Appendix H RUSHDOONY ON "HYBRIDIZATION":
FROM GENETIC SEPARATION TO RACIAL SEPARATION For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved (Rom. 10:11-13).
The New Covenant announces the restoration of the original judicial unity of covenant-keeping mankind. Under the New Covenant, the Mosaic barriers between Jew and Greek are erased forever (Acts 10). The unity of Trinitarian confession erases the judicial relevance of all other cultural and racial diversities among covenant-keepers. The unity of Trinitarian confession is the fundamental unity of the redeemed in history, for it will be their fundamental unity in eternity.
There is a great divide separating men: conflicting confessions. Men are either covenant-keepers or covenant-breakers. This division extends into eternity. All other disunities are secondary to this one: rival confessions regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Men seek other forms of unity besides Trinitarian confession. There are rival confessions regarding religion, politics, language, and culture. But the most powerful of all rival unities through the ages is racial unity. This unity is declared as primary again and again in history. Skin of different colors, hair of different types, eyes differently shaped: here are the building blocks of racialist social theories. Even the attraction between the sexes -- a powerful biological drive -- is said to be secondary to the importance of race. Interracial marriages are called "mongrelization," as if men were animals.(1)
Christianity subordinates sexual bonding to confession. Racism subordinates sexual bonding to race. The Christian insists that a confusion of parental confessions places the children in eternal jeopardy. The racialist insists that a confusion of parental races places the children outside the bounds of acceptable society: the half-breed as cultural nomad. The Christian announces a confessional covenant. The racialist announces a blood covenant. The Christian denies the legitimacy of a blood covenant, save one: the judicial covenant based on Christ's shed blood. The racialist may hedge his language in an attempt to make his blood covenant sound acceptable in a world of confessional covenants, or more important in modern times, political covenants. But the appeal of the racialist's blood covenant continues through the ages, while other covenants rise and fall, save one variety: confessional covenants.
It is strategically crucial today for Reconstructionists to affirm this principle of confessional covenantalism because of Reconstructionism's commitment to biblical law. The other movement similarly committed to biblical law is the Identity-Destiny-British Israel movement. These groups believe that white Anglo-Americans are the biological heirs of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and this supposedly genetic covenant is still binding: the judicial basis for honoring biblical law today. Thus, these groups are tied to the idea of a blood covenant. In the more radical Identity groups, such as the white supremacist Aryans, this blood covenantalism can turn violent against members of other races, especially Jews and blacks. In the first major academic study of the Identity movement, Michael Barkun correctly separates Reconstruction from Identity, but then offers a warning:
The theme of Bible-centered law cannot be left before examining one final element: the striking resemblance between the concept of Bible-centered law in British-Israelism and Christian Identity, on the one hand, and its counterpart among some contemporary evangelicals, on the other. These so-called "Reconstructionists" are part of the dominion theology movement that urges the reconstruction of society on Christian lines prior to the Second Coming. The Reconstructionists, including such figures as Rousas John Rushdoony, David Chilton, and Gary DeMar, consider biblical law binding and wish to see American law recast in biblical terms. There is, however, no evidence of any connection between the small but influential Reconstructionist movement and the British-Israel or Identity groups considered here. Indeed, there is no evidence that either is even aware of the other.(2) Where British-Israelism drew legal inferences from its claim of Israelite ancestry, Reconstructionism reflects a quite different Calvinist tradition transmitted through Dutch Reformed scholars and institutions. Nonetheless, should Reconstructionism expand beyond its currently small coterie, it may create a climate of opinion from which similar Christian Identity doctrines will inadvertently benefit. Since Reconstructionist leaders are trained intellectuals (something Identity figures are certainly not), the rigor of their approach may confer a halo of respectability on all ideas of Bible-centered law, including Identity's, despite the latter's completely separate origins.(3)
I take this warning very seriously. All traces of racist blood covenantalism in Christian Reconstruction must be forthrightly rejected on the basis of confessional covenantalism. This is my goal in this essay.
What Is a Hybrid? In 1967, Rushdoony wrote: "In view of the complexity of the problem of defining species, the problem of hybrids is correspondingly difficult. The phenomenon is real, but what is it? . . . Does the present state of knowledge permit the extensive theorizing so prevalent on every side of the issue?"(4) He made a good point. The whole question of hybrids and species was scientifically unresolved. He quoted an evolutionist, Irving W. Kornbloch, in what Rushdoony described as "a very careful and conscientious survey of what is called `The Role of Hybridization in Evolution' but is actually a survey of hybridization as such. . . ." Kornbloch had written: "If hybridization plays only a minor role in evolution, as some maintain, it is very strange indeed that there are so many vigorous, fertile hybrids in existence today, and more being found each year by those who earnestly search for them." Rushdoony's reply was narrowly focused: "To `prove' hybrids is one thing, to `prove' evolution is another." His point was well-taken: the two are not obviously the same.
Then Rushdoony went on to say something that he did not attempt to prove: an attempted neutralization of Kornbloch's assertion of beneficial hybrids. "Kornbloch has only demonstrated, in terms of a particular approach, that hybrids exist. More than that, he has not shown."(5) Perhaps; I have not read Kornbloch's book. But Rushdoony's final retort was simply rhetorical agnosticism: "Does the present state of knowledge permit the extensive theorizing so prevalent on every side of the issue?"
Six years later, all of his previous agnosticism regarding hybrids had departed, although there had been no significant breakthrough in scientific evidence regarding the evils of most hybrids, as far as Rushdoony ever suggested in print. He elevated hybridization in society to the status of covenantal evil, making its eradication a foundational principle in his social theory. In doing so, he moved from covenantalism to racism, as we shall see.
