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<span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 20px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px !important;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">=</span></h2><div><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">der volk is pseudo-populism?</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/maga-nazi">https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/maga-nazi</a></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hnn</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.americanpurpose.com/author/william-a-galston/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">William A. <b>Galston</b></a><b>'s recent essay <a href="https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-bitter-heartland/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"The Bitter Heartland"</a> begins, "We are living in an age of resentment . </b>. . [that] shapes today's politics." The more I read of it (and more about it later),<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> the more the great resentments of Hitler's followers came to mind</span>. They resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919 had imposed the "unfair" postwar Versailles <b>Treaty</b> [TPP clinton trade deal mex cda] upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the "decadent" godless ways of Berlin, as hinted at in the play and film <em>Cabaret</em>.</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and also their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies. This was especially true during the great inflation of 1923 – by then a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks – and the Great Depression. Historian Peter Fritzsche <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-First-Hundred-Days-Embraced/dp/154169743X" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">notes</a> that "between 1929 and 1932, one in three Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force . . . German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped."</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler's early tactics like boycotts that "relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews</b>," and he writes that "the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments and transformed them into final judgments and the promise of direct remedial action." Moreover, Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, "pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world."</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Almost a century after Hitler came to power in 1933, some of Donald Trump's followers remind us of Hitler's crowds</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> On at least one occasion, after Hitler ranted about the <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/the-november-criminals-1221093" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"November criminals"</a> (German politicians who negotiated the war-ending armistice of 1918), the audience cried out, "Hang them up! Bust their ass!" In both the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/10/trump-time-capsule-140-lock-her-up/503684/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2016</a> and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/10/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-justice-department/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2020</a> campaigns, Trump crowds (in response to their hero's words about Hillary Clinton) shouted "lock her up."</span></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Already during the 2016 campaigning, writer George Saunders <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">observed</a> some of the resentments of Trump supporters. Many believed "they'd been let down by their government . . . and [were] sensitive to "any infringement whatsoever on their freedom." Many suffered from what Saunders labeled <b>"usurpation anxiety syndrome," which he defined as "the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions."</b></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In <a href="https://www.americanpurpose.com/author/william-a-galston/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Galston</a>'s 2021 essay <a href="https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-bitter-heartland/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"The Bitter Heartland"</a> he cites a 2016 poll that indicated that 65 percent of whites without college degrees "believed that America's culture and way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s." But more than that poll, his essay dissects the continuing Trumpites' resentments much more thoroughly<em>.</em></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Like some before him, he indicates or hints at where the Trump resentful are mostly found: in small towns and rural areas, and among older people, non-college graduates, groups once dependent on manufacturing and mining jobs, and "social conservatives and white Christians." The resentful are more provincial and traditional and <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">many of them "lack access to high-speed broadband.</span>"</b></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>"They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated.</b> Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life." They believe that the big-city elites, the professionals, and the government—before Trump came along—all failed to help them achieve their share of the American Dream. They resent professionals and liberals telling them how to live, calling them racists, or limiting their freedoms—e.g. to buy multiple guns or go about maskless during our present pandemic. "President Trump was at his best, they say, when he ignored the experts and went his own way.</span>"</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Saunders earlier, Galston thinks that <b>many of the resentful feel they are "being treated unjustly, unfairly, or disrespectfully.</b>" The appearance of Trump and discovery of like-minded people—via the Internet and the person-to-person contacts of smaller towns—help overcome feelings of powerlessness. Feeling more powerful, some "people merely want a remedy for the injustice they have experienced. But others—typically those who experience disrespect—want more than redress; they want revenge."</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Galston closes his essay with some suggestions for dealing with Trumpite resentments, but they are less compelling than his analysis of them.