http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/27/virginians-cuccinelli/
Although many pundits think the religious right is waning, Republican Bob McDonnell, whose political views were shaped by radical right-wing beliefs--those of Christian Reconstruction--McDonnell's ties to the Christian Right were not an issue until the late summer when a Washington Post reporter obtained a copy of McDonnell's M.A. thesis in public policy written for the College of Law at Pat Robertson's Regent University. In a series of articles, the Post--reported that McDonnell's thesis attacks working women, birth control, and public school education. Critics pointed out how "conservative" these views are and that McDonnell is associated with Robertson (McDonnell also served as a Regent trustee until recently)--implying that such views and associations should discredit his campaign.
Bob McDonnell responded that he wrote the thesis twenty years ago, that he doesn't really remember much about it, and that he can't really recall the lectures of his thesis supervisor, Regent's Law School dean Herb Titus (whose views were so controversial that he was eventually removed from the faculty). He also claims to have moderated--pointing to his own family as evidence of his broadmindedness (he has several successful grown daughters). Mostly, however, he sidesteps the issue, implying that the press is out to get him, and that he is a genial jobs-and-economy/law-and-order sort of guy--not a Christian Right culture warrior.
There is, however, a problem with these claims. McDonnell's thesis is not a benign Christian intellectual piece or slightly biblically goofy. Rather, it is a detailed argument for the Republican Party to embrace a specific philosophical worldview called Christian Reconstruction, an interpretation of the Bible, politics, society, and the family that has proved so controversial that even some who hold these ideas will not admit to them in public. It is difficult to imagine writing a M.A. thesis based on Reconstructionist thought and not knowing exactly what you are doing.
Christian Reconstruction is, according to Professor Julie Ingersoll, a leading expert on the topic, "a label for a small group of conservative Christians who advocate 'reconstructing' society to conform with biblical law." The founder of this movement is the late R.J. Rushdoony, whose influence on the Christian Right has often been minimized by some of its leaders (because he advocated such things as stoning disobedient children) but whom others claim was the single most important intellectual influence on conservative Christianity in the twentieth century.
Professor Ingersoll argues that "the ideas of Reconstructionists helped to frame the worldview of the Christian Right, and helped weave together the issues that have dominated the Christian Right's political agenda while grounding those issues in a specific understanding of the 'family.'" Indeed, at the center of Rushdoony's thinking--and that of his disciples, such as Herb Titus, Bob McDonnell's thesis advisor--stands the idea of the authoritative, patriarchal family. McDonnell's thesis? "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade."
The Post, the Virginia Democratic Party, and liberal bloggers have looked at the thesis but have failed to really understand it--partly because they don't understand theology. They see Pat Robertson and they see a lot of anti-feminist language; they see some sort of narrow version of Christianity; and they see conservative politics.
What they don't understand is that McDonnell's work closely follows that of Ray Sutton, a Rushdoony disciple and the author of Who Owns the Family? God or the State? Published in 1986 by Dominion Press, Sutton's book is an influential Reconstructionist work--outlining a "statist" attack on the family through humanistic education, oppressive taxes, sexual perversion, women's rights, abortion, welfare, and national healthcare policies--and arguing that the family needs to be reconstructed to the biblical image of the Old Testament patriarchs in order to build a theocratic society. Indeed, McDonnell's analysis of the contemporary family follows Sutton point-by-point (a dependence that is clear in both the body of the thesis and in the footnotes). If the analysis is the same, does McDonnell also want to reconstruct the "biblical" family in order to create a Christian America? He certainly said that he wanted to "restore" a "proper balance of church, family, and state authority" to the nation (McDonnell, p. 61)--and called the separation of church and state "conventional folklore" (McDonnell, p. 62).
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The Family-Theocracy in America Exposed [part I]by illuminatiLiberi9,664 views
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