Subversion and the United Nations

Strategy of Subversion

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Constitutional Studies

Lesson: 1 of 2

Track: #100

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

Dictation Name: RR152A1

[Rushdoony] Much has been said and written concerning the Korean prisoner of war situation. As you recall we faced a serious problem with the men who were prisoners of war in the hands of the North Koreans during that war. They were returned to us very largely brainwashed; and a great deal was said subsequently concerning the failures of America, the failure of the home, the failure of our schools in training these young men, as well as the failure of the army. But the root of the matter I believe was missed. The Koreans were prepared, the North Koreans or rather the Communists, for these prisoners of war; and as they received each group of prisoners they would very quickly ask them questions determined to a particular point. To ascertain whether these American soldiers were either strong Christians, or strong believers in free enterprise, or whether they were of a hoodlum criminal background. About seven to eight percent of every hundred American soldiers taken were segregated by the North Koreans on the grounds that these men were either hardcore believers in capitalism or hardcore champions of Christianity. Another seven to eight percent were segregated as hoodlums. So about an average of fifteen percent were segregated out of every hundred, these represented leadership of a sort; good leadership as well as bad.

The remaining eighty-five percent even though they included often high ranking officers, were men who were basically followers. Men who did not have strong convictions about anything, and as a result having removed the leadership from them it was easy to brainwash them. It was no problem. The fifteen percent that they took out they put behind barbed wires with armed guards. The eighty-five percent they put in villages, from which the Koreans had been driven out, without a single strand of barbed wire around them and only one or two soldiers guarding them. They didn’t try to escape. They provided them with everything so they could build their own latrines, do their own cooking, and they didn’t have enough leadership to do any of that. In fact the situation go to be so deplorable that finally the Chinese communists came in and built latrines and cleaned up the villages because they themselves could not enter in in order to conduct their daily brain washing program.

The Chinese communists knew, as all subversive groups do, that the minority governs. History has never been dominated by majorities, but always by dedicated minorities. And the trouble today with too many of us who are Christian conservatives is that we’re waiting to get a majority, and all we need today is the dedicated minority. The minority that will say “here I stand I can do no other so help me God. And here I stand whether it be to my death or in terms of victory.” The communists represent such a minority. In Russia in 1917 there was one communist for every two thousand, two hundred and seventy-seven persons. In the USA as of FBI figures in 1949 there is one communist for every one thousand eight hundred and fourteen persons, in other words we have a much higher ratio of communists here. Even today the communists in the USSR are only about five percent of the population.

Manning Johnson an ex-Communist leader speaking on infiltration and control said a few years ago that “this can be accomplished by any subversive group if they control one percent of the citizenry, or if it’s an institution or organization, one percent of the members and have another nine or ten percent who are muddle headed sympathizers.” In other words to take over a church all they need is one percent of the clergy and another nine or ten percent who are muddled headed sympathizers. Thus in a church of a thousand ministers, ten is all they need, and another ninety or so who are fuzzy minded.

The minority can govern; the remaining ninety percent can be controlled unless they’re the hardcore, hard fighting minority in opposition. Thus the strategy of subversion whether it is in the hands of communists or Fabians or any other group of subversives is this: Develop that commanding minority, the one percent of dedication. Second, destroy or discredit the minority groups which produce men of faith and resistance. This means therefore that any group which can produce men of faith, men who will stand in terms of their principles, must be discredited. Any conservative organization, any church, any institution which stands clearly in terms of its convictions, which is capable of producing that resistance must be destroyed and discredited. All our opponents know this principle of minority rules, and their object having this minority is to destroy the minority groups which oppose them and it is foolish of us to expect any group to be bypassed; no matter how small or how insignificant it seems to be. Churches that are small denominations of ten and twenty thousand members only are not being bypassed. No more than those which have millions of members.

In 1905 when the Fabians began their work in this country they had very clear cut targets. They organized the inter-collegiate society of socialists in 1905. These were socialists student groups on various college campuses, and there weren’t too many campuses in the country that had these socialist groups, mainly the major ones. They were small organizations with memberships of five, ten, fifteen, twenty, that’s all. In 1955 when they celebrated their fiftieth anniversary and drew up a list of their alumni the list didn’t number to much, six or eight hundred, something of the sort, I have the list in my files. But that list included some of the most distinguished men in the United States; college Presidents, commentators, men in high places in Washington in the courts, in the cabinet, in congress. In other words the powers in the United States, in church as well as in state; just out of that handful of some five or six hundred men, the dedicated minority

Three targets were chosen by various subversive groups years ago as the central targets of infiltration. First, the universities, schools, and colleges to infiltrate and to control education, and thereby to shape the minds of the generations to come; and so it is that the universities and schools became a prime target, and a very easy target since they are all in the hands of the states, or in the hands even of private educations of certain accreditation agencies. And so a couple of generations now has been reared on doctored textbooks which are destructive of Christianity and destructive of Americanism.

