From the Easy Chair
The New Paganism
Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons
Lesson: 14-214
Genre: Speech
Track:
Dictation Name: RR161AF60
Year: 1980s and 1990s
Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AF60, The New Paganism from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.
[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 164, February 11, 1988.
Our subject in this session is the new Paganism. What we are seeing in our day is a revival of ancient Paganism, modernized, given a scientific garb, but really a revival of the Paganism that the Old Testament prophets faced and that our Lord faced and the apostles. All around us we encounter it. Its characteristic plan of salvation is one through the state or by man himself in some fashion or other. But the one thing it hates for sure is anything that smacks of a God of Scripture and of Jesus Christ.
At this point one of the things I have found all over the country is that the conservatives will feel closer to the liberals than they will to a Christian and that the conservatives will even feel closer, on occasion, if you get their dander up, to a Marxist than they will to a Christian. All of them are united in their hatred of Christianity, because to them this is the ultimate insult to man that he needs salvation or that there is a Christ whose atonement alone can save him.
And as a result, the Christian has to recognize that in our time he has to stand in terms of his faith that there is no real alliance he can work with anyone else, because sooner or later he will find himself abandoned by these other groups.
Now perhaps that is too strong a statement, but over the years I have found that some of those whom I thought were allies were my worst enemies, because they were willing to use me even to a considerable point as long as my purpose coincided with theirs, but the minute anything Christian came to the fore, they were ready to destroy me if they could.
Otto, do you want to make an opening statement? I made a rather blunt and strong one.
[Scott] Well, it is strong, but it was a great strife to me when I converted and I was in the state of euphoria which I think is common upon your first year, your conversion and I had an office in downtown San Diego and I bought a small cross, lapel cross and put it in my lapel. And I was astonished at the reaction that that aroused everywhere I went. I got hard looks in the most unexpected quarters. And I went in to buy something and they thought I was a minister. Only a minister would carry an emblem of that sort. And I began to encounter for the first time hostility from people that I didn’t know, because I had identified myself and it was the beginning of the realization that there are a tremendous number of Americans who literally hate Christianity.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And as you have pointed out and as I have also known and had reported to me, priests no longer wear clerical garb in public in many, many parts of the United States and abroad, because...
[Scott] It is not safe.
[Rushdoony] It is not safe.
[Scott] They are attacked.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And yet they act as though we are persecuting them.
[Scott] Well we are persecuting the non Christians and we are persecuting the anti Christians. It is discrimination, discriminatory for a Christian to say that he knows the truth.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And that he is a believer in Jesus. And I heard that question addressed to Jerry Falwell who is very quick witted, as you know.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Very quick in his responses. And he said, “Well, the rabbi tells his congregation that Judaism is the right way, does he not? And have you addressed such a question to the rabbi? Would you expect him to say anything else to his people? Do you expect any spiritual leaders of any group to say that he is not representing the truth? In what way is Christianity doing something unusual and offensive?”
[Rushdoony] Yes. And, of course, the only approach to take with such people is the offensive, like John Lofton remarking to one person who said, “You think you know the truth, don’t you?” And he said, “Yes, it is too bad you don’t. Do you want to hear it?”
So we have to be unashamed of our position and unafraid to confront these people.
[Scott] Well I heard the dialog. I have told you this before. I think that I heard a radio program or a TV program discussion between Malcolm Muggeridge who converted very late in life and William Buckley in which Buckley said... they were talking about being a Christian and Buckley said, “Well,” he said, “You know, it... it is... it is not really possible to bring Christianity forward in that social context.” He said, “It... it is embarrassing, at leads to embarrassing reactions and it disrupts the harmony of the situation and so forth.”
And Muggeridge said, “Not for me.”
[Rushdoony] Good. Very good.
[Scott] Now the difference between their faith was obvious. Muggeridge is a very famous Christian.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And has written very eloquently, but we began, I think, as a Catholic and had when he started National Review it was quite a Christian publication. And then after Vatican II I think he found differences with the direction of the church, his church and as many Catholics do when they get angry with their church decided to drop the subject publicly at least and the magazine ceased to be identifiably Christian. It still runs occasional articles, but overall it is a secular collegiate, I might say, publication.
[Rushdoony] Yes, it is very definitely collegiate. But he has never outgrown his Yale mentality.
[Scott] I am sorry he went there, really.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It was too much for him. He has never grown up.
[Rushdoony] No. Silly Yale sophomore.