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Partly this is because, while some are legitimate, others—like the reluctance of many white Christians to grant equal rights to all ethnic and religious minorities—are not. As we learned from examining the supporters of Hitler, understanding the difficulties of people and even sympathizing with their plight (e.g., being jobless) does not mean condoning resentments that lead to hateful behavior like victimizing Jews.</span></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The preceding comparison between two phenomena of group resentment, separated by almost a century, in two different countries and political cultures, omits many contrasts and nuances. In addition, we know how Hitler and German Nazism ended. The ending of the Trumpite culture of resentment is still unknown. Will it gradually decline? Will the Biden administration successfully address many of the Trumpite grievances? Will Republicans continue to stoke them? Will Trump run again in 2024? None of us know for sure. But thanks to the writings of Galston and others--he mentions <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BWMDZS8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Katherine Cramer</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620972255" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Arlie Hochschild</a>--we better understand the resentments, and that's a start.</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University, a Contributing Editor of HNN, and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/History-Russia-Russian-European-Eurasian/dp/1843310341" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">A History of Russia. 2 Vols.</a><a href="https://www.amazon.com/History-Russia-Russian-European-Eurasian/dp/1843310341" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"> </a>For a list of his recent books and online publications <a href="http://people.emich.edu/wmoss/pub.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">click here</a>.</font></p><div class="around-the-web" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); 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</font></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-strange-truth-about-the-pro-slavery-origins-of-christian-nationalism-in-the-united-states/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-strange-truth-about-the-pro-slavery-origins-of-christian-nationalism-in-the-united-states/</font></a></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The strange truth about the pro-slavery origins of Christian nationalism in the United States</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by<b> History News Network</b> March 14, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right around the time the House began its impeachment inquiry, the homepage of the U.S. Department of State featured a talk by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo titled “Being a Christian Leader.” Only a few weeks had passed since Attorney General William Barr told students at Notre Dame Law School that “secularists” are to blame for “moral chaos” and “immense suffering, wreckage, and misery,” and that “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.” Then, at a January campaign rally at a Miami megachurch, President Donald Trump told the largely evangelical crowd that God is “on our side.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most of us have a sense that this kind of religious-nationalist rhetoric and behavior got its start with the revolution that Reagan brought to power. A decisive moment was in August 1980, at the Reunion Arena in Dallas, Texas, when Reagan addressed 15,000 thousand pastors and religious activists. “I know that you can’t endorse me,” but “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing,” he said, to wild applause.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Reagan’s speech at the Reunion Arena marked a sea change in the role of conservative religion in American politics. But some of those who had helped organize the event were concerned that the one individual who deserved the most credit for the transformation of the interface of politics and religion was not on the podium. “We agreed that it was unfortunate that Rousas <b>Rushdoony </b>was not speaking,” radical theologian Gary North later observed, recalling an exchange with Robert Billings, a Reagan campaign staffer who had previously served as executive director of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority organization. Billings responded, “If it weren’t for his books none of us would be here.” “Nobody in the audience understands that,” North countered. “True, but we do,” Billings reportedly replied.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Howard Phillips, a former Nixon administration aide who was also present at the Reunion Arena, called Rushdoony the “most influential man of the 21st century.” As he confided to author and religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll in 2007, “The whole Christian conservative political movement had its genesis in Rush.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rousas John Rushdoony was born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had narrowly escaped the genocide, in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Rushdoony’s father, who founded the Armenian Martyrs Presbyterian Church in Kingsburg, California, ministered to a community of fellow Armenian refugees, who agonized and grieved as letters from relatives back home came to a standstill. “In Armenia, there was no neutral ground between Islam and Christianity,” Rushdoony wrote in 1997. “And I came to realize there is no neutral ground anywhere.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rushdoony left his family home and made his way to college at the University of California, Berkeley. He did not fit in. </b>Advised to read the classics, Rushdoony later called this “the ugliest experience of my life.” He pronounced the works of Shakespeare, Homer and the rest of the canon “classics of degenerate cultures. What they offer at their best is evil.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rushdoony emerged from Berkeley with all the distinctive features of his intellectual persona in place: a resolutely binary form of thought that classified all things into one of two absolutes; a craving for order; and a loathing of the secular world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rushdoony began to advocate for a return to “biblical law” in America.