The Power Worshippers

by Katherine Stewart

  Fifield’s main ideological target was the “Social Gospel,” which he took to be a mainspring of the New Deal’s evils. As the preceding Gilded Age had come to its bumpy end, a number of religious activists had allied themselves with progressive activists to support various social and economic reforms. The movement arguably reached its apogee in William Jennings Bryan’s failed presidential campaign of 1896, but it remained a threat in the more liberal churches of the land. In Fifield’s mind, the Social Gospel was just another word for communism, and it had to be stopped.

  Fifield understood that in a world that had just witnessed catastrophic economic collapse where government had indeed proved vital in rescuing workers, his views would not command immediate support. How would he make this unpopular doctrine appealing?

  The secret sauce was money. With a talent for whispering into the ears of plutocrats, Fifield secured major funding for his activities from the moguls of the Sun Oil Company, Chrysler, and General Motors, among others. These corporate sponsors expected, and received, a popular theology that lionized business and demonized labor unions and in general anything that required government to work on behalf of the people. Fifield’s methods had ample precedent in American history: it was Rockefeller money that sent baseball player turned evangelist Billy Sunday into the coal mines of the West Virginia hills to preach the sinfulness of striking in 1920.68

  While Fifield and his clerical allies were working the spiritual angle against the modern welfare state, a new group of libertarian economic thinkers emerged that shared their fear and loathing of government, if not necessarily their religion. Members of the Austrian school of economics, led by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and their American popularizer Henry Hazlitt, warned that the modern welfare state would soon overwhelm the free market and put humanity on the road to serfdom.69 They denounced labor unions, public education, redistributive programs, and other governmental interventions in the free market, which they believed would produce peace, prosperity, and the solution to all major social problems if left free to its own devices.

  Rushdoony found it all very thrilling. He admired the publications that came out of Fifield’s groups and their allies. All they needed, he thought, was a little more theological sophistication and economic firepower. He was also strongly attracted to the libertarians, but in his view they could use a firmer grounding in theology. Extending on Fifield’s religion of the Eighth Commandment, Rushdoony began churning out doctrinal works arguing that “capitalism is supremely a product of Christianity.” On the other hand, “socialism is organized larceny; like inflation, it takes from the haves to give to the have-nots.”70

  The field of education was the setting for perhaps the most fruitful marriage of libertarian economics and Rushdoony’s style of religious ultraorthodoxy. Both lines of thought dreaded the specter of government involvement in the education of children, if for subtly different reasons. But Rushdoony understood much more clearly than the libertarians the link between this anti-public education agenda and the old, proslavery theology. In 1963 he laid it all out in his 410-page anti-public education screed, The Messianic Character of American Education.

  Justice in education, for Rushdoony as for Dabney, was not merely a matter of exempting (white) taxpayers from the burden of supporting secular indoctrination. It was also about laying the foundations for the reconstruction of a theonomic society: one whose laws are based on what Christian nationalists today might call a “biblical worldview.” Presbyterian theologian A. A. Hodge, who was an avid admirer of Dabney and who Rushdoony admired in turn, delivered a lecture, which was published in 1887 after his death, painting “government schools” as “the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of antisocial nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”71 Citing Hodge and his predecessors directly,72 Rushdoony amplified the message, arguing that the “government school” has “leveled its guns at God and family.”73 “Liberal education is inevitably pluralistic,” he lamented. “It would follow that Southerners are clearly wrong in resisting integration of white and Negro pupils.”74 The implication here was that they were, in fact, right to have resisted integration. In Rushdoony’s view, there was nothing wrong in principle with segregation.

  Although the immensely influential pastor and radio evangelist D. James Kennedy distanced himself from some aspects of Rushdoony’s Reconstructionism, Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries broadcast network hosted Rushdoony as a guest in the early 1980s, and Kennedy’s tirades against public education are nearly identical in language and content to Rushdoony’s.75 In a sermon titled “A Godly Education,” later turned into a widely distributed pamphlet, Kennedy thundered, “The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools, has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war.”76 Disparaging public education pioneer Horace Mann as “a Unitarian,” Kennedy declared, “The modern, public education system was begun in an effort to deliver children from the Christian religion.”77 After Rushdoony’s death, Gary North, who had developed a close relationship with the politician Ron Paul, dutifully produced the Ron Paul Curriculum, a homeschooling program with an emphasis on “the Biblical principle of self-government and personal responsibility which is also the foundation of the free market economy.”78

  “Let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty,” North once wrote, “to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”79

  Libertarians like economist Milton Friedman sometimes expressed dismay when their school privatization schemes were used as a cover to fund segregated religious academies. Friedman took pains to insist that he abhorred racism and opposed race-based segregation laws.80 But he also opposed federal laws that prohibited discrimination, believing that unfettered free markets would magically solve the problem. In conversation with me, Gary North, clearly determined to allow no one to stand to his right, referred to Milton Friedman as “that Communist.”

