The Battle for the Soul of Reconstructionism: Kinism vs. Alienism

Not too long ago at a backyard barbeque I found myself embroiled with an old friend whom I had previously regarded as a solid-thinking Christian. This was a fellow who at one time counted himself a Confederate theonomist. Calvin, Dabney, and Rushdoony graced his shelves prominently. He had always been quite public about his reasons for relocating his family from Southern California to North Idaho – because, as he told it, he wanted his children to be raised amongst their own kind, where they would finally be safe to practice their faith and simply be White in public. He was the first man to have pointed out to me that the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s definition of murder being “the taking away of our own life, or the life of our neighbor, unjustly, or whatsoever tendeth thereunto” (question 69) clearly meant that racial integration, the foremost source of violence in society, was a clear violation of the sixth commandment. He counted himself a Kinist.

Yet as of this meeting it was clear that something had drastically changed with him. There was a glower in his eye I’d never seen there before, but I recognized it. It was contempt.

As the conversation opened on the subject of the dire need for repentance amongst Christians to alleviate the heavy curses befalling our people and the eclipse of Christendom generally, he balked, saying, “No, look around. Things are better now than they’ve ever been for Christians. I mean, temple prostitution is a thing of the past and as far as safety is concerned, we live in a golden age.”

To which I replied something like, “You can’t be serious. All of our ministers and seminaries are embracing the sodomite agenda, the open borders agenda, the forced integration agenda; they are talking about the abolition of the family and it’s working because divorce is now fully normalized within the churches; and based upon those arguments, many are beginning to speak of pedophilia as a mere ‘arbitrary cultural taboo’ rather than sin. Meanwhile, actual Christian doctrine is all but absent even in one-time-conservative Reformed churches. Our churchmen have all but wholly traded Christian doctrine for Marxism, Jacobinism, humanism, gnosticism, and yes, satanism.

“And we do still have temple prostitutes. It’s a worse problem now than it ever was in the ancient world, because rather than individual men defiling themselves at every new moon, it’s become a family affair as whole households visit the celluloid temple together every night. Even Jewish actress Emma Weisz has recently attested that Hollywood producers flatly regard actresses as nothing but prostitutes. Because they are in fact paid to perform sexual acts and flaunt their sexuality on film.

“As to the subject of safety, sure, our children are safe here, but that’s only because we live in what is for the moment effectively a White bio-preserve. And even if they are largely abandoning Christian doctrine, White people nonetheless retain many Christian social instincts. Much more so than any other group is yet to attain. But you know very well that everywhere our people are in reach of Blacks or Browns, we are being genocided in the streets in a one-sided race war waged by the coalition of all non-Whites (with the aid of White liberals, of course). And even here, where we remain a mega-majority, government and corporate forces are working overtime to marginalize White Christians out of any hope of gainful employment or the slightest representation in the public sphere by appointing any minority or heathen they can find over us. But I know you see all these things. We’ve talked about them a hundred times. We’ve always agreed on these matters till now.”

After this, he rebuked me for not “meeting people where they’re at” and for not understanding that “there’s no such thing as a perfect church.” In spite of his clearly having relinquished his long-held views, he reprimanded me as if I were the one making the departure from our previous consensus. It was a surreal experience, but I suppose it fits the psychological modus operandi of those descending into Alienism: they insist, in spite of their radical leftward slide, that they are unmoved, and stand where they always have – even as they denounce Kinists for standing with the historic Church. Invariably, aside from the Alienist impulse changing their perception of doctrine, it also seems to blind them to the rapid refurbishment underway in their own thinking. Though they are swinging wildly away from their previous equilibrium, they somehow see themselves as standing still, and those who remain fixed at their previous location seem to them to be the ones in motion.

I came to find out that some time prior to this conversation, a visit from a liberal family member resulted in my friend taking down his prized portraits of Confederate generals Jackson and Lee, which had long hung proudly in his living room. Because the liberal family member burst into tears at the sight of them. Really.

This is precisely the sort of personal pressure and psychological manipulation to which most conservatives fall. The demoralization numbs the perception to their own concessions, because the nature of the acquiescence itself is a realignment of convictions: once his liberal family member shed tears at the sight of his heroes, he himself wanted to take them down for they had in that moment ceased to be his heroes. After all, heroes don’t make women cry. Right?

In this way, my friend’s declension is just a microcosmic snapshot of a larger phenomenon. As with my friend, under pressure of the zeitgeist, self-identifying postmillennial theonomists are reflexively seeking out a path of lesser resistance and ideals of greater palatability in terms of the prevailing social values (cultural Marxism) by swapping out all the conservative, realist, and familist content of their worldview in favor of liberal utopianism. They begin dealing in counterfeits because, in the contemporary marketplace of ideas, fugazzis are the coin of the realm, and all genuine, non-adulterated currency is regarded as rogue syndicalism and treason to the marketplace itself.

