Studies in Political Philosophy

The Sabbath and Proletarian Revolution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: The Sabbath and Proletarian Revolution

Genre: Speech

Track: 09

Dictation Name: RR124E9

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou hast commanded a rest unto us, a rest unto our souls and unto our bodies, and we thank thee that thou art our rest, our refreshing. Therefore, we come unto thee, our Father, according to thy word, to cast our every care upon thee knowing thou carest for us, to commit all our ways unto thee in the confidence that thou art able, and so, our God, give us grace day by day to wait on thee, to rest in thee, and to trust in thee, in Jesus name. Amen.

Our scripture lesson today is Deuteronomy 5:12-15, and our subject is The Sabbath and the Proletarian Revolution. “Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.”

The Sabbath, in its origin, goes back to the Exodus from Egypt and the first passover. Because although the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, is set on the pattern of the seventh day of creation, historically, it dates from the first passover in Egypt, and it commemorates the day of Israel’s salvation from Pharaoh, and hence, as Moses in Deuteronomy speaks of the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy, he reminds them of their deliverance from Egypt, and says, “Therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.” It was their day of redemption.

Our day of redemption is Resurrection Day, the first day of the week, when Jesus Christ destroyed the power of sin and death, and therefore, we commemorate as the Lord’s Day as the Christian Sabbath, the first day of the week, the day of Resurrection, but today we see a great deal of down grading of the Sabbath and a steady decline in its significance. This is not accidental. The Sabbath is under attack because the meaning of the Sabbath, the Resurrection and our rest in Christ, is under attack. It is under attack because we are in the midst of a Proletarian Revolution. Who are the Proletariat?

Joseph Piper, a philosopher, has defined the Proletariat perhaps better than anyone else. He says the Proletarian is the man who is fettered to the processes of work, and when you have the Proletarianization of life, you have life geared to work increasingly and exclusively, so that the Proletarian Revolution is a steady gearing of the whole world and of all the processes of life to one thing: work.

When this is carried to its ultimate conclusion, man lives only to work, and even his leisure, his vacation, is seen as a reprieve from work in order to return to work more vigorously, in order to make him a more able worker, and a harder worker, so that everything, including his leisure, his vacation, has one reference: more work. Today, the Proletarian Revolution says that life is to be understood in terms of work, in terms of economics, and man’s life is to be reduced to a material dimension: work.

In terms of this, the Sabbath, of course, is meaningless, because the Sabbath is the denial of dialectical materialism. It is the assertion that Jesus Christ is Lord of Lords and King of Kings, that he is lord of the supernatural and of the natural, over matter and over spirit, and victor over all natural processes, supremely the process of death, the destroyer of sin, the bringer-in of life and of resurrection. The Sabbath therefore, is not a day of rest from work. Sabbath is set apart unto God. Its reference is not humanistic, rest and recreation, but it is theocentric, God-centered. It is resting in the Lord. It is not man’s day. It is the Lord’s day. Its purpose is not man’s physical rest, but to rest in the Lord and to trust him entirely for our salvation. This, of course, is the whole point of St. Paul in Hebrews 4 when he declares that the Promised Land, Canaan was only a partial rest, or Sabbath, but that the fullness of our rest was ushered in by Jesus Christ and will be ours in his eternal kingdom.

Hence, the purpose of the Christian Sabbath, of the Lord’s Day, is not to gain something but to give thanks for what God has done, and to listen to God, to harken unto him, and the purpose of the Sabbath therefore, is to submit to God, to rejoice in him. The Sabbath, therefore, is not to be a somber day as some people have made it, of a lot of do-nothing regulations, but a day of triumph and rejoicing, of celebration. It is interesting to read in a book by an Antiquarian, Eric Sloan, entitled American Yesterday, what the Sabbath was like in old America, and he writes, “The first churches were considered to be the main support in the structure of American life. An old New England name for the summer beam, the strongest beam of the house, was the church beam. It was this now-waning importance that the Colonists gave the church. Today, if you ask an average person why he goes to church, he will invariably say, ‘To gain something,’ but when you ask him exactly what he expects to gain, he gropes for an answer. Great Grandfather did not go to church expecting to gain anything more than he already had. He went there to give thanks for it. It seems incredible to do anything even to attend church without profiting materially from it, but Great Grandfather had mastered the magnificent art of standing still.”