Well, the marks of the pagan mind were occultism, a strong belief in it. And a disbelief in human responsibility. It was the stars or the environment or anything except the person who was responsible.
[Scott] Well, really the part of the crowd. To be a Roman, to be an Athenian, to be a Spartan, to belong...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Was a very much earmark, hallmark of the pagan person. So he belonged to Athens.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And therefore all honor was bound up in his position in his city. If the city went down they all went down. They went into slavery. They were totally wiped out. Now I find that a curious affinity between that and Riceman’s The Outer Directed.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] As against the inner directed. Riceman, you know, was the sociologist who coined the term WASP.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And since then it has become a pejorative all across the country. Somebody pointed out that white Anglo Saxon Protestant is redundant because all Anglo Saxons are white anyway. But, of course, that leaves us with an ASP, which is even worse. But he did bring up an interesting... instead of saying that our religion was what kept us together, he called it an inner gyroscope by which we maintain direction and balance. And he said when people were raised and... and the gyroscope was implanted. He deliberately never used the word Christian or Christianity in his entire book, The Lonely Crowd. And it is a very long book.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Never once did he mention the spiritual value...
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] He put it all in secular terms.
[Rushdoony] It was obvious when he was talking about inner directed that he was talking about Protestant Christianity.
[Scott] Absolutely.
[Rushdoony] But he couldn’t say it.
[Scott] He wouldn’t say it.
[Rushdoony] Yeah.
[Scott] He disdained the very term.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And then he said the outer directed, which he called the modern, incoming, emerging generation... and I think he was right, because if I remember correctly this was in the 50s that he wrote The Lonely Crowd. The outer directed wants to fit in the crowd, wants to be a peer among peers. And they teach this now in schools. A child who comes in and isn’t social who would prefer to sit and read, for instance, like you and I probably did, like I did at any rate. And I ... I would play baseball and I would do anything else, but I also wanted my time alone and I wanted my books. And there were times when I didn’t want to join the game.
Well, that would be given the... a child like that would get a bad mark because he doesn’t participate. Participation becomes important.
So this is really a recreation of the pagan mores, the pagan customs.
[Rushdoony] About 18 years ago I was at a conference at a college, a highly respected one and except for myself, the others were professors. And in this symposium, some of them were exclusively involved with graduate schools I spoke of the state, the modern state as a substitute form of religion and as a substitute for God. And I contrasted salvation by the state and the state’s program of cradle to grave security and so on with faith in God and Jesus Christ. And I mentioned Jesus Christ.
And a professor at one of the most important single schools in the United States who was one of the other speakers followed me on the platform and expressed his shock and dismay and disgust that in an intellectual community the name of Christ was mentioned. That was an insult to the intelligence of man.
Now he gave a very superficial talk, not much preparation because he felt that any word that came from him was to be received with awe. This was one of the men who in those days—I believe he is now dead—was internationally considered one of the greatest of the conservative scholars. And he was almost insane on the subject of Christ.
I am glad to say that another professor who was only vaguely related to a church was outraged by it, what he had to say and when he succeeded him, he ticked him off in no uncertain terms rather bluntly.
[Scott] Well, the great lure of the pagan culture for the men of the Renaissance and for the men of the Enlightenment and for the men of Victorian England was the license that it presumably provided. But what they overlooked was that there was a very tight corset applied in the pagan world. The was no liberty...
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] ... in the modern sense at all. There was no liberty for dissent.
Irving Stone, I. F. Stone, the famous radical whose newsletter you and I remember.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The great... great rabble rouser has spent the last 15 or 20 years studying ancient Greek and has written on the trial of Socrates. And according to the reviews—I haven’t read the book—according to the reviews, he feels that Socrates was quite legitimately put to death, because Socrates was against the democratic ideal.
Now I think this is very amusing, because to associate Athens with democracy is to overlook an awful lot.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Or the fact that the trial of Socrates was on the charge that he corrupted youth. And how did he corrupt them? He was a sodomite. They won’t say that.
[Scott] No.
[Rushdoony] Because that would be horrible to tell truth about Socrates.
[Scott] That is right. And he was, don’t forget, living during that period in which Greece was going to... Athens was making the turn into perversion.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] From the old days when sodomy was a capital crime.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] But the ancients had a code of honor. They had rules. You could violate them in certain areas, but there were other areas in which you could not. If you were... you couldn’t lie, for instance. You could be put to death for that. That would really shock a modern man, I think. And it is one of the reasons, I think that when the early Christians were asked their faith they confessed their faith even though it knew... that they knew that it could mean their death.
