A final piece of Rushdoony’s emerging belief system fell into place when he discovered the ideas of Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987). A Calvinist theologian who rejected the modernism that brought Darwin and Enlightenment ideas into the Protestant mainstream, Van Til insisted that man cannot think independently of God, and to try to do so is evil.

The nerve center of the Christian Reconstruction movement is located in the tiny Gold Rush town of Vallecito, about three hours east of San Francisco, off Highway 4. The founder of the movement, the late conservative theologian Rousas John Rushdoony ‘38, C.Sing. ‘39, M.A. ‘40, relocated here from Los Angeles in 1975, fearing civil unrest and World War III. He believed that in the event of nuclear attack, the area’s prevailing winds would mitigate the fallout.   

A small bear of a man with a white beard straight out of the Old Testament, Rushdoony named his headquarters the Chalcedon Foundation, after a 5th-century religious decree declaring God’s law supreme. He believed that modern America was in thrall to the false religion of secularism and that the only path to salvation was to reconstruct the nation according to Biblical law. It was a harsh vision: The federal government would be gutted, public education and Social Security abolished, debtors enslaved, and society reordered along patriarchal lines. Atheists, homosexuals, blasphemers, adulterers, incorrigible children, and a host of other offenders would be executed, as in the Old Testament. Once godly men had reclaimed the country, Jesus would return to usher in the new Kingdom.   

Such extreme views made Rushdoony a bogeyman to the Left and marginalized him even among the Right. Nevertheless, many of his ideas have seeped into the conservative mainstream.   

Rushdoony died in 2001 at age 84, but multiple candidates in this year’s Republican presidential primaries appeared to be channeling him. Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has made Rushdoonian arguments on everything from taxes to homosexuality, called for the posting of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, and for the nation to return to the Biblical principles upon which she says it was created. The country’s founders, she told a rally in 2003, “recognized the Ten Commandments as the foundation of our laws.”   

For his part, Texas Governor Rick Perry aligned himself with a Pentecostal sect whose founder, C. Peter Wagner, admonishes Christians to claim dominion over the “Seven Mountains” of American culture, a range that runs the gamut from entertainment to government. “Dominion,” Wagner tells his flock, “means ruling as kings.”   

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, though no theocrat, has employed Rushdoony acolytes as aides. There were echoes of Rushdoony even in statements by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, a devout Roman Catholic, vilifying the public school system, and in his accusation that President Barack Obama subscribed to the “phony theology” of environmentalism—a “theology” that elevated Earth above man and, by extension, man above God: “It’s just all an attempt to centralize power, to give more power to the government.”   

Granted, it’s not clear that all of these candidates have read or even heard of Rushdoony’s work. But Michael McVicar, an Ohio State University scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the obscure theologian’s impact on conservative thought, insists that the man has exerted a profound, if subterranean, influence on the modern Right. “Whether they know it or not,” he says, “they’re just one step removed from his influence.”   

One day last spring, my girlfriend and I drove up to Vallecito from San Francisco to see Rushdoony’s headquarters for ourselves. Chalcedon turned out to be a bare-bones affair, a combination of pioneer home and a strip-mall storefront, protected by a listing chain-link fence. We parked next to a car bearing a Ron Paul bumper sticker and went inside. At our entrance, the handful of staffers looked up from their desks, startled. Long silence followed.     “We don’t get many visitors,” one of them finally said. It seems most of the foundation’s business is done via mail-order.   

Since we were there, we browsed the bookshelves, admiring the heft of Rushdoony’s 800-page 1973 opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law. We remarked on its Spanish and Portuguese translations. “They’re working on a Chinese version, too,” said one of his daughters, Rebecca. “We have an underground mission in China.”   

Soon, Mark Rushdoony, the patriarch’s son and president of Chalcedon, swept in and made straight for us. He was tall, polo-shirted, wearing a cell phone on his belt. When I mentioned Berkeley, he looked as if he had swallowed something disagreeable. “That was a long time ago,” he said, adding that his father didn’t talk about his college years. We exchanged business cards, but that was the end of our conversation.   

Jill Rouse, one of Rushdoony’s 18 grandchildren, was more talkative. She told us that her theologian grandfather was also a movie buff. Twins was a particular favorite. Surely she didn’t mean that buddy comedy with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger playing long-lost brothers? The very same. “He watched it over and over,” she said. “He thought it was the funniest movie.”   

“People have this misperception of him as this strict pastor,” Rouse continued. She remembers a man who was warm, though professorial, and who sometimes drank beer with dinner. “He had a pool behind his house, and he loved having the grandkids over. He’d sit out there with us, watching us with a big grin on his face.”   

To Rushdoony, Christianity was an all-or-nothing proposition. “If the word of God means anything, it means everything,” he said in an oral history. From what biographical details are available, it’s not hard to see how he arrived at that diamond-hard faith.   

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Rushdoony was born in New York City in 1916. But he was conceived a world away, in blood and fire.   

An ethnic Armenian, he came from an elite family that he claimed had provided priests to the church for the previous 15 centuries. Much of Armenia had been an unwilling part of the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire since the 1500s, and in 1915 the Turks launched a campaign of genocide that killed or exiled some 1.5 million Armenians. Many of Rushdoony’s kinsmen were massacred, and his older brother, George, died for lack of medical care. Rushdoony’s parents, however, escaped across a river into Russia on a lame horse. Safe on the opposite shore, they watched as Turkish troops murdered their coreligionists. From Russia, Rushdoony’s parents eventually made it to America, finally settling in Kingsburg, California, south of Fresno.   

The Bible was everywhere as he grew up. A precocious kid who read by kerosene lamplight in his family’s farmhouse, Rushdoony had read the holy book at least six times by the time he was a teenager. He was also surrounded by reminders of the genocide, in the form of visitors from the old country bearing news of the dead. These reports helped shape his Manichaean worldview—either you were with God, or you were with Satan.   

“In Armenia, there was no neutral ground between Islam and Christianity,” he wrote in 1997. “And I came to realize that there is no neutral ground anywhere.”   

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