Factions in Theonomy: the Romanticized 1950s Fallacy
In the last article in this miniseries, I mentioned factions of “backward-looking” Theonomy that want somehow to recreate 1950, 1850, or 1650. I was not joking about these particular dates and factions associated, or about the damage they would do in creating various tyrannies. We need to have a clear understanding of what is at stake. This article is about one important part of that understanding.
Every expression of theological truth appears within a particular historical context and generally speaking cannot be divorced from it. The Scriptures are an exception, of course, although probably not to the extent that many would think. Every man-made expression of theology, however, is inseparable from its historical context. This context affects it to a far greater degree than many would like to imagine.
For the purposes of this article, I wish to focus on the most recent date, 1950. I have things to say about “1650,” and I have certainly said loads already about “1850” (see the nearly 500-page The Problem of Slavery in Christian America). But it is the “1950” group also gives considerable cause for alarm today.
To be sure, it is not just Reconstructionists. Gary North made a similar point about “Ozzie and Harriet” (Backward Christian Soldiers?, 50–51) in relation to conservative and evangelical American Christians in general. But this has sadly come to be true of a good number within the Reconstructionist and Theonomic “Old Guard” today, too.
What’s wrong with our churches today? A lot. But if anything is wrong with the evangelical, officially conservative churches, it is this: the members think that the way to restore Christian culture is to return to 1948. At the very latest to 1956. That would be as close to “heaven on earth” as any church member could dare to hope for.
Because of the partial isolation of most of our churches from the grim reality of culture in the 1980’s, they are reacting against the evils of 1968. They want to see a return of patriotism. They want dirty language off the prime-time T.V. shows. They want television starlets to put on some underwear. They dream of the day that Ozzie and Harriet will be the parent figures of America. (Trivia question: What did Ozzie do for a living?) The CBN commercial stations rerun "Father Knows Best" in the afternoon, or similar sitcom fare. Christian parents see these bland, thoughtless series as a kind of Novocain for their children’s minds, or even their own minds. It takes them out of the 1980’s.
That was 40 years ago. It has been 40 years in the evangelical wilderness, you could say! We have wandered so far that today the same “boomer” Christians have moved from Ozzie and Harriet to supporting a playboy and a lingerie model in the White House. This is the new purity—compared to Obergefell at least! This lesser-of-two-evils way of life sure does have some values-creep to it. Of course, we still want the Ozzie and Harriet days, too, because, you know, the kids these days!
The reality for evangelicals and conservative Christians is even darker in some ways, with its hand-dipped coating of 50s. What gets lost in the discussion of morals and the golden days is not only the cultural creep just mentioned, but the thread of racism and segregation about which these same culture warriors are at best usually silent, and always have been.
For the same 40 years now, conservative Christians have toyed with the idea of “getting involved in politics,” as long as by “getting involved in politics” you mean lip service to “pro-life” fundraisers and voting Republican. Obergefell may have received all the most recent ire of culture warriors, but the real Sodom and Gomorrah of our time is said to have been Roe v. Wade.
But I listen to some conservative Christian pundits cry about how “things were so much different back in Kansas when I grew up.” I find myself asking, “Was it, really?” Yes, they talk about how “we knew the difference between boys and girls,” but they also seem to rail against blacks in so many ways, seemingly at every chance, today. In some respects, things today are not really so different than white bread-basket America in the 50s or 60s.
Perhaps nothing has energized the conservative culture war more than sexual sins of all sorts, with homosexuality and abortion topping the list. Abortion, especially, is the abomination of abominations. Whole ministries are focused on it. Some professedly Reconstructionist or theonomic ministries put ending abortion front and center. I did it as well for a while. For many of these people, abortion is made the touchstone for the cultural outlook and the counterpoint for all discussion of social issues. It is pointless to speak of social reform, they say, as long as thousands of babies are murdered daily. Prison reform or poverty pale in comparison. We must concentrate our energies on the babies.
If we ask about continued discrimination against blacks and inequality, the retort is that if blacks really cared about blacks, they would not have such high abortion rates. Prison reform? Of yeah? Why emphasize what affects only a relatively few blacks when the real problem is the thousands of blacks aborted every day. Why speak of reparations or reconciliation or racial healing? Don’t you realize God is going to judge this nation for abortion, and the blacks have the highest rates of it! And don’t get us started about the fatherlessness problem tied up with it.
In all such discussion that I hear, I get the feeling that the protest against abortion, especially when coupled with the retorts against blacks, has just a little too much eagerness in it—almost like the proponent feels they have a trump card in saying it. That’ll put those people in their place! That’ll shut them up. It’s a Trump card that is also a conversation stopper.
