Rousas John Rushdoony (April 25, 1916 – February 8, 2001) was a Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian and is widely credited as the father of Christian Reconstructionism and an inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. His prolific writings have exerted considerable influence on the Christian right.
Rushdoony was born in New York City, the son of recently arrived Armenian immigrants. Before his parents fled the Armenian Genocide of 1915, his ancestors had lived in a remote area near Mount Ararat for about 2000 years. There are claims that since the year 320, every generation of the Rushdoony family has produced a Christian priest or minister. Within weeks of arriving in America, his parents moved to Kingsburg, California, where his father founded an Armenian-speaking Presbyterian church. Except for a time when his father pastored a church in Detroit, Rushdoony grew up on the family farm in Kingsburg.
Rushdoony attended public schools where he learned English. He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1938, a teaching credential in 1939 and an M.A. in Education in 1940. He also attended the Pacific School of Religion, a Congregational and Methodist seminary in Berkeley, California, from which he graduated in 1944, the same year he was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Rushdoony then served for eight and a half years as a missionary to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in a remote area of Nevada. In 1953 Rushdoony became pastor of a church in Santa Cruz, California, a small retirement town on the coast.
It was during his mission to the Native Americans that Rushdoony began writing. His first book, By What Standard? was published in 1959. In the early 1960s he was active in the homeschooling movement, appearing as an expert witness to defend the rights of homeschoolers. He moved to Los Angeles in 1965. That year he founded the Chalcedon Foundation; the monthly Chalcedon Report, which Rushdoony edited, began appearing that October.
Rushdoony had five children with his first wife, Arda June Gent Rushdoony, who died in 1977. He married his second wife, Dorothy Barbara Ross Rushdoony, who became the step mother of his children, in 1962. She died in 2003. His daughter Sharon is married to Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist writer and economic historian. Rushdoony's only son, the Rev. Mark R. Rushdoony, is the current president of the Chalcedon Foundation and editor of the Chalcedon Report. R. J. Rushdoony died in 2001 with his children at his side. Rushdoony read at least one book a day, in its entirety, for over fifty years of his life; marking each book in the margins, and making an index of its main ideas in the rear. It has been estimated that he read over 28,000 books completely in his lifetime. He is also said to have had about 60,000 plus books in his own personal library.
Rushdoony began his career as a writer in 1958, the same year he left the PCUSA and joined the more conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He began popularizing, albeit densely, the works of Calvinist philosophers Cornelius Van Til and Herman Dooyeweerd into a short survey of contemporary humanism called By What Standard?. Arguing for a Calvinist system of thought, Rushdoony dealt with subjects as broad as epistemology and cognitive metaphysics and as narrow as the psychology of religion and predestination. He wrote a book, The One And The Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy, using Van Tillian Presuppositional philosophy to critique various aspects of secular humanism. He also wrote many essays and book reviews, published in such venues as the Westminster Theological Journal. Like Van Til, Rushdoony's philosophy was based on the presupposition that the Bible is true.
Homeschooling
Rushdoony's next focus was on education, especially on behalf of homeschooling, which he saw as a way to combat the intentionally secular nature of the U.S. public school system. He vigorously attacked progressive school reformers such as Horace Mann and John Dewey and argued for the dismantling of the state's influence in education in three works: Intellectual Schizophrenia (a general and concise study of education), The Messianic Character of American Education (a history and castigation of public education in the U.S.), and The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (a parent-oriented pedagogical statement).
History
Rushdoony then pursued history – of the world, of the United States, and of the church. He famously maintained that Calvinistic Christianity provided the intellectual roots for the American Revolution and had thus always had an influential impact in American history. The American Revolution, according to Rushdoony, was a "conservative counterrevolution" to preserve American liberties from British usurpation and it owed nothing to the Enlightenment. He further argued that the United States Constitution was a secular document in appearance only; it didn't need to establish Christianity as an official religion since the states were already Christian establishments. He would further this study in his works on American ideology and historiography, This Independent Republic: Studies in the Nature and Meaning of American History and The Nature of the American System.
