Rushdoony

Molly Worthen has an interesting piece on Rushdoony and Reconstructionism in the June issue of Church History . She is hardly uncritical, but also notes that even while “journalists have made too much of reconstructionism’s grip on mainstream evangelicalism, they ahve also overlooked its real significance in the development of conservative Christian thought.” Her article aims to establish “groundwork for an assessment of Christian reconstructionism’s ultimate importance that is less melodramatic and more complex than that offered by recent ominous exposes of America’s Bible thumpers.”

Her treatment of Rushdoony’s thought is illuminating, and makes a number of intriguing points.

First, she argues that the foundation of Rushdoony’s work is not the Institutes of Biblical Law but his earlier work on the early creeds, which eliminated the ancient notion of divine kingship. Though she acknowledges that Rushdoony’s view of the importance of Chalcedon “may seem eccentric,” it is in some ways “closer to the understanding of the fourth and fifth centuries, where Christology was not an abstruse debate among churchmen, but a matter of immediate political concern.” Moderns had forgotten the lesson of Chalcedon, Rushdoony believed, by attributing divine prerogatives to the state.

Second, Worthen notes that Rushdoony’s opposition to public education arises from his opposition to the twin idolatries of modern society. Public education was “the nexus point of modern societies twin sins of idolatry: the worship of autonomous human reason, and the worship of the state.”

Third, Worthen several times links quotations from Rushdoony with quotations from Burke, to illuminating effect. Perhaps the best of these is her brief discussion of prejudice, which, in Burke’s words “renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature.”

Fourth, Worthen probes the charges that Rushdoony was a racist and Holocaust denier. She gives a long quotation from Politics of Guilt and Pity in which Rushdoony argues that the modern state manufactures a narrative of white guilt “in order to produce a submissive populate” and to bind the citizens to the state. Worthen argues that this is not at all “garden-variety prejudice,” and explains Rushdoony’s point by reference to his view of American exceptionalism. She concludes that “Rushdoony was radically anti-cosmopolitan.”

Fifth, she highlights Rushdoony’s notion that law is a state of war, which puts the reconstructionist advocacy of capital punishment front and center: “the most controversial aspect of Christian reconstructionism is its call for the public execution of individuals who commit acts that, while considered by some to be immoral, are no longer considered criminal offenses - let alone capital crimes - by modern western society, such as homosexual acts, adultery, and filial disrespect.”