From the Easy Chair

Profanity

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 16-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AG62

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AG62, Profanity from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 166, March 10, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a subject that is very much neglected and misunderstood. One of our problems in our time is that we have no sense of definition, because dictionaries today no longer have standards. Our subject tonight is profanity.

Now the word profanity today is reduced by many to saying certain dirty words, but that is not the true meaning. The word profanity comes from two words profano which means outside the temple or outside of God. So profanity is any living, any speaking, any acting that is outside of God which acts as though God does not exist.

Sometimes this is called Secularism, but the word Secularism has several meanings and while this is one of them, it is better to stick with the older and truer term profanity. Modern man acts as though God does not exist. Whereas at one time everyone of whatever religion believed that their lives from day one to the last in all their aspects were religious and that no aspect of life could be separated from faith, now faith is only a small corner of the lives of even Christians. They are profane, because they assume that most of their life is outside of God. They are profane when they feel that politics is outside of the faith or that art or anything else, music, any sphere of life if we say it is not a part of our world of faith, then we have become profane.

Well, with that introduction, Otto, do you want to make some opening remarks?

[Scott] Well, if you recall, when you are a very small child you were very much aware of the presence of God.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that seems to be true across the board. Later on, of course, that presence... that... that presence no longer seems as immanent as it was then, but you took God of granted.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Then you go to school.

[Scott] That is right. Well, then school helped break it up. There was one of the things that helped break up a lot of your very early feelings and thoughts. But if we look at the long reach of history, the ... once the ancients created a civilization these civilizations were always religious and they maintained themselves in some instances several thousand years. We are talking about the oldest democracy in the West, the oldest constitution in the West and we barely got 200. Now these were thousands of years of stability.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And of religious faith in which we may argue with the type and quality of the faith, but it was a faith that kept people going.

No civilization has ever survived the los of its faith. Now I can’t forget that wonderful comment of Owen Chadwick to the effect that if any other civilization had lost its faith as rapidly as ours, our experts would have broken each other down in order to get their study such a phenomenon. But since it occurred here amongst... amongst the people of the West, it has been treated as a natural development or not even a development. It has not even been commented upon. And your comments about what is profane makes me think about the effect of the gold strike where towns all across the United States had laws against blasphemy, taking the Lord’s name in vain and these men rushed out West for the gold fields and came back cursing, cursing their faith because they came back in most cases without any money, without the stake that they had started with and so forth. And the whole tradition, the whole flavor of the United States altered and it is no wonder that after that in the 1850s we ran into a Civil War.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that is a very interesting connection. The gold rush in 49, their return in the 50s and at the end of the 50s the outbreak of war.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] In 1860.

[Scott] And they killed each other so viciously. It was a modern warn in the sense it was a total war. The rules of warfare which had been well established were thrust aside. Sherman’s march to the sea is a standing disgrace to the army of the United States, because he treated women and children as combatants and burned down the homes, burned the crops, killed the animals, left the wave of devastation all the way. And this breaking of the normal civilized Christian rules of warfare was an extension of the downfall of true Christianity in the United States at that time.

Lincoln has never been properly assessed, nor has the north been properly assessed in that conflict.

[Rushdoony] It was the beginning of total war.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] The German general staff studied it very carefully and then used it in the Franco Prussian War. Of course, everyone used in World War I and World War II.

[Scott] Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] Well, profanity now is world wide. You had the so-called Islamic fundamentalists trying to wage war against it, but it has not been a popular movement. And there is a tremendous amount of hostility in both countries, in Saudi Arabia where it is strongest and in Iran. Those who are under 30, the overwhelming majority of the population in Saudi Arabia do not agree with it. So even the Islamic version is facing troubles. Profanity has taken over the world. And it is destroying the world.

[Scott] Well, it live without God means to live without guilt. It means that there is no sin. It means that all is permitted.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But, oddly enough, even the people who say that do not seem to be able to escape guilt. It eats them up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It eats them up. Stalin, in the end, locked himself in and had his meals delivered on a tray, left outside his door and would open the door and pull the tray in and then lock the door again, because the ghosts were coming after him. He was positive he was going to be murdered.

[Rushdoony] The woman who was his housekeeper and cook for years and years almost the only one who trusted him, who was trusted by him, on one occasion one of the boxes of tea that went into the room had been somehow in transit damaged so it was slightly opened. She went to a slave labor camp for that. Even though it was demonstrated on inspection that the tea was not poisoned.

