Cultural vs Spiritual Christianity
Part 2 of Dominionism: The Damnable Heresy of the Last Days.
MAGA Christianity is a fascist political movement masquerading as a religious one.
Cultural vs Spiritual: From the time white European Christians first set foot in the Western hemisphere, there has been a romanticized longing by different groups to establish some form or the other of theocratic Dominionism here. Whether it was the Catholic missionaries bringing a Papal Bull declaring this new world for the Pope, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock dedicating this land to God and the like, some groups have always envisioned a nation here that is truly “God’s country.”
That the Founding Fathers rigorously debated this sentiment and deliberately rejected it as we saw in Part I, hasn’t stopped the persistence of this myth. Deliberately choosing to create a secular (i.e., neutral) government in a (largely) Christian culture is one of the things that has actually made America great,[1] in spite of the efforts of amateur historians like David Barton to gaslight that history.[2]
Indeed, it seems that from the beginning, the idea that America itself ought to be “the new Israel,” or at least a messianic or exceptional nation,[3] has been a long-standing, worn-out mantra in Evangelical/fundamentalist circles. The increasing intensity of the cult of Israel in the Middle East has given this exclusive claim a run for its money and a schizophrenic personality at best.[4] Other terms throughout our history like “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that the US has a “manifest” or “obvious” destiny to push its boundaries to the West Coast and beyond, have not helped either.
Whether the United States accomplishing that destiny has been the will of God, or has been a force for good or evil in the world ever since, are subjects of endless debate. Myself, I see it as a mixture if you will, and discuss this issue at length in the second chapter of my book, American Babylon, American Antichrist.
At The Heart of This Controversy
Cultural vs Spiritual: Once you start diving into the history and vast elements that comprise the phenomenon we call the Christian Right, now morphed into Christian Nationalism, you get an appreciation for how many and deep are the “streams” making up this much-polluted and raging river. Like the cup God said He was going to force ancient Judah to drink, “it containeth much” (Eze 23:32).[5] There is so much here that the question is a lot like that of Bob Seger’s— “What to leave in, what to leave out?”
So, please allow me to cut to the chase about my basic complaint about Christian Nationalism, especially the American version. Set aside its incredibly presumptuous and narcissistic agenda to force a series of draconian pet laws upon the rest of the country, enforced by a mobster dictator no less. That political free fall is where most of the damage on a practical level is going to come from. Doubling down on obviously-failed and deeply unpopular Republican policies afflicting the American people since Ronald Reagan destroyed the New Deal,[6] is their blind response to 90% of all of the political and economic circumstances they themselves have created.
No, set all that aside and just look at it from the spiritual side, the very religiosity if you will, they claim is so necessary to keep the judgment of God from falling down upon the rest of us.
Christian Nationalism is what the Bible calls a “fair shew in the flesh” (Gal 6:12), a cheap and easy attempt to brag about one’s religious identity instead of actually having to live a spiritual life, to “walk with God.” As Eugene Peterson puts it in his Message Bible,[7] “They want an easy way to look good before others, lacking the courage to live by a faith that shares Christ’s suffering and death.”
All of this clamor, all of this frenzy to declare America “a Christian nation,” is just nominalism run amuck. It reflects the self-righteous, smug attitude of “church-goers,” of “getting people churched,” of “Moral Majority America” who think that “going to church” makes you spiritual or saved, even though the statistics of red state dysfunctionality are far worse than those of blue states.
It’s the “God, gold and guns” mentality, the sentiment that these and these only are “the real Americans,” that no one else is a “true patriot.” It is an obsession with forcing the whole country to “acknowledge God,” and stops right there. They acknowledge Him, but they do not obey Him (Jn 12:42,43). They will not prove they love Him by keeping the commandments of the New Testament, which is superior to the Old (Heb 8:6). Especially the many commandments about how we ought to conduct ourselves as responsible citizens of whatever country we find ourselves in (I Pet 2:12-15; I Thess 4:11-12; I Tim 3:7, etc).