Second, libraries and librarians; when the library associations review books and list them their recommendations are followed by virtually every library in the country. You have approximately two thousand colleges and universities in the United States. You have as well a number of junior colleges, particularly in the west. Then you have several thousand city and county libraries. Let us say a total of approximately eight thousand libraries. If a book is favorably passed on by a library association and put in its list of recommended books at least half of these libraries will buy that particular book, which means that an edition put out by a left winger, and these are the books that are recommended, will sell out entirely without a single private person having purchased a copy. So that a subversive book, a socialistic book, an anti-Christian book is sure of selling out its entire edition and sometimes two, if it’s strongly recommended to the libraries; without any private parties purchasing a copy. But if I publish a book or any Christian or conservative, it will not be listed. The libraries will not purchase it unless there is overwhelming pressure to do so, and as a result because it is not promoted by book review periodicals, nor by library associations and periodicals it is much more difficult to sell. Remember that Goldwater’s book had sold almost fifty thousand copies Conscience of a Conservative before most periodicals would even admit it was in existence; and they only did so because it was becoming embarrassing to neglect it. The man was to prominent to hide the fact of the book, and then libraries reluctantly began to purchase it. But most books are on the best-seller list at twenty and twenty five thousand.

The third area and main target of infiltration, indeed the central target, was the clergy, the church. Edmund Burke rating {?} statesman at the time of the French revolution declared that that revolution had begun a civil war in the west. That it was a declaration of war against Christianity. And he said there will be no peace in this war until either Christianity is destroyed, or the anti-revolutionary statism of the French Revolution is destroyed. “It is” he said, “a war unto death” and we are in the midst of that war today. Now the enemy has studied the ground far better than most of our members have, and they know the centrality of the church in this; and they especially know its centrality in the United States. We are told that sixty percent of the people in this country are church members, and we can sometimes to poo-poo these statistics stating “well of course a lot of church roles are padded, a lot of them are nominal members.” True enough, but remember this. There are any numbers of groups that are not formally organized as churches that are meetings across country as Bible study groups, holding worship regularly that are never included in any such statistics.

Remember this too, that there are many, many churches that are very strict on their membership and who limit only adults in their membership so that they have twice what their roles carry when the children are included. Actually the percentage of people who are connected with a church in the United States is very high. Moreover, and this very few people realize, there are more people in church on any given Sunday of the year than have ever voted in any national election. And the subversives know this. These people who sit in the church pews Sunday after Sunday represent the responsible citizenry, the property owners, the people who more than anyone else vote. Most of them are voters, the percentage of voters among those who do not go to church is low.

They represent also the office holders not only in the state, but also in all kinds of institutions in the community, and organizations. Now if these people can be reached week after week with something which represents Christianity but it’s actually anti-Christianity, you have subverted the most powerful single force in the nation. And so the clergy has been for a long, long time the central target of every subversive agency, and it is today. And there is, I submit, no more infiltrated agency then the Christian church.

Now I do not mean communist infiltrated, there is communist infiltration, but there is also Fabian socialist infiltration. There is infiltration by the humanist and by a wide spectrum of organizations, all of whom are agreed on one thing, they are anti-Christian and the state is their true church. Moreover churches have the most vulnerable organization of almost anyone, because in almost every denomination power is centralized in a handful of people at the top. An executive council or a small body will govern the national mission’s funds, the foreign missions fund, the seminary funds, the college funds, the Christian education funds, the trust funds, and a variety of other agencies. And all you need to do is work quietly and infiltrate and fill these few positions and then you control the machinery of the entire church.

And every major denomination in the United States today is not faithful to the infallible word of God, it is preaching another gospel.

The churches thus are the ideal target and we need to, first of all to unite with churches that are faithful to the word of God, to disassociate ourselves with national council of churches groups, and in any organization we belong to avoid centralization of control; because if there be a centralized control then we are an easy target for infiltration and control. Second, as long ago as Aristotle an important strategy of subversion was described as “revolution within the form.” Take over an organization; retain the form but not the content. Demand loyalty to the form, but not to the faith, use the same language but give it a different meaning; and this we see increasingly in church after church. Where the scriptures are despised and criticized and departed from week in and week out and there is no sin in that. But if you dare to criticize the church, or the ministry, or the Sunday school material, this is the great sin. Loyalty to the form, not to the faith; this is the end result of revolution within the form. And there are many good men who have fallen to this, who resent any criticism of their denomination; no matter what kind of evidence you bring out. But who refuse to take a stand when the faith is criticized. Wherever you have this kind of loyalty to the form rather to the faith you have either subversives or fools who can be used by subversives. We must obey God rather than men, the faith rather than the forms of the faith.

