From the Easy Chair

Christian Economics

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 51-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161B3

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161B3, Christian Economics from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 35, January the fourth, 1983.

Now today we have a guest with us, someone who is very important in his area of work and has a remarkable and varied background. His name is Daniel Harris, a very, very highly prized friend, a man of no mean ability both in the field of theological and biblical studies as well as in economics. Dan, we are glad to have you with us today.

[Harris] It is a pleasure to be here.

[Rushdoony] Dan, suppose you tell everyone what you do.

[Harris] I am a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and I trade contracts for future delivery in foreign currencies, gold and government treasury bills and Standard and Poor 500 contracts.

[Rushdoony] Tell us a little bit about your background, where you were born and your point of origin as well as your parents were concerned.

[Harris] I was born in ... a little over 31 years ago in Communist China in a Catholic hospital there that was taken over by the Communist Chinese. My parents were missionaries with the China Inland Mission which has now changed its name to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. And they were in China before the Communists took it over and were kept there by the... the new rulers for about two years and during that time they were under house arrest and were not mistreated, but were not given much freedom at all. And during that time I was born in China.

Five months later we were allowed to leave and spend some time in England, four years in Indonesia, several years back in America, four years in Taiwan and the rest of the time I have been in the Chicago area.

[Rushdoony] Very good. You parents came from England originally.

[Harris] My father was born and raised in England. My mother is American.

[Rushdoony] Well, Dan, I would like to read something to you that Daniel Rosenthal in The Silver and Gold Report said recently. “Reagan is the biggest spender in history.” He went on to say that indications are that our ever soaring federal deficits will at least be partly monetized and that inflationary expectations will soar. Would you like to comment on that?

[Harris] Yes. As a commodity trader, I read quite a bit of the writings that are around today because politics and economics are very closely related. And one of my favorite quotes is from Bernard Baruch many, many years ago and he stated, “Show me the charts and I will tell you the news.” Many people today in our... are looking to rhetoric and not looking at the facts and it is a very important not to be confused by all the nice sounding promises that come from the Reagan administration or from other capitals around the world. One experiment you can try is to look at the newspaper from a week or a month ago and notice how much of it centers around speculation and speculation which in... very shortly, like today, shows to be groundless. Applying is to the Reagan administration, I think it is extremely important to look at the facts. And they are not very encouraging.

First of all, the current budget is the largest ever in American history. Secondly, the number of employees of the federal government has greatly increased including 5000 new employees just for the IRS alone. It shows you where their priorities are. Thirdly, the federal government is still increasing the money supply and that can be seen every week in the M2 figures published each Friday. And although statistics can lie, it is very, very important that we do our own research and that is not saying that everyone needs to do the same research that a commodity trader or a stock trader or someone else in the financial fields does, but any one of you can look in the paper and see the figures from week to week and recognize that things are not what they seem.

[Rushdoony] In other words, don’t listen to Reagan. Look at the statistics including what he has done with the IRS.

[Harris] That is right.

[Rushdoony] The emphasis, thus, seems to be on tax gathering rather than tax cutting.

[Harris] That is exactly right.

[Rushdoony] Now you have commented about the news media. Do you read the daily papers?

[Harris] I occasionally read them, but I specialize ... well,. I read more specialized articles, for instance, The Reaper, published by R. A. McMaster, Phil Tiger on spreads, a couple of other specialized reports that deal more specifically with my field. And I find that the daily news is often very disappointing. It is aimed at trying to get people’s attention on emotional issues rather than actually what is happening, not that there is no room for emotion, but it does tend to cloud our judgment as to what is truly happening.

[Rushdoony] You are expecting more inflation then.

[Harris] I think there is no alternative.

[Rushdoony] This will have a bullish effect on the price of gold and silver, will it not among other commodities?

[Harris] It certainly appears to be that way. It is like adding more water into a bathtub. Any toys you have floating in the water are going to rise up and all the toys in our economy, whether they are real estate or coins or any sort of other investment, antiques, will eventually rise with the whole water level.

[Rushdoony] How soon do you expect the economy to catch up with the statistical realities? I ask that question, Dan, because instead of looking at the statistics, as you suggested, people are looking at the rhetoric. And the net result is they actually believe, some of them, that we are seeing a decrease in big government and that there is going to be a diminishing of inflation. Some insist there has been a major decrease in inflation and that the economy is going to stabilize.

