Rousas John Rushdoony (April 25, 1916 – February 8, 2001) was an American Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian. He is credited as being the father of Christian Reconstructionism and an inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement. His followers and critics have argued that his thought exerts considerable influence on the evangelical Christian right.
Rushdoony was born in 1916 in New York City to Armenian immigrants who fled the Armenian genocide. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and Rushdoony said that his family had produced a priest or minister in every generation since the fourth century. The family belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church before converting to Presbyterianism. He learned English at school while Armenian was spoken at home. He earned a B.A. in English and an M.A. in education from UC Berkeley, attended the Pacific School of Religion, and was ordained in 1944.
Rushdoony and his first wife Arda served as missionaries to the Shoshone and Paiute on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, during which time he began writing extensively. After returning to California, he became involved in the Christian libertarian movement, contributing to publications critical of centralized government and public welfare programs. His ministry continued in Santa Cruz, where he helped form a new Orthodox Presbyterian congregation, and later he founded the Chalcedon Foundation in Los Angeles in 1965. Through Chalcedon and his collaborations with figures like Gary North, he promoted Christian Reconstructionism, emphasizing the application of biblical law to society and education while critiquing secularism and modern democratic principles.
Rushdoony's theological and philosophical work extended across education, history, and politics, promoting a Calvinist worldview that emphasized human dependence on God and the application of Old Testament law to modern society. He was a major advocate for homeschooling and argued that American history and governance were rooted in Christian principles. His ideas have been highly controversial, drawing criticism for his support of harsh penal sanctions, his views on race and slavery, and his Holocaust-related claims.
Biography Rousas John Rushdoony was born in New York City, the son of recently arrived Ottoman Armenian immigrants Vartanoush (née Gazarian) and Yegheazar Khachig Rushdoony.1930 U.S. Census; WWII Registration Card Before his parents fled the Armenian genocide of 1915, his ancestors had lived in a remote area near Mount Ararat in what is now Turkey. According to Rushdoony, every generation of his family since the early fourth century had produced a Christian priest or minister, a line dated in some accounts to the year 320 AD. He described the practice as a hereditary priesthood, saying that his ancestors "would perpetually give a member of their family to be a priest to perform a kind of Aaronic priesthood as in the Old Testament, an hereditary priesthood. Whoever in the family felt called would become the priest. And our family did so. So from the early 300's until now there has always been someone in the ministry in the family."
Within weeks of arriving in America, his parents moved to the small farming community of Kingsburg, California, in Fresno County, where a number of other Armenian families had relocated. They then converted from the Armenian Apostolic Church to Presbyterianism. In Kingsburg, his father Yegheazar founded a church, Armenian Martyrs Presbyterian. Rousas later recalled: "By the time I reached my teens I had read the Bible through from cover to cover, over and over and over again."
The family moved in 1925 for a short time to Detroit, Michigan, where his father pastored another Armenian church. They returned to Kingsburg in 1931, and Rousas completed school in California.McVicar, pp. 22-23. His father was the pastor of Bethel Armenian Presbyterian Church in San Francisco in 1942. Rousas had a younger sister, Rose (named after their mother), and a brother, Haig. His father died in Fresno in 1961.
Education Rushdoony attended public schools, where he learned English, but Armenian was the language spoken at home. He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1938, a teaching credential in 1939, and an M.A. in Education in 1940. Rushdoony and Arda Gent married in San Francisco the week before Christmas 1943.
Rushdoony attended the Pacific School of Religion, a Congregationalist and Methodist seminary in Berkeley, California, from which he graduated in 1944. He corresponded for many years with his mentor at the school, the theology professor George Huntston Williams. In 1944, he was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.
He was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Valley Christian University for his book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum. Gary North stated that Rushdoony read at least one book a day, six days a week, for fifty years of his life, underlining sentences and making an index of its main ideas in the rear.
Ministry Rushdoony and his wife Arda served for eight and a half years as missionaries to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians on the remote Duck Valley Indian Reservation in northern Nevada. They lived in the reservation's primary town, Owyhee. It was during their mission to the Native Americans that Rushdoony began writing.
Arda taught at the reservation school and Sunday school, led a Girl Scout troop, coached the girls' basketball team, and visited with families. In 1945, they adopted Ronald, an orphaned baby from the reservation. Between 1947 and 1952 in Owyhee, four daughters were born to them. In late 1952, Rushdoony took an American Presbyterian Church pastorate at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Santa Cruz, California, and the family left Duck Valley in January 1953. Their son Mark was born the next month in Santa Cruz.
