The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

by Jeff Sharlet

  Martyrdom, real and metaphorical, is something of a family concern at Vision Forum. Founder Douglas W. Phillips’s father, Howard, is a Harvard graduate, a veteran of the Nixon administration, and a Jewish convert to evangelicalism, all marks of a fine pedigree within elite Christian conservative culture. Moreover, Phillips was one of the small group that “discovered” Jerry Falwell, recruiting the Virginian to lead the Moral Majority in 1979. And yet Phillips’s commitment to the intellectually dense ideas of Rousas John Rushdoony, considered too difficult and too extreme by many within the movement, led to internal exile within the populist front of American fundamentalism.

  In the past few years, though, Phillips has regained a measure of his former influence. Ideas once considered too heady for a movement that defined itself through televangelists are now taught in elite colleges and universities such as Patrick Henry, Liberty, and Regent—institutions funded by the millions those TV preachers raised from the masses—as well as in the most august of Bible schools and Christian colleges, Wheaton, Westmont, Moody, and Biola, invigorated by a new generation of book-hungry homeschoolers. The anti-intellectualism that shaped the fundamentalism of the twentieth century has been replaced by a feverish thirst for intellectual legitimacy—to be achieved, however, not on terms set by secularism but by the Christian Right’s very own eggheads, come in from the cold.

  They’ve brought with them the anxiety of a besieged minority. They’ve lent to the angry mob ethos of the Moral Majority—now defunct, displaced by countless divisions and battalions, a united front in place of a single army—the cachet of an avant-garde, with all the attendant wounded pride of a misunderstood genius.

  The chief candidate for that label within fundamentalism’s intellectual revival is the late Rushdoony, whose eighteen-tape American history lectures I had obtained from Vision Forum. Rushdoony is best known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a politically defunct but subtly influential school of thought that drifted so far to the right that it dropped off the edge of the world, disavowed as “scary” even by Jerry Falwell. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the death penalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting with gay men and growing to include blasphemers and badly behaved children. Such sentiments have made him a bogeyman of the Left but also a convenient scapegoat for fundamentalist apologists. Ralph Reed, for instance, the former head of the Christian Coalition, made a great show of attacking the ideas of Reconstructionism as misguided, not to mention bad public relations. More recently, First Things, a journal for academically pedigreed Christian conservatives, published an oddly skeptical antimanifesto titled “Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy!” in which a young journalist, Ross Douthat, eyes rolling, dismisses the fears of the “antitheocrat” Left by propping up Rushdoony as a fringe lunatic only to knock him down along with the liberal critiques that focus on his angriest notions. (Douthat was evidently unaware of First Things’s lengthy tribute to Rushdoony upon his death in 2001.) That reading of Rushdoony—by liberal critics and conservative apologists—misses what matters about his revival of providential history.3

  Rushdoony was a monster, but he wasn’t insane. His most violent positions were the result of fundamentalism’s requisite literalist reading of scripture, an approach that one senses rather bored him. A natural ideologue, he seemed drawn most emotionally not to the strict legal code of Leviticus but to the “strange fire” of its tenth chapter, the blasphemous tribute paid to God by priests lost in the aesthetics of devotion. Rushdoony would have had them killed for their presumption, which is exactly what God did. But I imagine Rushdoony sympathized with their misguided sentiments. His Reconstructionist movement fell apart when his son-in-law, an even more bloodthirsty theologian named Gary North, split with Rushdoony over what he saw as his father-in-law’s romantic insistence that the Constitution was an entirely God-breathed document, perverted by politicians, no doubt, but purely of heaven at its inception. North, who may actually be a psychopath—he favors stoning as a method of execution because it would double as a “community project”—was right on this one occasion.

