeal that non-citizens came from across Europe to receive free care. With the recession of the 1970s and the catastrophic collapse for a decade of the British economy, charges were introduced and the quality of care fell with the door firmly closed to “health tourism.”
The NHS has been in a cyclical state of financial crisis ever since and has many major reorganizations since 1979; and as an early-retiring, disillusioned colleague of mine noted (when I worked in the NHS), it had been reorganized back into the original state it was organized out of because of the ideological dedication of some influential staff to the founding ideals, and the refusal to embrace efficiencies and best practices from the private sector (Mrs. Thatcher, in her second term, had attempted to inject a tier of middle managers to deal with waste and inefficiency, which caused a visceral political reaction on the Left and was loathed internally within the NHS). It remains the most cherished British cultural myth and the model of government-run healthcare, despite its innate unaffordability and its state of dysfunction.
A further point of note is that the original architect of the British welfare state, Sir William Beveridge (Beveridge, “Social Insurance and Allied Services”) was a classical liberal and not a socialist. He viewed the welfare state as a “safety net” to support citizens in a temporary crisis; the expectation was still that the citizen would recover and work to support themselves, they could not live off the largesse of the government, courtesy of their taxpayers, via the benefits system, as is now the norm in many Western cultures. My wife, being Japanese (where the welfare state bears far more similarity to Beveridge’s model with extremely limited support), said that her greatest shock moving to Britain was seeing that people could live off the government when they choose not to work.
[26] Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 461–90; Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, 137.
[27] Rushdoony, “Noncompetitive Life.”
[28] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 1. Emphasis added.
[29] Rushdoony, Institutes, 34.
[30] Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, 9. Emphasis added.
[31] It is important to understand that the US Congress had never passed legislation regarding the “right” to abortion or the “banning” of prayer in schools. It was established in a judicial fashion as a matter of precedent through the courts. The justices “found” within the Constitution such principles through exotic and elaborate reasoning. Such judicial overreach and subverting of the anti-centralism of the Constitution was a strong factor in Rushdoony’s hostility to federal action. In recent years, the Trump’s administrations were notable in the first reversals of such “federal” decisions, reversing Roe vs. Wade, thus delegating abortion as an issue for state-level jurisdiction, and dismantling of “Chevron deference,” a foundational doctrine since 1984 that asserted the government agency’s primacy when interpreting “ambiguous” statutes.
This had effectively given enormous powers of coercion to federal government agencies over state legislatures because Congress had often crafted “deliberately ambiguous” language in the bills. The Chevron doctrine then ensured the federal interpretation of such a statute would become normative; see Turrentine, “Supreme Court Ends Chevron Deference.” The author of this piece was defending Chevron deference in the interest of “government efficiency,” whereas conservatives such as Rushdoony were always intensely hostile to it.
[32] In response to criticism and political opposition from Christians, Senator (soon to become president) Johnson surreptitiously inserted a clause within a much larger bill that made it an offense for 501(c)(3) organizations from participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office at the pain of losing their tax-exempt status. As a commentator noted, no one realized the clause was there until Johnson used it against his Christian opponents, but it subsequently proved a very effective psychological barrier to church participation in the political realm. However, much like the later alleged “ban on prayer in schools,” Christians for decades surrendered more than was necessary; a church could still be involved, it would just pay taxes and probably just needed the service of a competent accountant to minimize their liability, much as prayer and Bible study could still occur in schools on a voluntary basis; the legislation was misrepresented for decades by humanist groups as having far stronger prohibitions than were legally present.
[33] Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, loc. 219.
[34] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 63–76.
[35] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 87.
[36] This was the locus of my doctoral studies and the book based upon them: Macneil, Foundations.
[37] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 72–78.
[38] What I sketched in outline in some subsequent sections regarding the philosophical underpinnings, I developed in detail during my doctoral studies, which formed the basis of my Foundations. For the reader interested in exploring any of the themes in this chapter in greater depth, I would direct them there.
[39] Rushdoony, Christianity and the State, loc. 241.
[40] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, 87.
[41] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 3. Van Til remained in-post for almost fifty years; though made Emeritus in 1972, he still taught until 1979.
[42] For example, see chapter 1, “On Method,” in Hodge, Systematic Theology. The treatment of “theology as a science” suggests presuppositions based upon Enlightenment humanist thought rather than Reformation thought. McGrath engages in a lengthy analysis of the domination of Enlightenment thought within the old Princeton in Passion for Truth, 163–200.
