How Pragmatism Shaped a Theological Movement
One of the stranger alignments in late-twentieth-century American Protestant political thought was the marriage of Theonomy, also known as Christian Reconstruction, with libertarian economics. To a casual observer this pairing looks odd, even incoherent. Theonomy calls for the public application of biblical law and the moral disciplining of the civil order, libertarianism calls for a radically limited state, market neutrality, and a general skepticism toward collective moral enforcement. One seeks a covenantal polity, the other seeks procedural minimalism. One is thick with moral content, the other is deliberately thin.
Yet for several decades, these two impulses traveled together within significant portions of the Reformed world. The result was not merely an intellectual oddity but a revealing episode in the story of American Protestant political adaptation.
At root, Theonomy is a profoundly political doctrine. Its architects, most prominently R. J. Rushdoony and Greg Bahnsen, insisted that Christ’s lordship extends beyond the private heart, beyond the church, and into the structures of civil life. The Mosaic law, purified of its ceremonial elements, was treated as a continuing standard for justice. The magistrate was not merely a peacekeeper but a moral agent accountable to God. In its classical form, Theonomy aimed at nothing less than a re-Christianization of public order.
Libertarianism, by contrast, emerged from a very different genealogy. It is the child of modern liberalism’s fear of concentrated power and its faith in spontaneous order. Markets are presumed to be morally neutral mechanisms of coordination, the state exists primarily to protect property and enforce contracts. Questions of virtue, truth, and the common good are largely displaced into voluntary communities rather than embedded in law.
Placed side by side, these traditions pull in opposite directions. Theonomists want a morally activist state, libertarians want a morally agnostic one. Theonomists see law as catechetical and formative, libertarians see law as merely protective. Theonomists dream of covenantal unity, libertarians assume durable pluralism. That is a real tension, not a superficial one.
The first reason for this unlikely convergence was a shared adversary. Both movements looked with hostility upon the managerial-welfare state that had crystallized in mid-century America. To Reconstructionists, the administrative state represented not merely bureaucratic bloat but a spiritual usurpation, a rival sovereignty that displaced God with technocracy. To libertarians, it represented coercion, inefficiency, and the slow erosion of individual liberty. In opposing the same enemy, they formed a tactical alliance that obscured deeper philosophical incompatibilities.
Second, American Reformed Protestantism already carried a deep streak of individualism. The emphasis on personal covenant, the suspicion of hierarchical establishments, and the historical memory of dissent against state churches predisposed many evangelicals toward a small-state imagination. Libertarian economics, with its language of freedom, choice, and decentralized order, resonated instinctively with this ethos even when it sat uneasily beside biblical visions of communal obligation and divine justice.
Politics, classically understood
Before turning to the subsequent retreat, it is worth clarifying what “politics” means in a classical Christian register, because much of the confusion in the libertarian–Theonomic synthesis arises from a modern, flattened conception of political life.
For the ancients, and for much of the Christian tradition that followed them, politics was not merely the management of power, the adjudication of interests, or the securing of negative liberty. It was, at root, the ordered pursuit of the just or righteous polis. In Greek, the language of dikaiosynē sits at the center of both ethical and political reflection, the same word-family that describes a rightly ordered soul also describes a rightly ordered city. To ask what is just for a person and what is just for a community is to ask parallel questions about right order.
On this classical view, the city is not simply a neutral container for private pursuits. It is a moral form that shapes its citizens, habituates them toward certain ends, and embodies a shared vision of what is noble, fitting, and good. Law is therefore not merely protective but pedagogical. Institutions do not simply prevent harm, they cultivate character. Politics, properly understood, is the collective discernment and maintenance of this just order.
Christian political theology inherited and deepened this insight. The just polis is not merely one that maximizes freedom or efficiency, but one that reflects, however imperfectly, the righteousness of God in its public life. Rulers are accountable not only to the governed but to a higher standard of justice. Economic arrangements, legal structures, and civic rituals are all understood as morally charged rather than morally neutral.
Seen in this light, both libertarian minimalism and an overly narrow Theonomic literalism distort politics in different ways. Libertarianism tends to evacuate the polis of its moral substance, reducing politics to the protection of private spheres. Classical Theonomy, at least in its early form, rightly insisted that law must serve justice, but often equated justice too directly with the Mosaic civil code rather than with a broader, more mature account of righteousness under Christ.
A classical understanding of politics as the pursuit of a just city therefore clarifies what was at stake in the Reconstructionist project, why its alliance with libertarianism was unstable, and why the later turn inward represented more than a tactical adjustment.