A third form of the strategy of subversion is to avoid an attack on real issues. Never permit the real issues to come out so that it’s in a conflict between orthodoxy verses heresy, or Americanism verses communism. Crucify the opponent this is the strategy, on side issues. When J. Gresham Machen was brought up for trial in the Presbyterian church USA, now the United Presbyterian Church, after having fought for almost two decades against the modernism and the social gospel in the church they did not try him on the issue, they did not permit him when he was tried to bring out the real issue, that they had departed from their faith and the word of God and were preaching in another gospel, and he was challenging them on that. No, the issue they nailed him on was a technical matter, did he have any right to give missionary money to another and an independent missionary agency; and in the course of the trial they would not permit the real issues to come out. Always nail a man on the side issues is their strategy, on technical matters not on the real issues; and if possible do an end run around the main issues to buy off the opponents. In England the Fabian socialist bought out the churches by providing state funds for all the church schools, and this is the strategy which will soon be applied in this country.

A fourth strategy of subversion is to avoid creating martyrs. They know that martyrs bring people to their side, that when you make a martyr out of a man then immediately people are ashamed of their failure to stand and they begin to stand. So at all costs they seek to avoid making martyrs and indeed when there is a man who is making a stand, the strategy is to discredit his character, his mental health, everything possible about him. To so thoroughly discredit him with slander that even his own friends will feel ashamed of him. They will attempt to make him a disgrace to his faith rather than a hero of it; and I have found since I have gone across country, wherever a man has made a strong stand in the church in terms of the word of God and against subversion he is immediately the target of the filthiest kind of slander. To imply that he is an immoral man, to imply that he has a sordid past, that he is a pervert, that he is any number of things, or that he is financially dishonest, and it’s almost impossible not to hear of this about any leading Christian conservative. This is a regular tactic, and its purpose is to discredit. Moreover since no man is without his weaknesses he may be a little bit intemperate sometimes in dealing with people and easily lose his temper if he’s pressed and worn out and tired, any little things like this are exploited. And there is not a person in the conservative movement that you cannot hear a great deal of slander about as you go across country. And I know you can hear it about me, and I can direct you where you can get quite a record about me, and about how I’ve been involved in every kind of thing. This is normal, disgrace him, make it impossible for anyone to follow him.

In the Negro community today this is becoming a major crisis, in much of the country the negro churches have been completely taken over by left-wingers. In Harlem one negro seminary student told me, and this was confirmed by someone else who knew Harlem, only one church today preaches the gospel the rest of the churches have their pulpits occupied by left-wingers whose gospel is civil rights, and this one church has as its pastor a white man. This is not true in the south, and what is taking place in the south today? In community after community subversives are unleashing a flood of gossip concerning every kind of negro leader, whether he is a minister, a doctor, a lawyer, a college professor, school principle, whatever he may be, to thoroughly discredit him in the eyes of his people; to create a vacuum of leadership and then to supply it with the wrong sort of people. We need to as Christians avoid at all cost gossip. Because the very human failings of people to listen to gossip and to pass it on without having any knowledge of the real situation makes us a ready target for this kind of subversive tactic.

A fifth method of subversive strategy is infiltration. Some few years ago after the Second World War a very important work was published by Jeffery Bailey entitled The Conspirators. It was based on captured documents during World War II captured by the Germans as they over ran the USSR and then captured from them by the English. These documents were files of subversive activities throughout Western Europe, and the revealed quite a startling picture. Before the Communist revolution was over during World War I and shortly thereafter, the Bolsheviks had already decided there would be an anti-Communist movement in the West if they won. And therefore since an anti-Communist movement was a certainty it was important for them to get in on the ground floor of that anti-communist movement and to help organize it so they could control it. So they sent agents west as refugees, and hired agents in the west to help set up these organizations or to join organizations that were being set up. Now during the twenties as they faced famines and other serious crises in the USSR, there were times when the peasants and various peoples in the USSR with a little bit of outside help and arms could have overthrown the government. Each time they planned to do so at the critical moment there was a tip-off and the Bolsheviks were on their necks and had executed them in a matter of hours.

Little by little the anti-communist groups in the West who began to realize that everything they were doing was known to the Bolsheviks. Little by little they came to suspect that they had communist or Bolshevik agents in their midst. Now significantly at this point a second level of agents who had up until this time done nothing except to lay low now came forward with the evidence to denounce the first level of Communists agents and to get the credit for exposing them. Therefore they became the anti-communist heroes and the leaders of the anti-communist organization. Then little by little they began to outlive their usefulness as various men who defected to the west and gave testimony to Europe and before the American senate about Bolshevik activity were themselves assassinated, and it became apparent that there were conspirators working in these groups. Then a third levels of agents who had done nothing but laid low for fifteen and twenty years now denounced the second level of agents and took over. Infiltration is a set policy, anytime an anti-communist organization is established you can be sure the communist are going to try to be in on it and are in on it. This is inevitable, this is a matter of set policy with them, and some of their agents may do nothing for 10, 15, or 20 years and this has been documented, but lay low and wait for the day when they can be used.

