Father of Reconstructionism

The name of R.J. Rushdoony, the polymathic Reformed theologian, historian, and activist, has appeared with increasing frequency in accounts of the religious right. There is a small industry in screeds warning of the dire threat of theocracy, and Rushdoony plays the role of the father of all theocrats.

It’s a deserved role in some ways. Rushdoony taught that American society (all societies, in fact) should be reconstructed to reflect the legal prescriptions of the “law-word” of God. This could only be done if men and women were regenerated by the Spirit of God, but once made new, human beings were to pick up the Adamic task of taking dominion over the earth in obedience to the Creator. Every realm of human life, every area of scholarship, was to be brought under the Lordship of Jesus, reconstructed in accord with the Bible.

Rushdoony was a postmillenial theologian, which means that he believed that the task of godly dominion and culture-building would actually be accomplished in the course of history. Rushdoony’s vision was rooted in the Dutch Reformed neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper, mediated through Cornelius van Til, spiced with Rushdoony’s studies in American history, his study of medieval political theology with Ernst Kantorowicz at Berkeley, and his interaction with American conservatism.

Given the current field of books on the subject, it’s refreshing to have the comparatively screed-free work of Michael McVicar, a FSU professor of religion whose Christian Reconstruction is the most complete history of the movement, and most complete biography of Rushdoony, yet published. McVicar had access to Rushdoony’s correspondence and journals, and he uses them judiciously in the main to reveal the self-described “very fallible man” (quoted 13). There are some screedish elements, as in his description of Rushdoony’s political theology as “nauseatingly violent” (230). He doesn’t handle the patriarchy of Christian Reconstructionism very subtly. He adopts a rhetoric of shady backrooms and dark conspiracies when talking about Rushdoony’s travels and lectures to small groups in living rooms across the U.S.

Still, it’s a remarkably even-handed handling of a divisive and controversial figure. 

McVicar’s aim, though, wasn’t so much to write a biography of Rushdoony, or a history of the Christian Reconstruction movement, as a contribution to the history of religious conservatism, and an effort to probe “contemporary anxieties about the rise of a seemingly omnipresent federal bureaucracy that threatens to reach deeper into the private lives of ordinary citizens” and “an occasion for reflecting on the ways that scholars, journalists, and average American conceptualize the boundaries between religion and politics” and the interactions of Reconstruction, the Christian Right and Reaganism (16-17). It’s not only a not-screed; it’s a book about the screeds.

One of the surprises of the book (for me) was McVicar’s revelation of how well-connected Rushdoony was within American conservatism. He describes a meeting of the Council for National Policy at which Rushdoony, then Howard Philips, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich and others spoke to Ed Meese about a bill to codify a court ruling that gave the federal government power over Christian schools and colleges. A week later, Rushdoony was part of a small group that met with Meese in person to try to persuade him to convince Reagan to abandon the bill. That evening, Rushdoony had dinner with Patrick Buchanan and his wife (145-7). This is surprising because few conservatives, as McVicar emphasizes, acknowledged their debts to Rushdoony. And that forms another important part of the story: Rushdoony’s isolation at the Chalcedon Foundation, and his sometimes embittered reactions to that isolation. 

McVicar concludes that “the theology of R.J. Rushdoony has become a Rorschach test for the social anxieties of any number of progressives, conservatives, and Christians. No longer simply a theological controversy within conservative evangelicalism, Christian Reconstructionism has become a screen upon which critics project competing interpretations of the proper place of religion in American societies.” Reconstructionism is the archetypal “bad religion,” and opposition to it helps to constitute the “good” evangelicalism that is devoted to the gospel. 

McVicar’s judgment on this use of Reconstructionism is sharp: “Such saccharine discourses conveniently ignore that both evangelicalism and secularism are culturally constituted systems of exclusion facilitated by powerful institutional, legal, and governmental mechanisms. Rushdoony, unlike many of the fundamentalists and evangelicals of his generation, fully grasped the reciprocal relationship between knowledge . . . and power . . . and recognized how they conspired to constitute the limits of citizenship and who could govern whom. He intuited the relationship between the nation-state and total warfare and acknowledged that the intensification of global capitalism posed both problems and unlimited opportunities for American Protestantism” (230).

These last intuitions alone make Rushdoony a thinker who deserves more than screeds.