Academic literature on the topic 'Rushdoony, Rousas John'

According to the town criers of liberal American journalism, readers must wake up and do something. Hide your children—there is a movement afoot among conservative Christians to take over our country and give America a theocratic makeover. A slew of magazine articles and books—with apocalyptic titles such as American Theocracy and The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us1— announced conservative Christians' backward views on social and political issues, insidious webs of government influence, and intentions to return America to its supposedly Christian roots. Most of these authors devoted at least a few pages to an obscure religious movement and a man with a curious name: Christian reconstructionism and R. J. Rushdoony.

For more than half a century, Rousas John Rushdoony and his followers have articulated and disseminated what they understand to be a biblical worldview, based in aspects of traditional reformed theology and both the Old and New Testaments. This worldview seeks to apply biblical law to every aspect of life and to transform every aspect of culture to establish the Kingdom of God. While some components of their vision are so extreme that Christian Reconstructionists are often dismissed as an irrelevant fringe group, other aspects of their vision have taken root in conservative American Protestantism, especially in the Christian homeschool movement, and therefor influenced American conservatism more broadly. This essay outlines that worldview and points to some of those areas of influence.

Chapter 7 explores the successes and failures of what came to be called the Religious Right during the last third of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Evangelical Protestantism contributed significantly to the moralism of the movement while lending apparent biblical sanction to already well-established conservative political positions such as limited government and free market economics. Participants in the Religious Right drew selectively from theologians such as Rousas John Rushdoony and Francis Schaeffer, but a nontheological pragmatism ultimately came to characterize the movement under television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the emergence of the Tea Party movement confirmed how conventional conservative concerns about deficits and creeping socialism had successfully displaced ethical issues. This nontheological pragmatism can help explain the high levels of support for Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy by white evangelicals.