Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Whitehead is founder and president of the Rutherford Institute, which is active in many
important religious rights cases, including creationism cases. The Institute is named after
Samuel Rutherford (eulogized by D.James Kennedy) who, in his 1644 Lex Rex, argued
against the “divine right” of kings, declaring that the law—God’s sovereign Law—was
king, and not vice-versa (not ‘Rex Lex’). Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation was
“instrumental in establishing the Rutherford Institute,” according to Rutherford
promotional literature. In a 1977 book, The Separation Illusion, heavily influenced by
Rushdoony (who wrote the Foreword), Whitehead dismissed democracy as mob rule, and
explained that religion was never intended to be separated from government. Whitehead,
as already noted, defended the Calvinist South against the Northern Unitarian-Statist
aggressors in the Civil War.
David Hoggan, who has a Harvard history Ph.D., was another follower of
Rushdoony’s. He wrote sections of Rushdoony’s books (e.g. Rushdoony 1963), and
dedicated his own book The Myth of the ‘New History’ to Rushdoony, who he cites
frequently. In that book, which justifies Germany’s role in the World Wars, Hoggan
argued that evolutionist, anti-biblical propagandists have rewritten history (the “New
History”) to serve their ideological purposes, a distortion he and other “revisionist”
historians seek to correct. He advocates Christian values, and also argues that since
blacks were not worse off under slavery, the Civil War was a needless conflict. His
book, originally published by Craig Press, was reprinted by the Institute for Historical
Review of Torrance (now Costa Mesa), California, the group that denies that the Nazis
systematically killed Jews. 47 The last IHR conference was dedicated to Hoggan, and IHR
has just published Hoggan’s major work, The Forced War (1989), an apologetic for
Germany’s role in WWII, originally published in 1961 in German.
The best-known creation-science leaders are not racist (at last not in the most
direct sense). 48 But the views of the creationist Reconstructionists are easily adopted by
racists. All men are not equal. Christian is “radically anti-democratic”; democracy is a
great heresy; there is a “spiritual aristocracy.” North, in an article on the “Basic
Implications of the Six-Day Creation” in the debut J. of Christian Reconstruction issue
(North 1974:24), writes that:
There are therefore two distinct brotherhoods, for there are two fatherhoods: God the Father-Creator of all
men and God the Father-Redeemer of some men...Not all men are brothers ethically; the brotherhood of the
promise of grace is limited to God’s predestined elect.
47 The dedication to Rushdoony is omitted in the IHR edition, though many revisionist supporters are also
fundamentalist creationists—notably Herman Otten, who was a featured speaker at the last IHR conference.
In response to an inquiry of mine about Hoggan, Rushdoony denied that Hoggan was a Reconstructionist,
and said that he and Hoggan hadn’t had any contact since working together in the sixties at an unnamed
conservative foundation. Rushdoony also claimed to know nothing about Hoggan’s IHR ties.
48 Creationists such as Morris and Custance maintain that human races—descendants of Noah’s three sons
—have different and distinctive capacities and talents: Shemites (Semites) as spiritual leaders, Japhethites
(whites) as intellectual and political leaders, and Hamites (blacks, Mongoloids) as concentrating on
material and physical aspects of life. Morris condemns all extra-biblical genocide, but condones genocidal
acts described in the Old Testament, which of course he interprets literally. Many other creationists have
been flagrantly racist (e.g. Hasskarl 1898, Carroll 1900), and some still are today. See entries listed under
“racism” in subject index of McIver 1988a.