Reconstructionism
In what key ways did Christian Reconstruction contribute to the making of the contemporary religious right?
Reconstructionists had a lot to do with the widespread view among conservative Christians that every sphere of life—both public and private—is religious.
.. Similarly, because Reconstructionists believe that economic activity is a function of the family’s call to dominion, economic regulation by the government is considered unbiblical—a fundamental tenet of what is known as biblical economics.
.. Out of presuppositionalism, then, arises Rushdoony’s view that a biblical worldview was fundamentally incompatible with any other—an idea that has manifested itself in education more than almost any other area.
.. What Reconstructionists envision is a multi-generational transformation that starts in families: families need to be reconstructed in terms of biblical patriarchy. Women need to be in submission to men; children need to be educated in the home to fulfil their specific roles in terms of the exercise of dominion. Churches should be comprised of godly patriarchal families in submission to church authority.
.. Whenever I write about homeschooling and Christian Reconstruction there is a chorus of homeschoolers who want to distance themselves and point out that not all homeschoolers are Reconstructionists. That is certainly true. However, Christian Reconstructionists have been crucial to the character of the home schooling movement.
.. Many of the early Reconstructionists had ties to the John Birch Society and, as a solidly middle-class white movement they maintained the fiction that most African-Americans were happy until tensions were “stirred up” by agitators.
.. Rushdoony and the Reconstructionists helped build a resurgence of interest in and affection for, a pre-civil war vision of society. They did this, in part by promoting the work of Southern Presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney and the view that the civil war was not about slavery but was a religious war to preserve a godly southern culture from the tyranny of a secularizing North.