Record: Julie J. Ingersoll, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) [Available Here
Summary: Ingersoll is in a unique position to write a book like this. As a young woman she was married to one of the sons of prominent Reconstructionist Bob Thoburn and was very active in several Religious Right organizations. She and Mark Thoburn divorced in the early 1990s and Julie spent most of that decade earning a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, eventually becoming a professor at the University of North Florida. Her dissertation was published in 2003 as Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles
The book begins with a very personal and self-revelatory preface where Ingersoll offers some of her life story as context for the study. After a general introduction she lays out in successive chapters a series of topics pertaining to Reconstruction. The topics are organized in a vaguely chronological way in that the early chapters deal mostly with Rousas Rushdoony and his immediate successors, while later chapters deal with more recent Reconstructionists and those under their influence, but this is not a history book. Michael McVicar’s excellent Christian Reconstruction, a biography of Rousas Rushdoony, offers a more sequential and chronologically deliberate account. Ingersoll’s book, while not nearly so detailed as McVicar’s about Rushdoony, includes a much broader cast of characters and topics.
Chapter one summarizes Christian Reconstructionist Theology. Ingersoll very succinctly summarizes the Five Points of Calvinism (Reconstructionists are Calvinists), explains how Rushdoony linked the old south’s Southern Presbyterians like R. L. Dabney with the New Christian Right of the 1970s and 80s, and how his project is a synthesis of the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til, the Postmillennialism of New England Puritans, Dominion theology and “sphere sovereignty” inspired by Abraham Kuyper, and his own very aggressive Fundamentalist hermeneutic that led Rushdoony to argue that most Old Testament law still applies to today. When all of this is put together, we see that Rushdoony’s basic view was that government should not invade the spheres of family or church life at all. To do so is to violate God’s design for the world and to replace Christianity with Socialism and Secular Humanism. What we need instead is for Christian families to reconstruct the world from the bottom up according to the pattern outlined by God in the Bible.
Chapter two explains Rushdoony’s version of sphere sovereignty in more detail. It is the key concept in the book. The basic claim is that God has ordained three separate and distinct spheres in the world. First and most importantly is the family, headed by a patriarch. Second is the church, headed by male leaders (Rushdoony was not as interested in the particulars of Ecclesiology as were many of his successors). Third comes the Civil Government. Rushdoony’s chief political aim was to keep Government out of the spheres of the family and the church.
Chapter three emphasizes Rushdoony’s successor, popularizer, and son-in-law Gary North’s work, espeically his hard money libertarian economics. Other Reconstructionists influenced by North, such as Gary DeMar, Ray Sutton, and George Grant, are also discussed, the theme being that their prolific writing has popularized Rushdoony, allowing his ideas to reach a much broader audience.
Chapter four looks at one example of how this popularization has played out–the Christian private school movement. Ingersoll shows how Rushdoony’s writings on education, which date to the early and mid 1960s, were a key influence on the Christian day school movement that emerged in the 1970s and 80s. To illustrate, she tells the story of Fairfax Christian School, an explicitly Reconstructionist school founded by her ex-father-in-law Bob Thoburn, and the Rocky Bayou Christian School in Niceville, FL, founded by men inspired by Thorburn. She also recounts in detail the famous Faith Baptist Church case in Louisville, NE, which was pivotal in convincing local and state government to leave Christian schools alone. Reconstructionists played a key part in the legal and lobbying battle in this and many other Christian school conflicts of the 1980s.
Chapter five assesses the Reconstructionist influence on homeschooling. She begins by discussing Reconstructionist influences at the Home School Legal Defense Association, most notably on the late Chris Klicka. She then turns to curriculum, describing CLASS (Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools) and the now-disgraced Bill Gothard’s various options, all of which have strong Reconstructionist tendencies. Next comes a discussion of the 2009 Men’s Leadership Summit featuring Christian Home Educators of Colorado Director Kevin Swanson, the now-disgraced former Vision Forum President Doug Phillips, and several other men in the Reconstructionist wing of the Patriarchal homeschooling movement. Finally, Ingersoll briefly notes the vibrant blogging scene of formerly homeschooled young adults who have left the movement and are now openly critical of it (Libby Anne gets special recognition).
Chapter six lays out the Reconstructionist themes present in the Creation science movement. She is very clear that many influences other than Reconstructionism have produced the young-earth creationism of today, but her case that Rushdoony and his heirs played their part is a strong one.
