Christian Reconstructionism & Ethno-Religious Conflict
Part 2

2,314 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

Rousas John Rushdoony didn’t experience the Armenian Genocide in the strictest sense, but he grew up around many Armenians who had, and it undoubtedly shaped his worldview. R. J. was every bit as intelligent as his father, so he focused on getting an education. It was in Detroit that a teacher encouraged him to become a writer. His father returned to California in 1933 to serve as a pastor in San Francisco, and R. J. completed high school in Kingsburg while living at his parents’ farm.

Rousas graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1938 with a degree in English, earned a Master’s degree in education in 1940, and then attained a divinity degree from the Pacific School of Religion in 1944. Both of these institutions were quite liberal even in the 1940s, and at Pacific Rushdoony came to believe the school was more interested in Karl Marx than Jesus Christ.

Rousas married Arda June Gent in San Francisco in 1943. Arda was the daughter of English immigrants who had settled in Colorado. Rushdoony preached at a Chinese Presbyterian Church in San Francisco and then served as a missionary at the Duck River Indian Reservation in northern Nevada, the home of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone tribes. It is a place of great natural beauty, yet isolated. The winter snow and spring snowmelt made the unpaved roads impassable each year.

Rushdoony’s experiences in Nevada were decisive in forming his later worldview. In Nevada he saw that the Indians were in an appalling social state. Alcoholism, murder, casual violence, and sexual abuse were rampant. Crime was out of control, and yet the Indians were still shackled by the government in various petty ways. Rushdoony recognized the problem of anarcho-tyranny before the term was coined.

Rushdoony was particularly shocked when he spoke to a Paiute Indian named Pete who said words to the effect of: “Only a lazy son-of-a-bitch wants rights. A man wants freedom and justice, and he can take care of himself.”[1] Pete went on to denounce his fellow Paiutes as prisoners of the government, then warned that the “white man” was “ripe for the reservation, waiting for some superior man to drive him there.”

The New Deal Radicals

Rushdoony spoke to Pete in 1946. At the time, the American economy was being managed by New Deal economic policies which brought government control into every aspect of American life. It worked to a degree during the Great Depression, but it also had many wrong policies. At a time of hunger, for example, farmers were paid to plow crops under, starving cattle on the drought-stricken prairie were shot and buried rather than butchered, price controls held down wages, and taxes were high.

The Cold War was starting to take shape in 1946 as well. The Cold War dominated the international scene for nearly half a century in a way that it is difficult for those born after its end to understand. The world in 1946 was divided along two big-tent pseudo-religious ideological lines. The “Free World” was dominated by the United States, consisting of Western Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. The Communist Bloc consisted of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and was set to expand into China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Communist insurgencies soon raged in Latin America and the Arab world as well.

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Seminaries which taught more of Karl Marx than Jesus Christ churned out students who believed in the ultimate triumph of the Communist system. Many Western liberals thought that Yugoslavia, which was under Communist but not Soviet control, represented the way the entire world would end up politically. There were many in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration who either sympathized with the Soviets, were actual Communists, or were anti-anti-Communists. The anti-anti-Communists in fact felt that anti-Communists were more dangerous to world peace than the Soviets because their stand represented a provocation against a system whose triumph was inevitable.

The international system of alignments that existed during Cold War was like a massive glacier that covered mountain ranges and valleys. Potential wars caused by the “clash of civilizations,” such as violence between Christians and Muslims, were kept well below the surface for the time being. The political circumstances that led to the Armenian Genocide were thus forgotten.

The most important factor at this time, and the one which had the most long-lasting negative effects, was “civil rights.” Adherents of the ideology of civil rights held that racial problems in America would end by desegregating schools, integrating the military, and empowering sub-Saharan voters. New Deal radicals held every major position of power in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1960s, when their grip began to break as a result of the King Riots of 1968.

