From the Easy Chair

The Myth of Cultural Equality

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 87-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BU131

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BU131, The Myth of Cultural Equality, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 235, February the fifth, 1991.

Today Otto Scott and I are going to discuss, first of all, the myth of cultural equality. This is a very, very dominant motive and theme of our times. Its roots are very deep. They go back into the first half of the last century. There were elements of this in the New England Transcendentalists. But since World War II the most aggressive promoter of this idea on the public scene was Justice William O. Douglas of the U S Supreme court, not in his court decisions, but in his books. He promulgated the idea that equal respect should be accorded to all cultures. He went so far as to assert the rights to cultural survival and integrity of cannibal societies.

The issue came to a focus very early in the first half of the last century in American history. It had to do with Mormon polygamy. In the famous Reynolds case a Mormon polygamist claimed that he had the right to practice his polygamy in terms of the First Amendment, in terms of civil and religious liberty. The court wrestled hard and long with that. Earlier justice Joseph Story, one of the greatest of the, if not the greatest mind on the Supreme Court had said that while the was no ecclesiastical commitment, no church relationship to the state, culturally the United States was a Christian nation and, therefore, the Bible undergirded all the laws and the morality of these United States.

In the Reynolds decision the court wrestled with the issue and while they were not willing to be open about the Christian character of this country as Story had been, they did say that full civil liberties for any and all cultures and religions was impossible. They called attention to the fact that at that time, for example, the Thuggees of India practiced murder as a part of their religion, that ritual prostitution was a part of other religions, cannibalism was basic to other faiths and so on and on. And so they concluded that if there were full religious liberty in the United States there could be no law, because there was not a single kind of practice, including bestiality and homosexuality, that could not be vindicated in terms of some kind of religious practice somewhere in the world.

Now they did not make the logical conclusion which Story had earlier provided them with, namely, that there was one religion that could undergird the laws of these United States, Christianity.

Well, coming up to the present, in the 1950s Henry Van Til in dealing with this issue called attention to the religious nature of culture. He said, “Culture is religion externalized,” so that every culture represents a religious faith and is inseparable from it. However, this view has been denied on all sides and culture has been reduced to various artifacts and to the theater and art galleries and the externals, not to the essence of a culture. Moreover, what we have had is increasingly an insistence that basic to a nation is not a cultural integrity, but rather a political character so that the nation is to be unified around the idea of one man, one vote, the equality of all voters and the idea that, say, a Christian American culture or an Italian Catholic culture or any other culture deserves preservation, is seen as invalid. The essence of everything is the political.

Quoting now from Lawrence Auster in his study The Path to National Suicide he writes on page 30 and I quote, “In the words of former California Supreme Court justice Cruz Reynoso, ‘America is a political union, not a cultural, linguistic, religious or racial union.’ Now while there is some truth to this statement, can it be carried to extremes? Mr. Reynoso seems to be saying that the United States is nothing but a blank slate, a sort of political abstraction lacking any cultural identity that has a right to be preserved. Since, for example, we are not a linguistic union the English language has no special status. We could turn into a Japanese or Spanish speaking society tomorrow and, according to Mr. Reynoso, this would in no way change America’s essential character since in his view America has no essential character,” unquote.

Well, there you have a problem. What is the character of a country? Is it its... is it its political character, one man, one vote? Or is it a cultural, a religious heritage.

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

[ Scott ] Yes, thank you. Recently Octavio Paz, the Mexican {?} received the Nobel Prize in literature which was the first time, I believe, that a Mexican writer has received that honor. Some people said it was overdue. I don’t know, because I am not that familiar with his writing. But I did read his Nobel laureate speech and it was an excellent thought.

He went on to say that he was not Spanish nor was his family descent Spanish and that most of the people in Latin America could not really be called descendants of Spain. They were {?}. They were Indian. They come from various parts of Europe, especially today. After World War II there was considerable immigration into Latin America, as much as was allowed. None of them have had open immigration and certainly none of them has ever accepted as many immigrants as we have.

But Paz went on to say that the despite the fact that he himself was not Spanish and didn’t consider himself a Spaniard, he grew up and was educated within the framework of the Spanish culture. He spoke the Spanish language. They inherited Spanish law, Spanish customs, Spanish history. All Latin America, therefore, lives within the mental world of Spain. We live in the mental world of England. We speak English. All of the so-called liberties which we believe we have invented were actually inherited from England. The major religion in the United States, the Protestant religion, if you could call Protestantism a religion, let’s say Christianity, is English Christianity in large measure with, of course, its usual... its historic admixture of canonical law from the papacy and so on.

