From the Easy Chair

The New Paganism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 136-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CT178

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CT178, The New Paganism, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 288, April the fifth, 1993.

Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will now discuss the new Paganism.

The word new is important in that title. The old Paganism, such as you had among the Greeks and the Romans and various ancient cultures and civilizations, was clearly a form of Humanism, but it did believe in a fundamental order of sorts. Religion was a branch of the state and the state is the divine human order sought to enforce some kind of law structure within society.

Now, of course, the old Paganism had a problem. It became apparent after a while to people that the gods were non existent—they were mythological—that the state officials were not gods, that Caesar was a man like anyone else. And little by little cynicism set in to every one of these older Paganisms. And they ended up in lawlessness. They ended up with every kind of perversity made into an acceptable form of behavior.

The new Paganism is very different in that it begins with a premise that there is no good nor evil, that there is no authority of any kind, that every man is his own god, that every man can do as he pleases and the state should simply guarantee him the freedom to do that. The new Paganism, for example, is militantly against any restriction upon the natural, unconverted man. Every kind of behavior he wants to practice should be acceptable.

Judge William O’Douglas of some 40 years or so ago actually felt that anything natural was valid so that the cannibalism of natives should not be criticized or interfered with, that the various practices, polyandry in Tibet and other practices elsewhere all had their validity. When you believe, as Clark Kerr formulated it in a multiverse, you deny the fact of a universe, of a God, of one law, one faith one baptism as Paul put it. But there is a single order that is right and all variations from it are wrong. So the new Paganism says that everything is acceptable that man can do other than Christianity. The Marquis de Saad held that the only crime was Christianity, that whether it was murder, rape, incest, cannibalism, everything should be legalized. And we are legally moving in the direction of the Marquis de Saad’s plan for society.

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, as you were saying that I was thinking, you know, how do these ideas propagate. And I think Hollywood, the motion picture industry is now the great celebrator and communicator of Paganism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And they spread it world wide. And this is a fairly recent phenomenon. You know, they started out as being a dream factory and a teen medium, but now they feel that it is ... that the... that they have a mission to spread Paganism. They have picked the worst of what society does rather than the best and they attack what society holds sacred. And in that they have attacked Christianity as being consistently as Christians as being sub human and any ideas Christian as being subversive

[ Scott ] Well, it came down from the top. You brought up Nietzsche before. And Nietzsche lived at the time of Wagner who in his operas went to the gods of the Teutons and it was the same period of time that the great historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burkhart spoke about. Burkhart was a professor in Switzerland at the time and this is now the 1870s.

He predicted the rise of what he called the terrible simplifiers and at the time when the Louvre would be sacked and the museums would be sacked and destroyed. And in 1917 another generation or more later we had {?} who talked about the decline of the West at a time when the West still looked secure, when we still had... men were still wearing suits and ties and using civil language and when the institutions were apparently secure and so forth.

So at the very top, now, William James in his lectures at Edinburgh shortly after the turn of the century on the varieties of religious experience in which he went through all the different projections that people had, a concept of God. And one’s concept of God, you know, is a revelation of himself. One sees God has himself enlarged is the tendency. And he ended what was really a remarkable work by saying, in effect, that there was no particular reason to assume that there is only one God. The could just as well be many gods. He went in for polytheism and he said this was just as logical. So it is on surprise to know that he was to a happy man.

But the whole point of this is that from really if we... if we go into it in any depth, the Unitarians began to rise around the 1820s and 1830s in England out of the Deists, off shoots of the Deists. So on the very top there is the loss of faith and the loss of faith today is radiated and carried on by the movies and so forth. But these are 10th rate minds that we are talking about in the movies. This is a street level. These are the characters that can barely wear clothes if you see photographs of them. They can’t hardly speak English. They give you these drug induced hallucinations that they call movies and this has been a steady, rather precipitous decline intellectually from the... from the highest levels down to the bottom that nothing makes any sense. And I think Rush is right on target. He said this is different than the old Paganism. This is anarchistic Paganism.

Religion in this United States, according to the United States Supreme Court, religion can be even mentioning God. That is establishment of religion. When we have a supreme Court that calls a kindergarten prayer the establishment of religion and now you know of the towering structure that constitutes a religion. And when these people will take a piece of doggerel as religion we are looking at the complete collapse, intellectual collapse of standards. And this is the modern Paganism.

