R. J. Rushdoony: the father of Christian Reconstruction

R. J. Rushdoony (1916–2001) was a Presbyterian minister and writer who founded the Chalcedon Foundation and launched the movement known as Christian Reconstruction. His best-known book, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), argued that the laws God gave ancient Israel, including many of its civil penalties, still bind every nation today. He was also one of the most important early voices for Christian schools and homeschooling, and he testified for families in court.

Newsletter portrait of R. J. Rushdoony in 1958, in suit and tie, captioned The Rev. R. J. Rushdoony
R. J. Rushdoony in 1958, from the Presbyterian Guardian. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Who was R. J. Rushdoony?

Rousas John Rushdoony was born on April 25, 1916, in New York City, according to the Chalcedon Foundation’s biography. His son, Mark R. Rushdoony, writes that his grandparents, Y. K. Rushdoony and Rose Gazarian Rushdoony, fled the region of Van during the Armenian genocide, in which “One and a half million Armenians died,” and reached New York late in 1915.

The family soon moved to Kingsburg, California, where his father “founded an Armenian speaking Presbyterian church.” He studied at the University of California, Berkeley; the university’s alumni magazine lists him as “Rousas John Rushdoony ’38, C.Sing. ’39, M.A. ’40.” He earned a divinity degree at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley in 1944 and was ordained that year in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.

From 1944 to 1953 he served as a missionary pastor at Owyhee, Nevada, on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. In 1958 he left the mainline Presbyterian church for the more conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, pastoring an OPC congregation in Santa Cruz. In 1962 he left the pastorate to research and write full time.

In 1975 he moved from Los Angeles to Vallecito, in Calaveras County, California, onto land his family bought jointly with Chalcedon. He died on February 8, 2001, at 84. His son writes that “He was buried in his hometown of Kingsburg, California.”

What Rushdoony built and wrote

  • The Chalcedon Foundation (1965). Rushdoony “started Chalcedon (aka The Chalcedon Foundation®) in 1965,” in the foundation’s own words. Mark Rushdoony became its president in 1998.
  • Books on education. The Messianic Character of American Education (Craig Press, 1963) and Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) attacked public schooling as a rival religion. Gary North later wrote that Messianic Character “became the academic touchstone for leaders of the independent (non-parochial) Christian school movement.”
  • Books on American history. This Independent Republic (first published 1964) and The Nature of the American System (1965) traced the American founding to Christian sources.
  • **The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973).* The book works through the Ten Commandments and the case laws of the Old Testament. North wrote that “The Institutes* launched the Christian Reconstruction movement.”
  • Expert witness in school cases. “My father testified in dozens of these cases,” his son writes of the legal fights over Christian schools and homeschooling. The best known is the Texas Leeper case. His son says his 1987 testimony in Fort Worth was “pivotal” and that the families’ lawyer, Shelby Sharpe, “credited my father’s testimony as the decisive factor.” In 1994 the Texas Supreme Court affirmed the ruling, holding that a home school can count as a private school under state law (Texas Education Agency v. Leeper, 893 S.W.2d 432).
  • Gary North. The economist Gary North (1942–2022) met Rushdoony in 1962, married his daughter Sharon in the early 1970s, and became a leading Reconstructionist writer in his own right. According to historian Michael J. McVicar, “In 1981, North and Rushdoony had a very public falling out and the two never spoke again.”
  • The Council for National Policy. McVicar writes that it is “widely reported” that Rushdoony was an original member of the council’s board of governors, and that it is “less widely known” that “Rushdoony severed his ties with the group in the late-1980s.”

R. J. Rushdoony in his own words

Rushdoony’s supporters describe his project as a comprehensive Christian worldview: every area of life under God, power kept small and local, and families in charge of their children’s education. His son has written that critics made him “a mythological nemesis,” an “architect of Christian theocracy,” and that “This has never been the case.” The fairest test is his own text. Page numbers below are from the 1973 Craig Press edition of the Institutes, as scanned by the Internet Archive.

Theonomy: God’s law for today

“Theonomy” means “God’s law.” Rushdoony’s core claim appears on page 2 of the Institutes: “It is a modern heresy that holds that the law of God has no meaning nor any binding force for man today.” In a 1999 position paper he put it more simply: “If God’s law be dead, then God is dead for us.”