It is here where the intersection of my studies over the past few years have become revealing. Having what little insider info I have had, I was tipped off to some of the ground-level players who were crucial to the creation of the religion Right and Moral Majority—Paul Weyrich, for example. What those guys did and even said about the beginning motivations are revealing.
Too few people realize that Roe v. Wade was not the landmark genesis of the Religious Right, as we have heard so many times. The forces which later became the Christian Right had already formed many years before around different issues. The main issue at the root of it was race.
In the Southern states, this was of course a direct outgrowth of pure American racism. For many, racial activism was always tied to Communism and Leftism as well. A tremendous amount of the anti-Communist conservatism and libertarianism of the era was thinly veiled racism as well, if not purely.
The fault lines began, of course, with the early Civil Rights victory, Brown v. Board of Education. This desegregated the public schools. In many areas, whites responded by fleeing. They had already begun the “White Flight” from inner cities. They would not tolerate mixed schools though. At first, they resisted. The refused to desegregate the schools. They stymied the federal court and held out for fifteen more years in some cases. When the dam finally burst, whites again took to flight. The stats in some places are astounding:
In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County [Mississippi] dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.
The article in which this is reported (which I highly recommend you read!) explains the “real origins of the Religious Right.” What followed this white flight from the public schools is even more relevant to our discussion. Following trends in other places, “the number of non-Catholic private schools rose from seventeen in 1964 to 155 by 1970.”[1]
Whites left public schools and took shelter in whites-only private schools. The Civil Rights Movement followed hard with a new lawsuit. In two related cases, Green v. Kennedy (1970) and Green v. Connally (1971), the Supreme Court ruled the next step: private institutions could not practice discrimination and keep their tax-exempt status.
How this intersected with the later movement known as the Religious Right, or Christian conservatism in general, goes like this:
For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Even though Jerry Falwell, Weyrich, and Chalcedon (via William Ball, et al), among others have addressed this phenomenon in terms of religious freedom—and even if they were sincere—the action was still covering for despicable racism by conservative Christians (i.e., if profession is to be believed, among our the brethren).
It always strikes me as unbelievable that Christians all along throughout this era and these battles on this issue somehow thought they could win God’s blessing for religious liberty while covering for or looking away from racism. You cannot pretend to uphold God’s law in one area while trampling it in another. God is not mocked. He will not bless this charade. Yes, he does use imperfect people and imperfect mixtures of groups. But these were not mere imperfections: they were incorrigible rebels on race. Some of the kept fighting it for years, and the ones opposed to the racism kept sweeping that issue to the side for years:
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus. . . .
Many others swept the issue aside in the name of fighting leftism, and they remained alarmed as “leftist” kept advancing:
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”
These bits of history are rarely if ever rehearsed in our circles, but they certainly coincide with key phenomena among some of its proponents. I am not saying by any means that Rushdoony’s interest in private and home schools was racial, at least not primarily. But he was certainly conscious of it, as he was writing to condemn interracial marriages in his Institutes in 1973. He was also quite conscious of the flight from public schools around these times, and saw it as a victory for Christianity.
In a sermon preached probably around 1971—precisely when these Green court cases were being decided—Rushdoony concluded that “today you are seeing the last days of the public schools, its radical collapse.” He was on the same refrain still a year later: “there is a collapse everywhere of so-called public and private education.” By “private” here he meant non-Christian private schools. He was very clear about the phenomenon and what was causing it: departure, or flight. He said, “the days of the public schools are very definitely numbered. It isn’t going to be a quick collapse, but it is collapsing, . . . and increasingly, there is a flight from the public school across country.”
It is true that there were other issues at play in the interest for Christian schools, but the racial element remained as a thread or an undercurrent running through many if not most of them. The problem with the “1950” outlook is that all of these issues are tangled and bound up together.
Their counterpoints got bound up together in certain ways also. So, while if something like a pure Christian worldview without racism may have existed among some at the time, it was overshadowed in every political or social or activist group it could find by the powerful force that was indeed intensely racist. On the opposition side, pro-black and antiracist activism was en bloc marginalized as a Marxist or leftist activity. This all occurred during the height of the Cold War, of course. Desegregation, just socially, was unbiblical for many Christians still at this time. State-enforced desegregation was satanic Communism overthrowing all that is sacred among us.
This combination of issues, however, made it possible for the hard-core racists to fly under the radar by citing only the political and anti-communist angle of everything they hated. Don’t want blacks in your kids’ school? Join the movement against “the Marxist takeover of our schools.” Pulling your kids out to avoid integration? Easy. Just start a homeschool in the name of “teaching them then truth about our Constitutional freedoms!” There were any number of other issues to cite: evolution, prayer in schools, etc.