Leviticus 19:19: Case Law of Separation In Chapter 17, I provided an explanation of the case law against the interbreeding of cattle, mixing seeds in the same field, and not wearing clothing made of a linen-wool mixture (Lev. 19:19). I identified the underlying principle: temporary separation. I explained the first two prohibitions in terms of the mandatory separation of the tribes in Israel, and the third prohibition in terms of separating priestly status from non-priestly status. There had to be a policy of active separation of cattle breeds because of the normal tendency for cattle to interbreed. This means that the law had nothing to do with eliminating hybrids. The offspring of two breeds of cattle are not sterile. This was the reason why they had to be separated.
Rushdoony explains Leviticus 19:19 in terms of a biblical principle that there must be no hybrids in society. He discusses this verse in a section he titles "Hybridization and Law."(6) He concludes the section with this assertion: "Third, hybridization and unequal yoking involve a fundamental disrespect for God's handiwork which leads to futile experimentation, such as organ transplants, which represent sterile and limited gains in some areas, and a basic loss of moral perspective in every area."(7) Given the fact that Greg Bahnsen so far has been given at least an extra decade and a half of life and productivity because of a pig's valve that was sown into his heart, this conclusion by Rushdoony certainly needs exegetical evidence.(8) In this section, we shall examine the quality of his suggested evidence.
Unnatural Union
With respect to mixed fabrics, Rushdoony says, "To bring diverse things together in an unnatural union is to despise the order of God's creation."(9) This principle of interpretation -- unnatural union -- does not stem from Leviticus 19:19, nor is applicable to the passage. Such an interpretation reverses the meaning of the prohibition against the mixing of the seeds. What is normal within a local species is genetic mixing. Genetic separation within a species is abnormal: the result of environmental separation. In the case of the prohibition against mixing breeds of cattle or mixing crops in a field, the primary issue in Leviticus 19:19 was symbolic of the mandatory but unnatural preservation of the separate tribes of Israel until Shiloh came, the promised Seed. This is why this temporary prohibition ended when the promised Seed came, overcoming the judicial separation among Israel's tribes, and also between Jew and Greek, bond and free, male and female (Gal. 3:28). Within the confessional covenant of Trinitarianism, such separation is no longer mandated by God.
To the extent that Rushdoony's comment applies only to the prohibition regarding mixed fibers, we need to remember that clothing itself is unnatural. Clothing does not grow on trees or sheep. It is manufactured. The judicial issue of the third prohibition of Leviticus 19:19 was never the "unnatural" mixing of fabrics; all fabrics are unnatural. The issue was exclusively symbolic and ritualistic. The prohibition against wearing mixed wool-linen clothing had to do with priestly sacrifices and priestly clothing in a nation of priests. Wool makes people retain sweat on their bodies; linen does not. Thus, ritually speaking, the two fibers were at cross purposes. They are no longer at cross purposes because the New Covenant has abolished animal sacrifices. Priests today are not told by God what kind of fabric to wear. Sweat is no longer a matter of ritual importance. The new priesthood is clothed in Christ as a result of baptism (Gal. 3:27).
The Question of Sterility Rushdoony's entire subsection is titled, "Hybridization and Law."(10) In commenting on Leviticus 19:19, he reproduces a lengthy extract from Ellicott's commentary, most of which is devoted to a consideration of genetic mixing. Only one sentence refers to mixing wool and linen. Rushdoony says that the hybrid comes at great costs -- sterility -- "and thereby violates God's creation ordinance."(11) He identifies the prohibition against genetic mixing within a species as a creation ordinance rather than a temporary ordinance governing national Israel. Then he adds that "the commandments clearly require a respect for God's creation."(12)
There never was any such creation ordinance, as Jacob's experiment in miraculous breeding indicates. Jacob's agreement with Laban allowed Jacob to obtain ownership of those sheep and goats that were born in his herds (Gen. 30:33). He used rods to separate his animals from Laban's, and those conceived before the rods were stronger animals, although they were multi-colored and visibly less desirable. Laban wound up with feeble animals; Jacob with stronger (Gen. 30:42). There is no question that Jacob established a system of genetic manipulation. He allowed God to do the work, but he actively intervened in order to let God do the work: "And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban's cattle" (Gen. 30:40). The Hebrew word translated cattle here can be translated as flock, herd, stock, or possession. It was not limited to bovines.
Rushdoony is arguing that within a species, sexual mixing is unnatural and is therefore prohibited by biblical law. His argument makes no sense. First, what does he mean, "unnatural"? What is natural is interbreeding within a species. What is unnatural is separation. Second, if "hybridization" normally produces sterility, then it surely is a case of theological overkill to present the prohibition of hybridization as a fundamental principle of biblical law. Why would biblical law place the supposed principle of anti-hybridization into a position of importance if most hybrids are impotent? Hybrids are hardly a threat to social order. They cannot maintain their own uniqueness down through the generations. Their heirs lose any original unique characteristics as they interbreed. If anything, most hybrids become weaker over time: less able to compete in a natural environment. Their fruits are usually consumer goods, not long-term capital goods. Third, the scientific definition of a species is that cross-breeding is possible and normal among its members if they reside in the same environment. Rushdoony's assumption of the normality of genetic separation in nature is incorrect. The opposite is true. Genetic separation in nature, meaning the development of new breeds within a species, is produced by the interplay of reproduction and local environmental changes.(13) Species do not evolve, but local variants of a species can change in response to environmental changes. One such environmental change is technology: men's development of specialized breeding techniques.(14)
Hybrids themselves were of no concern to the Mosaic law. What was of concern was the active scientific process of interbreeding inside the boundaries of Israel. The prohibition against interbreeding was a prohibition against the production of newer, more productive breeds within the boundaries of Israel. The Israelites could lawfully import new breeds, but then they had to keep them separate from the existing ones in the land. Interbreeding was lawful outside of Israel's boundaries. There was never any creation ordinance against interbreeding.