Accordingly, in order to pass off their retooled humanism as Christian Reconstruction they must denounce the genuine article in especially harsh tones, insisting that the remaining holdouts (Rushdoonian conservative Kinists) are actually the innovators and forgers. By and by they come to blame the stalwarts for their own bad reputation, as they imagine that their public image is centrally besmirched by their unfortunate association with “racists.” So it is that Alienists are persuaded to denounce their old-line theonomist cousins, the Kinists with whom they have more in common than anyone, because they are desperate to attain an air of respectability amongst the Marxists, Unitarians, and Hindus by assuring them that the millennial vision of Alienist Reconstructionism not only agrees with their humanist eschatology, but actually achieves all their NWO objectives more thoroughly than any of their own -isms. In this light, they come to view their guilt by association with Kinists as their central impediment to dominion. Effectively, this makes all the penological categories of political correctness a foremost concern to them. So committed, they will of necessity continue on the slide to an ever-more-radicalizing leftism. This is the Franky Schaeffer effect: these men beg reprieve of and prove their allegiance to the NWO by castigation of their godly heritage.

Despite the best efforts of Alienists, it is no secret that the embattled Reconstructionist movement is presently taking a significant departure from its roots – especially so in the wake of R.J. Rushdoony’s passing. Granted, in the world of ideas, a certain pendulum effect is expected as theses are posited, reviewed, refined, refuted and/or discarded; such is the nature of all endeavors of intellect. It is also the substance of the Reformation battle cry, semper reformanda, and the biblical admonition that we “test of every spirit”: as such, every proposition is subject to review of peers, as well as the personal circumspection of the common man. Critique is inevitable, and amendments naturally follow near behind.

But in this case we really aren’t talking about clarification. What we are witnessing is the revolutionary redefinition of Reconstructionism. The Overton window, if I may use the term, in Reconstructionist thought is no longer moving in refining circuits; rather, we are at present witnessing a total inversion of definitions and transvaluation of content. No longer is the Reconstructionist community concerned with a strict constructionist view of federalism, common law, allodial land rights, independent Christian courts, maintenance of borders, resistance theory, just war theory, or family-centric nationhood under God. No, they have suddenly thrown in with the leftist crusades against protectionism, nativism, racism, and familism. They’ve inexplicably come to posit human rights and civil rights as consonant with God-given rights, even though these things were ever understood by all parties as the negation of one another.

Albeit, there were definite acts of subversion and protracted mutinies during Rushdoony’s life, such as when his son-in-law, Gary North, famously condemned Rush as a racist, which, of course, is the Marxian terminology for heretic. Never mind the fact that everyone to the left of Rushdoony would conclusively identify North as just as much a racist as Rushdoony. North also issued a star-chamber anathema over Paul Hill for successfully defending children from an abortionist serial killer. Which is to say that he joined the chorus of secular humanism as they prayed everlasting hellfire on a Christian martyr. Shamelessly, the man even went on to sell his treacherous correspondence with Hill in book form, thus extracting his thirty pieces of silver from the betrayal.

Others, such as Steve Schlissel, early danced their way into the Federal Vision camp. In Schlissel’s case, Auburn Avenue seems to have been the the convenient highway back to Jerusalem. Seeing as how Federal Visionism was based upon New Perspectivist (NPP) hermeneutical theories, the myopic preoccupations with Second Temple Judaism in NPP provided Schlissel an easy pretext for the codification of Jewish culture in the form of Shadchan services, feast days, and the general Hebraization of church life. Therefore, even if John Robbins calls Schlissel’s brand of Reconstructionism by the sanitized term “neolegalism,” it’s difficult to distinguish it from the old legalism known in Scripture simply as “Judaizing.”

Inasmuch as North’s vision of Reconstructionism is filtered through the lens of libertarian economism, Schlissel’s comes through the heavy filter of Judaic culture. Neither North’s nor Schlissel’s perspectives can be squared with genuine Reconstructionism as Rushdoony understood it, but in fact represent competing and adversarial theories of dominion.

Moreover, due to Judaism’s heavy bent of economism, North and Schlissel wind up with a good deal of crossover between them – much more so than either has with the thought of Rushdoony, at least. In any case, both said developments from Rushdoonian thought have been lately championed by men who have taken things in an even more insidious direction: rather than attempting to openly castigate the political incorrectness of Rushdoony’s writings as North had, they have set out to reinterpret and repackage Rushdoony as his own antithesis. Rather than plainly objecting, they are intent on selling the idea that in spite of Rushdoony’s many words to the contrary, he really agreed with them, and was a thorough proponent of the New-Age colorblind egalitarianism, economism, and open borders. Anyone who reminds them of the things Rush actually wrote and said of the covenantalist implications in regard to family, clan, and nationhood are denounced as pagans! This has become the tactic of the Marinovs, Swansons, Wilsons, Morecrafts, Ritchies, News, Halbrooks, and McDurmons of the land.