[43] Rushdoony, Limits of Reason, loc. 234. As a matter of cross-reference, we were discussing earlier how philosophers of science were similarly rejecting “brute” facts and theories while Van Til was formulating his apologetic. He was arguing, like Quine, that “factuality” was intricately involved in your view of nature. He used a very different vocabulary (being from an idealist milieu) but had come to conclusions similar to these post-positivist philosophers of science. Van Til was not given sufficient credit in this regard as to how fine a philosopher he was (contra William Lane Craig), in addition to a theologian and a Christian. I discuss this in much more detail in my Foundations.
[44] Luther, “De servo arbitrio [Bondage of the will],” (para. 125, Latin) in Martin Luther Collection.
[45] Holder, “John Calvin,” paras. 7–19.
[46] William Edgar, “Introduction” in Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 2.
[47] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 62.
[48] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 62. Kant did attempt an exploration of this issue in his Religion, a work notable for an insight into Kant’s undoubted spirituality and its infrequent mentions in Kantian scholarship.
[49] Van Til, New Modernism and Christianity and Barthianism.
[50] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 19–20.
[51] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 33.
[52] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 33.
[53] Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, xi.
[54] Indeed, Alvin Plantinga’s entire philosophical project might be to establish the “justification, rationality, and warrant for Christian belief”; Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, xi. He is firmly within what is, arguably, an Aristotelian externalist, epistemological model; see Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, x. His unique contribution to Reformed epistemology suggests a far more nuanced and sophisticated view, but his own words cited here of a debt to Aristotle show he is approaching the problem very differently than Van Til. However, Plantinga has also outlined an appeal for Christian philosophy in his seminal “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (reprinted in Sennett, Analytic Theist, 296–315), and his concept of “Christian self-confidence” in that address suggests there must nevertheless be an epistemic independence, which suggests a point of contact with Van Tillianism.
In updating this footnote after my doctoral work, I would now qualify further the assertion of a dependence on Aristotle given above; a careful reading of the reference to Plantinga’s own words confirms this. It does not give Plantinga sufficient credit in his contribution to a distinctively Christian epistemology. It is true that, here, he acknowledges the cogency of Quine’s criticism of modal logic (which Plantinga was defending) as in some way relying on Aristotelian essences. However, that is rather different than what I have suggested here, that his epistemology has a fundamental dependence on Aristotle; it is rather that he shares with Aristotle an externalist emphasis.
He is far more directly dependent on Reid, but even then, he refined and fortified Reid to the degree he was recognized by his peers as making a major original contribution to epistemology. Indeed, in part, my doctoral work explored the congruence of and differences between their philosophical approaches, asserting there is far more in common than is generally appreciated between Van Til and Plantinga, with both seeking an explicitly Christian epistemology, which, happily, I do mention above.
[55] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 36.
[56] Macneil, Foundations, §5.2.
[57] Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 36. Amplification (n. 9) was Edgar’s editorial note.
[58] North and DeMar, Christian Reconstruction, xi–xii.
[59] We will examine in the next chapter that there was a sustained conflict within the orthodox Reformed seminaries over whether Van Til was a “theonomist” in the sense of how Rushdoony, and contemporary Bahnsen, began to use the term in its sociological sense, which is captured by Bahnsen in the response to his critics that appeared in the revised edition of his Theonomy. However, Van Til was explicitly theonomical as an issue of theological principle: the only choice for men was theonomy or autonomy.
We will also see that Bahnsen and Van Til were extremely close, with Van Til indicating it was his desire that Bahnsen should replace him at his retirement and stated that Bahnsen had most clearly understood his position and, thus, was well placed to develop its social and political implications. Van Til’s wishes were not honored and Bahnsen’s time in academia was short, becoming an independent scholar and debater after a brief period at RTS, terminated prematurely over the controversy surrounding his Theonomy. Van Til also responded positively to Rushdoony in a Festschrift written in his honor at retirement (Geehan, Jerusalem and Athens, 348); Rushdoony was the earliest interpreter of Van Til to apply his work (By What Standard [1959]).
[60] Rushdoony, Institutes, 2, 5.
[61] Rushdoony, By What Standard, 203. Emphasis added.
[62] Rushdoony, Institutes, 3.
[63] Acts 15 is an extended pericope on this very issue. Similarly, the theme of virtually the entire book of Galatians centers on contrasting the inward renewal and work of the Spirit with the outward manifestations and customs (Gal 4:9–11).
[64] Acts 15 is an extended pericope on this very issue. Similarly, the theme of virtually the entire book of Galatians centers on contrasting the inward renewal and work of the Spirit with the outward manifestations and customs (Gal 4:9–11).
[65] Rushdoony, Institutes, 3–4.