[Scott] Well, in a cab going down Park Avenue one ... one summer day, stopped at a stop light and a door opened and one of those buildings along Fifth and two men came out and each one stood on each side of the door and then {?} appeared. And he looked right and then left and it was like a radar sweep and he saw everything. He saw me looking at him in the cab. He saw everything. All his senses were alert. And I thought, what a way to live?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Unforgettable.

[Rushdoony] Well, Humanism, of course, is the classic expression of profanity, because Humanism and the humanist manifestoes insist that the only way man should live is without God, with himself as the only standard and the only law.

One scholar, Hawks, has written that in history we have seen a remarkable fact. And he calls it the Greek miracle. And the Greek miracle was Humanism. Still another writer writing in the most recent issue of The Ancient World, a journal, L. R. Hill has said that the Greek miracle was the discovery of Humanism. In other words, the greatest thing in all civilization for our academicians has been living life without God.

[Scott] Well, if you look at other people there is all the good will in the world. It is awfully hard for a sensible man to pin his faith on humanity.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But they don’t pin it on humanity as a whole, but on themselves.

[Scott] On themselves as the epitome of humanity.

[Rushdoony] As the elite.

[Scott] As the prototypes.

[Rushdoony] Right, right.

[Scott] But the argument is, of course, that these are people who have warm values, who are compassionate and who are noble and who love beauty and they have high ethics and so forth, but every civilization in every era that has turned away from God has wound up in the gutter.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the gutter.

[Rushdoony] And the sad fact and the disastrous fact is that in the elitist intellectual journals like The Ancient World, you have these men advocating something that is more bankrupt than anything else the world has ever known, Humanism.

[Scott] Well, there was a... there is a humanist association in the United States you know.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They have several hundred thousand members.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they have rallies and they have meetings and they are determined to stamp out religion if they possibly can. I think the People for the American Way is a title that has always amused me, because a part of the ... the founders of that organization think that the American Way was anti Christian. The People for the American Way are humanists, but they don’t say they are. What we are moving into now and what we have moved into is a much more sophisticated propaganda than we were confronted with in the past. You know that your books are never reviewed, for instance, in any of the journals. They are attributed non objects. They are invisible. My last book on South Africa wasn’t reviewed anywhere, because one or two conservative places where its predecessors are reviewed all across the country. And we are now running into Humanists and Pragmatists and anti Christians and Communists and all kinds of individuals who have abandoned their labels and who have found that it is much easier to propagate their beliefs if they don’t label them.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, this profanity, of course, has captured many, many of the churches, many people who claim to be born again Christians. For example, to put your child in a humanistic school is profanity. It is saying that education outside of God can be good for a child. It is similarly profanity to live as though one had no responsibility to God and to Christ wherever one works, wherever one lives or that life in itself is mostly secular so that when you go to church Sunday you fulfilled your Christian duties if you don’t drink or fornicate during the rest of the week. Then you are holy.

Well, that is not holiness. That is profanity. The very fact that Dan Maxwell when he went to a number of prominent, so called Christian men of business, to get them to contribute to our Journal of Christian Reconstruction, you remember.

[Scott] Yes, I do.

[Rushdoony] ... the issue a few years ago on business.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And they looked at him and said, “What the hell does Christianity have to do with my business?” They couldn’t see any connection. But these are the people who regularly are featured at Bible believing groups. But for them their business is outside of the life of faith as long as they don't sleep with the secretary.

[Rushdoony] Well, I just came back from a ... from a meeting of the CMREs, you know a committee on monetary research and education and it has always been an interesting group, but a somewhat limited group in a sense, because the majority of those who attend are interested in the markets, what is going to happen in the market. There is a leavening number, you might say, who are interested in what the political impact of markets will have or what impact politics will have on the market. And that about represents the feeling of the group.

But none of the group, or hardly any of the group thinks that there is anything beyond those two matters.

Now, of course, there is. There is a great big sky over all of us. And there is the eternal and watchful presence of almighty God. And if you forget that, then you have lost your compass. You are wandering in a trackless sea. You are in the desert. And that is the reason that so many of these people are actually unhappy.

