Christian Reconstruction

Christian Reconstruction PDF Author: Michael J. McVicar
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469622750
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This is the first critical history of Christian Reconstruction and its founder and champion, theologian and activist Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001). Drawing on exclusive access to Rushdoony's personal papers and extensive correspondence, Michael J. McVicar demonstrates the considerable role Reconstructionism played in the development of the radical Christian Right and an American theocratic agenda. As a religious movement, Reconstructionism aims at nothing less than "reconstructing" individuals through a form of Christian governance that, if implemented in the lives of U.S. citizens, would fundamentally alter the shape of American society. McVicar examines Rushdoony's career and traces Reconstructionism as it grew from a grassroots, populist movement in the 1960s to its height of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. He reveals the movement's galvanizing role in the development of political conspiracy theories and survivalism, libertarianism and antistatism, and educational reform and homeschooling. The book demonstrates how these issues have retained and in many cases gained potency for conservative Christians to the present day, despite the decline of the movement itself beginning in the 1990s. McVicar contends that Christian Reconstruction has contributed significantly to how certain forms of religiosity have become central, and now familiar, aspects of an often controversial conservative revolution in America.

Christian Reconstruction

Christian Reconstruction PDF Author: Michael J. McVicar
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469622750
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first critical history of Christian Reconstruction and its founder and champion, theologian and activist Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001). Drawing on exclusive access to Rushdoony's personal papers and extensive correspondence, Michael J. McVicar demonstrates the considerable role Reconstructionism played in the development of the radical Christian Right and an American theocratic agenda. As a religious movement, Reconstructionism aims at nothing less than "reconstructing" individuals through a form of Christian governance that, if implemented in the lives of U.S. citizens, would fundamentally alter the shape of American society. McVicar examines Rushdoony's career and traces Reconstructionism as it grew from a grassroots, populist movement in the 1960s to its height of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. He reveals the movement's galvanizing role in the development of political conspiracy theories and survivalism, libertarianism and antistatism, and educational reform and homeschooling. The book demonstrates how these issues have retained and in many cases gained potency for conservative Christians to the present day, despite the decline of the movement itself beginning in the 1990s. McVicar contends that Christian Reconstruction has contributed significantly to how certain forms of religiosity have become central, and now familiar, aspects of an often controversial conservative revolution in America.

Rebuilding Zion

Rebuilding Zion PDF Author: Daniel W. Stowell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199923876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity. Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters. Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America PDF Author: Crawford Gribben
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199370249
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the Northwest of the United States, where they hope to resist the impact of secular modernity and to survive the breakdown of society that they anticipate. These believers have often given up on the politics of the Christian Right, adopting strategies of hibernation while developing the communities and institutions from which a new America might one day emerge. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a program of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, parts of eastern Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a haven in which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster and in which to build a new social order. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended as American society is rebuilt according to biblical law. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of this little-noted migration and considers what it might tell us about the future of American evangelicalism. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power. Their books are promoted by leading mainstream publishers and listed as New York Times bestsellers. Their strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. This survivalist evangelical subculture recognizes that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning.

Building God's Kingdom

Building God's Kingdom PDF Author: Julie Ingersoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199913781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In this fascinating book, Julie Ingersoll draws on years of research, Reconstructionist publications, and interviews with believers to paint the most complete portrait of the Christian Reconstructionist movement yet published.

The Black Church

The Black Church PDF Author: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984880330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity

Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity PDF Author: Josie McSkimming
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317106563
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
There is an increasing interest in the influence of religious fundamentalism upon people’s motivation, identity and decision-making. Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Re-construction of Identity details the stories of those who have left Christian fundamentalist churches and how they change after they have left. It considers how the previous fundamentalist identity is shaped by aspects of church teaching and discipline that are less authoritarian and coercive, and more subtle and widely spread throughout the church body. That is, individuals are understood as not only subject to a form of judgment, but also exercise it, with everyone seemingly complicit in maintaining the stability of the church organisation. This book provocatively illustrates that the reasons for leaving an evangelical Christian church may be less about what happens outside the church in terms of the lures and attractions of the secular world, and more about the experience within the community itself.

A Theology of Reconstruction

A Theology of Reconstruction PDF Author: Charles Villa-Vicencio
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521426282
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Behold, a new thing

Christian Reconstruction

Christian Reconstruction PDF Author: Gary North
Publisher: Inst for Christian Economics
ISBN: 9780930464523
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Offers information on the book "Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn't" (ISBN 0930464532), written by Gary North and Gary DeMar. Includes a book summary, bibliographic details, and downloadable versions in HTML and PDF formats, provided by the Institute for Christian Economics (ICE) in Tyler, Texas.

The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim

The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim PDF Author: Stuart C. Hackett
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606083678
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Dr. Hackett provides, in digestible form, a comprehensive, systematic, and pervasively philosophical apologetic for the Christian revelation claim. Although the approach is seriously philosophical, the text is free as possible of the earmarks of technical scholarship--reflecting the author's aspiration to reach the common person who has a deep interest in such questions. Thus, although positions, arguments, and counter-arguments are discussed (of necessity), these are set forth without distracting encumbrances. Specifically, this book is designed as a substantial textbook for college and seminary courses in apologetics. In his thorough introduction, Philosophical Prolegomena, a firm base for the whole study is established by initiating the reader firmly in epistemology and the concept of revelation. The main divisions are: -- Christiainity and the Revelation Cosmos: A Philosophical Case for a Theistic Metaphysic. -- Christianity and the Revelational Person: An Historical / Critical Case for the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. -- Christianity and the Revelational Word: The Propositional Expression of Revelation in Scripture. Dr. Hackett includes on every page parallel marginal summaries and outlines to guide the reader and to facilitate ready reference.

Reconstruction and Mormon America

Reconstruction and Mormon America PDF Author: Clyde A. Milner
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806165863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The South has been the standard focus of Reconstruction, but reconstruction following the Civil War was not a distinctly Southern experience. In the post–Civil War West, American Indians also experienced reconstruction through removal to reservations and assimilation to Christianity, and Latter-day Saints—Mormons—saw government actions to force the end of polygamy under threat of disestablishing the church. These efforts to bring nonconformist Mormons into the American mainstream figure in the more familiar scheme of the federal government’s reconstruction—aimed at rebellious white Southerners and uncontrolled American Indians. In this volume, more than a dozen contributors look anew at the scope of the reconstruction narrative and offer a unique perspective on the history of the Latter-day Saints. Marshaled by editors Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, these writers explore why the federal government wanted to reconstruct Latter-day Saints, when such efforts began, and how the initiatives compare with what happened with white Southerners and American Indians. Other contributions examine the effect of the government’s policies on Mormon identity and sense of history. Why, for example, do Latter-day Saints not have a Lost Cause? Do they share a resentment with American Indians over the loss of sovereignty? And were nineteenth-century Mormons considered to be on the “wrong” side of a religious line, but not a “race line”? The authors consider these and other vital questions and topics here. Together, and in dialogue with one another, their work suggests a new way of understanding the regional, racial, and religious dynamics of reconstruction—and, within this framework, a new way of thinking about the creation of a Mormon historical identity.