It’s the multitudes of church people who flock to charlatans and false teachers in the last days “having itching ears” (II Tim 4:3), that they might hear about how to use God for prosperity or other circumstantial benefits (I Tim 6:5; Mt 7:22,23). It’s running to every seminar on mind science masquerading as the Gospel, or to every radical political conference to learn how to twist the theme of redemption into a blood-soaked zeal to hunt down every heretic who stands in the way of their drive to Armageddon triumph (II Pet 2:10, etc).
It’s all of the above, rather than learning how to “do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:8). “If you love Me, you’ll keep My commandments” Jesus simply said, with the flip side being, “if you don’t keep My commandments, you have no part in Me” (Mt 7:2-29, e.g.).
This is the difference between this bath of pretentiousness and the America that has served us so well for 237 years, especially in terms of freedom of religion as we saw in Part I. The actual American paradigm expresses the humility to recognize that no one group has all the answers, least of all this basket of Bible belt ignoramuses and deplorables as Hillary Clinton so accurately put it, a term they wear like a badge of honor (Phil 3:19).[8] It’s to show the grace to grant to other groups their right of conscience as well, per Paul’s discussion in Romans 14.
Mein Own Kampf
Cultural vs Spiritual: I’ve written at some length about my own journey through Charismania here. I would now like to add some more detail.
Not long into my Christian life, I became aware of two different kinds of Christianity if you will, even though I didn’t know quite what to make of it at the time. I came to the Lord in 1974 in Sonoma County, California, about an hour north of San Francisco in the beautiful wine country. In those days, California culture was dominated by New Age philosophy which, to its credit, was a mindset that greatly tolerated, in the best American sense, any philosophy of life (“liberty”)[9] as long as people were “genuine” about what they believed. Thus, although “Jesus people” culture was certainly not popular or mainstream, it was tolerated as a sincere but oddball philosophy.
All that changed when I moved to Minnesota for more theological education a few years later. It was there that I encountered young people for whom “going to church” was just “part of what you do” in the world of middle America. What really disturbed me was their utter lack of understanding of the Bible, their indifference to true spirituality, and the carnal way they identified this with what it meant to “be a good Christian.” And mind you, this was far removed from the heart of “the Bible Belt.”
My main mentor in theology at this time, Harry Conn, was a world class engineer and a great thinker, but politically he was a rock-ribbed conservative. Considering the leftist excesses of the late 70s, perhaps he was somewhat justified. But being young and inexperienced, I was inclined to accept his thinking as synonymous with what it meant to be a Christian, even though in college years, I had a moderate liberal bent as was common at that time.
Nevertheless, the Bible was my interest, not politics, and every time Harry offered me the opportunity to get involved with what is now known as “the Christian right,” I felt a clear leading from God to avoid it like the plague. He even gave me an opportunity to join the Reagan administration, but I felt an especial sense of dread when I visited Washington, DC in 1986.
It was about a year later, standing in my kitchen one night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, pondering the city’s infamy for being the epicenter of Word of Faith doctrine which I despised, and asking God why He didn’t “do more” to stop this raging juggernaut, tearing up the truth of the ages in the Charismatic world? And I remember very distinctly this thought welling up from deep inside me—“Son, they have a judgment coming which they know not of.”
Looking back today, I can see what He was talking about, while I sure didn’t understand it at the time. While Tulsa’s concept of faith as a force that is activated by your words is not a necessary part of Christian Nationalist logic, it does, along with a lot of other Bible distortions, provide a pseudo-spiritual cover for naked political fascism masquerading as “a move of God.” If “knowing who you are in Christ” means the discovery of neo-Gnostic redefinitions of Christianity, then truly “nothing is impossible” to those who believe they can conquer the whole earth if need be.
It’s for reasons like this that complete charlatans like Kenneth Copeland can justify their looting of the people of God by reinventing themselves as “American patriots.” The company you keep, people.
