Revisiting The Grandfather of Christian Reconstruction: Rousas Rushdoony

Many of my readers may be asking, "What is a Rousas Rushdoony?" Others may recall him as the author of The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973). The Institutes came at roughly the midpoint of Rushdoony's life (1916-2001) and work; what he did on the grass-roots level beginning in the 1940s, according to Michael McVicar, was of much more significance.

Still, a flavor of The Institutes is useful because in them we have a partial sense of the message Rushdoony conveyed to groups, small and large (and courts as an expert witness) for over five decades. From the Introduction (pp. 4-10, emphasis in the original):

Law in every culture is religious in origin. ... Accordingly, a fundamental and necessary premise in any and every study of law must be, first, a recognition of this religious nature of law.

Second, it must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society. If law has its source in man's reason, then reason is the god of that society.

Third, in any society, any change of law is an explicit or implicit change of religion.

Fourthly, no disestablishment of religion as such is possible in any society. A church can be disestablished, and a particular religion can be supplanted by another, but the change is simply to another religion.

Fifth, there can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance.

The [Mosaic] law is therefore the law for Christian man and Christian society. Nothing is more deadly or more derelict than the notion that the Christian is at liberty with respect to the kind of law he can have. [John] Calvin, whose classical humanism gained ascendance at this point, said of the law of states, of civil government

For some deny that a state is well constituted, which neglects the polity of Moses, and is governed by the common laws of nations. The dangerous and seditious nature of this opinion I leave to the examination of others; it will be suffice int for me to have evinced it to be false and foolish. (Quoting John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.20.14) 

Such ideas, common in Calvinist and Lutheran circles, and in virtually all churches, are still heretical nonsense. 

Go here to listen to an hour-long conversation between Michael McVicar and Alastair Roberts about McVicar's recent book, Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (UNC Press 2015).The conversation shows that McVicar has read everything by and about Rushdoony. And McVicar does a fine job of tracing the intellectual and personal origins of Rushdoony's distinctive thought, and how the results of his tireless efforts have influenced the Religious Right, Christian Libertarianism, the homeschool movement, and Christian worldview thinking to this day.