Mark Rushdoony says that his father, R. J. Rushdoony, was not a Kinist

R. J. Rushdoony

The following is an email conversation sent to us by Les Riley between himself and Mark Rushdoony.  We have confirmed the conversation with Mark Rushdoony, who said we are free to publish this online. 

Mr. Rushdoony,

My family & I have benefited greatly from your father's work & the broader work of Chalcedon. I have shared with many.

Recently, there have been some claims about your father's beliefs related to race.

1) Many leftists call him a "racist" and this claim has been picked up by a number of reformed & other Christian people to say "stay away from Rushdoony -- he promoted racism"
2) On the other end of the spectrum the so-called Kinist movement ("reformed" racialists) agree with this, but they love it. Kinists claim your father as one of their own.

Refuting the first group (Marxists & those who blindly believe them) is not high on my priority list.

But, setting the record straight with the "Kinists" is something I do think needs to be done, soon.
If RJ Rushdoony would have agreed with the Kinists, please let me know. If not, please do likewise.

Thanks
Les Riley

Mark Rushdoony's reply to Les Riley:

Dear Mr. Riley,

The reference to race has long been used as a criticism of my father. In Institutes of Biblical Law I he was critical of interracial and intercultural marriages. The key to understanding his comments was the fact that he was talking about unequal yoking.

As a young minister at the end of WWII, he observed the broken marriages of U.S. G.I.'s. to "war brides." In many instances the GI's had looked at cultural traits and had mistaken them as personal traits. For instance, they saw Japanese women who showed complete deference to men.

They thought these were "old fashioned girls." They saw their cultural behavior and mistook it for a character trait.

After being married for a time, they began to see the womens' character and personality. As the women became more Americanized, it became obvious that they had little in common. They were, in fact, unequally yoked because they did not understand or even know one another. This was the thrust of his comments.

I once heard him specifically say regarding inter-racial marriages that we cannot forbid what the Bible does not. I was not involved in most of the marriages he performed, but I know he did perform at least one inter-racial (black/white) marriage, that of the son of a friend.

As that last fact would certainly show, he was not a Kinnist. You are right; they use the same quote to support their view. He saw the crucial unity to be that of faith, not race, and the reason for equal yoking to be (as with yoked oxen from which the analogy is derived) the necessity of working together.

Being too different interferes with the ability to work together towards Godly dominion. Anything which hampers that ability makes equal yoking more difficult, though not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle.

I hope this helps.

Mark Rushdoony
Chalcedon