But Christianity came in and brought liberty to the ancient world.
[Rushdoony] That is a critical point that they will not face. They talk about freedom in Athens.
[Scott] There wasn’t any.
[Rushdoony] There wasn’t any. No other culture made it possible or a prophet of God to walk in and tell a king that he was a sinner and say, “Thou art the man,” and indict him and be specific.
Now that was Israel, because it was God who was the Lord, not the ruler. And as Christianity has receded, the state has gained power...
[Scott] In every instance. A the faith has declined the government has expanded.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now the apex or the beginning of this, the beginning of this and when... when Europe lost its faith and I remember reading in {?} he said that before World War I only the very elderly still believed in Germany. That was before World War I. By the time of World War I there wasn’t a Christian ruler left in Europe.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] They sent millions of men to their deaths for goals that hey couldn’t even define. Now we see. Look at what happened here. From the 1830s until today in two world wars in our century, Europe has killed 70 million people, 70 million. This is a civilization cannibalizing itself.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And this is exactly what happened to Greece.
[Rushdoony] And then Rome.
[Scott] Greece committed suicide.
[Rushdoony] Rome did also.
[Scott] And so did Rome, a longer... over a longer period.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And more agonizingly.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Rome didn't have as organized a power facing it and threatening it in its key years, so...
[Scott] So therefore it lasted longer.
[Rushdoony] It lasted longer.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] And it was a grimmer collapse, because they absorbed all the decadence and degeneracy of every culture they defeated beginning with the Greeks.
[Scott] Well, they brought in all these oriental cults, all those practices, all those obscenities.
But the Christians, I was quite struck in reading Christopher Dawson’s description of the formation of Christendom about the aristocracy of Rome that shifted into Christianity, not the slaves, the aristocrats, because they knew what they needed. And they knew what they hated. Slaves, you know, need security. They are looking for food, their next meal. It is like somebody on the street. He has ... he is trying to figure out where he is going to get a bed. He is not worrying about larger things.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And it is interesting to note that our modern historian has totally twisted the history of the pagan world into one of freedom and the history of Christianity into one of slavery when just the reverse was true.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Even when they go to the worst in the history of Christendom, let’s say the Inquisition.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] What they do not say is that the Inquisition was created by the state. It was Frederick II, the pope himself an emperor.
[Scott] Right.
[Rushdoony] Who started the creation. A few folks used it, but by and large the bishops in the medieval era did more against the Inquisition, whereas the state used it to get rid of any group they did not like. And in Spain where the Inquisition was at its worst...
[Scott] Because the government ran the church.
[Rushdoony] And it was illegal to appeal to the pope against the Inquisition. The inquisitor was appointed by the crown.
[Scott] The crown was in charge of the Spanish Church.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And many commentators have called Spain the first modern state.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Because it was a totalitarian state. You couldn’t dissent intellectually. Yet, you know, they killed less people in the Inquisition in its whole course...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Than we see murdered every year in Detroit alone.
[Rushdoony] Yes. But you don’t hear about that.
[Scott] And there are how many... how many raging, indignant editorials appear about the murders of Detroit?
[Rushdoony] Never a one. Never a one.
[Scott] Well, of course, they are not in the name of religion.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Therefore there is no sense getting indignant about them.
[Rushdoony] That is right.
[Scott] They are just simple crime.
[Rushdoony] And what they are now doing because it is clear the facts are against them, they are going back and reinventing the past.
[Scott] Ah, yes.
[Rushdoony] Supposedly 30 million witches were burned in the late middle ages and early modern era. There weren’t that many people in Europe. And supposedly there were 15 million people in Mexico and what is now the United States. Indians that were massacred.
[Scott] Nonsense.
[Rushdoony] All invented.
[Scott] Well, this, again, is a sign of a new Paganism.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Because one of the earmarks of the pagan writers was their legends, was the ridiculous things that they wrote about the world and about other cultures and about the past or, I mean, Romulus and Remus.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Suckled by the she wolf.
[Rushdoony] Yes. I saw an interesting cartoon this past week of Romulus and Remus and one saying to the other as this she wolf was there with a leash in her mouth saying... the other saying, one saying to the other, “It is your turn to take mom for her walk.” Oh, dear.
[Scott] Oh, my.
[Rushdoony] Well...