[ Murray ] It is letting judges, it is letting men decide what the law is.

[ Scott ] And what you are allowed to think. Don’t forget that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because if a student isn’t allowed to mention God in class, neither is the professor. And outside the class in public debate we are being told that if you express your religious beliefs, you are forcing your religious beliefs upon other people and that is an offense. The mere expression of your faith is being outlawed. Now this is Paganism in action, because nothing makes a pagan angrier than to be told that there is a God.

[ M Rushdoony ] In schools it is popular now to have class discussions. Now a lot of Christians have... who send their kids to these schools are under the false illusion that, well, my child can tell what they believe and talk about their Christian faith in class and they are encouraged to do so and they think that somehow this is ... this means that what is going on in class is... is... is fine. What they don’t realize is that the whole purpose of class discussions is to say, “Nobody is right and nobody is wrong. Therefore everybody should get their ideas out in the open.” And the whole idea of this socialization is to let’s blend all these ideas and let’s see where we all agree. Let’s see where we can all agree on something and let’s blend all these ideas into something that is good for everybody.

It is not to say, well, here is someone who might have the best idea or here is someone who is right and here is someone that is wrong. We blend it. And when nobody is right and nobody is wrong then the only thing that is left is what is the pragmatic approach. On a social level the pragmatic approach, if there is no right and wrong, is the statist approach, because somebody is going to have to say that this is what it ... the way it is going to be. And so truth ends up being established for us.

[ Murray ] The public schools have become cafeteria learning. You just walk down the line and you pick out what you... what tastes good.

[ Scott ] Well, the idea that there is no right or wrong was expressed at a party I attended in San Francisco years ago. Most of the people were Berkeley people. And this one woman ... the question of rights came up and she said, “Well, there aren’t any rights. There is only what is allowed. There is no such thing as rights.” She was a Marxist.

I said, “Well, if I were to accept that line of reasoning you have no right to speak, because I have the power to knock you teeth out and you are only speaking because I let you. You have no right to speak.”

And she didn’t like that which was her own idea.

[ Rushdoony ] And did she leave with her all her teeth, Otto?

[ Scott ] Yeah. I... I didn’t knock her teeth out, but I... I could.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, one of the most interesting figures of this century who is highly touted as a liberator and a great writer, but actually he was a very pathetic little man, Henry Miller, little in character, little in his timidity and fearfulness. He wrote as though he were a great bold lover, but he was a pathetic figure, very pathetic. His one wife whom he was intensely in love with humiliated him at every turn and she was a lesbian. She actually brought her girlfriend right into the house.

At any rate Henry Miller was a champion of the new Paganism. He was against all law, all morality, all trace of Christianity. And he believed that what we needed was a time of the assassins, as he called it, a time when there would be a total war against all history and against the past, against all knowledge, when libraries would disappear, when the ability to read, to write would disappear and education would disappear and there would be, perhaps, 200 years of barbarism. Then, he felt, mankind would be reborn because it would be free.

It would have no memory of Christianity, of God, of anything like that. And then you would have a free people.

Well, that dream of Miller’s has been echoed by a great many people in the modern age. And it is an example of the new Paganism, the desire to live beyond good and evil in a world where there is no God nor any echo of him. And, of course, it is an illusion. It is impossible. But in the process it is going to create a great deal of distress, death and general disorder.

[ Scott ] My experience with these kind of free thinkers is that they seem to be under the illusion that they will continue to exercise the rights that they don’t believe in.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That the other guy is going to take care of them, just like that woman that I told you about. That the other guy is going to be fair.

I remember interviewing a fellow who got a terribly long sentence, a criminal and he was in a state of absolute foaming indignation over the district attorney who had promised him a short sentence if he would plead guilty and then they gave him a long sentence.

And I said, “Well, why would you of all people expect somebody else to be honest?”

[ Rushdoony ] What did he say?

[ Scott ] He didn’t answer. But he was very indignant at the fact that honest men weren’t what they were supposed to be. He expected the other guy to be honorable while he himself had no honor. And this seems to run like a thread through these kind of people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The ungodly want the rest of the world to be godly.

