Pagan familism is a red herring he (North -but you could also include DeMar as well) uses to drag across the trail to divert the hounds. Pagan “familism” bears little resemblance to Kinism. Further, and more fundamentally, what does North mean by “pagan,” pray tell? That term covers an extremely broad range of cultures and nations in the ancient world. It’s a rhetorical flourish, a scare word, and is another attempt at diversion. There are a limited number of behavioral modalities, and there are, of necessity going to be resemblances between the “pagan” family and the Christian family. North knows this. The burden is on him to prove that those specifc features of family life to which he ascribes the term “pagan” are indeed verboten on a biblical basis. I think it is amusing that the “intellectual” has to make use of such gross generalizations.
In the Roman “gens,” a father had absolute power of life and death over the children. They were his property. He could force them to be aborted in the womb, or he could murder them at birth. Without penality of law. Roman society during the Republican era was politically organized according to gens, and we suggest no such stratification of society, or division into political in and out groups based on genetics. The Roman “gens,” if this indeed is what North is referring to when he uses the shibboleth “pagan”, has no resemblance to Christian patriarchy, nor to Kinism, whatsoever. No prominent Kinist has ever asserted that fathers should possess such authority, and indeed the entire issue is beside the point.
The Bible calls worse than an infidel those who would not take care of their own after the flesh if the family is nothing next to the church, then this admonition is absurd and has no place. What could be worse than being cursed to hell? Well, apparently not being “familist” quite enough. Obviously the family has great importance in scripture. Jesus, while on the cross, is careful to dispose of his familial duty with respect to the upkeep of his mother by assigning this duty to his disciple. If family is nothing, then the disposition of this duty is absurd and makes no sense, nor does the fifth commandment. North does not care for the fifth commandment very much. He thinks it is the fifth “commendment” -feeling that it merely commends us to obedience to parents.
In fact, Jesus says that the law of God is made of no effect by the Jewish tradition of Corban, in which the amount of money dedicated to parental upkeep is given to the Temple instead. If the family is abrogated, and the church then has care of siblings, parents, and children, then the objection to Corban is absurd. North is being inconsistent here. Kinists do not argue that the family is above the church, we argue that a) the two are not mutually exclusive, and b) that the family is terrifically important. Between family and church, you have two of the most important “intermediary” institutions between the state (which North dislikes very much and wishes he could write out of existence) and the individual. North’s atomistic individualism (deriving as it does from an adolescent crush on the nihilist Ayn Rand) is utterly inimical to the health and wellbeing of the family, another institution he wishes did not exist. Essentially, North is an anarcho-capitalist, like Rothbard. But even Rothbard disagrees with north on the importance of family and tradition.
The family is so important, possessing of such sacral dignity, that its ritual protection features prominently in the Law. North, a reconstructionist, should understand the import of the laws forbidding incest, for instance. Such laws are absurd in a covenant in which the family has been abrogated. The reason that familial duty is derogated at all in scripture is because in “pagan” life and in the life of Israel, family was ALL. It was literally everything. But the church must also be our family. The reductionistic thinking that it must be the church OR the family partakes of a logically fallacy.
If you will look at my post above on the completeness of covenant, where I assert that the covenant is both physical and spiritual, you will get an idea how to combat North’s covenantal reductionism. Still, that is not the fulcrum of the Kinist position. We take our starting point from biblical liberty and the freedom of nations to conduct their polity (if not in contravention of God’s law), as is conducive to peace and prosperity, which forced integration is NOT. In this case, the “libertarian” North finds himself IN SUPPORT OF statist social engineering, integration, contrary to the position of most of his libertarian comrades de camp at such sites as Lew Rockwell’s. The assumption of his argument is that the natural state of humans of differing ethnicities is integrated, and that law must force them apart, sinfully. This is, of course, contra naturam. Men naturally segregate by race and ethnicity because it is wired in them to do so, interested as they are in all the commonalities of culture and resemblance that make for peaceful and secure relations. This is why nations are called ethnoi in the Greek texts. North has lots of suggestions on what we do with people who steal and kill, but not much is forthcoming from him on WHY certain people are targets, and what we do about it other than to “enforce the law.” The entire phenomenon of demographic imbalance in crime along the lines of race is as though it were a fiction made up by evil “racists.” It is the “third rail” of reconstructionist sociology. In fact, reconstructionism, outside of Rushdoony, does not even have a sociology. Therefore it is not a complete worldview. Reconstruction in the hands of North and Bahnsen turned into nothing more than a set of a priori axiomata for the principles of F.A. Hayek, which they refer to as “natural law.” Particularly in Bahnsen’s hands, theonomy is transformed into neoconservatism.
