New Christian Right

Rethinking Tax Exempt Status for Churches, My Cover Article for Christianity Today

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My latest article is the cover story for the January/February print edition of Christianity Today.

It started, quite inauspiciously, with a tweet thread that one of the editors asked me to expand upon. And then, a week before publication, the magazine’s editor, Mark Galli, wrote an op-ed calling for the impeachment of President Trump, kicking off a medium-intensity internet firestorm. Indeed, Franklin Graham, the son of Christianity Today‘s founder, evangelist Billy Graham, condemned the op-ed, claiming that the magazine has been turned into a tool “by the left for their political agenda.” I’m not sure my article will do much to assuage Franklin’s skepticism.

In any case, here’s an excerpt, though do go and read the full piece on the website.

The history of religious land-use laws is enlightening here. Using the federal government to protect tax-exempt status for churches is not a recipe for a stable, long-term equilibrium. It only works as long as Christians can maintain a white-knuckled grip on power, fighting to maintain their tax advantages by tooth, claw, court case, and ballot. The gospels tell us to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is certainly a strange way of doing it. After all, why did Jesus, when asked if he owed taxes to Rome, say, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17)? It is far better to live peaceably with all people, giving “to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes” (Rom. 13:7).

It might not be such a bad thing to lose tax-exempt status. We should consider, at the very least, the cost of maintaining this kind of cultural privilege. The true church of God, after all, is not reliant on its special status in the tax code. We can walk by faith and not by government largess.

Trump Wins, Sad! Panel Accepted by the American Historical Association, Glad!

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Creative Commons, Credit: Donkey Hotey

Creative Commons, Credit: Donkey Hotey, https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/20573036330/

Last Tuesday featured an odd juxtaposition in my little corner of the academic world. I’m a modern American political historian, among other things, so I pay close attention to topics that I might write about later in my career. Possible future monograph titles ranked from least to most depressing:

Trumpmania: How America Lost Its Mind in 2016 But Regained It In 2020 
The Passage of Power: The Years of Donald Trump 
The Rise and Fall of Trumpism 

But within hours of hearing about Trump’s win in the Indiana Republican primary and the subsequent suspension of Ted Cruz’s and John Kasich’s campaigns, I also received word from the program committee of the American Historical Association. They accepted a panel I had organized along with Michael McVicar, Nicole Hemmer, Heather Hendershot, and Kevin Kruse.

Our panel title is “Supplying Conservatism: Media Infrastructure and the Rise of the New Right.” There was something oddly poetic about having our panel on the rise of the New Right fifty years ago accepted even as we watched the movement implode in real time.  Maybe. (I’m a historian; give me at least 20 years to figure it out.) If the Republic falls before then, a member of the panel has suggested that we escape to the Colorado Rockies and join the resistance a la Red Dawn.

Anyways, if you are planning on spending January 5-8, 2017 in balmy Denver, let me know and we can get coffee.

“Supplying Conservatism: Media Infrastructure and the Rise of the New Right”

In the two decades since Alan Brinkley called conservatism the “orphan” of political history, scholars have responded by looking for the primary issue(s) which ignited Right-wing activism in the mid-twentieth century. Yet while hot button issues are necessary to rouse support, they are by themselves an insufficient cause. There are always means, media, or institutions around which movements coalesce. To put that in other terms, historians often explain the rise of the New Right by looking at shifts in the demand for conservative ideas. Yet changes in the supply of those ideas were equally important to the rise of modern conservatism. This panel focuses on the media infrastructure of the New Right. Radio, television, paperback publishing, and private intelligence agencies forged scattered conservatives into a national movement.

As Paul Matzko shows in “Polish Ham, Talk Radio, and the Rise of the New Right,” conservative radio broadcasting in the early 1960s stimulated grassroots activism. In one instance, broadcaster Carl McIntire condemned the John F. Kennedy administration for allowing imports from Communist Eastern Europe; a large group of his listeners, mostly housewives, organized boycotts of stores selling Polish hams and other goods. As amusing as the incident sounds in retrospect, it was no laughing matter for the Kennedy administration as detailed in internal White House memoranda.