It was a day when man ceased from his labors to rejoice in God’s labor. When man stopped working in order to rest in God’s work, the cross of Jesus Christ, but men work today increasingly because work is an escape. Men actually work to escape free time, and we find that many people in our day feel as Baudilare{?} did who wrote in his journal, “One must work, if not from taste, then at least from despair, for to reduce everything to a single truth, work is less boring than pleasure.” When men are burdened with a sense of guilt, they use work as a means of atonement and as a means of escape. Work then becomes a substitute for religion, and they work because work is the only way they can experience life. When they stop working they are dead, and they know it, and so they work to escape the burden of guilt and the sentence of death, and the meaninglessness of life which surrounds them.

It is interesting that in one major department store a few years ago in New York City, the employees went on strike for shorter working hours and gained them, and then the store had a major problem. It couldn’t get the employees out of the premises. On their shorter hours, they had time on their hands and they came to the store to stand around and visit with the other girls who were working, and so they finally had to barr all the employees from the premises except during their hours of employment. They did not want their free time. Life had no meaning for them, and so they wanted to work, or to be at the place of work, but for us as Christians, worship is, according to scripture, our rest, and it is according to God’s promise, a form of healing. Worship involves obedience.

The fifth commandment, we are told, in scripture, is the commandment with promise, but we are told moreover that all commandments are commandments with promise. The promise of a long life, or the promise of blessing, the promise of prosperity and the promise of healing, and Exodus 15:26 declares, “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee.”

In Hebrews 4:9, Paul tells us, “There remaineth therefore a rest (or keeping of the Sabbath) to the people of God.”

The Sabbath, therefore, from ancient times, because it was a day when man submitted to God’s work, God’s salvation, when he ceased from his labors, his attempts to save himself and recognize the salvation of God and rested in that fact, he had healing unto his soul and unto his body, and so from Antiquity, we find that every pagan monarch who claimed to be a messiah, every Caesar who pretended to be able to save men, went in for healing, and the kings on ritual occasions had the sick brought to them, selected sick, and laid their hands on them, and professed to heal them, and this survives certainly into England in the 17th century and perhaps a little later, when the king’s touch in England was an annual event, as the sick lined up, supposedly to be healed by the king and to receive a gold coin.

In ancient worship, there was no Sabbath. Apart from the Bible, we find no formal day of worship, because in all religions apart from Christianity, salvation is a matter of works. It is man’s doing. Man saves himself, and no religion, apart from Christianity, has a day of worship, except insofar as a result of Christianity, in imitation thereof, they had formally adopted a day of worship, but in every pagan religion, man saves himself, and so man is perpetually involved in working to save himself, and he went to the temple in any particular day of the week to worship on his way to work because it was working, demonstrating that he was capable of meeting the standard of the gods, that saved him, but in biblical faith, man was commanded to stop working on the day of worship to indicate that salvation was not his act, but the act of God. Ancient worship, therefore, involved, self-=salvation by man, and how far this went we can see when we analyze the Greek word “liturgy.” Liturgy literally means public work.

A Medicare program, a social security program, an unemployment compensation program, any kind of welfare program constitutes a liturgy, a public work by the state, and whether it was in Ancient Rome or in Ancient Greece, the public work of the state, whereby the state or the Caesar sought to save the people of the state with cradle-to-grave security, or some program of social welfare, this constituted the liturgy of the state, but what is the liturgy of the church?

The liturgy of the church is the morning prayer, or evening prayer, the service of divine worship, whereby not the public work of a Caesar or welfare program is celebrated, but the public work of Jesus Christ, whereby Jesus Christ destroyed the power of sin and death by his atoning death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead, delivered us forever from the power of sin and death. This is the Christian liturgy. Christ’s public work, and so the liturgy of the church is always centered on this fact, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it is celebrated supremely whatever day else it is celebrated on, on the first day of the week, the Day of Resurrection, the day of Christ’s public work, his liturgy.