I think Voltaire was very honest there, because he refused to allow his friends to discuss their unbelief in the presence of his servants. He would silence them when the servants were going to come in with refreshments because he said, “If they believe there is no God, then they will slit my throat and rob me of everything because there is no judge beyond the universe to judge them in due time.”

[ Scott ] I remember that and he was quite right.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He was quite right. And you... you would... you do better with primitives. You do better with the people of Brazil, bad as they are. They have forms of worship. And we have savages. We have pagans that are worse than the savages. And Dahlmer, Jeffrey Dahlmer, there is a nice, handsome faggot for you. The book has already been written about him. He is in the state of Wisconsin which has no capital punishment, but his victims are dead.

[ Murray ] Well, it seems like all these people are trying to find a way of excusing their behavior like kids coming up with excuses for reasons not to ... to behave with any discipline. And none of them want any discipline at all.

[ Scott ] Well, yet they are living in a country which is getting more regulated by the minute. They may be ... they may have some sort of an illusion. I think the basis of the illusion is the confusion between license and liberty.

[ Rushdoony ] I was about to make that same point. Yes.

[ Scott ] License is what the state offers when it takes over. Any people who accept that bargain that we will let you sexually misbehave and in the meantime we will control you in every other respect, winds up locked up.

[ Rushdoony ] Every age of tyranny has been preceded or accompanied by radical sexual license. This was true in Rome. It was true before that in Greece. It was true with the Renaissance, an age of tyrants. And it is again true.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] It preceded Nazi Germany.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] Most emphatically. We are not told about the horrifying conditions of moral degeneracy that marked the Weimar Republic.

[ Scott ] The Weimar Republic is the closest modern parallel to the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The arguments against abortion, the coat hanger argument, the argument that it is the compassionate who want women to have abortions and so forth. Practically the whole thing. I have in my library some books on the Weimar Republic and its social aspects and it is, as you say, pretty terrible. And look what had happened, what it ran into.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] What it ended in, what it culminated in. It built the ground for Hitler.

[ Rushdoony ] And we imported some of the very same people who have helped popularize that moral depravity in the films of Germany into the United States.

[ Scott ] Well, Billy Wilder and many others... he used to spend six months of the year in Berlin and six months of the year in Los Angles.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Marlene Dietrich.

[ Scott ] Marlene Dietrich.

[ Rushdoony ] She never succeeded in a film here and yet she was highly talented, subsidized because she was a missionary for the new Paganism.

[ Scott ] She was... well, she was one of their exemplars. But the... that is the bargain. The bargain is you can let down the sexual barriers and people mistake that for liberty. So that is the reason they think we are free now. But in every serious aspect they gradually corner you. And the Weimar Republic and the French Revolution and the Renaissance were all persecutors of the Christians. The Christians... they seem to be drawn to the Christianity like a moth to the flame. I have two ... I have a copy of the New York Review of Books which is one of my masochistic exercises which I read. The articles are long and turgid and pains in the ass, really. You know from the first sentence what the conclusion is going to be and the conclusion is several thousand words down the road. And there are two ... two advertisements in this latest issue. One is called the son of Jesus and I have forgotten the title of the ... oh, yes. The other is the big elaborate ad for the gospel according to Q, another piece of blasphemy. They cannot seem to leave Christianity alone.

Now you don’t see advertisements of books by Christians attacking Judaism. You never have. I can’t even think of any and I am a very widely read man. And yet the books against Christianity keep piling up.

[ Rushdoony ] It was interesting the other day to see on PBS something about these jungle tribes. And I turn in late and I never caught where they were. They could not count beyond two.

[ Scott ] Oh, goodness.

[ Rushdoony ] They count one, two... many. They were extremely primitive. No concept of advancing themselves nor any interest in it. They... it was said that the men would beat their wives, actually burn them at times and all this was said with reverential tones as though here were these dear primitive peoples who were so superior.

Now that is the kind of thing that marks the new Paganism. Any kind of practice anywhere in the world is valid if it is done by pagans.

[ Scott ] Well if it is not done by Christians. The big argument against Christians, the Christianity, of course, is that it is against the flesh.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The sins of the flesh. That is the unforgivable argument at all times. Although how they propagate it we will never know.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, some years ago in a learned quarterly I read an article by a historian about Boccaccio...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And his outlook in the {?}. All while the plague was going on he and these wealthy young men and women, playboys and playgirls withdrew to a safe place and ridiculed the moral universe, ridiculed Christianity, turned everything that was serious into a joke. And the scholars point of view was that unless we realize what Boccaccio’s goal was, we don’t understand the world that ensued, the Renaissance. And we can add that we cannot understand our time because the same mentality is here with us.

