Church and State: ‘Eternal Hostility’

I listened to Terry Gross interview D. James Kennedy on NPR which was all that I expected. Dr. Kennedy tried to make his points and Terry really could not comprehend.

What caught my attention was the interview that followed. Terry Gross interviewed author Frederick Clarkson who wrote the book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy And Democracy, on the growing religious movement to influence government. For someone coming from a secular point of view I was impressed. Nothing at all like Chris Hedges recent article in Harper’s Magazine, Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters.

Mr Clarkson gives a pretty good description of Christian Reconstruction when asked to describe the far end, the extreme end, of the movement that would like to see America to become a more Christian nation.

There is a movement I have written quite a bit about called Christian Reconstructionism and the leading thinker of which, the late R.J. Rushdoony, whose classic work is called the Institutes of Biblical Law. And what he sought to do in that work was to say, OK, if one were to have a government that was biblical what would that look like? What does God require for us in the way of biblical laws? And the effect of this, the analogy that I use is; if you were to take the US constitution and the entire history of US federal case law and compared that to the 10 Commandments and all of the stories of judicial application of the 10 Commandments as found in the bible you would have the Institutes of Biblical Law. So it really is the first effort to codify what biblical law would be.

After discussing some things he does not like about Christian Reconstruction’s interpretation and application of Biblical Law, He goes on to say:

These ideas, these thinkers, many of their works are in wide distribution, in Christian home-schools, Christian schools, seminaries, even law schools. Reconstructionists are small in number but the influence of their ideas and their published works is vast.

Christian Reconstructionist Movement, as they would name themselves, are a relatively small group of thinkers and scholars. Their books and their ideas are well known in conservative Christian circles but you hardly ever see them in the news media.

Terry asked how this movement, although not a well know movement and not a particularly popular movement has inspired political activity?

There has been a sea change in American Evangelicalism in the latter part of the 20th century and there are a lot of reasons for it. We see a lot in the news lately about Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series and apocolypticism. That’s been an emphasis in evangelical theology that has been in decline for quite awhile. In the 70s and 80s we saw people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell constantly on their television shows predicting armageddon and showing maps of the Middle East and predicting, trying to interpret current events in terms of what was supposed to happen in Biblical prophecy. Somewhere in the early 80’s they stopped doing that. Both Falwell and Robertson and many others had come under the influence of the Christian Reconstructionist writers. A great theological compromise had taken place because if you believed that the world could only change after Jesus returned and the world as it is now, being in the end times, was pretty much run by Satan; politics was kind of a waste of time. You couldn’t really expect to accomplish very much. While it was your duty as a Christian to do good things, changing the government wasn’t really seen as a particularly effective thing to do.

But there was another school of thought that extends beyond the Christian Reconstructionists they are generally referred to as postmillenialists and that’s generally the idea that the world becomes more perfectly Christianized, more perfectly Christian until Jesus can return. Its tremendously politically powerful idea because it means all the things you do in your life can make the world a more perfectly Christian place. And if you believe, as they do, that it is your job to Christianize the government; that’s tremendously transcendent idea. It takes the grunt work of politics out of the idea that you are actually building the Kingdom of God.