  Rushdoony was to the study of history what a holy warrior is to jihad, submitting his mind completely to God. He derived from the past not just a quaint hero worship but also a deep knowledge of history’s losers, forgotten Americans—minor political figures like John Witherspoon and major revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney and all the soldiers who fought first for God, then country, the rugged men of the past who carried the theocratic strand through from the beginning. The Christian conservatives of his day, Rushdoony believed, had let themselves be bound by secularism. They railed against its tyranny but addressed themselves only to issues set aside by secularism as “moral”; the best minds of a fundamentalist generation burned themselves to furious cinders battling nothing more than naughty movies and heavy petting. Rushdoony did not believe in such skirmishes. He wanted a war, and he summoned the spirits of history to the struggle at hand.

  Two central Rushdoony ideas, disassociated from his name, have since been assimilated into the mainstream of Christian conservative thinking. One is Christian education: homeschooling and private Protestant academies, both of which he was among the first to advocate during the early 1960s. Among the chief champions of that educational movement today are John W. Whitehead, a constitutional lawyer who counts Rushdoony as one of his greatest influences, and the founders of two fundamentalist colleges, Patrick Henry and New St. Andrews, explicitly dedicated to training culture warriors according to the tenets of Rushdoony’s other major contribution to postwar fundamentalism: the revival of the American providential history that had been rusting since the nineteenth century, when no less a hero of the secular past than Daniel Webster declared history “a study of secondary causes that God uses and permits in order to fulfill his inscrutable decree.” During the intervening years, elite fundamentalists studied at elite universities (Rushdoony attended Berkeley), and the rest of the faithful went to public schools and perhaps a Bible college. Elites learned secular history; the rest rarely learned much history at all, a state of affairs that kept the movement divided. It was Rushdoony’s disdain for all things secular that cleared the course for the convergence in the last few decades of the two streams of fundamentalist culture, united across classes behind a vision of a “God-led” society.

  A strict Calvinist influenced by his upbringing in the Armenian Presbyterian Church, Rushdoony found his way to the turn-of-the-century Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper and his idea of presuppositionalism, which maintains that (a) everybody approaches the world with assumptions, thus ruling out the possibility of neutrality and a classically liberal state; and (b) that since Christian presuppositions acknowledge themselves as such (unlike liberalism’s, which are deliberately ahistorical), every aspect of governance should be conducted in the light of its revealed truths. “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human experience,” declared Kuyper, “over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry ‘Mine!’”4

  And yet Kuyper’s Christ—more the product of nineteenth-century imperialism than of scripture—is, in a sense, an afterthought to Kuyper’s first assertion, which anticipated postmodernism and its distrust of modernity’s claim that we can know “facts” absent the interference of values. Kuyper turned instead to divine love as the foundation of what Rushdoony—and now the majority of the Christian conservative intellectuals—called a biblical worldview, a refinement of theology into political ideology.

  Kuyper was both a democrat and a theologian who as Dutch prime minister tried to conform all aspects of his country to his vision of God. For much of the twentieth century, he was remembered fondly only by progressive Social Gospel Christians, who saw in his European project of state health care and free education and even a market conformed to biblical law, to the detriment of raw capitalism, a foreshadowing of the “city upon a hill” prophesied for America by John Winthrop in 1630.5

  Rushdoony agreed, and he th
ought most Americans would as well, once they understood that scripture was the source of the nation’s idealism. He spoke often of his fondness for John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric, for instance, in which he heard echoes of America as a redeemer nation. “God’s work must be our own,” declared Kennedy, and Rushdoony smiled sadly. “They’ve lost the theology,” Rushdoony would lecture ten years after Kennedy’s death, “but they haven’t lost the faith.”

  Restoring the former was a matter not of grace but of education. New generations would have to be raised up who understood the ancestry of language such as Kennedy’s, who would seek to fulfill the vision not through social programs—unlike Kuyper, Rushdoony scorned governmental attempts to ameliorate suffering that he took to be God’s “inscrutable decree”—but through the intellectual as well as spiritual embrace of true religion. Telling kids to stay clear of bad influences would not do the job. Bible camps and radio preachers and all the various campus crusades and college clubs for the mildest of young people—no redeemers, they—had failed. Rushdoony decided to start from the beginning, to claim the future by reclaiming the past.