Chapter seven devotes more detailed attention to Doug Phillips and his Vision Forum ministries. The bulk of the chapter is spent building the case that the major themes of what is often called the “quiverfull” or “patriarchy” movement derive from Rushdoony and his successors, of whom Phillips is one. She analyzes many of Vision Forum’s products to explain how a Reconstructionist view of American history, gender relations, and family-based economic and ecclesiastical life are actually embodied in the world. The end of the chapter briefly recounts the details of the scandal that brought Phillips (but not many of his collaborators) down.
Chapters eight and nine focus on how Rushdoony’s Providentialist understanding of American History has been popularized for the conservative Christian masses. Chapter eight looks particularly at American Vision, an organization founded in 1978 that has long been the outlet for Reconstructionist authors Gary DeMar and Joel McDurmon. Chapter nine does the same for the work of David Barton, who is now by far the most influential, and hence most controversial, Providential historian, and several other figures associated with the Tea Party movement. Here as elsewhere in the book she is quick to note that Reconstructionism is just one of many influences, and often people who use Reconstructionist terms or concepts are unaware of the pedigrees of the ideas they articulate.
Chapter ten, finally, examines the idea of violence in the Reconstructionist movement. Given the philosophy of history assuming that Christianity is predestined to eventually take over the world and be the official world religion and the basis of government, do Reconstructionists advocate for and use violence to secure their ends? Officially, the answer is no, in that their Calvinism presumes that the Holy Spirit moving in the hearts of men will do the heavy lifting eventually. But sometimes some Reconstructionists do get a bit impatient. Ingersoll notes the popularity of Reconstructionist ideas among some in the more extreme wings of the gun rights movement, and she recounts some of the unfortunate cases where pro-life activists resorted to violence in their efforts to end abortion. Mike Bray and Paul Hill are given special notice. Hill was explicitly a Reconstructionist and defended his actions on those grounds, which prompted Gary North to write a rebuttal to Hill’s views.
Ingersoll ends with a short conclusion that summarizes her main points. She has not argued that the Tea Party Movement or the broader Christian Right are “really” reconstructionist or that Reconstructionism is the sole source for these views. But she has tried to show that in many circles within the broader movement “Reconstructions have played an important role, and I expect that they will continue to do so.” (p. 243)
Appraisal: I read this book directly after reading Michael McVicar’s excellent biography of Rousas Rushdoony. I was struck in both books just how frequently Reconstructionists and the institutions they have created have left a wake of destruction in their path, whether through ideological infighting, interpersonal conflict, or scandals involving sex or money.
Ingersoll’s book is one-of-a-kind. Her insider status gives her an understanding of the inner workings of the movement and the connections between individuals that most other scholars would miss, and her long-term immersion in the world allows her to hone in on what matters most in the ideology. The work is thus very valuable as a road map of the various influences Reconstructionism has had and will continue to have on homeschooling and the other domains she discusses.
My criticism is that the book could do with some quantitative analysis. As it stands, many of her generalizations are based entirely on anecdotes. For example, in the homeschooling chapter Ingersoll claims, based on a conversation she had with one homeschooling mother, that rank-and-file homeschoolers tend not to have the same overarching concerns about the nature of government that many reconstructionist or reconstructionism-influenced leaders have. But she thinks that people who stay in the movement tend to “become increasingly consistent in their views as they confront controversies over homeschooling choices.” (p. 106) Is this true? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. There is some good research on the political views of homeschooling parents (see, for example, here and here) that might have helped her here and elsewhere in the chapter, but she seems not to be aware of most of it. It is not uncommon for historians, especially intellectual historians, to generalize influence without providing much evidence. Most of the evidence Ingersoll provides is textual–who cited whom, who used what phrase, and so forth. Some hard numbers about how many parents use CLASS or Gothard curriculum, say, or how many Christian day schools have a Reconstructionist founder, would add a social history component to this book that would make it even more compelling.
Nevertheless, what Ingersoll has provided is most welcome to anyone seeking an explanation for where the more conservative ideas found among some homeschoolers came from. Basically, if you want to understand why so many conservative Protestant homeschoolers think that government should stay completely out of family affairs, that “Religious Freedom” really means the freedom of Christians to do as they please apart from Government oversight, that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and must return to those roots to realize its God-given destiny, that multi-generation huge family dynasties headed by Christian patriarchs are the way God is going to bring revival to the United States, that women are not equal to men and are miserable when they try to be, that government schooling should not even exist, that young earth creationism is the only legitimate interpretation of Genesis, and much else, you could do no better than to read this book.