From the Easy Chair

Anti Christianism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 22-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AK68

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AK68, Anti Christianism from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 174, July the fifth, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss anti Christianism. I do believe it is time we faced up to the fact that our faith is under attack, that everyone feels that while it is terrible to attack any national or racial group or any group dedicated to this or that cause, Christianity is open game for everyone. And the result is we are facing an increasingly vicious attack on our faith. It is being done in the public schools. It is done in the universities, without apology. It is done in courtrooms where anyone who treats the faith seriously is regarded as ignorant and stupid. And, hence, disqualified from any sensible discourse or as a witness.

Moreover, we have had the spectacle of a professor, Dr. Burkman, being dropped from a university when he became a convert to Creationism. And no group of professors would defend him, because they felt that as one who believed in God and the biblical faith and in the doctrine of creation, he simply was not deserving of any rights, not deserving of any respect. We have seen vandalism against individuals, against a creationist press. And yet with all this, the press is indifferent.

Well, with that introduction, Otto, would you like to develop the subject further?

[Scott] Yes. We have for quite some time now been exposed to the idea that anti Semitism is a loathsome attitude which is no consonant with civilization. And we have also watched the emergence of the word racism which is used by the black people to attack anyone who differs with a black individual or even certain arguments. And yet anti Christianism in is country is considered intellectually respectable.

Now this is a very strange state of affairs when 13 percent of the people are beyond criticism and over 80 percent of the people can be dumped on at will or at least their religion.

Now Christianity accepts all races, all ethnic groups, all backgrounds. It is the only truly universal religion in all the world. It is not hereditary. It is not limited to a particular ethnic group or area. It is not racial. It is not even cultural, because it uses every language, exists in every part of the globe. To assume that Christianity is somehow discriminatory is to overlook the catholic nature of Christianity itself.

Now we have gone to a very strange state of affairs when the religion of the majority of people of this country is become associated with the lower middle class, with a déclassé attitude, with the idea that only people who are stupid and ignorant and limited can be Christians or believe in the Christian religion and that therefore, can be mocked with impunity.

I really think that this campaign has gone far beyond the bounds of reason. The universities have now openly taken the position that the intellectual life must be separated from the Christian religion in all areas. Otherwise it doesn't deserve the term intellectual. And look at the universities.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Look at the barefoot students. Look at the unshaven professors. Look at the courses they are teaching. The only thing that is left is the {?}. The substance is gone a long time ago.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I do believe this has stemmed especially from the intellectuals and the academic community. They have seen Christianity as their major threat. And as a result, they have been vicious and militant in their hostility. The prevailing attitude is that if a man is a Christian or a student is a Christian that student is not deserving of even a passing grade as far as some professors are concerned.

In one instance a young woman who was a straight A student at a major university and was in line, really, for a faculty position, wrote a paper in which her Christian perspective was manifest, in fact a creationist perspective. The professor not only gave her an F, but made it clear that he would take every step to prevent her from getting a doctorate at that university and from continuing as a teaching assistant.

Now she protested to the dean and the dean refused to intercede. This is not an isolated instance. I run across episodes like this all the time. And it is part and parcel of a militant anti Christianity.

[Scott] Well, it has taken over the government.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is an official position of the government of the United States. It began after World War II and it has been escalating ever since. I recall being driven around the city of Washington by a bureaucrat that told me some years ago with tones of great pleasure that they had managed to persuade the churches in the area to remove their crosses, because they offended non Christians. All the crosses have been removed from every national cemetery in the United States at enormous expense.

[Rushdoony] In many city and town the church bells are not allowed to ring.

[Scott] It is noise abatement.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They were stopped in New York City years ago. The ... the list of lawsuits filed and the list of legal restrictions against Christians, Christian school children are not allowed to use educational facilities after hours for any Christian purpose and yet the same facilities are available to homosexual and lesbian groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And Marxist groups. The Georgetown University has recently been ordered—and obeyed—to allow homosexual clubs on its campus although that is against the tenets of the Christian religion and, of course, the Catholic Church.

