Gary North
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- For the bisexual rights activist, see Gary North (journalist)
Gary Kilgore North (born 1942) is a writer and publisher from the Christian Reconstruction movement.
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[edit] Biography
North received a PhD in economic history (The concept of property in Puritan New England, 1630-1720) from the University of California, Riverside in 1972. He gained some wider notoriety for his inaccurate prediction of Y2K catastrophe before 2000. Starting in 1967, North became a frequent contributor to the libertarian journal The Freeman. His writings also appear on LewRockwell.com.
North is the son-in-law of R.J. Rushdoony, one of the founders of Christian Reconstructionism.
[edit] Theological beliefs
Most Christian Reconstructionists hold to a type of Postmillennialism that holds that Jesus will return to earth only after Trinitarian Christianity has become the religion of the majority of the planet, with God's moral law as the civil standard for society. They believe that Old Testament moral and civil laws, such as those against adultery and sodomy and murder, should be presumed binding unless the New Testament says otherwise; this belief they call theonomy. Critics argue that what North is describing would be a theocracy, and that North and other Postmillennial proponents of Dominion Theology have influenced the growth of the Dominionist tendency among the much larger (and largely Premillennialist) Christian Right.[citation needed]
Theologically, Gary North is a Calvinist. He is president of the Institute for Christian Economics[1] which publishes many Christian Reconstructionist books online. Christian Reconstructionists are also presuppositionalists in their approach to Christian apologetics as taught by the Calvinist philosopher, Cornelius Van Til and oppose any natural law theory as a basis for civil law order. North is a member of the Presbyterian Church in America.
[edit] Predictions of catastrophes
In 1986, North co-authored with Arthur Robinson Fighting Chance: Ten Feet to Survival, a book advocating a nationwide civil defense program to construct underground shelters protecting US citizens against an anticipated nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. In 1987, North predicted in Remnant Review that an AIDS epidemic would overwhelm the world's hospitals by 1992.
In the late 1990's, North predicted that Y2K would be a global catastrophe,[2] and promoted his theories in the media and in his Remnant Review newsletter and website. In December 1999 he retracted his position,[citation needed] and in a January 2000 ICE newsletter, he publicly apologized for his mistaken view of Y2K, saying he was baffled as to why the transition didn't bring global chaos.
[edit] Political beliefs
North argues for the abolition of the fractional-reserve banking system, and a return to the gold standard. He also opposes the US Department of Education and Council on Higher Education Accreditation claiming it is a "cartel" and the group has, in part, caused higher education to "become uniformly secular, liberal, and mediocre: raising the cost of entry."[1] Furthermore, North believes that education and course work can be compacted on videos and DVDs and he sees the USDE and CHEA as preventing people from being educated through these media.
North's economic views are libertarian, and he is a believer in the Austrian School of economics.
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However, socially, he is an advocate of theonomic rule ("the rule of God's law") and proposes a strict legal system based on Biblical laws, which might execute people for violations of those laws (such as sodomy, adultery, witchcraft) that are not capital offenses under current U.S. laws.[citation needed]
[edit] Quotes
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"There is no doubt that Christianity teaches pluralism, but a very special kind of pluralism: plural institutions under God's single comprehensive law system. It does not teach a pluralism of law structures, or a pluralism of moralities, for this sort of hypothetical legal pluralism (as distinguished from institutional pluralism) is always either polytheistic or humanistic. ..."
"In this structure of plural governments, the institutional churches serve as advisors to the other institutions (the Levitical function), but the churches can only pressure individual leaders through the threat of excommunication. As a restraining factor on unwarranted Church authority, an excommunicaton by one local church or denomination is always subject to review by another, if and when the excommunicated person seeks membership elsewhere. Thus, each of the three covenantal institutions is to be run under God, as interpreted by its lawfully elected or ordained leaders, with the advice of the churches, not their compulsion." Gary North, Political Polytheism, pp. 576-577.
"The Bible does not allow the imposition of some sort of top-down bureaucratic tyranny in the name of Christ. The kingdom of God requires a bottom-up society. The bottom-up Christian society rests ultimately on the doctrine of self-government under God, with God's law as the publicly revealed standard of performance. It is the humanists' view of society that promotes top-down bureaucratic power. ..."
"Let's get this straight: Christian reconstruction depends on majority rule. More than this; it depends on overwhelming acceptance of the biblical covenant, perhaps as high as the 80% range of adult acceptance. In the initial stages of the Constitutional reform movement, such as today, Christians are under the civil rule of the majority. We must work within a covenantally alien system, and we must do so peacefully." Gary North, Political Polytheism, p. 586.
"It is not possible to ramrod God's blessings from the top down, unless you are God.... Only humanists believe that man is God. They do indeed believe in social salvation through ramrodding by the state. Christians are simply trying to get the ramrod away from them and melt it down." Gary North, Political Polytheism, p. 590.
"In winning a nation to the gospel, the sword as well as the pen must be used" (Gary North, Christian Reconstructionism, p. 198).
"The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant - baptism and holy communion - must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel. The way to achieve this political goal is through successful mass evangelism followed by constitutional revision." Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism, p. 87
"As a tactic for a short-run defense of the independent Christian school movement, the appeal to religious liberty is legitimate. Everyone who is attempting to impose a world-and-life view on a majority (or on a ruling minority) always uses some version of the liberty doctrine to buy himself and his movement some time, some organizational freedom, and some power. Still, nobody really believes in the whole idea. Politics always involves establishing one view of the 'holy commonwealth,' and excluding all other rival views. The Communist Party uses the right of free association to get an opportunity to create a society in which all such rights are illegal. The major churches of any society are all maneuvering for power, so that their idea of lawful legislation will become predominant. They are all perfectly willing to use the ideal of religious liberty as a device to gain power, until the day comes that abortion is legalized (denying the right of life to infants) or prohibited (denying the 'right of control over her own body,' after conception, to each woman). Everyone talks about religious liberty, but no one believes it.
"So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." Gary North, "The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right", The Failure of the American Baptist Culture, pp. 24-25.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- North's official site
- Articles by North
- Mises on Money by Gary North
- Gary North writings available free to read online
- NNDB Profile
- "Invitation to a Stoning: Getting cozy with theocrats" by Walter Olson, Reason (magazine), November 1998
- A critical 1998 commentary on Gary North's apocalyptic Year 2000 views
- "Super-Cheap Accredited Colleges" video by North
