The Case For Neo-Reconstruction

I. The Introduction to A New Series Set: PART ONE

This post is to announce the start of a pair of series, one will be on our greatest duty as Christians in this era and the other will discuss the greatest danger which threatens us today.

1. Our Greatest Duty

The greatest duty we have before us, I will be arguing, is that of uniting with other Christian of different theological backgrounds and denominations in our global struggle against an ascendant Babylonian order which seeks to not only suppress and persecute Christians, but also to expand totalitarianism, decadent immorality, and to reduce population worldwide.

The attempted uniting of Christians is something that has been done in the past through various movements called “Ecumenical movements,” but these are all failures, some of them are just plain fake, and most involved compromise on core beliefs by either side, or meaningless platitudes. Rather, our duty is not ecumenicism, but Irenicism. Irenicism is “peacekeeping” or establishing peace and fellowship between brethren. This duty does not start from the place of viewing Christian denominations as churches that need greater affiliation or unity, but rather starts from the place of recognizing as Biblical fact that there is only ever ONE church on the earth and in heaven. This true church is “publicly” broken, but is actually indivisible in its actual nature, as it is preserved providentially and supernaturally by the work of God. This true church is under orders to maintain unity and peace even if it means defying their denominational standards. We are obligated to have table fellowship, to recognize church discipline, to rightly administer the sacraments, and to preach the Gospel undefiled and this obligation is upon all who are actually Christian.

All actual Christians are part of the One True Church and all those who are part of that One True Church are, at least from a human perspective, Christians. Our greatest duty is to start acting like this fact is a fact, for only in doing so will we be able to face the existential threat which stands before us.

2. Our Greatest Danger.

The greatest danger we have before us comes from that Babylonian global order I have just mentioned; however, we must understand how it actually threatens us. It's easy to watch an Alex Jones clip or listen to the news and think that this threat is conspiratorial, far off, and not relevant to your everyday life; however, you would be gravely mistaken. As the pandemic taught us, the machinations of the elite can be implemented, in real time, against a family and there is little that they can actually do about it. They demonstrated that they could shut down your job, keep you from public spaces, keep you from travel, and all in the name of a medical emergency...they even shut down the churches.

This threat HAS NOT been taken seriously by Christians. For while many were willing to not go to church for a period of weeks, they still went to their doctors religiously.

These medical communities are the principal arm and wing of this global system, a system which has as its standard the official scientific consensus and its enforcement in the state authorities, but it is the medical authorities specifically that implement the policies of the scientists (trans-humanist naturalists), and it is the word of these medical authorities, and not God's word, that serves as the legal justification behind nearly every tyrannical and immoral policy implemented today anywhere in the world.

It is these authorities that also regulate our food, our drugs, and even what constitutes abuse or not in your “parenting.” Indeed, the next time a large family goes to their mandatory “wellness checkup” and the parents deny the latest mandate; these medical authorities have the power to take away your children without due process of law, and they threaten it regularly even over the most trivial of matters.

In a sense, the medical establishment, and the medical establishment alone, is able to hold nearly every Christian family in the United States and Europe hostage, "obey us or we will have your children!" Should you obey? Their goals are to decrease global fertility, cure death (a blasphemy), and remove parental rights. The official and only authorized medical licensing body in the United States defends abortion publicly (upon which many of their pharmaceutical products depends (and which some natural flavorings in food were designed from, yes you heard that right), and in spite of an exclusive monopoly on licensing for the treatment of health and having more money and power than ever, have themselves overseen (1) a decline in life expectancy, (2) unprecedented rates of cancer, (3) unprecedented rates of heart disease, (4) unprecedented rates of diabetes (especially in children), (5) a historically novel epidemic of obesity, (6) record rates of depression, mental illness, and sexually transmitted disease, (7) a terrible opioid crisis that has destroyed a generation, and (8) a historical drop in sperm counts and an overall decline in fertility such as the world has never known before, not ever.

Iatrogenesis is defined as “physician generated harm” and is often used to refer to malpractice (which itself is in the top five leading causes of death in the United States alone), but if we take into account these horrifying consequences, it is easy to see that our own medical community is, without doubt, the leading killer, disabler, and sterilizer of people in the history of mankind.

The threat of Iatrogenesis is the greatest danger that Christians face, as the worldview behind such iatrogenesis is consciously anti-Christian and seeks to implement that worldview through their own monopoly on medical power globally. This evil must be resisted before it is too late, for it is an inescapable trap that is closing around us as we speak.