The police have invaded prayer meetings on the theory that a zoning regulation was being violated and hauled the pastor and his communicants off to jail.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The whole business of the First Amendment has been ruled cannot be discussed in federal courts when a Christian Church and state issue is involved.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, of course, all of these are steps. Every single Christmas season, for instance, there are a series of lawsuits filed against a crèche, against any kind of Christian exhibition or display anywhere in the city or the village or the county. Pretty soon on even private property where it might offend passing motorists. So what we are really seeing is the progressive outlawing of the Christian religion from the public scene of the United States mandated by the government, applied by the government.

Now the protesters against abortion, Christian protesters against abortion are getting five and six years in prison in solitary confinement, but the bombers who blew up research centers during the 60s were hailed as heroes. What is the case of that young woman who pulled the plug on a machine that was not in use?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And was given five years in a Florida prison.

[Rushdoony] And I believe the first year, at least, was solitary confinement.

[Scott] All right. Now obviously there is a move under way to outlaw the Christian religion. We see that there is no objection to the reverend Jesse Jackson raising money in churches, because his Christianity is not taken seriously by the enemies of Christianity.

[Rushdoony] And because it is a form of Humanism.

[Scott] Yes. But ... and that is true also of the liberal clergy who are to be found in the forefront of the most disgusting demonstrations in the country. But the fact of the matter is that seriously speaking, Christianity is under attack and under intellectual abuse.

Now the constitutional rights of Christians are not unequal with those of anyone else. Christians have as much right to identify themselves in public, to speak in public and to carry on activities in public as any other group. And yet a Christian directory of businessmen has been ruled illegal, illegal. And the judge who so ruled was not impeached. This is what I don’t understand. I really don’t understand why nobody has filed against these officials.

[Rushdoony] Well, these people are anti Christian to the core. I would expect them to behave that way. I am in the courtrooms often enough and I see their venom and their hatred of Christianity. What distresses me is that Christians are not ready to fight for their freedom, that they are not ready to support those groups and agencies that are in the battle against this kind of denial of our freedom. In fact, those groups that are attempting to do the major part of the work, such as Rutherford Institute, get very little financing.

And Chalcedon has been in the forefront of this and we were instrumental in the founding of Rutherford as well as in helping other groups. And as Christian groups go, we, I believe, are accomplishing more than most of them put together. And yet there isn’t much funding.

[Scott] Well, I...

[Rushdoony] Plus there is this, if I may continue, Otto.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] There are too many Christians who are totally wrapped up in trivialities and I mean trivialities. I can pick up various publications, Christian and no Christian and regularly see the same names, names that I have encountered, a few on our mailing list, many that are not, but they still write in. They see a copy. They have got to object to every trifle that doesn't sit right with them. They are ready to make a big issue of trifles that don’t amount to anything as a way of proving how courageous and how sensitive a conscience they have without ever facing up to the basic issues.

[Scott] Well, you know, I just finished Dreisbach’s book.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Mere Shadow or a Real Threat. It is an interesting book and he only really began... He talked about the first amendment discussion in the convention in the House of Burgesses in Virginia and a couple of cases, 47, 1947, 1948 which began this judicial trend toward outlawing Christianity. And going beyond the confines of his book, it occurred to me as I read it that when the court ruled that the four line nursery prayer that was used in New York State and put together by four clergymen, when the court ruled that this was an establishment of religion, you darn well that the justices knew better than that. A four line limerick of any sort isn’t going to establish a national church. The First Amendment really was to not allow the establishment of a national church. At the time the Constitution was ratified there were five state churches which were not touched. Now to rule that posting the 10 Commandments on the wall of a school room is the establishment of a religion, absolutely proves the they don’t understand the English language. But, of course, they do.

