Cherry-picking or cherry-sorting?
[ by Charles Cameron — continuing discussion with Prof Kohen re Rushdoony, dominionism, and cherry picking of Torah laws for US implementation ]
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Prof. Ari Kohen at Running Chicken responded to a comment of mine about Fuqua and Rushdoony, suggesting he’s cherry picking which Old Testament / Torah laws he would like to see brought into US law:
I’ll admit I don’t know anything at all about Rushdoony, but I use cherry-picking because my sense is that people like Fuqua aren’t really concerned with all of the laws in the Torah and that, in fact, they don’t follow most of them. Instead, they gravitate toward the ones that speak to their own (political) positions and then use the Torah as “back up.” Do you think, for example, that Fuqua cares about shatnes or kashrut? If not, why not? If so, what makes you think that he does? Also, what makes you think that Fuqua is connected to Rushdoony? Is there some evidence for the connection?
This sent me digging — I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like about Rushdoony and his influence on the Christian Right — and since my response was was too long to go in Running Chicken’s comment box, I thought I’d post it here.
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Ari, if you’ll permit me to greet you thus, many thanks for your care in encouraging me to tease out the subtleties.
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First, let me say that while I cannot say for certain that Fuqua is connected to Rushdoony, the latter’s impact on strands of modern evangelical thinking has been considerable, both overtly and covertly, by affiliation and more loosely by influence. He is generally considered the father of the Dominionist movement, sometimes termed Theonomy or Christian Reconstructionism, and Frederick Clarkson’s coverage of the movement for the progressive Political Research Associates magazine, Public Eye, characterizes it as a “stealth theology”:
A key, if not exclusively Reconstructionist, doctrine uniting many evangelicals is the “dominion mandate,” also called the “cultural mandate.” This concept derives from the Book of Genesis and God’s direction to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over it. While much of Reconstructionism, as one observer put it, “dies the death of a thousand qualifications,” the commitment to dominion is the theological principle that serves as the uniting force of Christian Right extremism, while people debate the particulars.
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Christian Reconstructionism is a stealth theology, spreading its influence throughout the Religious Right. Its analysis of America as a Christian nation and the security of complete control implied in the concept of dominion is understandably appealing to many conservative Christians. Its apocalyptic vision of rule by Biblical Law is a mandate for political involvement. Organizations such as COR and the Rutherford Institute provide political guidance and act as vehicles for growing political aspirations.
In A Covert Kingdom, Part Four of his article, Clarkson writes:
Gary North proposed stealth tactics more than a decade ago in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (1981), urging “infiltration” of government to help “smooth the transition to Christian political leadership. . . .Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”
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The Christian Coalition actually proposed something similar to Gary North’s notion of “infiltration” when its 1992 “County Action Plan” for Pennsylvania advised that “You should never mention the name Christian Coalition in Republican circles.” The goal, apparently, is to facilitate becoming “directly involved in the local Republican Central Committee so that you are an insider. This way,” continues the manual, “you can get a copy of the local committee rules and a feel for who is in the current Republican Committee.” The next step is to recruit conservative Christians to occupy vacant party posts or to run against moderates who “put the Republican Party ahead of principle.”
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The second issue you present me with has to do with shatnez and kashruth, and here I certainly need to be explicit in saying that there are some aspects of the Mosaic law that Rushdoony would not apply to Christians.
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