I don’t know of a more unhappy country than this one and yet I have been in other parts of the world, very poor. There are large areas of Latin America where the poverty is intense, where the people are happy, because they do have a faith. Life is good for them. If there is meat on the table, well, then it is a time to feel good. And I just come back form this very well healed, upper middle class enclave, all unhappy as can be with very little exceptions.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the profane, they are profaning their lives.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, to get back to this profanity in the Church. I had an interesting experience some years ago at the beginning of the 60s. Dorothy will recall it vividly. I went from California up into Oregon for a meeting and there were a number of pastors going together. And we took two cars. One was a station wagon. I think there were about a dozen of us in the two cars. So on the way there were a number of stops, because it was a long trip. And we started early in the morning. We stopped for breakfast. They stopped for coffee, stopped for lunch and so on. And in the course of it I began to discuss a subject I felt was very important. I said it was important for them as Christian leaders to protect themselves in terms of what was coming economically. I said that one of the first signs of what was ahead would be the disappearance of silver coins. Now this was before the disappearance of silver coins.

[Scott] Before...

[Rushdoony] Well before.

[Scott] Before Lyndon decided to jacket the mint.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So I explained what was happening, why it was happening, what inflation meant, what hard money meant and so on.

Well, when we got there to the meeting and there was a banquet also the next day, the big joke at the banquet was yours truly and his ideas about silver. In fact, one of the leaders held up a silver dime. Of, course that was the only kind of dime there was then and said, “Let’s give this to Rush and make him feel safe and secure in terms of what he said is coming.”

And they all thought it was a big joke. There was only one who began to save his silver and accumulated quite a bit and then got weary and disposed of it all and told me some years later how much he regretted it.

Well, now that was profanity on their part. They were refusing to see what the Bible says about just weights and just measures, which applies to money. They were refusing to see the world outside of the Church as under God and his law. They were guilty of profanity.

And, of course, when things began to happen and they were unprepared for it, they all were resentful of me.

[Scott] All I can do is repeat Mark Twain. He said that human nature you can’t say much worse.

Well, there was something I remember reading once called The Sacred and The Profane and it was a title, if I am not mistaken, of a play. I can’t recall who the playwright was, but it was before our time. The title of that today would make no sense. The term profane doesn’t make any sense. Blasphemy doesn’t make any sense. You remember the Bishop Pike.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And how he was put on trial for heresy, I believe, in his denomination. I have forgotten what it was.

[Rushdoony] Episcopal.

[Scott] Episcopal. And the laughter of the journalists that such a medieval proceeding could take place.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, profanity today is so prevalent that the meaning has eroded. A profane man today, if the term is used at all, it has almost disappeared. {?} uses it as I said earlier bad language. But the Church is profane. The Church is profane, because it does not apply the faith across the board.

In New England and across the country in the early years of this country, we had election sermons. We had sermons that dealt with the facts of every day life. Martin Luther in his preaching spoke about stealing as debasing money. And so on down the line.

[Scott] Well, as you know, I have just written an article on the new law which has been passed.

[Rushdoony] An excellent article on the...

[Scott] In The Conservative Digest.

[Rushdoony] …March or... is it April?

[Scott] March, I think.

[Rushdoony] March Conservative Digest.

[Scott] In which Congress in its wisdom has enacted a law which in effect makes it illegal to have an election sermon, not quite illegal. It is renders you ineligible for a tax exemption.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Which is not quite illegality. It means that you have lost what the government no considers a right, but a privilege.

[Rushdoony] And, of course, now the Catholic Church is before the U. S. Supreme Court which could say that they have no right to tax exemption, because they are...

[Scott] Against....

[Rushdoony] Anti abortion.

[Scott] Yes. So now you have a profane nation, so to speak, in the real sense and that is when somebody enters God’s house to commit an offense.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The goal is, and it has been stated more than once, to say that the Church has no right to condemn homosexuality. We had a problem with that here in California about eight, nine years ago when a number of churches lost their tax exemption on that issue. Or to oppose abortion or to oppose adultery or oppose anything that is against the general consensus.

[Scott] Public policy.

[Rushdoony] Public policy.

This would be the end of the Church.

