Rushdoony and Theocratic Libertarians on Slavery

[Joanne98]

Today's Christian nationalists are working to recruit minorities with a revisionist history that demonizes liberals as the source of American racism. Simultaneously these same Christian nationalists justify slavery and glorify the Confederacy in the context of promoting biblical law.

Following the fold is a list of quotes from Rushdoony's books and other Christian nationalist texts, provided as documentation to accompany Bruce Wilson's recent article on Glenn Beck's promotion of the worldview which teaches this treatment of the issue of slavery. When Rousas J. Rushdoony died in 2001, Gary North wrote on LewRockwell.com, "Rushdoony's writings are the source of many of the core ideas of the New Christian Right, a voting bloc whose unforeseen arrival in American politics in 1980 caught the media by surprise." Rushdoony provided the intellectual foundations for much of the current war on separation of church and state, as well as the framework for understanding today's theocratic libertarians' paradoxical view of slavery and their fixation with the holiness of the Confederate States of America.

(Lew Rockwell is the founder of the "anti-state, pro-market" Ludwig von Mises Institute, based in Auburn, Alabama, which melds cultural conservatism with Austrian School economics. He served as Ron Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982.)
Rushdoony was the founder of Christian Reconstructionism and described as the father of the modern homeschooling movement. He was forthright in his teaching that the U.S. should be subject to Old Testament law in the most literal sense and mapped this out in his 800-plus page 1973 book Institutes of Biblical Law. He laid the groundwork for today's theocratic libertarianism, or the belief that the ultimate freedom and liberty will be found through the elimination of most of federal government and the uniform imposition of biblical law. In other words, replacing "statism" with Christian dominion would provide a utopian society in which federal regulatory systems and central government are not required. Think of it as a marriage between Ayn Rand's anti-religious, laissez-faire gospel of the free market with theocratic law. I described the timeline of the development of this ideology in my article Biblical Capitalism - The Sacralizing of Political and Economic Issues.

Rushdoony's goal of imposition of biblical law on the U.S. did not neglect issues such as slavery, and he claimed that "some people are by nature slaves and will always be." He argued that socialism tries to give the slave the benefits of freedom, and thus "destroys both the free and the enslaved."

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/7/13/115425/990/Front_Page/Rushdoony_and_Theocratic_Libertarians_on_Slavery

[ck4829]

1. K&R

[kestrel91316]

2. Rushdoony = dominionism aka christofascism aka biblical reconstructionism

Handmaid's Tale is their playbook.

[hootinholler]

3. Rushdooney, spawn of Calvin.

Lots of good info at Theocracy Watch.

-Hoot