For those pastors who happen to disapprove of Republican leadership or who might be leery of church-state entanglements, McCoy has a ready answer, which he articulated in a video on the Church United website: “I speak to these pastors” across the country, he said. “This is the one thing they say: ‘Politics is dirty.’ My response to them is, ‘So is the church. So what’s your point?’ ”22
Just five years after its founding, Domen’s organization is praised by some of the movement’s most prominent leaders. David Barton has appeared at California gatherings and endorsed the group enthusiastically: “One of the things the Bible makes very clear is that pastors should be the leaders in all aspects of community. And that’s one of the things Church United helps accomplish is get pastors to lead, not just in the pulpit but out of the pulpit as well.”23
At the 2018 Road to Majority conference, an annual gathering of religious right activists organized by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition that took place at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., Republican representative (now senator) from Tennessee Marsha Blackburn stood on the stage of a large auditorium, backed by an enormous red, white, and blue video screen. “You have all heard the Democrats say they’re going to have a big blue wave,” she said to the conservatively attired audience members filling the room. “We have to make certain that blue wave goes crashing into the great red wall.” With a nod to the West she added, “It looks like they had a little red wall building going on in California this week.”
Later at the conference, during a panel on legislative initiatives, Dave Louden, the national field director for the Faith & Freedom Coalition, remarked, “It’s incredible the organizing that’s happening in California!”
Apart from the obvious electoral advantages that Church United delivers in California, there is something else about Domen that seems to appeal to Christian nationalist leaders across the country. Domen’s efforts to build cross-racial unity—even as his group stridently promotes political division—makes him particularly valuable to a movement that must now inoculate itself against charges of racism in the past and in the present.
Another part of the attraction, strangely enough, is Domen’s own personal story. The way that Domen wrestles with his sexual demons—not in private but out in the open, in front of makeshift podiums in town squares—makes him the prized embodiment of what the members of his movement might call the “good homosexual.” By standing up as living “proof” that those who choose to do so will be redeemed, paradoxically he underwrites the license to revile those who do not. The troubled young man from Yorba Linda has indeed managed to transform his “brokenness” into the source of his own success and that of the movement he so ably represents.
CHAPTER 5
Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism
On a hot afternoon in August 1980, Ronald Reagan strode to the podium at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas, and addressed a crowd of 15,000 pastors and religious activists. President Jimmy Carter had declined the invitation to attend the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing, so candidate Ronald Reagan had seized the opportunity.
“I know that you can’t endorse me,” he declared, but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”1 The pastors went wild. Reagan went on to air his personal doubts about the theory of evolution. Then he offered a homespun hypothetical: if he were to be trapped on an island with only one book, he said, he would take the Bible. “All the complex questions facing us at home and abroad,” he said, “have their answer in that single book.” The performance, according to many political historians, clinched his victory in the election, as conservative Christians abandoned the famously evangelical Carter and put their faith in their newfound Republican savior. “We gave him a ten-minute standing ovation,” Paul Weyrich later recalled. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole movement was snowballing by then.”2
Among those present in the Dallas sports stadium that day was Gary North, an influential thinker in the world of Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement seeking to infuse our society at all levels with a biblical worldview. At Reunion Arena in 1980, however, North was concerned that one name was missing from the roster of speakers.
“We agreed that it was unfortunate that Rousas Rushdoony was not speaking,” he observed. “If it weren’t for his books, none of us would be here,” he said at the time to fellow activist Robert Billings, the former executive director of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority who was now on staff with the Reagan campaign. “Nobody in the audience understands that,” Billings said. “True, but we do,” North reportedly replied.3
Later, North would write, “Rushdoony’s writings are the source of many of the core ideas of the New Christian Right, a voting bloc whose unforeseen arrival in American politics in 1980 caught the media by surprise … They never did figure out where these ideas were coming from.”4
A few months after the Dallas event, with Reagan installed in office, Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony had the opportunity to make good on the omission. Along with Howard Phillips, Weyrich, and other leaders of the conservative Christian counterrevolution, he showed up at the White House to press the administration to end the outrage of depriving racially segregated religious schools of their tax exemptions.5