  AMID A PANTHEON now celebrated by fundamentalist historians, the most surprising hero is Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy, perhaps the most brilliant general in American history and certainly the most pious. United States History for Christian Schools devotes more space to Jackson, “Soldier of the Cross,” and the revivals he led among his troops in the midst of the Civil War, than to either Robert E. Lee or U. S. Grant; Practical Homeschooling magazine offers instructions for making Stonewall costumes out of gray sweatsuits with which to celebrate his birthday, declared a homeschooling “fun day.” Fundamentalists even celebrate him as an early civil rights visionary, dedicated to teaching slaves to read so that they could learn their Bible lessons. For fundamentalist admirers, that is enough, as evidenced by the 2006 publication of Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s Friend, by Richard G. Williams, a regular contributor to the conservative Washington Times.

  Jackson’s popularity with fundamentalists represents the triumph of the Christian history Rushdoony dreamed of when he discovered, during the early 1960s, a forgotten volume titled The Life and Campaigns of Lieutenant General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson. Its author, Robert Lewis Dabney, had served under Jackson, but more important he was a Calvinist theologian who believed deeply in a God who worked through chosen individuals, and he wrote the general’s life in biblical terms. To Rushdoony, the story transcended its Confederate origins, and he helped make it a founding text of the nascent homeschooling movement. It’s not the Confederacy fundamentalists love but martyrdom. Jackson fought first for God and only second for Virginia, and, as every fundamentalist fan knows, no Yankee bullet could touch him. He was shot accidentally by his own men and nonetheless died happy on a Sunday, content that he had arrived at God’s chosen hour.

  Born in the mountains of what later became West Virginia, Jackson was orphaned by the time he was seven. His stepfather shipped the boy off to one uncle who beat him and then another who gambled and counterfeited and drank but also let him read. Against all expectations and two years later than most, he became a cadet at West Point. He began at the bottom of his class.6

  Four years later, he had climbed close to the top, and without the help of charisma. His frame and his face had broadened, but his eyes, pale irises of cornflower ringed in dead-of-night blue, seemed distant. His nose was long, wavering, and it ended in what looked like a permanent drip. His bright red lips curled inward, as if hiding. Even as an army officer, he felt so out of place in “society” that he was deathly afraid of public speaking. Absent enemy fire, he did not know how to take a stand. Before the war he watched John Brown hang with his own eyes and marveled at the strength of the man’s Christian conviction and wondered, perhaps, what he would have done had it been his neck in the noose. And yet when his own time to fight came, he proved just as ferociously devoted to his cause. In All Things for the Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson, the fundamentalist historian J. Steven Wilkins opens a chapter on Jackson’s belief in the “black flag” of no quarter for the enemy with a quotation of Jackson’s view of mercy toward Union soldiers: “Shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave.”

  Earlier, in the Mexican War, Lieutenant Jackson defied an order to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alone with one artillery piece, and won. General Winfield Scott, commander of the U.S. forces, commended him for “the way [he] slaughtered those poor Mexicans.” Many of the poor Mexicans slaughtered by Jackson were civilians. His small victory helped clear the way for the American advance, and Jackson was ordered to turn his guns on Mexico City residents attempting to flee the oncoming U.S. Army. He did so without hesitation—mowing them down even as they sought to surrender.

  What are we to make of this murder? Fundamentalists see in that willingness to kill innocents confirmation of Romans 13:1. This snippet of Paul’s best-known epistle is a key verse for the Christian Right: “For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God.” Obeying one’s superiors, according to this logic, is an act of devotion to the God above them.

  But wait. Fundamentalists also praise the heroism that resulted from Jackson’s defiance of orders to retreat, his rout of the Mexican cavalry so miraculous—it’s said that a cannonball bounced between his legs as he stood fast—that it seems to fundamentalist biographers proof that he was anointed by God. Is this hypocrisy on the part of his fans? Not exactly.