The Conservative Counter-Revolution

Rousas grew skeptical of state power due to of his family’s history of being victimized at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, and his experience as a missionary on an Indian reservation solidified his concerns.[2] He was also not enthralled with liberal Christianity. But he lacked the intellectual weaponry to fight against them until he chanced upon a book called The New Modernism by the conservative Protestant theologian Cornelius Van Til.

Simply put, Van Til rejected liberal Protestant theology under the intellectual framework was “presuppositional apologetics.” The core of this theology was that

the relationship between God and His creation provides an important foundation for reassessing the nature of human knowledge. In a nutshell, if God created the universe, then he also created the means for interpreting it. A presuppositional apologetic works by demonstrating that another philosophical system has no foundation and is therefore either essentially meaningless or actually rests on Christian premises. Either way, the result is the same: the Christian God is the source of knowledge. To try to think independently of God is not only impossible; it also is the ultimate human temptation that leads to sin in its every essence.[3]

A presuppositional apologetic worldview has consequences. It rejected the post-Christian stupor which most Protestant theologians found themselves in and offered itself as a counter to the radical Enlightenment, Jacobin ideas of the French Revolution. Presuppositional apologetics therefore framed ideologies such as Communism and New Deal-rooted statism as flawed pseudo-religious systems.

After discovering presuppositional apologetics while ministering to impoverished Indians who were being ill-served by an all-powerful government, Rushdoony’s purpose came into focus. He was already sympathetic to the fundamentalist side of the fundamentalist-modernist debate that rocked the Presbyterian Church between 1890 and 1910. He therefore decided to work on educational reform from a fundamentalist and conservative Christian perspective.

Rushdoony’s ambition to advance through the broader Presbyterian and Calvinist world first manifested when he attempted to publish a manuscript on the history of English Protestantism. The manuscript was rejected in part because the publisher couldn’t justify the use of paper on a book about events in England, since the government rationing of paper was so stringent.

Rushdoony’s family grew through the 1950s. He and Arda adopted an Indian boy and then had five children of their own. Unfortunately, however, Rousas and Arda eventually divorced. From his diary entries, it seems that Arda suffered from mental illness. She was verbally abusive and hysterical, often accusing her husband of infidelity. She even physically attacked him to the point of tearing his clothes, forcing him to retreat to his study and bar the door. Their divorce was finalized in 1957, and Rushdoony won custody of the children. Arda died in 1977. The divorce dogged Rushdoony throughout his ministry. Jesus Christ didn’t say anything about homosexuality, and may even have tolerated it, but he certainly condemned divorce.

Rushdoony left the reservation in 1952 for a pastorship in Santa Cruz. The FBI ran a background check on him at this time but closed the investigation after finding nothing amiss. It was in Santa Cruz that Rushdoony began his career as a minister involved in the embryonic conservative and libertarian movements.

California in the 1950s was beginning to become the conservative powerhouse it would be until the early 1990s. The Golden State was filled with businessmen who’d made fortunes in the various industries that had thrived during the Second World War. Many were aligned with Christianity in some way, and all were frustrated with the problems of the New Deal and sought to make changes, especially once the poverty of the Great Depression faded into the history books. These embryonic conservatives and libertarians focused on the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” For them, excessive taxation was a form of theft.

Rushdoony started to draw a following when he began writing for a magazine entitled Faith and Freedom. In one of his articles he claimed that American culture is founded on two principles, classical liberalism and Calvinism. The article made enough of an impact that he was invited to speak at Carleton College in Minnesota, where he met leading libertarian activists and major donors, including representatives of the William Volker Charities Fund. These activists were seeking to gain religious support for their pro-business, anti-New Deal ideology.

Rushdoony wanted funding for a publication to be called the Westminster Herald, which would promote theologically conservative Christian ideas generally and conservative Presbyterian Calvinist ideas particularly. Rushdoony’s style of conservativism earned him enemies in the Presbyterian Church (USA), however. All of this was happening while Rousas and Arda were in the process of divorcing. In 1958 Rushdoony left the Presbyterian Church (USA) and joined the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and many of his former parishioners followed him to his new church. Two of the parishioners were Thomas and Dorothy Kirkwood. At some point between 1958 and 1962, Thomas and Dorothy divorced, and then Rousas married Dorothy in 1962. The exact circumstances of their courtship remain unknown.