So in that sense, up until very recently, in the same sense that Octavio Paz has been really a descendant of Spanish culture, up until fairly recently everyone in the United States, irrespective of their origin, has been an heir to the English culture and the English history, English literature, English law, English concepts and so forth. Maybe we don’t like it. There is an awful lot of anti English feeling in this country, but it is also a certain from of ingratitude, because culturally speaking the country was formed on the English pattern.

Now that particular assumption or... or reality, rather, is under strong attack. We are now being told in the terms that you just described that we have no particular culture whatever, which means, of course, that we are in the process of dissolution, culturally speaking. We are being dissolved into a sea of common humanity. And anyone who has ever experienced what that sea is like in those areas that have been inundated knows that that is not a very pleasant place to be.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I used to speak quite often, in the 60s especially, and in the 70s on college and university campuses and one of the things that I encountered was the fact that a great many professors, as well as students argued for the cultural integrity of every culture except western, Christian culture. And their argument is that ours is an imperialistic culture and therefore it has no right to exist, meaning that ours is one that believes in converting people.

Of course, if you raise the question, as I often did, is not Islam imperialistic to cite another religion. Their indignation is considerable. They don’t argue. They attack. Moreover, we have had at the same time a withering attack, since the 60s, on the idea of the melting pot, as though it has been a fraud and as though an elite establishment has maintained control of this country from the beginning.

Within the last two or three years I read a book and I don’t recall the title or the author. And the point of the book was the fact that our establishment is made up of a variety now of people who are regarded as WASPS, but are, in fact, not white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Many come from a thoroughly Catholic background. In one case one of the most prominent members of the establishment, so-called, whose name has been anglicized and who is sometimes attacked as the epitome of a WASP is a Greek in origin. These things tell us the extent to which our country has been a melting pot. All I have to do is to look at our mailing list, the many people I know, the very diverse backgrounds that they have in terms of their nationalities. But they have all been made part of this common American culture, which is British, as you pointed out, in origin. And I stress British because the Scottish background is very important, so that we have an attempt to deny history and also to render our Christian heritage, the fact that America has done a remarkable job of assimilating people, an attempt to denigrate that.

Now of the things that distresses me especially is that one of the groups that has been very, very rapid in its readiness to assimilate and to become a part of the American culture is the so-called Hispanic groups. And yet there is a militant movement now to push them back into their older cultures. Many of them left Mexico because they regarded it as an un free place and as an alien place to anything they cherished. And yet aggressively Mexican holidays are promoted in everything to Mexicanize the American Hispanics.

However, the rate of intermarriage is very considerable. The extent to which the Hispanics are becoming Protestant has in the past decade suddenly started to boom. They are becoming a part of the general culture. Within the Catholic Church they have been a force for Conservatism against some of the liberal trends of the Catholic Church so that they are asserting themselves and they are asserting themselves in terms, in increasing numbers, a traditional American pattern.

[ Scott ] Well, I think that is true. One of the criticisms made of Dukakis when he as a candidate for the presidency was that he went to the South West and spoke to various groups while campaigning in Spanish. And they were very upset because they said, “We are Americans and we want to be spoken to as Americans.” But it is not the Hispanics that are giving us, really, the same kind of intellectual attacks that we have received from some other groups. The attack on Americanism, if you could call it that, a traditional American value, really began, as far as I recall, maybe it went... began much farther, but I recall becoming aware of it in the 30s. By that time it was entrenched in the educational establishment. And it is beginning to appear outsides in publishing, in books and in articles and essays and journals and so fort. It was a concentrated assault on American history.

The slavery which was universal and practiced in every culture and every period was a... given a special character because it exited in the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now there is no sense in going into it. There were white slaves in Europe for a long time. There were slaves in Africa. At the time of our Civil War the blacks were still selling one another to the Arabs and to other people. There was slavery in Brazil until the 1880s. There was slavery in Sri Lanka until the 1960s and so forth. But this particular situation was fastened on to the Americans in an unbelievably difficult way, implacable, implacable. We are still seeing plays about it. Arthur Miller... a couple of... a few witch trials in New England at a time when they still had hundreds in Europe was suddenly held up as an exhibit of what is wrong with the American people.

