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This chapter documents the growth of the Christian Reconstruction into an intellectual and political force during the 1970s and 1980s. It details the relationship between Rushdoony’s work as an education and legal reformer and a wider trend on the part of evangelical Protestants to engage in direct political activism. The narrative expands far beyond the legacy of Rushdoonian Christian Reconstruction to explore diverse expressions of the movement cultivated by his son-in-law Gary North, theologian Greg L. Bahnsen, and lawyer-activist John W. Whitehead. By tracing the interconnected work of these activists and many others, the chapter highlights the practical aspects of Reconstructionism by following its influence in politics, seminaries, and court cases across the United States. These Reconstructionist-inspired activists marshaled grassroots Christian revolts in local politics, in Christian higher education, and against America’s system of compulsory state education.

This chapter closes this narrative of the Christian Reconstruction with an assessment of the fracturing of Reconstructionism into a decentralized movement without a central organizational or intellectual leader during the 1980s and 1990s. As the movement grew, a greater number of theologically and socially conservative Christians became aware of its agenda, inspiring both emulation and contempt. Meanwhile, a second generation of Reconstructionists heavily influenced by the antistatist sentiments of Rushdoony’s system developed separatist communities in Texas and elsewhere. These church-centered groups created their own closed economies built around guns, gold, and bomb shelters designed to protect Reconstructionists from the imminent collapse of the federal government. In the midst of it all, Rushdoony continued his efforts to make homeschooling legal, even as the movement he founded fractured and became the topic of intense debates in both evangelical and secular media outlets.

This concluding chapter charts the aftermath of Rushdoony’s theological legacy. As a result of Rushdoony’s ill health, financial setbacks, and the premature deaths of theologians such as Bahnsen and Chilton, the 1990s and early 2000s marked an era of change for Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation and North’s ICE. Worse, the theology of R.J. Rushdoony has since become a screen upon which critics project competing interpretations of the proper place of religion in American society. By using Reconstructionism to embody “bad” religion, such narratives reify the normative and naïve assumption that “good” American evangelicalism simply seeks to bring the light of Christ’s Gospel to a fallen world. Such saccharine discourses, however, conveniently ignore that both evangelicalism and secularism are culturally constituted systems of exclusion facilitated by powerful institutional, legal, and governmental mechanisms.

This introductory chapter discusses the narrative surrounding the rise and fall of Christian Reconstructionism—a narrative all too often dismissed by historians as niche and extremist. How this movement—which had gained widespread acceptance and popularity in its time—had amassed such a great amount of influence only to decline later on is explored in greater detail in the succeeding chapters. Suffice it to say that this narrative began when R. J. Rushdoony, the central figure in this story, had come to consider state education to be the source of the youth’s troubles. His efforts would later snowball into a nationwide homeschooling movement after the watershed Leeper et al. v. Arlington ISD et al. case. From its roots in educational reform Christian Reconstruction would emerge, fusing its educational, religious, and political spheres into a radical reconstruction of the humanity’s relationship between themselves and the Christian God.