Deemed dying or dead by many in the late 1990s, Christian Reconstruction – or ‘theonomy’ – has not only been resurrected dynamically in northern Idaho, it is also influencing Evangelical culture nationally, argues Crawford Gribben. Gribben makes a compelling case that theonomy's postmillennial goal of shifting America away from an Enlightenment-based democracy into an Old Testament-grounded legal system has gained footholds within mainstream culture. However, unlike traditional conservative Evangelicals who have relied on partisan politics to remake America via policies, theonomists are developing strong countercultural communities, complete with counter-hegemonic institutions like schools, colleges and publishing arms that then reach into the mainstream to transform hearts, minds and eventually systems. Christian Reconstructionists do not trust politics to accomplish the national transformation they seek. Only cultural reformation germinated within ‘city-upon-a-hill’ type countercultural communities, that then spread their influence outward, will eventually swamp and sweep away the old liberal order. Idaho's frontier-like remoteness, long inviting to iconoclasts, provides their main staging area. But Gribben's book is not focused on political or culture war issues. Rather it is an ethnographic intellectual history of Christian Reconstruction's 1960s-era birth, revival and expansion to 2020. Gribben strives to explain Christian Reconstruction's intellectual and theological evolution from R. J. Rushnoody to the present, as well as usher one inside its most successful community in Moscow, Idaho, to show its tactics of survival, resistance and worldly transformation in action. His tone is explanatory, not polemical or evaluative. And given his expertise in Puritan history's reformed tradition, Gribben is the perfect tour guide into the worldview, literary legacy and operations of this quietly burgeoning movement.
The first part of this book schools the reader in Rushnoody's most influential convictions, ideas, approaches and supporters, not to mention the whys, hows and impacts of his work. Gribben then traces who proliferated, expanded upon, or tweaked them in practical and theological ways. The list includes Gary North, James Wesley Rawles and Doug Wilson. In a fascinating chapter titled ‘Government’, Gribben explains how failures of the traditional Religious Right (Moral Majority, Christian Coalition) to leverage political power for cultural and structural change created fresh space for Reconstructionists’ libertarian and undemocratic approaches to government. Theonomists believe government's narrow purposes should be restricted to enforcing divine law and protecting its followers within a hierarchical society self-committed to rule by God. In such a state, Christians would recover a true ‘liberty’ from the tyrannical anarchy of democracy and its intrusive governmental protections of so-called ‘rights’. Reconstructionists experience the latter as a siege against themselves and God's dominion. Their perception of tyranny, embodied especially in Obama's presidency, have propelled them further into postures of countercultural survival and resistance.
In the second half of the book, Gribben focuses on Doug Wilson's emergent empire in Moscow, Idaho. Founded in the 1970s, he describes it as perhaps the most prominent and influential community today within the larger ‘Redoubt’ scattered across Idaho's panhandle, eastern Washington, and western Montana. The ‘Redoubt’ refers to a territory welcoming of ideologically conservative people who have migrated to the area in flight from more liberal places. They come in pursuit of personal turf and a like-minded political and economic structure that will protect their values, priorities and interests. These migrants tend to feel embattled by the same Enlightenment-based pluralistic democracy that Christian Reconstructionists seek to reform. And Gribben says that Redoubters who subscribe to different conservative religious traditions (such as charismatic Christianity and traditionalist Catholicism) nevertheless admire and rely upon Wilson's empire for leadership, resources and a model of success. Along with his church, Wilson has not only built a school (Logos School) and a college (New Saint Andrews) that teach a rigorous Christian Reconstructionist and western-centric classical curriculum. He has also given birth to exportable home-schooling resources and a Moscow-based consortium called the Association for Classical Christian Schools (that includes several hundred schools nationwide). Graduates pepper the Ivy Leagues and other prestigious universities. Since Reconstructionists view state-run public schools as pushing democratic egalitarianism, private Christian education became a means of counter-cultural resistance. Defying public schools also became a method of destroying democracy itself. Meanwhile, his vast publishing efforts (magazines and books), that burgeoned first from his community's own state-of-the-art printing press (Canon Press), now include titles being edited, printed and marketed by Random House and HarperCollins globally. These New York-based publishers see practical market value in the salability of Reconstructionists’ varied works among religion-themed audiences. Amazon Prime and Netflix also carry products Wilson helped create. Wilson uses media to fight the culture wars intellectually, while recruiting people into his culture and mission. Gribben details Wilson's use of education and media to show how Christian Reconstructionists are leveraging counter-cultural and counter-hegemonic methods to influence mainstream Evangelicals more broadly.
This book excels in all that Gribben sets out to do. However, to keep it focused and concise as an explicator of this movement's ideas, methods and mainstream-reaching impacts, he merely name-drops references to topics that readers may hunger to learn more about. These include the role of racism (something Gribben says they rebuke – yet its actual presence remains unexplored); the details of Christian Reconstructionists’ relationships with other Redoubt factions and the degree to which methods and goals dovetail or clash; the place of violence in its evolving methods of post-millennial transformation (which Gribben notes is a strain worth watching); the internal divisions, controversies and criticisms within Wilson's empire specifically; and how the traditional Evangelical Right is reacting to the theonomists. Gribben briefly grazes these topics as if to say he knows they are relevant, but he chooses to defer deeper exploration to others. For people seeking to understand theonomy through the minds and mouths of its most successful practitioners since Rushnoody, as well as their successful culture-building efforts and impacts in the twenty-first century, this slim, clearly written, exposition is well worth the read.