Today, we see in conflict, the liturgy of the modern Caesars and the liturgy of Jesus Christ, and the liturgy of the modern Caesars around the world is a proletarianization of life. It is a reducing of everything to work, work as outlined by the state in order to avoid inflation, or to build peace in our time, or a perfect world order, to abolish poverty or disease, or whatever else. Everything is geared to this proletarianization, to this reduction of life, to the work prescribed by the state, to the public work whereby man is to be saved. Is it any wonder, therefore, that they seek to destroy that day given to the public work of Jesus Christ, to the liturgy of Jesus Christ, to the celebration of his resurrection, and of his atoning work for us all?

But modern man, apart from Christ, of course, is hungry for salvation, and so he goes to the public work of the state for his salvation, because he is guilt-ridden and he wants, he hungers for salvation, but not of God. He has more leisure than every before but he cannot rest, for as Isaiah said of old, “The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no rest saith my God to the wicked.” But to those who find their rest, their salvation, in the public work of Jesus Christ, there is healing unto body and soul. It is significant that there is a very marked difference, even in the very blood-clotting time of those who move in confidence and faith, and those who are restless and disturbed, and without peace.

Today, as we are surrounded by the Proletarian Revolution, would cease to reduce life to the public work of the state and salvation to the public work of the state, we see this Proletarian Revolution seeking, first of all, to destroy Christ, Christianity, and the rest that is man’s in Jesus Christ. Second, they are working to destroy work as a holy calling, and to make of it instead a guilty burden, and third, the public work of the state destroys property and inheritance, and makes a mockery of all of man’s work.

As a result, we see a rise, first of all, in sickness, because man is so sick and guilt-ridden. We see secondly an attempt to solve all the problems of man by technology, and we are told that all of man’s ills are technological problems, not spiritual problems, because of proletarianization of life means that life is reduced to work, and since it is reduced to work, the public work, the liturgy of the state is a technical problem, a technological problem for experts to solve, and so whether it is a matter of health or a matter of the organization of society, or of education, it is all a question of technology, and we know from history that technology is the last stage of a civilization before it goes under. It is a way whereby a civilization says that man’s control is the answer to everything, and it tries to govern all of life and the universe by man’s control, and so it reduces sin to mental health problems, a problem for technology, and it says that all moral problems are technological problems. As one such scholar has said, “Adultery is a symptom of a social disease. We must treat it as such.”

Not a moral problem, just a technological one, to be treated as any disease is with its proper dose of penicillin, but when you take away the biblical doctrine of sin, you take away the biblical doctrine of responsibility, and you destroy man and you destroy the meaning of his life and of his work, and so the proletarianization of life which surrounds us today works not only to destroy the Sabbath, but it destroys thereby also man. There is no rest, said my God to the wicked, and our responsibility as Christians is to stand for the meaning of the Sabbath, which must not be reduced to merely some “thou shalt nots” or formal worship, but a true resting in the Lord, a recognition that God is our savior, that our rest is in his public work, his liturgy, his atoning death, and resurrection, and in the liturgy of Jesus Christ is our freedom, our joy, and our salvation. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that as we are surrounded today by the liturgies, the public works of modern Caesars, we have the blessed assurance that we stand in the liturgy of Jesus Christ, his atoning death and resurrection, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against us, for we are thine, and so, our God, confirm us in this our most holy faith, and make us resolute and confident therein, knowing that in the liturgy of Jesus Christ is our victory, our confidence, and our rest. Teach us, therefore, our Father, to rest in thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] I had heard that somewhere out {?} saying to {?} where and why?

[Rushdoony] It was changed with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and immediately thereafter, the disciples began to get together weekly, on the first day of the week, we find in the book of Acts, because this was their day of deliverance, the Day of Resurrection, and in the book of Acts, we read that they worshipped, when they worshipped together as Christians, in the evening, because the first day of the week was, for them, a day of work. They were not allowed to have the day off, and we find, for example, in the book of Acts that when they were having one of these evening meetings, a young man who is sitting in a window, Eutychus, fell out of a window and was killed, but Paul raised him up. So that we see, from the beginning, that this was the day of worship. The idea that it was Constantine who changed it is nonsense. All that happened under Constantine was that he recognized the Christian day of worship as a legal holiday in the Roman Empire, because he was now Christian. Yes?

