Chalcedon Blog

I received an email today from Mr. John Sugg of Creative Loafing and author of the recent Mother Jones article, "A Nation Under God." In the published article it explicitly reads as Mr. Sugg claiming Rushdoony denied the holocaust. A claim that is patently false. Here is what Mother Jones printed:

His defining tome, the 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, was published in 1973. But because of its extremism and overt racism - Rushdoony denied the Holocaust and defended segregation and slavery - Institutes and its author were largely ignored in mainstream circles until the movement launched by Schaeffer found its intellectual grounding in Rushdoony’s writings.

John sent me his original statement which is much different. I fault the editors of Mother Jones for radically altering John's statement. I can understand an editor's need to reduce the word count, but John's meaning is changed by the reduction. Here is what he originally wrote:

Rushdoony opined about what he calls the "false witness" of Germany's
responsibility for the Holocaust. He dismissed the accuracy of 6 million
Jews being slain, suggesting it was likely only a fraction of that number,
and he shrugs off Josef Mengele's hideous human experiments as "a few
sterilized women and a few castrated men."

What's not being debated here is the veracity of Rushdoony's beliefs regarding the holocaust. What's important is that we accurately represent Mr. Sugg's remarks now that they are brought to our attention. I hope Mother Jones will exercise more caution in the future when dealing with such a complex system as Christianity.