The Lives of Your Children at Stake

History Subverted

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 3 of 5

Track: 68

Dictation Name: RR146B3

Date: 1960’s-1970’s

[Rushdoony] Our concern this hour will be the teaching of history from a Christian, a thoroughly Biblical perspective. In the twentieth century in our state schools history teaching is either radically altered or has given way to the idea of social science. By in large with only occasional exceptions the state schools today do not teach history as we learned it once some years ago, and probably some of you also were subjected to history taught as an aspect of the social sciences. Now the approach of the social science to history, or to any other field of study, is governed by two basic premises.

First, history and society must be studied, according to social science, scientifically. This means that history must be studied in terms of purely naturalistic consideration. There must be no reference to God or to any eternal law. Only that is historical which begins and ends in history, which has its entire motive force from within history. As a result you have a methodology that requires one kind of conclusion, anti-Christian. When you say that the mode of force of history can only be from within history you are automatically excluding God from any relationship to history; and the whole of Biblical history and the whole of our faith disappears.

The methodology of the social sciences in the 1960’s was adapted and carried over into theology, and the result was the death of God school. The death of God school simply took these premises and said “God is dead, for us.” They did not say that no God can exist out there; they never dealt with that question. Their entire approach was “God is dead for us because no God is real for us, nor can we consider any God as an object of worship unless he begins and ends and is totally circumscribed by history.” Well the only such God possible the god like the state, a Caesar. This is basic to modern sociology. This means therefore in sociology you may have a history of Western culture which ostensibly begins about the time of our Lord or shortly before that and comes to the present in which there is almost no mention of Christ; and only a limited number of hours given to the history of the church. Why? In terms of any standard of historiography that they have as derived from the social sciences it’s invalid, therefore it has no place in history.

Now second, in the modern perspective the scientific method gives paramount importance to experiment. Therefore a scientific society must be an experiment in scientific planning. The result of that is totalitarianism. But before we deal with the implications of that let us consider what this does to history if what you say is that history must have a mode of force that begins in history, that is from man, begins and ends with man and is fully under the control of man; only when you create a scientific socialist state (such as the Marxists have done in the Soviet Union and in China) does history really begin. Before that you are in a semi-mythical era when man is trying to explain history and derive his motive for his history from something outside of history, from God. You therefore treat all of history before the scientific planner emerges and remakes man as history as a kind of a prelude to the present. Just as we as Christians see everything in the Old Testament as leading up to Christ, and we say “here is the center of history.” so the modern historian, having the perspective of social science must say that everything in history leads up to us, the scientific socialist planner, the social science. Therefore history is a prelude up until now, and therefore the real movement in history only begins when our plans are put into effect. You therefore nullify the past you see, you eliminate it from any serious consideration. There is no norm from beyond history, there is no norm in the past; the past is only prelude to man playing God.

Now let me narrate a little incident that happened to me about ten years ago which will give you something of a perspective of these teachers. I was in northern California in a debate in which, or forum rather in which one of the other participants was Mr. Paulson {?} and Mr. Dragovich {?}of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. And when of the state Senators, Senator Bradley, was the moderator. It was in a Jr. High auditorium and the auditorium was packed. The question and answer period was quite a wild one. I’d spoken about Christians schools and I said that Christian schools represented the principle of freedom under God as against statist tyranny, totalitarianism. And I spoke strongly on the issue of freedom, thinking there might be some non-Christians there that might recognize the implications of the state schools and their hostility to the Christian school movement. One woman in the back, a young woman who I learned afterwards was a school teacher, was trying like hundreds of others to get her hand recognized to ask a question, it was a very heated subject. She was not recognized and when the meeting was over she came charging down the aisle working her way through the huge crowd in that auditorium to get at me, I saw her coming. She came up and promptly denounced me as a quack. Why? Because I had used the word freedom, and she summed up her statement by saying that anyone who talked about freedom nowadays was immediately identifiable as a quack because, she said and these her exact words, “in the modern world freedom is obsolete.”

Now you cannot begin social science and what history teaching is about unless you grasp that statement. Why is freedom obsolete in the modern world? Well if you’re going to have scientific planning it means you cannot have a social experiment, society, unless you control all factors. Now to control all factors means that no man can be permitted to go his own way. How can you have valid social planning and control if some quack starts a Christian school, you see. Now this was her thinking and she was more honest than most of them are. Her premise was essentially very naively stating the principle of the social sciences; you cannot have freedom in a scientific world, in a scientific society because no valid experiment can then be conducted.