[Audience] Rush, what is the status today of Sunday, I should say {?} Sabbath in Russia today?

[Rushdoony] There is no Lord’s Day in Russia today. There has been a closing down of virtually all the churches in the Soviet Union except for a very limited number which are kept open as show places, for tourists, and tourists who go there say that they feel that religion is dead in the Soviet Union, it’s just the old folks who go, which is not entirely true. It is not dead. It’s very, very much alive, underground. The only ones who go are, indeed the older folks, because they feel they are too old to be hurt much anymore. They are not in line for any promotion. They are near the end of their life and it’s safe for them to go, they’re not going to be persecuted, but the young do not dare to go for fear of reprisals. Now, they know that these churches are fraudulent. The people know that, and the only clergy who are permitted to function are those who are ready to go along with the Soviet government, or are actually agents of the Soviet Union. However, they go for the liturgy or the music, and for nothing else. They depend on their own resources, smuggled copies, handwritten copies of various books of the Bible for their own spiritual growth, but there is no lack of religious faith in the Soviet Union, although the first day of the week is not a legal holiday, has no standing. It’s only as someone has a day off on that day and it can fall on any day of the week that he is free on that day.

[Audience] They recognize a day off for any reason.

[Rushdoony] Yes, they do. Originally, they tried to abolish the idea of a day off. It was a total proletarianization of everything, but they found that this was too destructive of productivity, and for that reason, they did grant a day off.

[Audience] I remember that, a long time ago {?} the whole thing {?} but I was going to ask {?} think that {?} proletarian revolution {?} that {?} sometimes bowling, golfing, and some other {?} evening classes {?} would you consider this a form of {?} would you consider this {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, very good point. Many men today are making work out of their play. Sometimes even a killing work, they go at it wish such an intensity, and it is significant that the conditions of our modern world are such that work, because it has been proletarianized, is more exhausting now with an eight-hour day than it was with a twelve-hour day some years earlier, and any of you who’ve talked to old timers who worked under the twelve-hour day some years ago at the beginning of this century, or some a little time later, will tell you that it was not exhausting. They didn’t mind it. Work had a meaning. They were doing it to accomplish something. They were going to get a home. They were going to buy a farm, and this would be theirs. They had a sense of procurity in what their work accomplished, and no one works today with a sense of security that his work is going to bring any return to him, and so the meaning of work is destroyed today, and an eight-hour day, when you don’t know what good your work will do you in the long run, is far more exhausting for people than twelve hours used to be. Yes?

[Audience] As I recall, the dictionary definition of proletariat differs from your definition, which is not necessarily {?} inconsistent, but the dictionary says the proletariats was a class of Romans, property-less people who were supported by the government, {?} supplied armies, and my question is, which term would be more closely applicable to Marx’s interpretation of proletariat?

[Rushdoony] I would say, historically, your dictionary definition is correct, but you see, the proletarian as Marx saw it, poor people whose life was to be geared totally to work, and work provided by the state, so that his conception of society was totally statist to the point of being comparable to the anthill or the beehive. The worker ants are born to work, and this is their life and nothing beyond it. Marx went so far as to say that in the true society when man’s alienation is gone and the total socialization is gone, there will not be wages. Just as the worker ants have their place where they eat and then they rest, and then they get up and they go to work and it’s a mechanical routine. So the workers in the true state will be so sub-human, they will not need work, just exactly is put before them to eat, to enjoy, to do, and this will be it. Their life will be beyond history and beyond self-consciousness. Yes?

[Audience] What place should work have in our lives?

[Rushdoony] Work, as I said, is a calling, and work, when it is truly under God, is a responsibility unto God. So that, when a man works, he works secondarily unto his employer and first of all unto God, in terms of God’s laws, God’s standards for integrity, for industry, and so on, and similarly, a wife worked first of all unto the Lord, and secondly unto her husband, because her husband cannot be God in her life. God alone is God, so that while she is working for her husband, it is as her obedience unto God that she is obedient unto her husband, and her obedience and work for her husband is always conditional upon God and his law, his word, his standards, but everything we do is unto the Lord so that Paul said whether we eat or whether we drink, we do it all unto the Lord. We live unto him. Our life becomes God-centered, so that everything has this primary reference. As the catechism says, “What is the chief end of man?” and the answer, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Does that help explain? Yes?

