Christian Schools

Intellectual Schizophrenia

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Lesson: 2-3

Genre: Lecture

Track: 98

Dictation Name: RR151B3

Location/Venue:

Year:

[Introduction] Now for concluding our speakers, he has spoken twice already today and we are certainly blessed to have Dr. R.J. Rushdoony speaking on intellectual schizophrenia. Dr. Rushdoony.

[Rushdoony] There is an old story about a university professor who had a nightmare in which he dreamed that he was lecturing to his class and woke up and found that he was. [General Laughter] I am reminded about that story because I slept only about an hour and a quarter last night on a plane from Los Angeles to Memphis, and I hope the same doesn’t befall either myself or you. Our subject now is intellectual schizophrenia, in particular the schizophrenia that besets the advocates of public education. We shall in this hour deal with the liberal and radical critique of the public schools. In recent years there has been a growing critique of the schools, a growing dissatisfaction with them, and this is in one respect not surprising. One of the things that catches my eye when I go on campus and I do appear on many secular university campuses year in and year out, is to examine the lecture subjects of other speakers, of secular humanistic speakers. Basically there is quite a polarity in these subjects, and they can be summed up under two heads. One type of speech is ‘Will Man Survive?’ and the implication is that he won’t. And the other type of speech is ‘The Coming Triumph of World Socialism’.

There’s something schizophrenic here. A very wild ambivalence between hopelessness and wild confidence, we should not be surprised at this. Because in humanism all depends on man and man is God, man will as he faces the immensity of this task and realizes that he faces it alone, be sometimes desperately, totally, hopeless. On the other hand as he tells himself that he is the only God in the universe he begins to feel that he is omnipotent and if he says that things shall come to pass and passes a law to that effect, it should. After all when man thinks of himself as God he thinks in terms of those categories of thought which are inescapable with a concept of a Godhead, and one is the creative word…’and God said and it was so’. And today at schools and in our legislature assemblies these men who see themselves as gods try the same thing. They pass a law and reality should be changed…but it is not. They instituted an educational program that should bring them out a new kind of person and it does not.

When man plays god against the void of a meaningless world he does become schizophrenic, and so it is true that as he faces schools he does so with wild confidence and bitter despair. There had been a flood of books in the last two or three years by radicals and liberals attacking the government schools. I could go into some of the more radical critiques; the Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has a number of publications and writers attacking the whole concept of statist education from the far leftist position, attacking the idea of compulsory school law and a great deal more. Dr. Ehrlich is notable among those who have mounted such an attack. But let us take a more moderate leftist attack such as that by Colin Greer. Colin Greer’s book, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation Of American Public Education, cites the fact that does concern many of these critics of statist education, they realize that nine million current school children will enter the labor market as functional illiterates. This is their own admission. Nine million children across the United States will finish their schooling as functional illiterates. This certainly does not spell success. Moreover as Colin Greer points out it is very difficult to call these facts to the attention of the educational fraternity and segments of the public because he says, and I quote: “Public education is a religion.” Unquote. The modern faith that is in salvation by education, the goal in our schools he says has radically changed from the colonial period when the function of schools was to produce the Christian man, fully armed and prepared by means of education to meet all problems.

Then it became Americanization and Americanization progressively became socialistically interpreted. Not sufficiently to suit, of course, Colin Greer and others. But he says the schools have failed to Americanize, immigrants are not educated properly, they have become largely able to progress in the United States by self-education, now Greer is correct at this point. A very large of studies over the past few years has revealed the fact that instead of being the great Americanizing force, the schools were a very divisive and oppressive force. They did not Americanize the Germans or the Irish or the Italians or any other group that came to this country. Nor were they very helpful in teaching them even English. I included the Irish there by the way because the great Irish immigration from 1820 on was largely not English speaking; they were the Gaelic speaking Irish. In fact, so many of the Gaelic speaking rural Irish came over that Ireland has virtually no Gaelic speaking people left. The Irish immigrants then had to learn English also. Who taught them? Predominantly with all these immigrant groups the basic education was done by their churches and by their own nationalistic organizations, the German-American group, the Irish-American group, the Italian-American group and so on. The documentation for this is quite extensive. The schools did not help them, they were misfits in the schools and they were treated as the lowest of the low. They were very quickly weeded out, and as a result there was an inner development in the ghetto areas of the big cities in which the organizations within the society, Italian or Irish or German or what have you, trained their own people and enabled them to advance, and to improve their lot in this country.