II. The Challenges of Irenicism and Iatrogenesis.

So, as we have discussed, our greatest challenges, in terms of both duty and danger, are irenicism and iatrogenesis. These two points will be the focus of our article-series by the names of “our greatest duty” (irenicism) and “our greatest danger” (iatrogenesis). In reality, they represent two issues each, for its not merely iatrogenesis we oppose, for in actuality, we oppose the tyrannical, fallacious, and inherently anti-Christian scientism and its consequences in physician-generated disease/harm (iatrogenesis), both intentional (whether malicious or well-intentioned) and inadvertent, whether by treatment or technological innovation.

Further, we are not merely proposing irenicism, but also its consequence of martyrdom, both inside and outside the church, whether red, white or green (these color-designations shall be discussed in future articles), a martyrdom that both demands, and is demanded by, a recognition of the true church both in earth and in heaven from which we are obligated, with equal force of both Law and Gospel, to maintain peace and fellowship among all sincere Christians (irenicism). Indeed, this idea of peace among believers must stand over-and-against the wicked divisions we have permitted among ourselves which has in turn allowed our enemies to plunder our camps, something we will not in the future be permitted to tolerate, for the vampires of sectarianism cannot be allowed another bite, for the church of the west is on the cusp of irrelevance and death.

To meet these challenges, we must be prepared, we must have a complete system ready and organized for such a battle and such challenges. To do this, we must look to the past in order to construct our future. We shall look to heroes who organized such a system and movement in the past and use their model for our own battle today, we shall look back to Christian Reconstruction.

In this, to properly understand and tackle our own contemporary goals, we should call the movement that shall be called for by us; “Neo-Reconstruction,” which is of course named after the original Christian Reconstruction movement. Our tenets shall build on that movement's original tenets and will seek to accomplish the same great victories that movement had accomplished for Christendom. Of course, to understand how we seek to pursue our greatest duty and fight against our greatest danger as neo-reconstructionists, we must understand how the original reconstructionists operated and how they succeeded so profoundly in their own time.

III. Some Background

For some background as to why I am writing on these topics, I want to discuss the Christian Reconstruction movement that emerged in full vigor in the 1970s and 1980s, which though unknown to your average evangelical, undoubtedly shaped how he looks at the world in 2024 especially if he is even remotely biblical and orthodox in his thinking.

So as not to understate the significance of Christian Reconstructionism, we will make clear that this movement is responsible for the right-wing conservatism of America today, especially on social issues, that fully emerged in the 1990s and became a real force behind both the Tea Party and the Trump phenomena in the United States, but this movement has never been given its proper due, except perhaps by those in the orbit of Christ’s Kirk in Moscow Idaho and the CREC in general (see the video here).

For this reason, it is important to give some background on these unsung heroes of Christendom, whose contributions must be respected, for their achievements have not only saved lives and families, but Christianity in general in the west, and this should be appreciated whether you are Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, or Pentecostal.

1. The Legends: Who Were The Christian Reconstructionists and What Did They Accomplish.

Ever see a pro-life rally? Or met a homeschooling mom of 4 or more kids? See a petition to have the Ten Commandments placed in the court’s main lawn?

Well if you have, then you have seen the real outward manifestation of something started by the Christian Reconstruction movement. In fact, such outward actions and movements could not exist if the Reconstructionists had not come first. When your Baptist preacher advocated for any of these points (God’s law in political spaces, the fight for life, homeschooling, etc) remember, it is only because his Bible professor first read such ideas in a Presbyterian’s book, a Reconstructionist Presbyterian to be exact.

Christian Reconstruction saw the introduction of secularism at the legal level as a real existential threat to Christian society and they formed their approach accordingly to face this threat. For them, even the idea of secularism as “religious neutrality” was absurd on the face. Because of this threat, these men, all of whom were theologians in their own right, recognized that the fight ahead of them would require a “reconstruction” of institutions (schools, businesses, banks, government agencies, etc) and that such had to be done in strict accordance with the Christian worldview as defined in the Holy Bible.

They demonstrated from Scripture the absolute Lordship of Christ in all areas and that this Lordship applied to philosophy (and by extension apologetics), ethics, and politics. Thus, Christians were not to accept laws or legislate laws based on popular appeal, or psychological studies, but on God’s moral law alone. Likewise, for them, God was not a personal belief or one option among many, or even an excellent and compelling probability; rather, he was an absolute and universally undeniable necessity and those who did not believe in Him were, by definition, delusional and intellectually dishonest and could be demonstrated as such in debate (and often were), all of this of being fueled by a real conviction that Christ’s kingdom on earth would be victorious and subdue all nations, governments, and spheres of society as an inevitability.

