Politics and Liberty

Liberty and Law

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 2

Track: 12

Dictation Name: RR102A2

Date: 1960s-1970s

[Introductory speaker] We again to open our evening, or afternoon session at this time with a lecture by the Rev. Mr. Rushdoony. He’s going to be lecturing on liberty, truth, and law. And we look forward to what you have to say.

[Rushdoony] On a single day some three or four years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States said no to a very simple school prayer and at the same time, said yes to two homosexual magazines. In both of these decisions, the Supreme Court believed that it was striking a blow for liberty. The question immediately comes to mind, liberty for what, and from what? And the answer is for liberty for man from truth. And the question that must be faced by us, because it is a question being raised on all sides today: is truth necessary?

The historical premise of western culture has been that the only valid foundation for and source of social order is in truth. And truth is religious, so that the only real question has been which religion. And men have attempted to establish their societies throughout the history of the west on a particular concept of religious truth. This was affirmed by the Westminster Standards in the Form of Government, Chapter 1, paragraph 4. “Truth is in order to goodness and the great touchstone of truth, its tendency to promote holiness according to our Savior’s rule, ‘by their fruits ye shall know them.’ No opinion can be either more pernicious or more absurd than that which brings truth and falsehood upon a level and represents it as of no consequence what a man’s opinions are. On the contrary, they are persuaded that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty, otherwise it would be of no consequence either to discover truth or to embrace it.” This was once one of the fundamentals of western culture. Everyone agreed to this, Protestant or Catholic. They believed that the most pernicious, the most dangerous, the most absurd thing, in the words of the Westminster Standard is to represent that it is of no consequence what a man’s opinions are, and that truth and falsehood are upon a level.

Men fought and died for the belief that truth is basic to social order. And this truth is Christian truth—theological truth. This idea stood until the French Revolution, and since then has been steadily under attack. And today for a minister to declare that it is important to social order what a man’s opinions are, what his theology is, for a man so to speak is to startle people. We are so accustomed to believing that this is a matter of indifference.

But the Supreme Court has gone one step further. It has said not only is it a matter of indifference, but it is a matter that is dangerous to society, if we affirm there is a truth. This ridicule of truth became very, very open with the French Revolution and culminated in Karl Marx. Marx ridiculed the idea of truth and when he said, “Religion is the opium of the masses,” he meant by it the hunger for truth—theological truth—is the opium of the masses, because society cannot be built on truth; truth is mythical. He declared, “The State is not to be constituted from religion, but from the reason of freedom. Only the crass and ignorant can assert that the theory of making the State concept independent,” (that is, of truth) “is a passing whim of modern philosophers.” He said further, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point however, is to change it.” Marx’s associate, Frederick Engels, in his eulogy of Marx declared, “Our dialectical philosophy abolishes all the notions of absolute and definitive truth, and any absolute human conditions which correspond to them. For dialectics, nothing is definitive, absolute or sacred. It reveals the relativity of all things, and nothing exists for it but the uninterrupted process of development and change.” Thus, for Karl Marx, as for Engels, since there is no truth, every man is a law unto himself and they said that logically, the practical, the wisest position was anarchism—total anarchy! But they said this was not socially feasible, and so the alternative was total Statism, that any alternative to that would be a state founded on theology, because if you’ve said there is truth, and society must be grounded upon a concept of truth, you are creating ultimately, a theological foundation for the state.

The separation of liberty and the state from truth, of law from truth, is not limited to Marxism. It is common to Fabianism, to Existentialism, to modernism in its many forms, and to many of our other (in fact, all of) our modern philosophies. And the disestablishment of liberty from truth has increasingly become the policy of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice William O. Douglas has associated Relativism with liberty and truth with Totalitarianism. He has said in his work, Freedom of the Mind, “To say therefore that the search for truth is not man’s mission may seem to some to be the ultimate sin. But those who construct a political system on the basis of their truth create Totalitarianism.” He goes on to say that the struggle for liberty in human history is a struggle against the dominion of truth, that man has become free progressively as he has overthrown the very idea that there is truth, as he has progressively affirmed that all things are indifferent, that there is no true or false about reality. And so, he says, it is high time for us to drop truth and establish society on the premise of liberty. And I quote again from Justice Douglas, “Truth is not the goal, for in most areas, no one knows what truth is.”