But there is a far more radical critique that Colin Greer makes of statist education. It is a startlingly one coming from a person who is himself totally non-Christian, he never even considers the Christian perspective. The schools, he says, have been radically ugly and evil in their basic impact because of their Darwinism. Now this is a startlingly criticism coming from a man who never even considers Christianity as a live option. He says the theory of natural selection which lies behind much of the American popular faith in public education, this theory consistently ignores the reality and the ineffectiveness of the criteria imposed from above upon those attempting to climb the ladder of success. And then he goes on to develop primarily what he means by this, the theory of natural selection, survival of the fittest. In education, he says, this means that the public schools, the government schools, very early in the last century shortly after Darwin, began to imbibe this perspective. In other words they imbibed it almost within a couple decades after the public schools were established. What did they do? They began to weed out in terms of the doctrine of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, those who were not the elite. And so he said, the fallacy until approximately 1930 was ‘weed out the lower levels in grade school’. Then the high school will be the training ground and the college for the elite, those who will provide the leadership for our Darwinian society.

They shall be training for education, for leadership in state, in commerce and in social life. The rest are for the labor market as unskilled or semi-skilled workers. But Greer points out beginning in the twenties there began to be a problem of unemployment. This presented a problem. Turn out all these youth at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, when there was no way of absorbing them into society, this might, they felt, create a revolutionary situation, and so the educational philosophy became ‘let us raise the mandatory school age to sixteen or eighteen and hold them in school longer’ and especially with the depression this became the general practice. Hold them in school longer, keep them off the labor market, we cannot absorb them. Therefore, do not flunk them out in grade school or in high school, and increasingly educational philosophy posited a mandatory passing all through the lower grades. And passing became increasingly the order of the day. Even those schools that did flunk flunked with the idea of helping the student to get ahead the next semester so that he could see his way through high school as a high school graduate. But flunking, you see, is then to be done on the college level. Since World War Two the situation has altered increasingly, because as we have a less and less free society and more and more socialistic society, jobs become as a result progressively more and more a problem. As a result, the idea increasingly is to hold them in school until approximately twenty with a junior college system. And pass them all the way through the second year of college, no flunking. And state after state, California is one of these; this is becoming the routine thing. Every child must go through school to the age of eighteen and is increasingly guided and steered through junior college, so it is becoming normal for all, virtually without exception to continue with their schooling to the age of twenty.

No failure below that. In college, the weeding is forty percent or more depending upon the school. It could be higher, some hold, but increasingly the attitude is perhaps as our economic situation becomes more and more difficult, we could hold them all the way through college and flunk them out in graduate school. State colleges are increasingly established with this in mind. Let them through, lets hold them as long as possible; we are less likely than to have social revolution. As a result, very great problems confront schools on all levels today. Most because this Darwinism leads to a feeling that they are training an elite only, they are preparing leadership and also because most students are aware of the fact that they are being babysat. That they are going to be passed, that nothing much is expected of them, that they are simply cogs in a machine. The first student revolt which broke out at the Berkeley Campus of the University of California very definitely was motivated by this impulse. The motto of the revolting students was Do Not Hold, Mutilate or Staple. In other words, their feeling was we are not persons; we are merely things that are being pushed along as useless until they can no longer push us any further in the educational process. And we resent being treated as something in the giant computer without any human significance. Colin Greer is right, education no longer is as it was in the colonial period and in the first half century of the republic, the education of the Christian man, every child to be educated in terms of the faith, in terms of the covenant, in terms of a responsibility under God to be a whole man in Jesus Christ.