Here is one additional piece of evidence that is worth noting: the mule. This is the classic animal hybrid: the normally sterile product of horse and donkey. It is a very strong work animal. It was used as a military animal in ancient Israel (I Chron. 12:40).(15) Its presence in the household of the kings (II Sam. 13:29; I Kings 10:25) and the presence of 240 mules among those who returned to Jerusalem from Medo-Persia (Ezr. 2:66) indicate that there was never any creation ordinance against hybrids. If there had been, Ezra and Nehemiah would have kept such beasts out of the land when they returned to rebuild. Mules could be imported, even though it was not legal to breed horses and donkeys to produce them. The deliberate mixing of seeds was illegal, not the offspring as such. The judicial issue was representational, not biological: tribal separation in Mosaic Israel until the promised Seed came. Confessional unity in Mosaic Israel was subordinated to tribal unity only until this messianic prophecy was fulfilled. Considered from the point of the confessionalism of pre-Mosaic and post-Mosaic law, the law against the mixing of seeds was abnormal, i.e., not representative.
The Lure of Racism Rushdoony's mistake regarding the importance of a law against "hybridization" is not some minor exegetical slip, nor is the application he makes with it. His identification of Leviticus 19:19 as a law prohibiting genetic intermixtures can produce serious theological and judicial consequences. It can lead directly to racism. Rushdoony's analysis and subsequent applications of Leviticus 19:19 are sufficient proof.
When applied to humanity, Rushdoony's argument is the once-familiar segregationist argument against racial mixing -- "the mongrelization of the white race," as it is sometimes described.(16) Rushdoony does not resort to such crass language, but his interpretation of Leviticus 19:19 insists that genetic separateness within a species is both normal in nature and universally required by biblical law. The man-imposed exceptions to this supposedly normal and normative process of sexual separation have been outlawed by God, he insists. Man supposedly must not attempt to produce hybrids -- a creation ordinance that is permanent in history.
Rushdoony does not hesitate to apply this exclusionary principle to inter-racial marriages. First, he writes that "St. Paul referred to the broader meaning of these laws against hybridization, and against yoking an ox and an ass to a plow (Deut. 22:10), in II Corinthians 6:14."(17) Broader meaning of the seed laws, yes; judicial specifics, no. Paul wrote: "Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" The issue here is faith. Christian faith overcomes all other divisions, including the Mosaic seed laws. (Note: Deuteronomy 22:10 immediately precedes a parallel verse to Leviticus 19:19c -- no mixing of wool and linen -- indicating that Leviticus 19:19c refers to covenantal-confessional separation, not tribal separation.) Second, Rushdoony writes: "But Deuteronomy 22:10 not only forbids unequal religious yoking by inference, and as a case law, but also unequal yoking generally. . . . The burden of the law is thus against inter-religious, inter-racial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish."(18) Note his asserted equivalents: inter-religious marriages and inter-racial or inter-cultural marriages. He is not speaking here merely of civil law; he is speaking of biblical law in general.
The shift in his argument is both subtle and significant. He is not arguing that inter-racial marriages do not produce children. Such unions are not biologically sterile. Then are inter-cultural marriages genetically sterile? He does not argue that they are. So what has "hybridization" got to do with either type of marriage? Genetically speaking, not a thing. Rushdoony has shifted his argument from genetics to race and culture. He has moved from a case law of the Bible regarding cattle, planting, and clothing to a racial-cultural application. He has invented a legal category of "hybridization" in order to apply it to inter-racial and inter-cultural marriages. What he is saying is that such marriages are covenantally sterile. The problem is, this is a denial of the New Testament doctrine of the gospel's power to break down the wall separating Jew from Greek, bond from free. His theology of sterility has mixed a false interpretation of a case law with traditional hostility to "inferior races."
The standard of unequal covenantal yoking unquestionably applies to marriage. Rushdoony is correct on this point: Paul makes this clear in II Corinthians 6:14. This Pauline prohibition is universally believed by orthodox Bible commentators to apply to marriage covenant. Almost all commentators believe that it also applies to the church government, although expositors in the Erastian, State church tradition may choose to downplay this. Christian Reconstruction teaches that this biblical principle of covenantal separation must also apply to civil government: not in Christians' dropping out of political life (pietism's recommended solution to the "unequally yoked" dilemma in civil government), but in the eventual exclusion of non-Christians from the franchise and from all public offices, after a nation is overwhelmingly Christian in its public confession. (Late in his career, Rushdoony began to deny in public the obvious civil application of the "no unequal yoking" covenantal principle, preferring instead to defend traditional political pluralism's anti-Trinitarian U.S. Constitutional settlement.)(19)
The judicial standard involved in the biblical concept of "yoking" is exclusively covenantal: public confession of Trinitarian faith, local church membership, the regular celebration of the Lord's Supper, and public obedience to God's law. For a Christian to deny salvation through faith in Jesus Christ is apostasy. To refuse to join the local church is an assertion of one's judicial autonomy. To refuse to celebrate the Lord's Supper is self-excommunication. To deny the law of God is antinomian. A Christian should not marry anyone who is remiss in any of these four areas. To be remiss in any of them is to break covenant with God. But marrying a Christian from another race or another culture is not covenant-breaking.