The retreat into the church
But the most significant factor was a gradual and largely unspoken retreat from politics into the life of the church. By the 1980s and 1990s, it was clear that a full Theonomic program was politically implausible in a liberal, pluralistic society. Rather than abandon Theonomy altogether, many of its adherents implicitly relocated its ambitions. The state receded from view, the church, family, and Christian institutions moved to the foreground. The goal shifted from reconstructing the civil order to constructing resilient covenant communities within a hostile or indifferent public square.
Here libertarianism proved psychologically useful. A minimal state promised breathing room for Christian schools, businesses, and congregations. Markets could be imagined as neutral spaces where faithful communities might thrive without interference. In effect, libertarian economics became a defensive shell around an ecclesiocentric project, a way to protect the church’s internal life by limiting the reach of secular power.
This produced a paradox. Reconstructionists continued to speak as if they sought a renewed Christendom, yet their preferred economic and political arrangements assumed a liberal order that privatized faith and fragmented the common good. The dream of a covenantal nation was gradually replaced by the reality of parallel Christian subcultures operating within a largely libertarian framework.
The internal reckoning
What makes this story more interesting is that the most searching critique of classical Theonomy did not come primarily from liberals or secular scholars, but from within the Reconstructionist orbit itself, most notably in the post-Theonomic work of James B. Jordan.
Jordan began as a close associate of Rushdoony and was deeply shaped by the Reconstructionist movement. Over time, however, he came to a fundamental conclusion that unsettled the entire project: the Mosaic Law was never intended as a timeless civic code for all nations, but as a pedagogical regime for an immature covenant people awaiting maturity in Christ.
In Jordan’s reading, the Law functioned less as a permanent blueprint for civil government and more as a tutor, a formational structure that disciplined Israel toward the coming of the New Covenant. Once Christ arrived, the political meaning of the Law did not simply “transfer” to modern states, rather, it was transfigured into a more mature political theology grounded in Christ’s kingship, sacramental life, and the creational order rather than Mosaic casuistry.
For Jordan, this meant that Christian political reflection should not begin by asking, “How do we reapply Deuteronomy to modern civil law?” Instead, it should ask: What does it mean for Christ to reign over nations now? How does the church’s sacramental life shape political imagination? What does covenant faithfulness look like in a post-resurrection world?
This move subtly but decisively displaced the original Theonomic project. Where Rushdoony and Bahnsen treated the Mosaic code as a quasi-constitutional template, Jordan treated it as a historical stage in God’s pedagogy, not a permanent civil order.
Ironically, this pushed Jordan away from libertarianism as well. If politics is shaped by Christ’s kingship and sacramental order, then neither the minimalist state nor the privatization of faith suffices. Jordan’s later work pointed toward a richer, more sacramental, and more politically serious Christian vision than either libertarianism or classical Reconstructionism could offer.
The deeper irony
A broader irony remains. Classical Christendom was never libertarian in this sense. Medieval and early modern Christian polities assumed that law should shape souls, that rulers were accountable to divine standards, and that economic life was morally ordered toward the common good. By embracing libertarianism, many Reconstructionists inadvertently adopted the political logic of the very modernity they claimed to reject.
What emerged was not a recovery of historic Christian politics but a peculiar hybrid: Reformed moral intensity housed within neoliberal political assumptions. The church became strong precisely as the public realm became thinner. Jordan’s intervention shows that the real tension was not merely between Theonomy and libertarianism, but between Mosaic civil literalism and a genuinely New Covenant political theology.
This leaves contemporary Christians with sharper choices than Reconstructionism ever fully acknowledged. One option is to pursue classical Theonomy consistently, accepting that a truly covenantal vision requires a robust, morally directive state, one that would necessarily depart from libertarian economics. A second option is to accept libertarianism consistently and relinquish Theonomy as a civil program, confining biblical law to the life of the church and voluntary communities.
A third path, closer to Jordan and to classical Christian realism, would affirm that Christ’s kingship has public meaning, but would read the Mosaic Law as formative rather than constitutional, developing a political theology rooted in creation, covenant, and sacrament rather than the direct transplantation of Old Testament case law.
Whichever route one prefers, the old synthesis of libertarian economics and Theonomic politics can no longer be treated as coherent. It was born less from theological necessity than from historical circumstance and cultural anxiety. Its real legacy is not a blueprint for Christian politics but a case study in how a community, sensing its marginalization, retreated inward while borrowing the political logic of the surrounding age.
In that sense, libertarian Theonomy tells us more about American Protestant adaptation to modernity than it does about biblical political order. Jordan’s later work suggests that the real task is not to revive Moses for the modern state, but to think about politics more deeply under the lordship of the risen Christ.
Image Credit: Moses and Aaron with the Ten Commandments (1675), Aron de Chavez. Wikimedia Commons.