Now it is Darwinism, weed out the culls, prepare a handful for social, political and industrial leadership. It is a ruthless, heartless system. Moreover, faith is gone in that system, faith in anything. Dr. Nesbit, one of the finest sociologists in the world today, has written a study and it delighted me because I was writing something along the same lines at the same time, although he did a far profounder job as far as the historical side was concerned, while mine was more theological. He titled his little study ‘The End of the University’, I believe, or ‘The Decline and Collapse’ or ‘The Decline and Fall of the University’. His thesis was that the university was the last meta-evil institution. And as such it was now going. My thesis of course was very much along the same lines approaching it from a different perspective; I singled out the term by Dr. Clark Kerr who in the early 1960s declared that the university was gone, that the multiversity had taken its place. Now his point in choosing this term was simply this: a university is a Christian concept; it presupposes that there is one God, one world of law, one universe and therefore a university in which this unified body of truth and law is taught. It’s a theistic concept; it is thoroughly a Biblical concept. But today there is no concept of absolute truth, in the modern higher educational institution believes in a multiverse. There can be many systems that have evolved out of the primordial atom.

There is therefore perhaps many universes, it is a multiverse and therefore the university is no longer tenable, it must be a multiversity in which anything goes except Christianity which holds to a one world of truth, absolute truth and law. As a result today we do have multiversities and the multiversities are militantly hostile to Christianity. But having no absolutes they teach magic, they teach almost any and every subject under the sun including astrology. They have no truth, and so it is that one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, a man who has no trace of Christianity in him, has written a very telling book on the end of the golden age. This man, a molecular biologist at the University of California, has analyzed what is happening to the university. And he declares that without the concept of truth it is no longer possible to have science, science will disappear. And he says that increasingly in graduate students this fact is becoming apparent, the graduate student no longer is like the scholar of old with a passion for truth. He is there because he is antiquarian, just as some people collect stamps because it appeals to them, so he is interested in physics or chemistry because he is doing his thing. And so he says this kind of interest will wane, it will mean that science will disappear and in a couple of centuries man having reverted to barbarism because he has no belief in truth, nor any desire to learn, will disappear from the face of the earth. And in the spring of 1970 when Natural History reviewed the book it was given four pages of review and the reviewer concluded that he could not buy the authors optimism.

Modern education is bankrupt. This bankruptcy came to very clear focus in a very startlingly report which was published in 1966, it had been commissioned earlier by President Kennedy and Dr. James S. Coleman of John Hopkins University had been made chairman of the commission. It was the Equality of Educational Opportunity Report. It was a study with the use of computers of all schools in the states. Since there was a great concern about immigration, it was a study of the schools as they differed, what was the difference between the black schools and the white schools and so on. Every aspect. The report was a major shock, both to the committee as the data began to come in, and also to educators and politicians, and they have ignored it. About the only attention paid to it was by Harvard University which pointed a faculty seminar on the Coleman Report on Equality of Educational Opportunity, edited by Frederick Mosteller and Daniel Moynihan. Now I see the significance of it, in effect saying yes this is so, we see no holes in this report, it’s valid. It’s very interesting too, that the report did not deal with Christian schools at all. There was one sentence that indicated something of recognition of their existence, the sentence says: “No one yet knows how to make a ghetto school work.” Perhaps it should be said that no one knows how to make a public ghetto school work. Now the findings of the E.E.O.R. or the Coleman Report which covered the era just before the compulsory integration of schools, in essence, came to three conclusions.

The first which startled everyone was this: black and white schools are virtually equal in quality. This was a shocker. There were slight differences, on some points the white schools had an advantage but on other points the black schools had an advantage over the white schools. So that as far as equality of educational opportunity was concerned, segregation had not handicapped the blacks. The second conclusion was even more upsetting to the educational fraternity; it was that that money made no difference in educational results. Spend as much as you want on facilities, equipment, and so on, it makes no difference. I trust some of you will remember this when the pressure is on you in your Christian school to have a chemistry lab or a physics lab…forget it! As a matter of fact I believe a very strong case could be made to the fact that they are a detriment to education. Those labs are a joke, no student learns to experiment, no experiment is ever conducted in a high school laboratory, they are just demonstrations of experiments that were made generations ago. And that demonstration could be done by a teacher before the entire class much more economically, much more effectively, with better teaching results. As a matter of fact I was told by one instructor in chemistry that he prefers students from schools where they did not have labs, they had learned more. They had done less playing with the little gadgets in the chemistry lab and more learning. The Coleman Report thus very definitely confirmed the fact that money makes no difference in results.