With men like R.J. Rushdoony, Dr. Gary North, and Dr. Greg L Bahnsen at the helm, this movement grew and created shockwaves through the reformed world, which at the time, was undoubtedly the intellectual peak from which all ideas flowed down into the “evangelical masses” of all denominations. Indeed, the movement’s initial success can greatly be credited to these three men, for they were undoubtedly brilliant intellectuals in their own fields (which was always acknowledged by their opponents), prolific writers, captivating speakers, unparalleled debaters, and zealous God-fearing men who practiced what they preached free from major public scandal (something not always true of their intellectual descendents).

The influence of this movement CANNOT be understated and must be rightly understood if you are to understand why we must model our own mission after theirs.

Reconstructionist are directly responsible for the homeschooling movement and indirectly responsible for the Pro-Life movement, as well as the Moral Majority which led to both the election of Ronald Reagan and the Contract with America under Newt Gingerich in the Clinton years, none would have occurred without Reconstructionism ever emerging. Hence, because of this, we can be pretty confident that the trans-movement and the crisis we face today would have occurred 30 years ago had it not been for the bulwarks built by the Reconstructionists.

The movement is therefore responsible for a whole new generation of Baptist and Pentecostal pastors specifically adopting a more “scorched earth” approach to the world in terms of seeing everything as either for or against Christianity and energized their political involvement. Further, the heirs of reconstruction are responsible for the Quiverfull/Patriarchy movement (opposing family planning and birth control), the recent recovering of biblical postmillennialsm and partial preterism by many evangelicals (see the American Vision), and newer high church movements among conservative evangelicals from the Federal Vision, the CREC, as well as major boosts to conservative Anglicanism (including an Archbishop), Lutheranism, Eastern Orthodoxy (two of the best Eastern Orthodox apologists today were formerly reformed presuppositional apologists, one was even trained at Bahnsen Theological Seminary in California), and to a lesser extent Roman Catholicism (Catholics tend to be too thomistic and secularized to tolerate reconstructionist attitudes). Indeed, several joint statements of cooperation between evangelicals, orthodox, and catholics against evils like abortion and homosexuality were spearheaded by those who were either directly or indirectly influenced by this movement, such as several of the prominent proponents of the Manhattan Declaration.

Likewise, this movement’s heirs would boost traditional Dutch Reformed and Scottish Covenanter churches and to this day, many of the biggest supporters and alumni of Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary are either Reconstructionist, former Reconstructionist, or Reconstructionist-adjacent (or inspired).

Lastly, the New Right that got Trump elected, especially its Christianized wing in the Kinists are nearly all Reconstructionist in their core theology, getting their Kinist ideas directly from Rushdoony (though taking it farther than he would have ever approved of). On the Libertarian side, those who were part of the Ron Paul revolution perhaps didn’t’ realize that Gary North had been his policy advisor at one point who also spoke several times at the Von Mises Institute, a right-libertarian and anarcho-capitalist think tank (this showing the influence of Reconstructionism). Indeed, the Tea Party movement never would have occurred had it not been for the popularity and influence of Ron Paul (and therefore of Christian Reconstructionism), indeed Ron Paul would even go on to create his own homeschooling curriculum with clear and present influences from the pen of Dr. Gary North.

2. The Main Tenets of Christian Reconstructionism.

The three tenets of old-school Christian reconstructionism were presuppositionalism, theonomy, and post-millennialism (all of which assumed a Calvinist, or atleast Augustinian view of God’s sovereignty over salvation and all of life and that people are totally depraved (corrupted by original sin) by default). These three tenets, if present in a person’s system of thought, are sufficient to identify them as some species of Christian reconstructionist (regardless of what they may say publicly).

