From the Easy Chair

The City

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 45-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AX91

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AX91, The City from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 194, May the 2, 1989.

Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss the city. The city is very, very important to historically and in the modern world. We are in the age of big cities. And we are unable to understand the problems we face because we don’t know anything about the history of the city. I think Christians often begin with a prejudice here, because in the Bible the first city was built by Cain, a murderer, built for his own protection. And so the assumption is cities had bad beginning and therefore cities are somewhat reprobate.

The reality is that cities, by and large, represented a religious entity and as Fustel De Coulanges in his classic work The Ancient City pointed out, a city was a religious entity. It was united in the worship of a particular god or goddess. To have citizenship you had to perform you part in the services of that faith and go through the annual lustrations or rites of atonement and the city gave you a community in the faith and protection. Cities were walled. This meant you kept evil out. You shared a community of ideas, of faith with the people within the walls. And, hence, within the walls you had security. You had peace. It was outside the wall that the criminal was. If foreigners came, they had to settle outside the walls. And they were the first suburbanites, so to speak, because being foreign to the people within the city and foreign to their faith, they could not live within that protected area. They had to live outside. So cities in their origin were quite remarkable.

Now some cities in the Greco-Roman Empire ceased to have that character because, of course, the religious cynicism led to a breakdown of the character of the city and places like Rome and Corinth and other cities became notorious because the evil that had once been outside the walls was now within.

Well, the end of the Roman Empire meant the end of the city. The city died because it was no longer a fit place to live. And Rome within a few generations after its fall went down to about 500 people living in ruins. People lived on estates where a powerful military figure, a lord protected them so that they could function, so that they could farm or do whatever trade they were doing.

Well, the city, again, is in its death throes, perhaps, as evil, once more rules within the city and the city has become a place where life is unsafe and people are now moving outside the city, going to the suburbs and finding the suburbs are becoming evil. So modern city has a problem.

Well, with that general introduction, Otto, would you like to make your general statement now?

[Scott] Well, I think what you have said is very interesting and accurate. But don’t forget that Rome lasted quite a long time as a city before it fell. And I ... I do ... I do recognize the argument that unlimited immigration may have had a lot to do with the decline and fall of Rome in society, coupled, of course, with the growing weakness and stupidity of the Romans themselves in their luxuries.

Well, when we look at the cities around the world we can only say that... I can only say that what you have said, the pattern you discern has been an American pattern. In other countries there is a great in pouring into the cities. Cairo, for instance, has a population of 18 million or so, unbelievable. They are living in the Mausoleums of the dead, the cities of the dead left over from many centuries before. They have moved into the Mausoleums and they looted inside the mausoleums outside on the outskirts of Cairo.

I talked to a fellow in South Africa who came from Egypt and he said, “If you could rent any kind of space in the city and stock it with anything to sell, you could make a very good living because with all those millions of people you would never run out of customers,” and they have rent control which, of course, has added to their problems.

Now Mexico City, the last time I was in Mexico City, I have forgotten exactly when, maybe four years or so, four or five, I have forgotten, maybe a little longer.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was a little longer.

[Scott] It was before I came up here. Well, at any rate, smog worse than anything any city that we have here. I don’t know what he population of Mexico City is and I don’t think the Mexican government knows because they move in. There is no records. There are hovels. There are mansions. They are crowded together. They have fire eaters at every traffic light, beggars who are swallowing fire, all that sort of thing. Everything is for sale. Everybody seems to be put against it and yet they are walking around dressed. They wear shows. They have clothes. And I recall Rio de Janeiro in 1930 when most of the people had no shoes. They wore sandals. But the city was clean and orderly at that time.

And speaking as a person who has spent most of his life in cities, I would say that we are living in a not one time belt, but several time belts where there are several levels of culture existing simultaneously around the world. A city like Hong Kong, for instance, is a great refuge, which is going to be turned over pretty soon to the Communists. A city like London is faster than New York, quicker than New York. Up until recently it was safer than New York. Muggings have appeared in the city of London and race, racial wars have erupted between the blacks and the Asians in London with... These are problems that London has not had for over a century. They never did have the racial thing, because they were homogenous before that. But they did have very rough elements before Sir Robert Peale put in the police, metropolitan police. It was putting in the police which gave the English government the authority and the moral authority to take away the weapons from the men, because they didn’t need weapons once they had the police to take care of them.