Yet in spite of all these hints, I still didn’t see any connection between Charismatic heresies and right-wing politics. In fact, just the opposite happened. While bored on my job and with nothing to listen to but right-wing talk radio, I discovered Rush Limbaugh in 1990, and became a confirmed “dittohead” throughout the length of the Clinton years.
This is why all this phenomenon is happening in our day—the wall-to-wall presence of right-wing radio with no countervailing liberal programming in response, throughout the heights and depths of America’s middle, rural, and Deep South.
Confederate Christianity
Cultural vs Spiritual: Speak of the Devil, MAGA’s heartland is the Deep South, home of America’s “original sin” of slavery. The Confederacy was the eventual outcome of this, that conspiracy of states to commit treason and insurrection known as our first Civil War (1861-1865). Confederate Christianity, Counterfeit Christianity, whatever you choose to call it, is a good example of what I mean by America’s long history of cultural vs. spiritual Christianity, of true vs false.
In my early years as a Christian, I could never figure out how it was that the Deep South, of all places, would be the home of “the Bible Belt,” that Book that verily containeth the “truth that will make you free.” Part of this is because it is simply the least educated part of the United States.
The background story is fascinating here, and serves as a warning about the dangers of living in a reactionary mentality. The term “Fundamentalism” arose in the late 19th Century, coined by the famous British preacher Charles Spurgeon. At the time, Darwin’s theory of evolution was tearing up universities and seminaries around the world as they indulged a “Higher Criticism” of the Bible. Spurgeon argued that if you don’t stand for the fundamentals of the Faith—the six-day creation out of nothing, the miracles, the resurrection of Christ, etc., then you no longer have Christianity.
Which I couldn’t agree with more. But those who stood with the “fundamentals” of the Bible, also came to distrust the “educated elites” from whence all this skepticism came. And with the South being the least educated part of the United States, “thumping the Bible” became their simplistic response. Modern Evangelicalism in the 1940s actually arose as an attempt to inject some intellectual credibility back into fundamentalist Biblical doctrine.[10]
Before all this began, during the Civil War era and after the revivals of the 1820s and 30s, the “Biblical view of history” was unchallenged and hit its peak. Thus, both sides justified their cause from the Bible. Abolitionists argued that it was way past time to put an end to the barbaric practice of chattel slavery, based on the (then-radical) values, if you will, presented in the Gospel, that there is now, “neither Jew nor Greek…bond nor free…male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Charles Finney, one of the most effective evangelists in American history, and a committed Abolitionist, preached that you can’t be on the right side of God and the wrong side of the slavery issue at the same time.[11]
Confederates argued that since slavery was in the Bible and even a milder form in the Law of Moses, that it was therefore acceptable. At least, that was the sermon. The truth was more ugly—that blacks were an inferior race that needed white paternalism to function in life, in direct contradiction to the New Testament ideals quoted above.
So, both sides made “an appeal to Heaven,” that God would judge between their causes. The result was the single bloodiest war in US history, 600,000 casualties. So traumatic it was, and so steeped in religious apologetics and apocalyptic language regarding the Second Coming, that even the music of the time reflected this, such as in The Battle Hymn of the Republic.[12]
Thus, the “wounds” that were left were never sincere, due to the South’s intransigent regional and racial pride. Even after God had “rendered a judgment,” they developed this “Lost (but Noble) Cause” mythology, repealing all the gains of Reconstruction, erecting monuments to confederate generals, and bringing in a reign of terror of lynchings, Jim Crow laws, segregation and the like.
Leave it to John Oliver to break down the true lies of Confederacy apologists:
Republicans and Democrats Flip Roles
Cultural vs Spiritual: Thus, in many ways, MAGA Christianity is little more than this wounded, race-based, grievance-laden pity-party, risen again at the hands of a 2016 demagogue who knew just what itch to scratch. And again they are making “an appeal to heaven,” that God would grant them victory in their struggle to rid the earth of all heathen and heretics, yada, yada, yada.
Silly me, in my youth I accepted this “judgment of God” regarding the Civil War, and actually thought all of this was resolved (finally) with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Lyndon B. Johnson, in signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 said that in doing so, he knew it meant the Democrats would “lose the South” for at least a generation because of it.
