Michael J. McVicar. Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 309 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2274-3.
Reviewed by Charles Cotherman (University of Virginia)
Published on H-Catholic (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Carolina Armenteros
Given the immense amount of ink that has been spilled in the attempt to understand the genesis and subsequent development of the religious Right in the United States, it is surprising that it has taken so long for a book-length treatment of Rousas John Rushdoony to emerge. Michael J. McVicar’s recent book Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism convincingly demonstrates that this lacuna is more a product of scholars’ indifference than it is of Christian Reconstruction’s insignificance. In McVicar’s telling, the story of Rushdoony and his mini-empire emerges as one that is both interesting—being full of intense theological infighting and plenty of scandalously politically incorrect quotations—and significant. As an individual and as the founder of a small, but disproportionately influential movement, Rushdoony stands as a figure whose influence on the ideology of the religious Right necessitates the type of book-length treatment that McVicar offers. As McVicar notes, “beginning in the early 2000s, Rushdoony became one of the most frequently cited intellectuals of the American right wing. Yet Rushdoony and Reconstruction [alternately termed “Theonomy”] remain understudied and fundamentally underappreciated in the religious, political, and cultural history of the twentieth century” (p. 7).
McVicar positions his dissertation-turned-monograph as “an alternative history of the rise of conservative evangelical activism” rather than as a biography of yet another angry Presbyterian fundamentalist (p. 9). (Though Rushdoony did fit pretty well into all of these categories.) On the whole, McVicar “purposefully avoids any attempt to provide a deeper assessment of Rushdoony’s character or his emotional and psychological states” (p. 11). The result is a book that reads something like George Marsden’s Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003), Catherine Brekus’s Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (2013), or Grant Wacker’s recent treatment of Billy Graham in America’s Pastor (2014). Rushdoony is examined at length, but the unique cultural and political context of the mid-to-late twentieth century also features prominently in this history. Rushdoony is the book’s central character, but he is also a window into the larger conservative movement. Unlike these earlier histories, however, McVicar’s modus operandi is to let Rushdoony’s journals and writings speak for themselves. There is very little engagement with Rushdoony’s own psychological or spiritual state, even in regard to the impact Rushdoony’s marital and relational problems may have exerted on his mind and work. One suspects that in some part McVicar’s methodology differs from that of Marsden, Brekus, and Wacker, who each seem to genuinely like the figures they are studying, because unlike these scholars McVicar finds less to commend in Rushdoony’s personal or public life. A more distant treatment of Rushdoony’s personal life allows McVicar to give Rushdoony a more sympathetic reading than might otherwise be the case. It is only in the book’s conclusion that McVicar alters his generally sympathetic tone and offers a sustained critique of Christian Reconstruction. Even there, however, his most biting prose is saved for the “base opportunism” of Rushdoony’s theological heirs, especially Gary North (p. 228).
It is not too much to say that great sources make this book. At its heart, the volume relies on McVicar’s extensive access to Rushdoony’s private journals and papers, which are housed at the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California. Throughout the volume McVicar’s supplements his gleanings from this largely unresearched trove of materials with extensive archival research, a number of personal interviews with leading Reconstructionist figures, and a wide reading of applicable primary and secondary literature. At one point he even tracks down Rushdoony’s FBI file, thus demonstrating that by the early 1960s Rushdoony’s profile had grown large enough to solicit some national attention. In McVicar’s deft hands these sources come together to shape a history that shed new light on the rise of the religious Right in America. McVicar is to be commended for finally bringing them to the attention of the academic community.
McVicar’s account begins by locating Rushdoony as the son of a an ancient Armenian Christian family forced to flee growing Turkish violence in the early years of the twentieth century. Upon the family’s arrival in Kingsburg, California, the elder Rushdoony started the Armenian Martyr’s Presbyterian Church for the sizable Armenian immigrant community in the region.
His father’s choice of place and career impacted young Rousas. By the mid-1930s the younger Rushdoony had enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, with the intention of becoming a Presbyterian minister. While there he came under the tutelage of the renowned German Jewish intellectual émigré Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, who did much to encourage Rushdoony’s desire for an academic life. Eventually he would go on to realize this dream through his work as a writer and leading public intellectual for the religious Right. In his early years, however, it was his calling to ministry that filled most of his days.