Here the argument to take weapons away from the Americans when the police can no longer protect us seems to be to be peculiarly perverse, especially in they cities.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I think we have got a very complex subject here tonight. It is true that very phenomenal growth of the city is taking place outside of Europe and the United States. Part of that is due to a very unhappy fact. All the new countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia are associating advancement and progress with urbanization, with industry. And so they are protecting very, very heavily the industrial aspects of their life. They are encouraging them. And we, too, are helping, while they are discouraging the agricultural aspects of their economy so that you have in many of the third world countries where once they fed their population an increasing problem with food production so that the people are being driven off the farm. It is no longer protected. It is no longer held as important. And they are pouring into the cities.

[Scott] Well, this Lloyd Bower pointed this out as they... absolutely result of foreign aid.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Most of the... Most of the foreign aid goes to governments. It doesn’t go to individuals. We as a nation, our government and our banks and our businessmen make deals with foreign governments in third world countries, but not with local businesses. And one of the things that the money enables these foreign governments to do is to suppress individual entrepreneurs and to put in their own state supported enterprises, staffed by their own favorites.

[Rushdoony] And all these third world countries are building cities.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...to out do anything in the western world.

[Scott] Well, they all have subsidized airlines as a matter of prestige.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And so forth. So the people ... then they... most of them set up socialist regimes in which they put price controls on agriculture which made it impossible for a farmer to earn a living.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So they had to leave the farm. They were forced off the farm. They have destroyed agriculture as Socialism has everywhere that it has ever triumphed.

[Rushdoony] So they go into the cities. They pour in there by the millions and they are aggravating the problem of a modern city.

[Scott] I think probably there are a number of horror cities, you might say. Lovells in Nigeria, for instance, is an incredible mess, incredible mess and they have every urban problem that New York is now experiencing, multiplied many times. Nobody pays any attention to it. Our press, which is staffed by bleeding hearts who think so much about the condition of the black people never have taken a look at Nigeria, not even out of the side of their eye. Nothing could illustrate their hypocrisy more tellingly than the fact that black Africa is sitting there festering while the only thing that we can think about is the Apartheid that remains in South Africa, the only prosperous country in the whole black area.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Some years ago, a friend, an economist, Hans Senholz said that he believed the great mistake of the United States which it is now repeating as a matter of foreign policy was that having a country that was ideally suited for agriculture and for supplying the world with raw materials, it chose very early to subsidize industry, business, commerce and to develop in that direction and to create a subsidy in an area that it has never been able to break loose from. And it sees progress as a subsidy to industry wherever it deals with a foreign country.

[Scott] Well, of course, the United States in a way is a creature of Europe. We didn’t experience the pioneering struggles of Great Britain, the first industrial power, because we came along at a later stage and we stole from them the fruits of their hard earned discoveries in textile and other industries and were able to apply it on the second stage of the industrial period, behind the protection of the English navy.

Now we were in the position, in other words, of Japan in World War II. We had a great patron upon which to patronize ourselves and to steal from and to live in protection behind. So we didn’t experience what Marx brought up from a period 30, 40 years before his own time as the exploitation of children and mines and all that kind of thing. We missed it. We had a pretty ... we inherited the fruits of our predecessors, our European predecessors.

To a certain extent, the third world is doing the same thing, but without the infrastructure of skills.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And without the experience of self government. Now... but we have a very uneven profile here, because San Paolo, Brazil, for instance, unknown here, a city of many, many millions bustling, prosperous, sky scrapers, everything that you can think of. And yet I doubt if I ever see the dateline San Paolo in an American newspaper.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So to a... an extent, we are almost going over some ground we have gone over before that is incomplete information. We are looking at a very complicated situation.

Now the American cities are varied. Saint Louis, for instance, I only read about in the national network as a city of great poverty and heavy crime. But when I have gone there to visit my friends at the Arch Mineral Corporation, I have been a guest in mansions. And as far as the eye can see I see nothing but beautiful homes, well kept high upper class areas, because apparently the press only visits East Saint Louis. They have no other part of Saint Louis that interests the press. It is like going only to Harlem.