[Scott] But mythmaking, slander, pornography, orgies...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Decadent theater, all these were Paganism in its decline.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now Paganism at its apex is represented in the Soviet Union where they have these enormous procession that goes by on May Day carrying these pictures, these living icons.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...of the politburo and all the weapons and they have the tomb of Lenin. There is nothing but worshippers lined up to see Lenin’s wax mummy or whatever it is.
[Rushdoony] You mentioned earlier the legends and the lives. Now that is deserving of an extensive amount of study, because since they had no conception of truth, the legend was all right. Socrates could discuss the pro and cons of the use of legends.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] What was good in them and what was bad, the immorality of the gods, although he had his own idea of what immorality should be tolerated.
Now, in the early years of Christendom many of the converts were still semi pagan and you had saints legends and the like, but as Europe became Christianized you had a steady development of a sense of history.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] And some of the earliest Roman converts were the first to develop, if they were intelligent men, a good sense of history so that when they talk about the medieval saints legends what you are dealing with is survivals of Paganism, simply transferred over and sometimes the very same stories told about the gods used for a saint, disguised Paganism.
[Scott] Well, lot... a lot of people overlook the fact, they seem to take it for granted that Rome ended eight o'clock in the morning and 8:05 all Europe became Christian. But this wasn’t the case. Sweden, the Norway, the Scandinavian countries became Christian quite later.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] So did Scotland, quite late. There were varying levels of conversion. The Middle East was by far the first. Armenia was the first Christian country, if I remember...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...correctly. North Africa was very Christian. And Italy
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And then it took a long time
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...to take over the Visigoths, the Goths, the Gauls and the others.
[Rushdoony] Well, it was in the 800s when Charlemagne finally broke the back of the pagan human sacrifices on the part of the Anglo Saxons who were barbarians. And he did it by lining them up at a river, finally, after a number of problems with them and giving them a choice of putting their head on a chopping block or going into the river to be baptized.
[Scott] Well, that was a method they could understand.
[Rushdoony] That they could understand, because they knew once they had been baptized by the Christian God he would be angry with them if they broke his rules. So it virtually ended human sacrifice on any major scale.
Well, that was in the 800s. The last of the Scandinavian peoples to accept the faith of ... and adopt it officially, which meant then they were able to work to convert the peoples, was in the 11th century. Yes.
[Scott] That is a long time later.
[Rushdoony] So you had not only some centuries before it was even officially accepted at the top a long time before it reached the people.
[Scott] Well, I mentioned to you, I think, either Thompson’s book on The Holy Fools of Russia.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now...
[Rushdoony] And I have read it since. You gave me a copy.
[Scott] You remember that she said, “We always thought they were Christians. Christian fools, but they were not. They were Shamans.”
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] They were the sorcerers who came with heavy metal and long hair and music.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And total immorality and it was accepted as a variation of Christianity.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Therefore the whole Russian Christian Church was tainted by these individuals. The Church accepted them because the people accepted them. Rasputin was the last of the great big ones.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] But what it adds up to by a very great scholar, I think, is the fact that the Russians never became Christianized. They remained barbarians all along and they still are. They don’t belong in Europe. They don't belong in the West. And the reason we don’t understand how to deal with them is because we are dealing with pagans.
[Rushdoony] Yes, but we are now dealing with them as an ally because our leadership has become pagan.
[Scott] Paganized.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] It is only nominally Christian. It pays lip service to the faith, but in reality has become pagan and has more in common with Gorbachev than it does with us. It accepts the basic premises of Paganism.
[Scott] I think you are right. I... I think you are absolutely on target there. I can’t think of any large institution in the United States today outside, of course, of our official churches, that would dare to call itself Christian.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] No schools.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] I mean they all.... they were all begun by Christians.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Yale, Princeton. Harvard began as a seminary. I hope you haven't seen the Harvard Yard lately.
[Rushdoony] No, I haven’t been there for some years.
[Scott] Well, it is a trip to lower Slovovia.
[Rushdoony] Well, that is true of a great many universities and to send one’s son or daughter to most universities is to show contempt for them.
[Scott] Well, let me say this, that every one of those civilizations that we are talking to died horrible deaths.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now we are the first great civilization to be well aware of all the causes of the death of our predecessors.
[Rushdoony] ...because Christianity has given us a sense of history.
[Scott] And no other civilization had.
[Rushdoony] Yeah.