That same year, Rushdoony was hired by the Volker Fund to form the cadre for an anti-New Deal, anti-statist organization called the Center for American Studies. It started out well, and Rushdoony wrote about the Fabian Society’s socialist strategy, enlightening many Americans about the problems wrought by the Labour Party’s New Jerusalem in England. Interestingly, Rushdoony wrote about the Fabian Society at the same time as Archibald Roosevelt was supporting similar metapolitical efforts.

The Center for American Studies also included Richard Weaver, the Southern Agrarian thinker who wrote Ideas Have Consequences, and David Hoggan, who wrote The Forced War. Feuding between them developed immediately, however. Hoggan and Rushdoony were a team at first, but Rushdoony’s uncompromising Calvinism put him unnecessarily at odds with Right-wing Catholics who were also involved in the Volker Fund. Rushdoony eventually left.

The Center for American Studies folded in 1963, but Rushdoony had made connections with wealthy donors who continued to sponsor him to lecture and write. In 1965, a group of conservative Los Angeles housewives gave him a stipend to move to Los Angeles provided that he would give lectures on contemporary issues facing America from a Biblical perspective. He moved there with his enormous collection of books and his family just after the Watts Riot.

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Rushdoony was then 49. His career up to that point had been checkered with feuds and infighting. He had then divorced and married a second wife under unusual circumstances. He was finally about to come into his own, however. He was on the cusp of establishing the Chalcedon Foundation, which would alter American society itself to a degree.

Rushdoony enjoyed several advantages at this time. He was quite experienced in fundraising and generating metapolitical content. His presuppositional apologetic worldview helped him to focus on finding the truth in all situations. He read continuously, writing notes in the margins of his books. His personal library weighed 14 tons. He was also good at public speaking, an excellent writer, and had a network of large donors — although he never really tapped into big money.

The Two Social Revolutions of the 1960s

Rushdoony had these advantages at the right moment. The 1960s saw two social revolutions, the first of which was the “civil rights” movement coupled with Jewish hegemonic control of the levers of power. This first revolution was truly radical, even if its promoters wore grey flannel suits and wore fedoras.

Not all the leaders of the early 1960s revolution were Jews or non-whites. Eleanor Roosevelt’s worldview was liberal, technocratic, and sympathetic to “civil rights,” for example. Many of the men leading the early 1960s revolution were old-stock American whites who had served valiantly as field-grade officers in the Second World War, and many were passionate Christians. Their liberal Christianity led to black rioting, however. Liberal Christianity also supported homosexuality, which helped pave the way for the AIDS crisis. And of course the early 1960s social revolution led America into the disaster of Vietnam.

The second social revolution first manifested during the 1964 election, when Barry Goldwater was running for President on the Republican ticket. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, but his nomination was a political watershed. Following the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles and a torrent of bad news from Vietnam, old-stock American whites, often of the Boomer generation, led the way for a major social change. Rushdoony was perfectly positioned to influence them.

Rushdoony also began to to attract talented followers. One was Gary Kilroy North, who was impressed by Rushdoony’s book Intellectual Schizophrenia. North corresponded with Rushdoony and was hired as an intern at the Center for American Studies just before it closed. Rushdoony became North’s intellectual mentor, and later Rushdoony became North’s father-in-law.

Most of Rushdoony’s followers were not men, however. His primary audience was politically active housewives who had free time, professional training, and organizational skills. They were often supporters of the John Birch Society and dedicated to defeating Communism.

Notes

[1] Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (Chapel Hill, N. C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 18.

[2] Barry Goldwater, the conservative champion in the 1964 election, likewise turned against state intervention in the economy due to his experiences with the Indian reservations in Arizona.

[3] McVicar, Christian Reconstruction, pp. 35-36.