On the other hand, my most recent visits to San Francisco have been like going into a real zoo. Market Street has got most grotesque characters wandering up and down I have ever seen anywhere. And New York is now foreign to me. It is... it is like a city from some other part of the planet. The population is heavily Hispanic, black and indeterminate oriental. It is no longer a neighborhood city. Those ... the neighborhoods have all integrated, so to speak, under rent control. And, of course, it is almost impossible for the average person to afford to live in New York. I don’t know how all those people function.

So there you have your Roman parallel.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, then we have another factor. Because of the high cost of subsidies, Welfarism and corruption, the city is decaying behind the surface.

[Scott] Physically.

[Rushdoony] Physically decaying.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that is happening in many cities is that the old bridges are increasingly unsafe and some are closed down.

[Scott] Across the country.

[Rushdoony] Across the country. Then one of the greatest disasters is underground, the water systems. In some cities like New York they are always collapsing and flooding an area and then a whole part of town will have now water. The sewage systems, they are all very, very old and they are collapsing. We know the disaster that is routine in some of the eastern cities where raw sewage goes into the ocean and the real pollution of the ocean is not by an oil spill or two which covers a small area. It is in the vast tonnage of sewage.

[Scott] Dumped by municipal establishments.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] By the government.

[Rushdoony] By the government.

[Scott] And the EPA which is supposed to monitor these things apparently has no eyes whatever. It has antenna of some sort, because it... it doesn’t know a thing about it.

[Rushdoony] It will go after some man who has five, 10, 20 employees and cannot afford to fight the EPA in court.

[Scott] What has happened to all these volunteer environmental experts who are always up there screaming whenever there is a hearing about a power plant or anything. Don’t they ever look at the sewage disposal in the places in which they live?

[Rushdoony] Well, I am going to give you this article from a Berkeley paper. Or... it is from the university paper, actually, The Daily Californian, Thursday, March 16, 1989. “Deteriorating Berkeley sewers regurgitating. Imagine stripping down for a hot relaxing bath and suddenly spotting raw excrement gurgling up your bathtub drain. This is not a scene out of a cheap horror flick, but a grim reality for a former Berkeley resident, one of the many victims of the city’s 100 year old crumbling sewer system. There was a repeated backup of feces and toilet paper through a sewer pipe in my backyard, at Chaney Way and Milvia Street, said the former tenant who requested her name be withheld because she was suing her former landlord. I had to call Rotor Rooter at least once a month for years, she said. They told me this was happening all over the city. They also said Berkeley was like an island floating on a sea of shit.”

And it goes on that way. A long, long article.

[Scott] I would... that is in the university paper.

[Rushdoony] In the university paper, not in the local daily. And the environmental protection agency says they are looking into the matter. But they are always looking into things.

[Scott] Well, maybe...

[Rushdoony] ...where cities are concerned.

[Scott] Maybe...

[Rushdoony] But nothing...

[Scott] Maybe it... maybe it has a racial origin. What... Since everything else in this country seems to have.

[Rushdoony] Here are some other items from this article.

“Every year an average of 180 million gallons of sewer water pours out of manholes and floods the streets and creeks of Berkeley and eight other East Bay cities suffering from deteriorating sewer systems. According to a 1985 report funded by the environmental protection agency.”

And...

[Scott] But they are mostly concerned with increasing the gasoline mileage on automobiles.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, of course, they want to destroy the largest oil company in the United States because of an industrial accident.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Notices have been posted along the shoreline warning people not to eat the shell fish. It is very possible that fish around the Berkeley pier also suffer from fecal contamination.

[Scott] I am sure of it.

[Rushdoony] Of course, on the east coast there are places where people can be arrested if they are fishing...

[Scott] But they seldom seem to be. Oh, for fishing?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Oh, yes. Well, the Hudson River as appalling contaminated when I was a boy. Long before any efforts were made. And so far as I know New York one of the richest cities in the world spent its money on boondoggling Welfarism with kickbacks, with all kinds of corruption, with... they offer welfare to anyone who would come to the city who needed it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And in the meantime the piers rotted, the streets rotted. I ... the last time I was there , there were potholes in the sidewalks, not just the streets, but in the sidewalks as well.

Well, I recall reading a book by a Russian woman named Alma Dingen who lived in Leningrad in 1917. She was a student in the conservatory there, a totally apolitical young girl who couldn’t have cared less about what was going on, was only interested in her music and her teacher and her courses and she was living with her mother in an apartment house in Leningrad. And she did see after a while truckloads of armed men, soldiers and what not, trundling through streets, but she didn't pay any particular attention. She was there, of course, when the revolution took place. And she said one night the lights went out and then she said the next day the water stopped. And she had to walk about three miles and she found a place where there was water. And all kinds of other women were there, too, with buckets and she had to go there, get a bucket of water and take it back and find the stairs to her apartment.