[Scott] No other civilization wrote books about other cultures, other parts of the world, other people.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
In the last century as western Europe began to move away from the Christian faith, it moved very emphatically into a worship of things Greek, of ancient Greece and the Greek culture. And it began to treat any relic of Greece as though it were an icon that ought to be worshipped. One of the remarkable works of the last century was a multi volume history of Greece by Grote, G R O T E. Grote was a Church of England rector, although primarily a political clergyman, one of the liberals of the day. And he wrote A Worshipful History of Greece. I have forgotten. I have it, but I haven’t looked at it for about 10 years or more. Six to 12 volumes, something like that. Every scrap of detail about the history, the life of Greece, the pottery, treated as though it were a glimpse of something sacred.
Now, of course, we don’t have the same kind of adulation of things Greece, but it is still very much overrated and it is dangerous at times to criticize anything of classical Greece.
[Scott] I would... I ran into that. I remember speaking at Rockford College some years ago and I mentioned the Greeks I passing. I called them elegant barbarians, men from nowhere. And I got an angry three page single spaced type written letter from a herr professor in Switzerland. And he signed himself, PhD classics and he went on at great length at how ignorant I was and what a disgrace it was to Rockford to have a man like me speaking at all.
[Rushdoony] Well, you see that any time you criticize the Greeks on some quarters. You get protests.
The interesting thing is that when they talk about the Greek thinkers they are talking about them seen through the eyes of 20 centuries of Christendom.
[Scott] Yes.
[Rushdoony] I think one of the things that to me some few year back it was particularly revelatory was to sit down and read through Aristotle. And I suddenly realized the Aristotle I was reading had nothing to do with the Aristotle I had learned about. It was Aristotle as mediated through Thomas Aquinas and through modern philosophy so that you read back into Aristotle categories of thought and perceptions and insights that never existed, that he real Aristotle undiluted is not the Aristotle that you get in colleges and universities today, Christian and non Christian. They are reading him with a Christian halo put around him and a Christian interpretation.
[Scott] Well, if we come right down to it, Plato, Aristotle and Socrates and the others all Sophists.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ... our scholars take these first three and set them to one side and say the rest were Sophists. But that is not the case.
[Rushdoony] No.
[Scott] They were all Sophists.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And they destroyed the faith of Greece. They destroyed everything that held the people together. And that was the decline of that civilization.
[Rushdoony] And their pupils range from the 30 tyrants of Greece to Alexander. They created tyranny.
[Scott] Well, yes, because it is the duty of the intellectual to rationalize and defend his culture. When the intellectuals turn against their culture and begin to attack it, the people lose their voice.
[Rushdoony] And they provide a philosophy for elitist power.
[Scott] All right. They open the gate, then, to tyranny.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Exactly.
[Scott] ... in the real sense.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Now when the Christian intellectuals turned against Christianity, they used all the weapons of the Sophists. They used the arguments of the Sophists and they hid from the people the arguments of the early Christians who overcame the Sophists.
[Rushdoony] That is why I thin it is particularly interesting that a study that one of our own staff, Dr. David Estrata Herero in Spain has been doing that is so important, because Aquinas was assigned to the task of making Aristotle Christian, as it were. And when he died he was working on a commentary on Romans which anticipated, to a great extent what Luther later wrote. And that is why he spoke of this other Aristotelian type writings as works of straw.
[Scott] There are... look at the way our schools have operated. They go from Athens in the fifth century to Rome and then in a leap into the age of the Enlightenment.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Never are the Christian centuries described, nor the Christian thinkers, nor the Christian developers. Yet the greatest civilization the world has ever seen arose out of the ashes of Rome. Far exceeding anything that all the pagans put together had ever been able to produce.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And it brought more liberty, more diversity, more variety than any civilization in history. For one, it wasn’t a centralized civilization. It was diverse. It was the one and the many.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And none of this is taught.
[Rushdoony] No. All we have done is to bomb cathedrals or pollute them as Westminster Abbey has been polluted with some people buried there.
[Scott] Oh, yes. Well, now, of course, to be buried in Westminster Abbey, Mohammedans will be interred there any minute.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Why not? Why not? They are just as good as anybody else. And although that is not the issue, the issue is that it is a Christian cathedral.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The issue isn’t equality. When Christians say that they are Christians they are not against equality, because Christianity recognizes the equality of all men, but they are simply saying that they are believers in Jesus Christ.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the new Paganism is now faltering badly, because it is suicidal as it has always been. It has destroyed every culture. When man exalts himself and makes himself his own God, he separates himself from others.
[Scott] And he becomes very unhappy.