[Scott] I would... well, of course it will be selectively applied for a while.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] Now I understand. I think I was reading today that various black churches have receiving envelopes to contribute to Jesse Jackson’s campaign. I don’t expect Congress or anyone else to move against that. But they will select unpopular small fringe groups to move against to establish all the legal precedents.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And because the Church is so profane, it doesn’t get worked up when it sees this sort of thing happening as, for example, a trial I mentioned, you know, that I was in a few months ago where a southern state moved against several churches on the grounds that they were favoring child abuse by favoring spankings for children and the deputy attorney general spoke of the Bible as a child abuse manual.

Now these churches throughout that state could not get worked up.

[Scott] They were not concerned.

[Rushdoony] They were not concerned. No one as in the courtroom except the ministers who were on trial. And that is profanity. It is unconcern.

[Scott] Though now you are talking about the profanation by the state, the government. Now the government is one thing. The state is another. Governments can come and go. Administrations can come and go, but he state is the entire operatus of the society which can expand or contract. When the state looms over the citizenry, when this administration, for instance, the Reagan administration which proclaims itself as conservative and we have some very strange people in it. We have an attorney general who has sanctioned the persecution of many of his own colleagues which is very strange, the department of justice under... under Meese has... has put a representative, Hanson, in prison and so forth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This administration has moved against the churches as effectively as any of its predecessors.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And... and gone farther than any of its predecessors while talking about its great respect for Christianity.

And profanation by the state is, of course, the ultimate challenge to all Christians.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the most important passages that I have often cited in Saint Augustine, has to do precisely with the state as a profane institution, because Augustine says that when a civil government, a state will not recognize the Lord, they will soon be no different than a criminal gang, a band of robbers.

[Scott] All right. That brings me back to a comment I have made before that the omission of Christianity from the constitution laid Christianity open for this.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And today Christianity does not prevail in the counsels of state anywhere in the world. And as a result we are in the disaster that we are that profanity has become enthroned and therefore God’s judgment is going to be on the whole earth.

[Scott] Well, yes. In the Soviet they have already outlawed God, so they have in China. So they have in Cuba, Nicaragua and other places. And we have sat here and watched it and not moved a finger and haven't even uttered a word.

[Rushdoony] Augustine said that people were either members of the city of God or the city of man and that history is a struggle between the two. And, at times, both church and state can be in one camp and then in another. And over the centuries church and state have gone back and forth between the city of man and the city of God. Today virtually every civil government is in the city of man and many, many churches.

[Scott] Well, virtually.... I wouldn’t say virtually, but a great many Americans believe that as long as they obey the state, they are performing the highest duty. They have no idea the company that they have placed themselves in.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, profanity, thus, is very clearly something modern man needs to be concerned about and yet there is never a sermon on profanity in its truly biblical meaning. It has disappeared from the pulpit.

[Scott] Well, you can see why.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It takes a certain amount of courage.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, to go against the highest priorities, even in the philosophic sense.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And even in a religious sense.

[Rushdoony] One of the organized forms of religious profanity since World War II is the death of God school of theology. The death of God school of theology insisted that God is dead to us, they said. They never said that God, per se, is dead. They said as far as we are concerned, he doesn’t exist. We don’t care. He can be out there, but for us he is dead.

Moreover, they were insistent on the priority of man and one of the leaders of the school spoke with a great deal of joy about his son whom he had trained to think of man as the creator. And once when they were out at night the boy looked up at the stars and said, “Daddy, which of those did we put up there?” And the son gladdened his father’s heart. He had to write about it he was so proud of his son. He was liberated.

The death of God school of theology was, thus, a school of profanity. It is no longer talked about, because it is not that their ideas have gone away, but they are so taken for granted now that the theologians all presuppose the ideas of the death of God school of theology.

Well, I submit that Pietism, although it may profess to believe the Bible from cover to cover, is guilty of the same kind of thinking, that God is dead as far as most of the world is concerned and that he is only interested in saving their souls so they don’t go to hell which is a way of saying that God is dead as far as most of the world is concerned.

[Scott] Well, it is really a way of saying that the world doesn’t count. I do.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] God is only interested in me, not in the world. The world is operated by the devil. So they have given up the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And to turn the world over to the devil means that you don’t... you don’t expect to change it or improve it or halt whatever it does, because it is the devil’s property. What is that then for God?

[Rushdoony] Very little.

[Scott] Very little, just the individual whose soul he so hungers to improve.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that makes God pretty close to a valet of some sort. I don’t know what.