The third result was even more devastating to the educational fraternity and it was this: the family is basic in educational achievement. The basic problem they found with black students in schools was not that there was not enough money spend upon them, nor that they lacked good teachers, the basic problem was that fifty five percent of the black children only had both parents in the home. The other forty five percent you could write off educationally. And this was the problem. Eighty percent of the whites had both parents in the home; the other twenty percent were useless in school. In other words the family is the governing factor in education, thus said the Coleman Report. But the question that it did not face was this, what is meant by the family? It obviously includes hereditary, it obviously includes morality, and it very obviously includes religion. The determinative aspect of education is not in education as far as our public schools are concerned, and the Christian school reinforces the family, the basic educational unit and therefore it is able to accomplish a great deal. The public school does not. Its effect thus at best is deleterious, bad. It cannot educate, it basically can only harm, and this it is doing. And ironically with deliberate intent, statist educational philosophy has leveled its guns at God and the family. In his book Common Faith, John Dewey in 1932 declared that Christianity, biblical Christianity and democracy were not compatible. Why?

Because, he said, the concept of Christianity that we meet with in the Bible is hopelessly aristocratic. It tells us that there is a division between the saved and the lost, the sheep and the goats, between truth and error, heaven and hell. And that’s aristocratic, hopelessly so. It is anti-democratic. In 1948 James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, former high commissioner of Germany, scientist, began to make surveys of education for the N.E.A. and he wrote in Educated Education in A Divided World on page eight, published in 1948 by the Harvard University Press that there was an irreconcilable conflict between democracy and the family. Every family is an aristocratic institution, it wants the best for its children and it doesn’t think about the children of the poor Hottentots or the children of the slum. It gets the best possible clothing, housing, food and schooling for its children, and does not think about the others. And so he said there was an inescapable conflict between democracy and the family. They have thus waged war against the only agency that has been able to be of any help to the schools. Have they learned anything from the Coleman report? Well the fact that the Coleman Report is virtually unknown and only a few people on the high levels of the educational fraternity are familiar with it is revealing.

What are these people who are familiar with the Coleman Report doing? They are proposing a solution, first that we begin education at the age of three to four years, and undercut the family thereby and increase the power and influence of the school by replacing the family as quickly as possible in the formative years of the child. And second that we create a central campus in each community requiring that all children be boarded there in order nullify and undercut the family. Ironic is it not, it is the secular statist educators themselves who come up with these conclusions and then they go directly against their findings because of their humanistic bent to make no concession to the family, let alone God. Now it is ironic that they are planning to repeat concisely the error of the Soviet Union. In the 1920’s the Soviets experimented precisely in this field. They provided nurseries for all working mothers and morning to night care for all children and took away the children from families. The parents picked them up at night and took them home. There is a story told that is true of one Soviet mother in those days that stopped by at the nursery late at night to pick up her baby to go home and then of course to come again in the morning very early before she went again to the factory and worked. And as she stepped out of the door with her baby she looked and noticed it was not her baby and she turned and said that this not my child that you have given me, you’ve given me the wrong baby. And the woman attendant says ‘But what difference does it make, it’s just going to go home and sleep at your place all night and you’re going to bring it back again.’ And of course it was that impersonal.

The hardworking mothers could do nothing except put their child to bed while they hurriedly fed the family, went to bed and in the morning carted it back to the nursery. The results were deadly. Doctor Korolyov, Soviet head of the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy declared when the policy was abandoned and I quote: “Under present conditions there is no doubt that the home offers the more stimulating environment for the development of the infant then the asylum. Not only have we decreased the death rate in this way by placing the institutional children in private homes, but we have insured normal development to a much larger proportion of babies, since in almost every case our asylum trained babies were both mentally and physically backwards.” Unquote. As a matter of fact and this was still under Stalin, some of the Soviet bureaucracy went so far as to say it was better for the child to be in a family, taught by parents who were still Christian, all the old superstitions of the Bible, then to be in a state nursery. Because the state nursery, to use a modern expression, would blow the mind of the child and its body too, and at least they had a potentially useful citizen in the home trained child. But of course this doesn’t mean the Soviet Union gave up. A friend and associate of mine when I was at the foundation regularly read the Soviet publications and he found that there was a great deal of editorializing about the grandmother problem. The grandmothers were the ones who stayed home and took care of the grandchildren and they were teaching them all those horrible bible stories. And so what they had hoped to eliminate was being fed to the younger generation.

