Following are quotes by Gary North in from the 1980s when he was part of a core group of Christian Reconstructionists in Tyler, Texas building the movement.  North stated in the introduction to his 1989 book Myth of Pluralism,  

"I am trying to lay the biblical foundations of an alternative society to humanism's present social order."

Christian Reconstructionism is often described as the movement that wants to execute adulterers, blasphemers, and homosexuals, by stoning.  Since this is not likely to happen any time soon, the movement is often dismissed as fringe and inconsequential.  The preoccupation with the stoning aspect has obscured the fact that many other foundational components of the movement have been mainstreamed in the Religious Right since the time when Gary North wrote the following words.  As you read the following quotes, consider how much of North's philosophy is now commonplace, not only in the Christian Right but also in this year's political campaigns.

One of the most revealing of Gary North's writings is in the first volume of the journal Christianity and Civilization, published by the Geneva Divinity School in Spring, 1982.  The entire issue was dedicated to "The Symposium on the Failure of American Baptist Culture."  According to editor James B. Jordan,

"The New Christian Right has indicated time and time again, that it does not know what it is doing, and its program is riddled with contradictions."

The Calvinist contributors to the journal were coming to the rescue to help the New Christian Right find "sure footing" and  argued that the movement would have to abandon its "Baptist individualism" and adopt the Christian Reconstructionist's brand of "full-orbed Biblical and Reformed Theology" in order to survive.  Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist Baptist, and Paul Weyrich had founded the Moral Majority three years prior, in 1979.

The following quotes are from North's article titled "The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right."  North begins by describing the 1980 Religious Roundtable-sponsored event in Washington, D.C., which drew 15,000 people.[Correction: The Religious Round Table office was in D.C. The rally was in Dallas, Texas.] The "National Affairs Briefing Conference" featured New Christian Right leaders and was keynoted by Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.  North describes it as "watershed moment for American fundamentalism."

"The rally was a political rally; more precisely, it was a rally for politics as such, and for Christian involvement in politics. It was a break from almost six decades of political inaction on the part of American fundamentalist religious leaders.
[p. 2]

North continues,

"Bible principles" is a euphemism for Old Testament law. The leaders of the fundamentalist movement are generally premillennial dispensationalists.  Some are believers in a pretribulation "rapture," meaning that Christians will be secretly "called into the heavens" before the great tribulation of the nation of Israel.  Others, a growing minority, are post-tribulationists, who think that Christians will go through the tribulation period before Christ comes to transform Christian believers into sinless, death-free people who will rule the world under Christ's personal administration for a thousand years. All premillennialists believe that the world will become worse before Christ returns in person to set up his thousand-year reign, so that they have tended in the past to take a dim view of those who preached the moral necessity of social and political action.  The campaign of 1980 changed this outlook.  Now they are talking about restoring morality to politics by imposing "Bible principles" on the nation.  Not Old Testament law exactly, yet "principles" based on Old Testament law. [p. 8]

North explains that the majority of American fundamentalists rejected Old Testament Law as valid because of their Dispensational theology and shunned political participation.  He also explains how this began to change after the election of President Jimmy Carter, when the Christian Right was "stung" by the "self-proclaimed born again" Baptist who North described as "handpicked by David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission."

North credits Rousas Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, as laying the foundation for political activism by the New Christian Right.

It was only with the publications written by R.J. Rushdoony, beginning in the early 1960's, that any theologian began to make a serious, systematic, exegetical attempt to link the Bible to principles of limited civil government and free-market economics. [p. 11]

North then describes a "black-out" of Rushdoony's work during the 60s and 70s, when he was not able to get his books reviewed in the Westminster Theological Journal with the exception of his Institutes of Biblical Law.

Thus, the fundamentalists have had no intellectual leadership throughout the twentieth century.  Only with the revival of interest in creationism, which was made possible by Rushdoony's support and Presbyterian and Reformed initial investment for The Genesis Flood, did the fundamentalist movement begin to get involved in arguments outside theology narrowly defined. [p. 11]

The 1960 book referred to by North, The Genesis Flood, was authored by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, and is credited as triggering the modern revival of creationism.

North continues,

In the speakers' room at the National Affairs Briefing Conference, I spoke with Robert Billings, who had worked with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority organization.  (He was subsequently appointed to a high position in the Department of Education.)  We were speaking of the conference, and what a remarkable event it was.  We agreed that it was unfortunate that Rushdoony was not speaking.  He said, If it weren't for his books, none of us would be here."  I replied, "Nobody in the audience understands that."  His response: "True, but we do." [p. 12]

The fundamentalist have picked up the phrase "secular humanism."  They do not know where they found it.  It comes from Rushdoony's writings throughout the 1960s.  Rushdoony influenced lawyer John Whitehead, who helped popularize it in a new widely quoted article by Whitehead and former Congressman John Conlan.  [p. 14]

Under the heading "State-Financed Education," North writes,

Fundamentalists are still trying to win their battle for the public schools.  Not all of them, perhaps, but enough of them, especially those who lead the creation science movement.  In 1982, they were still trying to get the public schools of the state of Arkansas to adopt creationist materials to be taught as part of the schools' curricula in science.  They had already given away the case by arguing only that creationism is a legitimate theory and explanation of the origins of the universe and man, to be taught alongside of evolution.  [p. 18]

The government schools are established as a humanist religion aimed at stamping out Christianity.  This is what Rushdoony said in his pathbreaking scholarly study, The Messianic Character of American Education (1963) The creationists are still schizophrenic.  They do not recognize the mythical nature of the objectivity hypothesis, and therefore they have chosen to do battle in terms of that mythical framework.  They therefore have to grant the evolutionists, in advance, equal rights with God's own revelation of Himself.  If they refused to do this, they would have no legal case to get their materials into the public schools.  Yet the public schools are a fraud; they are humanist schools th