From the Easy Chair

Authority

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 143-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CX185

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CX185, Authority, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 295, August the fourth, 1993.

This evening Douglas Murray—back again after a few weeks in Alaska—Otto Scott and Mark Rushdoony and I are going to discuss, first of all, the question of authority.

This is a very important question or subject for our time because authority in any historic sense is very widely denied. And yet Richard Sennett in his book Authority, published in 1980 had this to say and is perspective is not mine. It is not even religious, but all the same he said—and this is the first sentence in his book: “The need for authority is basic. There can be no society,” he goes on to point out, “without some kind of authority. The absence of authority is anarchy.”

What we have—and this is the title of his first chapter, “The Fear of Authority.”

Today instead of a respect for authority we have a very, very wide spread fear of it. And, in its place, there is a faith, he says, in the negative spirit, a faith in negation, a faith in destruction at times so that we are in a crisis because we have not resolved properly the question of authority.

Well, authority means that power and moral assurance, certainty, rightness comes from whatever is the ultimate authority and power in a society. For Christian civilization this is the triune God. In other cultures it has been gods or spirits or men, very often the political order.

In our time we have a crisis. There is a breakdown in any belief in God’s authority in a vast segment of our society so that authority now emanates from two sources. One is the power state. The other is the anarchic individual. As a result, people look to the state as the final authority and, in fact, a very common argument increasingly is that something should be done to the people who are protesting against abortion. And it is actually being said in print that since the Supreme Court has spoken, these protestors have no right to an opinion on the subject. They have no right to oppose what is accepted.

Of course, this is a far cry from the attitude of the 60s but it is an increasingly common one. The state has the authority and against that, of course, the anarchic individual, the belief that unless one gives his consent to something, it cannot be binding.

Because of this fact, our society is increasingly in crisis with the state refusing to be bound by any moral law and more and more and more individuals saying, “My will be done and no one has the right to contradict me.”

Well, with that general introduction, Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject?

[ Murray ] Well, I think we have all seen the bumper stickers in California. I haven't seen them anywhere else that says, “Question Authority.” And this seems to be a recurring theme bubbling up out of the mud in California, at least, for about the past 30 years, this anarchistic drive to eliminate all authority that each person is their own god and their own authority. And this has led us down the garden path.

The ... you mentioned the decision regarding abortion and I think it is difficult to sustain authority when you don’t have some unanimity within a culture and—correct me if I am wrong—but I think... I think the Roe versus Wade decision was five four. Generally the Supreme Court revisits a decision that is that close. And they haven’t revisited that decision or at least not treated it in depth for 20 years, which is rather unusual when that close a.... a vote and I think it has gradually led to this deep breach in our society over whether they exercise due authority or... or not. And it has... it has led to a deep schism in our society over the fact that the court can make such a divisive decision that goes against everything that a large percentage of our society believes in and try to sustain it over a long period of time without moderating it to try to mollify some of the ... the divisiveness that has been caused in society.

So they... they have destroyed their own authority. The Supreme Court... I... most people that I talk to have virtually little or no respect for either the people on it or any of their decisions and they have done it to themselves.

[ Scott ] Well, the court spent an awful lot of its capital... a lot of its capital on the abortion decision. It took a long step into the area that Rush referred to in ruling without morality. And we are going to back several hundred years, 400... 400 years really... a little longer than that, 450 odd years in English history when some of these issues were first thrashed out. The question of a standing army, for instance, England was different than the continental powers because it didn’t have a standing army and as long as it didn’t have a standing army it didn’t have a despot. There were limits to the government’s authority. After the civil war they did create a standing army and the army then came up for special examination.

Now the difference between an army... a... a member of an army, let’s say, a soldier. The difference between a soldier and a citizen is that the soldier gives up his constitutional rights. He... if he is told to step forward and get killed, he has to do it. He has no right to disobey an order even if the order means instant death.

Now we are back at the point where the argument is being raised that an ordinary citizen has ... that a soldier has the rights of an ordinary citizen. That is the basic issue which is being raised in the question of whether a homosexual can serve in the army or not. It has nothing to do with whether the homosexual may be brave or cowardly. It has everything to do with the fact that you have to obey all orders in the military and if the orders are to forget sex you have to forget it. If orders are told that whatever your constitutional rights are, they do not apply in the armed services.