This principle of covenantal discrimination applies to each of the three institutional covenants: church, State, and family. "Equal yoking" means a public commitment of all covenantal participants to the Athanasian creed or some other Trinitarian creedal statement, as well as church membership. The judicial issue is faithfulness to the covenantal oath. "Equal yoking" is strictly a judicial concept. "Unequal yoking" is therefore also strictly a judicial concept; as such, it has nothing to do with race or culture: in family, church, or State.(20) It has nothing to do with community standards except to the extent that these derivative standards are confessionally Trinitarian -- a product of the covenant.
The Marriage Covenant
Marriage is a covenant; it is governed by God's law. Rushdoony accepts this view of Christian marriage and has used it to develop a theological defense of divorce based on the Mosaic law.(21) The view of marriage as a lawful covenant established by oath between two individuals under God's authority leads to a significant conclusion: unless we abandon the Bible's identification of marriage as a covenant, we cannot legitimately say that "normally" marriages are this or that in a judicial sense. Marriages are either legal or illegal; there is no criterion of "normality" in a covenant bond except whatever is mandated by God's law. In the case of marriage, the law is indeed a creation ordinance (Gen. 1:26-28). To the extent that man's laws interfere with this biblical covenantal principle, the marriage covenant becomes inescapably antinomian and perhaps even pagan. Rushdoony fully understands this, which is why he attributes "creation ordinance" status to the principle of genetic separation in Leviticus 19:19, and then moves to cultural and racial applications. He seeks to transform community opinions regarding race into a judicially binding category.
Marriage is a covenant under God. A covenant is inescapably judicial.(22) Marriage is established by a binding oath.(23) Therefore, by applying any judicial criterion, including a supposed creation ordinance, to the question of the lawfulness of a marriage necessarily elevates this criterion to covenantal status. Rushdoony has made it clear what this supposedly biblical criterion is: anything that goes "against the very community which [marriage, citizenship, or church membership] is designed to establish." Once this confessionally empty judicial criterion -- community preference -- is applied to one covenantal institution, we cannot easily restrict it to that institution. Community preference, once elevated to a fundamental judicial ideal, breaks all covenantal boundaries. Thus, if Rushdoony were consistent in his discussion of marriage as the basis of community and the community's preferences as judicially sovereign, he would have to apply this principle of "what the community wants" to the covenants of church and the State. His overall covenantal theology rejects the lawfulness of such community intervention. This indicates that his view of hybrids and race is anti-covenantal.
Compulsory Segregation vs. Biblical Law He began writing Institutes of Biblical Law in the late 1960's, when the civil rights movement in the United States was in its radical phase. The word "integration" at that time had a very specific frame of reference: racial. Federal courts and troops had been forcing the racially segregated South to integrate its public institutions from the late 1950's through the 1960's.
Rushdoony broadly defines "enforced integration" as any attempt by a higher judicial agency to overrule local community preferences. He writes: "Unequal yoking means more than marriage. In society at large it means the enforced integration of various elements which are not congenial."(24) To say that southern white segregationists and black integrationists were uncongenial in the 1960's is putting it mildly. Lynching(25) of blacks by white mobs of varying sizes and motivations had been a familiar practice in the South for over a century: imposing the negative sanction of death apart from a civil trial. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists had been lynched, sometimes in Northern states. In New York City's week of anti-draft riots (July 13-17, 1863), at least eleven blacks were murdered out of at least 105 people who died.(26) After the Civil War, lynchings took place in the Midwest and West, though rarely in the Northeast; over 80 percent of the victims were white.(27) The largest percentage of lynchings took place in the South; by 1900, the phenomenon was confined to the South. Far more black males were lynched in the South than before the Civil War. Before the war, most blacks were owned and came under legal protection. Lynching became a socially acceptable community practice in the post-Civil War South. One estimate places the number of lynchings in the South, 1880-1930, at almost 4,000: over 700 whites and over 3,200 blacks.(28) In 1880, 32 percent of the victims were white; in 1930, only 9 percent were.(29) Sometimes accompanying lynchings were acts of torture, burning, and even dismemberment, especially when mobs were large.(30) Lynchings were rituals.(31) Judicially, there were few risks. Trials for people accused of lynching blacks were rare in the South; convictions were virtually nonexistent. While the "strange fruit"(32) of black men hanging on trees steadily disappeared after the 1930's and was almost gone by the 1950's, the lynching mentality still existed among the die-hard white segregationists.
The fact is, on racial matters (as on slavery matters prior to 1865), the South's community standards for civil justice for blacks were radically unbiblical: 1) denying the legal basis of slave marriages; 2) denying legal protection for the slave; and 3) no system of guaranteed redemption.(33) Thus, Rushdoony's critical comment on slavery in general applies to Southern slavery: "Modern man seeks to avoid the yokes of community life in Christ, and he falls under the heavy yoke of the state."(34) In this case, the State in question was local; neither state governments nor the national government had the means of enforcing justice in the American South prior to 1930. Local police forces and sheriffs enforced the law.(35) The local institutions of civil government in the South were sometimes tyrannical toward freed blacks after 1865. The most blatant judicial forms of this local tyranny were abolished by the U. S. Supreme Court and Federal marshals and Federal troops, 1954-70. When Southern blacks once again got the right to vote,(36) local politicians in the South "felt the heat," and therefore "saw the light." They changed. When Southern blacks imposed the sanction of the vote, they were not trying to make Southern politicians better people; they were merely making them more responsive to a significant new political pressure group. The underlying covenantal issue was political sanctions, not political salvation, although the rhetoric of salvation was commonly employed by civil rights reformers.