The modern educational community thus is beset with intellectual schizophrenia. IT is at war with itself and with reality. It recognizes the growing collapse in the area of statist education but it has no answer to the problem. It recognizes the importance of the family and then works to undermine the family. No more than the Soviet Union having recognized the centrality of the family can reestablish the family without faith, can we create any substitute for the family. The Soviet Union has very rigid and puritanical laws in effect now and yet it is being eaten with a dry rot of the new morality, pornography and every kind of moral dissipation and degeneracy imaginable. By failing to provide that one thing that makes the family strong, a bible Christian faith, they have so undermined themselves today in the Soviet Union that they have a major problem with production. They can no longer with promises, get the people to work. Production is collapsing in every area. And this is why there is a tremendous urgency to have consumer goods, particularly automobiles, produced. The invitation to European companies to build their auto plants there. So they can advertise to their youth, work hard! Save your money! You too can be like youth of America; you can have your own car. Now this is the purpose of the manufacture of automobiles there, to try and bribe the youth to work. The early indications are that it will not be too very successful.

There is an inner collapse because of the disappearance of any faith for living. Now our statist education today is progressively creating a collapse within a sizable segment of American life. It has no future as a result. As against this, today we have a growing body of youth who are being educated in Christian schools. I grant you that many of these schools are not all that they should be. But enough of them are doing an unparalleled job of educating the youth that so that leadership is coming forward that will in not too many years command this country, remake the churches and create a new kind of culture. One pastor who has had a Christian school for some few years now has said ‘do you know that I find it easier to preach and to preach more exigently and systematically, more theologically in my school chapel than to my Sunday morning congregation’. Because there is a different kind of character and maturity in them. As we face the future therefore we need to recognize that we are living in a dying nation, a dying world, and we should rejoice. It deserves to die. But the future belongs to those who are in Christ and we shall triumph, of that there is no question. I think we have time for a few questions unless you’d like to conclude it now. Are there any questions?

[Question, hard to hear] You made a reference to… statist education, it’s amusing to me when you make reference to these states, I think in terms of the nationalist state, and here of course we have the city and board of education, doesn’t this provide some kind of diversity and ameliorate the situation somewhat? I mean, we don’t have here the same situation that they had in Germany….

[Rushdoony Answers] That was the case a decade ago. Today the federal funds control all the states. Far more than the many states who produce textbooks themselves recognize. For example, the textbooks that are produced today are produced on subsidies by the federal government to the publishers and to the writers involved. This is why your new textbooks in the public schools are such beautiful things; there are unlimited funds to spend on them. The funds are provided on specifications that these textbooks are going to cover a particular subject from a particular point of view. So that you can have a very liberal and moderately liberal and slightly conservative type of textbook. Thus when a state system offers to schools within the state it’s choice of, say, in California as they do, pre-approved texts in a particular subject, all of those are federally subsidized. On top of that so many federal funds come into every school subject that in affect what you have to say is that increasingly all fifty states are branches of one federal school system. On top of that you must further say that our universities and colleges are divided between state and federal institutions. The so called private schools are largely federal. The amount of funds, for example, that Stanford University that are federal funds is so vast that I know that about ten years ago when I wrote Messianic Character, I thought for a while about going into this area of analyzing funds and I found at that time that a slightly higher percentage of federal funds had gone into Stanford than state funds into the University of California Berkeley. In other words there was almost as much in way of private funds in Berkeley as there was in Stanford. This is why Stanford or Harvard or any one of these supposedly private universities, they can pick the alumni in the teeth, because they don’t need their money. Now, last Sunday afternoon I had a visitor, a very wealthy man is a Stanford graduate and he told me he had approached the Stanford trustees and offered to endow a chair in government. No control on the chair, the one stipulation was that he must take an oath of allegiance to the United States.

His purpose in requiring this was that he didn’t want a Marxist or a revolutionist there. He wasn’t even specifying a conservative. And they turned him down rather crudely and nastily. They didn’t need his money and if he wasn’t just going to hand it to them and walk away, they didn’t want to talk to him. They don’t need it because they have federal funds. At the time that I made my study of the funds at Stanford in terms of writing something about it and I did make a reference to this at one point, even the romance languages, Spanish and the like were taught at Stanford with national defense funds. This is why when you’re told how much money goes into national defense; remember, not much winds up in the hands of the military.