[Rushdoony] Yes. As Sartre said once that God was not a problem to him, but his neighbor was because since Sartre saw himself as God, his neighbor had to be the devil. And that was good logic.
[Scott] There was a photograph, a series of photographs in Life magazine many years ago. It showed a bunch of people, different people standing on the street, on the curbs, most tragic looks, most awful looking hopeless faces. And it said: Who are these people and what are they doing?
You know, there were people in New York who were waiting for the light to change. And there wasn’t a smile in the car load.
[Rushdoony] Well, if I lived in New York, I would not smile.
[Scott] No, if you did, you might get arrested. They would think that you were out of your mind.
But we do have... we have ... we have a ... an unhappy culture.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And people say, “Well, why are we unhappy?” Well, of course, if you are empty, if you have no direction. Tom Wolfe’s book A Bonfire of the Vanities has sold over 500,000 copies in the first three months of publication mostly by word of mouth and it is being misreviewed across the country by people who keep telling us the plot, which is ridiculous. The plot is merely an excuse to describe the despair, the pointlessness, the emptiness of modern life. That is all the book is about. He doesn't have to say is there anything else, because when you finish the book you know here has to be something else, because the society he portrays cannot survive.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Well, fortunately for us we do have Christianity. We have 200 centuries behind us and we know that it will survive.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And Christians are the only people who can look bad news in the face, in fact, recognize that behind it is the hand of God and therefore the bad news means that judgment is under way and they are going to triumph.
[Scott] Well, if they triumphed in Rome, why can’t they triumph today?
[Rushdoony] Right.
[Scott] Rome was much stronger. The Christians were much fewer. We would have all these centuries of experience behind us. We have all these arguments. We have all these proofs, all these evidences.
[Rushdoony] Well, we are seeing the death throws of Paganism, the new Paganism all around us.
[Scott] Well, AIDS is one result.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] What a wonderful consequence.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Here we have all of these social scientists, a term that has always made me smile. They are neither social nor scientific. And we look at the results. Since Mr. Freud, Dr. Freud incidentally considered himself a great scholar of Greece, remember, and distorted every single one of the Greek myths.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Misrepresented the Oedipus tragedy and absolutely tore apart...
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] The history that he claimed to admire.
[Rushdoony] The interesting thing is that Freud said the three great Humanists were Copernicus, Darwin and himself. But with him Humanism had come to an end, because he had shown the emptiness of it all, if everything.
[Scott] He saw himself, you know, as a second Moses.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, he didn't care for the first Moses. He tried to make an Egyptian out of him.
[Scott] Oh yes.
[Rushdoony] So that...
[Scott] He... he... he wanted to get rid of him first.
Well, it is remarkable how far that nonsense proceeded.
[Rushdoony] Well, you know, Freud actually recognized that in the face of world that was strictly bad news, the Christians were happy. And he faced this before World War I and after World War I when the world was falling apart and had proceeded to do so more rapidly. And the question that raised itself and he tried to deal with it in one of his works. Wasn’t there something wrong with the whole position of modern unbelief? Although it claimed to be philosophically and scientifically sound, when it was the Humanist who was neurotic. And when the simple Christian believer...
[Scott] ...was happy.
[Rushdoony] ...was happy facing the horrible future that was coming. And finally he answered it thus. They escape the personal neurosis by embracing the cosmic neurosis, God.
[Scott] Oh, well...
[Rushdoony] Which was to say nothing at all. It was as empty a copout as imaginable.
[Scott] Well, if that is surmising how he felt, he was a member of a sub culture surrounded by an enormous civilization of a different faith, unable to confront that openly and yet he stole all its instruments. He stole the confessional. He stole the forgiveness of sins.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] He tried to remove guilt, which is an inescapable part of every heart, because of our inevitable rebellion and rebellious humors. He stole the promise, all the promises of religion and he distorted history in the process. He distorted human behavior in the process.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] He assigned an ignoble motive to everything that human beings did. Not a single decent motive. Nobody was ever in love. Nobody ever sacrificed himself.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the interesting thing, too, is that he did this in the name of creating a new priesthood, the psychoanalyst, the scientist, because he said the only way to eliminate Christianity is by taking the problem of guilt and making it a scientific problem so that the new priesthood will be the psychoanalyst.