How can we fight this? The only check to infiltration is a strong faith, and the centrality of a Christian faith, an informed, a thorough going Christian faith to all that we do; and the more firmly our conservatism is Christian the harder it will be for them to pass the test. And so a resolute Christian conservatism can best withstand the forces of infiltration.

The sixth method of the strategy of subversion is unification and synthesis; to consolidate power whether in church, or in state, or in education, into fewer and fewer hands so that it will be easier to pull a few strings and control everything. Therefore consolidate school districts as much as you can, and when you consolidated as much as you can then wipe out all boards and create county boards, and then wipe out county boards and create just the state board to run everything. In some states already this is quite far gone. Again unification of the government - let power flow more and more to the top because it will be easier to take over a country if the power is concentrated at the top. Similarly with the church, or any organization; concentrate power at the top progressively. Unify, consolidate, synthesis and then the takeover will be made simple. We must therefore work to decentralize and to restore power in every area to the grass roots, to the members of churches where the local congregation can if it chooses pull out of the denomination and retain its property. This cannot be done in most churches, although very few people are aware of this.

A seventh strategy of subversion is destruction of rights by indirection. You don’t attack something directly, but you abolish it indirectly. Today by means of zoning laws religious liberty is disappearing in the United States in many areas. There are communities which rule out by their zoning laws the existence of any church, you’re zoned out of the residential area, and you’re zoned out of the business, the industrial area. Where are you going to go? These zoning laws have been sustained by the Supreme Court. There are communities that forbid a church, there are others that will limit it to one of each of the three groups, Catholics, Protestant, and Jewish; and the Protestant will be one belonging to the council of churches. Others for example will say arbitrarily will say “we have eight percent of our land allocated according to our zoning ordinance, this is a specific community I have in mind, for education, recreation, and religion.” In no time at all the city parks and the schools had taken up more than eight percent, so there was nothing left over for the churches. Of course when they had an opportunity to put up a state college they grabbed that and they made an exemption; but for the churches, no exemption. They had denied the right, the freedom of religion without ever talking about it and the Supreme Court has sustained them.

Again the power to tax is the power to destroy. But the reason why the churches are tax exempt is not because they are non-profit but because according to our historic Christian faith we believe that the church is an independent kingdom, the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and when we maintain that the church should not be taxed we are fighting for the crown rights of King Jesus. We say that His realm cannot be subject to any other realm, but only to Him. Now the early Christians were not persecuted because they were Christians, they were persecuted because as Christians they refused to recognize the priority of Caesar, and the right of Caesar to say “you have to right to exist because I grant you that right.” This was the basic issue. At anytime the early church could of applied to Caesar and said “we want a license to exist.” And they would have gotten it. But their faith was this; it was not up to Caesar to say whether the church of Christ should live or not, that Caesar was not Lord over the church. Therefore they could neither apply to him for permission to live, or offer to incense to him as a God. The church was independent and only under Jesus Christ. And the move today, which is approved by Eugene Carson Blake of the Presbyterian Church and many another prominent church dignitary associated with national council of churches has one purpose, to put the church under Caesar, under the state. To make its existence subject to the approval of the state; and both the zoning laws and the taxing matter have as their purpose the surrender of the church to the state.

Today this again is being done by indirection. The last ten years or so in the state of California it has become necessary for every church to file annually its papers of tax exemption. Now in some counties the county clerks are indifferent, they don’t care, but it can be required and you can lose your tax exemption if you don’t, but in other words it’s one their sufferance. In some states it’s been carried a step further, you file every year, your tax exemption, and you pay a filing fee of five or ten dollars for your tax exemption, and the fee shows indications of rising a few dollars every few years until it will become a filing fee which will be equivalent to a tax. This is subversion by indirection.

An eighth strategy of subversion is conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning. I would here suggest that you hear David Noebel’s tape on Communism, Music, and the Beatles. It is obtainable from Christian crusade; it is an important analysis of conditioning. But Pavlov’s experiment was simply this, to associate certain things, the beat of a metronome or a bell, or a blinking light, with the giving of food to dogs. Until finally those dogs began to salivate when that light blinked or the bell rang, or the metronome began to beat, that meant food to them so whether they got the food or not they began to salivate, they were conditioned. Now this kind of conditioning is begin worked on us all the time. WE are taught to associate certain things with certain things in advertising of course, is nothing but a form of conditioning whose basis is the desire to make you break the tenth commandment “thou shalt not covet.” Its purpose is to make you covet more than you can afford, and to go into debt which is a form of slavery, for the scripture says “owe no man anything except to love one another” to go into slavery because you are covetous.