He gave the state a narrow job as “God’s ministry of justice (Rom. 13:1-8)” (p. 57), and within it the Mosaic penalties would apply. On page 235 he wrote: “Fourth, the death penalty is required by Scripture for a number of offenses.” His numbered list includes murder, “striking or cursing a parent,” kidnapping, adultery, “sodomy or homosexuality (Lev. 20:13),” “unchastity,” witchcraft, “incorrigible delinquency or habitual criminality,” blasphemy and “propagation of false doctrines.” He marked one item, sabbath desecration, as “now superseded.”

He argued that the penalties would rarely be needed: “when New England passed laws requiring the death penalty for incorrigible delinquents and for children who struck their parents, no executions were necessary: the law kept children in line” (p. 236).

Change through conversion

Rushdoony was emphatic that this order could not be imposed by revolution. “But the key to remedying the situation is not revolution, nor any kind of resistance that works to subvert law and order,” he wrote. After citing the New Testament’s warnings against disobedience, he went on: “The key is regeneration, propagation of the gospel, and the conversion of men and nations to God’s law-word” (p. 113).

Dominion and postmillennialism

Rushdoony was a postmillennialist: he believed the gospel would steadily win the world before Christ’s return. “I hold to postmillennialism not because I look at the world, but because I look at the Bible,” he told Christianity Today in a 1987 telephone interview. He tied this hope to the “creation mandate” of Genesis 1:28: “There is not one word of Scripture to indicate or imply that this mandate was ever revoked” (p. 14). The goal, he wrote, “is the developed Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, a world order under God’s law” (p. 357). In a later article he drew a line between two words: “Dominion is the exercise of godly power in our God-given sphere,” while “Domination is the exercise of lawless power over others.”

The American founding

In This Independent Republic, Rushdoony argued that American history’s “origins are Christian and Augustinian, deeply rooted in Reformation, medieval, and patristic history.” He read the First Amendment as a shield for the states’ own religious arrangements: “The freedom contemplated, therefore, was not freedom of or from religion, but for religion in the constituent states.” That reading underlies many later “Christian nation” arguments; our page on whether the Constitution is a Christian document checks it against the text.

Democracy

A line often attributed to Rushdoony, “Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies,” is usually cited to page 100 of the Institutes. A full-text search of the 1973 edition does not find it there. The sentence comes from This Independent Republic (1964), and the original is longer: “Supernatural Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies, as Dewey recognized.” It follows directly on a sentence about the philosopher John Dewey: “John Dewey emphatically affirmed this war against law.” What page 100 of the Institutes does say, in a passage praising colonial New England’s church-member franchise, is this: “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.”

Education

Of Horace Mann, the father of the public common school, Rushdoony wrote: “what he envisioned was a new religion, with the state as its true church, and education as its Messiah” (Messianic Character, p. 32).

Slavery and the Holocaust

Two passages in the Institutes draw the most criticism, and both should be read exactly. In a discussion of Old Testament servitude law, he wrote that the law “recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so,” and that it “requires that they be dealt with in a godly manner” (p. 251). Elsewhere he wrote that “the only kind of slavery permitted is voluntary slavery” and that a runaway slave “cannot be restored to his master: he is free to go,” with an exception for “the thief or criminal who is working out his restitution” (p. 286).

In a chapter on the ninth commandment (bearing false witness), he wrote: “The charge is repeatedly made that six million innocent Jews were slain by the Nazis,” and then quoted the French writer Léon de Poncins summarizing Paul Rassinier, a former Buchenwald prisoner (p. 586). Two pages later he argued that a generation “schooled to violence in motion pictures, radio, literature, and press could not be expected to react to a murder or two,” and asked, “Did the Nazis actually execute many thousands, tens, or hundred thousands of Jews? Men to whom such murders were nothing had to blow up the figure to millions.” Shortly after, he wrote: “The evils were all too real: even greater is the evil of bearing false witness concerning them, because that false witness will produce an even more vicious reality in the next upheaval” (p. 588). A history of Holocaust denial by Ben S. Austin calls Rassinier “one of the first European writers” to defend the Nazi regime on its extermination policy. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states the documented toll plainly: “Six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust.”