Anti-ham housewives were an irritant during the 1962 midterm elections, but during the 1964 election season Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign encountered a flood of cheaply-produced, best-selling conservative paperback books. Nicole Hemmer, in “’Hatchets with Soft-Covered Sheaths,’” details the surprising success of these campaign paperbacks, which despite being authored by little known grassroots activists managed to sell upwards of 16 million copies via an informal network of Right-wing publishers and marketing outlets.

Michael McVicar, in “Surveillance—Dossier—Exposé,” reveals a darker side to the campaign to put a conservative in the White House. Using do-it-yourself manuals, Right-wing activists created private intelligence agencies that compiled dossiers on Left-wing politicians and activists. Their goal was to expose embarrassing connections between the Left and Communist front organizations. The anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s had been democratized, commodified, and placed in the hands of grassroots activists.

Despite a self-imposed distance from grassroots activism, even conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley needed a way to circulate their ideas. In “Firing Line,” Heather Hendershot describes how Buckley used his television program to create a more cerebral strand of the New Right. Grassroots activists are adept at disruption, but Buckley gave the movement an intellectual foundation on which to build a more sustainable movement.

By the 1960s, New Right activists could access conservative ideas in new ways, whether on the car radio on the way to work, as a family gathered around the television set at night, reading a campaign paperback in bed, or writing in to a private intelligence agency for information on a local political candidate. The expansion of the media infrastructure of the New Right enabled new forms of conservative, grassroots activism which would dramatically reshape national and party politics.

Session Participants

Kevin Kruse (Chair), Princeton University
Paul Matzko, Pennsylvania State University
Nicole Hemmer, The Miller Center at the University of Virginia
Michael McVicar, Florida State University
Heather Hendershot, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism – Michael McVicar

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Christian Reconstructionism has long functioned as a bogeyman in electoral politics. Politicians identified with the New Christian Right are routinely tarred by accusations of proto-theonomy, the belief that the government should enforce Old Testament civil and moral laws. Fear is an effective means of getting out the vote, so around every election season you’ll find a profusion of essays, even entire books, suggesting that a vote for [insert conservative politician] is the first step towards laws punishing homosexuality, witchcraft, and even childish rebellion with stoning. The slippery slope towards Christian Reconstructionism functions for the Left as accusations of incipient socialism do for the Right.

Apologists for Christian Reconstructionism typically respond by saying that this common depiction of their movement is skewed. Yes, they believe that in an ideal society these sins would be punishable by the civil authorities, but the advent of that society is many generations removed from the present. By that point in time, society will have already been remade voluntarily by Christian families and thus homosexuality and other sins will be much rarer than they are today. Government sanctions would hardly even be necessary. (I’m not sure that this line of Reconstructionist reasoning has ever reassured anybody anywhere who wasn’t already a convinced Reconstructionist.) In any case, the apologist avers, it’s unfair to fixate on one small, controversial part of Reconstructionist ideology while ignoring the broader intellectual framework.

Michael McVicar’s book, the first critical history of Christian Reconstructionism, digs deeper into the ideology of the movement than either the shallow criticisms of previous books or the self-congratulatory work produced by Reconstructionists themselves. McVicar had unprecedented access to Rushdoony’s personal papers and thus was able to reconstruct the theologian’s intellectual evolution in his own words. The portrait of Rushdoony that emerges is of a theological lone-wolf who patched together a system of thought by borrowing from a surprising variety of sources.

From his mentor at UC Berkeley, German expat Ernst Kantorowicz, Rushdoony imbibed a romantic nostalgia for early modern European Christendom. As McVicar puts it, he was compelled by the “ways in which abstract theological conceptions of God and man had concretized into the political infrastructure of the medieval and modern worlds.” Rushdoony wanted to bring that missing sense of religious enchantment back to American politics. Not long after his time at Berkeley, Rushdoony chanced upon the work of Cornelius Van Til. Van Til, a theology professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, had created a system of Christian apologetics known as presuppositionalism. Van Til argued that epistemology is always grounded in presuppositions about the nature of the universe. In short, a belief in God so drastically alters a Christian’s approach to learning the truth that an uncrossable chasm opens up between theology and secular philosophy. By combining Kantorowicz’s political theology and Van Til’s system, Rushdoony created a critique of State progressivism. He believed that the government’s efforts to solve social ills without reference to God were not only doomed to failure but actively harmful.