This absurdity is being pronounced on the highest tribunal in the land as part of the destruction of Christianity in all public areas in this country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And for anyone to shake hands with a member of that court would be to disgrace himself.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They should be cut dead. Nobody should speak to them.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They don’t deserve to be accepted in civilized society. I think of what is the name? Black... I can’t think of his full name.

[Rushdoony] Hugo Black.

[Scott] Not Hugo Black. He was a former Ku Klux Klanner, a great liberal. The man who wrote the abortion decision.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Scott] I can’t think of his name off hand, but he complains that people still come up and talk to him about it. He wanted ... he overturned 200 centuries of judicial precedence, 200 centuries had been wrong on abortion. And he still expects people not to say anything to him about it.

No, we have gone a long way down the road to losing our rights as citizens as well as Christians, because if you don't have the right to exercise your religion you don’t have any rights. You don’t have any rights. For the people of the United States, for the Christian community to have acdepted these decisions is a standing disgrace.

[Rushdoony] Yes and what they do not realize is that if, in terms of our law the Christian faith is not important and God is not important, if Christ is not important, how do they figure that they who are nobodies will be important and that their life will have any value? I don’t believe that the courts that have dispensed with God and with the church’s freedom will treat human beings as having any value unless they are criminals.

[Scott] Well, you know that this court is a political court.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Has been a political court since it was created.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] John Marshall was a politician out to aggrandize power at the expense of the other two branches of government. Now the Supreme Court this combined with the Congress of the United States to reduce the presidency to the state of a level civil servant who has to report to Congress and the approval of the court before he can exercise the authority of his office.

But this is a revolutionary court. This court is paralleling the steps of the courts of France in the 1780s and 90s. And as long as they make decisions in favor of the revolution, the newspapers applaud them. Let them make one little decision to slow the pace of the revolution and suddenly there is all kinds of outcries. But they have, in effect, they have stripped Christians of constitutional rights.

[Rushdoony] There is an interesting factor here that no one has written about and it is deserving of an historical study, namely, that in the early years of this country both as colonies and then as a republic, the state bodies, whether they were called the assembly or the General Court as in Massachusetts or House of Burgesses in Virginia or the House of Representatives in Washington, DC, were not seen as law making bodies. There was very little statute law. It was biblical law. The courts govern in terms of that. And the purpose of these bodies of representatives or general court or whatever they were called, assembly men, was this. They were there to protect the people from the state.

[Scott] Yes. Absolutely.

[Rushdoony] Because what was then recognized was that whether it was a king or a president or a governor here was a power that was a potential threat to the people. And therefore, those who represented the people were there to protect the people from the central government. And today they have become our biggest threat.

[Scott] Well, Dreisbach was interesting on that. They have used the 14th Amendment, the due process in the 14th Amendment, as an excuse, as... as a vehicle to take all of the Bill of Rights away from the states and install them in the federal authority.

Now the Bill of Rights were to protect the states from Washington. They were not to interfere with religion. They were not to interfere with education. They were not to interfere with the system of justice, with the courts of the states and so forth. And now, of course, they sit on top of everything.

Now the average person, I don't think the average Christian still understands. The anti Christians understand. They will jump right down your throat if you say this is a Christian country.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They will say it never was. And they will be vehement. They will get up and pound the table and shout at you and yet it wasn’t Mohammadans who created this country. The Constitution wasn’t written by Buddhists. No non Christian group has ever in the history of the world, including today, given equal rights to Christians. And yet Christians in this country gave equal rights to all groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the worst part, Otto, is that the most vehement persons to say this was never a Christian nation are professors in church related colleges.

[Scott] Oh, gosh.

[Rushdoony] They are savage not his and the treat anyone who makes that statement with contempt. They read him out of intellectual circles. They insist he cannot be a scholar.

[Scott] M. E. Bradford wrote a book examining the Christian background of the people who put the Constitution together, overwhelming devout.

