In an article titled “An Invitation to Stoning” in the libertarian magazine Reason in 1998, Walter Olson wrote that one of the consequences of Mr. North’s extreme views was to “let everyone else feel moderate.”
He added: “Almost any anti-abortion stance seems nuanced compared to Gary North advocating the public execution of not only women who have abortions, but also those who advised them to do so.”
Asked to evaluate Mr. North’s legacy, David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a respected libertarian research group that is generally conservative in economic decisions and more liberal on social issues, said: “I have never read North and have not given him much attention.”
But many others, according to Mr. North’s website, which boasts, “No website by any evangelical news magazine, news site, theological seminary, church denomination, or publisher has even come close” to its popularity.
Mr. North’s 1996 book, nearly 1,000 pages long, claims that the Presbyterian Church has been taken over by theological liberals.
Mr. North was a meticulous researcher. In 1996, he published Fingers Crossed, a 1,000-page account of how theological liberals influenced the Presbyterian Church in the early 20th century (the first 300 pages alone included 900 footnotes). In 2012, he began the mission in 1973. , he completed a 31-volume economic commentary on the Bible.
While some of Mr. North’s strong views could be reduced to a matter of opinion or preference, many of his critics said others were weak or downright wrong. His prediction, for example, that the midnight computer crash of December 31, 1999, commonly known as Y2K, would set the stage for the birth of a liberating Christian theocracy—”Y2K is our deliverance,” he declared—turned out to be unfounded.