1. Presuppositionalism: The belief that all people assume a certain worldview wherein their notions of ethics (right and wrong), metaphysics (the nature of reality), and epistemology (how we know) are internally justified or affirmed, but only the presupposing of the Christian worldview can consistently and actually justify how our knowledge actually works. That is, what we all must do and think as humans only makes sense if Christianity is first true. Indeed, for presuppositionalism, God is not proven per se, but demonstrated as necessary in an absolute sense (what is called a transcendental argument). Indeed, according to presuppositionalists, unbelievers can only do good things, make accurate predictions, or engage in proper reasoning, because they assume things that can only be true if Christianity is true, even if they would outwardly deny it. This outward denial of something they inherently know, is said to be suppressed by their own sin-nature’s effect on their mind (the noetic effects of sin). Only a regenerated person that consistently assumed the Christian worldview as revealed in Scripture can truly justify his worldview and ethics.

2. Theonomy: The belief that God’s moral law, even as it is manifest in the penal code of the Old Testament, is universally binding on all mankind and that political systems of all kinds are obligated to institute and enforce God’s moral laws including those penalties ascribed in the judicial system for behaviors that remain as crimes for Christians today. This was the most controversial of the Christian reconstructionist positions as it required the belief that, homosexuality, adultery, bestiality, and other such acts would have to be criminalized with the death penalty; however, Christian reconstructionists would argue that such could not be enforced unless a nation first became a Christian majority.

This view’s strength came from the motto “By What Standard?” (which was also used to defend presuppositionalism) and this motto argued that any law or policy that a Christian sought to support, ought to have an obvious Scriptural justification. Hence, if you believe that murder is to be a crime, you must have a biblical basis for this belief (and this in fact is true). The crux came when a person is asked the question of: "how should murder be punished?" The theonomist will ask again “by what standard?” Again, scripture gives us the answer with the death penality. Murder however, is much easier as we have culturally maintained some degree of acceptability to the notion that murdered should be executed, but the Theonomist will press further and ask: "should adultery or homosexuality be crimes?" Again, by what standard? The Scriptures are once again plain, both are crimes and both are deserving of death. According to the Reconstructionist, the reason that Christianity was in decline in the west and the reason it failed in the face of increasing immorality and unbelief in the nation, was because the nation had abandoned any recognition of Christ as universal king of all spheres (including the state) and with that abandonment, the dropping of biblical laws occurred, the purpose of which, was to suppress and restrain outward public immorality and support true religion.

On this, they have been undeniably correct.

We are going to get our laws from somewhere, if not from God, then from whom?

3. Post-Millennialism: The belief that the Gospel must not only spread to all nations but bring them under the authority of Christ as King. For post-millennialists, the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament require that there will be a universal Christendom upon the earth. This does NOT mean that all will be truly converted and elect, but only that all will be baptized and part of a professing orthodox body and that all Christian nations will acknowledge Christ at the governmental level and enforce biblical law (see theonomy above).

Eschatologically, this implied that Christ is reigning as King now and that His kingdom will become increasingly manifest on the earth overtime, the spread of Christianity historically seems to confirm their views even as it has become less popular in the developed world (China, for example, is projected to be majority Christian by AD 2050, etc). Not only this, but such a view implies that many of the more commonly accepted texts as referring to the future, were likely fulfilled in the past. Indeed, many of Christ’s words regarding what many have seen as the “end times” were said by Him to occur “before that generation passed away,” which was fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 in judgment of the Jews for rejecting the Messiah (a view called partial preterism). Post-Millennialism emphasizes that our prayer for the Kingdom to come and God’s will to be done, on earth as it is in Heaven, can only be fulfilled by that mustard seed growing into a great tree. This view sees the promise “that the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea” really coming to pass before the second coming, and it recognizes that when the psalmist says that “all things shall be put under His feet as a footstool” that this will really happen. The progress of Christianity is not a straight line, it has hills and valleys, but the data is in and it is plain, the Kingdom has advanced, the Temple was destroyed, the Jews are hardened, and Christianity is now the greatest religion in the world, but will also soon overtake the largest communist nation on earth (which is soon to be sole super-power) in only a couple more decades. No rapture, no fear, only the hope and confidence of absolute and inevitable triumph of Christ’s kingdom over the world awaits His people.

3. The Limits of The Christian Reconstruction Project and System.

Regarding apologetics, it is hard to deny that Dr. Greg Bahnsen was probably the best debater of the 20th century, rivaled only later by Dr. James White (also a presuppositionalist) and Dr. William Lane Craig (a classical evidentialist/composite case apologist).

Indeed, presuppositionalists continue to present the most effective apologetic strategies in their debates and have done so consistently, and their formerly dismissed predictions of where the acceptance of a non-Christian worldview would lead, are not dismissed any more as everything they said would happen (including the increasing acceptability of pedophilia) has come to pass and is coming to pass before our very eyes.