But they neglect the glaring fact that Rushdoony, great though he were, was not the actual founder of Reconstructionism. Aside from an occasional book review written for the Westminster Theological Journal, Rushdoony’s status as a Christian luminary began with his first book, By What Standard?, published in 1959. Even use of the term “Reconstruction” in regard to Christian law well predates this. Though a Quaker, and in spite of his imbibing a good deal of Allied propaganda, Elton Trueblood argued persuasively for overt theonomy in his 1946 book, Foundations for Reconstruction. Clearly, he was a Reconstructionist before R.J. Rushdoony brought the term to notoriety.

The same goes for H.B. Clark, author of Biblical Law (1943), as well as T. Robert Ingram, who penned The World Under God’s Law (1964), both of whose works Rushdoony cited fastidiously as corroboration for his thesis of the normativity of biblical law in Christendom past. Clearly, then, even if he is now generally portrayed as an innovator, the good Rushdoony well understood his efforts as contiguous with a broader movement and tradition spanning the whole of the Christian era. Far from an innovator, Rushdoony’s genius was as a sublime synthesizer. He saw and clarified the interrelatedness of things. His use of the term “Reconstruction” sprang not from the man’s imagination, but from its own historical context.

In the American civil context, the term “Reconstruction” was a reference to the federal government’s plan to forcibly reorganize the social institutions, psychology, and religion of the nation after the War Between the States. Though the mission of top-down Reconstruction was aimed first at the defeated Southern states, it took into its scope every one of the states and territories of the day. So with the benefit of a century’s worth of hindsight, and having seen the deleterious fruit of secular Reconstruction from sea to shining sea, Christian men rose once more to posit the antithesis to the humanist theory – “Christian Reconstruction.” So differentiated by inclusion of the word “Christian,” it should be understood that the sort of Reconstruction now posited was not only an alternative to the Marxian federal version forcibly transforming the country and the folk thereof, but a declaration of renewed defiance against the same.

Thus Otto Scott summed it up, “[W]e are in the position of being counter-revolutionaries. We’re not introducing anything new, we’re trying to restore what we had.”

This candid identification of Christian Reconstruction with the “counter-revolution” is, by classic definition of the term, a rejection of the egalitarianism and Jacobinism which defined the French Revolution. Scott then identified Reconstructionism with the position of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Louise de Bonald, et al. Counter-revolutionary socio-politics were by 1848 sloganized by the phrase, Travail, famille, patrie, which translated is, “Work, family, fatherland.” This formulation was coined as a repudiation of the infamous revolutionary slogan, Liberté, égalité, fraternité: universal liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

But the subversive parties who have today usurped the mantle of Reconstructionism in nowise see themselves as counter-revolutionaries. They have no aspirations of restoring what’s been lost because, both by their new social ethic and their confusion of Providence with the pagan doctrine of Ordeal, they tend to see all the former bulwarks of Christendom as sin overthrown. Inconceivable as it may be, in many respects they have come to see the Jacobin advances achieved in cultural Marxism as the consistent outworking of Christian Reconstruction. Rather than Christian Reconstruction offering the antithesis of federal/secular Reconstruction, they’ve come to see these antonyms as synonyms. They see all the late socio-ethical inversions decried by Rushdoony, Machen, Clark, Trueblood, Ingram, Gillespie, and others not as curses upon a backslidden Christendom, but as the Kingdom come into its own. The august postmillennialism of Rushdoony appears to have been surreptitiously traded in for a ruthless utopianism – the same utopian vision held in common among Jacobins, Leninists, Trotskyites, Illuminists, New Agers, Bahaists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, satanists, and humanists of every sort – an eschaton of compulsory borderless egalitarianism under a monolithic planetary regime. Now, Alienist Christians may dismiss their apparent alignment with the social eschatology of all the schools of leftist heathenism eclipsing Christendom at present by accusing us of arguing “guilt by association.” But that rhetorical deflection has no strength to parry when their position is contrasted with history, for our position is ever-present, silhouetted against the backdrop of the counter-revolutionary character of Christendom from the days of the Apostles, who ceaselessly rebuked the innovations of Judaism and Gnosticism, to the Nicene fathers, to the Westminster Divines, to the Black-robed Regiment, to Rushdoony, demonstrating clearly that the Alienist perspective is not extending Christian social theory and eschatology, but rather breaking with them, radically. For Christendom always understood Christ to be the millstone which smashes all empires (Dan. 2) and, thus, all miscegenationist social eschatologies in favor of a strictly nationalist millennial vision:

Let the peoples praise You, O God;
Let all the peoples praise You.
Then the earth shall yield her increase;
God, our own God, shall bless us.
God shall bless us,
And all the ends of the earth shall fear Him (Ps. 67:5-7).