</b> The Bible, Rushdoony said, commands Christians to exercise dominion over the earth and all its inhabitants. Women are destined by God to be subordinate to men; men are destined to be ruled by a spiritual aristocracy of right-thinking Christian leaders, and public education is a threat to civilization for it promotes a “secular world-view.” In over thirty books and publications, including The Messianic Character of American Education and The Institutes of Biblical Law – often hailed as his magnum opus and recommended as one of the Choice Evangelical Books of 1973 by evangelical flagship journal Christianity Today — Rushdoony laid it all out in a program he called Christian Reconstruction.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is little mystery about the historical sources from which Rushdoony drew his own inspiration. He laid out all the details in his works. Setting aside the hardline Dutch Reformed theologians who supplied the backbone of his thought,<b> Rushdoony drew on two traditions that would prove essential in understanding the genesis of today’s Christian nationalist movement. The first was the proslavery theology of America’s antebellum preachers. The second was the economic libertarianism that took root in reaction to the New Deal.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Among apologists for Christian nationalism today, the favored myth is that the movement represents an extension of the abolitionism of the nineteenth century and perhaps of the civil rights movement of the twentieth century, too</b>. Many antiabortion activists self-consciously refer to themselves as the new abolitionists. Mainstream conservatives who lament that the evangelicals who form Trump’s most fervent supporters have “lost their way” suggest that they have betrayed their roots in the movements that fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of discrimination.<b> But the truth is that today’s Christian nationalism did not emerge out of the movement that opposed such rigid hierarchies. It came from the one that endorsed them.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rushdoony understood this well. Not long after escaping the horror of Berkeley, he took an interest in the work of Robert Lewis Dabney, a defender of slavery before the Civil War and who also supported patriarchy and the American form of apartheid after the war.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rushdoony reprinted and disseminated some of Dabney’s works through his Vallecito, California-based Chalcedon Foundation</b>, as well as through his publishing company, Ross House Books. He found himself agreeing with Dabney that the Union victory was a defeat for Christian orthodoxy. In Rushdoony’s mind, Dabney’s great adversaries, the abolitionists, were the archetypes of the anti-Christian rebels – liberals, communists, secularists, and advocates of women’s rights – who continued to wreak havoc on the modern world. As Rushdoony’s fellow Reconstructionist C. Gregg Singer put it, proslavery theologians including Dabney, Thornwell and their contemporaries “properly read abolitionism as a revolt against the biblical conception of society and a revolt against divine sovereignty in human affairs.” Rushdoony himself concluded, “Abolitionist leaders showed more hate than love on the whole.” The defeat of the orthodox side in the Civil War, Rushdoony asserted, paved the way for the rise of an unorthodox Social Gospel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rushdoony’s admiration for southern religious orthodoxy was such that he adopted a forgiving attitude toward certain forms of slavery.</b> In books such as Politics of Guilt and Pity and The Institutes of Biblical Law, which is essentially an 890-page disquisition on “the heresy of democracy” and the first of a three-volume series under the same title, he makes the case that “the move from Africa to America was a vast increase of freedom for the Negro, materially and spiritually as well as personally.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so,” Rushdoony muses, and the law requires that a slave “recognize his position and accept it with grace.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>One of Dabney’s pet peeves was the provision of public education to Black children, whom he referred to as “the brats of black paupers,” </b>which required unjust (in his view) taxation of “oppressed” “white bretheren.” Rushdoony sympathized with Dabney’s point of view on public education, and here began to fuse his views with a small-government ideology. “State supported and controlled education is theft,” he wrote, and called the claim of ownership to the lives of citizens by a “humanist state” slavery, too.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rushdoony did not agitate for the literal enslavement of Black Americans in his time. But his fascination with proslavery theology was no passing fancy. The idea that the United States is a Redeemer Nation, chosen by God; that it is tasked with becoming an orthodox Christian republic in which women are subordinate to men, education is in the hands of conservative Christians, and no one pays taxes to support Black people; that at some point in the past the nation deviated horribly from its mission and fell under the control of atheist, communist, and/or liberal elites—the stuff of proslavery theology was the life of Rushdoony’s political thought.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Rushdoony soon found an even greater source of inspiration in the libertarian economic thinkers who emerged to beat back the New Deal. He was very much taken with figures like James W. Fifield as well as members of the Austrian school of economics, and began to churn out works arguing that the <b>modern welfare state was “organized larceny” and “capitalism is supremely a product of Christianity.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this Christian-libertarian vision, Rushdoony saw the foundation for a thoroughly religious – or better, <b>theocratic</b> – understanding of the American republic. In Rushdoony’s telling, it was not the intention of America’s founders to establish a nonsectarian representative democracy. The First Amendment, he argues, aimed to establish freedom “not from religion but for religion.” “The Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order,” he wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The idea that the United States is a “Christian nation” – not just in the sense that its population was originally mostly Christian but that it was intended to serve as part of a Christian world order – was Rushdoony’s central contribution to the religious right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rushdoony had many prominent admirers, among them evangelical leader D. James Kennedy, whose ministry received millions of dollars in donations from the DeVos family.