However, I have noticed a few flaws in their actual proofs or arguments, especially when it comes to the transcendental argument for the existence of God.

Presuppositonalism as a tenet demonstrated that we all have worldviews and that Christianity is the perfect worldview in terms of justifying human intelligibility and thought, it showed the necessity of Christian worldview philosophy, but failed to actually create one.

Presuppositionalism did not comprehensively answer questions on causation, perception etc. It did not give us definitional answers on the nature of the mind and the mind’s relation to the body, its identity with the soul, or how it actually receives knowledge from God (some did attempt to take a stab at this by just regurgitating Plato or leaving where St. Augustine left off). Indeed, these are just a myriad of subjects where Christians did not take a positive construction based on the beautiful gift that presupposititionalism had given them. For the first time, they had a real foundation and framework for developing a comprehensive and exclusively Christian philosophical system, but they never left the airport of apologetics. Presuppositionalism did not give us the destination, but it did give us the direction. Not only this, but though authors like Van Til (the grandfather of reconstruction) theorized of a proof that would be exclusively Trinitarian, it was not demonstrated in debate; however, I would argue, this can actually be done. We are not to prove some notion of an intelligent designer or god that is not our God, and our God is One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, the presuppositionalists agreed with this in principle, but never got to making that proof meet such expectations in practice.

Theonomy likewise reminded us that our ethics, our standard for right and wrong, was always and must always be God’s law; however, the theonomists did not, as St. Augustine had done, flesh out the letter v. the spirit distinction and the practical implications of fulfilling that Law in love, it gave us the good which we had lost, but it did not have time to get us back to the perfect. Yes, the laws of our nations should reflect the law of God, but how should Christians use their property and possessions for the kingdom? What do we do about the real ethical issue of division among Christians? What type of government is most compatible with Christian law? Democracy, Republic, Monarchy, Anarchy? What about helping the poor or promoting fertility when it is collapsing? What about the opioid crisis? What about permitting or banning polygamy or slavery? Something more was needed, but the Bible provides that too and it answers all these questions. They just need to be made clear to all.

Post-millennialism recovered for us an optimistic eschatology of Christian victory and destroyed the almost nihilistic defeatism that existed among evangelicals (largely introduced by dispensationalism) but it did not paint the picture of the goal to which we strive with the confidence of Christ’s reign. Indeed, the door has remained open for a picture to be painted of a Christian world that I would argue is no more Christian than the wicked utopianism of the socialists (some of which were “liberal postmillennialists” themselves) in the early 20th century.

Indeed, what will the Christian golden age look like? Will it have suffering and the bearing of one’s cross which seems so necessary to our sanctification according to the New Testament? Will the golden age look more like the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, or the Shire from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? These questions too need answered, and I would argue that we already have the answers to them if we are willing to look with an obedient heart.

Christian Reconstruction successfully created a homeschooling movement (due to Rushdoony specifically), and influenced writers like Francis Schaeffar, from which today millions of Christians can in gratitude attribute their abiding in the vine to being educated at home or in a Christian school when they otherwise would have, given the statistics, apostasied during their publicly funded education.

Indeed, millions of people in general, Christian and non-Christian alike, shall be spared death because of the overturning of Roe V. Wade, which would not have been possible without the pro-life movement, which never would have occurred had the Moral Majority never formed, which would not have formed had Francis Schaeffar not written “The Christian Manifesto,” which would not have been written had there not been the Christian Reconstructionists and their three primary ideals, which I had just described, influencing and pushing him to write such a work.

The history of ideas works this way, all ideas we see today have a pedigree just like the people that develop them, but what made Christian Reconstructionism work was its project of a consistently Christian approach. There is no compromise with non-Christian ideas, whether Aristotelian or Platonic or otherwise, but only the demand that we measure all things against the Christian worldview. “By What Standard?” “All of Christ for All of Life” “Christ or Chaos” “No Neutrality” are all phrases that epitomize this approach and to which all sensible Christians immediate recognize the truth.

Our goal is not to reinvent the wheel or throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to follow the creed of the reformation; Semper Reformanda, “Always Reforming.” We are again called to build upon that which is good, reject what was inadequate or erroneous, and press forward.

To face the two great challenges, which we discussed at the start, of irenicism and iatrogenesis, we must now call for a new reconstruction, a Neo-Reconstruction.

-Joshua Johnson