Secrets of the Extreme Religious Right: Inside the Frightening World of Christian Reconstructionism

As an unprecedented shift in public opinion brought about the legalization of gay marriage, a vigorous counter-current has been intensifying under the banner of “religious freedom”—an incredibly slippery term.

Perhaps the most radical definition of such freedom comes out of the relatively obscure tradition of Christian Reconstructionism, the subject of a new book by religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstructionism.  As Ingersoll explains, Reconstructionists basically reject the entire framework of secular political thought in which individual rights have meaning, so “freedom” as most Americans understand the term is not the issue at all. Indeed, they argue that such “freedom” is actually slavery—slavery to sin, that is.

Reconstructionists aim to establish a theocracy, though most would no doubt bristle at that description. They do not want to take over the government so much as dismantle it. But the end result would be a social order based on biblical law—including all those Old Testament goodies like stoning gay people to death, while at the same time justifying “biblical slavery.”  These extreme views are accurate, Ingersoll explained, but at the same time quite misleading in suggesting that Reconstructionism is a fringe movement with little influence on the culture.

‘If someone wants to understand these people, I think the smart thing to do is to take those really inflammatory things, acknowledge that they are there, and set them aside,” Ingersoll advised. “And then look at the stuff that’s less inflammatory, but therefore, I think, more important. I think the Christian schooling, homeschooling, creationism, the approach to economics, I think those kinds of things are far more important."

She continued, "The fights that we’re seeing right now over how religious freedom and constitutionally protected equality for the LGBT community, how those two things fit together—or don’t—that fight was presaged by theologian Rousas Rushdoony in the ’60s. He talked about that fight. Not particularly with regard to LGBT, but with regard to the expansion—it was civil rights. He didn’t say explicitly racially based civil rights, but that’s what he was talking about in the era.”

As Ingersoll’s book explains, the influences she just mentioned are quite significant. But in order to understand them and how they’ve succeeded, we need to understand the worldview they come out of. In the book, Ingersoll explains:

According to Rushdoony, biblical authority is God’s authority delegated to humans, who exercise dominion under God’s law in three distinct God-ordained institutions: the family, the church, and the civil government. Each of those institutions has carefully delineated and limited responsibilities. When humans decide that those institutions should serve any functions beyond the ones ordained by God, they presume the autonomy and supremacy of human reason and thus violate biblical law.

So, “tyranny” is violating that law, and the God-ordained “separation of powers” behind it, and “freedom” is opposite of “tyranny”—following the law. Understanding where this conception comes from, and where it leads to helps to shed a great deal of light on what Reconstructionists are up to, which in turn helps us begin to see the influence it has. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Rosenberg: Christian Reconstruction is a term many people may not be familiar with. I’d like to begin by asking you to explain what it is.

Julie Ingersoll: This is a term that was given by Rushdoony to talk about this approach to Christian theology that focuses on reconstructing society in a way that overcomes the effects of the Fall. So, for these folks, God created Adam and Eve, put them in the Garden of Eden to have dominion. And the Fall interrupted that. With the Resurrection, people are restored to their original purpose. So the focus that he had was to set about a strategy for reconstructing the kingdom of God as it was intended to be, in the way that he understood it.

PR: As you describe, three of the most significant aspects of Reconstructionists are pre-conceptualism, post-millennialism and theonomy. Could you explain these ideas for us and why they’re so significant?

JI: Presuppositionalism, this comes from [theologian Cornelius] Van Til, and it basically says all knowledge starts with presuppositions. And those presuppositions – in Reconstructionist thought, there’s only two fundamental thoughts you can start with. One is you start with the revelation of God in the Bible, or you start with anything else – and “anything else” hangs together for them in the sense that if you don’t submit to God’s authority, then you are relying on your own reason, your own rationality to adjudicate right and wrong. '

For Reconstructionists, that goes right back to the Garden of Eden and eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil, and trying to know good and evil for themselves, and for them to label that is humanism. So “everything else” gets lumped into that category of humanism, because it is all, in their minds, a failure to submit to God’s authority, and to develop knowledge by relying on God’s  revelation.