  Rushdoony emphatically agreed with the immortal principle articulated by Dabney himself: “Americans, taken as we find them, who do not get their moral restraints from the Bible, have none. Training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral.”81 The same message spills out of the works of Christian nationalist leaders today.

  Borrowing from other anti-New Deal writers such as Albert Jay Nock and mixing in language from the Bible, Rushdoony articulated the doctrine of “the remnant.” When history takes a wrong turn, he says, God leaves behind a “remnant” of true believers, tasked with guarding the light in dark times and then retaking civilization—or, as he called it, “the task of reconstruction”82—thus bringing about the term Christian Reconstruction. The job of the Reconstructionists, according to Rushdoony, is to remain faithful no matter what. “History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith,” he says.

  Libertarian economics came to dominate Christian nationalism. Gary North published a book, Christian Economics in One Lesson, that was self-consciously modeled on Henry Hazlitt’s libertarian bestseller, Economics in One Lesson. Jerry Falwell, among others, took to tossing around quotes from Milton Friedman and attacking labor unions, redistributive policies like food stamps and Medicaid, and government regulation.83 The fact that members of his congregation often depended on these same government programs did not seem to trouble him at all.

  Ultimately Rushdoony’s contribution had less to do with the originality of his ideas—they were in large measure borrowed—than with the cla
rity and forcefulness with which they were expressed and elaborated upon. To his followers, his moral certainty was inspiring. To the future leaders of the movement, it could prove embarrassing. To much of the rest of the world, it was the kind of clarity that chills the blood. To those who knew him personally, it all came down to a certain paradox. The father of six children, five biological and one adopted, Rushdoony appears to have enjoyed warm relations with his kids (of whom he gained custody after divorcing their mother, Arda) and was welcomed in many groups as a thoughtful, charismatic leader. Yet, in his writings, he reimagined a world in which a particular understanding of the Christian religion dominates every aspect of life, and those who deviate from certain “biblical” orthodoxies could be condemned to death. Many of Rushdoony’s ideas justify the politics of today—perhaps in ways that even he didn’t intend.

  The fusion of hyper-capitalist ideology with hyper-Calvinist theology, purveyed by the likes of Fifield and chiseled in the granite of Rushdoony’s ponderous works, secured the financial future of Christian nationalism. America’s plutocrats understood that they had a friend on the Christian right. Just as the moguls of the 1930s and ’40s flocked to Fifield, a number of their heirs and successors attached themselves to evangelical leaders who hewed to this brand of thinking. Although few plutocratic families linked themselves in such obvious ways with Rushdoony himself (Howard Ahmanson Jr.’s onetime admiration for Rushdoony was not shared by other members of his clan), others put their money behind figures like D. James Kennedy, who carried, in more palatable packaging, many of the same messages as Rushdoony: that any attempts by government to interfere with the accumulation of great riches was equivalent to theft, and what the people really needed was not equitable tax policy or accessible health care or quality public education but religion.

  Sometime in the late 1970s, observers of the American religious landscape came to a sudden, shocking realization: fundamentalism was back. The revival came as a surprise, because the keepers of popular opinion had formed the firm impression that old-fashioned literalism was a dying taste, doomed to fall behind in the march of science and progress. The defeat of the anti-evolution ideologues in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, it was thought, marked the final step in fundamentalism’s humiliating exit from the modern world. The secularizing forces that elevated liberal theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich in the 1950s seemed to culminate with Time magazine’s 1966 scandalous cover story, “Is God Dead?”

  Yet, by the 1970s, even as nonbelief continued to capture the headlines and the total number of religious believers drifted slightly downward, the proportion between liberal religionists and their conservative brethren began to shift. With the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, it suddenly became clear that millions of Americans—as many as 50 million, some claimed—identified as “born-again” Christians, and millions more aligned themselves with an increasingly austere form of Catholicism. What’s more, ultraconservative Americans were starting to organize at the polls and vote their religion.

  Although the return of old-line religion struck many observers as a novelty, in retrospect it is clear that the new orthodoxy followed the pattern set by the counterrevolutionary revival of the preceding century. The technology in the early days was the revival tent and the empty cornfield; in mid-century it was the radio and television set; and now we may add the cell phone, computer screen, and the megachurch or local outpost of a large parachurch network. But the reactionary character of the message, considered apart from specific policy agendas, was remarkable in its similarities. Then as now, the movement drew its energy from the needs and anxieties of a mass of struggling Americans—even as it allied itself with concentrations of economic power in its time. Just as in the days of proslavery theology, the contradictions were almost too obvious to be seen. Poor whites were, apart from enslaved people themselves, the system’s greatest losers, and yet, with the guidance of men like Dabney, they joined with its loudest supporters. The enemy, all agreed, was some form of godlessness, and redemption always came by “reclaiming” the nation.