[Question Unintelligible] …I can’t laugh, it’s so tragic, accreditation today is a means of keeping good educators from doing their job.

[Rushdoony Answers] If I may something too on this, I graduated from a little high school in a small farm community in the midst of the depression and they didn’t even have the money to teach some of the courses that were required by the university. So when I applied at Berkeley, the University of California, I didn’t have, I think, two of the necessary courses for college preparatory. And I recall that the Dean was just stepping out of a back office and one of the clerks said here is a student from a high school who hasn’t took the courses and is applying. And he just asked me ‘what school’ and I said Kingsburg High School and he said ‘let him in!’ That was it. The reason I found out was that all the graduates of that school, though not accredited, had been A students. There were two of us who applied that year, we were both accepted, we both graduated with honors. Now, they had, I found, a record on every school. If a school, such as a new Christian school, didn’t have one, they examined the first students and then they built up a file. And they went by that rather than accreditation. So that although the farmers in our little community didn’t have money for a lot of courses and wouldn’t hire the teachers, it didn’t make any difference. They knew we were college material, let ‘em in. That was the attitude.

[Man speaking] I would like to add this also, in view of the article, and that in my opinion, one of the worst laws that destroyed parental control over the child was compulsory school education. And furthermore, here are persons that are fooling themselves, as a ruling class, to set up standards by which we are to be measured. I was a high school dropout. Now I’m not brilliant by any means, my IQ is maybe 78, but I just got tired of school and as I’ve said to some of you and I don’t mean this in a boasting way but I just left at the 10th grade and went into college and took their entrance exam and got in. And I went to nine years of university and didn’t have any trouble. We have a young man who graduated from the Christian Heritage school and he received without any accreditation, two unconditional scholarships from two different universities in the State of Alabama, and left to his own choosing where tuition and all were fully paid. Now this young man was so outstanding that in his last year of high school I had him to read through in addition to his regular work in the high school, Rushdoony’s This Independent Republic: The American System and Politics of Guilt and Pity and at the age of eighteen he ran for the presidency of the Alabama State Commission and made a good showing because he stood and was able to handle the issues from a conservative perspective. And it made an impression and people took him seriously, and I believe that one day in the realm of politics that he will be able to project the king rights of Jesus Christ and will come to some recognition. And he is a straight A student in college at present time. So these are frightening methods that are merely trying to make us surrender a little more of our own authorities and freedoms to certain standards that are arbitrarily set up by these individuals.

As Dr. Singer pointed out, they’re painting a parking lot and such you see. So I think that harassment is a good sign, that we’re finally being recognized, we’re here, lets agitate them to death. I believe in agitation and it is just agitating, by the way, I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to study the conspiracy from the Rushdoony perspective that they read it closely and thoroughly and maybe several times, the chapter devoted to it in his book The American System where he gives a tremendous exposition of Psalm Two and is it in the Politics of Guilt and Pity or in The One and the Many that you deal with Satanism and conspiracy?

[Rushdoony] I couldn’t tell you.

[Same Unidentified Man] Well it’s in one or the other, and buy both and you’ll find it anyway. He goes into quite some detail on this element on sovereignty, showing that if we deny the sovereignty of God it goes over into Satanism and if we recognize there is a controlling element in conspiracy outside of God’s power, domain and control that this is real witchcraft and demonism. Both books are worthwhile and if you buy the one on the Politics of Guilt and Pity, study over and over, from my perspective, maybe you’ll want to rebut this, the chapter that deals with masochism and Satanism, and if you understand his application of that you’ll start understanding a great deal of what is happening in politics and courts, and within our schools and families as well.

