Gary North
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- For the bisexual rights activist, see Gary North (journalist)
Gary North is a writer and publisher from the Christian Reconstruction movement. (He is the son-in-law of R.J. Rushdoony, one of the movement's founders.) North received a PhD in History 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.
Contents |
[edit] Theological beliefs
| Part of the series on Dominionism |
| Ideas |
| People who advocate Dominionism |
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R. J. Rushdoony |
| Dominionist groups |
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Chalcedon Foundation |
| People who influence Dominionism |
| People who define and track Dominionism |
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TheocracyWatch |
| Financiers of Dominionism |
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, but not all, 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] Y2K controversy
North has attracted much criticism for his beliefs, not least from Dispensationalists who obviously dispute his Millennial eschatology. Many Calvinists, especially those who hold to an Amillennial eschatology (which is most of them), also dispute North's position. His postmillennial views were once the majority position among American Calvinists prior to the 20th century.[citation needed]
Gary North once predicted that Y2K would be a global catastrophe.[2] He later publicly apologised for his mistaken view of Y2K in a January 2000 ICE newsletter. North previously co-authored Fighting Chance: Ten Feet to Survival, a book urging the construction of backyard underground fallout shelters in anticipation of a predicted nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
[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 somewhat libertarian, but socially, he as 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. North claims such measures are in line with libertarian social principles because, as in Ancient Israel, the church/community would execute people not the state.[citation needed]
