So, You Wanna Go Back to Egypt? . . . Are you sorry you’re in the desert, Instead of your own back yard? – title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circa. 1980
Author’s Note: This series is autobiographical to provide background for the books and articles you will find on this website. When the series is finished, I will provide a summation in a bio-page. Links to previous installments are found at the bottom of the article. –JWS, website creator.
Wyoming was a hard place for me financially. It was still suffering from the “Reagan/Volcker Recession” just before the renewed boom in oil and coal. I had joined a barter club which soon after became ITEX (International Trade Exchange). I used my idle time to earn trade “dollars” that were accepted with participating merchants and corporations. The experience taught me a lot about the alternative economy. It raised my standard of living.
I used the barter dollars to move to Puyallup, Washington where I hoped that the economy was better. It was, but not as robust as I had hoped. The only skill I could market was my experience with house painting. I had completed a six-month training course at Cox Data Systems while yet in Wyoming to learn MS-DOS, word processing and computer accounting. This was a decade before the appearance of Windows.
Marketing my training was a bust, as the Puyallup recruiter said the industry was experiencing a condition of “reverse” discrimination. In other words, he couldn’t find me a job because I wasn’t a cute secretary. So, I returned to the trades.
I discovered that we were just a few miles from the main Boeing manufacturing plant. Everytime Boeing had a lay-off (which seemed to be an annual occurrence), or the union was on strike (which also seemed to be just as frequent), its employees would pick up a hammer or a paint brush and flood the handyman market with a superfluity of labor. I had to compete with that.
Nevertheless, I was able to make a go of it and pay the bills. During my slow time, my wife, Kaylynn, went to work at the local DQ, while I watched our one-year old, Josiah, at home and continued my studies.
Even though we rented, the location was beautiful in the farming area on the edge of town. Outside our backdoor was an 11-acre raspberry field, and in front of us, an unobstructed view of the majestic Mt. Rainier. Today, all of that has been lost to the sprawl of apartment buildings.
We attended a large charismatic church where we could get lost in the crowd and would have no responsibilities. I set up my personal library in our living room to continue with my research and writing. I had considered a stint in Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and even interviewed with the leadership in Tacoma. But I came to realize that organizations like YWAM are not ideological. They do not recruit people with an interest in scholarship. They exist for aid and comfort to “show people the love of Christ.” They never deal with the source of human misery.
Why should there ever be a Red Cross if the world is no longer at war? Ideology concerns itself in dealing with the cause of human misery and stopping it before it can do its evil work.
Only scholarship can address these kinds of questions because scholarship is the opposite of ignorance. Emotional people with poorly equipped minds cannot see the cause and effect of institutionalizing sin. Sin for such people is hidden in the world of motives. They cannot understand how the laws of the Bible are meant to guide us now in this life in all spheres of life. But again, most Evangelicals are premillennialists and do not expect institutional problems to be resolved until “Jesus comes back.”
It was during those years in Puyallup that I plunked away on my Canon word processor to form the first iteration of my new doctrinal distinctives in a newsletter I called “The Family Spokesman.” An archived copy of its inaugural issue can be found here, in which the final pages were a plea to Wyoming Evangelicals to support Russ Donley’s candidacy for Governor:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/fs1.pdf
And for those who might think that my association with Russ Donley is made up, I have included a personal letter from him on his assessment of the political situation in Wyoming at the time:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/donley87.pdf
I used my newsletters to stay in touch with my friends and colleagues in Wyoming. “Wyoming as a Christian Republic” was expanded into a worker’s manual. New issues of The Separatist Papers were published to fully state what I had learned about America’s heritage in the Pilgrims, Puritans, and the Lollard followers of John Wycliffe.
You can find the remaining ones archived here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Separatist-Papers-8-11.pdf
Essay #10 was the penultimate issue with a review of Thomas Cumming Hall’s book on the Religious Background of American Culture.
It had so impressed Harry Conn, that he ordered extra copies and sent me this kind letter:
It is good to get your recent literary and theological effort on Wycliffe. I have read it very carefully and much of it twice. I have found it to be very enlightening and helpful. I hope it gets a very wide circulation. (excerpt)
The full letter can be found here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/conn87.pdf
Not having any institutional connections or personal resources to publish a book, it was left to Ben Hart’s Faith & Freedom to advance the thesis, which can be found here:
https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Freedom-Christian-American-Liberty/dp/0929510046
Notice that his book was published in 1990. It is good as far as it goes, but it didn’t go far enough, as you might discover when reading my remaining essays.
Conn had suggested that I contact Gary Kenner and try to publish it through his organization. But I already knew that Kenner was distrustful of my postmillennialism and would never do it.
As I continued with my research, I discovered that “America” was inherently a separatist phenomenon of people voting with their feet. America represented an ideological and not just a geographical separation from Old Europe. Europe had been corrupted by Roman Civil Law. For that reason, I began to study the history of law to understand its impact of what was once called “the American system.” American Separatism was an ideology which replaced colonialism with nationalism. It replaced “Ruler’s Law” (as Cleon Skousen would call it) in favor of “People’s Law.”
Today, such discoveries may seem quaint and sentimental. But this era represented bicentennial commemorations of America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787). The entire two-decade period of the 1970s and 80s represented renewed devoutness among American Patriots to a rediscovery and recovery of America’s heritage. I was among them. The controversies and challenges are still with us today.
I mentioned that the Christian father is the agent of Christian reconstruction. I was first inspired of the proposition by the massive collections of Verna Hall and Rosalie Slater: The Christian History of the Constitution, et al. They argued that Protestant social theory begins with the “Self-Governing Christian Man.” But they still had an “institutional” perspective, rather than a familial one. A true “family-based” society requires that such self-governing Christian men have a sphere of control for righteous dominion. That sphere I would discover would require that they be willing to administer the sacraments to their respective families and that they have independent estates. They need land and children. I learned this from the Southern Agrarians and the actual writings of the Founding Fathers.
With this discovery in mind, I conceived of a new publication to replace The Separatist Papers as the literary organ of my ongoing research. One day, I happened to see a work van for a landscaping service called “terranomics.” And there was my moment of epiphany: I would call it Biblical Terranomics. Essays on Biblical Land Law would be my new field of research. My hope was to someday write it as a textbook, much like Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law. My research would now be directed, not just toward theology, but also America’s roots in the common law, which required a study of a thousand years of Anglo-American history. . .
(to be continued)
James Wesley Stivers, 7/9/23
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