I don’t... I think the death of God nonsense created such a furor, such a reaction. You know, Time magazine didn’t recover for an awfully long time from running that on the cover on Easter. Now most of our big Christian holidays are the occasion for anti Christian exhibitions of one sort of another. We are regaled with documentaries which make fun of us. Or else there is the ACLU charges to remove Christianity from all public places and so forth and so on. And, in fact, Christmas and Easter are becoming painful occasions, because all the enemies appear. And you were talking about the profane. The profane choose holy moments to profane.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean, the whole point of profaning something is to select the most sacred symbols to object to.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That was the whole point during the Middle Ages and still of the black mass, of caricaturing it in the most obscene and profane way imaginable. And today that sort of thing in a variety of forms is commonplace.

[Scott] Well, we see Christianity as a subject of comedies, a subject of satires, subject of bad novels, the priests succumbing to the sins of the flesh. And you look at those who express such horror. The pornographers are amazed. They ... they think that any... any failure anywhere along the line of any Christian is something against nature as though Christianity is some form of magic or another or as though Christians don't admit that they are sinners. It is an interesting subject.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The world today is so caught up in its profanity that it cannot tolerate even a small corner of the world being left to God in Christ. And therefore the more it pushes back the Church and limits it, the more intense its hatred becomes. One would thing, for example, in the Soviet Union that having destroyed most of the churches including centuries old architectural gems, and having driven so many people out of the church, they would relax. But they have only intensified their persecution. And it is more savage today than it has been since the revolution.

[Scott] It is interesting. They always portray Saint Basil’s cathedral in Moscow, you know, with the onion shaped spires.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the multi colored and inside is an Atheist museum.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Every one of our correspondents stands there with a microphone and with Saint Basil’s cathedral in the backdrop and never of them has ever said what is inside that place.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] None of them have ever remarked on it. But if it was a museum devoted to mocking any other religion would they be quiet?

[Rushdoony] No, they would not. Their anti Christianity is essential to their whole world and life view.

Well, one has only to speak to the press as I have on occasions when I have been somewhere at a conference and they deign to come in order to write something ugly, to see their intense hatred for anyone or anything that is Christian.

[Scott] Well, that brings up the whole point that Satan’s rebellion was against goodness. It was against virtue. Melville in his Billy Budd novel, the ... the mate that hated Billy Budd hated Billy Budd because he was virtuous. It is no accident that Nero selected the Christians to persecute and to blame for the fire, the conflagration that took down so much of Rome, because the Christians with their spectacularly austere lifestyle offended Nero more than any other group of people could possibly offend him.

And this brings up the whole question, because there is something about your virtues which arouse the enmity of those who don’t have them. The enmity of the irreligious against those who go to church, the enmity against the name of Jesus is incredible.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Burning, intense. People get offended. I have had fellows say to me one day, “I don’t mind religion, but I just don’t want to hear about Jesus.”

I said, “I wonder why that is?”

They have never read anything that Jesus ever said. They have never read the gospels. They never quote him. They don't know anything about him, but they have a hatred. And I found in my course that some of my most bitter opponents have been individuals who oppose me for my virtues, not my vices. They don’t mind my vices. They like to see those.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have a situation today where Congress sees fit, as you mentioned earlier, to try to control the churches. And yet if you take the most flagrant vices that have come to light with regard to TV evangelists and compare them to what is routine on Capital Hill, you wonder that they have the nerve to dream of...

[Scott] Anything.

[Rushdoony] ... being righteously indignant about anything or anyone else.

[Scott] Well, the Wall Street Journal has done us a service recently regarding Congress and brings to mind the question, in my mind, at least, and I think it would be worth somebody filing a case on, as to whether it is constitutional for Congress to exempt itself from the laws it enacts upon the rest of us.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because what, in effect, Congress is doing is creating itself as a nobility exempt from the laws that affect the common man.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I am not sure that that is consonant with our constitution.

[Rushdoony] No, but it is certainly consonant with the Pharisaism of Congress. I do believe that never since the first century have we seen such organized Pharisaism as Washington, DC represents.

[Scott] Incredible.

[Rushdoony] Both parties.

[Scott] Both parties is right. But there is the profanation of all that is decent in this country’s traditions.

[Rushdoony] And it tells us very clearly how right Saint Augustine was when he said that civil governments without God will soon become mafias, as it were.