In the middle of the ‘70s, the IRS springboarded off the Green cases and revoked the tax exemption of Bob Jones University. BJU had eked by general desegregation by admitting a token black student or two, but it still forbid interracial dating or marriage. The agency moved harder: “In 1978 the IRS announced new benchmarks that schools had to meet to retain their tax status. If Christian schools had been formed at the same time that public schools in the community had been desegregated, those schools needed to prove that they had ‘significant’ numbers of minority enrollment and were actively seeking minority students.”[2]
The details of the reasoning behind how the major players capitalized on these developments is interesting:
These regulations created a firestorm among supporters of Christian schools— hundreds of thousands of letters were sent to the IRS and to members of Congress. Falwell joined the disapproving chorus. “The Infernal [sic] Revenue Service has been questioning the taxability, the exempt status of Christian schools,” he said in a sermon in February, 1979. “Why? To put the Christian schools out of business. Why? Because they’re motivated by the devil in this effort, that’s why.”[3]
But it was not some grand diabolical scheme of the devil to destroy Christianity altogether. It was not an attack on Christianity at all per se. It was merely the IRS following the advance of law on one issue: racial desegregation. Had it not been for the intransigence and incorrigibility of so many Christians on the issue, there never would have been such a problem. If Christians would have overwhelmingly acted like Christians and solved the segregation issue privately, charitably, and through general community to begin with, there would have been no advance legal action for the IRS or the federal government to enforce to begin with.
In some cases, the façade of faith and freedom was pierced a bit and the real issue of race peaked through:
Senator Bob Dornan (R-California) called for the resignation of the IRS commissioner, asserting that the IRS had assumed Christian schools were “guilty until proven innocent…People all over this land are sick and tired of unelected bureaucrats engaging in social engineering at the expense of our cherished liberties.”[4]
“Social engineering” can mean many things, but of course everyone knew exactly what social engineering the Senator was reacting over. The issue then was not just the encroachment on liberties, it was the underlying racial issues for which so many of the constituencies were trying to use their liberties as a cloak of maliciousness to avoid.
Yet on the surface, again, proponents of this outlook need not say a word about racism or racial desegregation, etc. They could merely wage a cultural, moral, political, or spiritual crusade against “leftism,” “Marxism,” or some other such boogeyman. Once the Religious Right fully concretized as a Republican venture, all of the epithets could be summed under the sole enemy-boogeyman, “Democrats.”
This is what we hear still today, too. It is virtually all we hear from some of the old guard of Reconstructionists and Theonomists, as well as those who circle nearby. There is very little if any forward thinking, exegetical work on issues being produced. Virtually the whole of it is a repetition of mainstream Republican talking points, perhaps with the sole exception of criticizing public schooling (at least when it is discussed). The arguments seem to be taken from FOX News or some Alt Right source, then given a thin biblical veneer. In some cases, there is no veneer. But the real mainstay and go-to appeal is to exhibit the endless list of evils perpetrated by the Democrats. It seems like an eternal parade of scaremongering and outrage based on whatever leftist name or organization is in the news.
Meanwhile, there is a substantial number of the racist types still following along right under the same umbrella, able to take shelter under the same anti-leftist, anti-“Marxist,” anti-Democrat rhetoric. “Pelosi is a commie!” “AOC is a socialist!” “Democrats are all Marxists!” “BLM is commie!” Right there, along with this 1950s wing of the Theonomists, are the hard-core Southern Presbyterians, still confederate at heart, and sometimes in voice, some Dutch Reformed “Kinist” types who would probably not bat an eye if Apartheid was reintroduced and expanded globally (but would officially denounce it by name), many who think the American South did no wrong in its slavery, and probably not in anything that followed either, including a few friends of the modern KKK, and many more. There are many, I am now more suspicious if not convinced, whose crusade against public schools has more to do with Brown v. and Green v. than with biblical exegesis. Then, there is also the “Jewish question,” some would say.
Indeed, some of the major Christian Reconstructionist ministries that to this day refuse to denounce those who still support religious bans on interracial marriages, refuse to do so either because they hold these views themselves, or partner with people who hold these views, or have too much dependence on donations from people who do. It is safer, indeed, simply to avoid exposing the sensitive aspects of these issues, and instead keep denouncing the generalized enemies: Democrats, leftism, etc. Keep quiet on those deep distinctive issues that cause divisions with long-time friends.
But the problem is, this story has one deep, distinctive issue at its root in this nation’s history. It is not “Democrats” and it is not “leftism” or “Marxism” or “Communism.” America’s deep original sin was the enslavement of blacks, and she compounded that sin with deep racism. And she hammered the nails even harder for decades afterwards by fighting the social and political equality of blacks, kicking and screaming the whole way, to the bitter end. And conservative Christians were either leading the fight or covering for it with patriotic platitudes the whole way.