Rushdoony attempts to skirt the covenantal issue by an appeal to judicial neutrality: neither a pro-segregation nor a pro-integration judicial standard. This line of argument is an implicit denial of his fundamental philosophical premise, namely, that there can be no neutrality. But in racial matters, he insisted, there can be such neutrality judicially. In 1971, he wrote: "Let us consider one aspect of that [class] conflict, the racial situation. The attempts to force integration and to force segregation by law are very old. With Assyria, forcible integration was a policy of state. All these attempts failed when the social conditions militated against them. If two peoples were relatively equal and religiously congenial, integration quickly followed, despite all legal obstacles. Where the differences were marked, neither opportunity nor law was able to bridge the gap. Neither legalized integration nor segregation accomplish anything more than to aggravate a situation. To introduce the state into an area of personal, religious, and moral decision is to abdicate the harmony of classes for a statist imposition. If a person or if a people are inferior, nothing can compel their rise; if they have a potential, why prevent their development? Where there are religious and social reasons against mixed marriages, nothing can further such marriages as long as the faith and the society are strong. If these factors are invalid or disappear through disbelief, nothing can prevent integration in the short or long run."(37)
This line of reasoning is basically the same as the one Gamaliel took with respect to the civil suppression of the Jerusalem church by the Jerusalem rabbinical council. If the church is of God, he said, it will flourish despite persecution; if it is not, then it will fail (Acts 5:34-39). It was an argument for toleration based on judicial inaction. But this argument departed from the Mosaic law's mandatory civil sanctions against a call to false public worship (Deut. 13). Gamaliel, in his call for civil neutrality, necessarily called the Jewish authorities to abandon Moses, for he did not call them to accept Jesus' testimony in the name of Moses, which Jesus had done (John 5:45-46). His call for religious toleration was not merely a call based on a theory of religious neutrality; it was a call to abandon the Mosaic law. We should not interpret either argument for State inaction -- Rushdoony's or Gamaliel's -- as judicially neutral. They are not neutral; they are accomodationist.
In Rushdoony's case, he had only two choices: 1) come out against Federal laws against state laws that enforced segregation, or 2) come out in favor of Federal laws -- and Federal troops -- enforcing laws that abolished state laws that enforced integration. There was no third choice. Either state laws enforcing segregation would be enforced or they would not be. By denying the legality of state laws enforcing segregation, the Federal government's position was not inherently integrationist; rather, it was for social voluntarism -- what Rushdoony said he believed in. People in the South would be allowed to marry whomever they pleased without state laws prohibiting this on the basis of race. But Rushdoony did not call for support of such Federal legislation and Supreme Court interpretations. He opposed the civil rights movement, as his writings from the era reveal. In 1966, he quoted favorably the words of Lyndon Johnson in 1948: "The civil rights program, about which you have heard so much, is a farce and a sham . . . an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I fought it in the Congress. It is the province of the state to run its own elections."(38) Johnson was substituting state judicial sovereignty for Federal judicial sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of segregationist states in the South. He was promoting the view that negative political sanctions imposed by black voters would not be brought against white segregationist politicians like himself. When his political base changed -- from U.S. Senator from Texas to President of the United States (1964-1969) -- his view of sovereignty changed. He became an advocate of civil rights. Rushdoony criticized the later Johnson by quoting the earlier Johnson. But in doing so, he necessarily came down against Federal laws abolishing segregation.
What if a local civil government has previously introduced a restrictive marital standard? What if it has made illegal all inter-racial marriages? What should a higher civil court do? Nothing? Then it accepts the local court's compulsory segregationist standard. It has not acted in a judicially neutral manner, for there is no judicially neutral manner. Should the higher court declare the law unconstitutional? Then it necessarily interferes with regional community standards. There is no escape from some judicial standard. There is no judicial neutrality.
Let us get this point clear: civil government-enforced racial segregation is biblically illegitimate. The State should not dictate to anyone that he must not marry someone, except in cases of incest or a previous marriage. A higher court must declare as invalid any local law that forbids marriages on the basis of race. This is a biblically mandatory restriction on any local community's authority to legislate laws governing the racial aspects of marriage. This is not a civil vote for or against inter-racial marriages; it is a civil vote of "no confidence" with respect to the State's authority to compel decisions in this area of life.
The issue here is covenantal. Rushdoony knows this, and this fact led him to modify his doctrine of community preferences to this extent: "The effects of integration have too often been studied only by proponents and opponents of integration. Unfortunately, both believe that enforced integration is possible. From the days of the Assyrians, who moved nations and peoples about to homogenize their empire, to the 20th century, such attempts have been failures. People do not inter-marry unless a common faith, culture, and standard brings them together. Then, they cannot be kept apart."(39) But if this is true of marriage, then there can be no valid civil or ecclesiastical law against inter-racial marriages if the partners share the same confession of faith, no matter what local community standards happen to be -- the opposite of what he argues in the Institutes of Biblical Law.
There is a fundamental schizophrenia in Rushdoony's doctrine of the marriage covenant specifically and covenantalism generally. This schizophrenia stems in part from an incorrect interpretation of the Mosaic laws prohibiting genetic mixing. This has led him to elevate community racial standards over biblical law in the name of a creation ordinance that never was.