[Rushdoony] Well, when these people get through they are like Nietzsche who said the only Christian was Jesus Christ, whom, of course, he did not like. And that attitude is there never has been a Christian culture or a Christian nation, because what they assume is that unless it is perfect, it cannot represent...

[Scott] Ah yes.

[Rushdoony] ...Christianity.

[Scott] Yes, I know. And I went though that nonsense with a friend of mine in New York who was orating against the New York Athletic Club which my dad belonged to. There is two, you know. There is one downtown. There is one midtown. And he... he was upset because he said it was anti-Semitic. I said, “But you are Jewish and you are a member.”

He said, “Yes, a few token members.”

I said, “Well, what is your argument?” If you want to come down, don’t you think Christians have a right to have a club of their own?

Oh, he said, “Yes, of course, they do. But why can’t they be more Christian?”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now I can see his idea of how we should be is something different than human.

[Rushdoony] Or Buddhists who feel that we have no right to be Christian around them because it will be offensive to them...

[Scott] Well, of course...

[Rushdoony] ... but they are free to be Buddhists.

[Scott] Well, yes, the Christianity offends by existing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you certainly shouldn’t call attention to it. You shouldn’t where a cross on your lapel or anything. I put that on. When I was first converted I put a little cross, a tiny cross on my lapel and people used to stop dead and stare at me in the street and follow me with their eyes and not with friendship. I was astonished at the dirty looks I received. Absolutely appalled.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is worse now than it was then.

[Scott] Worse now. You are so cheering.

[Rushdoony] Well, how long has it been since you have seen a priest in clerical garb in public?

[Scott] Come to think of it, I don’t recall.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It is not safe.

[Rushdoony] It is not safe in many states.

[Scott] It is not safe.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] What a commentary.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now who else is unsafe? Are Buddhists safe?

[Rushdoony] They are safe.

[Scott] Are Jews safe?

[Rushdoony] They are safe and the Moslems are safe and the Sikhs with their turbans are safe. Everybody else is safe.

[Scott] Except Christians.

[Rushdoony] Except Christians. They are resented.

[Scott] How far down the line do we have to go before we realize that we have been pushed off the table all together? I think it is more than time to begin to respond. Send letters to the newspaper. Let’s call on the editor personally. You know, I... I started to get the Stockton Record and I... and I couldn’t stand it because they ran an anti Christian cartoon I think the second week I was reading the paper.

We have got Conrad, the cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times and every time he uses Christian symbolism in savage and satiric ways.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And yet he is printed, that hate monger.

[Rushdoony] Well, most of your cartoonists in this country—and that is political cartoonists on the editorial page, are really so warped mentally you wonder. I am embarrassed when they have a cartoon on my side, because it is so incredibly savage.

[Scott] You have a point. In fact, the whole public dialog has moved downward.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Things are said now and written that would never have been said or written a generation ago.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Because hate mongering was... was recognized as such.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I sat on the plane next to a very young woman, must have been 30 years ago, 25 or so, who said that she thought the theater was greatly improving in New York. And I said, “Why?” And she said, well, she had just seen the play The Deputy which, as you know, portrays Pius XII as an accomplice of Hitler’s.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I looked at her with astonishment and I said, “You consider that a breakthrough?”

And she said, “Yes.”

I said, “Would you appreciate an anti-Semitic play?”

And she was literally shocked and said, “Of course not.”

But I said, “An anti Christian play is freedom?”

[Rushdoony] And it was totally inaccurate historically.

[Scott] Oh, absolutely.

[Rushdoony] The fact that it was demonstrated again and again at the time made no impact on people.

[Scott] Well....

[Rushdoony] Because it was the hatred that satisfied them.

[Scott] Yes. Now, of course, there is a whole torrent of that sort of thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean it is... it is ... it is across the board. I mean, when you see...

[Rushdoony] Well, I don’t think it is going to improve in the near future and I don’t think it is going to change until Christians begin to show some kind of resentment towards it.

[Scott] Well, if you won’t stand up for yourself, who do you stand up for?