A friend of mine, a very fine Christian woman who is also an artist, was describing to me some time ago when I saw her in the East her experiences. She went to New York and visited the Museum of Modern Art. And she was following two elderly women who were going from picture to picture in this museum of modern art where you have these far out things, and she was interested in their comments as an artist so she stayed close behind them to get their reaction. And they came up to this one large canvas which had hung some newspaper, classified add sections things like that just glued onto it and lacquered over, and some pieces of burlap attached and lacquered over, and a rope hanging across the picture tacked onto the canvas, and a lot of splotches of paint. And the two women looked at it, these two elderly women, and one said to the other “honestly now, isn’t that junk? Why its absolute junk.” And the other one agreed and she said “it’s crazy, just crazy, I don’t see how anyone can call anything like that art.” Then they went up closer and they looked at the label next to the picture and it stated that this was from the collection, the private collection of Nelson Rockefeller and had been purchased for eighteen thousand dollars. And they stepped back and looked at it again thoughtfully and finally one of them said, “eighteen thousand dollars. It must be art.” Now that’s conditioning. You begin to think of money as value and you associate value, art, eighteen thousand dollars on that and therefore it is art.

This is the kind of things that is done with us continually, it is done in textbooks. I have seen textbooks that are deliberately perverse, that involve all kinds of complicated language which really says nothing, but has as its basic function to make you believe that you are stupid, that you cannot understand it because you haven’t the intelligence to do so, therefore you might as well take the opinion of the expert who wrote it. And I submit for one that Lords Keynes treatises on Economics, which are the reigning economics of the day, are exercises in this kind of double talk, and that a great deal of modern scholarship is precisely this kind of double talk. To condition you into thinking you’re not smart enough to understand and therefore you might as well leave it to the experts. There never has been a time in the history of the world that there has been a populous, the American people today, better trained to understand what is going on in the world.

There are very, very, few people particularly among the white Americans of this country, who are unskilled laborers. Virtually all are highly skilled. Consider what it takes for example to be a farmer, a farmer today is not only a man who knows agriculture backwards and forwards and is a specialist in his field, but he is usually also a good mechanic. He is also usually a good electrician, and sometimes he’s a few other things as well. Now all these things involve complicated skills, they involve as much intelligence as Lord Keynes’s subject, economics, involves. And almost any other field of work you go into today the amount of intelligence required is considerable. But have you ever had a time when more people spent more money trying to convince the rest of the population that they were stupid and couldn’t understand and we should leave almost everything under the sun to experts? This is conditioning, and it is a strategy of subversion.

A ninth strategy of subversion is the piecemeal introduction of programs. The idea is to hit hard with an all out campaign, or imply an all out program and create a wave of shock and of horror. This was the Medicare program a few years ago. The whole thing was introduced at once; everybody was up in arms about it. They fought it to the nail, they defeated it. But did they? They were so relieved when they beat the main bill that they were ready to sit back and say “well we’ll let this compromise bill go through” . Well the compromise bill said more than was hoped for in the beginning. But if you hit them with something that’s far out then you can bring them to compromise on something which is more than you hoped to gain in the beginning; if you can pass the measure, all the better. Sometimes you can, it has been done with a number of things in the last year. And then having once conditioned them to resisting the far out thing you can introduce it in such small degrees as to lull people and to make it seem silly to fight. They will wait for the big battle and lost the war because it will be fought in terms of a series of small campaigns.

A tenth strategy of subversion is the reinterpretation of language. Words are major weapon of warfare today. Many conservatives today are fighting against the word democracy and insisting rightly that ours is a republic, not a democracy. But consider what’s been done to the word republic. The USSR- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; we’re claiming we’re a democracy now, at least many people are claiming it for us, and they’re claiming that they’re a republic. The whole thing is turned upside down, words are being destroyed as far as their meanings are concerned, and people get up and say they believe in the resurrection, but if you them and sometimes I’ve done it, to and three and four hours, you finally get them to admit that they don’t mean what you mean when they talk about the resurrection of our Lord. And they will talk about the Virgin birth and never mean a word of it. They will talk about the inspiration and infallibility of scripture and never mean a word of it. This is neo-orthodoxy, it uses the form of orthodoxy and empties it of all meaning and puts the new content into it; and they will insist that the differences are only semantics.

