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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.
In the late 1960s, Rousas John Rushdoony was a retired Orthodox Presbyterian pastor who ran a little-known organization called the Chalcedon Foundation in a tiny town in central California. He and a handful of disgruntled Ph.D.s and ex-seminarians churned out books and articles that sold few copies and were probably read by even fewer. Forty years later, secular journalists are calling Rushdoony's movement "the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today."2 If his followers have their way, these writers warn, America will become a patriarchal society with zero religious tolerance for any faith other than fundamentalist Christianity, where church and state are effectively one and Mosaic code is the law of the land, where homosexuals, adulterers, and disrespectful teenagers are executed by public stoning.3 This most virulent form of Christian reconstructionism never claimed more than a handful of adherents. However, while journalists have made too much of reconstructionism's grip on mainstream evangelicalism, they have also overlooked its real significance in the development of conservative Christian thought. For a brief moment in the late twentieth century, Rushdoony challenged anyone who would call himself or herself a conservative Christian to take the whole Bible seriously-including inconvenient verses in the Old Testament that most Christians, even biblical literalists, politely ignore. He pushed a mutant strain of Calvinist theology to its logical conclusions.
Before the recent rash of pop analyses of the Christian Right, literature on Christian reconstructionism was almost nonexistent. Frederick Clarkson, a journalist who began to sound the theocracy warning siren earlier than most, published the...