[Rushdoony] That is right. The Buddhists are not going to defend us.

[Scott] And who else is going to defend us?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And when somebody gets really sarcastic in print, I think we are going to have to send them little cards, little notes saying, “I noticed your comments. I have put it in my scrap book. I will remember it for years to come. We appreciate knowing your position and we will list you among our favorite hate mongers.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think that is a word we need to use for these people. Hate mongers. Hate mongers.

[Scott] That is what they are.

[Rushdoony] Because that is what they are.

Well, I do believe that before this century is over, if Christians don’t make a stand and begin to turn things around by becoming relevant, we are going to see the persecution of the Church on major scale.

[Scott] It is already underway.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think the comment you made some years ago how after your conversion you found the irrelevancy of preaching appalling.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] I think that is the problem.

Otto, I would like to go back to a figure from the 20s, 30s, 40s who, in a sense, started a great deal of this. Not that there were not anti Christian forces at work beginning with Emerson and before him William Elray Channing, Unitarian movement. But in this century it was on a differerent basis. Those men in the last century opposed the faith and fought it in terms of saying, “I don’t believe that and this is what I believe.”

But Sinclair Lewis set out to make the faith ridiculous. And in his novel Elmer Gantry he wrote a savage attack on the Christian ministry. I should say that at the same time he attacked everything that was traditional America, the small town, businessmen, Rotarians and other service clubs, the family. He had nothing but a vitriolic contempt for all the stable traditional elements of American life. And I think we need to recognize how important he is in the development of anti Christianity, because he made that kind of slanderous attack respectable.

[Scott] Well, he did. He drew an acid portrait of a certain type of corrupt Protestant clergymen, social... the socially ambitious Protestant clergyman, one of the boys, a drinker, gambler, adulterer, et cetera. And it was brilliantly done. It was so brilliantly done that it tarnished every Protestant clergyman from that day to this. But he wasn’t the only one. You had H. L. Mencken.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Who was tremendously popular and very talented and who hated. Mencken was the one who created the term the Bible belt and the {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And said nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. And he wrote vitriolic articles about Christian spokesmen. His ... he was one of the fiery brands that scorched William Jennings Bryan and that made... Bryan died of a broken heart. He was humiliated not in the trial, not in that Scopes trial, but by the press reportage of the trial.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And then there were others. There was Edgar Lee Master and The Spoon River Anthology which everyone in his little graveyeard was exposed as an evil individual posing as a good person. And you had Sherwood Anderson, Linesburg, Ohio.

[Rushdoony] Oh, he was particularly repulsive.

[Scott] And the fellow that ran away from his wife and children and went to Chicago and stopped wearing a necktie and became an all American author and this and that and so forth and so on. And every one of these were what you might call brilliant second raters.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Treated as first raters.

[Rushdoony] Add to that Carl Sandberg.

[Scott] Carl... well, Carl Sandberg... you might as well read newspapers as read Carl Sandberg, that fellow.

[Rushdoony] I will never forget his coming to the university of California at Berkeley and how the liberal students regarded it as one of the great events of their school career and how sickened and disgusted with Sandburg they were. He was an old man then and they referred to him as an old goat, foul mouthed, leering at their girlfriends and just totally repulsive. And it was something of personal satisfaction to me to see that their hero had turned out to be a heel.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] ... a bum.

[Scott] This was a whole genre, a whole school of literatures that came up in the 20s and survived into the 30s and paved the way for the open anti Christian hatred that we see today.

[Rushdoony] And in most instances their life left a great deal to be desired. Sinclair Lewis, for example, as a boy, was a stupid jackass. He was the butt of all the humor of all the other boys because he was so stupid. He was so idiotic. And as a writer he vented his hatred on America, that he had been treated as he had been. And is whole life was a mess. He was an alcoholic. He was resesntful of anyone around him who should evidence of being better than he was. There was nothing good about Sinclair Lewis.