Christian Reconstruction
Rushdoony's most important area of writing, however, was law and politics, as expressed in his small book of popular essays Law & Liberty and discussed in much greater detail in his three-volume, 1,894-page magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law. With a title modeled after Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, Rushdoony's Institutes was arguably his most influential work. In the book, he proposed that Old Testament law should be applied to modern society and that there should be a Christian theonomy, a concept developed in his colleague Greg Bahnsen's controversial tome Theonomy and Christian Ethics, which Rushdoony heartily endorsed. In the Institutes, Rushdoony supported the reinstatement of the Mosaic law's penal sanctions. Under such a system, the list of civil crimes which carried a death sentence would include homosexuality, adultery, incest, lying about one's virginity, bestiality, witchcraft, idolatry or apostasy, public blasphemy, false prophesying, kidnapping, rape, and bearing false witness in a capital case. Although supporting the separation of church and state at the national level, Rushdoony understood both institutions as under the rule of God, and thus he conceived secularism as posing endless false antitheses, which his massive work addresses in considerable detail. In short, he sought to cast a vision for the reconstruction of society based on Christian principles.
The book was also critical of democracy. He wrote that "the heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state ... Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies." He elsewhere said that "Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy," and characterized democracy as "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."
Rushdoony's work has been used by Dominion Theology advocates who attempt to implement a Christian theocracy, a government subject to Biblical law, especially the Torah, in the United States. Authority, behavioural boundaries, economics, penology and the like would all be governed by biblical principles in Rushdoony's vision, but he also proposed a wide system of freedom, especially in the economic sphere, and claimed Ludwig von Mises as an intellectual mentor; he called himself a Christian libertarian.
Rushdoony was the founder in 1965 of the Chalcedon Foundation and the editor of its monthly magazine, the Chalcedon Report. He also published the Journal of Christian Reconstruction and was an early board member of the Rutherford Institute, founded in 1982 by John Whitehead. He later received an honorary Doctorate from Valley Christian University for his book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum.
Rushdoony was, and remains, a controversial figure, as does the Christian Reconstructionist movement that he founded. Many of Dominionism's critics are, in fact, other Christians. "The main weakness of the Reconstructionists' argument," says one such critic, lies in the fact that
the nation of Israel was unique in world history as God's specially selected and covenanted people. For them, and for them alone, He legislated directly, adding specific laws and penalties to the already existing moral law (without supplanting it). His purpose for doing this was to keep the Israelites "shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed" (Galatians 3:23). It should be remembered that the children of Israel had just spent four hundred years as residents of a pagan civilization, most of which time they were in bondage there as slaves. With few exceptions, they were themselves pagans at heart, as their constant backsliding into Baal-worship demonstrated, and a severe law-code was necessary to preserve the godly line through which Christ would come into the world.
Theologian Meredith G. Kline seconds this critique, maintaining that Reconstructionism makes the mistake of failing to understand the special prophetic role of Biblical Israel, calling it "a delusive and grotesque perversion of the teachings of scripture." Kline's student Lee Irons further argues that "Ironically ... it is the wholesale rejection (not revival) of theocratic principles that is desperately needed today if the church is to be faithful to the task of gospel witness entrusted to her in the present age.... It is only as the church ... puts aside the lust for worldly influence and power - that she will be a positive presence in society."
The evangelical Christian Research Institute (not to be confused with the Institute for Creation Research, or ICR) asks an even more basic question: are Christians supposed to be taking dominion at all? In the CRI's journal Robert Bowman, Jr. argued that "the Bible never commands Christians to take dominion. A search for such a mandate proves fruitless. The Bible never even hints that this is to be a responsibility of the church between Christ's first and second comings."
Even Cornelius Van Til, whose thinking was so influential with Rushdoony, distanced himself from the father of Reconstructionism. In a 1972 letter Van Til wrote:
Then too I am frankly a little concerned about the political views of Mr. Rushdoony and Mr. North and particularly if I am correctly informed about some of the views Gary North has with respect to the application of Old Testament principles to our day. My only point is that I would hope and expect that they would not claim that such views are inherent in the principles I hold.
Other critics have been much harsher. Pointing to Rushdoony's dislike of democracy and tolerance and the wide use he would make of the death penalty, the British Centre for Science Education called him "a man every bit as potentially murderous as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or anyone else you may want to name amongst the annals of evil" and "a thoroughly evil man."
