Homeschooled to Hell and Back

Evangelicalism tore my family apart; death brought us back together

Photo courtesy of author.

If I could trace the years of my childhood in the warm, Sacramento sun back to a single name, it would be R.J. Rushdoony — the father of Christian Reconstructionism, and, by many people’s definition, the strongest inspiration for the modern Christian homeschool movement.

In 1963, Rushdoony launched his ideas about the American educational system with a book titled, The Messianic Character of American Education. In 1965, he started the Chalcedon Foundation, an organization that would, eventually, go as far as to say that home education is the only model for education given in the Bible. In 1973, he wrote a book called The Institutes of Biblical Law, which referred to the biblical 10 commandments as the ordering principle to be applied to modern life, and offered that civil government must be dramatically shrunk to meet biblical standards. With that, he’d launched the Christian Reconstruction movement that sent my parents — among so many others — running from America’s private and public school systems and into an entirely different kind of educational design.

In 1989, the year that I was born, Bill Gothard launched his Institute in Basic Life Principles — an organization that would later be riddled with sexual abuse allegations and…