The pertinent question for North is this: where in the Bible are we commanded to set up states that use law to force together populations that would naturally segregate? Where is the necessary inference from scripture, and does not any argument in its favor also already presume the proximity and presence of nationalities that would not be present without force of law or historical accident? Secondly, what is the effect of this forced integration (and the concomitant “equal rights amendment) on property rights, and what is to prevent the state from making other such inferences from scripture and using them as the basis for forms of social or economic engineering to which North might object? Again, the libertarian North finds himself lined up in FAVOR of abrogated property rights in the name of statist social engineering. If the state is free to force integration in the absence of a clear biblical mandates to the contrary, then the state is (a fortiori) also free to enforce segregation in such an absence. So then, the burden of proof lies on North to show us in unequivocal terms, where the bible states that ethnicities must me forced together or permitted to marry, and why it is verboten for them to do the direct opposite. If you’ve ever read a book by North, (so plodding is his style that most who claim to have read his books are lying) it’s 900 pages of exegetical equivocation followed by 200 of outright bombast.
You will notice that North will almost never resort to the Greek mss. For one thing, he’s an economist by training, not a biblical exegete. His exegesis is ham handed, and inelegant. It is this way because of the procrustean bed he tries to force scripture into, to comport with his cosmopolitan, laissez faire, libertarian prior ideological commitments. The weakness of Kinists is that they try to argue from “covenant.” The arguments for Kinism do not need to contact the discussion of covenant whatsoever to be piercingly effective, as a they go right to the heart of what states are and are not empowered to do.
If they are talking about us its because we’re influential far beyond our actual numbers. The term “familism” was resurrected so that North could talk about Kinism without having to refer to Kinism directly, and thereby give us publicity. There aren’t any Christian “familists” extant but us. To be sure, when North or DeMar discuss the evils of “familism” they are talking about Kinism.
The pertinent question for North is this: where in the Bible are we commanded to set up states that use law to force together populations that would naturally segregate? Where is the necessary inference from scripture, and does not any argument in its favor also already presume the proximity and presence of nationalities that would not be present without force of law or historical accident? Secondly, what is the effect of this forced integration (and the concomitant “equal rights amendment) on property rights, and what is to prevent the state from making other such inferences from scripture and using them as the basis for forms of social or economic engineering to which North might object?
JM, I think these questions are excellent points for any discussion regarding Kinism and scripture. Thanks for phrasing them in this way, it will help me a lot.
I haven’t read any of these postings yet, but, Shotgun and JM, you might find them of interest in the discussions ongoing between those so-called theonomists and the concept of Kinism. This is on their FB page.
It is interesting that there should be a topic “Rushdoony versus Kinism.”
Let me give one example of Rush’s thought on marriage, found on page 412 of his book The Institutes of Biblical Law:
Corinth was an industrial and commercial center. Its life was not familistic, but atomistic and individualistic. Marriage in the non-Jewish sectors of society was based primarily on personal considerations [implying that there are other considerations than personal, and as we shall see, there are also considerations other than religious to consider], desires, and advantages [very much like the conception of marriage that prevails in the modern church immersed in pluralistic, secular society]. In terms of this, marriage was no longer a covenant both with a person, a people and a faith, as it had been in the Old Testament.
Elsewhere, he states [p. 413] that while Greek marriage had been individualistic, the earlier, and stronger understanding of marriage as being both familist and societal, that is, the relative benefit or injury to society resulting from appropriate and inappropriate marriages was a legitimate consideration, and formed a part of the background of the Biblical Law itself.