He was too optimistic. When Nixon and his fellow cynical party operatives crafted the “Southern Strategy” to flip the South, he furthered the transformation of the “Party of Lincoln,” the most progressive of its day, into a regressive one.[13] By the time Reagan announced his decision to run for President in 1980, he did so from Philadelphia—not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three voters’ rights workers had been murdered in 1963. No subtlety there.
In spite of all this, I was encouraged that the country elected its first black President in 2008, and thought we were making progress. Barak and Michelle Obama, in spite of whatever criticism of his policies people may have, endeavored to set a classy tone of grace above racial controversy, and on behalf of civil social attitudes in general.
And then came Trump. If you can’t feel the difference, I don’t know what to do for you. As I’ve said before, you either get who this guy is or you don’t. This site and the many stalwart journalists documenting this disgraceful era—men and women whom Donald Trump has threatened to imprison—will help you catch up.
In this clip from this video, we get an idea of the blatant racism to be found in militant MAGA Christianity:
This is why, in spite of its many hiding places, MAGA Christianity truly is little more than white supremacy called out of the woodwork after a respectable administration, by a well-documented racist, lest your memory fail you. I hate to break it to people, but Heaven is a thoroughly integrated place, where everyone is treated as an individual, not a group. So if you want to go there, you better get used to the idea now.
The “Point of View” of a Godless Socialist
Cultural vs Spiritual: Speaking of race, one of the great complaints of right-wingers in America is that “the left” (i.e., Democrats) are all cultural Marxists, out to divide the country through racial and sexual identity controversies. Since true Marxists are just as revolutionary and subversive of the American paradigm as the MAGA movement, I would have to agree with them. By insisting on balkanizing all Americans into different racial groups, and creating sexual identities out of thin air, the resulting chaos indeed, well-serves their common aim to collapse a society, so their revolutionary vanguard can use the population as guinea pigs for their new utopian worlds.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but the Church could do a better job by pointing out that this racial model runs contrary to Martin Luther King’s ideal of aiming for a color-blind society. It was King’s dictum that it’s “the content of the character” that ought to be the true standard for assigning identity to people. It’s very Biblical, according to the principle that “God is no respecter of persons,” established by the Founders’ phrase that “all men are created equal.”[14]
Likewise, I don’t think Democrats realize what an albatross sexual identity politics is around their necks. The average American parents are appalled by “Drag Queen Story Hour,” and other attempts to desensitize, recruit and train their kids. But when one party is trying to make America a true democracy and obliterate the antiquated remnants of ante-bellum America such as the Electoral College and filibusters, while the other is advocating for autocracy (as if the Reformation never happened), the lesser of the two evils becomes crystal clear to me.
One of these “godless Socialist” groups has a YouTube channel called Second Thought. In a recent video entitled “The Growing Threat Of Christian Nationalism,” the presenter put forth his summation of what Christian Nationalism seems to him to be, summed up in three main points. I lsit them here with my own commentary following:
1. America was founded as a Christian nation, the Founding Fathers meant it to be so, and the Constitution is just as inspired as the Bible itself. Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, a strong Trumpist, seems to be a typical example of this. It owes its popular stance largely to David Barton’s appropriately-named Wallbuilders ministry. It elevates being an American to being a Christian, to where the two are inseparable. Hence, an American who doesn’t identify as a Christian isn’t “a real American,” and probably is even a traitor to “everything America stands for.”
Furthermore, America is not just an Exceptional Nation, but the New Israel. Thus, other nations are inferior to the US. It leads in essence, to the idolatry of a nation. To be an American is to be pure and free, while other nations are all corrupted. “To embrace the cultural values of other nations is inherently polluting out society, just like the societies from which refugees flee,” writes Stephen Wolfe.
According to Wolfe’s popular book, The Case For Christian Nationalism, “Christian Nationalism is a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself, both heavenly and earthly good in Christ.” In other words, it is some form of a theocracy contrary to the neutrality policy of the Founding Fathers.