  Just as the activity on the ground fell into a familiar pattern, so, too, did the ideas that accompanied the movement. A surprising number of leaders found themselves making sense of the new world with ideas that had ample theological precedent in Rushdoony and his mentors and predecessors.

  They rediscovered a supposedly Christian founding of the American republic and detected a plot to subvert the nation’s destiny through secularization. And once again they invented a plan for redemption that involved taking the country “back” to a time that never existed. As the movement grew, new writers and theologians emerged and struck off on their own—only to end up on the ground Rushdoony and his forebears had tilled.

  In recent years, it seems, more of Rushdoony’s admirers have felt emboldened to step out of the closet. In a 2018 blog post, Watchmen on the Wall, the Family Research Council’s alliance of an estimated 25,000 pastors, characterized Rushdoony as a “powerful advocate for the Christian and home-school movements across America” who “challenged Christian leaders of his day to stand on biblical truth in the public square” before quoting extensively from his Institutes of Biblical Law.84 Other leaders have self-consciously distanced themselves from Rushdoony. They reject guilt by association with his philosophies and have done their best to pooh-pooh “alarmism” over his ideas. And yet, Julie Ingersoll aptly observes, “little slivers of Rushdoony’s work seem to be everywhere.”85 In the drive for homeschooling and the privatization of public education; in the providential history of Christian nation mythologizers; in their insistence that public officials be guided by a “biblical worldview”; in the unabashed commitment to the subordination of women, part of the order and structure of the universe as God intended; in the fusion of the Bible with libertarian economics—even in their arguments for gun rights and against universal health care—today’s Christian nationalists follow the logic, if not necessarily the theology, laid down by Rushdoony.

  Although his heirs pursued their own theologies, and in cases explicitly disagreed with him on certain doctrinal matters, an astonishing number settled on one version or another of dominionism, or the fundamental idea that right-thinking Christians should assume power in all spheres of life. C. Peter Wagner, father figure to the New Apostolic Reformation,86 whose leaders consider themselves to be apostles and prophets, promoted a particularly influential variety of dominionism widely referred to as the “7 Mountain Mandate.” Once in the shadows of the religious right, the movement appears to be approaching the mainstream. Seven Mountains dominionist promoter Lance Wallnau was given a featured speaking slot at the 2018 Values Voter Summit, and other prominent speakers at the summit peppered their presentations with references to the “mountains of culture.” In his book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, Wagner traces the ideas and their genealogy with admirable clarity: “The practical theology that best builds a foundation under social transformation is dominion theology, sometimes called ‘Kingdom now.’ Its history can be traced back through R.J. Rushdoony and Abraham Kuyper to John Calvin.”87

  Gary North put his finger on the deeper forces at work when he observed that “the ideas of the Reconstructionists have penetrated into Protestant circles that for the most part are unaware of the original sources of the theological ideas that are beginning to transform them.”88 Then again, perhaps some of those circles are aware of the sources of their ideas after all. “Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same,” as one person put it to Michael J. McVicar, author of Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism.

  The evolution of the conservative movement over the past forty years has exposed the inner truth about its origins. “Evangelicals have traded Ronald Reagan’s gospel-inspired depiction of America as a ‘shining city on a hill’ for Trump’s dark vision of ‘American carnage,’ ” writes the journalist Sarah Posner, a reporting fellow with
Type Investigations, in a 2017 article for the New Republic. “And in doing so, they have returned the religious right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain the South’s segregationist ‘way of life.’ ”89

  In the final analysis, Rushdoony and his Reconstructionists were effects of history, too, not its causes. The new nationalists rediscovered—or simply reinvented—their ideas because they answered to a logic that has much deeper roots in American history. Slavery may have ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, but the system of economic exploitation through racial division lived on, and the proslavery theology that sustained it in an earlier time did not simply vanish. The hierarchies that arose in the Gilded Age hit some roadblocks in the progressive era, but that hardly stopped plutocrats from enlisting new champions of theological legitimation. Christian nationalism exploits and intensifies inequality, and dominionism is its logical end point and the actual engine of the so-called culture wars. Its ideas persist not on account of any clandestine texts or secret cabals but because the forces that produced them remain very much at work in shaping the movement today.

  The many paradoxes and contradictions of Christian nationalism make sense when they are taken out of the artificial “culture war” framing and placed within the history of the antidemocratic reaction in the United States. To any outside observer, it must seem odd that Christian nationalists loudly reject “government” as a matter of principle even as they seek government power to impose their religious vision on the rest of society. America’s slaveholders, too, revealed a similar inconsistency when they championed “states’ rights” and at the same time demanded the assistance of the federal government in catching runaway slaves and defending the slave system. Plenty of other political movements, including progressive movements, might say that they like government when it does what they like, and they dislike it when it doesn’t. Among Rushdoony’s successors, it would become clear that what they actually oppose is simply secular, democratic government, whereas what they invariably support is religious or theocratic government. At bottom, they agree with Rushdoony that there is no neutrality: the state either answers to God or it answers to something worse.