[ Rushdoony ] The interesting thing is the Salem witch trials began when the clergy were against it. Only one minister in New England favored the trials and he, of course, later publically repented, but the clergy got the blame.

[ Scott ] The clergy got the blame in Europe also.

[ Rushdoony ] It was doctors who said that the girls were possessed.

Well, there is an interesting book that has been published recently which bears on one point you made, a very important one, with regard to slavery. It is by an English writer. His name is Gordon Thomas. The title, Enslaved: An Investigation into Modern Day Slavery, published by Bantam Press in 1990. And this is a very, very important work and you won’t see it publicized much, because it doesn't say some nice things about the non white peoples of the world. For example, and I quote on page 211, “According to the anti slavery society there are an estimated 200 million slaves in the world. Some 100 million of them are children.” Now this is as of 1990. “Other organizations concerned with combating slavery such as the United Nations Center for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs, the Defense for Children International, and the International Abolitionist Federation all suggest the figures could be larger. No one really knows. Unlike the days when slaves were actually counted and registered, no record exists of those now held in enforced servitude.”

Now the data he gives here is exceedingly grim. In fact, one of the grimmest aspects of it is that there is a major harvest in slaves who are bought in Asia and Africa and kidnapped in Europe and America to be killed for organ transplants. And, he says, hospitals are unwilling ever to investigate the sources of the organs. We have massive slavery, but because it involves non Christian cultures in the main, nothing is done to criticize these facts even though slavery is more prominent on the world scene than ever before.

[ Scott ] Well, on the question of the witchcraft, Crate wrote a book in which he proved fairly well that the witchcraft trials were held by the university men and not by the church. The university men were the lawyers and the judges, not priests or monks or ministers. The witchcraft, the record of witchcraft was poisoned by ex post facto forgeries that were placed in the archives to place the blame upon the Church.

So we have here, when we talk about historical events, a poisoned well which has been used, of course, for modern propaganda. What we are running into or what we ran into here was a deliberate effort to blacken the American culture by blackening its history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] At the expense of every constructive thing that this country did by people who were descended from people who never did any of these constructive things, who even today will not allow a foreigner citizenship. Mexico doesn’t. Israel doesn’t. No country does excepting a few of the western nations which have now gotten so soft that they have decided in that old phrase about what is wrong with the liberals and who is a liberal.

A fellow said a liberal is somebody who thinks it is unfair to stand up for his side. Now we have turned into a liberal country that thinks it is unfair to protect itself, to defend itself or to maintain itself.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, this myth of cultural equality is a dishonest one because it is aimed against Christianity. We are to respect other cultures, but not our own. Today it has become difficult to start any kind of construction in many areas unless you pay an Indian to stand there and discover traces of Indian artifacts that will make it holy ground.

[ Scott ] It is all holy ground.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And this is true now in New Zealand with a vengeance. And, apparently, is under way in New Zealand. I mean Australia. So all this is premised by a radical disrespect for Christian American culture.

[ Scott ] Well of course, a lot of people have forgotten that Christians can be offended or that Christians can be insulted. They seem to feel that to be Christian means that you must enjoy being insulted. It is your duty to accept insults. And that, of course, is a very short range theory. It... it doesn’t end well.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You called to my attention almost two years ago the Wall Street Journal editorial proposing, it was July the third, 1989, a constitutional amendment which held there shall be open borders. In other words, every one in the world should have a right to emigrate to the United States.

[ Scott ] Occupy this country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, the Wall Street Journal doesn't have a great large number of minorities on its staff, that is official minorities. It has very few Asian editors as far as I know. It has no black editors. And there are a number of other groups that are not represented on the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, we know that their relatives, they feel, have a right to come here from all over rand according to our laws they do.

Anybody who can claim to be a 17th cousin of somebody that is an American citizen has a right to come into this country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That was a apart of the immigration law of 1965, which replaced the McCarron Act which was an excellent one. Now in terms of that, if you have a distant relative they have a right to come over here. Then that person can bring over all their relatives.

[ Scott ] All their relatives that is...

[ Rushdoony ] So...

[ Scott ] How can... how can you prove it?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] How can you disprove it?

[ Rushdoony ] And because of inter relationships, if you bring over one person from one country ultimately you can relate everyone to that one person through a network people as you bring each one over.

[ Scott ] Well, of course and... and what documentation is necessary?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, to continue, while Bob was turning over the tape and getting ready, there was some comment made by the women present and I suggested that we make this sometime a round table with the women folk included and Joanna said, “Then you would have to call it the Uneasy Chair.” So we are dispensing with that.

