August, 1995 

Dear ICE Subscriber:

For about 15 years, approximately once a month, I have received a letter asking for information regarding where to attend a college, graduate school, or seminary that teaches theonomy. A variant of this letter is the one that inquires about a Sunday school curriculum, home school curriculum, or other curriculum that teaches theonomy.

I suppose this should be encouraging to me: people want to pursue the topic in a formal way. Yet these letters always depress me. These readers do not understand the nature of either social change or cultural innovation. They are seeking a completed academic program, preferably with full certification by secular humanist educators. That is, they expect our mortal enemies to certify programs designed by us for entry into the world of bureaucratically certified employment.

Occasionally, I imagine that perhaps Lenin received letters like this one in Siberia during his exile.

Dear Mr. Lenin:

I am very interested in Marxism. I have read several books by Marx and several of your books. I was wondering if you could recommend a university here in Russia that teaches your ideas. I want to major in political science. Could you recommend a detailed bibliography on Marxist political science, from lower division through graduate school? My goal is to be employed by the Czarist civil service after graduation.

Very truly yours,

This is not how academia works. Let us consider the careers of a few successful academic innovators.

Karl Marx never taught in a college. He never taught anywhere. He never had a job. He was supported by Friedrich Engels all of his life. He sat in the British Museum, took notes, and wrote.

Charles Darwin never taught anywhere. He never had a job after he returned from his five-year cruise on the H.M.S. Beagle. He married the heiress of the Wedgewood pottery fortune. He cut books into sections because too much weight on his lap bothered him, then he sat down on a couch, and read. He wrote.

Sigmund Freud always wanted to teach at the University of Vienna. He never got an offer. So, he psychoanalyzed people. He wrote.

Ludwig von Mises always wanted to teach at the University of Vienna. He never got an offer. So, he served as an economist with the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. He fled to the U.S. during World War II, and taught for 24 years at New York University (1945 to 1969) as a visiting professor. His salary paid by outside donors; NYU was simply a conduit. NYU got his services basically for free. He was an academic outcast. He wrote.

There is a pattern here. The intellectual pioneer is unable to get a job at a prestigious university. One of the few exceptions was Pitirim Sorokin, who founded Harvard's department of sociology in 1933. But one of his disciples refers to him as having later been forced into retirement. Sorokin was too conservative.

Karl Marx did not start a graduate school. Neither did Darwin or Freud. Nevertheless, they exercised enormous influence. It took Marx's ideas longer to become acceptable, but eventually these ideas triumphed. Today, they survive only in colleges.

Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962), speaks of a radical shift in a worldview as a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts in academia come from two places: (1) creative amateurs outside a formal academic discipline and probably outside the academic community; and (2) younger, untenured scholars who jeopardize their careers by speaking out. The more radical the thesis, the less likely that academia will tolerate it.

Yet successful innovations are eventually picked up by those academic institutions that would never have hired the innovator two generations earlier. This does the innovator no good whatsoever during his lifetime.

A truly radical innovation must first prove itself outside of establishment institutions. This should be obvious to everyone, but it isn't. Those trusting souls who ask about the developed programs that will spoon-feed them theonomy, certify them, and send them out into a world ready to pay them middle-class salaries are naive. They do not recognize how young this paradigm is. They do not recognize that this worldview has been pioneered by people who are outside of academia and whose careers were deliberately blocked by Christian academic institutions.

To become part of the Christian Reconstruction movement, a would-be academic must be ready to do the following: (1) go through the academic gauntlet of men who either no nothing about Christian Reconstruction or who hate it; (2) bootstrap his own academic field, all by himself; and (3) abandon all hope of a salary for his lifetime effort to bootstrap this discipline. The best he can hope for is to develop a mailing list of people who are willing to fund his efforts. This is extremely rare. To receive enough donations to pay a salary is even more rare.

This is the price of reconstruction. If you choose to follow Lenin, do not seek full-time employment in the Czar's bureaucracy.

There are no silver platters, no silver spoons, no spoon-fed reconstruction of society. There are only self-funded, bootstrapped careers. There are no off-the-shelf cookie mixes; you must bake from scratch.