After taking the time to earn two more degrees (a master’s degree in education from Berekely in 1940 and a divinity degree from the Pacific School of Religion in 1944) and marry Arda June Gent at the end of 1943, Rushdoony and his new bride spent the better part of a decade serving as a missionaries on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. During this time Rushdoony’s academic, political, and theological aspirations matured. Freshly inspired by Cornelius Van Til’s The New Modernism (1946), Rushdoony undertook what was to be a lifelong project of developing Van Til’s presuppositional method. As Van Til and Rushdoony understood it, presuppositionalism made it impossible to carry on a legitimate debate with anyone who refused to acknowledge the Christian foundation of all knowledge. Like the Reformed Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper before him, Van Til developed this thought around the idea of antithesis. Rushdoony, like his contemporary Francis Schaeffer, found this method of reasoning appealing. As McVicar notes, “Rushdoony embraced Van Til’s theology partly because of its political implications: Van Til’s antithesis between Christian and non-Christian forms of knowing justified educational separatism and secession” (p. 43). As Rushdoony prepared to battle for American society it helped to imagine that his opponent’s logic was hopelessly flawed.
By 1952 the tedium of missionary life and a growing desire to enter wider streams of theological and political discourse prompted Rushdoony to move with his family to a settled pastorate at Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Santa Cruz, California. Yet even as Rushdoony’s career and commitment to presuppositionalism solidified, his marriage was falling apart. After Arda filed the paperwork the two divorced in 1959, and Rushdoony refused to discus the matter further. In 1962 he remarried Dorothy Barbara Kirkwood. Both Dorothy and her first husband, Thomas Kirkwood, had been members of Rushdoony’s church, and both had been strong supporters of Rushdoony as late as 1958. McVicar steers clear of a full examination of this relationship, whose origins he simply labels “murky” (p. 57). On an issue where McVicar could have drawn more blood, it is notable that he does not.
Throughout the late fifties and early sixties Rushdoony forged and severed more than connubial ties. In 1957 his attempts to publish the Westminster Herald, a journal dedicated to attacking liberalism in the mainline churches, caused him to run afoul of denominational leadership. One former general assembly moderator even went so far as to condemn him as “devil-possessed,” a charge which led Rushdoony to quip in characteristic self-confidence that the statement “indicates a return to conservative theology.... Perhaps having recognized the devil’s existence, he may even admit God’s” (p. 56). Despite his own confidence, however, the situation between the denomination and the ambitious minister deteriorated. In 1958 Rushdoony and sixty members of his church seceded from the PCUSA to join J. Gresham Machen’s Orthdox Presbyterian Church (OPC). Even this relationship was destined to be short-lived. By 1962 Rushdoony was ready to leave the trappings of the ministry for good. A job offer at the highly conservative, well-financed Volker Fund came just in time.
The Volker Fund proved to be just the institutional launching pad Rushdoony needed. By the time Rushdoony joined, the conservative think tank had perfected a “fusionism” that brought classical liberals and libertarians together with militant anticommunists and traditionalist neoconservatives. Richard Weaver’s emphasis on the power of ideas lay close to the heart of the fund’s fusionist project. As McVicar notes, fusionist conservatives like Rushdoony worked out of a paradigm in which “the social ills of the United States can be boiled down to bad ideas and not structural inequalities” (p. 70). Rushdoony agreed with this framework for social reform. He did not, however, agree with the laxity of Christian conviction he witnessed among his peers. With a select number of his superiors he helped facilitate a purge of atheists at the Volker Fund. Once purged the Volker Fund was renamed the Center for American Studies (CAS). But even the newly Christianized organization was not rigorously Christian enough for Rushdoony’s sectarian standards. Refusing to take no for an answer, Rushdoony continued pressing for an increasingly strict, thoroughly Reformed consensus until the CAS let him go in September of 1963. According to McVicar “the combined failures of the Westminster Herald and the CAS effectively ended the second stage of Rushdoony’s development” (p. 77). Now he would be on his own, or at least almost on his own.
It is worth noting that McVicar’s treatment of Rushdoony’s involvement with the philanthropists at the Volker Fund adds shades of nuance to what is sometimes a fairly vague picture of religious and conservative funding. All too often the contributions of a select few oilmen (e.g., the Stewart brothers in the early part of the twentieth century and J. Howard Pew in the century’s middle decades) receive lengthy treatment in histories of American evangelicalism, but other streams of financial support are largely neglected. McVicar’s treatment of the Volker Fund demonstrates the crucial link between other wealthy philanthropists in the conservative movement and the early ideological formation of the religious Right.