Well, I would like to quote a remark made not too many years ago, not long after World War II by theologian Will Herberg. He said, “The American’s image of himself is still the Anglo American ideal it was at the beginning of our independent existence. The national type, as ideal, has always been and remains pretty well fixed. It is the Mayflower, John Smith, Davey Crockett, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln that define the American’s self image. And this is true whether the American in question is a descendant of the pilgrims or the grandson of an immigrant from southeastern Europe,” end of quote.

Now that was true when Will Herberg, a Jewish theologian wrote it.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] It defined the Jewish Hollywood producers of the 1930s and 40s, very, very carefully and faithfully. But since then it seems that every group is determined to destroy that image of the American and to wage war against it.

[ Scott ] Well, I agree with that particular quote from Herberg. I don’t agree with his wonderful... his wonderfully effective misdefinition of the religious situation of the United States at that time. He is the one who called it the home of three great religions—Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, of course, Protestantism and Catholicism are branches of the same tree, Christianity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So there is really just Christianity. And Judaism has always played a role in Christendom and it played a role here. But I do agree with his overall definition of Americanism.

Now if you were to repeat that today on a public platform or even a public outlet, national TV or something of that sort, you would immediately be challenged.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You would be called a racist or certainly a bigot because it does not include the contributions of other people. And at the rate we have accepted other people and accepted that argument, what profile can we call an American today?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, this attempt to destroy our cultural integrity has gone so far that as Auster comments on a footnote on page 47 of his study, “To let... today there are both liberals and conservatives who categorically deny that there is even such a thing as race.”

Now, of course, you and I have both encountered that. It is given scientific respectability and a number of scientists ridicule the idea that there are such things as races. Well, some of the races of the world are championed because they insist on their integrity and we are told we cannot believe in it. So it is a very, very absurd and contradictory situation.

[ Scott ] Well, it is much like Dr. Johnson’s response to bishop Berkeley. Berkeley said nothing material is real. Johnson kicked a stone and said, “I repute refuting thus.” And those who say there are no races should look around.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There are obvious differences in humanity which go far beyond the verbal.

[ Rushdoony ] I think that it would be well to explore briefly—or not so briefly—the key element in this attack on cultural integrity of one man in particular, the Marquis de Sade. He was the first to a full scale and total assault on the integrity of Christian culture. And many of the champions of the attack on cultural integrity had quoted the Marquis de Sade as their great champion. The Marquis de Sade felt that all things should be permitted. He said, because there is no God, everything is permitted except one, Christianity. And to him Christianity was and there he applied rigorously Voltaire’s premise. Wipe out the infamy, that is, the Church. And that has been the strategy ever since for those who follow in that tradition.

The one roadblock, of course, is Christianity and the Church and, therefore, it has to be eliminated in order to establish the full equality and the end of cultural integrity. So the Marquis de Sade is very important in this respect. And we have seen the breakdown of cultural integrity in the moral sphere in that everything that Christians regard as evil is now given civil rights or is in the process or receiving them. Abortion, of course, and homosexuality have received their civil rights so-called. There are organized groups now favoring child molestation. There are organized groups in favor of incest. I read of one group that had been organized to promote necrophilia and a doctor in Sweden has long been a champion of the civil rights of every kind of pervert.

[ Scott ] Well, first of all, the Marquis de Sade was not a maquis. He was a liar. He was a count. He called himself a maquis. And it has always irritated me that he got away with that particular lie. Secondly, I think it was Rousseau who brought in the idea that a noble savage was the equivalent, in fact, the superior of a civilized European.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this is what we are seeing today. We are seeing Rousseauism combined with de Sade. And it is interesting, because it is part of the egalitarian movement. I have just gotten through reading an excellent book by a Spaniard named de la Mora...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes, very fine.

[ Scott ] ...called Egalitarian Envy. And the idea being that we are all the same, that nobody is any better than anybody else. And, of course, if that is true, then there is no reason for us to have names. That would be a little too much. Maybe numbers would do or, perhaps, nothing. At any rate, like the insects, the insect world which is now being promoted, the idea that we are all people. Unfortunately, as Orwell pointed out, some pigs are more equal than others.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Everyone is equal now in the new world order of the United States department except Christians. Christians are the only group that cannot be insulted. The only group of whom any charge can be made without ever seeing any letters of protest in the paper, without seeing any demonstrations, without anyone getting punched in the nose. It is amazing. It is as though only Christians have been anesthetized. We have been given laughing gas. And this, of course, is the culmination of three generations of denunciation.