She was there three years. Her mother died while she was there. She left at the end of three years and she said when she left there were still no lights and no water in Leningrad. Now this little item, a little sidelight on the revolution which you don’t hear from the fellows with the guitar.

[Rushdoony] No, no. Or the fact that Jamie Flanagan went there after finishing school. His grandfather took him and in an ostensibly luxury hotel in Leningrad he had ... well, the conditions were deplorable beginning with the fact that the sheets had holes in them that were about 16, 18 inches across, great big holes.

Now this is the decay that is still there. And Socialism is creating a light... a like decay everywhere it goes.

[Scott] Oh, this is recently.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Just...

[Scott] How... how recent?

[Rushdoony] Oh, three, four years ago.

[Scott] I see.

[Rushdoony] Five at the most.

[Scott] All right. Well...

[Rushdoony] So things are very poor there. Gary Mose can tell you that in some of the hotels where you stay the plumbing is so bad that you are not allowed to deposit toilet paper in the toilet.

[Scott] Well, that isn’t the only part of the world which this is true. I mean, this is happening in Africa, black Africa.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is not happening in Latin America so far as I know, but I don’t know the condition of the Caribbean island newly independent places.

[Rushdoony] Well, you and I both read, I believe, a few years ago, a book written in the early 70s by an Italian scientist who predicted that the new dark age would begin with the breakdown of city services, lights, water, sewage and so on. And he said the infrastructure of the cities is decaying and nothing is being done about it and the day will come and they will collapse.

[Scott] Well, of course under a more energetic and virile government people would be put to work. When you think of all the unemployed we had in the 30s, I think unemployment ranged almost to 30 percent unemployed. And most of the unemployed were helped actually by their friends and their families more than they were by the government, because everyone that had a job was helping somebody that didn’t. You couldn’t turn them away.

But what did the government have them do? Nothing.

[Rushdoony] Nothing.

[Scott] The little bit that the W... three...

[Rushdoony] WPA

[Scott] WPA did was ridiculous.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They really didn’t do anything of any substance. And the CWA? What was it, the CCC?

[Rushdoony] CCC.

[Scott] They planted little trees. I mean, it just nice. You know, it makes you feel all warm inside. But nothing really basic was done with all those unemployed people at a time when the infrastructure of the country needed everything.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, of course, it is in a state of advanced decay. We don’t have enough money to fix up all these things. But we still have all these unemployed people on welfare.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the situation will not improve until people are awake to the problem and most people do not want to wake up to it. All you have to do is to look carefully in the news items in the back pages of papers and you use increasingly accounts of the infrastructure decaying.

I think, Otto, that one of our problems is that not only are we seeing the infrastructure decay, we are seeing the people decay. Today’s Stockton Record has a long story on “Vandals Desecrate Tracey Cemetery.”

Tracey is a small city. I imagine it is about 70, 75 miles, 80 miles from here. And what has happened is that the cemetery there has been vandalized. Headstones and statues, some more than 100 years old of the original settlers of Tracey have been shattered. And devastation has been enormous.

In this instance, at least, there was no vandalizing the graves themselves which is increasingly common from coast to coast. And what we are seeing is a decline of civility and the rise of barbarism, vandalism, destruction for the sake of destruction.

[Scott] Well, I think we ought to take a look at our judges. Everyone talks about the poor police who are greatly put upon, who don’t get enough money and who are not given any credibility when they go into court who are treated as nothing, their word against that of the criminal is not sufficient. And for some strange reason we have developed a sort of a semi religious feeling in this country about anybody that puts on a black dress and sits behind a high desk. This is absolute nonsense. We don’t know, really, who these judges are. We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know their religious affiliations. We don’t know their social status. We don’t know anything about them except that they went to school and they served in one government capacity or another. There is no record of their rulings. We can’t compare their records. We don’t know even when the newspaper prints the result of a case it simply says the judge said this or the man was found guilty and sentenced to as though it was all done by invisible forces.