The stories were not what was most important for Boccaccio, it was the opportunity to get one subtle or not too subtle dig in against the faith.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Although I just learned from Bellor’s book that we could probably credit Boccaccio with resurrecting Tacitus. And Tacitus was not a popular... well, Tacitus to an extent is held responsible for the Machiavelli. Where Tacitus was writing about Tiberius and the other caesars in contempt, Machiavelli wrote about them admiringly as epitomes of the prince. And we get this now from our media regarding the attitude of Clinton and Hillary and Shalala and the rest. They are being written about admiringly. And the dominant, the manner in which the Democratic party tried to put all the Republicans in prison during the Reagan and Bush years for the sin of having been elected, is admired. The way they run Congress today, you know, they run roughshod over the minority. And just in the last few days a minority has had such a whipping from its constituents that the minority is standing up and blocking some legislation and they are horrified, because this is all supposed to run one way.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, they are determined to make it one run... run one way. And to me it is ironic that Paganism, the new Paganism is so totally against dissent. And yet it presents itself as the champion of freedom, freedom, of course, they limit to licentiousness.

[ Scott ] That is it. That is the end.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There is no other freedom that is worthwhile.

[ Rushdoony ] Not for them.

[ Scott ] When Truman Capote, unspeakable, but talented, wrote that book In Cold Blood, about eth two murderers in Kansas who went in and murdered an entire family to no avail because the family had nothing in the house and it was just a farm family that took them in and fed them and treated them kindly and then returned were butchered. And Capote wrote this long book, very convincingly In Cold Blood. It was a terrible book to read, but it was well done of its genre.

There were a spate of reviews... a spate of letters that went into the New York Times book review in which the majority of the letters assumed that if these two young criminals had slept together they would have avoided criminality.

[ Rushdoony ] Unbelievable.

We mentioned earlier Nietzsche and his writings, his contempt for truth, his belief that a lie is very often far, far preferable and far more useful than the truth. He also wrote a book entitled Beyond Good and Evil because he did not believe that morality was valid and that morality had to be abolished.

Well, I think the political sphere has been a good illustration of Nietzsche’s thinking. Our politicians, of both parties, have been contemptuous of truth, contemptuous of the people. And we don’t have to look any further than the last two presidents or take the last six or seven to see how casually truth has been dealt with. And this is the new Paganism, because the new Paganism wants us to believe that we now live in an era when things are to be determined scientifically, not morally. And the only time, by the way, I have seen a favorable reference to morality in any political discussion is in a book written, oh, maybe 20 years ago by one historian about Woodrow Wilson and the politics of Woodrow Wilson.

He saw it as an example of the highest kind of morality, because, of course, it conformed to the humanistic attitude. Perhaps only in that context will they use the term morality.

[ Scott ] They used... you are right. They used the term morality whenever there is a policy that they approve and only then, because morality then becomes confused with their policy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Normally they are anti morality.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] They want a world that is beyond good and evil.

[ Scott ] It is part of the degradation of language.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The English, with all their faults—and they have many—are beginning to go the same way. And you find it on the highest levels. Although they still use their language with more precision than the Americans, they have abandoned the right and wrong to a great extent.

What is normal and what is abnormal is beginning to fade into a general Libertarian excess so that they will praise an individual—and you notice this in The Spectator. They will praise an individual for all sorts of qualities although his personal life is unspeakable.

[ Rushdoony ] We think of Nietzsche usually as a philosopher, but Nietzsche saw himself as a philologist.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And it is interesting that one who was a philologist would so debauch language. In terms of that, the third international Webster’s followed a Nietschian premise. It debauched language.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] It did it systematically.

[ Scott ] Yes. It put B C down as bachelor of chemistry as the first definition. Can you imagine? It is absolutely useless. They are selling it for 19 dollars and nobody is buying it.

[ Rushdoony ] And now even Catholic and Protestant scholars and university presidents will not write B C. It is B C E...

[ Scott ] Before common era.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes. Even Notre Dame.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now why the Catholics...