The proselytes of this neo-theonomy must therefore acknowledge their schism, else they drop all pretense and join Nietzsche and Heidegger in their proclamation of the end of metaphysics; which is to say that if the New-Age Reconstructionists refuse to interact with the facts of history as regards Christ-law (and they do), they have effectively followed the path of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and virtually the whole roster of linguistic philosophers since to metaphysical suicide, renouncing any expectation of intelligible correspondence between their ideology and reality. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.

If they opt for ideology at the expense of the reality of Christian history and the teleological continuity of clan, nation, and race around us and in Scripture, they commit themselves to the same faith-destroying metropolitan vision which James Thomson denounced as “The City of Dreadful Night,” where everything is a dark artifice designed in rebellion to break all natural and filial associations, marooning all at length in a state of functional solipsism.

As it permeates a people, the Christian faith necessarily sanctifies their culture, instilling righteous prejudices in favor of their wholesome order under God: prejudices against the ugly, the chaotic, the foreign, and the wicked, for all of these are deleterious of the beautiful, the orderly, the familiar, and the good. As with the term “discrimination,” which used to mean discernment, the concept of prejudice used to mean not injustice, as it signifies now, but rather, the near opposite – informed conviction. Essentially, righteous prejudice was the objective of every Christian creed, confession, and catechism. By the witness of the early church in Scripture, our fathers understood Christian prejudices in our folkways to be social insulation against that age-old heresy, gnosticism. For they saw gnosticism as the taproot and substance of all of the leftist ideological abstractions throughout the ages.

Burke’s “prejudice” was designed to counter gnosticism, the disease of Western intellectuality . . . from [the time of] primitive Christianity to Renaissance humanists, Enlightenment rationalists, and, in our own time, Marxian socialists and Freudians.¹

Of course, our modern Alienists would scoff at the insinuation that they have any commonality with Freud. But what else are we to make of their new penology defined by pathology? What do their constant invocations of psychoanalytic categories like “xenophobia,” “racism,” “misoxenia,” “ethnocentrism,” and “anti-Semitism” amount to, if not psychoanalytics in the place of theology? How do their allegations against Kinists differ from the arguments leveled by the Frankfurt School Freudians in the benchmark work of psychoanalytics, The Authoritarian Personality?

Since modern Alienism is contextualizing all matters in terms of all those neo-gnostic caterories, Robert T. Ingram’s case against the secular humanists of his day now applies equally well to the neo-theonomists. By way of their gnostic abolition of categories, they also endorse functional monism:

The movement toward integration is a denial of Christ. It is part of an effort to create one society in which there are no distinctions or differences. . . . For it is not the races only that must disappear and be brought into conformity with the requirements of a world-state: so with the sexes, so with parents and children, so with nations, states, tribes, and empires. All must go and be swallowed up in the maw of the great monad, theologically familiar to students of oriental mysticism as religion, and to traditional Christianity as Satan.²

Even if totally inverse of the Christian worldview, the neo-theonomists’ sudden embrace of all the goals of Christ’s enemies is as obvious as it is convenient. Alienist Reconstructionism echos not Rushdoony, but the arch-satanist, Manly P. Hall:

The age of boundaries is closing, and we are approaching a nobler era when nations shall be no more; when the lines of race and caste shall be wiped out; when the whole earth shall be under one order, one government, one administrative body.³

The most recent casualty in this Alienist coup is the Chalcedon Foundation’s position on the covenant family structure. Where Rushdoony championed the trustee family under God, the organization which he founded has now, by the pen of Bojidar Marinov, denounced any who advocate that model as not merely incorrect but “pagan.”

Of course, the good Mr. Opperman has well enough trounced Marinov’s revolutionary argument for the domestic family as the Christian model. Handily so in fact, but I would venture to add one thing to that discussion: the term translated “family” in our English Bibles is almost always the Hebrew word mishpachah, the foremost definition of which is not family but “clan.”And what is a clan? Webster’s definition for it is “a race; a family; a tribe.” By contrast, there is a more limited term used in Scripture which more accurately accords with the domestic “family” or “house” – that word is bayith. Not just the text’s presupposed legitimacy of the mishpachah (clan), but its predominant usage over bayith (house/family) indicates that the generic conception of the family unit in Scripture is not the nuclear/domestic model (which came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century), but indeed is the broader trustee (clan) model taught by Rushdoony. There is simply no way around the fact that, by the very definition of the words, Scripture everywhere presupposes as the normative means of dominion the very “clan culture” which Marinov condemns as “pagan.”