For Justice Douglas, as well as for many, many others of this school, which is the reigning school of jurisprudence today, this means that laws restrictive of liberty must be dropped in the name of liberty. Therefore, Douglas, together with these other jurists is skeptical of laws against pornography, laws against subversion, laws against various forms of sexual perversion; these are no business of government, because all of these ideas involve the assumption that there is a truth, and that certain forms of sexual behavior are wrong because they depart from the truth, or certain opinions (political or otherwise) are wrong because they depart from the truth, and certain kinds of writing are pornographic because they do not meet a mythical, moral standard.

In another work, America Challenged, Justice Douglas declares, “Freedom in this broad sense is the ultimate aim of the good society.” Strange how that word ‘good’ creeps in when he’s dropped the idea that there’s something either good or bad. “Freedom in this broad sense is the ultimate aim of the good society. We have the institutions as well as the traditions that make that freedom possible. That is the one overwhelming advantage we have over the Communist camps.” His objection to Communism is that they do believe in their particular brand of truth, and so they are not fully liberated. They have traces of Conservatism yet. Everything, according to Justice Douglas, must have freedom. In still another work, Democracy’s Manifesto, he writes “We believe that the extinction of any civilization, culture, religion, or life way is a loss to humanity.” You get the implication of that? The extinction of any civilization, culture, religion or life way is a loss to humanity. Moreover, he believes, as others do, that to try to destroy or eliminate any of these is genocide. This means that Christians are very, very guilty when they try to convert Cannibalism—cannibals from Cannibalism. After all, this is a religion, it’s a folk way. And who is to say it’s false and our position is true? There must be total liberty for every position in this perspective.

And indeed, today we have all kinds of court cases in process to destroy every kind of legislation that would be premised on an idea of truth. There are two cases that have been filed in San Francisco, California, challenging the right of any governmental body to infringe upon the civil liberties of individuals by having laws against narcotics. And the suit is supported by those who believe their civil liberties are infringed by laws against narcotics, and there are similarly attempts today to say that any form of perversion must have legitimate status because it is an infringement of civil liberties if such practices are banned.

I have here a congressional report of 1964, a series of hearings in which the Mattachine Society, a society of homosexuals appeared before a congressional committee, protesting that their civil liberties were being violated by legislation aimed against them, and demanding that their civil rights as a minority group be vindicated. In the course of the argument, the president of the society said the total government employment roll is about two and a half million, and we estimate that there are two hundred thousand- a quarter of a million homosexuals in the government. Then he went on, interestingly enough, to cite the support for his position this total liberty for all ideas and the denial that there is any moral truth. He went on to support his position by citations by many clergymen. At this point, one congressman, Mr. Daudy, found it too much for himself to take, so he got a Bible and he immediately began to read from it the various passages that deal with the biblical condemnation of homosexuality. And he went on to quote from Leviticus 18:22 and from the New Testament, various passages from St. Paul, and he concluded by saying that the condemnation of God upon this was unequivocal, that the Lord says that it is the sin of abomination and they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. “I cannot see how you can interpret that as you have, or that there could even be a difference of opinion in regard to what that says.” And the president of the Mattachine Society said, “This is a matter of theology. I feel that a theological discussion on the part of a member of congress in his capacity is grossly improper under the First Amendment to the Constitution.” In other words, truth has no relationship to law, and liberty must be from truth.

