[7] North converted to Christianity in high school and, after attending a rally where anti-communist activist Fred Schwarz spoke, began frequenting conservative book-stores in the Los Angeles area during his college years.

[8] Between 1961 and 1963, while an undergraduate student at University of California, Riverside, North became acquainted with the works of Wilhelm Röpke, Rose Wilder Lane, Cornelius Van Til, Austrian School economists Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard, and also read the works of Calvinist philosopher Rousas John Rushdoony.

[15] North's own website, Garynorth.com, posts commentary on religious, social, and political issues and offers paid access to investment advice and other premium content.

[19][20][21] As director of curriculum development, North outlined four goals of the educational project: providing a "detailed study" of the "history of liberty"; teaching a "thorough understanding of Austrian economics"; serving as "an academically rigorous curriculum that is tied to primary source" material rather than textbooks; and teaching "the Biblical principle of self-government and personal responsibility", which North called "the foundation of the market economy".

[22] North wrote that the "starting point for all economic analysis" lies in accepting that "God [has] cursed the earth" in the Book of Genesis 3:17–19; this "made scarcity an inescapable fact of man's existence".

According to the Times, North believed that the Bible forbids inflation, welfare programs, and also writes that "God would prefer gold money to paper".

[4][32] For non-capital offenses, North eschewed prisons as a punishment, but preferred "whipping, restitution in the form of indentured servitude, or slavery".

[36] North was also a prominent promoter of exaggerated predictions of computer failure from the Year 2000 problem (Y2K) during the late 1990s,[37][38][39][40][41] earning him the nickname "Scary Gary.

"[42] His main website became dominated by links to extremist predictions for Y2K damage, including widespread collapse of governments and financial institutions.

North declared on his home page that Y2K "may be the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced" and labeled 2000 as "The Year the Earth Stands Still".

[43] Critics said the motivation for North's predictions was linked to his Christian reconstructionist aims, which require widespread societal collapse to set the stage for a new theocratic order.