The band of advisors that gathered in the White House freely acknowledged Rushdoony’s foundational role in the new Christian right. Howard Phillips, a right-wing activist with a perch in the Nixon administration, called Rushdoony the “most influential man of the 21st century,”6 telling author and religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll in 2007 that “the whole Christian conservative political movement had its genesis in Rush.”7 But Rushdoony’s close associates were far from alone in their assessment of his contributions. Rushdoony’s works were required reading for some classes at Pat Robertson’s Regent University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and a standard component of the reading lists among many theologically conservative Protestants.8 (Several of Falwell’s associates later pushed back with an essay critiquing Christian Reconstructionism for advocating positions that some other conservative evangelicals found “scary.”)9 Howard Ahmanson Jr., the reclusive heir to a banking fortune, considered Rushdoony a personal mentor and donated over $700,000 to his organizations.10 The Christian homeschooling movement, which has played a role in indoctrinating fresh generations in a “biblical” worldview, is explicitly indebted to Rushdoony’s work. The Quiverfull movement, which encourages ultraconservative Christian couples to produce as many children as possible, was in large part inspired by Rushdoony.11 The broadly influential theologian Francis Schaeffer offered Rushdoony “kind words about their mutual work” in a “warm, highly personal 1978 letter,” as Ingersoll reports.”12 In a 1990 essay, theoconservative Richard John Neuhaus pointed out that Rushdoony’s “theonomy,” or idea of a social and political order rooted in “biblical law,” has “insinuated itself in circles where people would be not at all comfortable to think of themselves as theonomists” and advised readers that “the distance from Norman Vincent Peale to Rousas John Rushdoony is not so great as may first appear.”13 Christian Reconstructionists were at the table in the early days of the Council for National Policy, which to this day functions as a nexus of power for the right-wing and reactionary Republican machine, and their ideas have left a powerful imprint on “The Family,” the secretive yet influential organization of “believers” in politics.14
The views of the theologian who lies at the center of so much influence are not hard to state simply and clearly: Rushdoony advocated a return to “biblical” law in America. The Bible, says Rushdoony, commands Christians to exercise absolute dominion over the earth and all of its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking, orthodox Christian clerics; and the federal government is an agent of evil. Public education, in Rushdoony’s reading of the Bible, is a t
hreat to civilization, for it “basically trains women to be men,” and represents “primitivism,” “chaos,” and “a vast ‘integration into the void.’ ”15 In over thirty books and publications, including The Messianic Character of American Education and The Institutes of Biblical Law—often hailed as his magnum opus and recommended as one of the Choice Evangelical Books of 1973 by evangelical flagship journal Christianity Today—Rushdoony lays it all out in a program that he calls Christian Reconstruction.
There is also little mystery about the historical sources from which Rushdoony drew his own inspiration, as he is careful to lay them out, too. Setting aside the Bible itself, there were the Dutch Reformed Presbyterians whom he studied. A key figure in Rushdoony’s personal development was Cornelius Van Til, who maintained that rationality is possible only on the presupposition that the Bible is true—which is to say, in plainer language, that the “Christian worldview” is the only legitimate basis for rational thought. Van Til and Rushdoony both also drew on Abraham Kuyper, also a Dutch Reformed theologian known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life. “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” said Kuyper.16 But two other intellectual traditions appear to have played critical roles in the development of Rushdoony’s thought and expose the real implications of his commitment to radically conservative theology. One is the work of America’s redoubtable band of proslavery theologians. Another comes from the theologians who labored on pro-capitalist, libertarian responses to the specter of the New Deal.17
To be clear, the Christian nationalist movement is large and diverse in its specific theologies. Many of its representatives know very little about R. J. Rushdoony, and others take pains to distance themselves from him.18 Some of his extreme positions, such as the idea that homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, incorrigible teenagers, and practitioners of “witchcraft” are all worthy of the death penalty, have been loudly repudiated by many conservative religious leaders. Yet it is difficult to understand the ideological origins and structure of Christian nationalism in America today without taking into account Rushdoony’s ideas. Just as in that pivotal 1980 conference that put Ronald Reagan on the road to the White House, Rushdoony remains an unacknowledged leader of the movement, a sage whose ideas continue to speak long after he has been silenced.
Few thinkers invent new ways of being out of whole cloth, and Rushdoony was not among them. He himself understood this well and celebrated the fact. His purpose was to rescue a lost cause, not to fabricate it. Although he leaned on many role models from the past, one of the most revealing of his acknowledged antecedents is arguably Robert Lewis Dabney, a Presbyterian minister and theologian born in Virginia in 1820.
To those who knew him as a young man, Robert Lewis Dabney “was even then the most Godly man they had ever met.” In old age his students revered him as “St. John.”19 By most accounts, he was generous, passionate, considerate, and a thunderous presence in any church or lecture hall.20 He dedicated his life to serving the Presbyterian church and to fighting for the rights of true believers.