[Scott] I know, but toward the end he began to pay the price. He went to Yale to speak to some students at Yale and he was absolutely astonished when they began to give him the same treatment that he had given everybody else.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They began to make fun of him. And they began to shout sarcastic things at him. And he didn’t understand that he was reeping the rewards of his own efforts.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. I shall never forget the very real grief and hurt of a professor of New Testament who had introduced Modernism to a particular seminary. And in his day had been savagely attacked—and rightly so—because he was very pharisaical. He felt that he was bringing in the truth. And what he did was to destroy that seminary. It had been a reformed seminary and he turned it into a moderist one.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] And he wanted it to go no further than he did.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And when the seminary began to go far beyond him, he was incoherent with frustration and he was a joke.

[Scott] He didn’t want... he wanted... he wanted {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. They treated him with the same disrespect he had treated the faith.

[Scott] Well, this is what is at the end of the road. At the end of this hate mongering road the people who are attacking Christians will find themselves in the same position.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they will be shocked.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because it can’t happen here. Well, it can happen anywhere that you open up pandora’s box.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] If you are going to outlaw one group of people because of their religion, no group of people is going to be safe.

[Rushdoony] That is right. That is right. And this is why we are developing the kind of hatred that is manifest today, the gangs in our big cities among the youth are racial gangs.

[Scott] Yes, they are.

[Rushdoony] And they are regularly performing acts of incredible depravity and hatred, once against another.

[Scott] That is true. Now I went...

[Rushdoony] They are monsters.

[Scott] I went to see that movie Colors. And it was as violent as you would imagine. But the movie was a lie from the first reel onward, because it had the gangs all inter... interracial. The gangs are all interracial. They were black and Hispanic all mixed together with a sprinkling of whites. That isn’t the way it is. And the same thing is true when you pick up television. The same thing is true when you look at a movie. The same thing is true when you look at the commercials. A totally false America is being radiated in print and in film and on radio which does not exist.

Somebody recently described New York City as a seething pit of racial and ethnic hatred. And yet it is the New York intellectuals who call themselves that, who are still talking about the depravity of the rest of the United States.

[Rushdoony] Well, today you not only have the cities divided into racial gangs among the youth, but the prisons, warfare between racial gangs, vicious, degenerate warfare.

[Scott] Well, then, you know, this flows up from the bottom.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] After all, if you want to look at the condition of a society, when Dickens came to the United States, he and his generation looked at the prisons, the hospitals, the orphanages and the churches in order to judge and evaluate the American society.

Who today evaluates our society in those terms? And if they do, what evaluation can they reach? Desegregating the prisons is what created the gangs in the prisons.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this flies in the face of every liberal shibboleth, but the fact of the matter is that you cannot reconcile different and different ethnic groups excepting through religious means.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is the only reconciling element there is.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] How many black people in the United States know that in the entire history of the black race they have never ever given equal rights to anyone of their own race or anyone of any other race, anyone outside the tribe excepting after they convert to Christianity.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I recall 40 some years ago going with a letter from a federal official to a major western prison to pick up a man and take him across two state lines. It was an interesting experience, both going to the prison to pick him up and chatting with him, because he was sorry to leave and he was telling me it was not a bad life. And he told me about the food they had and he was a pitcher on the baseball team and he said they are going to miss me and I hate to leave them in the middle of the season. Nothing comparable to what marks prison life today. The...

[Scott] How long ago as that, Rush?

[Rushdoony] Over 40 years ago.

[Scott] Forty years ago.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] The homosexual gang rapes...

[Scott] No, no. {?}

[Rushdoony] The knifings. All that sort of thing. There was order then.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Even in the prison there was order.

[Scott] Well, what I just said about the black people applies with equal force to the Scots. The Scots were known as the most savage people in all of western Europe. And one of the things that I ran across when I was researching that book on Jamie Stewart, shamie Jamie was of one of the higland earls who skinned alive and hung the carcass of one of his enemies outside the parapit of his castle.