From Paul Matzko’s review of Wolfe’s book:
“When fear propels one’s political project, it generates paranoid delusions. It is delusional to propose that the pathway forward for conservative Christians—living in a society in which religious “nones” outnumber any other single religious group—is violent revolution on behalf of a Presbyterian prince [i.e., Trump] who will punish blasphemers. While there are still challenges to religious freedom in America, there has never before been a society in human history where Christians have been so free to worship, speak, and live out their faith. [Amen to that.]
Karl Deutsch once defined a nation as any ‘group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.’ Wolfe’s nativist vision of a Christian nation and his stated aversion to arguing from history fit that definition in both regards. Like a socialist who declares that true communism has never been tried, Wolfe naively asserts the desirability of state-sponsored religion and hardly bothers to prove it ever actually worked.”[15]
Wolfe purportedly lives in a rural area, quite removed from a true consciousness of 21st Century America, from which he can speculate on his romanticized version of a “Christian America.” As Matzko points out, Wolfe wants to avoid basing his arguments on history, given the pitiful track record of the merging of state and church in history, including America’s own.
2. Christian Nationalism is rooted in cultural insecurities, starting in the 1940s and 50s with the Red Scare (a legitimate thing to be “scared” about). This, coupled with oligarchic slander against FDR’s New Deal as “creeping socialism,” along with Communist persecution throughout the world, and you have the US clinging to a Christian faith and freedom paradigm.
During this era, a Christian Nationalist Party arose, along with the John Birch Society, named after a missionary martyred by Communists. There were (failed) efforts to inject Jesus’ Name into the Constitution, and declare the US a Christian nation. The “In God We Trust” and “one nation under God” mottos were successfully added, along with the Pledge of Allegiance, a much more controversial and subjective matter.
From the popular Taking America Back For God by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry:
“Economic, political or cultural upheavals cause Americans to fall back on their core identities, traditions, values and narratives about themselves to bring about order out of chaos. In some cases—as with American Christian Nationalism—myths, traditions and identities that were not originally part of the nation’s core can be manufactured for the purpose of establishing order.”
“Christian Nationalism becomes more salient during times of societal unrest…Economic, political or cultural upheavals cause Americans to fall back on their core identities, traditions, values and narratives about themselves to bring order out of chaos.”
Yes indeed, more salient. More useful to exploit. Rather than the fix the problems that they have largely caused, they see their self-induced chaos as opportunities for exploiting a situation, thus going from bad to worse.
One of the practical outcomes of this fear of the outside world was the rise of the Homeschool movement and the abandonment of the public school, one of the few institutions that allowed Americans to get to know their neighbors at a young age. Absent a decent class analysis (such as Christians had in the days of FDR), the villains in the Evangelical mind turned out to be not Wall Street elites but the “cultural elites”—i.e., “liberals.” Thus, this is not just about taking over government; it’s about ejecting the heretics of the day—liberals, sexual deviants, immigrants, etc.
3. “America is the savior of Christianity, not the other way around; America is the last best hope for Christianity, not just the world.” This denies the global nature of the Christian faith. It is truly myopic indeed.
God is the guarantor of the faith in the world, and if it’s ever snuffed out altogether He will have the angels flying through the air proclaiming the everlasting Gospel to the inhabitants of the earth (Rev 14:6). Indeed, Jesus Himself intimated that when He comes back, will He find faith on the earth (Lu 18:8)?
In fact, the biggest underlying reason it seems to me for the emergence of a militant “Christianity” in the last days is simply that—that it’s the last days, and most Christians can’t stand the thought of a world where Jesus Christ becomes less and less popular. It’s when a combination of the popularity of secularism, Darwinism, atheism, New Ageism and other religions means Christianity becomes less and less relevant to them. Coupled with the emergence of this highly-visible, noisy form of Christianity into another gospel, spirit and Jesus (II Cor 11:4), and it’s no wonder the “nones” are growing in number.