Now the social situation in which the miscegenation laws were present in the U.S., that were later overturned (not by social consensus but by judicial fiat) was a long established milieu. It is not the purpose of the Christian religion to overturn the societal norms that obtain where Christianity finds itself. This principle is severally established in scripture, but nowhere more clearly than the admonition of Paul that every man ought to “abide in the same calling wherein he was called” [1 Cor. 7:20]. This edict was addressed particularly to slaves [under unbelieving masters], but must also be applied to the broader social milieu, wherein the revolutionary overturning of the established social order is not contemplated. Christianity is not an instrument of social revolution, but rather the means by which the man and his nation are saved, and the means by which hearts are sanctified and regenerated in situ. It was only the violent overturning of the established social and legal order by the state acting in a messianic capacity that mad made legal what was everywhere shunned.
To divorce marriage from these broader considerations is to “paganize” the institution, and to say that the considerations that under-gird the law are inscrutable is to make the law not merely irrational, but anti-rational. But this kind of sealing off from examination of the Spirit of the Law (scripture being God-breathed), was certainly not adhered to by Christ, who indeed did examine and interpret the Law, revealing its intent, rather than treating it as a dead letter.
I inserted parenthetical comments above for emphasis. Rush is here saying that in the OT law, a marriage was not simply a personal and religious covenant, it was also a social covenant with a people. Elsewhere he states that the spirit of the marriage laws militate against unequal yoking of not just a religious kind, but also a social and biological kind, since it tended to undermine the unity for which marriage was established.
So as Kinists, we speak not authoritatively, but rather ministerially that the view of unequal yoking cannot be as simplistic as is claimed by those who would preserve by mandate what is a legal and historical fiat -that is, the social and geographic proximity of unequally yoked races. This is not to say that there can never be cases of equally yoked members of different races, but the scenarios in which this might be the case are difficult to imagine. One does not define the law by the exception. As to the differences that amount to disqualification, firstly, even among Christian blacks, there are profound religious differences with whites, where Black Liberation Theology tends to prevail. This Marxism that operates under religious cover, is not really Christianity at all. This is one factor. Another factor is that sociological differences are also very profound, whether in the individuals themselves, or in the families that the marriage proposes to join, for marriage is also a compact between families -which is easily shown in the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws.
There may very well also be biological reasons that militate against mixed pairings, for reasons such as variability in intelligence, susceptibility to disease, and other very serious potential objections. It is only our immature and wholly pagan elevation of the centrality of romantic love in marriage that opposes these objections, which universally obtained prior to contemporary times.
The foregoing would impel us to ministerially counsel against mixed pairings, even where under extraordinary circumstances they might be technically countenanced under the law. Further, with such conditions prevailing, it is certainly within a society’s moral authority to prevent such pairings in respect of these factors alone. There is nothing in the law that forbids it, just as there is nothing in the law that forbids the requirement of a minimum marriageable age.
Thus, we would state, that it is a sin to enter into a marriage in which one is unequally yoked, and there are good reasons for supposing that the determining factors in individual cases could well extend to racial considerations (and everything that goes into it). If such conditions are found to be prevalent, it would be a prerogative of the state to (on religious and other grounds) forbid such pairings. That groups of shared characteristics can be administrated collectively is established by no less an authority than Christ himself, who speaks collectively of Canaanites using a colloquial epithet for them, as He judged this epithet to be true. Paul adds his weight to this interpretation in addressing Cretans collectively [Titus 1:12]. Replete in the Old Testament are “foreigners” addressed collectively, and not judged on an individual basis, but on a collective basis, though there was a path by which exceptions to this judgment could be established. We know also that God deals with nations collectively, and our evidence is the rejection of the physical covenant seed of Israel (to whom Christ was sent exclusively in what Paul refers to as his ministry of the circumcision), though there were individual believers among them.
But this is all beside the point, which is that mixed marriages do not proceed where racial aliens are not present. We therefore desire a theological liberal to show us where the scripture forbids the exclusionary laws that would be adopted by an ethnostate. They can’t because they don’t exist. Israel was an ethno-state, with its Mamzer laws. That there were Patriarchs who married foreign wives to establish alliances with other nations does not falsify this fact of Israel’s social, political, and legal organization. Rushdoony states that marriage in Israel was familistic, and barred joining to foreign wives. This establishes Israel as an ethnostate in the very laws which God ordained for it, which cannot, therefore, be immoral to impose today, nor can laws which prevent the proximity of significant populations of foreigners to which marriage might then become an option.