And what changed that savage people? Only Knox and Christianity.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And then the very areas where those terrible barbarities had prevailed became so peaceful that for a couple of centuries there were whole areas that had no jail.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And recently one Scot said the disaster that befell Scotland was convalescent.

[Scott] Oh, really?

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is a wonder they are having problems there today.

[Scott] I will say.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Scott] I will say. That is just ridiculous.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] That is... Well, we have moved a long way. We have moved so far as a society. I don’t think the press dares... dares report where we are.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] On the Ocean Beach incident in New York City the whole question of a racial incident black and white. Some professor down in Texas went ahead and examined into the situation and came to the conclusion that nine times as many crimes are committed by blacks against whites as vice versa, nine times as many.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that is by one tenth of the population.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, it is interesting that they have long said that black crime is because of white cities and white police and so on. But in cities with black mayors and black police chiefs, there are more arrests of blacks than in the other cities.

[Scott] Yes, because they... the color isn’t going to keep them from being arrested.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Well, somebody put it a different way. They said what we are creating is a series of black enclaves throughout the metropolitan areas of the United States in which white man’s law no longer exists and in which white people cannot safely enter or get out.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the anti racists have created the real racism in American life.

[Scott] Now the treatment of justice Bork, once he was labeled a racist it wasn’t necessary to prove it.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] The label carries its own guilt. It is like the mark of Cain.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is how people used to mark an outlaw. These... these epithets, these labels are used to outlaw individuals.

[Rushdoony] And labeling is what the intellectual, the academic community and the liberals go in for today. There... it is their alterative to thinking.

[Scott] Well, look at the business of the western studies in Stanford.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I mean Jesse Jackson walked on the picket line saying, “Ho, ho, ho, western culture has to go.” And Plato, Aristotle and all the great classic writers were to be discarded because they were white males.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And they are trying to develop courses in American Indian Literature.

[Scott] Really?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes. And why should they bother? Why, you know... Well, of course once you set up evolution. They used to call this over in Britain, you remember? In the 60s there was a ... an effort to devolve.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...to make Wales separate and make Scotland separate, to pull the country apart. Now the devolution of academia or the devolution of the bonds that hold us together, you sever those bonds. So then each group becomes a warring group and then, of course, pretty soon you don’t have a country.

But what you do have—and this has occurred in other places—you finally get a majority that goes beserk because the only thin that keeps a minority citizen safe is the tolerance of the majority. Once the majority understands that it itself is not going to be tolerated, then all minorities are in peril of their life. Now you would think that students of history would know this. Of all lessons it is the clearest.

[Rushdoony] Well, we could see from our state schools that they are schools for barbarians. We see it in the behavior of the students. We see it in the gang life that is common place among students in all our metropolitan centers.

Now you and I never knew of such things when we were young.

[Scott] I read about the family court today, family court in New York just today. And I don’t know. I am not sure just now where I read it. Boys 12 and 13 years old convicted... gang rape and murder and torture of bag ladies, of elderly women in the 80s, of the most monstrous possible crimes. And according to the rules of New York State, the most they can get is 18 months in jail.

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] These are things that we have never dreamed of happening, not for centuries, not since the days of ancient Rome.

[Rushdoony] You and I know that before 1950 you could walk around the streets of Manhattan whether it was a poor neighborhood or not and you were safe.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] At midnight or 1 AM.

[Scott] Anytime. You could sleep in Central Park if you wanted to.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now there were many things wrong with New York in the United States then. But there was still a Christian character and a Christian law and order that prevailed.

[Scott] And we didn’t have the ruling class that we have got now.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Who keep telling us how smart they are. Well, we are afraid of our physical safety.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So there were things that definitely needed changing.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] There were aspects of the treatment of some minority groups that had to be changed.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] There was a framework of law within which it could be done. Now that framework has been destroyed so that everyone is at peril now.

[Scott] All right. Now hatred has gotten its license.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And its use of the license in the last several decades has been to do its best to stamp out Christianity.

