Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest by Crawford Gribben

Abstract

Reviewed by: Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest by Crawford Gribben Eileen Luhr SURVIVAL AND RESISTANCE IN EVANGELICAL AMERICA: CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Crawford Gribben Oxford University Press, New York, 2021. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. 210 pages. $32.95 cloth. In 1961, R.J. Rushdoony observed the onset of American modernity and determined that the conditions suggested imminent decline. Echoing earlier traditions of American jeremiads, Rushdoony — a dominant figure in Calvinist-influenced efforts to order American society along biblical lines — lamented, “there is . . . in each degenerating culture, and in the totality of history as it matures, a progressive degeneration of the natural man” (p. 138). Rushdoony concluded that, as state power expanded, American culture would experience turmoil, catastrophe, and — ultimately — collapse. While interventionist-minded evangelicals sought to reform American culture during the late twentieth century, Rush-doony, a postmillennialist, urged followers to survive, resist, and reconstruct American culture according to Old Testament law. By the late 1980s, Rushdoony’s repeated calls to reconstruct American culture fell to the wayside as evangelicals immersed themselves in politics. Perhaps as a result, scholars writing the history of evangelical activism have often minimized Rushdoony’s influence, choosing to focus on top-down political engagement. In Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America, Crawford Gribben, a historian at Queen’s University in Belfast, disputes these claims by tracing the “origins, evolution, and cultural reach” of Rushdoony and other Christian Reconstruction-ists (p. 13). Gribben characterizes his work as a “social history of theological ideas” that contextualizes an understudied tradition of modern conservatism within American religious, political, and cultural history (p. ix). He argues that as evangelical political efforts fragmented in the 1990s, “a much more vigorous, variegated, and entrepreneurial evangelical landscape” took its place (p. 63). Reconstructionists, also known [End Page 102] as theonomists, claimed a new relevance in this moment. Gribben counters reports of theonomy’s decline by tracing the alterations in cultural strategies and lived practices of Christian Reconstruction, which “has been revived, modified, and tempered, and, as its advocates develop savvy and strategic use of American mass culture, its ideas have a greater cultural purchase than ever before” (p. x). Second-generation Reconstruction activists sought to create “intentional communities” that lived by the demands of the Old Testament, in what one movement novelist characterized as the American Redoubt, an area including Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington (p. 5). By retreating into these White-dominated areas of the Pacific Northwest, cultural separatists could better survive and resist the doomed systems of liberal democracy at the “end of white Christian America” and prepare to reconstruct a biblically aligned society on its ashes (p. ix). Using a mix of ethnographic and literary critical approaches, Gribben follows the trajectory of Christian Reconstructionism from its roots in modern libertarianism and the “third disestablishment” to its newer incarnation among cultural separatists such as Douglas Wilson, an influential pastor in the movement, who have built an array of educational, institutional, and media forms in towns including Moscow, Idaho, now considered “America’s most post-millennial town” (p. 53). Gribben describes the recalibration of theonomist ideals through chapters that describe the movement’s altered understandings of migration, eschatology, government, education, and media. The most powerful sections of each chapter come when, having explained the intellectual origins of a particular topic, Gribben draws on his fieldwork, conducted in 2015 and 2016, to describe the lived practices of migrants to Moscow. Noting that Reconstructionist strategies rely on individual regeneration rather than force, Gribben critiques political pundits who paint Reconstructionism with too broad a brush. In his pursuit to be as “objective as possible” and to allow “participants to speak in their own words,” Gribben maintains that leaders deny that their views are racist but leaves readers to draw their own conclusions regarding the racial overtones of their fascination with, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis or Confederate-friendly accounts of slavery and the Civil War (p. 146). Nevertheless, at a moment when the United States Supreme Court has handed conservatives victories on issues including school prayer, abortion, and government support for religious schools, it is useful to remember that...