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. –JWS, website creator.
My only friend who supported the Wyoming mission was my long-time colleague from MST: Randy J. Thiry. I had laid out my vision in a white paper called, “The Wyoming Project: A Quest for Christian Reconstruction” and then began publishing theological essays on Christian Separatism. You can find the early ones archived here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/sp1.pdf
He wrote a couple of articles in the early issues of “The Separatist Review” which can be found here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/sr1.pdf
While Randy eventually settled next door in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his brother and family, he would visit me frequently and offer counsel and encouragement.
The rest of my acquaintances thought I was just going through a phase and that I would eventually see the error of my ways and make my way back to the Midwest. One former acquaintance, Randall Davis, snickered and offered this assessment:
I have to confess that I am greatly disappointed in your endeavors. I would think that those who have a good understanding of God’s moral government would not be tempted to jump on the bandwagon of civil religion.
To this day, he is a pastor near Boise, Idaho. I don’t know if he still feels this way. But it is worthwhile to analyze the full text of his letter because it contains the same temperament and rationale of today’s Evangelical pietists. You can find it here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/magicvalley.pdf
While some Moral Government advocates were social and political activists – following Harry Conn’s example – and early-on made significant contributions to the “Christian New Right,” some were not interested. They usually gravitated towards Gordon C. Olson who focused on revivals rather than political controversies over the influence of secular humanism.
You must remember that in those days, it was still illegal to home educate your children, and in most states, it was difficult if not impossible to start a Christian school. Most people today take these freedoms for granted, but I remember the day when pastors and parents were jailed for violating the truancy laws. These were eventually overturned either in the courts or by legislation, but in the beginning, it was a genuine battle against the secularists.
As for me, my mark was made in the advocacy for student-run Bible Clubs on high school campuses. While in Rockford, I suffered harassment from the municipal bureaucracies and the denunciations from ministers and the leaders of youth organizations who liked the status quo. I chronicled this in my various newsletters at the time. My experiences eventually made the pages of the quarterly journal for the “Christian Legal Society” (Winter, 1980) at about the time that I made acquaintance with the much younger version of Christian attorney, John Whitehead. He later founded the Rutherford Institute and subsequently became a prolific writer. But his early books were the best, especially The Separation Illusion, which argues the legal case that the separation of church and state does not exist in the 1st Amendment. More another time.
The notion of “Christian Reconstruction” (CR), however, was a term openly touted by Rousas J. Rushdoony, an avowed Calvinist. Even though it was a much needed ideological wedge to challenge the institutional juggernaut which the humanists had in public education, it was still too much for these Evangelical pietists. In the Moral Government movement, Olson’s advocacy of the moral transformation of society from spiritual revivals was held by some to be all that was needed. They did not want to institutionally challenge the humanists; they wanted to convert them to Christianity. I said, “Good luck with that! Defeat them first; then convert them.”
I didn’t fail in my Wyoming endeavor. In my short tenure there, I successfully recruited and elected Frank Dusl, a Catholic, to the State Senate and Dan Tippits, a Mormon, to the Wyoming House. I was sought out by Russ Donley, the long-time Speaker of the House, in his quest to become the first Mormon Governor of Wyoming, but by then, I was done with the project and wanted to move on. The Mormons have a strong presence in the western states, and to this day, notwithstanding their espousal of patriotic causes, are still an institutional barrier to the notion of Christian Reconstruction. It took me many years to sort out the Mormon question which will be addressed in a future installment.
I discovered that the notion of CR is a quest of puritanism, rather than separatism. It requires numerous and tenuous alliances with institutional rivals, such as was in my case with Mormonism and Catholicism. It ran contrary to my separatist ideal and I began to realize that the institutional source of CR could not be the church.
After reading Thomas Cumming Hall’s book on The Religious Background of American Culture (1930), I began to realize that a different agent was necessary: the Christian father.
I became a patriarchalist and realized that a new, vast field of research and theological development would be necessary. If the Christian father is the true biblically-ordained agent in Christian Reconstruction, then a way must be found to elevate the family to an institutional status equal to or greater than church and state. So I hung up my activism for more research.
In the meantime, I married, had a son, and befriended someone who would later become a lifelong colleague: Dennis Lyle Zwonitzer. He had traversed the State as the state coordinator for Pat Robertson’s (“I will never run for President”) Freedom Council and doing numerous seminars on America’s Christian Heritage. He successfully mobilized conservative Christians for political action in the state capital, especially on the matter of freedom of choice in education. He would become a lifetime source of information, encouragement, and a fellow-traveler in life’s journey. You will meet him again in future installments of this series.
But for the time-being, he took the torch for CR as I withdrew into starting a family, a family business, and continuing with my research and writing.
(to be continued)
https://2046ad.org/so-you-wanna-go-back-to-egypt-pt-2/
JWS, June 11th, 2023