Standards for Exclusion What criteria determine which group is excluded from what covenantal organization? Rushdoony has already made his view plain: community standards. Let me quote him again: "The burden of the law is thus against inter-religious, inter-racial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish."(40) But there are also church communities and political communities. Are they also autonomous from biblical law? Can they lawfully ignore a creation ordinance? Racism spreads. The concern of Rushdoony's analysis here is not with a specific biblical limit on State authority. His analysis rests on an all-inclusive principle: a creation ordinance. He has announced the existence of a creation ordinance in order to justify a view of marriage based on community standards of order and propriety. Rushdoony's assertion of the existence of a creation ordinance of genetic separation leads him to embrace in principle the humanistic theory of society that he elsewhere opposes so eloquently: John Dewey's view of community standards and community authority.(41)
In Christ, the only valid standards for judicial exclusion in a formally covenanted church, State, or family are: 1) denying the Trinitarian faith (or oath) and 2) repeatedly breaking God's law as a way of life. Race is not a valid standard for covenantal exclusion, and wherever race becomes such a means of exclusion within any organization that is bound by a common confession of faith, it works against the ideal of the biblical covenant. There is no earthly court-enforceable biblical law against personal separation from others outside of church, but there can be no valid judicial exclusion of any race from the rights and obligations of the ecclesiastical covenant. Any program of enforced racial segregation within a covenantal institution is judicially evil. Annulling such a program by higher law within that covenantal hierarchy is not itself a program of enforced racial integration. Rather, it is merely prohibiting a judicial evil: State-enforced racial segregation.(42)
It is true the national government in the United States has abolished state laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages. This is not the same as forcing racially different individuals to marry. To confuse the two is a monumental confusion. It is a confusion based on racism.
Judicial Review The biblical judicial issue of race in the United States in the 1960's was not enforced integration, whatever the humanistic judicial issue was. The biblical issue was this: illegally enforced racial exclusion from the voting booth, i.e., access to civil covenant sanctions. Blacks were being kept from exercising their legitimate civil right of imposing civil covenant sanctions on civil rulers. They were being excluded by state and local laws from participating in a republican civil rite of covenantal renewal. The civil rights movement was judicially a civil rites movement. Lyndon Johnson understood this in 1948. He affirmed his commitment to keep blacks away from this rite of covenant renewal -- the imposition of civil sanctions.
The State has neither the authority nor the power to make men into better people. It cannot lawfully or successfully force people to have warm feelings toward their neighbors. But the State does have the God-given authority to impose sanctions against certain evil acts. For example, if a lower branch of civil government is excluding people from the civil franchise or from access to civil institutions on the basis of anything except their lack of a covenantal profession of allegiance or their having been convicted of a felony, a higher civil court has the obligation to annul that exclusion. Such a judicial annulment is not inherently an example of forced integration, although it can be and has been an aspect of a larger program of forced integration. Rather, it is the judicial annulment of a covenantally illegal law that forcibly excludes people from the legitimate office of citizen -- those who impose sanctions in the voting booth. The American South enforced such illegitimate laws for almost a century, 1877-1970. The national government, for political reasons, went along with this illegal covenantal exclusion. This cooperation between national and local civil governments ended in the decade of the 1960's.
The national government's application of new civil sanctions did change millions of white people's minds in the South, 1957-1970, unlike the application of far more rigorous military sanctions during Reconstruction, 1865-76. No one in the South today publicly laments the annulment of the various "Jim Crow" segregation laws; the climate of opinion has changed.(43) Jim Crow laws have gone the way of chattel slavery, but these laws were no less enthusiastically affirmed by white Christians in the South, 1890-1960. But the overall climate of moral and political opinion among the non-Christian, university-educated elite of the South regarding the locus of political sovereignty -- Federal rather than state -- had steadily changed during the twentieth century. Thus, the specific climate of opinion regarding segregation shifted rapidly, 1957-1970, when Federal sanctions were imposed. What the North's military governments of the Reconstruction era had not accomplished, 1865-76, humanistic public education, nationally marketed textbooks, college education, theological liberalism, and President Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964 did accomplish.
Rushdoony's misidentification of the judicial annulment of illegal racial segregation in public institutions as necessarily a product of "enforced integration" is a variation of a similar error on his part: identifying the Supreme Court's covenantal obligation to strike down bad or unconstitutional laws as an illegitimate attempt to make men good.(44) He confuses the biblically legitimate concept of judicial review -- annulling bad laws -- with biblically illegitimate messianic acts of State healing: salvation by law. This messianic view of civil law is at odds with the fundamental legal position of the Bible, which presents the State as God's monopolistic agency for the coercive suppression of public evil.(45) But if we reject the principle of judicial review in the name of anti-messianism, we are left without any means of judicial appeal (Ex. 18). If the mere annulment of a bad law is discussed as if it were inherently a case of imposing positive civil sanctions (which biblical law rejects), then there cannot be lawful judicial review. This would go far in destroying the judiciary.(46)
The same principle of judicial review applies to hierarchical church courts. Any local church that excludes people from membership on the basis of race must be disciplined by its denomination or association. The local church must be excluded from the larger fellowship for its practice of unjustly excluding people from the local fellowship. It does not matter what the local church's "community" thinks. The issue is quite simple: What are the judicial terms of God's covenant? They are never racial in the New Covenant. They were never racial in the Old Covenant, either.(47) They are confessional and moral.
Sovereignty: From the Bible to the Community Leviticus 19:19 commanded the Israelites to keep their breeds of cattle separated. This meant that they could not lawfully breed their cattle systematically. The law also required them to keep the seeds of different crops separate from each other in any given field. Finally, they could not wear cloth of a linen-wool mixture.
