Head for the hot tub!: Theocracy looms

When I first started researching the intelligent design controversy, an earnest individual warned me that the ID guys might be fans of a deceased American fundamentalist (?) named Rousas Rushdoony, a guy who really did want to start a theocracy.

As it happens, I knew about Rushdoony vaguely, as a local poli sci prof had written briefly about his "Dominion theology" a decade earlier in a Canadian church press rag. No link panned out, of course, and dying in 2001 probably limited the guy's influence.

Now I see where a Brit anti-ID group is fronting Rushdoony. If they can't raise a better scare than this, ID must be pretty safe.

Debunking the nonsense generally, Rich Lowry writes in Free Republic:

Purveyors of the theo-panic love to exaggerate the influence of the bizarre Christian Reconstructionists who actually want an American theocracy. As New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels notes in a review of the spate of new books, Christian Reconstructionists play "a greater role in the writings of the religious right’s critics than they ever have in the wider evangelical world." He notes that the flagship evangelical journal, Christianity Today, almost never shows up in these books, because, inconveniently, it is "moderate, reflective and self-questioning."

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.