[Scott] Well, he was a true Victorian in the sense of the word science had a mystic effect.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ... as far as he was concerned. DO you remember? That was a day when everything that was supposed to be good was scientific, end quote.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] I mean they had Rube Goldberg ideas, but they called it science.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Well it is very, very interesting that, too, that Freud knew he was creating a synthetic Christianity, or rather a substitute for Christianity.
[Scott] There was an anti Christian bent to his efforts.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] ...which was quite clear. You didn’t have to be much of an analyst to see it.
[Rushdoony] That is right. Now, of course, Freudianism is in disrepute increasingly. One of the few good things the Feminists did was to go after Freud.
[Scott] Yes. On the other hand, they have substituted another meaningless word, therapy.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] So I read Ann Landers and the others. It is always very amusing. I always read letters to the lovelorn because they are both Feminists and therapists. They are always sending people to the therapist. They always need therapy.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And nobody ever seems to take the time to track those who go get therapy and what happens to them.
[Rushdoony] Yes. The ... well, one European scholar did and what he found out was there was a far greater rate of recovery if you did not go to a therapist. The therapist impeded recovery, because basic to modern psychotherapy is the feeling that the belief that scientific belief, ostensibly, that not you, but the environment is responsible. And that is the essence of old Paganism.
[Scott] Well...
[Rushdoony] Stars or your ancestors, your father or mother or the... the gods. Somebody else did it to you.
[Scott] Well, yes. You were the ... Freud said your parents.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And, of course, that meant that their parents and so forth all the way back.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] So really nobody was responsible for anything. Rousseau and the criminal society and the innocent Christians.
But Paganism is a deadly disease which, I think, the Italians contracted in the 15th century.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It destroyed Italy which has never come back as a nation since, despite Garibaldi, despite putting it together on paper. It is still ... you ask an Italian where he is from he will say Roma, Genova. He will never say Italy. There is no such place.
And it is in the process of reducing our world. Paganism... the Soviets are pagans. Africa, of course, is in a syncretic position part pagan, part Christian, part ancient cults of its own. And here what we can we say about the Christian community of the United States?
[Rushdoony] It is one of the few parts of the world where the Christian community has a potential if it will confront issues, if it will wake up to its responsibility. It is the only place where numerically a sizable proportion of the population will declare themselves to be Christian. So we are still unusual in that respect
[Scott] Yes. And also the debate unbelievably course and sadistic attitudes and behavior of the non Christians and the anti Christians are making the Christians of the United States stronger every year.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Exactly.
So when we see these problems, we have to rejoice, because the Bible requires us to, because our deliverance is near. What Van Til calls epistemological self consciousness is setting in. What these people are doing as they blame the parents, the grandparents and so on or child psychology, animal psychology and so on, Van Til had an excellent term for it all: integration into the void, integration backward into the void.
[Scott] I remember that exchange between James Agee. He died of a heart attack in a taxi cab in New York. He had a conversion just before, not too long before he died.
[Rushdoony] I didn’t know that.
[Scott] Yes, he converted. And his mentor was an Episcopal priest at Saint Luke’s parish in Greenwich Village and... named Father Fly, strange name, English, I guess. And at one point Agee wrote to Father Fly, he said, “I seem to find more things wrong with people today than I used to before I converted. What is happening to me? Why do I become suddenly so critical?”
And the priest wrote back, “As you grow in spiritual strength, the signs of spiritual sickness become more evident to you.”
[Rushdoony] Very good. Very good. Yes. And that is why many Christians find themselves heartsick. As C. S. Lewis said, the morning after his conversion he was {?} man of all England. I know exactly how he felt, because he suddenly saw the responsibility, the enormity of the problem of the evil all around him. And that is the part of the process or maturing as a Christian which too many are unwilling to see.
[Scott] Well, there is the point also that conversion doesn't come as the end of a long happy experience. It comes as the result of a walk through the desert.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] It comes after tribulations and humility and humiliations and this consciousness of error and so forth. It is very painful process. And the idea that anybody is going to be converted in a flash of lightning, I always think it is {?}. The end results are the tremendous shakings and then {?} I think it was Lewis also who said, “God acts as though, ok, I have got you. Now you stand to one side and {?} to the next crowd.” Because all of the sudden all your troubles catch up with you.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And from then on you have a mature life.
[Rushdoony] And the more you face up to the problems you have the problems in the world around you, the more mature you become as a Christian, the greater the strength. And while it is very upsetting in the process, it also leads to a greater joy, because, you know, yes, I see the evil. I see the problems. But now I am beginning to see the greater power of God and fact of his forth coming victory.