And it’s a real tragedy, because Jesus Christ is popular with people, whether they realize it or not. I hardly ever hear non-believers, including atheists, have anything bad to say about Jesus. When the real Jesus walked the earth, He was like the original rock star (Mt 4:25; 21:9), until He was sentenced to death (Mt 26:56). If the church put more emphasis on living the faith (I Pet 2:12-15), being a model citizen for instance (I Pet 2:17; 3:16), instead of making common cause with militias, fanatics, grifters and con men like Trump, maybe it would do more to win over the American people than anything else.
The Theonomy Phenomenon
Cultural vs Spiritual: Theonomy is the theological term for the belief that the Old Testament Law of Moses ought to be implemented in the New Testament era, to bring about the triumph of God’s Church over mankind, including and especially over the power of the secular state.
It is a philosophy built upon a number of contradictions to Biblical revelation, including not honoring Jesus’ principle of Church and State as two separate “institutions” (Mark 12:17), as we have seen. Another is simply that the New Testament is superior to the Old (Heb 8:6), built upon better promises, such as God indwelling the believer and developing a closer, more intimate walk with Him. This produces a more spiritual walk than the “God-fearing American” nominalism we saw above. In the New Covenant, God can blow about His people “like the wind” (Jn 3:8), which must surely frustrate the average control freak and political operative who just wants to “harness bodies in the pew” for right wing causes.
Likewise, the Law of Moses is likened to a schoolmaster (or guardian) over a child (Israel, the world) until it was old enough to function as an adult (Gal 3:24). The New Testament reflects the tone of an age of grace, of an “acceptable year” attitude by God (Lu 4:19). Its emphasis is on redemption, second chances, etc.
The modern prison system was once called the penitentiary, because it was there where convicted criminals could go to “do penance.” Under the Law of Moses, there were 27 different offences that merited the death penalty; the rest was handled by restitution. It’s a system that appeals to the impatient and self-righteous nature in human beings, found in abundance in Donald Trump. It’s a system way too barebones and primitive for a modern super power like the United States, though it does appeal to the “hang ‘em high” crowd.
Nevertheless, theonomy has been a part (albeit a small part) of the Dominionist movement, an extremist part of the extremist Christian Right. Its visionary founder was Rousas John Rushdoony, a naturalized American from Armenia. It is said of Rushdoony that at least one member of his family has been a priest or minister of the Faith since 320 AD., a very impressive lineage. He chose to become an ordained Presbyterian minister, but he came from a part of the world where Christianity has traditionally been based on the Roman, hierarchical model. His idea of the necessity of Christianity dominating the State may have influenced such a radical departure from the American Reformation/Enlightenment tradition.[16]
The Home-Schooling Movement
Cultural vs Spiritual: Rushdoony is often credited with being the father of the home-schooling movement. His bias against the state as having a naturally-adversarial role to the faith, bound to indoctrinate students into loyalty to it instead of God, may have reflected the atmosphere of the mid-20th Century and the threat of Communism:
“Where God’s law is honored, no man can regard himself as meeting God’s requirements of holiness who gives his children to a godless system to education, or who feels that a secular state is acceptable to a Christian. God’s law requires obedience by all men and institutes at all times.” (Emphasis added).[17]
“Socialism, statist education, mental health programs, social security, and a variety of other statist programs provide the framework for man’s growing attempt to claim the power of predestination for himself.”[18]
These statements are so loaded with bad thinking, it’s hard to know where to begin. Far from Christians having a duty to reject the secular state, Paul affirmed the opposite—that even an oppressive empire like Rome is a “power that be,” and “ordained of God” (Rom 13:1), whose ordinances we should submit to (I Pet 2:13,14).
Rushdoony’s heyday was the mid-20th Century, when world Communism was a threat to the Western democratic/freedom alliance. But although FDR had found a way to make capitalism work for everyone, with public programs like Social Security, mental health, an educated populace and the like, Rushdoony apparently links all of this to “godless Communism” and totalitarian systems.