How Rushdoony’s ideas spread

Homeschooling and Christian schools. This is the clearest channel. Chalcedon calls him “the Father of the modern Christian and home school movements.” Historian Julie Ingersoll told Berkeley’s alumni magazine: “Go to a homeschooling conference, and he’s everywhere, beneath the surface.” Pastor Douglas Wilson, reviewing McVicar’s biography, wrote that “He became enormously influential in homeschooling circles as he began traveling the country to provide expert testimony.”

The Reconstruction movement. Gary North built a publishing operation around the ideas, and Greg Bahnsen gave theonomy its fullest academic defense in Theonomy in Christian Ethics (Craig Press, 1977). Ingersoll devotes a chapter of her book to “American Vision and the Repackaging of Rushdoony,” on the ministry associated with Gary DeMar, and another to how David Barton’s “Christian American History” is “rooted in Rushdoony’s philosophy of history.”

The religious right. In 1987 Christianity Today reported that Rushdoony and North appeared on Pat Robertson’s and D. James Kennedy’s broadcasts, and that Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto drew on Rushdoony’s social analysis. It added that most religious-right readers of Reconstructionist material did not adopt the whole system. (For how a different strategist, Paul Weyrich, built the movement’s institutions, see our Weyrich profile.)

Today. For how these ideas compare with the newer Seven Mountains teaching, see The Seven Mountains Mandate explained.

Where historians and critics disagree

How much influence? Here the experts split. Journalist Katherine Stewart argues that the idea of America as a “Christian nation” meant to serve “a Christian world order” was “Rushdoony’s central contribution to the religious right.” Historian Molly Worthen, in a 2008 article in Church History, pushed back. As Peter Leithart summarized her argument, journalists “have made too much of reconstructionism’s grip on mainstream evangelicalism” but have also “overlooked its real significance in the development of conservative Christian thought.”

McVicar, whose 2015 biography drew on “exclusive access to Rushdoony’s personal papers,” lands between the two. “Nobody was a central node like Rushdoony was,” he has said, while his book traces the movement’s decline from the 1990s. Wilson, a sympathetic reader, put the common ground this way: “his arguments and insights were frequently used but rarely cited.”

The theological critics. Some of the sharpest objections came from inside Reformed Christianity. John Frame of Westminster Theological Seminary called Rushdoony “one of the most important Christian social critics alive today,” yet his 1976 review faulted the Institutes on how the law applies to new situations and found its “discussion of love is almost exclusively negative.” In 1990 members of the Westminster faculty published Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, sixteen essays critiquing the movement. William Edgar, also of Westminster, wrote in Rushdoony’s obituary that the Institutes shows “a certain deficit of grace and forgiveness.” These are disputes among Christians about how to read scripture; we report them without taking a side.

What the record shows. Rushdoony was a learned, prolific writer who wanted a decentralized society, opposed revolution and believed change must come through conversion. He also wrote, plainly, that Scripture requires the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, blasphemy and the spreading of false doctrine, and he called democracy a “heresy.” Both are in his own words. For the question his program raises about whose reading of scripture would rule, see Which Christianity would govern?

Related

Further reading

Sources

Primary

  • R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1973), Internet Archive scan (lending library; full-text search available), pp. 2, 14, 57, 100, 113, 122, 235–236, 251, 286, 357, 586, 588
  • R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1963), Internet Archive scan (catalogued there under the wrong title, This Independent Republic), p. 32
  • R. J. Rushdoony, This Independent Republic (Nutley, N.J., 1964), Internet Archive scan (lending library; full-text search available), source of “Supernatural Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies”
  • R. J. Rushdoony, “This Independent Republic” (excerpt from This Independent Republic, pp. xiii–xv), Chalcedon
  • R. J. Rushdoony, “God’s Law,” Chalcedon Position Paper No. 232, July 1, 1999
  • R. J. Rushdoony, “Sovereignty, Power, and Dominion,” Chalcedon (posted April 21, 2016)
  • Texas Education Agency v. Leeper, 893 S.W.2d 432 (Tex. 1994), as cited in Social Security Administration, POMS legal memorandum

Chalcedon and family accounts

Scholarship and reviews

Journalism and commentary

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