Old Geneva & the New World
LEITHART, PETER J.
Old Geneva & the New World The Reverend Rousas J. Rushdoony, 1916-2001. BY PETER J. LEITHART "Revisionism," the Rev-• • I W erend Rousas J. Rush-doony wrote in The -A- Nature of the American...
...it presents a "worldview" that embraces every area of life...
...Throughout his writings, he insisted that this could not be achieved by federal fiat...
...In one sense, the neglect of Rushdoony's death is hardly surprising...
...Irascible though he was, Rushdoony had another side...
...Changing the laws was not the first step toward realizing a Christian culture...
...Strongly influenced by the Dutch tradition of Calvinist philosophy and social thought, Rushdoony Peter J. Leithart teaches theology and literature at New St...
...After ordination to the Presbyterian ministry, he spent several years as a missionary in San Francisco and Idaho...
...His writing played a major role in two of the most important developments in the past half-century of American religious life: the spread of Christian education in private and home schools, and the rise of the Christian Right...
...The proliferation of "biblical score-cards," which evaluate politicians and political issues by biblical principles, owes something to his work, as does the flood of "Save America" seminars, conferences, and movements...
...The Enlightenment's pretense to pure, objective knowledge was therefore not just an intellectual dead end, but an attempt to systematize the temptation Satan offered Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: "You shall be as gods...
...But Christianity, Rushdoony insisted, cannot be confined to a small "religious" sector of life...
...Hearts must be changed first...
...In The Messianic Character of American Education (1963), Rushdoony exposed the religious assumptions that animated the theory of public education from Horace Mann to John Dewey...
...In place of prisons, Scripture requires restitution for crimes against property (a point picked up by Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship...
...Rushdoony was not content to assail statism...
...Modern education is committed to a vision of social salvation through education and to a religion of humanism, where man rather than God stands at the center of all things...
...Churches warred and split over the finer points of Reconstructionism...
...Still, widespread conversion would mean political and cultural transformation...
...Rushdoony indirectly affected Pat Robertson and D. James Kennedy, and had a very direct impact on Constitution party founder Howard Phillips, who embraced Calvinism under Rush-doony's influence...
...just as regularly, they slouched back a few years later, having abruptly and mysteriously disappeared from the pages of Rushdoony's monthly Chalcedon Report...
...By stressing the uniqueness of Christ's union of human and divine, Chalcedon struck a death blow to the ancient tradition of divine kingship...
...An American original, if there ever was one...
...Dissent from the master was not tolerated by the master himself...
...Of equal significance was Rush-doony's nearly single-handed revival of "postmillennialism," the belief that the world is destined to be Christianized at the end of time...
...I interviewed him, many years ago, and asked him what the Reconstruction movement was aiming for...
...Not all of the faults and follies of the movement can be attributed to Rush-doony's followers...
...Some disciples rushed recklessly into political activism, ignorant of the workings of modern politics and heedless of Rushdoony's own warnings that politics was not the means of salvation...
...Though the number of card-carrying postmillennialists is still small, the confidence of the Christian Right expresses something of this optimistic vision of the future of society...
...This doesn't mean knowledge is impossible...
...The most immediate—and least attractive—effect of Rushdoony's books and newsletters was the creation of the "Christian Reconstructionist Movement," a loose and fractious collection of writers, activists, and pastors dedicated to "reconstructing" Christian civilization...
...He named his think-tank after the Council of Chalcedon (a.d...
...In addition to scores of books on strictly theological subjects, he published two collections of essays on the American political system, a history of Western philosophy from the standpoint of the Trinity, a treatise on the political and sociological implications of early Christian creeds, several books on education, a study of modern psychology entitled Revolt Against Maturity, a monograph on Freud, and a prophetic exploration of the "politics of pornography," not to mention several decades of monthly newsletters and lectures...
...You could almost hear the leather creaking and smell the cup of tea on the side table...
...Early in the twentieth century, however, it was displaced by varieties of "premillennial-ism," which teaches that the world is destined to degenerate until Christ returns to rescue it from self-destruction...
...All individuals have "certain pre-theoreti-cal and essentially religious presuppositions" that shape their perspectives on the world, Rushdoony argued...
...He spent his entire life outside the mainstream...
...Whether he knew it or not, John Ashcroft was echoing one of Rushdoony's characteristic slogans when he made his much-vilified confession "No King but Jesus...