But even Marinov’s domestic family vision isn’t what he alleges it to be, because his libertarian view of contract has warped his understanding of the covenant in such a way that he argues for the complete interchangeability of all members of nations and of families. This means that what he really advocates is what Carl Zimmerman identified as the third way: the “atomistic family.” Historically, that is the utilitarian model which obtains not in covenant communities, but under communism, anarchism, or other strains of economic materialism.

Aside from Marinov’s ex cathedra ban on the trustee family, the centerpiece of Rushdoony’s social theory, this Alienist coup is evident in any number of other dimensions. Here’s a short list of doctrines which they have traded out in deference to the zeitgeist:

• The trustee family is replaced by the domestic (really, atomistic) family.
• God-given rights are replaced by civil rights/human rights.
• Postmillennialism is replaced by a Marxian eschaton/NWO.
• Theonomy is replaced by the positive laws of a humanistic legal order.
• The theonomic republic is replaced by the irreconcilable forces of libertarianism (democracy) and a borderless federal totalitarianism.
• Family-centric tribal society is replaced by individualism and ecclesio-centrism under global-federalism (NWO).
• Bottom-up sanctification of society is replaced by top-down political force.
• Localism is replaced by federalism.
• Free enterprise distributism is replaced by the “free market’”(international socialism under banks).
• Biblical debt law (anti-usury) is replaced by usury.
• Commodities and property-based wealth acquisition are replaced by stocks, bonds, derivatives and like corporate Ponzi schemes.
• Biblical servitude (domestic slavery) is replaced by political/federal slavery.
• The doctrine of vocation is replaced with one-size-fits-all careerism.
• Agrarian/artisan independence is replaced by corporate economism (cash nexus).
• Stewardship of the earth is replaced with eco-plundering/despoilment via laissez-faire capitalism.
• Land-based dominion is replaced with ethereal monetary schemes.
• Conservatism is replaced by the irreconcilable forces of economic libertarianism on one hand and cultural Marxism on the other.
• Natural hierarchy is replaced by pretended egalitarianism.
• Ordered diversity is replaced by forced integration/homogeneity.
• Theonomic nationalism is replaced by international socialism.
• Presuppositionalism is replaced by crimestop programming.
• Negative apologetics is replaced by the Marxian “Culture of Critique.”
• Christian penology is replaced with Marxian social pathology (racism, xenophobia, etc.).
• Borders between nationalities are replaced with turnstiles to facilitate international corporations’ movement of “human resources.”
• Christian nationalism (i.e., Kinism) is replaced by propositional nation theory (Jacobinism).

Taken together, all of this logically undermines the postmillennial goal of human restoration and paves the way for the transhumanist revolution and technological singularity (the further realization of Ingram’s forecast of monism) presently being pursued by secular humanists. These emergent trends are consonant with the agenda of amalgam and unity that defined the rebellion at Babel and are indistinguishable from the Alienist prerogative at work today. In Alienism, transhumanist singularity has no impediment and is therefore a foregone conclusion. These trends will no doubt shortly come be touted in Alienist circles as the very definition of God’s kingdom on earth. In fact, it has already begun in their praise of GMOs. After all, how will one who has resolved himself to the proposition that equal-yoking in Scripture is a question of creed only (without regard to any fleshly concerns) object to his daughter marrying the boy who has been spliced with shark and lizard DNA? Under the doctrines of Alienism, if he professes faith in Christ, neither his reptilian eyes nor his unusually sharp teeth are grounds for a Christian father to object to such union. No, only Kinism has the theological capital to call such a pairing an unequal yoking. Alienism can but grease the slide into the depths of that dystopian nightmare. Worse, because Alienists have come to hold amalgam as a sublime fruit of the gospel, in the age of transhumanism such a doctrine will inevitably come to regard the chimeric mixture of man, animal, plant, and machine as a central mark of their faith. It may sound like hyperbole now, but it isn’t: if God deigns not to break them from the course they are on, very soon Alienist congregations will come to look like the Isle of Dr. Moreau. They will condemn any congregation which clings to their humanity as “pagans.”