The turning point in Rushdoony’s life came in the summer of 1965 when a group of women from the suburbs of Los Angeles approached him following one of his talks. After identifying themselves as members of a patriotic group called Women for America, Inc., they offered to pay Rushdoony a small living stipend if he would move to LA and lead them in a weekly Bible study. Rushdoony jumped at the chance. With the exception of his commitment to lead the weekly study the money came with few strings attached. He would finally be free to follow his own intellectual, theological, and political instincts. At this point McVicar’s account explicitly draws on and/or adds texture to the work scholars such as Lisa McGirr (Suburban Warriors, 2001), Donald Critchlow (Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 2005), and Darren Dochuk (From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, 2007) have done on the significance of suburban conservatism in the postwar era. As with other notable conservatives, it was in some part Rushdoony’s partnership with conservative women at the grassroots that eventually helped to propel him into national prominence. Buoyed by his new relationship with Women for America Rushdoony was finally afforded the chance to do what he loved—dedicate himself to the study and propagation of a specific brand of biblicism. By the end of 1965 he had coined his project “Reconstruction,” hired his future son-in-law Gary North as a research assistant, and begun forming the Chalcedon Foundation. Together these efforts were Rushdoony’s first major steps toward constructing what McVicar describes as “a rigorous brand of Christian education built around biblical law” (p. 98). Theonomy had been born.
McVicar’s account hits its stride in the fourth chapter. While the first three chapters provide much that is helpful, it is only after Rushdoony teams up with Women for America and creates the Chalcedon Foundation that his ideas begin to have the wider influence that he had hoped. As Rushdoony entered this new phase of ministry one of his first encounters was a negative run-in with the editorial staff at Christianity Today. With its all-star cast of J. Howard Pew, L. Nelson Bell, Billy Graham, Harold J. Ockenga, and Carl F. H. Henry, the journal (founded in 1956) functioned as the gatekeeper to mainstream evangelicalism in America. After failing to win the support of both Henry and the extremely pro-business, pro-free market Pew, Rushdoony gave up on the evangelical establishment and its leaders’ hopes of forging a respectable middle way. Rebuffed by the evangelical gatekeepers, Rushdoony turned toward alternative subsets of American Christians. He eventually found a receptive home among proponents of private Christian and homeschool education.
From chapter 5 on McVicar’s book reads like a who’s who of American evangelicalism and the religious Right. With the publication of his multivolume tome The Institutes of Biblical Law in 1973, Rushdoony laid the groundwork for influence within a conservative movement that was coalescing around fears of increasing statism and the expanding role of the IRS in policing private Christian schools. In just a few years the issue of abortion would further fuel similar sentiments among conservative Christians in America. Rushdoony’s long-standing antistatism positioned him to ride the conservative wave over the next two decades. By the mid-1980s Rushdoony’s ideas had subtly, but undeniably, influenced some of the biggest voices in American religious conservatism. From D. James Kennedy, the influential pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, to other national and international figures such as Pat Robertson and Francis Schaeffer, Rushdoony’s ideas were incorporated and distilled to fit into the ministerial and political ambitions of these figures. Much to Rushdoony’s dismay, however, few of these individuals cited him when they drew from his theological wells (p. 206). Rushdoony had already become a lightning rod for controversy. Thus even while his ideas gained influence within the writing and preaching of evangelical gurus, association with Rushdoony himself was typically avoided. This was especially true after Rushdoony’s old nemesis, Christianity Today, published a negative cover story on Christian Reconstruction in 1987.
But if Rushdoony had his enemies, he also had, for a time at least, a strong group of extremely committed protégés. Foremost among these was Gary North. From the early 1960s throughout most of the 1970s North served as Rushdoony’s right-hand man. After earning his PhD in economics at the University of California, Riverside, North furthered Reconstruction and antistatist economics through his own think tank, the Institute for Christian Economics. If there is anyone in this book who comes across as thoroughly dislikable it is North, not Rushdoony. From his strictly pragmatic courtship of Rushdoony’s daughter Sharon—whom North noted that he courted “not because I was in love with her, but because I respected her”—to his eventual betrayal and calculated defamation of Rushdoony following a personal falling out in the early 1980s, North comes across in the worst possible light (p. 153).