[Audience] It’s significant that {?} section of the World Council of Churches preparing this, and very, very well, so we may {?} familiar with this report.

[Rushdoony] I haven’t seen this one. I’d be very interested in it.

[Audience] I’ll be glad to bring some copies to you, I don’t know whether I can do it {?} but it explains that times were changed over, you know, from the process from Saturday to Sunday. The point was that they didn’t need a day of rest, but they {?} after work, and they said that it wouldn’t make any difference whether it was five days{?} or ten days, that they {?} because the people {?} did things after work, so they were just {?} a week off.

[Rushdoony] Yes, such attempts as well as some of the calendar reform attempts have behind them an attempt to destroy the Sabbath, the Christian calendar, the Christian year, all these things, and to substitute for it the liturgy of the state.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, just the word “liturgy” is so significant when you see its original meaning, and what the Christians from the beginning made of the word, because they saw the difference. The public work of the state, Caesar’s program was salvation, but they had their liturgy in what Christ had done, and this is what the liturgy celebrates, and of course, the liturgy in these World Council churches and others is simply Caesar’s liturgy. Yes?

[Audience] I’d like to announce this subject {?}. My little girl was receiving her report card Friday, and now she has to take and report back Monday to the teacher on what she thought she should be graded and was given a sheet with all the subjects, and now she has to write down what she thinks she deserved. Please respond.

[Rushdoony] I’m trying to say what I think of it without being profane. [laughter] No doubt the next thing she’ll be asked to fill out a report whereby she grades you as a mother. This is subversive of authority.

[Audience] Well, what I can I do when this happens?

[Rushdoony] I would explain to her how it is thoroughly subversive of authority. It is telling her that, in a sense, she has the right to put herself in the place of the teacher and to be judge over herself, and that this is destructive, that one of the lessons of life is to take authority, sometimes to submit to things that are wrongfully decided against us, say a bad grade given, because thereby we learn to distinguish between authority properly and improperly used, and no one can ever rightfully exercise authority who has not submitted to it first of all. So that after explaining to her all that it involves, that it is overturning the moral order, tell her, “Nonetheless, you are required do it, do it but recognize the evil that is in this entire movement.”

[Audience] What grade is she in?

[Audience] Fifth{sixth?} grade.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] {?} our son is in college {?} taking a class in architectural design, and the difficulties today whereupon the different students are supposed to grade each other’s work, and pass sentence on them. How much is this {?} just mentioned?

[Rushdoony] That’s a little different. As long as the teacher does the final grading, because here it is a case of someone who is an adult, as college students are or should be, and are being prepared to face a world in which their peers are going to be critical of their work. Now, I think, for example, in seminaries, the most useful classes in homiletics are those where not only the teacher criticizes the young students practice preaching, but the entire class participates and tears it apart, if it needs to be torn apart, because he then sees it sometimes a little more bluntly and realistically, and without the polish, and this is healthy. So that these fellow students are not grading him, if the teacher is conducting the class properly. The teacher is grading him, but he is also seeing how his thinking, how his designs meet the eyes of peers who are being trained exactly as he is to be experts in the field, and I would say this is a little different. Yes?

[Audience] Speaking of colleges, how would one go about to try to correct this problem of literally, to get rid of one of the teachers, but I mean, {?} the best way, but in yesterday’s paper with your {?} that the teaching at Valley State, now in their classes they’re going to have the game that they used at seminar{?}. In other words, he thinks that this will take the place of the old time {?} tournament, and if you’ve read and know about {?} and the game, it’s a fantastic thing to have happen at college. I mean, how can they get away with . .

[Rushdoony] Very easily unfortunately. It is planned subversion. It is the destruction of the purpose of a college, but we are seeing this progressively, and I would say that this case is just a small fraction of what is going on at every institution, that there is usually far more subversive and dangerous, and anti-Christian activity than hits the papers, but it’s only some who like to do things to attract publicity and want to get their name in the papers that will self-consciously do things, as this man has done, to attract attention, but most of them will do the same and far more, and never attract attention.

