The American Indian: A Standing Indictment Against Christianity and Statism in America
About this ebook
Government experts created the Indian reservations. America’s churches whole-heartedly supported it, convinced the reservation would be the key to winning souls for Christianity.
In 1944 young R. J. Rushdoony arrived at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada as a missionary to the Shoshone and the Paiute Indians. For eight years he lived with them, worked with them, ministered to them and listened to their stories. He came to know them intimately, both as individuals and as a people. This is his story, and theirs.
It is also the story of an experiment that failed, disastrously—and exercise in statist paternalism and ineffective Christian meddling whose effects ravage the Indians to this day. The reservation system debased the people it was meant to serve, and the churches failed in their mission; until, in the end, the proud and resourceful Indian was transformed into “a defeated man, lacking in character.” This is Rushdoony’s eyewitness testimony to that failure.
Today, as America’s leaders expand the welfare state and radically transform the entire nation, we’d do well to reconsider this first experiment in government dependency and a Christianity stripped of God’s law—before all of the United States is transformed into a massive reservation on a continental scale. Rushdoony’s description of our past is also an indictment of our statist future.
About the author
Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.” He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.
