"[10] Within weeks of arriving in America, his parents moved to the small farming community of Kingsburg, California, in Fresno County, where a number of other Armenian families had relocated.

Rousas learned to read English by poring over the family's King James Bible: "By the time I reached my teens I had read the Bible through from cover to cover, over and over and over again.” The family moved in 1925 for a short time to Detroit, Michigan, where his father pastored another Armenian church.

Rushdoony attended the Pacific School of Religion, a Congregationalist and Methodist seminary in Berkeley, California, from which he graduated in 1944.

Through letters over the years, he kept up his friendship with his Pacific School of Religion mentor, theology professor George Huntston Williams, who saw in him the "heir of a great national Christian heritage" who would "enunciate anew the Gospel which seems to have been forgotten for a season."

[13][15] In Santa Cruz, Rushdoony became a reader of the Christian libertarian magazine Faith and Freedom, which advocated an "anti-tax, non-interventionist, anti-statist economic model" in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

[17] Rushdoony contributed articles to Faith and Freedom, including one describing his observations of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, arguing that government support had reduced residents to "social and personal irresponsibility".

In their petition, the group asked that Rushdoony be ordained as their pastor and stated, "[W]e cannot abide in any church which seeks to define righteousness or sin, salvation or sanctification, except in terms of the Word of God.

Chalcedon and Reconstructionism obtained the support of major Christian book publishers and endorsements from influential evangelical leaders, including Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Frank Schaeffer (who later repudiated the movement).

In fact, Rushdoony's primary innovation was his single-minded effort to popularize a pre-Enlightenment, medieval view of a God-centered world.

By de-emphasizing humanity's ability to reason independently of God, Rushdoony attacked the assumptions most of us uncritically accept.Rushdoony developed his philosophy as an extension of the work of Calvinist philosopher Cornelius Van Til.

In order to be rational, Van Til claimed, one must presuppose the existence of God and the inerrant, divine inspiration of the (Protestant) Bible.

"[9] Rushdoony began to promote the works of Calvinist philosophers Cornelius Van Til and Herman Dooyeweerd into a short survey of contemporary humanism called By What Standard?.

Arguing for a Calvinist system of thought, Rushdoony dealt with subjects as broad as epistemology and cognitive metaphysics and as narrow as the psychology of religion and predestination.

Rushdoony's next focus was on education, especially on behalf of homeschooling, which he saw as a way to combat the intentionally secular nature of the U.S. public school system.

"[23] Some historians have argued that this aspect of Rushdoony's thought influenced some activists in the Neo-Confederate movement[23] and Southern conservatives such as J. Steven Wilkins.

Under such a system, the list of civil crimes which carried a death sentence would include homosexuality, adultery, incest, lying about one's virginity, bestiality, witchcraft, idolatry or apostasy, public blasphemy, false prophesying, kidnapping, rape, and bearing false witness in a capital case.

[27] Although he supported the separation of church and state at the national level, Rushdoony also believed that both institutions were under the rule of God,[28] and thus he conceived secularism as posing endless false dichotomies, which his massive work addresses in considerable detail.

Rushdoony argues that the Constitution's purpose was to protect religion from the federal government and to preserve "states' rights.

"[33] Rushdoony's work has been used by Dominion Theology advocates who attempt to implement a Christian government subject to Biblical law in the United States.

He also published the Journal of Christian Reconstruction and was an early board member of the Rutherford Institute, founded in 1982 by John W. Whitehead.

Pointing to Rushdoony's support for the death penalty, the British Centre for Science Education decried his perceived dislike of democracy and tolerance.

"[39] In The Institutes of Biblical Law, he uses the 1967 work Judaism and the Vatican by Léon de Poncins as a source for Paul Rassinier's figure of 1.2 million Jewish deaths during the Holocaust, and the claim that Raul Hilberg calculated the number at 896,292, and further asserts that very many of these died of epidemics.

"[42] Carl R. Trueman, Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary wrote in 2009 regarding the passage and Rushdoony's Holocaust denial: His sources are atrocious, secondhand, and unverified; that he held this position speaks volumes about his appalling incompetence as a historian, and one can only speculate as to why he held the position from a moral perspective… He deals with the matter under the issue of the ninth commandment and, ironically breaches it himself in his presentation of the matter.

[43]Joe Boot, on the other hand, rejects Trueman's claim, arguing that Rushdoony's "sole point was to say that our society has become so desensitized to violence, brutality, and cruelty that citing murders in small numbers doesn't have the same psychological impact upon people anymore.