Now is this having an effect on the market?

[Harris] There is no doubt that since approximately January 1980 when gold hit its peak that there has been a temporary lull in the increase in the rate of inflation. I say that carefully. It is the increase because inflation is still continuing. As long as the government keeps printing new money out of nothing the ... the scenario is still set for continued inflation. I believe that there has been a decrease in the inflationary expectations, but that is somewhat analogous to Reagan talking about cutting the budget when all he has done is cut the increase. But the fact remains that we are spending more today than ever before in the budget. We have more dollars available today than ever before visa vie the money supply.

[Rushdoony] Where are those dollars available in the public or private sector?

[Harris] I think you have to look at who gets those dollars first. When they are printed, they go to the people first in line, which would be the multi national banks. And then they are putting the dollars currently into help roll over a lot of the LDC loans, under developed country loans.

[Rushdoony] Then a lot of our new dollars are going overseas.

[Harris] It certainly appears to be that way.

[Rushdoony] But they will return, do you think in purchases? Or what will happen to them?

[Harris] I think we have seen it partially turn already, because starting in August we had a big boom in the stock market. And it seems like people are buying blind and just about everything went up. There were exceptions, but quite a bit of that was ... were foreign dollars coming back to America buying various stocks. The same sort of buying has not hit other areas, but that may... may come some time in the future.

[Rushdoony] Dr. Han Seinholds has said that we are beginning the monetization of foreign debts to the Monetary Control Act of 1980 passed under Carter and that there is a move to increase the debt limit of debtor nations to the IMF. Do you want to comment on that?

[Harris] I think that the other economists have probably started ... said it better than I could say it. The idea of buying foreign government’s debts should be really reprehensible to every American tax payer. I am sure you wouldn’t want your neighbor’s defaulted house to be put on you and yet that is what we are giving to someone who is far across the sea, let alone across the street.

[Rushdoony] Well, I would like to buttress a few of the things you have said, Dan, by going to The Daily News Digest which is published in Phoenix, an exceptionally good report which I have quoted before and which, of late, has cite some very interesting things with regard to the IRS.

For example, let me find is item. Here it is. “IRS Confiscation of Money.” This is in The Daily News Digest for December 22nd, 1982. “Under a new IRS ‘law,’” law is in quotes, “that took effect September 4, 1982, IRS agents may impose and collect on the spot a 50 percent tax on large sums of money carried by couriers who refuse to identify the money’s owner.”

Now the Digest’s opinion is this. “They may say such laws are directed at drug traffickers, but do we really want the IRS or any branch of government to have power to confiscate private property at will simply because the person possessing it doesn’t want to reveal all?”

Do you want to comment on that?

[Harris] It is interesting that from the time Uncle Sam prints a dollar and it leaves Washington, DC, he makes every effort to make sure it comes right back to him sooner or later.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Harris] {?} his dollar.

[Rushdoony] And more and more of it is going right back to Washington. Now this I enjoyed, too, also from the same issue of The Daily News Digest. “Food Stamps as Currency.” Have you read about this or heard about it?

[Harris] Yes, a bit.

[Rushdoony] “Ladies of the night have been long noted for their adaptability, but they have begun to outdo themselves. Given the sluggish economy Philadelphia prostitutes have been instituted creative financing in their industry. Recently, for example, a woman who was selling herself for 50 dollars an hour stopped a prospect wearing old clothes. When he responded that it was a temptation, but didn’t have that much cash, she replied, ‘Hey, ok, I’ll take food stamps if you have got them.’

“‘Food Stamps’ he asked.

“‘They are as good as money,’ she explained.

“They are for a fact. Federal authorities say that every one from barbers to medical doctors are trading in food stamps these days. It is against the law, of course, but it is reportedly going on all across the country. Authorities say that real estate agents have sold homes for stamps. And dentists have taken the coupons for bridge work and extractions. A plane has been sold in Texas for the stamps as have cards in Norfolk, Virginia. Some families in Washington pay their rent with coupons, for example. Federal drug agents used food stamps to purchase 40,000 dollars worth of heroine from dope dealers in Baltimore. One of the Baltimore agents believes that the illicit stamp trade may amount to billions of dollars a year. He tells the people he knows who prints the stamps off set presses. And a man in New York has been caught with 200,000 dollars in coupons in his home.