Meantime, as the neo-theonomists endeavor to reinterpret and redact Rushdoony’s work to fit the priorities of the zeitgeist, their myriad attempts at refuting Kinism have only served to further highlight the deficiencies and heterodoxy of their own views. None of which has discouraged them from inveighing upon the subject of the historical/theological pedigree of Kinism. Even if they have no hope of refuting it, they at least want to have some lectern-worthy commentary on the subject to assuage their own self-doubt. The resultant theories, while comical, are nonetheless worthy of note as much for their groping randomness as for their wild variance one from another. Here are just a few of their theories on the origins of Kinism:

• Started by Bret McAtee a few months ago
• Started on Facebook a year ago
• Started by an uneducated redneck in an Arkansas trailer park a couple of years ago
• Started by bookish bloggers five years ago
• Started by Harry Seabrook ten years ago
• Started by David Duke in the 1980s
• Started by English skinheads in the 1980s
• Started by the Dixiecrats in the 1960s
• Started by paleoconservatives in the 1950s
• Started by the Klan in the 1930s
• Started by Hitler
• Started by Karl Marx
• Started by Darwin
• Started by rich industrialists
• Started by the old WASP establishment in America
• Started by Nathan Bedford Forrest of the original Klan
• Started by the Reformed Boer churches
• Started by Confederate slaveholders/antebellum Presbyterians
• Started by the American Founders
• Started by colonial merchants
• Started by the Puritans
• Started by the English crown
• Started by the Scottish Presbyterians
• Started by Dutch traders
• Started by the Spanish crown
• Started by John Calvin in Geneva
• Started by Martin Luther
• Started by the Roman Catholic Church
• Started by Muslims
• Started by St. Augustine
• Started by pagan Germans
• Started by pagan Celts
• Started by Roman senator Cicero
• Started by a backslidden St. Peter
• Started by a backslidden St. Paul
• Started by first-century Judaizers
• Started by first-century Pharisees
• Started by the Maccabees
• Started by Edomites
• Started by the prophet Jonah
• Started by Moses’s relatives
• Started by Moses
• Started by Abraham
• Started at the fall of Babel
• Started by the Cainites
• Started by Sethites
• Started by the Fall of Man

Yes, I’ve heard all of these accounts of the origins of Kinism from Alienists just in the last four or five years. Often, fellows like David New, Marcus Pittman, or Bojidar Marinov will hold several positions on the matter at once. It is typical for such persons to start a conversation alleging that Kinism is an entirely new concept absent from history; before discussion’s end, they’ve turned about to argue to the contrary, that Kinism is ancient and normative throughout history, but is only now being gradually wiped away by Christianity. This double-mindedness arises of course from the irreconcilable conflict between their ideology, which would cast Kinism as an innovation, and history, which ubiquitously attests to the normativity of Kinism as the Christian social order throughout time.

They haven’t realized it yet, but in attempts at explaining the origins and legacy of Kinism, they are hopelessly corralling themselves into a radical two-kingdom theology, because their emerging position on the matter is that Kinism is normative in history but was never a part of true Christian history. That is, they are, with no apparent cognizance of the fact thus far, coming to argue that Kinism is the normative historical social order – but only outside the Kingdom of God. Even if Kinism seems to have been upheld in family, church, and state by our greatest Christian luminaries, their actions to that end will increasingly be interpreted as periods of backsliding or even outright apostasy. So, even if Christians did advocate Kinism, no true Christians acting in accord with genuine Christianity did so. Even if Christendom was doggedly Kinist, they insist Kinism is outside Christendom.

Someone will ask, don’t we too interpret the pedigree of Alienism similarly, in a dualistic fashion? No. Not exactly. Though we can trace Alienism back from the modern neo-theonomists on the secular side via Marxism and Jacobinism (demonstrably the foremost tributaries to modern Alienism), we also find a quasi-Christian strain of the same popping up again and again throughout time. But, unlike with Kinism (which was advocated rather uniformly by the most orthodox of our Christian fathers and codified in all Christian lands), in each case where Alienism reared its head in the churches, it was championed by the heretics: Gnostics, Docetists, Montanists, Monists, Cathars, Romanists (at the height of their counter-Reformational hubris), Anabaptists, Libertines, Unitarians, Enthusiasts, Charismatics, Oneness Pentecostals, Open Theists, Process Theologians, Liberationists, the assorted Social Gospelites, Jesus Freaks, etc. Which is to say that we can account for the history of Alienism as ever having come from without: as successive remanifestations of that same Babelite impulse redundantly anathematized in Scripture (Gen. 10-11; Deut. 4:19; 32:8; Ps. 2) and always attempting to overthrow established ramparts of Christian law.

Conversely, the Alienist view of history is uniquely R2K in that they wish us to believe that though Kinism was law throughout all magisterial Christendom, Christians never had anything to do with it. Their view can only make sense if you accept that genuine Christians always regarded the civil realm as apart from and outside Christ’s dominion. This, genuine Theonomists can never do.

