Book Plug - Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction
If you are reading anything about Christian Nationalism right now, make it this book!
In a previous post I introduced readers to the Christian Reconstructionist concept of theonomy. I was recently pleased to get my hands on a very readable book that details how this obscure version of conservative Christianity has pervaded much of the political right in the United States.
I’m trying something new here with Quick Links to the Book Excerpts below. If they don’t work, please let me know.
On the Wrath Of God / On Sphere Sovereignty / On the Hierachy of the Family / On the Christian Nation / On Homeschooling / On ‘Biblical Patriarchy’ / On Personhood Amendments / On ‘White Guilt’ / On Abortion Related Violence
After starting it on Monday, I flew through Julie Ingersoll's book "Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction" in under a week. This never happens for me - I tend to start books fast, and then slowly trail off towards the halfway point. Not this book. It is, perhaps, one of the most important books of the past decade. Published in 2015, its analysis ends before the Donald Trump era of Republican politics in the United States, and, as such, provides a background to the rising tide of Christian Nationalism in both the United States and Canada. I'm very interested in an update from Dr. Ingersoll, perhaps a second book on how the Christian Reconstruction movement has further entrenched itself in American right wing political culture.
Here are some excerpts from Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction:
On the Wrath of God
For these Christians, most of the explicit condemnations in the Old Testament are still applicable. Reconstructionists don’t see them as being outside the “character of God,” as many other Christians might. Moreover, according to Reconstructionists, Christians who find it hard to countenance the God of the Old Testament are guilty of presuming that their own reason is adequate to question the sovereign God who is Lord and Creator of all. To embrace those aspects of God’s character that strike us as angry, harsh, and violent is the very test of obedience. By accepting what God tells us in scripture rather than what seems to our own minds to be right, we humbly acknowledge the limits and contingent character of human reason. To presume to judge God is hubris.
On Sphere Sovereignty
There is no more important key to understanding Christian Reconstruction than Rushdoony’s concept of the family, which undergirds everything else. While Rushdoony argues that God has ordained authority to function in three distinctly separate spheres—familial, ecclesiastical, and civil—familial authority is the most fundamental and, in many ways, the model for the others. He writes, “The meaning of the family is thus not to be sought in procreation but in a God-centered authority and responsibility in terms of man’s calling to subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it.” p. 64
On the Hierarchy of the Family
Rushdoony is very explicit about this, and he finds in the fifth commandment—“honor thy father and mother that thy days may be long upon the land,”—much more than one might expect. Rushdoony points to Isaiah 3:16–26 as an illustration of what happens when men fail to exercise their God-given prerogative of dominion in the family: “Women rule over men; children then gain undue freedom and power and become oppressors of their parents; the emasculated rulers in such a social order lead the people astray and destroythe fabric of society.” Rushdoony anticipates a future collapse of society like that depicted in Isaiah in which “the once independent and feministic women are humbled in their pride and seek the protection and safety of a man.” His analysis is grounded in essentialized views of gender in which males, by nature, fight for territory and status while females’ instincts are “personal and anarchistic.” He writes, “the woman becomes absorbed with problems of law and order in a personal way, i.e. when her family and her family’s safety are endangered by its decay. The man will be concerned with the problems of society apart from the condition of crisis. p. 43
On The Christian Nation
Healer of Nations [written by Gary North] is helpful in understanding the overall Reconstructionist vision, because North lays out explicitly just what a Christian nation would look like. Here is one of the clearest articulations of this vision.
A Common View of God: All citizens would acknowledge the sovereignty of the Trinitarian God of the Bible . . . His Word, the Bible, would be acknowledged as the source of the nation’s law-order.
A Common System of Courts: A Christian nation would follow the example of Exodus 18 and establish an appeals court system. Men would be free to do as they please unless they violated a specific piece of Bible based legislation or a specific Biblical injunction that the Bible says must be enforced by the civil government . . .
Common Biblical Law: The Bible as the Word of God would be the final standard of justice . . . The national constitution (written or unwritten) would be officially subordinate to the Bible . . .
Judgment by Citizens: The judges in Exodus 18 were to be men of good character . . . Covenanted citizens alone may serve as judges. All other civil rights (legal immunities) belong to every resident . . .