[Question or Comment Unintelligible] I have a question that perhaps applies to a couple people.. I’m brand new in education, so I have a lot of questions, not long ago… one thing I took note of in all the readings we were supposed to do… I think perhaps things are not all so black and white, I know Mr… was certified by the state, I don’t want to appear to be the defender of the…. But can’t a governor be interested in entertaining those and also interested in Christian education?... Welfare workers put to work… California…

[Same Unidentified Man Speaking] I think there is a black and white, though I don’t think all things are either black or white, there’s also grey which is a mixture, and I have yet to encounter a human being that I was confident was totally consistent both in his convictions and in his conduct. I suppose that we find –I’m just sort of thinking out my opinion- that if I found the person who was a thoroughly consistent Christian in every corner and aspect of his life, that he must surely be already in heaven. On the other side, it would be rash indeed to say we do not have thousands upon thousands of good Christian people teaching in our government schools. What I said earlier at one point, that if it had not been for this that we would have been destroyed long since. And I think it’s true today, on the other hand, I do not see how a school can even be reasonably called Christian if they’d accept a governing control of an anti-Christian agency. This I cannot see, this I see in black and white.

[Unintelligible Comment] Is the agency of a necessity anti Christian?

[Same Unidentified Man Speaking] If it professes to be, yes…. You can trust a Communist. You can trust him to be Communist. And I think if a person devotes his life to fighting the implications of Christianity and the claims of Christianity, that I believe they are anti-Christian. And out of all the areas of life that there is indeed to be black and white it is here. Somebody said earlier, I think it was Dr. Router that there is only one way to come to God. There is only one way. And ultimately in schools I think this is what we’re dealing with. We may be very well meaning and very well intentioned but there’s still only one way and this can be said about the Lord Jesus Christ. It must be said. I’m sure you heard the line of reasoning of C.S. Lewis and many others have said it, but he made it popular: “Unitarians, they say they believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been a good man and a great teacher, they may say he is the best man that ever lived, but the greatest teacher that ever lived, but if he says he is not God then he has declared him to be the most hideous being that we can imagine, because he most certainly professed to be God.” He is either, or perhaps both, utterly wicked and stupid or he is God. I’m the same way with creation, there is no neutrality. You can make a statement ‘all things were made’ and that statement is either true or false but there cannot be any halfway, and if it is all true, then God, and if it is all false, then Darwin. And it is false if there is only one thing that wasn’t made.

[Rushdoony] I can understand your feelings with regards to Governor Reagan; almost every time he opens his mouth I’m delighted. Almost every time he acts I’m horrified. [Laughter] Conservatives tend to be impressed by orators and liberals by action. He satisfies both. The appointments he has made to the state board of education are on the whole worse than those made by his predecessor Pat Brown who was a very liberal democrat. The appointments he has made to the [unintelligible] board and various other boards that deal with law enforcement are worse than those of Pat Brown. He comes out very strongly against crime and against coddling offenders. But I spend the better part of the day with a friend who is a state senator in his office at the state capitol not too long ago and he was showing me pictures of conditions in prisons, the newer ones look like country clubs. One of them has a golf course as well as tennis courts and swimming pools and so on, and he said that last year there were almost nine thousand escapees out of seventeen thousand prisoners in the state prisons.

The state prisons have a lower population than ever before in the state of California because under the policy of the administration there is bonuses to the various counties and municipalities if they don’t send them to the state prison. So there is a good record, we have less criminals. Now, there was a great deal of hue and cry because some of these escapees as well as parolees were out killing people. We’re going to have far fewer escapees this year. You know why? Because the definition of an escapee has been changed. If he is caught within a certain amount of time and within three miles of the prison he’s not an escapee, he’s just a W.O., he’s just strolling a little too far. Now that’s the kind of gymnastics that’s going on and it’s too bad. Certainly his expressed philosophy is excellent. One or two appointments he has made of his associates are good. But by and large there’s no great cause for joy in California, believe me. And certainly in education and law enforcement which are two key areas, we have lost ground badly.

[Unintelligible Comment]

[Rushdoony] I think he’s playing politics, I think he’s out to please everyone and unfortunately conservatives are very much impressed by oratory, the liberals by action. He satisfies both.

[Unintelligible Comment]

[Rushdoony] Yes, I think it’s pretty much a national pattern, I believe this is on the whole true of President Nixon as well. I think President Nixon is a much more intelligent man than Mr. Reagan, in fact, I believe perhaps the most brilliant mind we’ve had in the White House this century is Mr. Nixon. I would not say he’s the most moral mind.

[Unintelligible Comment]

[Several other men talking, bits and pieces intelligible but not on a whole]