Abortion and the Christian homeschooling progenitor you may never have heard of
If you only knew how many Mean Girls memes I wanted to include and didn't you would not be judging me for the ones that I did
Earlier this week there was a pretty popular Twitter thread making the rounds about abortion, Christian supremacy, and what anti-choice folks “really believe” as opposed to how the media tends to report on them. You can read it here if you’d like, although there were some parts of it that I thought were a little inaccurate and less-than-helpful if the goal is to get people to understand the historic, political and theological underpinnings of the crisis of reproductive rights we’re currently experiencing. For example, I don’t believe for a moment that the majority of anti-choice folks genuinely think that abortion is the same thing as murder of toddler—for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is because most of them are not doing shit about the gun violence that’s actually killing toddlers and children all around the country every day.
But there was one part of the thread that I agreed was incredibly crucial and overlooked in a lot of the coverage of the evangelical Christian roots of the anti-choice backlash to Roe that has led us to where we are today, and it’s this:
This sounds like a pretty sweeping statement—and it is—but it’s not without merit. In fact, theologically there’s a name for this kind of thinking: presuppositional apologetics.
Many years ago, when I was much younger and straighter and sadder version of myself, I was a student at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, where I earned a degree in theology with a concentration in philosophical theology and apologetics. My penultimate semester I took a class dedicated exclusively to the practice of presuppositional apologetics, through the lens of its founding father Cornelius Van Til, a Dutch-American Reformed philosopher and theologian who pioneered the framework in the mid-1900s.
Presuppositional apologetics or presuppositionalism essentially posits that the Christian faith, generally as articulated through a fundamentalist, literalist reading of the bible, is the basis of not only all legitimate religious and theological reasoning but also all rational thought in general. In other words, according to presuppositional apologetics, human beings could not even sit down to have a rational debate about theology or ethics without the Christian god being real because that god supposedly underwrites all human knowledge and attempts at knowing. Therefore, attempts to prove or disprove Christianity or the bible with “reason” or “facts” are already suspect because rationality itself is predicated on Christianity as revealed through [a fundamentalist and literalist reading of] the bible. This version of Christianity, then, is not merely Van Til’s truth or any particular person or denomination’s truth, but rather The Truth ungirding the whole of existence.
But this post isn’t even about Van Til, because most people have never heard of him and his work is relatively obscure outside of intracommunal debates between members of Husband Father Pastor Twitter. Instead it’s about a different dead guy most people have never heard of, who learned from Van Til, incorporated many of his teachings, and impacted politics in America in dangerous and irreparable ways that have everything to do with the situation we are currently in.
R.J. Rushdoony was a Calvinist philosopher and theologian who studied and wrote about Van Til’s work in presuppositional apologetics extensively until his death in 2001. Many credit Rushdoony with pioneering and promoting the idea of Christian reconstructionism, a theological framework which teaches that the laws enumerated in the Hebrew Bible can and should be used contemporarily and applied to modern societies, and that it is true Christians’ obligation to ensure that biblical law (again, as interpreted through a fundamentalist, literalist, and usually pretty anti-Semitic lens) is instituted in their communities (including — you guessed it — the death penalty for things like homosexuality, something that some contemporary preachers still promote).
Anyway, crucially to my point here, Rushdoony is also considered to be the father of the modern religious homeschooling movement. Rushdoony influenced famous and infamous homeschooling figures like Bill Gothard, who was eventually disgraced by multiple allegations of sexual abuse and harassment and whose cult Institute in Basic Life Principles counted TLC’s the Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting as ardent supporters before their oldest son Josh was arrested for possession of child pornography and revealed to have molested several of his sisters. Rushdoony also heavily influenced alt-right Reformed evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson, a homeschooling proponent (and neo-Confederate) who is most well-known in #ChurchToo world as the guy who officiated the wedding of a man known for serial pedophilia who then proceeded to molest his own child. In short, think of pretty much anyone awful in Christian homeschooling world and you’re one or two degrees away from R.J. Rushdoony and, by extension, Cornelius Van Til.
So what does all this have to do with abortion? Well. Like the OP in the Twitter thread said, anti-choice Christians “believe their beliefs are universal. The only valid ones. The basis of all life on earth, the basis of every single person's reality.” I mean, that’s just like, the rules of presuppositionalism.
Presuppositionalism teaches that the fundamentalist-literalist interpretation of the Christian bible is the basis of all theological thought in particular and all reasoning in general, and Christian reconstructionism teaches that because that interpretation forms the basis of all life on earth, then it is right and just to use political and social power to enforce the laws of that interpretation on others and to resist criticism from others who may object—after all, they’re borrowing from your worldview to even be able to speak in the first place.
I know this from observation and from formal study but I also know this because I was homeschooled myself. K-10th grade, until I started college at the age of 16. I was discipled into the anti-choice movement and spent years of my youth contributing to it. Growing up, I was taught that real Christians only vote Republican because Democrats “kill babies” and that abortion was the greatest and most severe injustice of our lifetime. And in spite of the fact that much work has been done excavating the historic reality that the Religious Right, including modern homeschooling movements, coalesced around resistance to racial equity rather than abortion, it remains that abortion resistance is and has been a key animating organizing force behind many of the political events that set the stage for what happened on June 24, including the Trump presidency and the promised appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices. Homeschoolers and the homeschooling movement particularly have influenced and been key players in the rise and triumph of the Religious Right, and echoes of Van Til’s and Rushdoony’s theology can be heard in the halls of Congress every day.
And this is the part where I make fun of everyone who ever made fun of me for going to bible college, taking eight years off and then going back to seminary, quizzically wondering aloud at me what I would ever do with a degree in theology, as if theological literacy isn’t one of the most useful analytical tools you have during the rapid descent into theocratic Christian fascism.
Finally, I have just one more thing to say, and it’s to R.J. Rushdoony:
P.S. Due to being homeschooled and missing several decades of knowledge about pop culture and secular music, I recently found out that Janis Ian, in addition to being a character on Mean Girls, is a real lesbian who made a lot of very vibey sexy music and the fact that she is a real lesbian to me makes the character of Janis in Mean Girls even more relatable, as someone who has also always been a huge dyke but didn’t figure it out until WAY past high school. Solidarity, Janis.
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