Though brief, McVicar highlights Rushdoony’s “anti-humanist” political thought, the role of the Mosaic Law in society and how it would apply in case-laws such as those requiring the death penalty, the kingdom of God and postmillennial eschatology. McVicar uses well the key sources of Rushdoony’s thought, primarily his magnum opus, the Institutes of Biblical Law (1973).

Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiii + 309 pp.

As with many others, I suspect my first exposure to Christian Reconstruction was through an interest in presuppositional apologetics. It was in the pages of a Festschrift for the Dutch-American theologian Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) that I first read of Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001). This led me to Rushdoony’s book-length study of Van Til and a head-long fall into the world of theonomy. To this day I maintain a hefty collection of back-issues of the Journal of Christian Reconstruction and the magazine Faith For All of Life and have a goodly number of their books on my shelf. My theonomist of choice was Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995), whose skills at debate were impressive. But I also appreciated Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North, largely for their critical–and entertaining–engagement with a wide range of interesting subjects. My self-identification as a theonomist waned after sitting under the teaching of Douglas Vickers, a former economist who had been a friend of Van Til and John Murray (1898-1975), and who writes Reformed theology and apologetics.  In his Sunday School class, Vickers’ godliness and theological acumen were clear, and I was bewildered when North uncharitably attacked him as a “Keynesian” in the preface of the book, Baptized Inflation (1986). It was then that I realized that the tone of many theonomists was not only off-putting, but sub-Christian. That experience removed my rose-coloured glasses and allowed me to look at the movement with more objectivity, which led to a greater appreciation of their Reformed critics. My interest in Christian Reconstruction has remained over the years, so I was quite expectant when I heard of Michael J. McVicar’s work on the subject, first as a doctoral dissertation at Ohio State University, and now as the published monograph under review.

Writings on Christian Reconstruction over the past fifty years have swung between one of two extremes, both within and without Reformed circles. On the one end are those who are violently uncritical, who parrot the movement’s talking points as gospel. Strangely, a number of his followers, many of whom could never have met him, refer to him as “Rush,” as though he were a lifelong buddy. On the other are those whose criticisms are just as thoughtless who lead readers to fret that theonomists are about to overrun the church or even the world (for a brief survey of such writings by McVicar, see pages 215-216). This is why McVicar’s Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism is such an important book. It is a fair summary and analysis of the movement, taking in its remarkable aspects and its faults, without resorting to the triumphalism of the fanboy or the fear-mongering exemplified in the journalistic approaches of Michelle Goldberg or Chris Hedges. McVicar’s work lived up to and exceeded my expectations.

McVicar’s focus is the life and thought of Reconstruction’s founder, R. J. Rushdoony, a man of remarkable industry and insight, and his relationship to American conservatism. A prolific author, Rushdoony wrote on a staggering array of subjects, from Reformed theology to the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), from economics to education reform. Yet in spite of the number of words that poured from Rushdoony’s pen, it really was not until Christian Reconstruction that a clear and compelling picture of his life was offered for public consumption. Rushdoony was born to Armenian parents who had escaped genocide in the early twentieth century, coming first to New York, where Rushdoony was born in 1916, and then making the trek to California, where the fields were fruitful. Rushdoony’s father was a minister whose church catered to the Armenian diaspora in Southern California. A bright student, Rushdoony studied English at the University of California, Berkeley (1938), and pursued divinity studies at the Pacific School of Religion in 1944 towards becoming a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Surprisingly he was originally of the political left, with an early membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. It was through his experience in the 1940s as a missionary to the Paiute and Shoshone at the Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada that he began to see problems with socialism, as government handouts seemed to bring with it apathy, degradation and unrest. His missionary experiences, coupled with his discovery of Reformed theology, particularly of the Kuyperian variety, and the apologetic method of Van Til, helped Rushdoony develop a theological and ethical system that he dubbed Christian Reconstruction.

For Rushdoony, Reconstruction was a paradigm that sought to bring every aspect of life under Christ’s Lordship, built on a theonomic ethic which subsumed reality under the law-word of Christ in scripture. At its founding, Reconstruction proved attractive to many caught in the burgeoning of American conservatism. Among this group of anti-statists conspiracy theories abounded, large sums of money were exchanged to fund think tanks, opposing factions developed, and at the center was Rushdoony, whose otherworldly look, whether in native headdress, or Saruman-esque white beard, adds to the film-noir veneer of the time. Aesthetically, Rushdoony’s world of Southern California religion and politics had the ambiance of a Roman Polanski film. It was a world of ex-hippies turned lawyers, and secretive billionaires, together striving to bring about grandiose political change. And there was Rushdoony, moving easily between bas bleu lectures hosted by conservative housewives in Southern California, and lawyers in courtrooms fiercely defending homeschoolers. At his height he took his outlook to the upper echelons of American politics, including visits to the White House. When reading Christian Reconstruction one can almost hear the music of Jerry Goldsmith playing in the background.

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