“Here is how it works. The lady in Philadelphia normally sells herself for 50 dollars in regularly currency, but she will take 100 dollars in stamps. Taking the coupons to one of the 230,000 stores authorized to redeem them. There she will sell them, say, for 75 dollars, making a tidy 25 dollar profit and the store makes a similar profit when it turns the stamps into the government for their face value.

“It probably isn’t really necessary to point out that tax payers pay for all of this as usual.”

Have you found any of them coming in to the commodity market, Dan?

[Harris] I am sure there is financing come from all sorts of...

[Rushdoony] Anything else you want to add to what you have been telling us, Dan?

[Harris] Well, just in conclusion, Rush, I could rephrase Psalm chapter 20 verse seven to say that some trust in Reagan and Volker, others in gold and silver, but others in cruise missiles, but we will trust in the living God.

[Rushdoony] Very, very good. Dan, by the way, in one of the largest churches in the Chicago area regularly teaches as class in biblical studies and does a great deal of studying in that direction. He has a great deal of delight in doing that on the side and I think it is of interest that at least we at Chalcedon have contact with me in commodities and in market newsletters and the like who increasingly have a theological concern. I think this is most interesting, because economics is essentially a theological subject. It has to do with ethics. And it has been separated from that for too long. And now in a time of crisis there is an interest in this area.

You mentioned. R. E. Mc Masters. He has more than a little interest in this field. Do you want to comment on that? You are very familiar with his writings.

[Harris] Yes. I have been reading his newsletter The Reaper for probably four or five years. I would say he is largely responsible for my ... my education in this particular field, along with quite a bit of on the job training. But one of the interesting things to ... to put together with what you just said is that theology is a matter of the heart and a person’s wallet is probably closer to their heart than their head is.

And so when you start dealing with money and investments and these sorts of things, you are getting right down to the nitty gritty.

[Rushdoony] Very well put. Very well put. Well, the Bible says, “Where your treasure is, there will you heart be also.” And there must be a lot of hearts close to the commodity base and the board of trade.

Well, now to go on to a few other subjects. I cited The Daily News Digest which, by the way, is published in Phoenix, Arizona, PO Box 39850, Phoenix, 85069. And it is 97 dollars a year, an outstanding source of news.

The Daily News Digest in speaking of Andropov says this and this is in the issue of December the eighth, 82. “For 15 years the newly selected Soviet chief, Uri Andropov presided over the files collected by several hundred thousand skilled spies. He also knows all about the moral deviations of all the key people in the West and could undoubtedly ruin thousands of them within a week. They know it, too. You should not be surprised that so many western commentators have treated Mr. Andropov with very grave caution. For 15 years his men were building up their files with tape recordings and photographs. He could, of course, have ruined half the politburo. No wonder he received the unanimous vote. No one dared vote against him because the politburo members have lived very sordid private lives.”

Well, that is a very telling point and I think it is indicative of something that in the past few weeks since Andropov became head of the Soviet regime, wherever I go there are very favorable articles about Andropov. And you would think that he was a soul of sweet reasonableness. All this goes on at the same time that we have more and more news coming out that the evidence is mounting against Andropov as the man who was responsible for planning and engineering the plot against the pope.

So here we have the worst hit man in the world and we are told that we need to deal very carefully with him, because we mustn’t offend a man who represents the voice of sweet reason finally come to power.

So when anybody tells you that Andropov is a superior man and a man of reason, a man of capitalistic sympathies and really an undercover western liberal, you had better wonder what that man was doing in the dark when he though no one could see him, that is, no one except the KGB.

Well, there are a few other items in The Daily News Digest I want to touch on before going on to something else. The Daily News Digest deals with the KGB’s infiltration in Japan and speaks of the fact that during the 1970s 10 of the Socialist party leaders in Japan were under Soviet influence, that a great many of the journalists in Japan were similarly under KGB influence. This kind of control has prevailed all over the world because there has been no area that the KGB has not been active in.