In Santa Cruz, Rushdoony became a reader of the Christian libertarian magazine Faith and Freedom, which advocated an "anti-tax, non-interventionist, anti-statist economic model" in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Faith and Freedoms views on government aligned with Rushdoony's fears of centralized government power, given the Rushdoony family's memories of the Armenian Genocide. Rushdoony contributed articles to Faith and Freedom, including one describing his observations of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, arguing that government support had reduced residents to "social and personal irresponsibility".
The Rushdoonys separated in 1957 and later divorced. About this time, Rushdoony transferred his church membership from the American Presbyterian Church to the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church's newsletter, The Presbyterian Guardian, reported in July 1958 that "the Rev. Rousas J. Rushdoony… was received and a new Orthodox Presbyterian Church organized, consisting of [sixty-six charter members] who had separated from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in Santa Cruz." In their petition, the group asked that Rushdoony be ordained as their pastor and stated, "[W]e cannot abide in any church which seeks to define righteousness or sin, salvation or sanctification, except in terms of the Word of God. We have witnessed, here in Santa Cruz, against modernism, man-made perfectionism, and church bureaucracy". The newsletter article goes on to report, "The Presbytery in receiving the church also examined Mr. Thomas Kirkwood and Mr. Kenneth Webb as prospective elders, and they with Mr. Rushdoony were constituted the session of the church," and announced the publication of Rushdoony's By What Standard? later that year.
Later life The May 1962 edition of The Presbyterian Guardian reported Rushdoony's resignation, noted as "reportedly to devote his time for his writing and lecturing." Rushdoony married his second wife, Dorothy Barbara Ross Kirkwood, in 1962. She died in 2003.
Rushdoony moved to Los Angeles in 1965 and founded the Chalcedon Foundation; the monthly Chalcedon Report, which Rushdoony edited, began appearing that October. His daughter Sharon later married Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist writer and economic historian. North and Rushdoony became collaborators, and their partnership lasted until 1981 when it ended due to a dispute over the content of one of North's articles. Following the dispute, North and Chalcedon continued to promote each other's views independently, but they did not reach a "truce" until 1995.
Under Rushdoony, the Chalcedon Foundation grew to twelve staff members with 25,000–40,000 people on their mailing lists during the 1980s. Chalcedon and Reconstructionism obtained the support of major Christian book publishers and endorsements from influential evangelical leaders, including Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Frank Schaeffer (who later repudiated the movement).
Rushdoony died in 2001 with his children at his side. Rushdoony's son, Mark R. Rushdoony, became and remains the president of the Chalcedon Foundation and editor of the Chalcedon Report.
Philosophical and theological contributions Michael J. McVicar summarized Rushdoony's theology and philosophy as follows:
Rushdoony developed his philosophy as an extension of the work of Calvinist philosopher Cornelius Van Til. Van Til critiqued human knowledge in light of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. He argued that sin affected a person's ability to reason. In order to be rational, Van Til claimed, one must presuppose the existence of God and the inerrant, divine inspiration of the (Protestant) Bible. Rushdoony attended to the implications – where Van Til held true knowledge came from God, Rushdoony asserted that "all non-Christian knowledge is sinful, invalid nonsense. The only valid knowledge that non-Christians possess is 'stolen' from 'Christian-theistic' sources." In effect, Rushdoony extended Van Til's thinking from philosophy to "all of life and thought."
Early writings Rushdoony began to promote the works of Calvinist philosophers Cornelius Van Til and Herman Dooyeweerd into a short survey of contemporary humanism called By What Standard?. Arguing for a Calvinist system of thought, Rushdoony dealt with subjects as broad as epistemology and cognitive metaphysics and as narrow as the psychology of religion and predestination. He wrote a book, The One And The Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy, using Van Tillian presuppositional philosophy to critique various aspects of secular humanism. He also wrote many essays and book reviews, published in such venues as the Westminster Theological Journal.
Homeschooling Rushdoony also wrote extensively on education, and advocated homeschooling as a way to combat what he described as the intentionally secular nature of the U.S. public school system. By the early 1980s, he was active in the homeschooling movement, appearing as an expert witness in support of homeschooling parents in legal cases. He criticized progressive school reformers such as Horace Mann and John Dewey and argued for the dismantling of the state's influence on education in three works: Intellectual Schizophrenia (a general and concise study of education), The Messianic Character of American Education (a history and castigation of public education in the U.S.), and The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (a parent-oriented pedagogical statement).
History