This position is not a new one. I indicated it began at the time of the French Revolution and the great advocate of this position was the Marquis de Sade. And the Marquis de Sade in his various writings, which unfortunately, after being banned for a century and a half, are now again being published extensively in this country and throughout the world. The Marquis de Sade demanded a total toleration of all practices because, he said, there is no truth. Therefore, he said, there must be a right to practice every kind of sexual perversion. There must be a right to murder when we feel so inclined and there must be no laws punishing it. There must be a right to cannibalism. There must be a total right for everything, he said, except Christianity. The one thing we must abolish in order to free man is truth! And it is Christianity which stands for truth, therefore Christianity must be abolished.

And this is what we are in process of doing today in this country. We are making it progressively legal for anything to be in the schools. It is legal to teach Marxism in the schools but not the Bible. In Californian recently, a teacher was vindicated for writing a play at {?} called “Jesus,” whereas another teacher whom I know was not only discharged but had his teaching certificate withdrawn for two offenses. First, this fourth grade teacher, teaching one morning, asked a child a question and the boy broke into tears as he stood to recite, and he called the boy up to him and he said, what’s the matter, Tommy? And the boy sobbed, he said, my folks didn’t think I understood what was happening when they sent me to school this morning, but my baby brother is dying. And this teacher, Al Lynch, impulsively put his arm around the boy and drew him to him and turned to the class and said let’s all bow our heads and pray for Tommy’s brother. And the children were all deeply moved. They spoke about it on the playground. It was heard by another teacher and reported to the administration and it was put down as a demerit in his record and it was entered thus that he had been guilty of an irregularity with a fourth grade boy. And he protested, you have implied that I have been guilty of a perversion. If you want to put down that I was guilty of praying in class, put it down. But they refused to change it. And then a little later, they sang Christmas carols; he led them in the singing of Christmas carols. He’s lost his teaching certificate.

And yet at the same time, after I spoke about his matter in one community, a teacher came up to me quietly, handed me something and said, “Read it when you have time.” And I read it after the meeting. From the Union Teacher, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, Los Angeles, September 1965, concerning the charges filed against the principal of a certain high school in Southern California, in the Superior Court of the State of California, and here are some of the charges:

The principal did state on more than one occasion to groups of teachers that the incidents of homosexuality and prostitution among the ___________ Faculty were a matter of great concern to him. The actions of the principal did cause great resentment among the faculty and brought about the circulation of damaging rumors and a general atmosphere of suspicion and tension in the schools.

Nothing about the truth of the charges, just that it was damaging to the reputation of the school, and so charges were filed against the principal.

Truth, in other words, is the one thing that is illegitimate today, the one thing against which war is being progressively waged. And so there cannot be Christianity in the schools, or in the State. The implication of it ultimately is that there cannot be any church of Jesus Christ.

And we have seen in certain states, legislation introduced, which in the name of abolishing prejudice, would abolish any preaching which in any way reflected discredit upon anyone else. So that if you said those outside of Christ were sinners, you would be guilty in terms of such legislation. We have moreover, increasingly such things as the Kinsey Report which is based upon the premise that there is no truth, and that the great enemy of man is truth. And in the second volume of the Kinsey Report, Kinsey declared that legislation against child molestation was wrong. The real damage, he said, is not done by the molester, but by cultural conditioning. The child, he said, is constantly warned by adults, parents and teachers against strange men and as a result, they are emotionally upset or frightened by their contact with adults. And he said, actually, if they were not frightened by these warnings from their adults, these experiences would be very meaningful. And so, he says, the real offender is not the adult child molester, but the inhibiting parent and society with their moral ‘Thou shalt nots!’ I’m quoting. “Some of the more experiences students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police officers and other adults who discover that the child has had such a contact may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves. The current hysteria over sex offenders may very well have serious effects on the ability of these children to work out sexual adjustment some years later in their marriages.” And so on.

These things must be taken seriously. They are increasingly being written into the fabric of our law by legal decisions. It is an all-out warfare against truth in the name of liberty. And this liberty means total tolerance of all evil and a total love of all evil. It means ultimately, an hostility to law because law rests on truth. Something is illegal because it is wrong! The law is concerned with right and wrong and with procedures to establishing law and order. Hence, there is an increasing hostility to the very idea of law as a part of the order of truth.