Accusations of Racism and Holocaust Denialmoreless
Rushdoony has been accused of Holocaust denial and racism. Rushdoony believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as "unequal yoking", should be made illegal. He also opposed "enforced integration", referred to Southern slavery as "benevolent", and said that "some people are by nature slaves". In The Institutes of Biblical Law he calculated Jewish deaths during the Holocaust to be between 896,292 and 1.2 million, suggested that many of those died of epidemics, and accused Holocaust survivors and researchers of bearing "false witness" against Germans. Rushdoony states, "The false witness born during World War II with respect to Germany is especially notable and revealing. The charge is repeatedly made that six million innocent Jews were slain by the Nazis, and the figure—and even larger figures—is now entrenched in the history books. Poncins, in summarizing the studies of the French Socialist, Paul Rassinier, himself a prisoner in Buchenwald, states: Rassinier reached the conclusion that the number of Jews who died after deportation is approximately 1,200,000 and this figure, he tells us, has finally been accepted as valid by the Centre Mondial de Documentation Juive Contemporaine. Likewise he notes that Paul Hilberg, in his study of the same problem, reached a total of 896,292 victims. Very many of these people died of epidemics; many were executed..."
Rushdoony, in his book Foundations of Social Order, criticized Christians who in his view identified “‘God’ with the city, with the ‘spick, black nigger, bastard, Buddhahead, and kike,’ with ‘all men,’ and calls for communion with all men as they are This concept runs deeply through the so-called Civil Rights Revolution.”
“The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo ['civil rights'], a modernized power drive.”
The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 61
Moral order establishes society in more than itself; it grounds society in truth and thereby makes possible the health and welfare of society as a whole, and it provides the best possible framework for the liberty and development of man.
Law & Liberty, p. 110
Dissolve man's self-government, and you make a totalitarian authority over him a social necessity.
Law & Liberty, p. 18
When man's sinful will is the only source of the law, as it is for humanism, then the law becomes legalized robbery, which is, after all, the simplest and best definition of socialism.
Law & Liberty, pps. 91-2
The Western liberal pays lips service to a few Christian ideas, holds to a Marxist environmentalism, and an English parliamentarianism: like the mule, he is a hybrid and just as sterile.
Law & Liberty, p. 117
Nothing is more productive of social chaos than the attempt to create a perfect system.
Law & Liberty, p. 122
On political infrastructure of a Christian theocracy: "The world is in rebellion against that [Christ's] government. From these rebels and revolutionists, we hear much talk about "peace" [...] and a great deal of hostility to government. But Isaiah tied the two together: "Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end". True peace, in other words, is a product of true government. When there is true law and order, then there is also true peace. Abolish law and order, and you abolish peace and create a situation of revolutionary warfare and anarchy. By abandoning Christ as Savior and King, by abandoning His government and peace, we are moving into a world of perpetual warfare. We are engaged in "perpetual warfare for perpetual peace" because we are seeking it without Christ" (Dec. 16, 1967).
On Christian unity in evangelistic endeavors: "When we are Christians, to the extent to any degree we are faithful to the gospel, we are bigger than ourselves. And that is why whether they are Arminian, Roman Catholic, or Calvinist, people who are truly serving the Lord are bigger than their own thinking, bigger than their own faith. We transcend ourselves. And that is the glory of the gospel. It enables us to do more than we can do. It is the grace of God working through us. It is not that we teach different gospels; we are trying to teach the same gospel even though at times our emphasis will be a warped one, a limited one, a partial one. All the same, God can use it".
In colonial New England the covenantal concept of church and state was applied. Everyone went to church, but only a limited number had voting rights in the church and therefore the state, because there was a coincidence of church membership and citizenship. The others were no less believers, but the belief was that only the responsible must be given responsibility. One faith, one law, and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state, and it has worked towards reducing society to anarchy.
The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 100
Deuteronomy 13 cites three cases of instigation to idolatry, first, in vv. 1-5, by the false prophet; second, in vv. 6-11, by a private individual; and, third, by a city, vv. 12-18. The penalty in every case is death without mercy. To the modern mind, this seems drastic. Why death for idolatry? If idolatry is unimportant to a man, then a penalty for it is outrageous. But modern man thinks nothing of death penalties for crimes against the state, or against the "people," or against "the revolution," because these things are important to him. The death penalty is not required here for private belief: it is for attempts to subvert others and to subvert the social order by enticing others to idolatry. Because for Biblical law the foundation is the one true God, the central offense is therefore treason to that God by idolatry. Every law-order has its concept of treason. No law-order can permit an attack on its foundations without committing suicide. Those states which claim to abolish the death penalty still retain it on the whole for crimes against the state. The foundations of a law-order must be protected.
The Institutes of Biblical Law, p. 38
All men are NOT created equal before God... . Moreover, an employer has a property right to prefer whom he will in terms of 'color,' creed, race or national origin