  Key men always obey orders, but they follow the command of the highest authority. Jackson’s amazing victory is taken as evidence that God was with him—that God overrode the orders of his earthly commanders. The civilians dead as a result of Jackson’s subsequent obedience to those same earthly commanders are also signs of God’s guiding hand. The providential God sees everything; that such a tragedy was allowed to occur must therefore be evidence of a greater plan. One of fundamentalist history’s favorite proofs comes not from scripture itself but from Ben Franklin’s paraphrase at the Constitutional Convention: “If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?”

  Put in political terms, the contradictory legend of Stonewall Jackson—rebellion and reverence, rage and order—results in the synthesis of self-destructive patriotism embraced by contemporary fundamentalism. A striking example is a short video on faith and diplomacy made in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, by Christian Embassy, a behind-the-scenes ministry for government and military elites created in 1974 as a sister ministry to the Family, with which it coordinates its efforts.7 Its founders, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade and Congressman John Conlan, considered themselves America’s saviors. For Bright, the threat was always communism, but for Conlan, it was a Jewish congressional opponent who, lacking “a clear testimony for Jesus Christ,” would not be able to fulfill his responsibilities.8

  And yet, Christian Embassy’s self-promotional video almost seems to endorse deliberate negligence of duty. Dan Cooper, then an undersecretary of defense, grins for the camera as he announces that his evangelizing activities are “more important than doing the job.” Major General Jack Catton, testifying in uniform at the Pentagon—an apparent violation of military regulations intended to keep the armed forces neutral on religious questions—says he sees his position as an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a “wonderful opportunity” to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. “My first priority is my faith,” he tells them; God before country. “I think it’s a huge impact,” he says. “You have many men and women who are seeking God’s counsel and wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secretary of defense.” Christian Embassy also sends congressional delegations to Africa and Eastern Europe. “We were congressmen goin’ over there to represent the Lord,” says Representative John Carter of Texas. “We are here to tell you about Jesus…and that’s it.”

  The Embassy encourages its prayer-cell members in the S
tate Department to do the same; their first priority is not to explain U.S. positions but to send the diplomats home “with a personal relationship with the King of Kings, Jesus Christ.”9 Brigadier General Bob Caslen, promoted since the making of the video to commandant of West Point, puts it in sensual terms: “We are the aroma of Jesus.” There’s a joyous disregard for democracy in these sentiments, its demands and its compromises, that in its darkest manifestation becomes the overlooked piety at the heart of the old logic of Vietnam, lately applied to Iraq: in order to save the village, we must destroy it.10

  But that story is older than Vietnam. Here’s the village life, modest and hard but sustained by tender mercies, that Jackson wanted to save: Between the Mexican War and the Civil War, he moved to tiny Lexington, Virginia, to become a teacher. He married a minister’s daughter, gardened, took long strolls, meditated often on peaceful portions of scripture. The bloody hero of the Mexican War disappeared, replaced by a shy, painfully polite man, obsessed with “taking the waters” for his frail constitution. When the minister’s daughter died bearing their stillborn child, he married again, his “beloved esposa,” Anna Jackson, who, after his death, revealed that whenever they were alone together the publicly awkward, nervous man would grab her, kiss her, and twirl her round. They danced secret polkas. He taught Sunday school.

  This is the myth of the quiet man, a noble soul of no outward distinction. “When it came to learning,” writes the Christian biographer J. Steven Wilkins, assessing his hero’s visible assets in All Things for the Good, “everything was a challenge.” Wilkins continues: “He did not have striking characteristics…He was gangly, uncoordinated, and spoke in a high-pitched voice…He did not have a great personality.” Slow, homely, and squeaky; also, peculiar in his posture—he sat ramrod straight, he said, because he was afraid of squishing his organs—and known by what friends he had for smiling lamely when he guessed that someone was saying something funny. Then came the war.