On January 1, 1965, there was, in San Francisco, a benefit ball for homosexuals by a group of clergymen. And when the police interfered, these clergymen protested and one of them made this statement, “The police department wanted to deal more in theology rather than open up a dialog. They looked at the rings on our fingers and said, we see you’re married. How do your wives accept this? They said, we believe in the Ten Commandments. What do you believe in? They wanted to know what theological concepts we had. I believe their theological jargon and beliefs are somewhat outdated.” This same demand for the overthrow of truth was behind the free speech movement and the other student movements at the University of California campus in Berkeley. And this statement was made openly over the public address system there in Berkeley (and I quote literally), “Students should have the same sexual freedom on campus as the dogs.”

The one thing these people will not tolerate is orthodox Christianity, because this is the foundation, the source of law and of morality, and they are bent progressively in establishing Relativism in our courts and in disestablishing Christianity as the foundation of our law.

As long as civil government exists, it will have a rationale, a law of its being, and that law will be its truth. And today, the ‘new truth’ as it were of our society is Relativistic Humanism. And it is the established religion of the new liberty.

But let’s back up and examine Justice Douglas’s assertion. Is truth totalitarian? Is Douglas right? Does the affirmation of truth mean that we are going to be a persecuting people, a totalitarian people? And the answer is, remove truth and you have Totalitarianism. Why?

Civil government, the State, is the coercive branch of society, the coercive arm. Remove truth from the State and all you leave to the state is coercion; coercion without truth. You have coercion in a Christian state. But it is a coercion governed by truth, by the Word of God, by the Law of God. And take away truth and you have coercion, pure and simple, coercion for the sake of coercion.

As far back as 1936, Justice Stone of the Supreme Court said the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self restraint. He recognized that already the Christian foundation was gone, that the Supreme Court by denying that there was Christian truth had said in effect, we can do as we please; there is no restraint of truth upon us. And since we deny truth in the Word of God, certainly we’re not going to affirm it in the Constitution. And so he said the only check upon us is our sense of self restraint. And this is rapidly going now in the court. What is there to restrain men when they abandon truth? And the new liberty which is separation from truth means the right if the court to do as it pleases with the law and as a result, total power looms in every area.

And this divorce from truth is the basic fact in the churches of our day, the basic idea of Modernism, the basic idea in Ecumenicism, is that man no longer has to reckon with an infallible Word. He no longer has to contend with truth and his approach to the problem of church union is pragmatic. We will give a little and you will give a little and we’ll come together with some compromise position which need have no relationship to the Word of God because there is no such thing as an absolute truth. There is only a developing tradition as was so ably expounded to us this morning.

When truth goes from the State, naked power, sheer coercion alone remains. And hence, Stalin defined the essence of State action as coercion. We must coerce and coerce and coerce. And terror then becomes justified because there is nothing wrong with anything. There is no truth or error about anything. And so, Machiavelli long ago in The Prince, spelled out the judicious use of terror and Lenin advocated it and it became applied and today Communism is simply the application of total power whenever it is convenient, and we have had Mr. Sylvester representing the federal government, state that it is expedient very often for the State to lie; it is not bound by the truth.

As George Orwell, in 1984 very discerningly stated it, “The object of power is power.” Divorce the State from truth and it has one goal: power and more power over man. And it seeks to play God over man and to predestinate man totally and to govern him absolutely. Thus separation of the State from truth, from theological truth, and Marx was right, it’s either a theological foundations or it is total Relativism, separation of the State from truth has simply meant liberty for the State to claim total and unlimited power while at the same time paradoxically, promising unlimited freedom from truth to its citizenry. And this freedom is license to immorality as a façade for the steady loss of liberty to the State.