The beleaguered people to whose cause Dabney rallied were, more precisely, his “oppressed” white brethren of Virginia and neighboring states to the south. Their oppression consisted in, among other things, having to pay taxes to support a “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.”21 These unjustly persecuted white people, as Dabney saw it, were also forced to contend with “the atheistic and infidel theories of physical science.”22 He had two sciences in mind—geology and evolutionary biology—“the one attacking the recent origin of man, the flood, etc., the other presuming to construct a creation without a creator.”23 The malevolent tormentors of the wholesome white taxpayers of America were the secular, liberal elites who dominated national political life. Though hardly a man of the people by temperament—he referred to democracy as “mobocracy”—Dabney was keenly sensitive to the realities of electoral politics.24 “If … the voters among these [faithful Christians] would go together to the polls, they would turn the scales of every election,” he declared.25
In the first half of his career, before the Civil War, he sermonized loudly about the “righteousness” of slavery and argued that opposing slavery was “tantamount to rejecting Christianity.”26 In this respect he was an unexceptional figure in his time. Upon the outbreak of the war, Dabney joined his fellow Southern Presbyterians in resolving in conference: “We hesitate not to affirm that it is the peculiar mission of the Southern Church to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing both to master and slave.”27
Certainly, many American ecclesial voices rejected slavery. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, abhorred slavery. The first Methodists in America passed resolutions condemning it, although as both the church and slavery expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, much of the Methodists’ opposition to the practice was sidelined and in the deep South turned into direct support for the institution. Other clerical voices opposing slavery included ministers such as Reverend Calvin Fairbank, who is believed to have aided the escape of dozens of slaves; the Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney and his disciple Theodore Dwight Weld; and John Leland, a Baptist minister. In Boston’s West Church, Charles Lowell, a staunch abolitionist, ended the practice of segregated seating, and prior to the Emancipation Proclamation the church became a safe house on the Underground Railroad. Prominent abolitionist clerics in England included William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who hosted Frederick Douglass on his first UK visit.
But a preponderance of representatives of major American denominations of the time had made their peace with slavery, and either conscientiously refrained from making any judgment that would upset the established order, or supported it outright. A leading Baptist of Georgia declared, “Both Christianity and slavery are from heaven; both are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of time.”28 The Georgia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church unanimously resolved “that slavery, as it exists in the United States, is not a moral evil.”29 The Episcopalians of South Carolina found slavery to be “marked by every evidence of divine approval.”30 The Reverend J. C. Postell of South Carolina stated that slavery “is supported by the Bible … [T]he fact that slavery is of divine appointment would be proof enough with the Christian that it cannot be a moral evil,” adding that it “is a judicial visitation.”31 The Charleston Union Presbytery resolved that “the holding of slaves, so far from being a sin in the sight of God, is nowhere condemned in his holy word.”32
Contrary to popular myth, many representatives of the churches of the North went along with Dabney’s program. Reverend Wilbur Fisk, the Methodist president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, agreed that “the general rule of Christianity not only permits, but, in supposable circumstances enjoins the continuance of the master’s authority. The New Testament enjoins obedience upon the slave as an obligation due to a present rightful authority.”33 Moses Stuart, the top Bible scholar at Andover in Massachusetts, applauded the sentiment: “The precepts of the New Testament … beyond all question, recognize the existence of slavery.”34 The president of Dartmouth College, Nathan Lord, added that any criticism of slavery is “dishonorable to God, and subversive of his government.”35 John Henry Hopkins, the Episcopal bishop of Vermont, who published a tract and a lengthy book defending slavery, penned a letter to the abolitionist bishop of Pennsylvania “to prove, from the Bible, that in the relation of master and slave there was necessarily no sin whatever.”36 The founder of Yale’s Divinity School and the leading Presbyterian theologian at Princeton concurred.37
The identification of religious authority with the perpetuation of the institution of slavery reflected something far more important than mere adaptation to the largest concentration of economic power in the nation—although it was that, too. At a deeper level, it was
part of a counterrevolutionary response to the perceived liberal and irreligious excesses associated with the American Revolution. The period around the American Revolution was, by most accounts, a low point for fundamentalism and a high one for freedom of thought and what was considered heresy. In a letter to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse dated June 26, 1822, Thomas Jefferson famously predicted that all Americans would shortly convert to Unitarianism, and Thomas Paine went even further, suggesting that they would abandon all traditional religions in favor of a pure deism, or religion of nature and reason.38 Yet those prognostications missed the mark by approximately 180 degrees. In the decades following the Revolution, an evangelical surge rolled across the landscape, sweeping aside the Unitarians and other liberal religionists and installing hardline Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist sects that, while often popular in their rhetoric and methods, promoted literalism and absolute submission to authority in their doctrines.
In that wave of fundamentalism, two forces played decisive roles. One was the emergence in the early years of the republic of a hard-core theological establishment, centered chiefly in the Northeast, radically opposed to both religious liberalism and political liberalism. Led by men such as Reverend Timothy Dwight, the Yale leader who came to be known as “Federalist Pope of Connecticut,” these theologians condemned the French Revolution along with the godless nature of American democracy. The other force was the institution of slavery itself, which benefited from and in turn promoted the values of biblical literalism and absolute submission to authority. Borrowing the language that the Federalist theologians developed in their assaults on liberal religionists and supporters of popular democracy, the new generation of leaders promoted a theological vision that emphasized the divine origins of the existing order, which invariably involved domination and subordination, always of men over women, and frequently of white people over Black people, too.
The Power Worshippers Page 13