He also links it to eternal salvation too, no less. Government providing for “the general welfare” as the Constitution requires it to, he sees as “man’s growing attempt to claim the power of predestination for himself.” In other words, the thousands of years of earthly progress humanity has accomplished, he characterizes as an attempt by humans to replace God’s plan of eternal salvation! Again, yet another example of how Dominionists can’t seem to keep the physical and spiritual worlds and their respective concerns separate.
Nor, as an aside, does he understand the concept behind predestination either. Since he was a committed Calvinist, it shouldn’t surprise us that his idea of Predestination was that God secretly picks and chooses whom He wants to save eternally. Therefore, all He needs to gain Dominion over the earth are enough believers such as Rushdoony, who understand that the state and “statism” are idols that must be destroyed.
But Paul explains “predestination” in Romans 8 more fully. For all that come to Him, He has predestinated that they will all go through a process of being “conformed to the image of Christ” thereafter (8:29). All men are called by God to eternal life (I Tim 2:4; II Cor 5:15; I Jn 2:2). Whom He did foreknow was His Church in general; I don’t believe it refers to every individual who responds (8:29).
Ours Is A Gospel of Grace, Not of Law
Cultural vs Spiritual: Rushdoony characterized Southern slavery as “benevolent,” and opposed in general the spirit of the New Covenant we are now living under. Someone once said the Old Testament was “law, but not without grace,” while the New Testament is “grace, but not without law.” Certainly John put it similarly with, “For the law was given by Moses, but [the fullness of] grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (Jn 1:17).
While our world burns, you could go on forever detailing the absurdity of Rushdoony’s theory, but let’s just take one little example from Deuternomy 13:
12 If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the Lord thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying,
13 Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known;
14 Then shalt thou enquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you;
15 Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword.
16 And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the Lord thy God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.
Please note. This was commanded for one of Israel’s own cities! Can one imagine what one could rationalize about another people, such as modern-day Israel is doing right now, calling the helpless, hapless Gazans, Amalek, knowing what that name meant in Israel’s history (I Sam 15:3)? If God had actually made good on Israel in their subsequent history, in breaking this law, would even Judah have survived to fulfill His redemptive plans for the world?
The tragedy of Rushdoony’s work and personal life (e.g., his later clash with his son-in-law and heir-apparent, Gary North), is a classic example of a person too given to hashing out abstract philosophical concepts in his head, and neither stepping back to see the big picture, nor coming back down to earth to, like a good scientist, observe the results of one’s hypothesis. In this case, inherent hostility to and suspicion of government, and the destruction of public education in general, that at one time at least, gave Americans of such diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, an opportunity to get to know each other as well as learn academically. As it is with all right-wing excesses, it always tends to balkanization, isolation, everything being privatized, fear of one’s neighbors and a survivalist mentality.
Next: The Christian Right
Notes: Cultural vs Spiritual
[1] It is something of a parallel to that 67 year period post-Constantine in ancient Rome’s history, wherein all religions in the Empire were tolerated including Christianity after three centuries of vicious repression.
[2] I think “amateur” is applicable to so much of the Christian Right, who do not understand that realpolitik in the United States is about power and money. (Wait! On the other hand, maybe they do understand that, especially in how you run for office, how you govern.) https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-billionaires-privilege-is-taking-f87
[3] Exceptional is a bit much, but people in the foreign policy community especially, have at times referred to the United States as “the indispensable nation,” in that being so militarily-powerful compared to the rest of the Western freedom alliance, the defense of democracies would collapse if the US ever “retreated from the world.”
[4] At least the Pilgrims et. al. were a little closer to the truth here. The Church literally is spiritual or faithful Israel in this New Covenant era, and has (theoretically) more natural legitimacy than the current nation of Israel (which is why they are so subconsciously obsessed with “legitimacy”). But both are wrong in their conception of bringing the Kingdom into the earth before the return of the Messiah.