[Scott] The South African government is a fairly Christian government. It works very hard to do something to escape the odium that it has collected from around the world, because of its racial situation. And it is caught in a very curious bind. If it abandons authority that whole area will fall apart. If it maintains authority it stands convicted of racism.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They are in a difficult situation and one of the problems is that churches are becoming theologically soft and weak so that is as great a threat there as anything the United States or the Soviet Union poses.

[Scott] Our churches have never really been strong and as far as I can gather since the 1820s.

[Rushdoony] I think they began to go downhill about that time. In fact, in New England it started much earlier, but in the country at large, about 1820 and after, there were times of recuperation in every area. But the basic direction despite some recoveries was basically down. What you had was the rise in New England of the Unitarians and elsewhere of the Pietists who withdrew from the world. The country had Christian schools, but the Pietists killed it. They wanted only a concentration on the life of the soul and education was something the state could do just as well. So they surrendered it.

The war, as you said earlier, in 1860, was related to the gold rush and it was related also to the rise of Pietism and the refusal of Christians to face up to the issues. The sad fact is that it was the abolitionists who were either Unitarians or Humanists outright were most concerned with dealing with the issue. The others didn’t want to face up to it. They wanted the status quo. And that was it.

Well, the ... I went into that at a bit, you know, the secret six.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that is coming out again pretty soon. The ... I... I gave it to somebody... I gave a copy of that first edition to somebody in South Africa and they said, “Well, what relevance has that to our situation?”

[Rushdoony] Amazing.

[Scott] And I also gave a copy, I remember, to a Cuban exile who was trying to help the Nicaraguans to understand the nature of the threat against Somoza and had much the same reaction that events of a hundred years or more ago really don’t have much relevance to the situation we are in today, which brings us back to the belief that there is nothing permanent, that Augustine is now talking about the world, the permanent world in relation to the age of man or the situation of man. And I wonder if the clergy of the United States ever gets any history in the seminary outside of the history of the Church? Is the clergy educated in the true sense?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that is an interesting question. And this mater of permanence. One of the things that nobody has ever commented on, with regard to Saint Augustine is Saint Augustine’s knowledge of the nightclub life of his day.

[Scott] Well, it was extensive.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Saint Augustine, before his conversion was very much a man of the world. So he comments upon the acts that were common place, acts which he had enjoyed. And he cites them, because, he says, “This is how far we have gone.”

Now some of the things he describes would be hardly repeatable, which would be true, also, of many things that prevail today. But the point he was making was that men were going further and further afield in profanity in a life outside God and in pleasure outside of God and in opposition to God’s law.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] And therefore, the end was near and the fall of Rome was inescapable.

[Scott] No question.

[Rushdoony] So if Augustine were alive today...

[Scott] ...he would recognize the situation.

[Rushdoony] He would recognize the situation and he would say, “Oh, ho, let’s look at your entertainment. Let’s look at your films, your nightclub life. What goes on here?”

Well, it looks like the new Rome is about to fall.

[Scott] Well, I recall and I have always regret that I don’t recall who wrote it, the man who wrote... he said, “And those who still find pleasure in vice and pain in virtue have not had enough experience with either.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very good. Very, very good.

[Scott] Now the ... if you reach the stage that we have reached here it is not possible to profane women anymore, because there are no bounds including the most revolting sadism...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And thousands of bodies across the country.

[Rushdoony] And the Feminists have helped do it to themselves.

[Scott] Well, their answer is to teach women how to use karate. They have wrestling classes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But this really from the point of view of civilization is a terrible point to reach, because when you no longer protect the women and children, you don’t have a civilization where they remain. Even savages take care of their own.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Even primitives. It is the greatest... the oldest taboo in the world, in history. I noticed on television today that I saw Israeli soldiers being Palestinian women who are demonstrating.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is not to pinpoint the Israeli army. I don’t think any other army would behave any better in this time.

[Rushdoony] Well, we are seeing a very, very thorough breakdown and the war against the unborn is a part of it. People... it is a tremendous bit of profanity, because the most instant kind of life, the unborn child is the object of total war.

[Scott] Well, look at...

[Rushdoony] And it is mothers themselves who are responsible for initiating it and to me that tells us how sick, how evil our civilization has become.

[Scott] Well, of course the excuse for abortion is always that either the woman has been raped or it would create great distress if she had a child, but it is hard to believe that this would be true with 25 million women. They couldn’t all be economically distressed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They couldn’t all have been raped.