This is why, for example in the soviet Union, there is no guilt about their facts, about slave labor camps and the like. When under Stalin in the 30’s the forced collectivization of the farms led to widespread agricultural disaster and then famine, the Soviet Union later admitted to 6 million who starved to death. Others who escaped put the figure at 13 million at least. They finally had to stop this effort at collectivization. Stalin in calling a halt to it did not say “We have done wrong.” He simply spoke of over-zealous experimenters, that was all. You see even though it was a failure it was a valid experiment. Because if you failed in an experiment in science you know that that doesn’t work so you try another way of accomplishing your same goal. So you have unsuccessful experiments and you have successful experiments. Thus from the standpoint of the soviet theoretician there is no good and evil, those are moral categories. There is only a good experiment or an unsuccessful one; and the unsuccessful ones are stepping stones for the successful ones.

All this goes back to sociology August Comte divided the history of the world into three eras. The first was the mythological era, when men believed in myths; and religion he says was then the reigning principle. And men were trying through religion to answer the question “What is truth? What is reality? What is the nature of the universe?” But he says then men outgrew this and they reached the second stage, philosophy, and they began through reason to ask the same questions, what is truth, what is the nature of reality, and so on. But he said this was really an aspect of theology, they had not yet outgrown the theological mentality. Now he said we have reached the third age of history, the scientific age when man is no longer concerned with truth. Why? Because truth is a myth, the question “what is the meaning of things?” is never to be asked, Comte said. The only questions are technological, man decides what he wants then he develops and applies the technology to accomplish what he wants. This means therefore history is no longer a true story of the past, it is a story that has been re-fitted in terms of “what do we want to accomplish as scientific planners.”

Now in a way here Mr. Gibbs and I were discussing a few things about American history and I happened to mention two aspects. I said someday I hope to get into continuing work I’ve begun on a Christian history of the United States and I said one of the things that’s neglected for example is that Patrick Henry was a very dedicated Christian who printed theological books and tracts at his own expense; and as he went from town to town in Virginia to appear as a lawyer in the local court defending his clients he would pass these around to jurors, to the judge, to other attorney, and was a kind of traveling evangelist. Even on his death bed he witnessed to the doctor, an agnostic. Patrick Henry by the way, also I told him, was responsible really for the United States as we know it more than any other person, because he saw as the war was approaching that if the peace were signed soon the United States would end up forever a little country on the Atlantic seaboard. That everything over the mountains would be British, and apart of Canada because the British owned all of what is Ohio right on down to the gulf.

So Patrick Henry on his own worked night and day and raised a Virginia army, a small army, and sent them Westward over the mountains with orders “clear out the British.” The culmination of that campaign was the battle of Vincennes, it wiped out the British throughout the Midwest, pushed them back into Canada so that everything, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, all that territory on down south became American at the peace treaty. And so the dream of Patrick Henry of a nation that would extend Westward to the pacific became possible. Now that’s one of the greatest events of the war of Independence, one of the most important. Do you ever hear about it? Is there any textbook that tells you about that? Why the newest textbooks drop out Patrick Henry entirely. Why? Because they’re not interested in truth; truth for them is what works. Patrick Henry is an impediment to truth because of his faith.

This is why George Washington is getting demoted progressively, I could go on to the importance of Washington as a geopolitician who helped plan the strategy of the future and it was only because Jefferson interfered with his ideas and altered them that perhaps we had the Civil War, but that’s getting side tracked. But do you see the point? These are important aspects, critical aspects of our history. Here in the bicentennial year we should have been celebrating what Patrick Henry did, otherwise we would have been a small country on the Atlantic seaboard, nothing more. And this would be Canada today, part of Canada. But your idea of truth and mine as Christians is not that of the social scientists. In terms of their standards they are not being dishonest; they’ve made it clear that history to them means something radically different. Thus history as taught by the social sciences is the story of mans struggle to liberate himself from God and from superstition and to find himself in terms of science and a purely this worldly life.