[ Rushdoony ] That upset me.

[ Scott ] ...did this I don’t know. What goes on in their mind?

[ Murray ] Look at what you have to pay for an older dictionary. You know, that second edition of Webster’s cost me 150 dollars. It probably sold new for 20.

[ Scott ] That was a bargain.

[ Murray ] {?}

[ Scott ] No. It sold for a little bit more. I have forgotten now. I have it. A hundred and fifty dollars for that is a bargain. The last time I spoke to some students from a Catholic university I think from Georgetown, I am not sure, was at a Philadelphia society meeting. And to my astonishment they were going on at great length about Aristotle.

Now why anyone in this day and age would go on about Aristotle baffles me.

[ Rushdoony ] When you read Aristotle without any Thomistic ideas in your mind, if you just put them to one side and read Aristotle as a Greek, you find him a very muddle headed thinker. And our problem is that scholars today, in particular Catholic scholars, see Aristotle through Thomistic yes. And that is not tenable.

[ Scott ] It is not tenable at all. It is not tenable at all. I mean they make fun of the early explorers in the age of exploration under the impression that they didn’t know that the world was rounded and, of course, they have always known that, on the theory that there was such a thing as a flat earth group.

I was taught that in American primary school and I discovered later in life, of course, that that is a total myth. But Aristotle did believe it. And they respect Aristotle.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] It worked for him.

[ Rushdoony ] When I was a student a Berkeley there was one professor, in particular, who in dealing with English drama had a particular item that he used at least once a semester and sometimes two or three times. He loved to ridicule Christianity. And this particular person, who is affiliated with the Globe Theater and sundry other businesses, kept very close records and he, among other things, had a house of prostitution.

In his record book he would always begin in the year of our Lord such and such a date.

Well, the students would all laugh and think it was a great story. But there was at least an element of order there.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Hew knew that he was living in the year of our Lord and that there was a judgment to come. And that is why there was, in spite of the wildness of that era, an element of restraint.

[ Scott ] Well, they knew when they sinned.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there is ... they knew somebody was watching.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Of course, also hey had the idea in those days that you could repent at the end and be saved.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. White, in a book that he wrote on the Renaissance cavalier, said that medieval man knew always that the eyes of God were upon him. Whether he believed or not, he knew that. But Renaissance man believed he was on a stage and it was the eyes of man who were upon him so that what Castiglione wrote in his Courtier was if you were a knight and you were in battle, you played it safe unless you could sees the prince or the king watching, looking in your direction. Then you charged boldly because life is a stage. And you have to make sure you do your acting when it counts, when the right person is watching you.

[ Scott ] Things are in a strange way, though, altering. The people who do not believe that God is watching are learning very... with great difficulty that that world is watching. And now one of the offshoots of licentiousness is, of course, the abandonment of censorship on what you can write about the dead.

Now recently somebody has written a biography of Kissinger. I haven’t had the time or the inclination to look into it, but I saw a long review of it by one of the nation’s reviewers and I was very surprised, because apparently the biographer has gone into the details of Kissinger’s duplicity. Kissinger was a fellow who would say one thing about Mr. Nixon to Mr. Nixon and lots of other things about Mr. Nixon to other people. And he did that with everyone. He lied consistently all through his public career in Washington. He was the one who authorized the wire taps on his staff and who lied to the staff about it. And obviously he didn’t learn to lie in Washington. He liked long before he got there. So what he has to say about his own background is a lie, too.

And the reviewer said, “In the end he stands exposed as an evil individual.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Mr. Kissinger had remained very quiet, because he is not dead. But he knows better than to say anything.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the modern pagan outlook leads to the loss of free speech, freedom of press, because when you believe that the eyes of God were upon you, you also confessed your sins. You made no bones about it. And when you go back and not only to the Middle Ages, but the Reformation era, subsequently, you find very prominent figures publicly confessing very serious sins.

[ Scott ] I am very... I remember that. When I was a boy I read the ... the book... the autobiography, I guess you would call it, the confessions of Benevento Cellini.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I was... I remember at one point he was dragging his mistress across the floor by her hair when he received a summons to... from the pope.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And he so described it. And if that is the sort of candor which, of course, we do not run into.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right. Well, you see, you had that kind of candor in one of our presidents. Cleveland.