[Rushdoony] Well, you have the rise of abortion in the last days of a civilization as in Greece and Rome. When that happens it means that the will to live is gone.

[Scott] The fear... future is ... looks dark. Nobody wants to bring anybody into a future world and also the selfishness that I don’t want to be burdened.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is it.

[Scott] I don’t want to be burdened with these new lives that I will have to take care of and be responsible for.

[Rushdoony] When a civilization has will to death it will dig up any excuse of what it is doing, including killing unborn babies. It would make more sense if those people themselves committed suicide rather than going after the unborn.

[Scott] Well, is it businesses that profane act? Of course, we {?} down to it. To be profane in the sense that you have described it, is to operate as though God doesn’t exist.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this, of course, is the essence of criminality. The thing that marks the criminal from other men is a criminal of either sex is their lack of respect for the rights of others. A criminal treats other people as though they have no rights whatever. They have no rights to property. They have no rights to their own life. They have no rights to be safe. A criminal will beat them, will shoot them, will kill them, will rob them, will swindle them, will lie to them, do anything, treat other human beings as though they are nothing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, when this happens, when the state begins to behave this way, when the state begins to say human life is nothing, then nobody’s life is safe, because they say, “Well, it is a fetus.” But nothing else ever emerges from the fetus except a human being. So it is ridiculous to assume that we are not talking about human beings.

And you are talking about what Augustine mentioned, a criminal state.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, a criminal state has no future. This is what is very clear from both Scripture from the saints like Salvian and others. It was Salvian who wrote in some respects the best account of the fall of Rome. He said, “Rome is dying that it continues to laugh.” And the said the fall was a demonstration that God was on the throne and instead of bewailing the fall of Rome, he summoned Christians to recognize it had to be, that if there was nothing in the way of being pessimistic or sour or having a bad outlook, to say that Rome is going to fall and we, as Christians must face up to this fact. Rather he saw it as the hope of the future.

It is sad that we don’t read Salvian more, because his Governance of God was such a telling book.

Today as we face the future we know that this order, the world over, is under judgment and it is going to collapse. That is the most marvelous thing we could say about the future.

[Scott] Well, people live. One of the great things about historical reading is one is surprised at the fact that there are survivors, that life goes on, that the world didn’t come to an end.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That you can go through these matters. People laugh. People feel good.

[Rushdoony] And our children and grandchildren are going to have a better world because of God’s judgment on this one.

[Scott] Well, certainly. If all this enormous and evil reality comes to an end, it is going to be better for our descendants.

[Rushdoony] And the world is not going to be better certainly by the growth of more power in Washington or any other capital.

[Scott] Well, Washington is.... is a laughing stock of the world. It is incoherent. It is cowardly. It is the Roman Senate in its worst days. It is... I just saw on television tonight the contra leader who had just been informed that Congress had voted down all assistance and he said the United States has just betrayed another ally. We have made ourselves an absolute disgrace and at the same newscast, by the way, for the first time said that Soviet troops or Soviet arms, rather, are pouring in to Nicaragua at the rate of hundreds of millions of dollars, more in the last two months than ever before.

So the day of reckoning is rather clear on the horizon.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Somebody at that meeting I was at last weekend said, “It is not superstition to observe a train is coming.”

[Rushdoony] Well, and we were told by people who have left the Soviet Union that it is on the brink of internal collapse.

[Scott] Well, they have, too...

[Rushdoony] The wages of sin are always death everywhere in the world.

[Scott] Yes, but we are no position to pick them up.

[Rushdoony] No. No. Well, all this tells us that God is on the throne.

[Scott] And that there is a penalty for profanation.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is drawing to a close. Do you have any final statements, Otto?

[Scott] I think you have given Augustine his Confessions and The City of God, a very good plug tonight. Those books are still in print.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they would be well worth reading.

[Rushdoony] They will be in print when the big names of today will be forgotten.

[Scott] Can you imagine they have been in print how many centuries now?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] Sixteen centuries.

[Rushdoony] In his Confessions Augustine begins very early, I think, in the first or second page by saying, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” And that was the sentence that Francis Thompson picked up and wrote the greatest poem in the English language, The Hound of Heaven.

[Scott] I agree with that. That is true. But I guess you have to meet that hound before you realize how true it is.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Magnificent poem. Comes right out of the psalms, of course, also.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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