[5] Even though Judah was in exile in Babylon at the time, God gave the prophet visions of the condition of the Temple back in Jerusalem (Eze 8) when the elders came to him for advice (chapter 14). The very walls of the Temple complex were covered with the filthy and blasphemous images of pagan gods. God told Ezekiel that when His people do such extreme things, that He Himself will set up a trap for them, similar to the “strong delusion” allowed in II Thessalonians 2, and the “prosperity” of the Antichrist, in spite of the fact that he’s obviously full of “names of blasphemy” (Rev 17: ), a chilling warning to not play games with God.
[6] All of FDR’s upper class fellow plutocrats never ceased to slander him as a “socialist” or “Communist,” when all he was doing was saving capitalism from self-destruction by making it work for everyone
[7] OMG! What is happening to me, that I’ve quoted from The Message, twice now in this site!? https://donald-trump-antichrist.com/introduction-to-this-website/
[8] Clinton had a boatload of experience with such people when she was First Lady of Arkansas.
[9] Whereas the word freedom is broad and can be a vague term, “liberty” has a more narrow meaning. That is, “If you stay within the boundaries of the nation’s laws, you’re ‘at liberty’ to live life any way you like, to pursue ‘happiness’ anyway you see fit.” It’s almost a more libertarian philosophy, of only minimally imposing morality upon those around you, rather than an endless quest to test your neighbor’s sense of patriotism, for instance. You know, that MAGA sense of what “a real American” looks like.
[10] “By the end of the 19th century, the old evangelical consensus that had united much of American Protestantism no longer existed. Protestant churches became divided over ground-breaking new intellectual and theological ideas, such as Darwinian evolution and historical criticism of the Bible. Those who embraced these ideas became known as modernists, while those who rejected them became known as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists defended the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and adopted a dispensationalist theological system for interpreting the Bible.[10][11] As a result of the fundamentalist–modernist controversy of the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalists lost control of the Mainline Protestant churches and separated themselves from non-fundamentalist churches and cultural institutions.[12]
After World War II, a new generation of conservative Protestants rejected the separatist stance of fundamentalism and began calling themselves evangelicals. Popular evangelist Billy Graham was at the forefront of reviving use of the term.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism_in_the_United_States
[11] “‘[Oberlin College’s] immediate background was the wave of Christian revivals in western New York State, in which Charles Finney was very much involved. “Oberlin was the offspring of the revivals of 1830, ’31, and ’32.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberlin_College
[12] E.g., “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…sifting through the hearts of men before His Judgment Seat,” etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic
[13] A regression begun in the 1870s when the Robber Barons managed to buy up the Republicans, where they’ve remained ever since, except for a brief period during Teddy Roosevelt’s time when they became progressive again. https://www.amazon.com/Unreasonable-Men-Roosevelt-Republican-Progressive/dp/023034223X
[14] This is not to dismiss the truth that America has an ugly racial history that ought to be known on the one hand, nor obsessing over the past on the other, with the potential to guilt-monger white America, the very thing that triggers so much of the MAGA movement. I understand the concept of “white fragility” here, but everyone has to watch their motives if we want to move forward in a positive way, building a true meritocracy.
[15] https://reason.com/2023/05/13/beware-the-christian-prince/
[16] Rushdoony also had a very basic, flawed understanding of New Testament salvation. He wrote in the Forward to his Theonomy in Christian Ethics, “Salvation is by the grace of God through faith, and sanctification is by law.” Actually, sanctification is by faith too, in the sense of allowing God to lead us into those situations, experiences and relationships that “grow us in grace and knowledge” (II Pet 3:18). Those that let Him lead them that way, “they are the sons of God” (Ro 8:14). He is right in that God sometimes does use law to sanctify us, especially when we are “too full of ourselves,” but He also uses grace when we fail, fall short, feel hopeless, depressed, etc., to remind us that as long as we keep getting up, He is always for us (Ro 8:31).
[17] Rousas John Rushdoony, forward to Theonomy in Christian Ethics, Greg L. Bahnsen (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1979), x–xi.)
[18] Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History, 7.