Indeed, such marriages were strictly prohibited to Israelites, as shown in Nehemiah 9:2 and 13:23-27. Unless Nehemiah is inventing biblical law, which he clearly is not, marriages with foreign wives (unknown in the individual case whether belief in Jehovah obtained or not) whether for political, economic, or any reason whatsoever are prohibited where continuation in the covenant of Israel was in view -a condition imposed on all the returnees from exile, with no consideration of individual cases mentioned. This law, as is all God’s law, is of course RETROACTIVE, applying to Solomon, or any other instance of the marriage of foreign wives. It is also interesting to note that scripture seems to uniformly assume that foreign spouses will be corrupted by foreign religious practices. How could this be known in advance? It is not known, it is assumed. That same “foreignness” applies in contemporary times to racial minorities.
Do you know of the best, most thorough and extensive defense of confessional nationhood?
I want to sink my paws into it.
I’m going through Gary North’s material on the seed concepts and working up a critique, but he never addresses the real, underlying issue. He is just doing, what amounts to, an arbitrary assertion against Rushdoony’s interpretations and then throwing the “racist” term around. North also frequently writes out against a so-called pagan “familism.”
By the way, as a result of the dust up (which looks like its finally settling down, although the posters at the Confessional Puritan Board are still going strong), Mr. Marinov (who writes for American Vision) has implied that he is going to work up a book against the “kinist heresy.”
I suspect we may see an article from American Vision on the topic this week.
Should he write the article, it will be addressed in our next issue of the Kinist Review, and I will personally send him a copy.
Perhaps you might invite your friends on the “Puritan” board here to engage with us. I doubt they will do so. All our critics want to do is preach to their respective choirs and influence anyone who might stumble across their sites with the term “heresy.” It’s really a marketing tactic. They stand to gain little by coming here and debating us, and could lose a lot of credibility if they are publicly shredded -and usually they are. Let them first define Kinism (I doubt they know it well enough to do so), and then let them show where it is heresy. Mostly they are simply propping up and knocking down straw men. I’m unaware of a thorough formal defense of confessional nationhood (as though that is the only polity countenanced by the Bible, when Israel itself was an ethnostate.) You could start with Lincoln’s “proposition nation” (which of course is an oxymoron, the term nation deriving from the root nat, or birth).
Rushdoony has been accused of Holocaust denial and racism.[15] Rushdoony believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as “unequal yoking”, should be made illegal. He also opposed “enforced integration”, referred to Southern slavery as “benevolent”, and said that “some people are by nature slaves”. [16] In The Institutes of Biblical Law he calculated Jewish deaths during the Holocaust to be between 896,292 and 1.2 million, suggested that many of those died of epidemics, and accused Holocaust survivors and researchers of bearing “false witness” against Germans.[17] Rushdoony states, “The false witness born during World War II with respect to Germany is especially notable and revealing. The charge is repeatedly made that six million innocent Jews were slain by the Nazis, and the figure—and even larger figures—is now entrenched in the history books. Poncins, in summarizing the studies of the French Socialist, Paul Rassinier, himself a prisoner in Buchenwald, states: Rassinier reached the conclusion that the number of Jews who died after deportation is approximately 1,200,000 and this figure, he tells us, has finally been accepted as valid by the Centre Mondial de Documentation Juive Contemporaine. Likewise he notes that Paul Hilberg, in his study of the same problem, reached a total of 896,292 victims. Very many of these people died of epidemics; many were executed…” [18]
Rushdoony, in his book Foundations of Social Order, criticized Christians who in his view identified “‘God’ with the city, with the ‘spick, black nigger, bastard, Buddhahead, and kike,’ with ‘all men,’ and calls for communion with all men as they are… This concept runs deeply through the so-called Civil Rights Revolution.”
A very stupid attack, that does not even make any sense:
Kinists and communist-globalists are both alike. The difference is one
of scale. Kinists seek to destroy racial distinctions by creating an
all-white nation. Communist-globalists seek to destroy racial
distinctions by creating a color-blind, or “all white,” world (since
white is the absence of color).
