This may end up in GD, but I’ll place it here because I’m looking for factual answers.
Can someone give me the gist of Christian Reconstructionism? What’s the prevailing philosophy? How popular is it, and is its popularity/practice increasing? I hear there are aspects of it that actually promote, or at least excuse enslavement and murder. Is this true, and to what extent? …or am I completely off the mark?
I know there are related practices that I see as possible subsets (or offshoots) of the movement, but I’m looking for a general consensus on the most widely accepted beliefs, because the more I Google the more unclear I become.
The Pit thread started by Wolf meister also has some highly relevant information. I confess that the whole Christian Reconstructionist movement worries me greatly – and, I think, with good reason.
What I wouldn’t give for the power to gather up these Christian fanatic nutjobs, and their Muslim counterparts (the Wahabbist Sharia-law-imposing Caliphate-restoration Islamofascist fruitcakes), and strand them all on a remote Pacific island with a variety of weaponry and let them go all Battle Royale on each others’ asses.
Christian Reconstructionism is silly wishful thinking and worrying about it is sillier.
The gist is that Biblical principles should govern all of life, public and private, by legislative fiat where necessary.
How popular is it? It is, of course, the dream of every religious devotee that the whole world would come to the same personal conclusion as they did. This makes Christian Reconstructionism automatically popular with huge audiences.
But what exactly are the principles of Christian Reconstructionism? Well, they are the principles which one can derive directly from the Bible–this notion is the core of fundamentalist belief.
Since no two fundamentalist Christians have ever agreed what those principles are, I wouldn’t bother to get too hysterical about it. So far in history every fundamentalist Christian group has self-destructed nicely by arguing over what the Bible says, and eventually split itself up. No need for outsiders to feel like they need to break them up–they’ll do it on their own.
Dig under the covers a bit and you won’t find “a” movement. You’ll find a zillion “leaders” of bands of the Faithful, each guaranteed to splinter into additional bands. There will never be enough cohesiveness to represent any real threat.
In my area, they’re on school boards, town councils, village panels, and other town and county elective offices. And perhaps one representative to the state legislature.
True, they do tend to fall out with one another. But nothing unites them better than a common foe, whether it be humanism, liberal religion, catholocism, islam, or increased access to birth control.
They are all over the place. Commonest place to find the leaders is in churches, large and small. Listen to the messages about how the US is going to hell in a handbasket and how we need to get back to our Christian roots. How we need to halt legislation which is permitting sinful behaviour. How we need to create legislation to govern sex and drugs and personal behaviour, and what our schools teach about God and evolution. And on and on. The core of the Evangelical right are essentially reconstructionists in one form or another. I’d guesstimate something like 20% of the population but I admit it’s a WAG and it’s utterly dependent on how you decide to define a reconstructionist.
I simply don’t get how the fundies can claim to know anything about Christianity and still hold the implicit belief that they seem to: that they can guarantee that their children will all be Christians, because they will “be raised” that way. In fact, their whole social agenda seems to be based on the presumption that everyone could be made Christian if it wasn’t for the evil influences of a non-Christian society. Fundies seem to have as much confidence in the power of indoctrination as Communists do (or used to).
Haven’t they heard of free will? Of original sin? Of Christ’s own warning that the line dividing those who (truly) follow him and those who don’t will cut across every social institution from family on up? Or his warning that simply saying “Lord, Lord” or performing works in Christ’s name doesn’t make you a Christian?