History, briefly, is the liberation of man by science. God has no place in it. Let me site a few passages from a world history textbook which is one of the more conservative ones. I picked it up at a Christian school conference in Chicago a few years ago, I hope none of you are using it although I will have to admit it is one of the more conservative ones. It’s Rudenhanes {?} The World’s Story. On page three they write “to pack a suitcase for a journey is more fun than to fill a box with odds and ends and put it into storage. When you prepare for a journey you have a purpose.” Well there is purpose in history, but you see the purpose here is your purpose. You don’t go to history to learn about God’s purpose, or the purposes of men in the past apart from God and what happened to them; now man over and over again has tried to build his towers of Babel, and the confusion that God ordained for the first strikes all of them. No, the purpose they write is this, and I quote “in this course you will survey the march of humanity from earliest times to present and learn about the great triumphs and tragedies of mankind. In other you will make human experience available to you.” You’re going to go here to tap human experience in the past in order to use that human experience as you face the world today. There is no law beyond man, nor any purpose beyond man, thus when they mention the Ten Commandments in passing they speak of it as having this purpose, to prevent quote “acts that would spread discord within the group.” Its purpose is totally seen as humanistic. Law as a revelation for these writers is given way to laws to, quote “promote the welfare, the harmony, and the co-operation of men in society.” Total humanism.

The teachers manual gives the purpose of the course and I’d like to quote in a little details what they tell the teacher the purpose of teaching history is. “1.) To see that many types of problems facing mankind have been persistent through the ages in various cultures. 2.) To realize that the pace of change in human affairs has been accelerated throughout history exemplified most vividly by the changes in the nineteenth and twentieth century’s. 3.) To appreciate that the co-operative efforts of ever larger groups have advanced civilization; (you see they’re one worlders so they’re pointing to that from the teachers manual and the first pages of the book on) the enormous benefits, the great responsibilities, and the grave danger. 5.) To know about and to understand the development of other nations and regions of the world with which we have such close contact so that we may have a fuller appreciation of contemporary world problems.” So you get your appreciation of problems not from the word of God, but knowing other cultures, other religions, other peoples. “6.) To gain a background for understanding the decisions that our government now must make which in turn affect all parts of the globe. 7.) To appreciate the strength of endurance that mankind has had to experience in order to achieve its present states.

So you see it is the worship of mankind. Mankind, whom you are supposed to understand and appreciate all the contributions all of which as we shall soon see, have their virtually equal value. But of course for us the issue is this, in whose hands is history? In God’s hand or mans?

Luther at a critical point in the reformation said, and I quote “God alone is in this business. We are seized so that I see we are acted upon rather than acting.” Why did Luther say that? Because he said “I’m saved not by my works, but by the atoning work of Jesus Christ so that in my salvation it is God through Christ who acts upon me. Therefore in what I do it is now God continuing what he began in my redemption is acting through me.” So that he said “History is the act of God.” Now in effect what he was saying, if you’ll pardon me for getting my reformed theology in, was predestination. You see you cannot escape that doctrine I don’t like formulation of it by many Calvinists because they use it as a club to beat people over the head. And they turn it into determinism; it isn’t determinism because it affirms human responsibility. The world is either a world of chance or it is God’s world; if it’s chance it’s an impossibility, but today what the social scientist says is “I believe in predestination but predestination by may, we’re going to have total planning and control to save the world from catastrophe.”

Now in my book The Mythology of Science (this is a plug) I point out how these scientific planners actually not only say they are going to defeat death and give man immortality, but they say ultimately somewhere in the future they’re going to enable man to live without a body because a body is a handicap. That in untold millions of years the sun is going to die but we have the technology look ahead and see how a new sun can be created. Man as creator. Some of the daydreaming of these scientists, very responsible ones which I cite in that book, are staggering in their pretensions. Man is going to be God according to their thinking. Thus in effect we are compelled today to choose between one form of predestination, one form of total government or another. Mans or God’s, that’s the basic issue confronting us increasingly.

One scholar, Hedley, has said concerning Luther and Hedley would not share our faith but he has been very accurate in this statement, and I quote “with his conviction that God is the ground of historical causation Luther stands within the tradition of Paul and Augustine. Only God could be at the root of all temporal events. At the same time the theocentric position separates him from modern historical understanding; this difference is not limited to the problem of causation but appears in its two immediate implications. That every action derived from God gives unity and meaning to history, and secondly because man is the instrument of God one is denied the luxury of being a spectator. Man is constantly being acted upon and serves as a co-operator in this action. This unbroken activity of God pushes man into an unbroken co-operation in history. In such a situation there can be no dead history and no flight from history.”