A very stupid attack, that does not even make any sense:
Kinists and communist-globalists are both alike. The difference is one
of scale. Kinists seek to destroy racial distinctions by creating an
all-white nation. Communist-globalists seek to destroy racial
distinctions by creating a color-blind, or “all white,” world (since
white is the absence of color).
Well, that’s silly…
A small, homogenous community is not a nation; nor does Kinism preclude other ethnicities having their own places of residence (not sure if the concept of nation state is accurate in our context).
A very stupid attack, that does not even make any sense:
Kinists and communist-globalists are both alike. The difference is one
of scale. Kinists seek to destroy racial distinctions by creating an
all-white nation. Communist-globalists seek to destroy racial
distinctions by creating a color-blind, or “all white,” world (since
white is the absence of color).
That is the most valid and idiotic critique of Kinism I’ve run across. And that’s saying something. There have been a lot of idiotic critiques of Kinism. When someone who matters steps up to the plate, I’ll address it forthwith.
I’ve followed this recent little dust up from the start, and have yet to see any serious critique of the positions espoused here. It’s truly sad that supposedly grown, theologically-trained and sharp-thinking men argue this way.
At least three of them have said (repeatedly) that the topic (and our positions) are not worth responding to, and they made it known that they would not be replying or responding, only to go on and continue responding. They feel safe in the embrace of our pagan culture, and think that their majority position is a defense against an undesirable position. The weight of society is against us, they feel, and so if they ignore us, then they win by default. But, time and time again, they see that the people (at least the people exposed to this discussion) were willing to listen to sound reason and soberly reflect on the subjects involved. So, they would no longer feel safe in their pagan embrace, but feel compelled to write.
Out of all the sludge, caricatures, and straw-men, it seems that two people have come up with two different arguments that I feel are the “best” ones to arise out of all this. But, don’t mistake me here. I don’t respect the first one, and think it petty. The second one is more respectable and needs fleshing out.
Argument 1: Mr. B. Marinov, (no doubt hoping to bully people into conformity with his view) was fond of implying that “kinism” and “Marxism” go hand in hand because Marx and the communists played-up the distinctions among people. So, in some ambiguous and undefined way, the “kinist” (a term, I suppose, Mr. Marinov is powerless to define) is really a “Marxist.”
Argument 2: Was offered by Lori McDurmon, (whom I presume is the wife of American Vision’s Joel McDurmon) and was not picked up by the other egalitarians. I don’t think they saw her argument, or realized she was making it at the same time they were making their arguments. Her position was a well-articulated presentation of Gary North’s arguments against the continuing validity of the seed-concepts, and focused on the relevant passages. North argues that interracial marriages are allowed today because, in short, they are no longer applicable in the NT age.
I’m not saying these were good arguments. I’m just saying that, out of all the garbage on FB, and in various forums and emails the past week or so, these two bubbled to the surface as the most coherent (in my opinion.)
Doesn’t argument #2 only hold up if one believes that the New Testament wipes out all the obligations the Old? (There’s a fancy name for this, but I don’t remember what it is.)
My understanding is that Reformed Churches do not believe that position; that the OT, while not a detailed guide to behavior/dress/dietary/circumcision law, still has much to say about how we should live. If you completely disregard the OT, the ten commandments become null and void, being replaced by the law of Love (which will allow you to do pretty much anything, because you’re forgiven).
Does anyone know what that’s called? I’m afraid my theological terminology is kind of weak.
Thus, David, though very clearly and thoroughly soiled with the stain of miscegenation, was yet “king” of all Israel and Judah. Then there’s the fact that this miscegenation is given the honor of peculiar mention within the genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ!!!!!
He was also stained with the sin of stealing another man’s wife and murdering him and contrary to this poster, it is the ADULTERY and MURDER that are given special mention in the genealogy rather than “miscegenation” which isn’t even intimated at. However, even more interesting is that women are mentioned at all in the genealogy since they typically aren’t. Additionally, the women mentioned are prostitutes, adulterers, incestuous and generally not holy and blameless. Even if you believe this passage has something to do with interracial marriage, there is more here than an endorsement of miscegenation and it would require much more exegesis than the hacks are doing over at the board.