So, presuppositionalism is very important. It leads to the idea that there is no neutrality. You can’t have a secular sphere. Secularity is humanism. Secularity says, well, I’m not looking to God to know whether this policy is the best one or not. I’m going to use quantifiable science through measurement, through rationality and maybe debate. So it becomes really important for that reason. And that is a really important category for these people.

Post-millennialism and theonomy are kind of related, sometimes in the book I called them corollaries. So post-millennialism – Christianity is a tradition that posits there is a trajectory to history that leads to a culmination. Not all religions have that. In Hinduism, time is eternal and it just keeps getting reset. But Christianity has that idea. There’s a beginning of time; there’s a purpose to history; it has a trajectory – teleology is the theological term for it – and it ends somewhere. And so there’s long been Christian disagreement over how it ends.

One of the earliest versions is called premillennialism, and it says that Jesus will return before there’s the establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth. The dominant view that you see among conservative Protestants is a version of the premillennialist, but it dates only to the 19th century. We can get into the weeds on that, but it’s dispensationaliam. It’s the view of Hal Lindsay, and any movie that you see about the rapture, and Armageddon, and all that stuff. So it takes all those things that seem like prophecy in the Bible, it puts them off in the future, and expects the world to get worse and worse until Jesus returns.

Then there’s amillennialism, the passive view that most Catholics have: “Oh yeah, the Bible talks about the kingdom of God, but that’s in heaven. It’s not an earthly thing.” But the one that’s relevant to these folks, is perhaps one that the Puritans had ...says the kingdom of God was established at the Resurrection. Going back to that earlier thing about Genesis, so Adam and Eve left the garden and they couldn’t exercise dominion that God had created them for, and that went on for a while, until the Resurrection, that, in the view of Reconstructionists, restored humanity to its original purpose. And so that purpose is to build the kingdom of God on earth. And that is post-millennialism.

There is a second coming, but Jesus will return after Christians have filled the whole earth with good news, with the gospel. And for them, what it means is… for a lot of contemporary Christians, like preaching the gospel means going out and saying Jesus died for your sins, and people say the sinner’s prayer, and then they’re Christians.

But Reconstructionists are really critical of that idea. They think it starts there, perhaps, but that evangelism for them is really about teaching people to bring all of their lives under the Lordship, to make every aspect of life infused with the authority, wisdom of the Bible. And that’s the autonomy. The way in which they establish the kingdom of God, as expected, to post-millennialists is through the application of biblical law, or theonomy.

PR: That explains very well how post-millennialism and theonomy fit together. One thing that emerges in your book is how different their concept of freedom is from what’s commonly assumed in America today, and how the opposite of freedom is defined so differently as well –  majority rule, and democracy as tyranny.

This has emerged particularly in the rhetoric of “religious freedom” against gay marriage. So where does this concept of freedom come from and what does it entail?

JI: That’s a good one. Some of that, at least philosophically or theologically, goes right back to that division between submission to the authority of God, and claiming authority for our own rationality. It goes right back there. So, for these Christians, the way they understand it, the only true freedom is freedom in submission to God. The thing that we might think of this freedom is actually conceived of as bondage to sin.. And in some ways, if you say were does that come from, it says that in the New Testament, right? That’s what Paul says. Paul is working with all of those inversions, to live is to suffer, and to die is gain. And the leaders are the servants, he inverts all kinds of categories in that way.

You also see some of this in the discussions about slavery. And there’s a good bit about that in the book. To me, this is one of the more interesting developments over the last decade. Because, on the one hand you do have this real minimization of the horrors of slavery, and the wrongness of slavery. You have people talking about, “It wasn’t so bad,” and “These are actually Christian families” and “People were well treated,” and “They were better treated than they were in Africa,” you get all that kind of stuff. So actual, literal slavery gets a little whitewashed if you pardon the word. Where actually being required by the federal government to fill out a tax form is considered involuntary servitude and slavery, and that’s appalling! 