This is a strategy in particular of the Marxist and the Fabians. Stalin said “Marxism has no room for fixed and unchanging conclusions and formulations valid for all times and all periods, Marxism is hostile to all dogmatism, Marxism” he said “involves the use of words therefore as warfare.” Engel said “our dialectical philosophy abolishes all the notions of absolute and definitive truth, and any absolute human condition that corresponds to them. For dialectics nothing is definitive, absolute, or sacred. It reveals the relativity of all things and nothing exists for it but the uninterrupted process of development and change.” They are relativists. The only thing they absolutize is themselves, and therefore they use words relatively to mean whatever it will help them to mean for the moment.

An eleventh strategy of subversion is the use of crises, emergencies, pseudo-prophets. They create a problem or an emergency, for example a riot, and offer a plan which is supposed to solve the problem or relieve the emergency, and then get people to put the plan into operation not for the purpose of solving anything, but to further the aims of socialism and to place more socialists in positions of power. So they create artificial problems, one of them is overpopulation. The statistics are doctored; the problem is a manufactured one. But there’s scarcely a periodical you pick up today without talk about overpopulation, and today it is even being seriously discussed whether we should come in the near future to licensing births so that there be no unlicensed births. First however you see you have to convince people that you have a crisis, overpopulation. Deny the validity of their crisis; they speak for example of the tremendous abuse of soil in this country. There is abuse of soil, but it’s primarily on government owned land. It’s not the privately held lands that are being eroded; they are being improved in most instances. If you’re a farmer your bread and butter depends on taking good care of what you have, your land. But this is not true of government lands, and many of them are over-grazed, and over-grazed by people who don’t own any land but have powerful connections with the government. It would be interesting if you were to get a list of those who have grazing rights on the national forests and national lands of the state of California, who are they?

Another strategy of subversion is the use of agent provocateurs, people who claim to be conservatives and are actually Judas goats. A thirteenth strategy of subversion is the use of psychiatry, the mental health program to replace the doctrine of sin with the doctrine of sickness, to replace responsibility before God with responsibility of the rest of us to care for the sick. The cure of souls belongs to the ministry of grace, and we must fight the whole mental health program as a rival plan of salvation; as an anti-Christian way of dealing with the problem of sin.

The basic premise of these and many other strategies of subversion, which we cannot take time to go into tonight because the time is short, is the religion of humanity, humanism, the religion of anti-Christ. It has ancient roots, it goes back to the tower of Babel, it is a basic heresy and subversion. It is the desire to create the society of Satan, the kingdom of anti-Christ, and its basic premise has been very well formulated by a man who unfortunately holds a very prominent position in a Christian college so-called. And he writes in the March 1964 issue of a Christian, or ostensibly Christian periodical that “we must recognize that we are all of one flesh and constitute one family the universal neighborhood of mankind.” And he says that “our task is to recognize not, discriminate. The discrimination and separation” he says “is false, anti-Christian.” Our task then is to recognize, not to discriminate. In other words we cannot make a stand against good or evil, against the Godly and the ungodly, for or against. Our only task as Christians he says is to recognize, to love everyone without distinction or discrimination. IN other words to give a blank check to all evil, to accept the total equality of all positions, this is the creed of anti-Christ. And the basic subversion today is the subversion of our faith. I stated at the beginning that the subversives recognize the power of minorities, and they believe that if once percent, a dedicated one percent stand in terms of what they believe, with another ten percent they can carry the day, provided they do not have a dedicated minority at the other end of the spectrum.

Consider our sorry plight, we as Christians today as Bible believing Christians probably number thirty million in this country. There are easily thirty million who profess to be Bible believing Christians and yet how impotent we are, how futile in the face of these things. When subversives who number a bare handful are able to direct government agencies, and dominate various aspects of American life, including the churches. And yet we are impotent in the face of this. Our Lord said “ye are the salt of the earth.” What is salt? Well in terms of what it meant in those days it was the preserving agency. You were only able to preserve things, meat and other things, through the use of salt. And he said “if the salt has lost its savor it is therefore good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden underfoot of men.” When the salt you were using to preserve your meat was no longer any good, you weren’t going to put your meat into it and spoil it, and you weren’t going to take that crock of salt and throw it out into your garden because you would harm the soil, you took that salt and you put it on the road or the pathway where it would do no damage to your soil, and it was there trodden underfoot. And our lord said to his church “ye are the salt of the earth, called to be the preserving agency in this world, and if you fail to be that then you are going to be cast out by Me to be trodden under the foot of men.”

He also said through the lips of Saint Paul writing to the Corinthians “what, know ye not that the saints shall judge the earth?” The word judge there has the same sense as it does in the Old Testament, to Govern, to rule. This is our requirement, and our Lord commanded us, and whatever your interpretation of prophesy and ends times you cannot get away from this statement, simply this “occupy till I come.” Let us occupy.