Disingenuous though the neo-theos have been in respect to Rushdoony’s Kinism (and I’m certainly not absolving them of guilt), their actions aren’t entirely unprecedented. Even the Reformation was quickly co-opted by the Radical Reformation. So much so that the Reformed wing of Christendom is now completely overshadowed by the heirs of Anabaptism, Pietism, and Arminianism. The displacement of the genuine by the counterfeit is now so thorough that if you try to discuss the Reformation with most lifelong Baptists (even ministers), they actually have no idea what you’re talking about. By “Reformation” they often assume you to be referencing some sort of yogic transcendental meditation. The vindication of true religion in the Reformation, which shaped the West and America, is wholly unknown to most evangelicals. Even the word “Protestant” has become alien terminology to them. It is equally startling and discouraging to find that when you cite Martin Luther, more often than not, they take you to mean MLK, Jr.; they have no reference to the Lion of Wittenberg, but have been programmed from the cradle to love the Wolf of Birmingham.

Even if we would rather compartmentalize discussion of the coup affected upon Reconstructionism from broader Christendom, we cannot do so completely. They are contiguous not just by our ecumenical association as Christians, but also by the ideological trends of the zeitgeist which seem, in varying degrees and differing emphases, to permeate every denomination. The rot has been in the building a long time. Even if it cannot erode the cornerstone, it has eaten at every wall and pocked ever pillar.

If Rushdoony has his Marinov, Tyndale had More. More, whom pope John Paul II declared “the patron saint of politicians,” authored that humanist canon, Utopia, and he had Tyndale burned alive for daring to translate the Bible into English. Which is to say that More had Tyndale immolated for believing in the pluriformity of Christian cultures (i.e., for being a Kinist). Such an outcome should well impress upon all the severity of the disagreement between utopians and biblical Christians. It’s a matter of life and death. Given his druthers, Marinov would do to us as More did to Tyndale, and for the same reasons.

The internal death struggle between postmillennial theonomy and progressivist utopianism, which well preceded America, has defined the American kulturkampf from the beginning: The Mathers, Cotton and Increase, found themselves fighting a rear guard action in the late 1600s to defend an orthodox worldview at the old Ivy League universities. The fall of those watchtowers to liberalism precipitated the rise of “New Light” thinking and Unitarianism in the Northeast. As of the second Great Awakening, Presbyterian progressive Charles Finney denounced the Westminster Confession and creedalism in general, ultimately leading him to deny the doctrines of grace. Why? At root, because he appraised them to be both rigid and unjust. But aside from God’s prescribed standard of justice – His holy law – there is only what humanism has termed “social justice”: mere socially-dictated sentimental appetites, otherwise biblically termed as rebellion.

Finney’s functional atheism blent easily with and widened the streams of Jacobinism, ensuring that Red Republicanism and abolitionism were then foregone conclusions in America. Freethinking 48ers found many fellow travelers among the Finneyites, and the latter brought a crusader’s zeal and vernacular to the war on their common foe – Christendom, the foremost representative of which at that time was the ethno-traditionalist Southern states. Since then, Christian society in America has never ceased straddling the same fence between a theonomic millennium and the progressive utopia. For now, the latter is advancing, but only by ever great dilutions and loss of definition. They advance by constantly redefining their position to include ever more positions which the previous generation of Christian* Utopians would have regarded beyond the pale (note, for example, the Reconstructionists’ late inclusion of charismatics). Progressivism at length denounces all its own laborers. Liberalism tolerates none of her own heroes for long.

Progress has been in a great many quarters the precise equivalent in spiritual terms of Providence.⁴

The difference now is that the progressivists (Alienists) claiming the mantle of Christian Reconstructionism aren’t so forthrightly juxtaposing their ideology contra God’s law as in times past, but rather claiming them to be the same thing. But their chameleon ruse isn’t fooling anyone, other than perhaps the small and conflicted clique of chemically-damaged career militarists, GOP staffers, Asian mail-order bride recipients, and transracial-adopting prairie muffins who have coagulated into their new ideological base and the bulk of their mailing lists. It is apparent to all others, left and right of them, that their new brand of Reconstructionism is a poor counterfeit, for it is the diametric inverse of Rushdoonian thought and the common law expression of theonomy throughout time.

A prime example of the subversives outing themselves is seen in two contemporary issues: Cliven Bundy’s resistance of the Feds contrasted against the illegal alien invasion. On both issues, the neo-theonomists chimed in diametrically opposite of what everyone would expect. In regard to Cliven Bundy, both Gary North and Joel McDurmon have argued that the rancher is a statist for citing the county and the state of Nevada as confirming his grazing rights which predate the government. Which is to say that North and McDurmon consider Bundy a statist for crossing over the arbitrary boundary recently imposed by the unconstitutional Bureau of Land Management, contrary to his family’s grazing rights which preexisted the BLM, the county, and the state of Nevada (and citing the county and the state as witnesses to those facts). As inconceivable a position as that is, the Alienist crowd seem to be of one mind on the subject. At least do those in the public eye.

