Recommended Reading: salad

[ by Charles Cameron — a follow up to Recommended Reading: the meat, discussing the word Christianist, also an intellectual foundation for the desire to fuse church and state ]

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In a comment on Daveed and Laurel’s post, Tim Mathews writes:

The views of a hypothetical “Christianist” yearning to fuse church and state are clearly ad hoc and usually incoherent, with little to no significant intellectual foundation. Thus, the Islamist versus Christianist dynamic seems, to me, to be an invented controversy. “Islamist” is a descriptive label applied to an agenda with an intellectual foundation. “Christianist” is a label in search of a description.

I’d like to make two comments here:

First, FWIW, the term “Christianist” already has a usage promoted by the essayist Michael Ventura, who writes in Shadow Dancing in the USA:

In following the lead of James Hillman’s work, I’m going to use “Christianism” in place of “Christianity” and “Christianist” in place of “Christian” whenever possible in an attempt to get around the enormous bias for the religion built into our very language.

This isn’t the same as using the term in parallel to “Islamist” – but it’s a usage worth noting.

As to there being “little to no significant intellectual foundation” for the desire to fuse church and state in Christianity, Rousas John Rushdoony opens his monumental Institutes of Biblical Law with the following observations:

When Wyclif wrote of his English Bible that “This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” his statement attracted no attention insofar as his emphasis on the centrality of Biblical law was concerned. That law should be God’s law was held by all; Wyclif’s departure from accepted opinion was that the people themselves should not only read and know that law but also should in some sense govern as well as be governed by it. [ … ]

No less than Israel of old, Christendom believed itself to be God’s realm because it was governed by the law of God as set forth in Scripture. There were departures from that law, variations of it, and laxity in faithfulness to it, but Christendom saw itself as the new Israel of God and no less subject to His law.

When New England began its existence as a law-order, its adoption of Biblical law was both a return to Scripture and a return to Europe’s past. It was a new beginning in terms of old foundations….

You can read the complete Introduction here (.pdf).

Max Blumenthal‘s 2009 Republican Gomorrah opens with a chapter on Rushdoony, contrasting him with Billy Graham, who:

routinely urged his audiences to “create a culture with Christ at its center,” but his message was consistent with the evangelical tradition of effecting change through personal persuasion, not political imposition. … By contrast, Rushdoony’s concept of cleansing the land of sin by seizing the reins of government was genuinely revolutionary.

John Frame‘s much earlier review of the first volume (of three) of the Institutes appeared in the Westminster Theological Journal 38:2 (Winter, 1976), 195-217. It offers the uninitiated reader a decent overview of the book:

Rushdoony not only acknowledges biblical authority, knows the Bible, and knows our cultural situation; he is also able to apply biblical principles to our culture in creative and cogent ways. Rushdoony has grasped a hugely important point that theologians rarely acknowledge, namely, that theology must involve the application of the word of God to the whole world. Otherwise, theology is a “lie,” testifying that God himself is irrelevant (p. 597; cf. pp. 308, 652ff). The Institutes, therefore, presents a plan for the reformation of all aspects of human society in accord with biblical law. Rushdoony advocates this reformation in various ways:

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