Continuity: Each succeeding generation would be trained by Biblical law by parents (Deuteronomy 6:6–7) and by the civil government through public instruction in God’s law (Deuteronomy 31:10–13). p. 63-64
On Homeschooling and the Role of Parents in Educating Children
[From the CLASS Homeschool Curriculum] God has committed to parents the high privilege and solemn responsibility of training and educating their children in the fear of the Lord. We further believe that they dare not surrender this God given right to any other institution, such as the state . . . Education is religious, the Scriptures are the ultimate authority, and parents are accountable to God for the instruction and discipline of their children. Therefore, we cannot in good conscience come under the control of either civil or ecclesiastical authorities with respect to the education of our children. p. 108-109
On ‘Biblical Patriarchy’
…biblical patriarchy asserts that God is male and that the human male is the “image and glory of God in terms of authority, while the woman is the glory of man.” With regard to family authority, the “husband and father is the head of his household, a family leader, provider, and protector, with the authority and mandate to direct his household in paths of obedience to God.” And while men have a calling to exercise dominion in the world, women’s calling is to assist their husbands by serving in the home. Women in the “exceptional state” of being unmarried may have “more flexibility” in their exercise of dominion but it is not the “ordinary and fitting role of women to work alongside men as their functional equals in public spheres of dominion.” Patriarchal authority requires that fathers retain responsibility for the education of their children, primarily in the home. Grown sons may leave their father’s home, but daughters should not do so until they are married. Sons may choose their wives (with parental counsel), but daughters should look to their fathers to find a suitable spouse for them. p. 150
On Personhood Amendments
Reconstructionists claim that when the civil government overreaches its legitimate biblical authority, the right to resist it is rooted in the authority of God. Titus’s second lecture applied the argument that the Tenth Amendment is the constitutional remedy for what he perceives of as the overreach of the federal government in the form of a strategy to bring about an end to legal abortion through “Personhood Amendments.” Titus’s argument is that while the US Supreme Court did not find a “right to life” in the Fourteenth Amendment, this does not preclude states, under the Tenth Amendment, from establishing a higher standard of protection in their various state constitutions. In his view the federal Constitution does not give the federal government the power to decide when life begins so, based on the Tenth Amendment, states may do so. p. 183
On ‘White Guilt’
Rushdoony, in <The Politics of Guilt and Pity, 1970>, argues that civil government denies the freedom from guilt wrought by the resurrection and, ultimately, demeans and dehumanizes those it claims to help. In that volume he essentially outlines a defense of social inequality and, before the term “white privilege” was even used in this way, he critiqued the concept as nothing more than the “cultivation of guilt” as a means to power: “The political cultivation of guilt is a central means to power, for guilty men are slaves; their conscience is in bondage, and hence they are easily made objects of control. Guilt is thus systematically taught for purposes of control. Several instances can be cited readily. For example, the white man is being systematically indoctrinated into believing he is guilty of enslaving and abusing the Negro.” p. 221
On Abortion Related Violence
The all-or-nothing character of the abortion debate, including the belief held by some that Christians can legitimately use violence to stop abortion, begins with the assertion that abortion is the violent taking of a human life that is in no salient way different from the killing of any other innocent person. It is this first principle that makes the pro-life arguments comparing abortion to the Holocaust and slavery more than rhetorical hype. Legalized abortion is understood as part of a larger cultural transformation, a “culture of death,” in which increasing opportunities and life choices for women have changed notions of childbearing. p. 227
In Canada, Pastors Joe Boot (Toronto, ON) and Henry Hildebrandt (Aylmer, ON) made use of explicitly Reconstructionist arguments when they refused to close their churches during the COVID pandemic. Indeed, Joe Boot, Pastor of Toronto's Westminster Chapel, who I met in the mid-2000's when he ran the Canadian chapter of (now deceased and disgraced) Ravi Zacharias' Apologetics Ministry, now runs his own publishing house, Ezra Press. There he has published a number of books, including the 696 page "The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society" in which he expounds on his presuppositionalist apologetics to claim that the Reconstructionist view of law, theonomy, should be applied to Canada.
I believe that Julie Ingersoll's book should be at the top of the reading list for scholars and lay individuals interested in understanding the very specific and often obscure beliefs and foundations the underlie many of today's Christofascists.
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