In addition to North, Rushdoony also attracted a young Christian lawyer named John Whitehead and a budding theologian named Greg Bahnsen. After spending most of the late 1970s working closely with Rushdoony, Whitehead teamed up with Franky Schaeffer, the son of Francis Schaeffer, in the early 1980s to found the Rutherford Institute, an influential Christian legal advocacy group. Gradually distancing himself from Rushdoony himself, Whitehead continued to promote many of his mentor’s ideas. Similarly, Bahnsen showed what Theonomy might look like when communicated by a theological professional. After he joined the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) in Jackson, Mississipi, in 1975, Bahnsen demonstrated that he had learned much from his mentor’s style. A natural scholar, Bahnsen published one of Christian Reconstruction’s most important volumes, Theonomy in Christian Ethics, in 1977 and assembled a loyal cadre of like-minded students during his first years at the seminary. He also infuriated most of the faculty. By 1978 RTS decided not to renew his contract. By that point he had already passed on Reconstructionist principles to a new generation. Students such as Gary DeMar and David Chilton went on to become authors who promoted Bahnsen and Rushdoony’s thought in their books. Some went even further. Paul Jennings Hill, one of Bahnsen’s most notorious protégés, went on to use Theonomy to construct a theological justification for vigilante justice that eventually led him to murder Dr. John Britton in cold blood outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, in the summer of 1994.
By the time Hill took it upon himself to made the war of ideas a literal gunfight, Rushdoony and the movement he birthed were well past their prime. Throughout much of the 1980s caustic infighting between Rushdoony and the group of Reconstructionists assembled under Gary North in Tyler, Texas, had made the movement look increasingly unappealing to mainstream evangelicals. Yet the shunning Rushdoony and Theonomy received at the hands of evangelical outlets like Christianity Today had mixed results. Evangelical blacklisting forced Rushdoony to focus on subsets of evangelicalism (e.g., homeschool families) rather than the evangelical mainstream as a whole. As a result, many evangelicals did not even see Christian Reconstruction coming. McVicar is especially keen on this point: “as Christian Reconstructionism’s influence became more apparent in classrooms, courtrooms, and small churches, it caught many evangelicals observers off guard” (p. 197). Uninformed, many evangelicals found concepts of this “dominion” theology (i.e., the idea that Christians were called to assert their dominion on society) appealing, especially as these “dominion men” distanced themselves from the movement’s controversial founder. Through a watered-down theology of dominion and Rushdoony’s rigorous work on behalf of Christian homeschoolers Theonomy survived, if not in its entirety, to influence another generation of evangelical leaders and organizations. Like those who went before them, modern-day proponents of Rushdoony’s ideas often take the liberty of borrowing his ideas without linking his name directly to their work. But make no mistake, McVicar is right to connect the dots between David Barton’s efforts to Christianize America’s history and Doug Phillips’s Vision Forum ministry (now defunct following Phillips’s admission of an inappropriate relationship with a woman who was not his wife). A part of the larger “Quiverfull” movement, Phillips, the son of Rushdoony’s close friend Howard Phillips, had advocated a return to Christian patriarchy and “the necessity of building large family dynasties, generations of families with six, eight, ten or more children” that could “raise a godly seed for Christ and the salvation of America” (pp. 223-224). Though hardly a quotation of The Institutes of Biblical Law, statements like these demonstrate that Rushdoony’s emphasis on dominion is still alive and well within pockets of American evangelicalism.
With the exception of a few small errors (e.g., the wrong publication year for Van Til’s The New Modernism, p. 34 and his reference to “Dan” Barton rather than David Barton, pp. 196, 297), McVicar’s work lives up to the author’s claim that it “offers an alternative history of the rise of conservative evangelical activism” (p. 9). This is a side of American evangelicalism whose influence has far exceeded the amount of scholarship it has generated in the academy. One hopes that McVicar’s work signals a change in this tide. This just might be the case. Oxford is poised to release Julie J. Ingersoll’s Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction in August 2015.
In the end McVicar’s book is indeed a “landmark work,” far surpassing in scope and depth of research anything previously written about Rushdoony or the movement he birthed. Not only is this volume a much-welcomed contribution to the scholarship of religious conservatism and evangelicalism in America, it also serves a model for scholars who are writing about persons whose opinions differ markedly from their own. McVicar’s Rushdoony is an intensely human figure, who, as McVicar notes, is “neither a saint nor a monster” (p. 13). Instead of leaning to either extreme, McVicar presents Rushdoony as “a very fallible man” (Rushdoony’s own evaluation of himself) who embodied “a complex mix of hubris and humility” (p. 13). McVicar’s Rushdoony offers plenty of room for critique, but he also offers a surprising amount of room for respect. In the end McVicar uses this tension to pose one of the book’s framing questions: what constitutes “good” and “bad” religion in America? Christian Reconstruction argues that the answer to this question is not as straightforward as some may assume.
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Citation:
Charles Cotherman. Review of McVicar, Michael J., Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism.
H-Catholic, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44026
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