Rushdoony’s first ministry was as a missionary pastor to the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada. Rushdoony believed the social disorder on the reservation was the result of the heavy hand of a State that had divorced itself from God’s law. As Rushdoony griped, “[The state] is the giver of all things, the course of power, of land, and (having built a reservoir for irrigation here) even of water….The government hospital delivers the children, and the government army taketh them away, and blessed is the name of the government each Memorial Day.” In the face of widespread drunkenness and gambling on the reservation, Rushdoony’s messages of individual salvation seemed insufficient. The reservation, and American society more broadly, needed a full-orbed reconstruction along Biblical lines.

While on the reservation, Rushdoony encountered the third major ideological strand that composed Christian Reconstructionism. Rushdoony had grown dissatisfied with premillennial eschatology, the belief that society would sink into ever greater depravity until the second coming of Christ to earth. Rushdoony rejected premillennialism’s pessimistic outlook in favor of postmillennialism, the belief that Christians would actively usher in the kingdom of God. Christ would return once a truly Christian society had pervaded every corner of the globe. The telos of history, according to one postmillennial scholar found in Rushdoony’s personal library, “is nothing less than a Christianized world.”

These three major components of Rushdoony’s thought–Kantorowicz, Van Til, postmillennialism–were all borrowed from other sources, but he gave them his own spin by adding a novel scriptural hermeneutic. Traditionally, Reformed theologians had distinguished between three kinds of Old Testament law: civil, ceremonial, and moral. The ceremonial laws were fulfilled by the first coming of Christ and the civil laws ceased to apply after the transition from theocratic Israel to the New Testament Church. Only the moral commandments remained fully binding for Christians.

Rushdoony rejected this division between “two tables” of the law as excessively facile. He believed that the division between civil and moral law had been read into scripture rather than pulled from the text itself. Furthermore, even ceremonial law, while technically superseded by the new covenant in Christ, remained instructive as a series of principles that should inform proper Christian living today. Rushdoony’s opus, Institutes of Biblical Law, applied these Old Testament laws and principles to modern American society in mind-numbing detail. For example, the OT prohibition on mixing linen and wool threads when weaving clothes and harnessing oxes and donkeys together while plowing (Deutoronomy 22:11) elicited a lengthy discussion on the dangers of genetic hybridization, bestiality, interracial marriages, and the wanton use of the pesticide DDT.

Indeed, that odd list of issues is evocative of the idiosyncratic nature of Reconstructionism. Rushdoony attempted to harmonize three discrete streams of thought and the rough edges show through. For example, Rushdoony believed that America was headed to hell in a handbasket. (Gary North later pinned his hopes on Y2K.) That’s a grand narrative usually associated with premillennialism. Yet once America had been debased Christian Reconstructionists, organized around patriarchal family units, would rebuild a Kingdom society brick by brick. Rushdoony wedded the pessimistic assumptions prevalent on the Right during the New Deal and early Cold War with an optimistic future view of the Kingdom associated with postmillennialism. Similarly, Rushdoony’s distrust of heavy government intervention from his days on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation led him to advocate for a radically decentralized, shrunken State. And yet his hermeneutic also led him to conclude that the Bible commanded a massive extension of civil authority to protect and advance the institution of the church and Biblical morals. It’s the natural outcome of an ideological project that mingled the fears of mid-20th century conservative political culture, the political theology of a German romantic historian, and the theology of two Dutch Reformed intellectuals.