...A son of immigrants, Rushdoony proved a thoroughly American intellectual—in the old-fashioned sense: an independent-minded autodidact and polymath, who approached even the most esoteric matters with an earthy practicality...
...This theological critique underlies Rushdoony's work on education...
...Tim LaHaye's best-selling Left Behind novels are classics of pop-premillenialism...
...wrote on an astonishing array of topics...
...For Christians, then, every subject in school has to be studied and taught in the light of Christian truth...
...For Rushdoony, attacking neutrality was a theological imperative...
...And especially in the massive two volumes of The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973 and 1982), Rushdoony explored how biblical law could resolve modern political dilemmas...
...Rushdoony's books provided the starting point for the development of thoroughly Christian curricula in thousands of private schools—and home schools—across the country...
...He pointed out that the Mosaic law enacted the death penalty for abortion, adultery, sodomy, and certain forms of incest, and he argued that these penalties are still just today...
...Rushdoony's books took on a Tal-mudic authority, and Reconstructionism became in some quarters a closed ideology, providing instant and simple answers to every possible question...
...Such opinions made Rushdoony too controversial for many to embrace openly, and his influence on the Christian Right is therefore hard to assess...
...In many respects, his political vision was a kind of Christian libertarianism...
...In 1965, he founded the Chalcedon Foundation, the Christian think-tank that served as the vehicle for his work for the remainder of his life...
...Postmillennialism was popular among nineteenth-century American Protestants...
...A string of disciples made their way to Vallecito to work with Chalcedon...
...Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian parents who had fled the Turkish genocide, he went on to study English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also finished a master's degree in education before taking a degree in theology from the Pacific School of Religion...
...And yet, despite this isolation, Rushdoony may end up having as great an impact on American life as other, better known American theologians of the past century...
...At the heart of Rushdoony's thought was an attack on what he called the "myth of neutrality"—an attack so overwhelmingly premodern, it could occasionally sound postmodern...
...Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho...
...On social issues, however, he was anything but libertarian...
...BY PETER J. LEITHART "Revisionism," the Rev-• • I W erend Rousas J. Rush-doony wrote in The -A- Nature of the American System, "is long overdue in American history...
...Academic theologians, even conservative Calvinists who shared his basic theological outlook, panned Rush-doony...
...He had a lengthy feud with his son-in-law, Gary North, a prominent Reconstructionist...
...Modern states may have shed the trappings of divine kingship, but, Rushdoony claimed, their ambitions are equally messianic: There is only one divine king, and he does not reside in Washington...
...Since I was speaking to the commanding officer of the movement, I was expecting something like a five-year plan...
...The tapes were a personal invitation to Rush-doony's study...
...451), the church council that formulated the orthodox dogma that God and man were united without confusion in the person of Christ...
...If the public schools' monopoly of education is going to be shaken by the earthquake of Christian education, the epicenter will have been a small town in the mountains of northern California...
...A flat tax should replace the income tax, while inheritance and property taxes should be abolished...
...Arguing that political systems are no more neutral than educational philosophies, Rushdoony sought in his political writings to uncover the humanistic pretensions of the modern state...
...This is a creed with profound political implications...
...And, in the end, he had an impact...
...At the time of his death, he was working in Vallecito, California—hardly the hub of American intellectual life...
...Recon-structionism was embraced by hardcore conspiratorialists and militia groups to produce the very definition of "fever swamp...
...Welfare, education, and social security are responsibilities of the family and church, rather than the state...
...Rushdoony replied, "I am simply a servant of Jesus Christ...
...For many years, he produced a monthly series of tapes, From the Easy Chair, in which he would comment on contemporary events, converse with his Chalcedon colleagues, read poetry, and casually review books (he is reputed to have read a book a day for fifty years and accumulated a library of forty thousand volumes...
...it simply means that human knowledge is not divine knowledge...
...He attempted to rethink political theory, law, community, property, economics, and justice from an explicitly Christian viewpoint, and advocated establishing a Christian civilization and political order...
...He was an eccentric and a genius, a man of follies and a man with some genuine greatness in him...
...Like most small, ambitious, highly motivated movements, Christian Reconstructionism has its loopy side...
...That was nearly forty years ago, but the fact that Rushdoony's death on February 8, 2001, was widely ignored is a sign we're still waiting to see the revisionism for which he hoped...
...He is King over everything and everyone, and my only goal is to press his crown rights into every area of life and thought...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 27