Now there is no possibility of having a system of justice when you have judges who do not apply the law. New York City has the toughest gun control law in the United States and the oldest. The Sullivan law was passed in the 30s. Five years mandatory in the penitentiary for having an illegal gun in New York City.

[Rushdoony] And it is the only law they seem to enforce with any enthusiasm.

[Scott] It is not enforced. It is not enforced.

[Rushdoony] Well, if they want to enforce it, they send you to prison for that.

[Scott] Oh, they can, but they don’t.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, they might put me in prison or you in prison.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is what I mean.

[Scott] But they don’t... they don’t print... they don’t put the gangs...

[Rushdoony] Oh, no, not the criminal.

[Scott] ...of New York in... in prison... in prison for it.

[Rushdoony] It is the honest citizen who is defending his store or his home that is likely to be arrested.

[Scott] Well, all right. The police have to arrest anyone who violates the law, but the judge is the fellow who is supposed to apply the law and nothing has been done to any judge by any group of citizens in the country so far as I know. They have never been impeached. There is no protest. There is no record. Nothing. This is very strange.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, another thing you saw this, I am sure, in the U. S. News and World Report for April 10, 1989 on the cover the large letters read, “Murder Zones: America is full of its own Beiruts where drug lords reign and no cops tread.” And the leading article says... is titled, “Dead Zones. Whole sections of urban American are being written off as anarchic badlands, places where no cop... where cops fear to go and acknowledge this is Beirut, U S A.”

[Scott] Well, can I interrupt on that? The ... that situation has historically led to martial law and to the assumption of total and complete power by an individual. Disorder leads to autocracy. In Caracas when the {?} took over some years back complete disorder ruled. The homes of the well to do were sacked. They ... my step mother told me she saw this fellow going down the street wearing on his hat, on his heads the uniform of a Venezuelan general carrying some furniture. Perez Jimenez, the dictator, took over. He stationed a soldier at every intersection with orders to shoot to kill at any signs of a public disturbance. The body was to be left in the street for 12 hours as an object lesson.

Less than a half a dozen were actually shot dead. They remained in the street. Within three days the city was like a garden. That was the end.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, a few years ago I forget what city it was in, it was in my travels I was told about this. What the police did was to try to inform people of the really horrifying conditions they faced, what they saw. So they were taking various businessmen or ministers or educators, occasionally a professor or two on a tour for part of a night, say six hours in a police car to see what was happening, to get an idea what they had to deal with and how difficult their job was.

I think it was finally dropped because of insurance problems, not that anyone got hurt as far as I know. But it made the people who were on those trips realize something of the terrible problems the police face. But, by and large, no attempt has been made to do that to people at large through television, to inform them, look. This is the problem. We are going to have to back our police. We are going to have to get a different kind of judge or else anarchy is going not take over the entire city.

[Scott] Well, is saw a program. I think it was called Reporters, I am not sure, on television in which it showed actual drug raids and arrests. And they broke down the doors and they rushed in and the forced men and women to lie down on their stomachs.

Now I don’t know why you can’t arrest somebody why they are standing up. I don’t know why it is necessary to degrade them. I don’t really understand some of the tactics that are underway today at the same time that the courts turn them loose. You have this unconstitutional violence at the firing end and you have this unconstitutional clemency in the courts themselves. The courts are dominated by sociological ideas instead of by the statutes, instead of the courts.

If we look at the ... the one writer said, “Our inner cities have become black fortresses in which white people are not allowed and they are running on their own and killing each other.”

But, of course, now with the crack business they are fanning out of the cities across the larger population. And we have great disparities in newspaper coverage and in concern. Mayor Bradley who was presiding over a growing cemetery down there was just reelected mayor of Los Angeles, while Mayor Barry in Washington, DC is under all sorts of criticism because he hasn’t solved the problem that nobody else has solved. Both these situations are unjust.

[Rushdoony] Well, one reason they make the people lie down is that in a situation like that they know that their life is on the line and if the man is standing they never know when he is going to turn and fire. But if he is lying down, face down, they know that they can look around. They can see if there is someone else and they have a measure of safety. It is warfare.

[Scott] Well it is warfare. And I do not want to be too critical of them, but I must say that what they are showing doesn’t give me any good feeling about the police authority in the United States. It looks to me like a bums going after bums.

[Rushdoony] Well, one consequence is that a great many police are leaving cities if they can find work elsewhere.