So we need to recognize that the news gathering sources of the world are everything that Dan Harris said they are and worse, because the KGB has had its hand in all of them and has tried to get as much power over these people as possible.

Well, now, to another subject. One of the interesting people in the history of the American West was Josiah Gregg. And Josiah Gregg wrote about the West and had a very real vision of its potential and it future. He was a native of Tennessee and he wrote in 1844 Commerce of the Prairies: A Classic Account of the Santa Fe Trail. And one of the things that made him notable was that he saw and set forth very clearly the vision of the West as so many in his day shared it.

According to him, freedom was the goal of both the nation and the citizens. And the imperative appeal of the far West was the promise of greater freedom. As a result, those who went westward were dreaming of freedom above all else.

Horgan, who has written a book on Josiah Gregg, Paul Horgan, Josiah Gregg and his Vision of the Early West, a book first published in 1941 and most recently reprinted in 1979 by Farrar Straus and Giroux in New York. Horgan says this. “Far west was very fate. Steamboats and even children, according to the custom, were named for it. Promises were redeemed by it, a man to himself, a debtor to his neighbor, a lover to his bride. It had the grand commonness of all hopes.

“This did not mean that the West did not represent problems, the wilderness earth and the Indians. But,” Horgan says, “Ready and willing to find themselves good lives out of the land, the settlers moved out ready to bundle into stockades because their hope drove them west, kept them there, made them work against all odds to establish there the freedom.”

Now he quotes Gregg this way speaking of the western man and the western trader. “In the first place, the wild, unsettled and independent l life of the prairie trader makes perfect freedom from nearly every kind of social dependence an absolute necessity of its being. He is in daily, nay hourly exposure of his life and property and in the habit of relying upon his own arm and his own gun for both protection and support. Is he wrong? No court or jury is called to adjudicate upon his disputes or his abuses, save his own conscience. And no powers are invoked to redress them save those with which the God of nature has endowed him. He knows no government, no laws save those of his own creation and adoption. He lives in no society which he must look up to or propitiate. The exchange of this untrammeled condition is sovereign independence for life in civilization where both his physical and moral freedom are invaded at every turn is certainly likely to commend itself to but few. Not even to all those who have been educated to find their enjoyment in the arts and elegancies peculiar to civilized society.”

And so, he says, “This was the thing that drove men westward, this vision of freedom.”

I submit that that vision is still operative in this country, although it has been very much tarnished. We have seen the gimme society, but I believer there is residual on the American character that same dream of freedom. And I believe it will reassert itself in the years ahead. We are seeing that I the Church and state battle.

The kind of law that prevailed is, at times, interesting. Gregg cites this. “There was a technique of bankrupt payment of debt which was regarded as perfectly legal by both the debtor and creditor. And it had a savage morality. The debtor, unable to pay his debt in money was privileged to grant strike of a dollar to his creditor who tied him to a tree and lashed him once for every dollar that was uncollectable. It was a public ordeal, a public feast, a strictly regarded form of settlement which bought a license for hurt and yielded the obscure enjoyment attendant upon the spectacle of pain when sanctioned by numbers of men present, all guilty as witnesses. This, a hundred years ago during what might be called America’s Middle Ages, a period of brave preparation for a greater discovery.”

Well, a little more about early America. There is a delightful book Diary of My Travels in America. This goes back about 50 years almost before Josiah Gregg. The man who wrote the diary—and this is just a part of a much larger diary, most of which has been lost—was Louis Philippe, prince of France and later King of France. Louis Philippe in 1796 fleeing from the French Revolution came to America and with his two younger brothers and his man servant traveled throughout the America of the day, the United States of the day, met with Mount Washington, smoked a peace pipe with Cherokee Indians and more.

And the sad fact is that in the process Louis Philippe learned a great deal about freedom and came to prize what the United States represented. He was a great admirer of this country. He genuinely tried 50 years later when he was King of France, a much older man, to apply these ideas. But they were still very much alien to French culture. And so after a time he was overthrown.

He saw the operation, according to the editor, Henry Steel {?} of that instinct of volunteerism which was to strike de Tocqueville as, perhaps, the most important of democratic qualities. The readiness of men and women to band together to do whatever needed to be done to hew out paths, to build stockades, to set up churches and schools, to govern themselves with our without outside authority.