These first two laws spoke of separation: separating the confessionally identical and culturally similar tribes of Israel. The third law required them to avoid clothing that symbolically testified to equality between priest and non-priest. None of this had anything to do with a prohibition of hybrids. None of it had anything to do with the separation of races and cultures. It had to do, first, with separating similar tribes until Christ, the promised Seed, came in history. Second, it had to do with the separation of God's priestly nation from non-priestly nations.
Rushdoony has invented a supposed creation ordinance of hybridization. Then he applies this mythological judicial principle to inter-racial marriages -- marriages between partners who may share the same covenantal confession. He identifies local community standards of order as the standards that must govern marriages. This transfers sovereignty over the marriage covenant from God's law to the local community. This new sovereignty, which Rushdoony offers in the name of biblical law, cannot easily be restricted to the marriage covenant: unless there is some higher biblical principle to stop it, the doctrine of community sovereignty moves into church and State. We have seen where this leads: to humanism, both right-wing (Scottish Enlightenment Whiggery) and left-wing (totalitarianism).
Rushdoony invokes a creation ordinance. What higher principle is there than a creation ordinance? It is more fundamental than Mosaic law. Only a New Testament law possesses greater authority. There is such a law -- no separation between Jew and Greek, free and bond -- but Rushdoony ignores it. He wants to keep superior races and inferior races separate until such time as local community standards approve of covenantal bonding, i.e., marriage under the authority of the local community's judicially autonomous covenant. Any appeal beyond this authority -- whether to biblical covenant theology or the U.S. Supreme Court -- Rushdoony rejected as marks of integrationism in the 1960's and 1970's. He has never publicly abandoned this position. He still invokes a non-existent creation ordinance prohibiting hybridization.
Rushdoony concludes his discussion with these words: "Hybridization is an attempt to deny the validity of law. Its penalty is an enforced sterility. In every area, where man seeks potentiality by a denial of God's law, the penalty remains the same, limited gains and long-range sterility."(48) He moves from a biological phenomenon to a social metaphor. He takes this metaphor very seriously -- judicially seriously. He moves from biology to biblical law. His defense of biblical law suffers.
Conclusion Rushdoony's defense of a non-existent creation ordinance is a classic example of what Van Til identified as circular reasoning. Rushdoony's discussion of hybridization begins with a presupposition: that genetic sterility is morally evil and therefore biblically prohibited. The Bible says nothing about this aspect of animal or plant breeding. It prohibits the mixing of seeds in one field, but it does not identify sterility as the reason for the prohibition. To make his case, Rushdoony has to ignore the fact that Israel brought mules -- genetically sterile -- into the land after the exile.
Then he moves from genetic sterility, which he calls hybridization, to social sterility. His argument implicitly assumes that certain practices he disapproves of are socially "sterile." These practices include inter-racial marriages between "inferior" and "superior" races, as defined by local community standards. He also rejects all organ transplants.(49) To make this case, he invents a creation ordinance that never existed -- a law against hybridization -- and then he transplants this theological construct to practices he does not personally approve of. He is implying that the supposed creational prohibition against biological mixtures is the symbol of a prohibition against certain kinds of inter-racial marriages, among other practices. Such marriages must await community approval before they can become covenantally valid. He thereby subordinates the marriage covenant to community opinion. This is humanism, pure and simple. It is John Dewey disguised as John Calvin: community over confession. If taken seriously, it could all too easily become Martin Bormann disguised as Martin Luther: race over reformation.
This kind of biblical exposition is, as Rushdoony has derisively called it elsewhere, eisegesis: reading into the text of Scripture things which the expositor dearly wants the text to say, despite the fact that the text says nothing of the kind. It is surely not exegesis: deriving from the text the message God wishes to communicate. That there are racial differences among men is obvious, an aspect of the worldwide division of labor (Gen. 11; I Cor. 12). But there is only one difference that matters covenantally in church, family, or State: theological confession. Here is the great dividing line. Rushdoony's discussions of biological hybrids and race relations have obscured this covenantal line of demarcation.
There was never a creation ordinance against hybrids. There was a temporary Mosaic seed law that symbolized the prohibition against marriages that crossed tribal boundaries inside Mosaic Israel. This law ended forever with the coming of the New Covenant and the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. There was no tribal inheritance to be preserved in Israel once the promised Seed had come. There was no tribal system in Israel after A.D. 70.
Footnotes:
1. The theology of the 1960's racist cult leader Wesley A. Swift is typical of this outlook. He insisted that "mankind violated the courses of divine law, by mongrelizing his races. . . ." Swift, In the Beginning God, p. 1. Sermon, Feb. 5, 1967, published by the New Christian Crusade Church, Hollywood, California. The Mongolian race, he said, appeared 660,000 years ago; the Negro race appeared 73,000 years ago; and the white race appeared 7,400 years ago. Swift, God's Call to Race (Hollywood, California: New Christian Crusade Church, n.d.), p. 2. "After the fall of Lucifer, the areas of retrogression have generally been marked by their integration and mongrelization. The Negroid is one of the lowest species on the face of the earth, because he fell the furthest, and because, when he came to earth under the Luciferian design, he was used for the mongrelization of the ancient Asiatics and the interference with other races." Ibid., p. 5. Then what of the great flood in which all but one family perished? Swift's answer: there was no universal flood. Lots of other races survived the local flood in Noah's day. "There weren't any Negroes involved in the flood." Swift, Were All the People of the Earth Drowned in the Flood? (Hollywood, California: New Christian Crusade Church, n.d.), p. 25. Swift's covenant was a racial covenant: "We think, when people understand these things, they will understand their divine responsibility which is to preserve their race and to carry out the directions of God." Idem.