Bureaucracy is not innovative. This seemingly obvious observation has yet to penetrate the thinking of many enthusiastic theonomic job-seekers. They think someone will happily pay them to undermine humanist society. Or they think that some church full of evangelicals and fundamentalists is ready to hear a young preacher challenge modern pietism and lay a mountain of social responsibility on them. The modern church is not an armory. It is a nursery.

What to do? One way that a Christian minister can earn a decent living is to set up a Christian day care center. If he can get 150 children into a 5,000 square foot building, the day care can gross almost $500,000 a year. This will pay for the real estate, pay his teachers, pay him very well, and leave money for starting another day care center. His wife can run it even if he decides to become a full-time pastor later on. She can get a very good income and build a retirement program for herself. This also gives her a good excuse for not becoming a full-time unpaid social worker, which is what many preachers wives are.

One day care center provides a comfortable income. Help launch a second by training new workers, and you can get a management fee and maybe a return on the real estate investment. For an entrepreneur, this offers opportunities to build equity in other centers. If a man launches new day care operations, by age 45, he can retire with a good income if he starts at age 25. He can then do anything he wants to do: preach, write, or whatever. Nick Kozell has helped start five centers since 1992.

If you do this, however, some home-school fanatic in your congregation may attack you as being unspiritual, an underminer of the family — as if the unmarried and divorced mothers who are the prime market for day care services have solid families. What they need is a stable environment for their children, where the children can learn to read at age 3 or 4, learn self-discipline, learn the ten commandments and the gospel, and have a man as a role model. This is what a Christian day care center can offer.

For churches that have empty space, Monday through Friday, here is the way to get non-Christens to pay off the debt and fund the establishment of new congregations.

If you are interested in day care as a career, contact Nick Kozell, Good Shepherd Day Care, 342 Neff Ave., Harrisonburg, VA 22801. He has set up a legal umbrella, as well as a training program, to help Christian day cares get started. In most states, it only takes 12 semester units of young child development to get licensed, assuming you have to be licensed. I did this at my local junior college in the evening for two semesters, just to say I had done it. It was not that difficult. If you are looking for a high income, low competition area of Christian service to get into, this is a very good one. I can't think of a better field for a new college graduate or for a 50-year-old victim of corporate downsizing.

With the demise of lifetime employment by large corporations, there are no longer any assurances. When an engineering firm or software firm can use the Internet to hire an English-speaking M.A. in engineering who lives in India, and pay him $400 a month, the newly graduated American engineer faces a major problem. He had better have something to offer an employer besides mere technical skill.

So, the new reality of the international free market is that the guarantees are disappearing. This is another reason why local services such as day care centers are good career choices. They do not face competition from Asia or Latin America.

My point is simple: to get involved in the Christian Reconstruction movement is to paint yourself into a career corner. You will initially have to fund your own operation. I did this with ICE. I still take no salary. I earn my money in the business world. Only a handful of pastors preach theonomy today, and they have one thing in common: small congregations. Unless you can make money outside of your calling, you will be hard-pressed financially.

The new economic reality is this: advanced professional degrees are today little more than job-hunting licenses. There are no guarantees. For example, seminaries are turning out thousands of graduates each year. There are not enough full-time positions available to employee all of these graduates. There is no escape from the risk of having to bootstrap a ministerial career. This is why beginning pastors need a second income. This is called bi-vocationalism. It used to be called tentmaking.

One seminary that trains men in bi-vocationalism is Cranmer Theological House in Shreveport, Louisiana. It is a Reformed Episcopal school. It offers a three-year degree M.Div. program, a three-year diploma program for students without a college degree, or a four-year Bachelor of Theology program. There is also one-year certificate in Bible and theology. It has an arrangement with a local manufacturer who offers jobs to up to 20 students. These pay $20,000 to $22,000 a year, which is a good income in Shreveport. Address: P. O. Box 52591, Shreveport, LA 71135-2591. Or call: 1-800-REC-0910. Its president is Ray Sutton, author of That You May Prosper.

Independence has a price. There are no free lunches. We must find ways to pay our own way. This is not easy, but it is rewarding in the long run.

Sincerely,