</b> Kennedy popularized Rushdoony’s ideas through multiple sermons and publications, exhorting attendees at a 2005 conference organized by his ministry to “exercise godly dominion” over “every aspect and institution of human society.” The ultraconservative Catholic leader Richard John Neuhaus, who worked to broker a conservative evangelical and conservative Catholic alliance, pointed out that Rushdoony’s “theonomy,” or the idea of a social and political order rooted in “biblical law,” has “insinuated itself in circles where people would be not at all comfortable to think of themselves as theonomists.” He also attested, in 1990, to “increasing encounters with ideas clearly derived from Christian Reconstructionistm even among conservatives in the mainline/oldline churches.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, the ideas of Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionists have penetrated into evangelical and conservative Catholic circles that are, quite often, unaware of their original sources. “Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same,” as one observer put it to Michael J. McVicar, author of Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and the American Religious Conservatism.To be clear, the Christian right is large and diverse in its specific theologies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of its representatives know very little about R.J. Rushdoony and others take pains to distance themselves from him. Some of his extreme positions, such as the idea that homosexuals, blasphemers and adulterers are all worthy of the death penalty, have been loudly repudiated by conservative leaders. Yet it is difficult to understand the ideological origins and structure of Christian nationalism in America today without taking into account Rushdoony’s ideas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Rushdoony’s work is touted today by some of the leading personalities and policy groups on the Christian right. Perhaps the most telling example comes from<b> David Barton, </b>whose efforts to reframe our constitutional republic as a Christian nationalist enterprise are at the center of so many of the movement’s cultural and legislative initiatives. Though perhaps not in a formal sense a Reconstructionist, Barton dances around many of Rushdoony’s defining ideas, even on the question of slavery.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a paper titled “The Bible, Slavery, and America’s Founders,” posted on the WallBuilders website, Barton cites Rushdoony extensively, and argues that “in light of the Scriptures, we cannot say that slavery, in a broad and general sense, is sin. But this brief look at the Biblical slave laws does reveal how fallen man’s example of slavery has violated God’s laws.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Where Barton strikes out on his own, it is to take a swipe at modern, liberal government as a form of slavery, </b>a gesture that Rushdoony surely would have endorsed. “Since sinful man tends to live in bondage, different forms of slavery have replaced the more obvious system of past centuries,” Barton explains. “The state has assumed the role of master for many, providing aid and assistance, and with it more and more control, to those unable to protect themselves.” In a 2018 blog post, Watchmen on the Wall, the Family Research Council’s alliance of an estimated 25,000 pastors, praised Rushdoony as a “powerful advocate for the Christian and homeschool movements across America” who “challenged Christian leaders of his day to stand on biblical truth in the public square.” Rushdoony is a foundational thinker whose ideas continue to speak, long after he has been silenced.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For a long time now, critics have viewed America’s religious right as a social or cultural movement. They assume that it represents a reaction to modern, secular culture, and that it speaks for a large mass of disaffected conservative evangelicals and others who are preoccupied with issues of concern to the family. But that simplistic interpretation is plausible only for those who do not actually listen to what its leaders have to say or trace its ideas to their primary sources. Christian nationalism today is a political movement, and its primary goal is power. Its ultimate aim is not just to win elections but to replace our modern constitutional Republic with a “biblical” order that derives its legitimacy not from the people but from God and the Bible – or, at least, the God and the Bible that men like Rushdoony claimed to know.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Katherine Stewart is an author and journalist. Her newly published book is The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury, March 3, 2020).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Follow Katherine Stewart on Twitter: @kathsstewart.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was originally published at History News Network</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ME plan</font></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/jared-kushner-gives-birth-to-travesty-of-the-century/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/jared-kushner-gives-birth-to-travesty-of-the-century/</font></a></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div><div>=</div><h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 20px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px !important;">
</h2><h2 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 20px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px !important;"><a href="https://hnn.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=191ccdd6c73c5afeafd52cfb8&id=70c2193241&e=5871539293" target="_blank" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hnn.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D191ccdd6c73c5afeafd52cfb8%26id%3D70c2193241%26e%3D5871539293&source=gmail&ust=1571596981479000&usg=AFQjCNHSr4LuhSY_hHc4lNEH8imC1tDqWg" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">How the Vaping Industry Is Using a Defensive Tactic Pioneered Decades Ago by Big Tobacco</a></h2><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 12px; line-height: 26px; color: rgb(119, 119, 119); font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px !important;"><em>by Sarah Milov</em></span><span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px !important;">Sarah Milov, author of The Cigarette: A Political History, argues "the most dangerous aspect of vaping might not be what it does to the body, but rather what it does to the body politic."</p></span></span>