[ Scott ] Yes. Cleveland was one of our best...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And when he was confronted with the fact that the landlady at the boarding house where he had lived as sheriff in Buffalo, I believe, had had an illegitimate child he took the responsibility, even though the child was not his, but he said, “I was guilty. I was one of the men there who had connections with her,” but she was already pregnant. But he supported the child.

And the clergy of the country backed him and he was elected.

Now when you do not believe that the eyes of God are the important thing, but the eyes of man, then you wan to silence anything about yourself that it might be discreditable. So you have had a great deal of censorship when attempts at censorship to prevent other people from knowing because they have replaced God in your thinking.

[ Scott ] Well, it is not working.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] I mean, we may have lost freedom of speech, but the revelations and, of course, because of the laws of libel and slander you cannot libel the dead in American law.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] And I was shocked. I have been persistently shocked by the revelations about some of our celebrities that come out right after they die. I never thought Bernstein was a good conductor. I always thought Bernstein was an absolute nonsense terrible conductor because he distorted every composer’s music. But I had no idea that he was a sexual monster as well and a social monster until he died and then suddenly out it comes. The same thing about Malcolm Forbes. I had no idea that Forbes... there was anything wrong with Malcolm Forbes until he died and then suddenly out come these books.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, with Bernstein, he himself wrote about them before his death.

[ Scott ] Well I didn't read it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He wrote about it as though it was creditable to exercise the freedom to commit incest and other things. He was an contemptible character.

[ Scott ] Well, no wonder he was a bad artist.

[ M Rushdoony ] Liberace won a lawsuit against someone who suggested that he was a homosexual.

[ Scott ] Can you imagine? Was there any ever...

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] How could he have won that lawsuit? He must have bribed the judge.

[ M Rushdoony ] It must have been little old ladies on the jury.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think we ought to turn our minds now to the problem of how we are to deal with the new Paganism. One of the things that I found very encouraging today in some of the reading I was doing in some of the reading I was doing was that no movement in the world is growing more rapidly than Christianity. It is not only growing phenomenally here in the United States, but all over the world in every continent. The advance is tremendous so that the new paganism as well as the old in some continents has to obliterate Christianity in the next generation or two or it will be plowed under by the rising tide of Christian faith.

[ Scott ] Well, we know that this government is doing its bets to outlaw Christianity...’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... from American public life. But we also know something about both Christianity and Paganism. I have a book. I think you probably have it, too, Pagans and Christians.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it is a... it is an interesting book in spots. At times it kind of...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is scrambled.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But there is one section which found intriguing and that is that there is a myth to the effect that pagan Rome, for instance, was sexually free and that everything was permissible, which was untrue. If men went to a brothel they had the same feelings of shame later that they would have today or that they would have in Christianity, because it was a step downward. It wasn’t real. And at no time have individuals lived without a conscience. They have always had a conscience. If they do something that is disgraceful or dis... or something that is dishonorable , they feel it. They know it.

Sin brings its own immediate punishment and the new pagans and their idea that they can escape the concept of sin are doomed to disappointment because they do not. Even when they write about it and they brag about it, what is his name? Allen, the movie producer, the... the film fellow, Woody Allen. I mean, whatever his real name is, we will never know.

[ Murray ] Woodrow.

[ Scott ] Woodrow. Huh? I don’t believe that. He is now paying the penalty and he is not proud of the exposure. He is not giving any speeches in favor of his liberty. And the new pagans are learning what the old pagans learned, that it leads to misery.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] He has made a lot of movies along those lines that, you know, freedom to do what you want without any consequences.

[ Scott ] Yes. I have never seen one. Somebody asked me once if I had read the book Our Crowd. I said, “I don’t have to. I come from New York. I know that crowd.” And it is not our crowd. It is their crowd.

[ Murray ] Well, I usually can’t get more than about half way through one because it reminds me of the Buster Keaton movies where Buster Keaton stars, he is the producer, the director, writes the story, is the prop man, sweeps the floor, the whole nine yards and you get sick of that after a while. About all you can stand is about a half a movie.

The... you know, the thrust of multiculturalism in this country kind of runs into a problem where you have got people of widely divergent religious backgrounds, because how do you punish people according to one particular code of justice when you have got people in this country who don’t think it is a crime to do a particular thing and you have got other people that do consider it a crime. How do you have an... an even handed code of justice? That is one of the problems that multiculturalism creates. The, you know, you have got people... Islamic people, all of the various religions in this country that is, you know, supposed to be a melting pot and it is not melting together.