PR: By this definition, “freedom” ultimately has nothing at all to do with individual rights, or with the individual, period. And that suggests a completely different way of seeing the world, which brings me to my next question.  In contrast with terms like “fundamentalism” and “modernism,” you suggest a more profound grasp of what’s going on with Christian Reconstructionist can be had via the terms of “maximalist” versus “minimalist.”

Can you explain what this distinction is and how it helps us understand what’s going on?

JI: That division, that categorization comes from Bruce Lincoln, a scholar religion at the University of Chicago. Part of the problem with that fundamentalism/modernism division is it denies that fundamentalism is essentially modern. I mean, it’s really, really modern. When you look at how they're fighting the battle between creationism and evolution, they turned creationism into science. They’re really really modern. Now, they are opposed to secular types of modernity, but they are not really opposed to modernity. And in many ways the crises of modernity are what give rise to specific answers they offer.

Plus, I think that that division, the meaning of those terms changes from one context to the next. So I think they are really difficult words to use, at least with any scholarly accuracy. In everyday discourse it might work, particularly if you’re in a conversation with people who sort of share some understandings and assumptions. But then all of a sudden you have people who are trying to talk about fundamentalism as a global phenomenon, and that’s really problematic. 

But what Lincoln says – and it’s still entangled with modernity –is that in the modern period, we’ve compartmentalized life. And so, instead of having religion infuse every aspect of our lives, for the most part people who look at the world with modernist eyes think of parts of life as being religious or spiritual, and parts of life being scientific, and parts of it being rational.

So we might be really different persons at work than we are in our families, or in our churches or at our schools. And each of these realms has its own sets of rules, and we have our own understanding of our diverse identities within the spaces, And so people who are comfortable moving in that way, and who see most of life as secular, and then set off a severe specific sphere in which religion remains salient, as I was just saying, if you divide life into all these spheres that have their own sources of authority, and rules and functions and ethics, your own identity varies between them. Then religion is off on its own, and its supreme in its own sphere, but it doesn’t infuse all of the others.

For Lincoln, that is minimalist. Religion has its own sphere, but its influence is limited, it’s minimal with regard to all of the others. So we, in the modern world, don’t necessarily think of work, for example, as religious. And this is part of what’s underneath the debate over where to draw the line in the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision. So, if we’re going to have marriage exemptions, that allow people to even violate discrimination laws, on the basis of religion conviction, we’re going to have to say where the line is of what counts as religion.

For those of us are minimalists, we say, Oh, that’s easy, it’s church. Okay, well maybe it’s Christian schools. But then you get these broader categories, where you’ve got hospitals, that have historic roots in religious traditions, but now use all kinds of public funds. Are they religious? Are they secular? A minimalist will say those are going to be secular, but a maximalist says no, everything is essentially religious, for a maximalist. So I think that framework is much more effective for thinking through these conflicts than trying to think in terms of fundamentalism.

One more point on that. You see the culmination of this in the Hobby Lobby case. For most of us in America, this is a secular matter; there may be a religious overlay to it, but for them it’s not. It’s a calling, it’s deeply infused with religion. But I don’t think it’s there just saying that for the purpose of making a legal case to do something they want to do. I actually don’t think that. They see themselves as seeking to infuse all of life with religion.

PR: Why has the impact of Reconstructionism not been widely recognized, when it is arguably one of the most coherent responses on behalf of maximalism?

JI: Well, there’s a bunch of reasons. Some of the people don’t like to be identified with Reconstructionists, but another reason is that the influence is unrecognized because up until recently so much of what was written them was, “Rushdoony advocates stoning of homosexuals.” So yeah, he did do that, but if all you’re going to do is take those really far-out crazy things and just focus on those, you’re going to miss the real influence. Because culturally we’re moving, thankfully, in the other direction on LGBT rights. But when you look at the Reconstructionist world much more broadly, you see places where the influence is deep and profound. And it’s not so far out there that these things will never happen.