And today, as day after day the Supreme Court whittles away at truth and increases the power of the State, at the same time it deludes the people into believing they are more free because they have more license. They have the right to be pornographers. They have the right to be perverts, and this is the new liberty which is given to man—license, while his true liberty under God is steadily being destroyed.

The position of course is a contradiction. There cannot be unlimited power for the State together with unlimited liberty as it is promised to the people. The end will be the total destruction of the liberty of the people and the total power of the State. Our position as Christians must be, of course, the biblical position, which affirms the sovereignty of God and thereby denies the sovereignty of the State or the sovereignty of man as an individual.

The foundations of the American approach to this were laid down by 1635 in New England by John Cotton. The Reverend John Cotton, in his writing and especially in a series of sermons on Revelation 13 declared emphatically, it is necessary that all power on earth be limited! And he declared that only God can have unlimited power and therefore neither man nor the State could ever possess it or dare to claim it. And only God can have unlimited liberty and therefore man can never pretend to it. And so he said there can only be limited power and limited liberty on the human sphere. To dream of more is to be guilty of sin. Man is a creature, he said, and power is under law and liberty is under law; God’s Law. And only in such an order is there any liberty possible. And he went on to deny the right of any state to offer the good society, and he said, the promise of the good society from the State is the smell of the leopard, of the Beast, because the State cannot offer a saving order. God alone offers salvation. The State cannot offer the good society, but only uphold law, justice. To liberate the State from God’s truth is to surrender man to the State.

Now, in any system of thought, you can locate God and truth by going to the source of law. Wherever your source of law is, there is your god and there is the truth in your system. You cannot separate them else you have a broken godhead, which is a philosophical impossibility. Thus, track down the source of truth, the source of law and there you have the god of the system. Now, in our system, where do we derive our law? Is it not from the State? Have we not denied that God is the source of truth? That God is the source of our law? Is it not Congress and the Supreme Court which are themselves the ultimate sources of law and do not recognize the higher lawgiver and the higher court? So that in our system, when you trace down the source of law, it stops in Washington. And there is the god of our system. There is our truth in god incarnate, and infallibility is therefore transferred from God to the State and there is no appeal beyond the State.

But man can only live in terms of God’s truth, or perish because he has departed from it. We cannot break God’s Law or depart from His Word without bringing judgment upon ourselves. And to dream of making a lie work, which is what Washington is doing today as well as Moscow and every other state virtually in the world. To dream of making a lie work is like trying to fly by flapping your arms. It doesn’t work. You will have a beautiful and speedy take-off if you take off from the Empire State Building. But you will have a rough landing.

And the same destiny today awaits modern man and the modern State. Jesus said, “I am the truth.” The truth is personal. It is not an idea, it is not an abstraction, it is the person of Jesus Christ. “If the Son make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” And I think we are guilty of abusing that passage if we restrict it to the Doctrine of Salvation. I think its application is total. And there can be no freedom for a state, a church, a school, or a man in his person or in his institutions unless they be built upon the truth of Jesus Christ. Anything else is slavery. Anything else leads to ruin and to judgment. If the Son make you free, then and then alone are we free indeed. May God grant us speedily this freedom in Jesus Christ, the truth and in Him the glorious liberty of the Sons of God.

[Closing announcer] One announcement before we take a five or ten minute recess, Mr. Rushdoony has informed us that his lectures that he is giving here will be in two forthcoming volumes and he suggests that if you would like, we would be, we could have a list. He hasn’t suggested, we’ve suggested that you might have a list; we might take a list of those who would like to order these two forthcoming volumes. I think probably rather than trying to distinguish which lectures will be in which volumes, if you’re interested in ordering the two new volumes or two forthcoming volumes from the pen of our lecturer, if you would leave your name on a paper with Mr. {?} in the office here sometime during this institute, we’d be glad to place those orders with the publisher as soon as we can.

I think we’ll just take about a ten minute break. We’re a little bit ahead of schedule. Ten minute break and then we’ll come back in and try to get ahead- get started on the next lecture just a little bit early.