[Announcer] service tonight so we will pass the plates and you may put your contributions in it. George will you help Frank with the plates please? Now, {?} ready for your questions.

[Rushdoony] Yes, Carline.

[Carline] Would you say the {?} movements have been infiltrated?

[Rushdoony] I’m sure it has been, and I know that many people who hold a position of prominence in some conservative circles I’m very dubious about. But I think that if we start looking at the enemy and what they’re doing we’re going to die of frustration, we need to know what their strategy is but we’ve got to forge ahead in terms of what we’re doing. And there’s this, the more active an organization is the less chance of infiltration. Where you’ve got people busy doing something all the time, and busy studying the faith and active in terms of it, it’s harder to infiltrate. It’s a stand-still organization that is most easily infiltrated.

[Audience member] {?} [something about being so knowledgeable and yet finding ourselves in this condition]

[Rushdoony] Well partly we are being conditioned by these methods to accept it and partly it’s a spiritual laziness. We’re ready to duck our responsibilities. Now I know in the bay area where I’m residing, in the Peninsula at {?} there’s so many things in the area going on and the support for them is tremendous, but unless a small handful of people will take the leadership and do these things they won’t get done. And in one organization after another any number of people will come forward and say “well I’m with you, but I don’t think I’d better stick my neck out. You go ahead and do it and I’ll be all for you.” So there is that aspect to it also; a lack of faith, and a lack of courage.

[Audience member] That list that you have,{?} is it available or is it possible to get a hold of that?

[Rushdoony] It is no longer in print but it was put out by the LID, the League for Industrial Democracy in 1955, the author was Mina Weisenberg and you can probably find it in Chico State college library I would guess. But look up the LID, the League for Industrial Democracy and it was a pamphlet of about, oh forty, fifty pages giving a report of its history.

[Audience member] How do you differentiate between a Fabian-socialist and a communist?

[Rushdoony] A good question. The Marxist has a hard doctrinaire position and a party line to follow, which holds to economic determinism and the class struggle. He is required to accept the Marxist interpretation of history. The Fabian socialist says “you don’t have to believe in any particular thing, we don’t accept the class struggle as necessarily true, we don’t hold to economic determinism, we just believe that socialism is a good thing and any which way we slide into it, it’s alright.” Now it’s much easier to be a Fabian socialist than it is to be a Marxist socialist. To be a Marxist socialist and apart member you’ve got to, well do better than tithe in many cases; you have to pass a script examination on the points of doctrine and study unceasingly. This makes them a very dedicated group. The Fabian socialist doesn’t believe anything, so any which way you go into it fine, you don’t have to study anything or believe anything as long as you’re for socialism. The Fabian Socialist emblem which has been pictured in the recent VERITAS Foundation book, The Great Deceit is a very interesting one. Their emblem is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They can, because they don’t believe really in anything, lend themselves easily to any kind of group organization. A communist is more readily detectable because he stands hard and fast in terms of certain ideas. But the Fabian Socialist will make himself agreeable to any kind of position because, they’re all the same, you can believe anything as long as you’re for socialism.

Now many Fabian Socialist can and do profess a form of Christianity, many are vegetarians, many are theosophists, many have gone over-board for any number of kinds of cause; and they’re agreeable to all this. Fine, believe what you want as long as you’re for socialism as well. As a result they are exceedingly powerful and have penetrated into one area after another and can win converts very easily.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] There are two books put out by the Veritas foundation, one Keynes at Harvard and the other The Great Deceit you can get both of them I’m quite sure at the American Opinion bookstore in Chico.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, because socialism requires control and the only kind of control it leads to is total control, this means the control of religion. And progressively they are moving not only towards unifying all the churches, which is an important step towards total control you see, but also working towards the one world religion.

It’s interesting that one of the first things Japan did when it began to militarize and centralize was to require that a United Church of Japan be established, and the reason for it was this. Before that there had been, oh seventy-eighty church groups in Japan formed by various missionary bodies. It’s pretty hard to control seventy or eighty groups which are often very de-centralized in their government and even if you get in touch with the main office of this particular group why this doesn’t mean that you have any real contact with the local churches. But when you centralize them all in one united church, you lay down the laws of somebody at the top and it’s passed on right down to the bottom, that’s the purpose for working for a united church; to facilitate centralized control. So freedom of religion is definitely not contemplated by any socialist state, in fact it is one of the first thing any socialist order is opposed to. It wants its own particular kind of religion and it will destroy everything that stands in its way.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, I see what you were referring to. Well there are any numbers of such book and Keynes, I mentioned his economic books on the college level…[Interruption]… Yes any of Keynes economic book will show that, but almost any kind of book that you pick up that’s in this area, which is left wing, will go in strongly for this kind of double talk. Your economics today, your more recent ones, are even worse than Keynes. They go in for all kinds of mathematical formuli to express economic ideas and there’s really no relationship between the two.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] It’s an exercise in double talk and in confusion. And I think a lot of our new math follows that direction, I don’t know too much about it but what little I have learned seems to indicate that it is designed to have a confusing effect on the child. It was once very simple to get math, you sat down you memorized your multiplication table, which nowadays is no longer done in many a school, and then you went on from there and you learned some things very simply. But I saw a problem that a child brought home in new math recently and it was a long and involved one written out, and it began “If seven is greater than ten” and went on from there. Now that’s pretty confusing to a seventh grade child to think of seven as greater than ten, but that’s the way the problem was set up.