You have mentioned... you brought to my attention a number of historians who took control of the American historical association who went down this path and now if you even bring up American history there is as mile that appears on the other person’s face and he begins to tell you about low, the poor Indian, about the blacks and about the Irish having a problem when they came here and so forth. And, of course, the Irish... you couldn’t say that was a racial problem. It was a cultural problem. They misbehaved and they were illiterate and untrained. But we are coming into a very difficult period when, for instance, the state of California deliberately restricts the number of Caucasian students that can go into Berkeley, although they far out number all other citizens, high school citizens who go apply. We are running into a very peculiar situation where the existing majority of the country is treated as a minority by its own government.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And these are mainly Caucasian professors and writers who are propounding these theories as though their children are going to be somebody else.

[ Rushdoony ] You referred to the situation, the quotas and the racial characteristic of admissions at Berkeley. Sometime within the past year in my travels when I mentioned that someone told me that the University of California is at least honest about it. It is an actual practice in many a major university across country.

Well, last night on television there was a news cast of a council meeting in a California city. The mayor, not publicly, but in a private conversation had made an invidious remark about Martin Luther King.

[ Scott ] Oh. He said he wasn’t an angel.

[ Rushdoony ] Something of the sort. Well given the fact that Martin Luther King has been demonstrated by some of his own associates to have been an adulterer and also to have been dishonest, a plagiarist and having received his PhD degree dishonestly, it would be pretty hard to say anything honestly that would be favorable to the man. And yet he came close to losing his position as mayor, very close...

[ Scott ] Very close.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. At the same time we have had the new governor, Pete Wilson, in effect attack Christianity by declaring—and I am quoting now from the Sacramento Union Sunday, February the third, 1991, David Chilton’s column. “One of Wilson’s first actions as governor was to issue an official proclamation declaring February a self esteem and responsibility month. That is why he appointed Andrew M. Mecca, former chairman of the state self esteem task force, to head the department of alcohol and drug programs. The plan is to keep young people already afflicted with a perennial case of self absorption off of drugs by telling them how godlike they are, as if they needed reminding. And since he cares so very much about our youth and the message he is sending them, Wilson appointed pro abortionist John Seymour to take over his spot in the senate. Abortionists, you see want women to feel good about themselves even if it means ripping infants out of their wombs and tearing their little bodies to shreds,” end quote.

Well, of course, what Pete Wilson did was to indulge in new age propaganda because the essence of this self esteem bit is the new age thinking. So he proclaimed a month to honor a particular religious group in the state of California. This kind of thing is happening at various parts of the country, but for David Chilton there would not have been any particular attention called to this or to the background of the thinking or to say that this is new age propaganda.

[ Scott ] Well, let’s look at where the new age is taking us. At this point we have a army of 500,000 people in Kabul engaged in the beginnings of what looks like a protracted war. And we are already hearing about the racial composition of the army as though it is some sort of discrimination. We have been told that the percentage of black volunteers too high when combat is involved. It wasn’t too high when job offerings and career offerings were involved, but when danger is involved it is bad.

Now we are reaching a point where we are going to have difficulty in defending the country because a man who wants to lay down his life to defend a nation has to have some idea of what he is defending.

[ Rushdoony ] How many of our troops in Saudi Arabia, black and white, are told that slavery is common place to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries as well?

[ Scott ] That is beginning to seep through the edges. It is beginning to percolate through the black community. I don’t know what effect it will have on the black Muslims, but this, of course, has always been true of Islam.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Islam is a religion which you never hear any more about which gives you one choice: convert or die.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. In fact, one of the maxims of Islam over the centuries was that a Moslem had the right to test the sharpness of his sword on any unbeliever’s neck. That was literally true.

[ Scott ] It is in almost every sense a very evil civilization. And that has been hidden. It is an interesting to observe that where Christianity, which brought individual freedom and the equality of every soul which brought in ever race, every ethnic creed, which brought brotherhood to the world is fastened with all these dark accusations. Well, Islam which was created by the sword and maintained by terror has been treated as though it is a noble undertaking.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now you were present, Otto, when in a conference recently I called attention to the fact that one of the first names that Christians gave to themselves and which appears in the liturgies was the third race. They were the new humanity in Jesus Christ, a new humanity which embraced all peoples of all tribes, tongues, races and colors. And no people in all of history have shown the readiness to include other groups than have the Christian peoples. And yet simply because it isn’t perfect, everything is done to denigrate Christian culture.