[Audience] Well, this is what I mean. When it comes out in the paper and states very it clearly {?}, you know that other things that {?} article are worse than this probably, and has never hit the papers, but it just seems fantastic that you can’t get rid of . . .

[Rushdoony] You can’t. You can’t. It would be like asking a group of atheists to hire me as their chaplain. They’re not going to do it, and the state today is interested in one thing: proclaiming statism, and furthering the liturgy of Caesar. Now, they’re never going to put through any other kind of program, no more than Johnson is going to come through say, with Robert Welch’s program for America. It would be fantastic to expect it, and your statist schools today are not going to change their tune or do anything other than further exactly what they’re doing.

[Audience] Well, it’s enough that the parents realize this and would object, wouldn’t this, they still couldn’t rid of him?

[Rushdoony] No, you might get rid of a few, but what you would be doing in the long run is cleaning it up slightly as far as its public relations angle is concerned, because it is a socialistic institution, and it’s going to propagate socialism. It’s like regulating prostitution. All you do in a sense is put the public stamp of approval on it, and what we have to say progressively is that the whole concept of the state control of education is ungodly and anti-Christian, and we’ve got to work for its abolition and to create our own schools, because they’re not going to change.

[Audience] That’s the only way you can . . .

[Rushdoony] Yes, we can be glad when anyone is trying to get rid of some of these people, and we can try to prevent it from going any further because there are enough of our children involved in, but in the long run, all education that is controlled by the state, since the state is clearly non-Christian and anti-Christian, is going to be geared to the destruction of Christianity and its moral standards.

[Audience] Well you have little ones in school but you don’t dare take them out, and teach them at home.

[Rushdoony] You can put them in Christian schools.

[Audience] This is true, but some people feel that they cannot afford this. I have no family.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I know a lot of people feel that, but my answer to that is Christian education is not that costly, and some of the poorest people I know are providing Christian schooling for their parents, and some of those I’ve heard complain drive new cars and seem to be dressing very, very well, and when I think of two men I know who are in one part of the state, well, in another state, and were doing fairly well, and both quit their jobs when they came under conviction with regard to this matter, as to what the public schools were doing to their children, and without having a job, moved into California, into a small town that did have one Christian school, and then started to look for work, because then they felt we cannot destroy our children, and our children are being destroyed.

Now, when people are ready to do that, I think anyone who says, “Well, I want these things but I’m not prepared to make any sacrifice for them,” I can’t see that we can waste our time on them, because there are Christian schools that charge, in some cases in this state, I’ve seen very fine ones charge as little as $14. This means they pass the hat to a lot of interested adults, but there are some in this area, $22, $25 a month. This is very reasonable, and I have seen some of these parents, and I’m not exaggerating, send their children to public school with fifty cents to $1.00 every day for spending money, which would take care of their Christian schooling. Yes?

[Audience] This last issue of the PTA paper which I really meant to bring because it has so much now in it. They have a group of parents from the parents their schools, and they have been trying to fight in various areas, and they {?} the PTA, the NEA, some of the members of the groups of citizens in that town, and the PTA, get together and it says we must organize to fight {?} wherever it comes out to try and brainwash or promote their own ideas, they want to put in their own propaganda, their own {?}, their own type of economic thinking, and then we will, of course, lose objectivity in our teachers. So there were many articles on this. They’re having a fight right now {?} and all that were with them, including the {?} wherever it is and at one place in Northern California. This is going on right now. It shows you that the fight seems to be quite {?} because all of the educators immediately organized {?} They’re meeting right now to give this PTA, they hope, a larger voice, {?} to form it in both in the principals and in {?}.

[Rushdoony] And already the federal government, although most people don’t know about it, has a major part in the writing of textbooks. It subsidizes their writing, so that before the State of California considers a textbook, it’s already approved by the federal government. Now, this is the extent to which it’s gone. What we’ve got to do is to fight a rear guard action, keep it from going any further as long as we can, but meanwhile, center our effort on building up a Christian school system from Kindergarten through graduate school. Yes?