But contrast the North/McDurmon view of the Bundy Ranch episode with Marinov’s position on the illegal alien invasion of the Mexican border: Marinov flatly argues, like all international-socialists, that borders are a nationalist/collectivist idea, and according to the gospel of libertarianism, therefore statist: “Biblically, the government is not allowed to restrict immigration.”⁵ As with North’s and McDurmon’s stance on the Bundy ranch issue, none of his fellow neo-theonomists seem to gainsay him on the matter either.

So let’s try to understand this. Arbitrary government-created borders that hamper White Americans (Cliven Bundy) are legitimate, but our historic and constitutional border with Mexico, which objectively differentiates the territories of one people from another, is not. Boundaries are illegitimate if they hamper the free grazing of foreign Brown folk in our land, but thoroughly legitimate if they hamper White Americans. If you oppose Mexicans invading America, you are a statist, but if you believe Bundy has the right to ignore the BLM’s arbitrary boundaries, you’re also a statist. The Alienist-Reconstructionist community seems now perfectly agreed and committed to these completely irreconcilable positions.

And yet, as if he foresaw their their treachery, their own patriarch witnessed against North, Marinov, and McDurmon long ago:

Because the Bible is a land-based book, and our faith tied to the earth as the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1), the question is not an academic one. For modern man, land has become a commodity and an investment, not essentially a faith inheritance. Our modern outlook thus warps our perspective. For this reason, our federal government thinks nothing of allowing in as immigrants an increasing number of people who are religiously and racially hostile to us. They see no relationship between faith and land. As a result, the United States and the Western world have embarked on a suicidal course. They reject the concept of Christendom and embrace instead the humanistic “family of man,” and thus immigration policies in the U.S. and Europe are based on myths and illusions of a destructive nature. Because neither land nor inheritance is now seen from the perspective of faith, we have problems in these spheres. The modern state sees itself as the primary owner, and hence eminent domain is basic to its life, and it therefore views itself as the primary heir with death taxes. Both a tax on the land and death taxes are anti-Biblical.

A disregard for ties to the land has been one of the most destructive forces of the twentieth century. In Africa, artificial nations were created after World War II without regard for the fact that they encompassed rival warring tribes. Artificial unions such as Yugoslavia were created after World War I, bringing together differing peoples and religious groups. All such efforts have simply created chaos and conflict. The rationalistic planners of our time are Hegelians: for them, the rational is the real, and their rational ideas become a Procrustean bed on which humanity is tortured.⁶

That is Christian Reconstruction – Travail, Famille, Patrie; Land, Leute, und Lord; Gut, Blut, und Gott; Faith, Folk, and Fatherland. How anemic does Alienism appear when compared to that robust faith for all of life. Alongside Rushdoony, these pretenders sound more like South American Revolutionaries, Eastern metaphysicians, or Randian Objectivists than Christian Reconstructionists. But in spite of their Bernaysian ballyhoo, the hypno-gestures of Mesmer, and the ringing of all of Pavlov’s bells, their attempts at forcing a re-imagined Reconstructionism on us is ever frustrated because the genuine article continues to reassert itself from its central sphere of power: the family under God.

Nonetheless, their anti-family think tanks operate much like the cell phone industry: early on everyone found it especially difficult to believe that our cell providers would conduct warrantless tapping of all their customers’ phone lines until it was revealed that the government was paying a higher premium on access to certain users’ lines than the users pay for their plans. This means that even if their users were outraged at the idea of their provider selling their info, the companies would continue the practice, because the government pays more than their subscribers. In a capitalist society, a board of directors’ highest goal is to enrich their shareholders. Entities with deep pockets (such as the government, hedge funds, and sundry international corporations) will always outbid the individual customers. And with the Reconstructionist movement come under Alienism, it is no different: Reconstructionist organizations may sell products and services to those they purport to represent, but the primary source of their income has become the sale of their subscriber and donor lists in the open market of all those deep-pocketed antichrist institutions.

Though Rushdoony orthodoxly affirmed the family under God as the central pillar of society, the foundations which claim the man’s legacy have turned about to deny this central aspect of the Christian social order. As much as they renounce the trustee family in the abstract, so too do they tangibly deny the same by catering to corporations over the family: they are subservient then to the leviathan government and all the NGO buzzards swarming about it to feed on the dead it leaves in its wake. The mantle-bearers have mutated Christian Reconstructionism into little more than an array of intelligence-gathering arms in the paid spy networks. Their stock in trade is no longer the furtherance of God’s law in terms of the family under God, but service to the secular and alien entities which prey upon us. What they sell is us – and they sell us to our enemies. But why shouldn’t they benefit from the Patriot Acts 1 and 2? So far as they see it, they’re just joining the “winning team” against all the old racists. Like Rushdoony.

There is no war so savage as peace with Alienists.

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