[Scott] All right. There is a psychological rule which have never seen written and which I have personally invented to the effect that the problem you can see is a problem you can solve. If you can’t see a problem, of course you can’t solve it.
[Rushdoony] {?}
[Scott] You can’t recognize, because it exists. But if you can see it, the fact that you can see it means that God has given you the ability to overcome it.
[Rushdoony] A good verse in the New Testament, “Wake thou that sleepest and Christ shall give thee light.” Well, that is an unusual statement. Awake thou that sleepest. But the light then is to be given after you wake up. You wake up in darkness. But the light will be given, because you are awakened to the fact of the darkness in the world around you.
[Scott] Well, just look at this brief discussion of Paganism. Look at how many professors and how many students {?} with their lives and {?} in those graves without learning the lessons that lie there exposed for them to pick up.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Having seen the record of great historic failures they adopted it in the public schools of Britain as a model to follow.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] And where is Britain? And what happened after they began those studies? What happened to the {?}, to the energy of Britain after it lost its faith in the 1830s and 40s and settled for outer respectability and inner Paganism?
[Rushdoony] And with the revival of Greek studies and the exaltation of Greek culture led to homosexuality.
[Scott] Yes, of course, yes, of course.
[Rushdoony] So we have AIDS as a product of that type of Paganism.
[Scott] And you have... and you have {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes. And it is interesting to me. I have mentioned this to you before, Otto. With all the talk about AIDS and where did it come from, I have mentioned to this to people including doctors. Why not go back and look at the Roman writers, at a poet like Catullus as he describes his disease. Or go to the brother of Louis XIV and to his circle of sodomites there at Versailles.
[Scott] Well, look at {?}
[Rushdoony] ...and the diseases they had. It reads like AIDS to me.
[Scott] Well, what happened to all those people? Let’s go back to Rome. They had millions of people {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Millions upon millions and yet three centuries later, four centuries later there were a handful of people in Rome.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] There weren’t enough to construct new buildings.
[Rushdoony] Rome was depopulated before the pagans ever hit it by disease. They had committed suicide in more ways than one.
[Scott] {?}
[Rushdoony] And this is happening to us. We are beginning to see a drop in population. We are beginning to see the death wish of modern culture.
[Scott] Well, of course, the abortion is the same as the infanticide of the pagans. Abortion is Paganism.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Right. But at the same time we are seeing growing birth rates among Christians. We have to go back a while in American history to see the same kind of birth rates. Christians now are having more babies than anybody else. They are putting them into Christian schools in increasing numbers. So a new culture is being born.
[Scott] Well, that reminds me of my father’s covenant. He gave me {?} lectures under the guise of {?} other successful people. They were all more successful than I was. And finally one day I said, “Well, what is your definition of the successful man?” And he stopped. He said, “Well, a man who outlives his enemies.” And you remind of that when you talk about Christians beginning to be popular.
[Rushdoony] Well, it won’t be the first time it has happened, because the only ones with the cultural {?} to rebuild when Rome collapsed were the Christians.
[Scott] Well, of course, they were the only ones that had any reason.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] Why travel if there is no goal?
[Rushdoony] The others were looking backward at what Rome had been. And the Christians were glad for an opportunity to rebuild. They took a beating. They took some losses, but now they could rebuild. So they were the ones who commanded the future.
[Scott] Well...
[Rushdoony] Well...
[Scott] Of course, the Christians were the only ones who believe in a future.
[Rushdoony] Yes.
[Scott] If you take the pagan view, there is nothing between me and {?}. The world ends when you die.
[Rushdoony] yes.
[Scott] That is it. Now in that case why do... why bother to do anything that requires more effort?
[Rushdoony] It is like James when he was asked what about the future given his economic premises? And he said, “Long run we are all dead.”
[Scott] Well, as Dennis Peacock pointed out he represented a class that doesn't believe in the future, because it doesn't propagate.
[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.
[Scott] Homosexuality is a vote against life.
[Rushdoony] Yes. And when you vote against life, God takes you seriously.
[Scott] Of course. He gives you what you ask for.
[Rushdoony] Yes. So these people are going to get what is coming to them.
Well, our time is virtually over.
Otto, do you have a last statement you want to make...
[Scott] No.
[Rushdoony] ...for...
[Scott] No, excepting that I ... I think the inner directives is a misnomer. These are really outer directives.
[Rushdoony] Yes. We have a future for that reason, because they are Christ’s directives and he is the Lord of history.
Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you all.
[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.