In other words, what he saw was self government. And he found it most impressive.

Louis Philippe met with many of the great men of the day as well as many very ordinary people. he shared to a degree the romantic view of Indians which prevailed in his day and yet he also was able to write very realistically of them. He was very much distressed by slavery, but all the same was appreciative of the good he saw everywhere including in the South. He also had an eye for the absurdities and the rather primitive kind of accommodations he sometimes had in frontier areas. He regularly wrote with surprise of the fact that some of the wayside inns were surprisingly good and the food excellent. But some of the inns in far away places were very, very bad.

And he said when he was in area and he had just seen a number of wild turkeys and a good deal of game—this was early in his travels—“The food in the inns is nothing much. Generally it amounts to no more than fried fat back and corn bread. Eggs have disappeared and the {?} are finished. In the better places they make us little wheat cakes that are rather good. There is coffee everywhere, but bad, very weak. The sugar is always black {?} or unrefined maple sugar which I like better. We had tea only once and it was good, but it is not to be found. No where in the inns are there chamber pots. We asked for one at Mr. Jay Campbell’s and were told that there were broken panes in the windows that we could use. The reply was perfect for a game of cross questions and crooked answers. There were, indeed, many broke panes and it is a rare thing here to sleep in a hermetically sealed room.

“The other day, being in a loft we were looking of the widow or opening that should do service for a chamber pot. We found it 10 feet up. And so we insisted on some sort of receptacle. They brought us a kitchen kettle.

“Most of the houses consist of one large room on the ground floor with two facing doors left open all day to cool {?} and an attic or loft where travelers sleep in pairs.”

Now an interesting fact. Even in those days the common subject of American conversation was taxes and prince Louise Philippe writes at one point he says, “Our host was a Pennsylvania German named Rocker and his wife was an intolerable chatterbox. The bad weather collected a fairly large number of travelers I the vicinity and we were exceedingly uncomfortable. Shortly, a conversation arose about the company among the company about the distress of the western folk and everybody railed to his heart’s content. They claimed to be overwhelmed by taxes, although there may be no civilized people who pay anywhere near as little. They pronounce it useless even to pay for the support of the local government of Kentucky. Everywhere they complain with the same angry acerbity of government by rich, eastern businessmen. Everywhere they parrot paltry Jacobin commonplaces, that the poor work hard and the rich get richer and that the rich are not happy merely selling land at exorbitant prices, but find various ways to extort what little money the settlers make, et cetera, et cetera.”

Life hasn’t changed much since 1797.

Well, Prince Louis Philippe was a very astute observer and he died in 1850 about 53 years after his American journey at the age of 76. He had been monarch until 1848 when the revolution deposed him. He never forgot his American journey. He always longed for the same kind of constitutional freedom in France that the United States had. He held to being a citizen king was the first popular as the bourgeois king, simple and dramatic with the palace royale open to casual visitors and ordinary citizens, but because he was a Bourbon and a king, he was never entirely accepted. When conflict arose he became less the citizen and more the king, perhaps a little too late, because France was not ready for freedom. Not too long after, it destroyed its own freedom that it had supposedly been so eager to have by making Napoleon III emperor.

Well, Louis Philippe, King of France from 1830 to 1848 was an admirer of this country and its freedom. I wish more Americans today had the same respect for our freedom before we lose it entirely to the IRS, to the federal government and to our own appetite for more and more handouts.

Recently the December the 27th, 1982 issue of Newsweek had a covers story, “The Bible in America: How one Book Unites us, Divides us and Still Defines us.” In part it is a good article in that it calls attention to some aspects of our country which are being all too often neglected today, namely that this country is still to a great extent determined and its character set by the Puritan faith and by biblical categories.

Now the thing that is good is that he says that the Bible far more than the constitution is the determining document in the United States. However, the article is one continuous attack on the idea that America is some way a chosen land and we a chosen people. The article begins by quoting John Winthrop, 1630, “The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people and command a blessing upon us in all our ways.” And then from Ronald Reagan, November 25, 1982, “I have always believed that this anointed land was set apart in an uncommon way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the earth who had a special love of fait and freedom.”