[Audience] We selected a Christian college, and we thought he wouldn’t get promoted being from a {?} and he got it there, and {?} socialism, so we accosted one of the professors and Mr. {?} asked why he was getting this here, and he said, “Well, he’s going to get it anyways so we should recognize it here,” and we said, “Heavens, no because we’re paying for it,” and these people who dedicated their wills and so forth, they’re not even being considered in this, and now, because we can’t resource them. I mean, it’s just beyond us.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but the problem here is, and this is a tragic thing, we’ve got to realize that there are practically no Christian colleges in the United States. There are many church college. Now here is an important difference. We cannot call a church-controlled college a Christian college, because a church-controlled college is not thinking primarily about its loyalty to Christ, but its loyalty to an institution, and so it’s going to play politics in terms of that institution, so that an institution, to be truly Christian, has to have its primary allegiance to the faith, to a body of doctrine, not to an institution. Now, the church, to be truly Christian, has to have its primary allegiance to Christ, rather than to men, or to politics, and so it is with the school. It has to have its primary allegiance to Christ, and this is the problem increasingly, and it’s being recognized by more and more people, that the church college is finished. It is being subverted because its loyalty is institutional. I discussed this a couple of years ago with a professor of philosophy at a Jesuit university and he agreed thoroughly with me, and he said, “Our problem here is precisely that,” and he said, “We need an institution that will be faithful to our faith, not to institutional boards and groups that are going to take us whichever way they’re going to go.” Yes?

[Audience] Would you please comment on your appendix on the Intellectual Schizophrenia back to subversiveness in Sunday School?

[Rushdoony] Well, and with this I will finish. I do have an appendix in Intellectual Schizophrenia which should be out, by the way, in paperback on June 1, and in it I say that the Sunday School is a mess, because instead of teaching the basic doctrines of the church, it teaches just plain moralism, which is sometimes scarcely even Unitarian moralism. It tells the children, “Now Jesus wants you to be good,” and this is it, and the kids get this over and over again from the teacher and from the material, and the idea of being a Christian is being good little boys and girls, nothing about the essentials of the faith, nothing about the doctrine of the trinity, the doctrine of salvation, the doctrine of the church. All these things are basic to being a Christian, but they get cute little entertainment and a lot of nonsense. As one church right now that’s facing a crisis because they, Sunday School, is headed up by someone who believes she is fully in conformity with the faith of the church and thinks that John Dewey is one of the greatest educators that ever lived, and she cannot understand why they are hostile to Deweyism in Sunday School. Yes?

[Audience] Rushdoony, can I make this comment, you know, to teach the Sunday, there’s been some comment on these two-way radio programs about the service that has {?} Robinson spoke and {?} spoke {?}, commentators {?} of these programs have ridiculed the people who have objected to this. This is the trend, of course, and what gets me now is {?} is now, at the same time, you know, Jewish people have their Passover services. Now at the same time, as far as I know, no Passover services in these Jewish congregations, have invited Christians to speak {?} conduct those services. So, actually, the criticism that testified is {?} these people criticizing the {?} services. They’re testifying {?} the fact that it’s a one way street. {?} this ecumenical thing. It’s only one way, and could you comment on that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. It’s a one way street, however, that is going to go beyond Judaism into a one world religion, but for the first step, and I had in my briefcase, and this will answer it as well as anything, it’s from the Oakland Tribune, March 21, on a world gathering of Christian scholars pondered dramatic new possibilities of Roman Catholic and Protestants solidarity and so on, meeting at the University of Notre Dame, whose president, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, called it the greatest theological event in the Western Hemisphere in our times. About 400 leading intellectuals of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Judeism are taking part in the seven-day meeting. Now, this will be the first step, and then the next step, the inclusion of the other religions, so that it won’t be too many years and it may be much sooner than that, that you will have some representative of Buddhism, or some other religion, at the Sunrise Services. This is definitely being contemplated, because the goal is the one world religion, as the parallel to the one world state, and we have to stand against this because, of course, it is definitely and totally anti-Christian.

Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.

End of tape