[Audience member] You get that in the churches {?}

[Rushdoony] Because it very quickly becomes apparent to you what is important to these ministers. And the things that is important to them is not Jesus Christ and salvation in and through him, but salvation through a new social order. And the most important thing in the world then will become proposition fourteen to defeat it, or the civil rights movement, and so on. And when you detect that in these men you know that if you stay there you’re a party to what they represent. You’ve got to get out because I don’t believe God will hold us guiltless if we stay there and support men who are preaching a social gospel rather than Jesus Christ.

Now the word of God has a lot to say about society. The Ten Commandments for example, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, that has a lot to say about private property. And you can go then into the various laws of Moses and there is a lot that it says concerning private property. And it also says a great deal about theft, that restitution is a fundamental thing, not imprisonment. But today for example we don’t pay any attention to what the Bible says about restitution. A man can steal a thousand dollars from you and he’ll be sent to prison and if he’s got that thousand stashed away it’s still his when he comes out, unless you can prove that the money he has in his pocket is what he took from you. The only time restitution is required is when you steal from Uncle Sam. Well then you pay back to the last penny. But the word of God says, and I take the law of God very seriously, if a man steals say a hundred dollars he is supposed to restore the hundred plus another hundred. The exact amount he hoped to pocket. You don’t put him in prison, you make him repay. IF he steals a sheep he restores fivefold because a sheep can multiply. If he steals a cow he restores fourfold; restitution.

There’s a lot of preaching from the Bible about society, and I believe in Biblical preaching on these things and it isn’t this gospel of being saved by love. This business of love is another religion, another plan of salvation. People are supposedly to be saved by love, not by Jesus Christ. And what the Bible means by love, if I may preach a three minute sermon here, is not what these liberals mean when they say “love thy neighbor” and “love thy enemy” they mean sharing what you have, and they have a socialistic interpretation of it. But what does the Bible say? First Leviticus 19 gives us love they neighbor and it tells us that the neighbor is the enemy, and the stranger within thy gate; so that love thy neighbor as thyself and love thy enemy are one and the same commandment. Then Matthew 19 gives it to us, we have it in the other gospels as well and we have it in of course supremely briefly stated in Romans 13 verses 8-10. And what is it to love your neighbor as yourself? In each instance it is given as a summary of the second table of the law. “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet.”

In other words, “I love my neighbor if I do not kill, if I respect his right to life. If I do not commit adultery, if I respect the sanctity of his home, if I do not steal- if I respect his property, if I do not bear false witness- if I respect his reputation and his good name, and if I do not covet- that is if I respect these things in thought as well as in word and deed. Now I can think my neighbor is no good, I may dislike him, say as a Mohammedan whose every moral standard is anathema to me, and who hates my faith, and who hates my Lord. But if I respect his right to life, home, property, and reputation in word thought and deed I have kept the commandment to love my neighbor as myself. I have fulfilled the scriptural requirement.

What we have done, or what these modernist have done, is to take the Biblical words and separate them from the law of God and to make them emotional things. But whenever the Bible speaks about love, it speaks about love that is inseparable from law. Forgiveness is another word that has been abused. Today it’s just an emotional thing. The Biblical word for “forgive” and “forgiveness” is in every case a legal term. It has two meanings, the most common word for forgiveness, or meaning for the word forgiveness in the Greek Testament is “charges dropped because satisfaction has been rendered.” In other words we are forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ. The charges against us have been dropped because satisfaction has been rendered. The other meaning which appears in our Lord’s declaration from the cross “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Father, defer the charges for the time being, for they know not what they do. It’s a legal term. Law and love, law and forgiveness can never be separated in the scripture, and the supreme instance of how law and forgiveness, law and justice, law and love meet is the cross of Christ. The law functioned to the uttermost there; the death penalty against all of us sinners, and also the grace and love and forgiveness of God unto salvation.

Well I think I’ve spoken long enough

[Announcer] Thank you very much, I’m glad for that three minute sermon. Shall we consider ourselves dismissed then?

[Audience member]

[Rushdoony]