Now for us therefore history is not a social science, it is a theological science because it is the work of God in time. An important fact for us to realize is that the term “dark ages” is a very old one and Christians first coined it. The so called Dark Ages were not dark; as a matter of fact they were ages of remarkable light, tremendous missionary activity. Times indeed of political upheaval but at that time the Christian thinkers, as Dr. William Carl Bark of Stanford has said, laid down the foundations of Western civilization and Western freedom. The term dark ages goes back to that time and earlier, to the early church. How did they use it? They said the dark ages are the times before Christ and the areas of history where Christ is not Lord. In terms of that definition we would have to say the United States and the whole world is now in a dark age. That Christ as the light of the world is the bringer of light and anything outside of life belongs to the vast dark ages of past history. Now that was the original use of the term dark ages. However Petrarch removed the term from the pre-Christian, non-Christian world and applied it to everything from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. Later the scholars limited it to some of the early centuries of what they called middle ages, and now they are attempting to abandon the term because while they like to think of it as darkness outside of humanism, it’s pretty hard to say that some of those thinkers of the so-called dark ages or the medieval cathedral builders were ignorant superstitious people living in darkness.

As a matter of fact the term middle ages is interesting too, it was born of the same kind of thinking. It referred to everything that was Christian to the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, the re-birth of humanism. So the Christian era, however defective from our perspective, was the middle age between the light of paganism and the light of modern humanism. Now again we cannot accept that kind of thinking. What constitutes light and what constitutes darkness? For us that’s a theological question, not a scientific one. After all if you’re going to take a technological answer to that as valid you have to say, for example, that ancient Crete was certainly a time of light. They had modern plumbing in ancient Crete, hot and running water, flush toilets. Civilization has had that several times and lost it. There is some slight evidence that it may have existed earlier in Mohenjo-Daro in India. Is technology light? Or is it Christ that is the light?

As a matter of fact the middle ages developed some of the most important inventions that history has ever known. One of the greatest inventions was the horse collar. Do you realize that until the horse collar was developed, and Rome didn’t have it, you couldn’t move much freight, you couldn’t have much freight in commerce because anything a horse pulled was against its windpipe and would strangle it, so you couldn’t have much of a load; several horses to pull a chariot with one or two men in it. But with the development of the horse collar technology began to flower in the Middle Ages, and they’re many inventions like that, but because they’ve been superseded we don’t recognize their importance now. But the tremendous burst of progress that ensued from simple things like that is enormous. But do you read about that in your history books, the invention of the horse collar? Supposedly they’re interested in our scientific past, but that isn’t a truth that fits in terms of their picture of the past. For us the modern era is a Dark Age, and they Christian school must see itself as a light bringer in darkness.

Now as we analyze humanism in the form of the doctrine of evolution and its effect on education we must see that one major form of the manifestation of the doctrine of evolution has been the stage theory of development. This in the earlier form of Darwinian thinking was the basic form of humanism. Marx saw feudalism as the first stage, capitalism as the second, and socialism/communism as the third and final stage, an evolution in history. Spangler saw a little later a rise and fall and no means {?}, the beginning of pessimism {?}. Why? When you depart from the supernatural and triune God of scripture you depart from any idea of an objective truth or law, and therefore all things ultimately become meaningless. There is no goal, and how can you say history has evolved rather than devolved? Why must it evolve? Why not devolution? So Spangler logically saw that, so Spangler said “it’s just a rise and a decline, it’s meaningless.” So all civilizations like people are born, they reach a maturity, they decay, and then they are dead; this led to the second development of evolutionary perspectives as they apply to education, relativism.

In relativism all things are equally valuable, equally true, and equally false, equally meaningless. For example in anthropology one of the most powerful influences in the world today is Claude Levi-Strauss and he writes, and I quote “a primitive people is not a backward or retarded people, indeed it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievement of civilized people far behind. What civilized man seeks above all is not truth but coherence. Not the scientific distinction between true and false, but a vision of the world that will satisfy his soul.” When Levi-Strauss gets through Africa is no longer a missions field, it is a place to go for wisdom. You go into the jungles and you talk to these cannibals for wisdom, and cannibalism is an equally valid way of life. Who are you to object to it? Now this was actually annunciated, this faith, by a recent Justice of the United States, William Douglas. He insisted on the equal rights of all opinions including cannibalism.