By the time we got to 1950 or so, it was a tall order to turn back. In many parts of the country and among many circles, you simply could not promote equality for blacks without getting maligned or suspected as a leftist. To march with or help blacks brought you under suspicion of also attacking the Constitution, liberty, law and order, and the Gospel.
Even after the Civil Rights Movement, many white (including many Christian conservatives—indeed the vast majority in many areas) fought it all the way, in every way possible. This means that among those same vast circles, the same phenomenon was still playing out. To aid the black causes meant you were a Marxist, leftist, etc. If you honored liberty and fought Democrats, you would not do something so stupid as side with the pro-black forces. If you did speak up for blacks, it meant you supported the devil and the IRS to attack Christian schools. Yes, it was this bad.
This kind of thinking not only outlasted the Civil Rights movement, it still prevails today. You cannot say “black lives matter” in many circles today without being accused of supporting the “leftist” goals of a particular organization that uses that phrase as a name. March with the blacks or aid them in any way and you are de facto a Marxist, cultural Marxist, and doing the work of the devil and his evil minions, the Democrats.
The problem with the 1950s outlook of Reconstuctionism is that too many of these guys are still bound up in this twisted game of rhetoric and polarized nonsense. Worse, in doing so, they either overlook racism, tolerate it, wink at it, or participate in it.
If you suggest that black communities still suffer many negative effects from their tortured history in this nation, you are clearly a Marxist and leftist. That is the “narrative” of the left, used to keep blacks dependent, begging for welfare handouts and more. We are told in so many ways that the tortured history of blacks ended way back when. But the history shows that even after the Civil Rights advances in the 50s and 60s, whites were still living out a worldview of discrimination in various ways on up through the 70s, 80s, and beyond. In other words, some of the same people saying it ended back then were living out just the opposite.
The Civil Rights gains came largely through government compulsion. This was and still is the downfall of it all; but while it is widely cited that Democrats or leftists are to blame on this account, this is not true. The Christians and conservatives are still the ones to blame—for not solving these issues through private means first. Blacks were from day one stiff-armed by White America; everywhere they turned, virtually, they found themselves segregated and pushed out, run from, or attacked. In widespread fashion, whites simply refused to integrate. The harder blacks sought equality, the more they were rebuffed and attacked. It eventually came to pass that the only people who would help them were leftists who claimed social and political equality, and who fought for it. Black issues became leftist issues by default—but only because the conservatives and Christians largely abandoned those in need when they had the chance to do something.
Worse, though, the white conservatives not only abandoned the cause, they fought to prevent it. This meant effectively that the only avenues open for achieving equality would not be voluntary. Thus, the only solutions that came about were coercive: Brown v. Board of Ed., the Civil Rights Act, the IRS, and more. The whites in this scenario undermined themselves. They could have prevented the loss of their liberties. Now we all suffer more because of it.
Undoing this problem will be a tremendous hurdle. I am not entirely sure I can envision how to do it in total, though I have some ideas. More on that later.
One thing I know will not help is to keep hammering the old “Republican vs. Democrat” talking points, insults, epithets, and shallow rhetoric. Also, fatally unhelpful are the old associations with various racist ideas and individuals. You simply cannot heal the problems in this nation and recover biblical liberties without first healing the racial wounds with blacks and all people of color, as well as immigrants, etc. It won’t happen. The more you blame and cut down “Democrats” on this, the more you seal the long-term fate of the nation, and your grandchildren with it. It’s not that Democrats are wonderful and to be defended; but that the eternal blame game is a losing proposition in biblical terms. The only recovery of freedom will come when love of neighbor prevails. Love of neighbor does not prevail, Christ taught us, when we do the easy thing and love only within our comfortable monolithic majority. Love of neighbor prevails truly when we help the most vulnerable among us, including the marginalized, the Samaritan, widows and orphans, etc. That is, love of neighbor prevails when it is hard to do so, but we do it anyway.
When we blame the left for their statist, socialist solutions, we are blaming ourselves for failing to address the problems privately to begin with. And the key problem that was there from the beginning, in more ways than one, but certainly with blacks, was racism. This is one big area on which we need to focus going forward. If biblical law in society and culture is going to be our claimed mission, then reimagining and reinventing a 1950s paradise is a hypocritical, ignorant, hurtful, and losing venture.
Notes:
[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=historydiss, p. 220.
[2] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=historydiss, p. 222.
[3] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=historydiss, p. 222.
[4] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=historydiss, p. 222.