I remember when Daniel Bell wrote his book The Post Christian Era, the post Christian era at a time when 100 million Christians were going to church every Sunday. He had the nerve to treat all those millions of people as invisible.

[Rushdoony] That phrase was picked up over night by Christian thinkers and used. Instead of fighting it, they used it.

[Scott] Yes. I see where now this is before common era and common era is used by Notre Dame.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The University of Notre Dame Press.

[Scott] Before Christ...

[Rushdoony] BCE.

[Scott] ...and Anno Domini, the year of our Lord has been dropped.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] By the Christian scholars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So we have enemies within and without. However, it is interesting. If you brace any of these people, if you say that is anti Christianism and that is hatred and that is prejudice and that is bigotry and I will not put up with it, they back up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are surprised at how easy it is. I remember Paul Godfried, the senior editor of The World And I said, “Do you know what surprises me, Otto?” He said, “It is how easily the WASP allowed himself to be pushed off he stage.”

Well, I said, “He didn’t know there was a war on.” Anyone can be pushed off the stage if you are pushed from behind.

[Rushdoony] Well, whether the WASP is on the stage or not is not as important as the fact: Does Christianity command him and all the others on the stage? And that has to be the direction of our effort in the years ahead.

[Scott] Well, of course.

[Rushdoony] Re Christianize every element of the population.

[Scott] Of course Christians don’t go around pushing people off the stage. But we have lost the stage. We have lost our proper place on the stage.

[Rushdoony] I think that is partially true, if it means the media, if it means the academic community. But I think behind the surface there is a growing Christian community that is creating its own institutions. Christian schools are an obvious example. The vast network of Christian periodicals and newsletters and the like, Christian agencies like homes for delinquents, homes for addicts, farms for rehabilitating different kinds of problem people and so on and on so that there is a government arising and a community arising behind the scenes that the press makes no note of.

[Scott] Well, the press doesn’t dare make note of it. The press hates it.

Do you realize that the biggest crowds in the history of the United States showed up for the pope and the press never noticed? I mean this is not a press. This is a propaganda belt. And the Christian press is getting better than it was. It is getting more numerous than it was. But it still is not a fighting press that it should be.

[Rushdoony] No, not yet.

[Scott] I mean, I am sure it will reach that stage and it will have to reach that stage if it is ever going to get anywhere.

[Rushdoony] There are few of a Christian periodicals that are ready to fight and are making a good strong statement. But most of them simply record trifles.

[Scott] Tea and crumpets.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes.

[Scott] No, I think ... I think a column I know, enemies of Christianity wouldn’t be amiss. These are people who have proclaimed their hatred of Christianity so they should be properly recognized and saluted.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Some of our major Christian periodicals ought to have a section, enemies of Christ.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, we have just a few minutes left. Is there a closing statement you want to make and any encouraging word on the whole...

[Scott] Well, I... I feel better having vented these sentiments. You know, there comes a time when trying to keep butter from melting in your mouth gets a little bit painful. And I... I think that this conversation, this sort of conversation could easily take place in any place in the United States and should more often than not.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You cannot overcome enemies whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the fact that the Supreme Court has gone off beyond the bounds of reason is something that should not be respected.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I think it is high time we realize the extent to which the courts have been at war with us. More than any other group, they have been the most militant and persistent. And they have wrought the greatest damage in this past generation. And the judges, by and large, are now, for the most part, political hacks. Occasionally you have a remarkable judge as in a federal court in April in Sacramento, an Hispanic judge who is really remarkable, very impressive.

Ironically some of the best judges come from minority groups or from women lawyers who are named to the bench. They have something to prove. So they do excel. But by and large the judges are the real revolutionaries who are out systematically dismantling American society to create their humanistic, anti Christian culture. And most people see them in terms of dignified older men who are giving us justice. They are giving us anti Christianity.

[Scott] They really are.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. 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.