Now this is called a piece of arrogance, in effect, that this type of thinking ostensibly is unique to the United States and therefore constitutes a piece of presumption that in that we ostensibly believe that America was in the Bible and that America, therefore, has a place in the divine plan.

The truth is that what the Puritan thinkers and those who followed them, who spoke about the place of American in God’s plan were talking about was, first of all, predestination. In terms of predestination there is nothing that is not in God’s plan. And wherever you are and whatever country you have to say, “God created me and God created this particular portion of the earth for a particular purpose so that we, like everything else, have a place in the divine plan.”

Now my duty is to find out what our place is and fulfill that calling. Then, second, the is the concept of the chosen people. Well, who are the chose people? Are they of necessity one people and one alone? The Bible is very clear on that. The Old Testament, the Hebrew prophets warned the nations saying that God chose you because of his grace, that he can call the Ethiopians out and make them his chosen people tomorrow. In other words, God’s chosen people are those who manifest his righteousness, his justice, in other words, in their every day lives, believe in him, obey him and walk in terms of his Word. This is why the Christians very early saw themselves as the new Israel of God, the new chosen people. This is why one group after another throughout the centuries have held, we are God’s chosen people. This is why this same faith marked the people who came to this country.

It is clearly a biblical belief to believe that you and I are chosen by God when we are redeemed by him. We are his chosen people. By the election of grace we are made his. We can be as families a chosen family when we are the Lord’s. What is wrong with saying that we as a nation can be a chosen nation? This is an entirely legitimate and a biblical belief. If a nation serves the Lord, if the nation becomes the vehicle of God’s power, of God’s law, God’s grace, then that nation is chosen. And what the Puritans and others in the early days of America held was that the United States should make itself into God’s new Zion.

Now that is basic to the American character, a belief that this nation has a duty to serve God and if it serves God faithfully it can say, then, we are God’s chosen people. He has used us to do certain things in the world. This is entirely legitimate. There is nothing contrary to Scripture in this. There is everything in Scripture to favor this. As a result, this sustained assault on the concept of election with regard to individuals and the nations or nations manifests an anti biblical, an anti covenantal characteristic that marks modern man.

Tomorrow Uganda could be a chosen people. Tomorrow the United States could again be a chosen people, as I believe it once was. We should strive for this rather than regarding it as something wrong, something inappropriate.

Thus, while the article has a great many good things in it, its basic hostility to the concept of election or predestination marks it as radically humanistic.

I would like to go now to something related to this. I mentioned Uganda and I would like to turn now to the words of a man from Uganda {?}. This is from Today’s Mission the world Christian magazine, November December issue, 1982. {?} was one of the leaders of Uganda who went back into the country to attempt to rebuild it after Idi Amin. And this is what he says concerning Idi Amin. “He destroyed a nation and he did it in many ways. First, he killed off the middle class. He did this by inviting people to register for high level jobs, listing their qualifications and whereabouts while doing so. He then systematically murdered them by a brutal means, driving over them repeatedly with cars, slicing them to pieces while still alive and feeding them to the crocodiles in the Nile River. Anyone with an education was considered competition. Consequently, all the industries were ruined because their managers were replaced by people with no technical know how. Our machines, copper mines, sugar factories, cement factories, water systems, everything were destroyed.

“Amin also destroyed the family. Imagine kids having to watch as parents are brutally dismembered, their eyes poked out with knives and then their heads cut off. No one would claim these orphans because they were scared of receiving the same treatment.

“Traditionally Uganda has no orphans. We had extended families where my father’s brother was also my father. The sister of my mother was also my mother. But today you can find children called abandoned. Never before have we had this condition. You can find dead children on the sidewalk and no one will claim them. You won’t believe it, but where the garbage pile rises next to the market place in the capital city Kampala, you will find the bodies of abandoned children who tried to steal some small piece of vegetable to remain alive. For that they were brutally beaten to death. This is going on today. Uganda has completely degenerated morally. There are 20,000 kids living in that market place all starving, underclothed, dirty, hardened by the murders of their parents, severely emotionally damaged, none loved by anyone.