[ Scott ] I think we probably should close the borders for 50 years or so while we undergo a period of adjustment.

[ Rushdoony ] Never had a problem of multiculturalism when the peoples we let in were Christian.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] They very quickly adjusted to life here. I spent some years at the settlement house in New York City... not... I spent some days at the settlement house in New York City that dealt with immigrants. And the history of that, I was told by the director, was that one wave after another of immigrants would come here and within five to seven years they would move out of the neighborhood and another wave would come in, because it took them only that long to get ahead, to adapt, to fit in with churches and other groups in communities into which they moved. That was the American story.

[ Scott ] Well, we had a different immigration system. The new system enacted in 1965, which was led through enactment by Senator Ted Kennedy left an open door for all the relatives of those accepted and also they changed the quota from northern Europe and even from Southern Europe, from all white Europe they shrank the quota and they opened the gates wide to Asians and blacks.

Now this was a deliberate policy by the government of the United States to change the racial and religious composition of the country. And none of the people who voted for it and none of the speeches that were made in its favor and under the promises that were made, that it would not do that, have ever been resurrected or published. And we have in this country—and this is a persistent complaint of mine—we have so many conservatives and so many Christians who are well educated and have money and time and leisure and yet they have never really gotten into these things in the kind of depth that the people need and they have never identified the authors of these revolutions.

[ Rushdoony ] One problem, of course, Otto, is that it would not be published.

[ Scott ] Well, you would have to publish it yourself.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. If you had the money.

[ Scott ] Yes. You would have to find some group...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...to back it. Right now I think you would. I think you would find groups, because there are small groups that are publishing of brochures and pamphlets and articles and essays. But they haven’t done the real... real job.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have a few minutes. Perhaps we can go around and see what each of you have to say about the new Paganism and the fact of coping with it, triumphing.

[ Murray ] Well, I think people have to become much more discriminating in what they watch on the media, the books that they read. Paganism oozes out of every pore from the media, from movies, from television and these pass times should not be viewed as a primary source of information. People need to read more and be much more disciplined in what they spend their time viewing and the movies that they go to see. Peoples get brainwashed after a while and if you watch enough of this Paganism you begin to think that it is the way life should be. And people simply have to draw back and away from it.

[ Scott ] Well, I remember a dialogue, an exchange of letters between Hagee, the writer and film reviewer and an Episcopal priest named Dr. Fly in which Hagee said that since he converted to Christianity and gave up a lot of his dissipations and so forth, he found that the people he used to like and associate with he no longer liked and could no longer associate with because, he said, their flaws began to irritate him. He couldn’t put up with it. And he wondered what this meant. He wondered whether this was a result of having converted and was it making him less tolerant.

And the priest wrote back, “As you grow in spiritual health the signs of spiritual sickness become more evident to you.”

[ Rushdoony ] Very good. Very good.

[ Scott ] And I think that is... that is where we fit.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We are talking about the signs of spiritual sickness.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, it reminds me of what you were talking about Sunday. I thought maybe you would bring it up about the difference between syncretism and apostasy. And you were talking about how they northern kingdom when the ... after Solomon when the northern kingdom split off of from Judah that the northern kingdom was syncretistic and the southern kingdom of Judah was more of an apostate kingdom that had periods of revival. And it seems that the United States is... is not just an apostate nation, but it is becoming increasingly syncretistic. And part of the problem with that is our churches and Christianity abandons the law when it abandons cardinal doctrines of Christianity. It doesn't just become a weak Christianity. It becomes a syncretistic Christianity.

And so much of the problem of turning away from Paganism is correcting these flaws in the Church, because our churches are much of the problem. It is not just going to back to the churches. It is going back to Christianity and going back to Scripture.

[ Murray ] They poison instead of purify.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I think that is very well put and I think that is the problem and some of the letters I received today so tellingly described as one minister did, in particular, the problem in the church where an indifferent kind of faith in a pastor is more tolerable than a strong unequivocal one. They don’t feel threatened by the man whose preaching is fuzzy, but the man whose preaching is clear cut they see as a threat.

Well, God bless you all and thank you for listening.

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