[Scott] I don’t blame them.

[Rushdoony] There is no trouble in getting men in an area like this, even though the pay is dramatically lower. It is simply that they find that they cannot take it so they apply for a position in an out of the way place.

[Scott] Now everywhere that that sort of condition has existed, everywhere that you have the equivalent of private armies as in Germany during the 20s, as in China before the Communists, as in Africa before the dictators, you had in the end dictatorships.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Without question unless the citizens, unless the Christian community decides to stop sitting in a voluntary ghetto and does something about the society that it has inherited which is supposedly a Christian society, we are going to be confronted with the kind of crisis and solution that we do not want.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. This situation is not going to change and it is not going to go away by people refusing to look at it. The only solution that is tenable is the only alternative to dictatorship is for the Christians to wake up, for the Christians to begin to do what they can in their community to become responsible where they are.

[Scott] Ok. Now I recall when Charles Dickens came over here. I wasn’t actually around, but I remember reading about it, that he visited the orphanages, the hospitals and the prisons.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because he said those are the areas where you can find out what a society is worth.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] How it treats the sick, how it treats the elderly and the poor and how it treats the criminal.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And orphanages are no longer permitted by state law in most of the country.

[Scott] All foster children, foster parents.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now there is an opportunity developing there because Christians in most states are barred as foster parents. They are not wanted. However, there is going to be a breakdown because inflation makes it untenable the person who is taking care of children finds that the costs are greater than he can afford.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] And under Carter there was a brief spell there when because of inflation they were having trouble making placements. It was no longer profitable for those who were maintaining foster homes. And it is beginning to provide Christians with an opportunity.

Then hospitals. This is an area where Christians have to reenter the field. Originally all hospitals were Christian. We originated them.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] We have got to get back into that area.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] Without federal help. This is what has destroyed the Catholic, the Lutheran, the Presbyterian, Episcopal hospitals, because they were ready under a federal act to have matching funds from the federal government for building hospitals. As a result, they still have Christian names, but they perform abortions. They do a great many things because the law requires them to and they don’t have the gumption to say no. Or... and to fight the whole thing.

Then prisons. Of course, the whole prison system is rotten. But we are beginning to see some good ministries here.

[Scott] Well, of course, I feel that the Christian community, the Christian congregations place too much of a load on the Christian clergy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They expect the clergy to do all these things and while all they do is attend service. And this is not what it is all about.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the things I feel very strongly about is this, Otto. Nowadays one of the sizable elements in any congregation is your widow. There are many widows in almost any church. Well, in Scriptures we find that there was an order of widows out of which the convent developed. And the young girls were taken in which was contrary to the New Testament requirements.

But the order of widows took care of a great many of the needs in the community. They took care of welfare among the Christians and some of their neighbors. They took care of some of the educational needs, some of the visitation. And seeing needs and passing on knowledge of the needs to the deacons to investigate where it was not wise for them to go.

Well, this is an area that would be easy for us to reenter, because we have far more widows than the early church did when life expectancy was not as long.

[Scott] Women didn’t used to live before the advance in medicine, women died in childbirth with great frequency. In fact, until modern times men outlived women, because of that. But the whole question is for the Christian community to start paying more attention to the larger community.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Nothing is going to change until the Christians begin to change.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] Until they see their world responsibility...

[Scott] Because...

[Rushdoony] ...beginning in their own neighborhood and in their own community.

[Scott] The alternative is a man on horseback who is not going to be benevolent. We have here the ... all the incendiary elements which made the Russian revolution a particular horror, because one of the things that made it so horrifying there was the presence of resentful minorities. And it as the resentful minorities that became Lenin’s shock force, secret police, {?} torturers and so forth. They had something against the upper class and against the people of another ethnic group that had been in a ruling position.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this is what we in the United States will confront if that eventuality ever occurs.

[Rushdoony] Well, when Henry VIII seized the monasteries and many of the old foundations of the Catholic Church, a tremendous social problem was created in England.

[Scott] Yes, the homeless.

[Rushdoony] The homeless, the hungry, the beggars that had once been taken care of by the church orders and foundation.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] And after the death of Henry VIII labor, a puritan pastor preached a sermons at Saint Paul’s, two of them, in fact, calling what Henry VIII did sacrilege. And he said God is going to judge us because it was theft of what belonged to God. If it was misused it could have been properly used, but for the Lord’s work, because it was the Lord’s treasury.