“What are Christians doing about it and the widows? Today we have widows with five kids prostituting their bodies in order to provide for their families. Wells are contaminated from murdered people. Latrines and sewer systems are overflowing and spreading disease. Soldier abuse has also contributed to single girls starting prostitution. Once pregnant, they will use a stick or whatever they can to try to abort the child. A 10 year old abandoned girl will be abused in the gutter several times every night of the week. It is as whole segment of society has been created as a result of Amin’s rule.

“What can be done? Well, of course, ultimately it has to be the reconciling love of Jesus. A whole society has to be rebuilt and that can only happen by his power. People are angry. They want revenge. They want to lash back at anything because their hearts have been torn apart by indescribable pain.

“We are making homes for the unwanted and unloved. We are taking those children from the market place, scrubbing them, putting clean clothes on them, feeding them and wrapping our arms around them. Some of those 12 year olds haven’t bathed for years. And then we tell them about Christ and his love for them.

“We have started sewing industry for the prostitute mothers. Because of the lack of electricity we use manual sewing machines. If they make money this way, they will be able to stop prostitution.

“What about the men? Many could have jobs by carting goods or shining shoes, but it is extremely difficult to buy wheels for wheel barrows or to import shoe polish. It is too costly. We have become a sort of coop to supply these materials. This, alone, will create hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs. Also we are trying to break the cycle of poverty in the slums by taking one child from each of the slum families and teaching him or her a good trade. Hopefully this will become a means of financial support and also an example to their peers of something to strive for. These kids also will eventually head up the now devastated industries of our country.

“What can we do? First of all, risk and get dirty. No fancy theories or state trips. Christians must realize that it cost Christ his life to reach us. We need Christians to come and give us back our moral fiber, to rebuild our economy, to encourage us. We need help.

“Some people say westerners aren’t wanted. Read your Bibles. God commands us to go. He doesn't say to ask other people’s permission. It is common sense that we need food, clothing, money, shelter, clean water and moral strength. It is clear that some also lack spiritual relationship with Christ. This enough should be a call.”

{?} has a PhD in art history. He was a professor in Uganda when Amin began his reign. He started a church which had to go underground and the church today has 14,000 members. {?} was on Idi Amin’s hit list, but by God’s grace he escaped arrest and death.

Today he heads up an organization called Africa Foundation to work primarily among the orphans and the single mothers.

This is the kid of thing that constitutes Christian Reconstruction. This is the kind of thing that in God’s time will make Uganda a chosen nation. We need to have a life dedication and there are men in this country in an increasing number who are manifesting the same kind of faith.

A little in the way of statistics on Uganda. Out of a population of 12 and a half million, half a million were murdered, 300,000 widowed and 800,000 orphaned.

Well, that tells us something about one aspect of the ministry that is underway all over the world today. There is a great deal more that I could go into today, but time is running out. I want to go into some other subjects dealing with Chalcedon’s work, the Church and state struggles in this country and much more at a later date.

For the present, it has been good to be with you again and it has been a delight to have Dan Harris with us. Do you have anything more to add to what you said earlier, Dan?

[Harris] No, thank you very much, though. It is a pleasure to be here with you, Rush.

[Rushdoony] And it is a pleasure to have you, Dan. I ... well, I am going to take a minute or two in a lighter vein to give you something that I found more than a little delightful. This is a story told by Alvin W. Barclay who was vice president under Harry Truman during this childhood days in Graves County. He said, “In those days a man could hardly aspire to public office unless he was a disabled Civil War veteran. One day in a brush arbor at Wingo, four candidates were making their appeal to the voters. The first candidate had crutches and an empty trouser leg pinned ostentatiously to his rotunda. ‘Ah, here to the call of duty,’ he said. ‘And I fit in during the war. I lost my leg at Shiloh and I therefore appeal for your suffrage.’

“The second candidate told how he had lost his arm at the battle of Cynthiana. The third pointed proudly to the patch over the eye he lost in Vicksburg.

“Now the fourth candidate hobbled forth. ‘I never fit in the war,’ he said. ‘And I never got wounded, but, my fellow citizens, a physical disability is a qualification for office. I can tell you this. I am the doggonest most ruptured son of a gun you ever saw.’”

Well, he was probably better qualified for office than some we have in Washington today and in the state houses.

Well, on that note, I will say good bye and I will be with you again in two weeks.

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