Well, what happens to education then? No education. I was speaking once about four or five years ago to a group and afterwards this young woman studying elementary education in a major state university came up to me and said “you know the dean of our school in a lecture to our class said that we shouldn’t waste our time teaching any subject matter. All subject matters that you teach children will be obsolete by the time they are mature, and therefore you will have cluttered their minds with obsolete materials.” The world is subject to continual social change. Therefore what you have to teach is social change, or social revolution. Well what are you teaching? Perpetual revolution, if there is no meaning to anything, that anyone over thirty is not to be trusted. The answer to that came very soon from some junior high students; no-one over sixteen was to be trusted. Well it makes sense; they are the wave of the future you see. Evolution, nothing has any meaning except the future, and if you are closer to the future because you’re younger then you can say to those above you “get out of the way.” And you can say of history that it has no meaning for you.

Henry Ford was a logical humanist, he said history is bunk. Well for Henry Ford technology was everything, and the answer to the future was technology; and technology in this sense means controlled planning of the human creature. Man controlling man to re-make him totally {?} Of course you have seen, if you’ve read Harper’s magazine the past 4-5 years faithfully, and read some of the new books like Second Genesis and others that now they are reaching the point of dissatisfaction with man. There are some who, let me add by the way in France the death of God school was succeeded very logically by the death of man school. But you have men like Skinner who has said that people are incapable of controlling their lives, therefore we have to have some kind of control. This might mean electrical implants into everybody’s brain when they are born so that you can have a push button control of people. It might mean chemical controls, or there are some who have said the answer is cloning, creating artificial men out of some of your body cells. What does it all indicate? The goal is the end of history.

Now, Marx said that history must end when communism arrives. You reach the {?} state. Scholars since then like Roderick Seidenberg have written on the end of history. A time when history will be no more because man will no longer have alienation, he will be totally like the animals without a history. Religion has entered into the picture, supernatural religion (Christianity they mean) and has alienated man from himself. That is, from his status as a biological animal. As a result man now thinks that he is a being with history, with meaning, with a direction, with a purpose to his life; in this world and the world to come. But when you eliminate that man will be no more self-conscious than the bees in a beehive or the ants in an anthill are conscious, self –conscious. There is no history to a beehive nor to an anthill, it’s the same thing endlessly. This they say should be the goal of man, the end of history. SO as modern history is taught in terms of social sciences it works ahead to the death of history, to the elimination of the idea of history.

Henry Miller (do you remember him, the pornographer?) said “I think it’s wrong to think.” Why? It involves self-consciousness. He went further and said, and he was simply reproducing very simply, directly, and not evilly what the social scientists were teaching, that the goal would be world revolution, world chaos for a couple of centuries so that books, reading, civilization would totally disappear and man would revert to an animal status. Then a new paradise could emerge. Now, with this perspective in mind you can begin to understand the rebelliousness of modern youth. Rebelliousness in modern youth is an educational product. When you study education in our colleges and universities today one of the things you are required in many schools to study is adolescent psychology. Let me say there’s no such thing. It does not exist. Ours is the only civilization in all of history that has had the phenomenon known as adolescents; it is not biological. It is not a natural time of revolt; it is not a natural time of alienation from the older generation. Throughout history children as they reached what we called adolescents or puberty are most intent upon imitating their elders because now they’re reaching maturity, now they want to learn the arts of maturity, they become the closest to their parents at that age. But our modern education has created something that even Christians think is natural, adolescents. It’s a myth, it is something that is foisted upon, forced upon our children and it isn’t something natural it is something unnatural and anti-God, anti-Scriptural.

Now in due time as we create more and more Christian schools, more and more Christian institutions and a Christian culture we will not see adolescents. I can recall with some delight and pride when Martha, my youngest daughter, looking at some of the teenage girls in the neighborhood and she was about ten or eleven at the time, said “oh it’s horrible being an adolescent and I hope I never am. They go crazy when they reach their teens.” Well she never was an adolescent, she was a Godly daughter and she is now approaching her mid-twenties, a very Godly mother. No adolescents, of course not. She had a Christian home, Christian school, a Christian community and her life was limited to that. She is better able to cope with the world today then those whom she knew at the time who went to the state schools, to the schools of the enemy. [Amen’s in the audience] Let us bow our heads in prayer.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank Thee that Thou art the Lord of history, the captain of the whirlwind and storm, that all things come from Thy hands and Thou hast called us to be Thy people, to go forth and to conquer in Thy name. Make us masters and conquerors in the area of education that we may reclaim the children of this land for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; that we may be in Thy hands the makers and shakers of history, in terms of Thy sovereign fight. Bless us to this purpose in Jesus name, amen.