So, he said, unless we make restitution to God, we the people of England, there will be a judgment upon us from the almighty.

The result was one of the greatest outpourings of giving in Christian history. Foundations, schools, charities set up and the effect of them has remained to this century. This was all done as a way of making restitution. Every conceivable need Christians were addressing themselves to and they changed England. They made England unlike any other country in Europe.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] We could do the same.

[Scott] I would think that if Christians appeared on the side of justice because we are up against a welfare state that they didn’t have. We are up against a welfare state that is there like Lady and Lord Bountiful, pouring out all these goodies in one form or another. So we compete on that level I don't think it is going to be practical. But if we appear on the side of justice we will be appearing where there is a total vacuum and I think that we could make tremendous change in the United States.

[Rushdoony] Well, in one sphere after another care of delinquent children, care of prisoners fresh out of prison, care of youth...

[Scott] A court hearing. This is really what I think of. I am to thinking so much in terms of care of. I am thinking in terms of getting into that court to see what nonsense is going on.

[Rushdoony] Yes, oh yes. We need. I am... I am going to come to that.

[Scott] Good.

[Rushdoony] To create our own courts as Laurie Ecks and we need to have a ministry to the aged. We need to have people court watchers in every courtroom to report to the Christian community on what is happening.

[Scott] We shouldn’t isolate ourselves in this complete a way. I think Christian schools are essential. I think Christian courts would be very helpful. But I think fundamentally this is a still a Christian country. The overwhelming majority of the people in this country are still Christians. But divided by denomination, divided by self interest, do not appear on the side of justice, do not appear at these various lectures to rise up and say... express the Christian viewpoint.

John Lofton is about the only one I have ever heard of who went to a lecture by some professor and who rose up and said, what is... how does this square with the Bible? And through the whole place into pandemonium. And he shouldn’t be left to do that all by himself.

[Rushdoony] Well, nobody does it better.

[Scott] I don’t know. We might develop some...

[Rushdoony] The John Lofton school of public questioning.

[Scott] Well, you see what I am saying is that...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because everywhere else the government has preempted, the government has preempted every area of official concern.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The homeless that we talk about mainly are people who have fled from the compassionate government. They are out there because they can’t stand one more form with 48 questions a minute.

[Rushdoony] And the only good work being done is being done by Christians as far as the homeless are concerned.

[Scott] That is true. And ... and for that matter the missions and the whole ... that sort of effort has always done more good.

[Rushdoony] And they are trying to put the rescue missions out of business.

[Scott] I am sure. They have for a long time. But what I would really say would be to see Christians get into the public issues and to get involved in the problems of the police.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What is wrong with the court, why the newspapers don’t seem to be able to reflect the society in which we live in any decent way. There is a dozen different areas which would, incidentally stop, I think, a lot of the congregational members, a lot of the people in the church from feeling so bad about things, because action has a way of making you feel better about life.

[Rushdoony] I ... our time is almost finished, but I have to tell you this story, Otto.

Oh, about 30 years ago I gave a talk to some group and... in which, among other things, I said with more sense than I knew at the time that unless we stressed the importance of the police, we were going to be in trouble within not too many years. And I was speaking in a particular community and I knew what the police were getting there and it wasn’t much. And I said they should be paid twice that.

[Scott] Easy.

[Rushdoony] That startled a great many people. And I went into why I felt that they should be paid more and how we should stress their importance to the community. It was amazing how that got around among the police and not only the police, but the highway patrol and the whole area. I really was treated royally by the police. I couldn’t get a ticket.

So they... it was obvious they were grateful for some kind of appreciation of what they had to do and the problems they face.

[Scott] Well, they really should get some help with the courts.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, one thing more before we conclude. I am very happy that these tapes are being heard so widely. I think it would help better if some of you were listening on borrowed tapes would also subscribe to the tape ministry, because, after all, both the ministry and Chalcedon need the income and some of you re duplicating 50 and 100 tapes every time you get one. Well, we are glad that the word is getting out, but we would appreciate some contributions and the tape ministry could use the subscriptions. So just drop a note to Chalcedon, P. O. Box 185, with a gift or ask to be placed on the tape mailing list and we will thank you from the bottom of our heart. Like the police, we appreciate being paid.

Thank you all for listening.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.