[ Scott ] Well, there was a book, you recall, called How the West Grew Rich. There were not platoons of Chinese millionaires that came over in the Middle Ages to teach the westerners how to improve agriculture or to take care of their medical problems or to lend them money to set them up in business or anything of the sort. There has never been teams of black Africans running around the world civilizing and educating people and setting up orphanages and hospitals. Only the Christians have done that. And yet even the worst of our enemies abroad have never {?} all of the calumnies that have been propounded in this country by our own people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is astonishing. If there is going to be an anti Christian program on TV I know they will find a minister to carry the burden.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the things that I remember vividly from the 30s was the number of Christians who went all over the world to teach various things together with guns to the peoples. You remember Frank Lauback who brought literacy to virtually every people throughout the world, did a remarkable work. And he was a teacher to more people than anyone has ever been in history. He has not been honored in our text books. There was Sam Higgenbottom, a man of remarkable achievement who spent his life in India teaching the people in that country how to farm and the change he made in that country was enormous.

[ Scott ] Well, I...

[ Rushdoony ] Even... excuse me. Even as recently as the 60s it was predicted that by 1980 or 1975 people would be dropping dead by the millions in India for lack of hunger, food, because of hunger, starvation. But it was the work begun by Sam Higgenbottom that transformed India and has made it a food producing country, something no one expected. And yet who writes about Sam Higgenbottom and tens of thousands of others like him? Sam Higgenbottom happened to be a Presbyterian missionary.

[ Scott ] Well, the same thing could be said of every other group, every other group. They have never sent teams around helping anybody. Every other religion...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Only the Christians have shared all their inventions and the fruits of all their research and their efforts with the world. Every other group took care only of its own. Now there ... we get this business of cultural imperialism. We are told that our text books and our children should be taught about the contributions of other cultures. This reminds me of Woodrow Wilson’s constant complaint that when anyone disagreed with him they did so from a selfish reasoning. He was the only man in the world who never had a selfish interest. Every one that disagreed with him was selfish.

Now everyone who disagrees with not only our official minorities, but our unofficial minorities is a bigot. It is bigotry to even mention the existence of the white race. The term arouses suspicion and, of course, to say that you are a Christian means that all doors or not all doors, but many doors automatically close. And many minds close as well.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now, of course, in large parts of the world we are told that this is true. If you simply say you are an American... We have been advised by the state department not to dress like Americans, not to wear American flags. There are now several agencies that I know of, personal agencies, private agencies that will get you a second passport so you won’t run the risk of your life in traveling with an American passport. There is no law against having another passport. And this is grown up because we are now the pariah people of the world. We have been so grotesquely denigrated not only by our intellectuals, but by our enemies in Hollywood who portray us as monsters, as perverts, grotesque and send us all around the world.

[ Rushdoony ] I have good news for you, though, about Hollywood. The election last November was notable for one fact that is not being publicized. Every issue that your film stars came out and produced commercials for failed.

[ Scott ] Well....

[ Rushdoony ] They were the kiss of death this time.

[ Scott ] Well, they have been the kiss of death for a long time. Culturally they are the kiss of death.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But this time the people reacted negatively to everything that Hollywood {?} stars did commercials for.

[ Scott ] Well, this is... that is... I would say ordinarily that that would be hopeful. But the problem that I keep running into is that the American nation no longer appears to pay attention to results. The American government doesn’t pay attention to results. Businessmen don’t pay attention to results. They continue to plow money into areas in which they lose. Movies are produced that lose at the box office and yet another one comes along with the same genre. The great television networks are losing viewers by the thousands, the tens of thousands, but they are still telling us the same nonsense. It is very strange.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is nearly up. But to close on a more hopeful note, I think it is remarkable that in the face of this really intensified attack on us, the place of Christians in American society is such that the opposition is afraid. They cannot understand why we are growing. I have in the past few weeks had calls from major television stations asking questions. And the thing that impressed me was that they are getting a little afraid to attack without first checking up on their facts. I think that is the most hopeful sign I have seen.

So they are becoming uneasily aware of the growing importance of Christians. And I think we are going to see that grow. We are going to increase in numbers, in awareness and in strength.

[ Scott ] Well, I certainly hope that is true.

[ Rushdoony ] I believe it is.

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

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