Much of the rest of McVicar’s book is an interesting account of Rushdoony’s mostly failed attempts to work with conservative think tanks. Because of his Van Til-ian presuppositionalism, he kept pushing broadly-based conservative groups to adopt stricter policies on employing Catholics and agnostics. Rushdoony’s disciples, including his son-in-law Gary North, spread his ideas to a wider audience by being willing to view non-Reformed conservatives as co-belligerents in the fight for a Christianized America. They also connected Christian Reconstructionism to the survivalist movement, which turned out to be a very profitable source of income for North in particular. It wasn’t long before Rushdoony, North, and other Reconstructionists started squabbling over who represented the future of the movement. (North even insinuated that his father-in-law had gone insane for living in godless California.)

If I have one critique of McVicar’s book, it’s that I think he exaggerates the influence of formal Reconstructionist thought on the broader New Christian Right. In his final chapter, he argues that everyone from Francis Schaeffer to Pat Robertson borrowed ideas from Rushdoony. I suspect McVicar gets this from Rushdoony himself, who frequently grumbled about people stealing his ideas without giving him credit. Yet while the language of “dominion” certainly bounced about in Right-wing discourse, I’m not sure that McVicar gives strong evidence that those ideas necessarily came from Christian Reconstructionism. New Christian Right intellectuals were more likely to cite Abraham Kuyper or Cornelius Van Til than Rousas Rushdoony. I’ve embedded a Google Ngram for “Abraham Kuyper,” “Rousas Rushdoony,” and Cornelius Van Til. It’s hardly scientific, but it’s suggestive as to their relative weight on conservative Christian political theology.

Take the example of Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s books, How Should We Then Live? and A Christian Manifesto, were hugely influential among evangelicals interested in cultural engagement during the 1970s and 1980. McVicar credits Rushdoony with a “distant, complex influence on the genesis of Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto” and recounts one of Rushdoony’s journal entries: “Read Francis Schaeffer: A Christian Manifesto, another book using some of my material…with no mention of me…Not faith but timidity is the mark of too many Christians today, including able men like Francis.” Yet while Rushdoony may have felt that Schaeffer borrowed his ideas, it seems just as likely that Schaeffer merely pulled from the same streams as Rushdoony had. Schaeffer attended Westminster Theological Seminary and had taken classes from Cornelius Van Til. He certainly borrowed Van Til’s ideas, but I’m not sure McVicar gives any direct evidence that Schaeffer borrowed from, or even read, anything by Rushdoony. A visit to Schaeffer’s archives might have shed light on the matter, but in this and other instances, McVicar is too willing to take Rushdoony’s assertions at face value.

I’ll close with a personal comment. (That’s the advantage of writing a review for your own website!) As a Reformed Christian myself, I found the sections of McVicar’s book that touched on Rushdoony’s hermeneutic of Scripture deeply disturbing. Oddly enough, I do agree with Rushdoony on one point, that the traditional division between “two tables” of Old Testament law is facile. It’s just not that neat and tidy when you get down into the weeds. However, I push that observation to exactly the opposite conclusion. I agree with David Dorsey’s view in “The Law of Moses and the Christian: A Compromise.” The New Testament authors say that the entire Old Testament law code is fulfilled in Christ and is thus voided for the New Testament believer. While pieces of the Old Testament law are restated and even expanded upon in the new covenant, the Mosaic law code is no longer binding upon the life of the Christian. Period. The OT law does have value inasmuch as it tells us something about the character of the God who wrote it, but it should not be fodder for endless speculation on how to apply OT law to NT life. That feels more like something learnt sitting at the seat of Gameliel than at the foot of the Cross.

And it’s worth noting where Rushdoony’s hermeneutical logic led him. McVicar includes the following anecdote. At one of Rushdoony’s Bible studies, a student asked him, What would happen to a Hindu in a reconstructed America? Rushdoony, bouncing a child on his knee, responded, “As long as he didn’t practice his faith, the Hindu would be fine.” The student pushed again. And what if said Hindu did practice his faith? Well then, Rushdoony replied, “He’d be guilty of violating the laws of the state.” And? “And be subject to capital punishment.” Rushdoony pushed his vision of a postmillennial Christendom enforcing Old Testament law to its logical extreme.