2. This is incorrect. Rushdoony and I have relied on the work of a British Israelite, Curtis C. Ewing, with respect to the structure of the sabbath week of Mosaic Israel. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 134, 511, 830n. Ewing would occasionally attend conferences where Rushdoony or I would speak. He, like Rushdoony, kept the dietary laws. Rushdoony repeatedly cites the work of Howard B. Rand, Digest of the Divine Law (Merrimac, Massachusetts: Destiny Publishers, 1943). See Institutes, pp. 57, 106, 228, 528n.
3. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 208-9.
4. R. J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1967), p. 119.
5. Idem.
6. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), pp. 253-62.
7. Ibid., p. 262.
8. Bahnsen's physician told him that the same sort of congenital heart defect that afflicted him had been invariably fatal a decade before Bahnsen received his first heart operation. There had been no known treatment.
9. Ibid., p. 87.
10. Ibid., p. 253.
11. Ibid., p. 255.
12. Idem.
13. The ability of insects to adapt to pesticides is an example. A plant species' ability to develop resistance to blight is another.
14. Walter E. Lammerts, a pioneer in the Scientific Creation movement, was a highly successful breeder of roses. His roses won numerous international prizes. Lammerts, "The Scientific Creationist Movement in the United States: A Personal Account," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, I (Summer 1974).
15. It was still being used during the American Civil War (1861-65): an important beast of burden for military transport.
16. Such language is now confined to neo-Nazi cults, racist cults, and some of the more aggressive branches of British Israelism.
17. Rushdoony, Institutes, p. 256.
18. Ibid., pp. 256-57.
19. See his explicit denial of theocratic politics in the transcript of his nationally televised interview with Bill Moyers, "God and Politics: On Earth as it Is in Heaven," Public Affairs Television (Dec. 23, 1987). MOYERS: "Is that the kind of society, where Christianity is the official religion, like it was in Armenia?" RUSHDOONY: "No." (Transcript, p. 7.)
20. Obviously, if two people cannot speak the same language, they may have future marital problems. This is not a valid covenantal objection to their marriage. The presumption is, one or both will learn the other's language. This is also true of churches. Members of churches cannot lawfully be excluded from the Lord's Supper because of a language barrier. Should a person be excluded from citizenship because of a language barrier? No. But he will have trouble being elected to public office. He can be barred from voting on the basis of functional illiteracy in the language on the ballot, but states that require secret ballots -- only one person per booth at a time -- can and should provide translations on the ballot for major linguistic groups.
21. Rushdoony, Institutes, pp. 401-15.
22. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.
23. Ibid., ch. 8.
24. Rushdoony, Institutes, p. 257.
25. Named after Virginia judge Charles Lynch, who convicted and hanged Loyalists during the American Revolution. Walter F. White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer, [1929] 1969).
26. Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 282 (blacks murdered), p. 5 (total deaths of 105).
27. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 8.
28. Monroe Work (ed.), The Negro Yearbook: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, 1931-1932 (Tuskegee, Alabama: Negro Year Book Publishing, 1931), p. 293; cited in idem.
29. Idem.
30. Ibid., p. 42.
31. Ibid., ch. 2.
32. The title of a 1939 song made famous in the North and infamous in the South by black blues singer Billie Holiday.
33. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 232-44.
34. R. J. Rushdoony, Law and Society, vol. 2 of Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1982), p. 69.
35. Brundage, Lynching, p. 161.
36. They possessed this right during Reconstruction, 1865-1877.
37. Chalcedon Report #68 (April 1971). Reprinted in Rushdoony, The Roots of Reconstruction (Vallecito, California: Ross House, 1991), p. 746.
38. Chalcedon Report No. 5 (Feb. 1, 1966), in Roots of Reconstruction, p. 551.
39. Chalcedon Report #74 (October 1971); Roots, p. 769.
40. Rushdoony, Institutes, p. 257.
41. On Dewey, see R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1963), ch. 15.
42. This should not be understood as a legitimation of laws requiring businesses to serve people or hire employees irrespective of race. Economic discrimination is not a covenantal act. If a business decides to hire or not to hire people of a certain race, the State should remain silent. Civil laws prohibiting economic discrimination inevitably become laws mandating quotas. Bureaucrats, if they are to be restrained in their quest for power, must be provided with written numerical ratios as guidelines to determine whether or not racial (or other) discrimination is taking place. This means quotas.
43. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); I. A. Newby, Jim Crow's Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965). Cf. Charles S. Mangum, Jr., The Legal Status of the Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940).
44. "Second, we must remember that the Constitution can make no man nor nation good; it is not a moral code." R. J. Rushdoony, "The United States Constitution," Journal of Christian Reconstruction, XII (1988), p. 22. For a discussion of Rushdoony's confusion on this distinction, see Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 687-91.
45. See above, Chapter 16: "The State's Monopoly of Vengeance."
46. This does not mean that decisions by the courts should not be appealed to a combined review of the executive and legislative branches. See North, Political Polytheism, pp. 502-13. There should be no single institution that possesses final jurisdiction in history. Every doctrine of divine right challenges God as the only final court of appeal.
47. The exclusion of Ammonites and Moabites from citizenship for ten generations (Deut. 23:3) was judicially based on the origin of both those nations in Lot's drunken committing of incest with his daughters (Gen. 19:31-38). The descendants of bastards were also excluded for ten generations (Deut. 23:2). The covenantal issue here was not race; it was covenantal rebellion.
48. Rushdoony, Institutes, p. 262.
49. There is a lingering suspicion in my mind that he began with certain views on race and went looking for a biblical reason to justify them.
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