Now this was well understood when the standing army was established. And yet apparently we have attorneys now, lawyers and persons of high education who don’t know this simple historical fact. So we not only have a lessening of authority, but we have a lessening of intellect, a lessening of education, a lessening of the understanding of what constitutes a civilized society. Now a civilized society offers both freedom and protection, but it also offers responsibilities. And they are not on a sentimental basis. They are not on a whimsical basis. They are on the basis of the Christian civilization. A society that forgets that is no longer in the proper sense of the word civilized and authority then descends to the level of governmental terror as in the Waco incident.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, the... a lot of what passes for authority {?} authority, it is just the threat of power, which is what I think you were...

[ Scott ] Right.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... you were just saying. And government today has unquestioned power, but it doesn't have the respect that... that an authority carries. You know, you respect the authority of your father or your mother. And you respect authority because of its position by its very nature. People today don't respect government except be it for the fact that it has power. And so power is the only thing that... that the vestige of what the government has today with what the modern state has by which it claims to control the people and it is able to control people. But it has lost the authority and people today don’t only... only regard government because it has power and... and they are really separate.

[ Murray ] Well, that kind of manifests itself in the public’s attitude, at least in this country, toward the death of police officers in the line of duty. In the 1970s fairly recent there were approximately 100 police officers killed in the line of duty nationally per year. Now it is well over 200 and climbing, but the attitude has changed. There used to be a sense of indignation because the average citizen realized that the death of that police officer by a criminal was an attack on the citizen indirectly. It was the citizen who is where that authority came from, to put the badge on that man who was out there defending the public safety. But that attitude has changed over the past 20 year. Nowadays people say to a large extent there is a lot more people... a larger percentage of people out there that say, “Good riddance. It is one less guy who is going to give me a ticket or one less guy who is going to stand in my way of doing what I want.” So the attitude has changed. There used to be a real sense of indignation when a police officer was killed in a community and that has... that has changed.

[ Rushdoony ] Earlier, Douglas, you mentioned the bumper sticker question authority. I found that in talking to people who maintain that stance that they really mean question Christian authority, question family authority, question the authority of the university so that what they were doing is to replace the historic areas of authority, the religious authorities with their personal authority. Then they do everything to muddy the water on an issue by throwing in all kinds of statements that are half truths.

Very early in the abortion debate I found that people were saying, “Well, 150, 200 years ago there were no abortion laws.” And that is a recent attitude. But the fact is that while there were no statutes on the subject, the common law governed and the common law regarded it as murder. So technically they are right. The statutes are maybe a century or so old, but before that in terms of the common law, there was a very strict position.

Mark, you said that power has replaced authority and that historically is the end of a civilization. When power replaces authority it means that there must be, as Otto indicated, large standing armies to enforce the will of the monarch or of the state and people must be intimidated at every turn, because they will not obey out of any respect for those who are in power. And so the replacement of authority with power is an indication of the beginning of the end. Cultures that have gone down that road resort, then, to all kinds of oppressive things. Torture is one. We have seen it in our day in Marxist countries. It was routine in antiquity, legal in Roman law. It was displaced only by Christianity, but the Renaissance reintroduced it and this century has reintroduced it on the greatest scale in all of history and that is because authority is gone and power has replaced it. The Soviet Union was a good example of that. The Soviet Union killed off the priests in great numbers and all authority figures.

Well, the first generation had a capacity for work because of the work ethic of their Christian faith and in the first generation the little garden plots in the collectives were the source of over half the food in the Soviet Union. They would bring them in to the black markets and sell them. But as time went on, by the time of the 80s, for example, the garden plots were, with rare examples, rare instances, a thing of the past. What they were doing was to steal from the collective harvest and take it into town as though it had been their own garden produce.

So it was a civilization in the course of a rapid breakdown because power had replaced authority and therefore with the people in time character was replaced with theft and the country was desperately on the skids.

[ Murray ] Well, the question of who is in charge seems to span all of recorded history. Everybody seems to be perplexed by it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] It is... the question never seems to get answered definitively or... or in a lasting way except by those people who are Christians.

[ Rushdoony ] There is an interesting aspect of history that is forgotten and it has been very much on my mind the past few months. I have gone back and reread Plutarch whose perspective is not mine on Sparta. When Lycurgus took over, he was determined to create a power state in order to make Sparta strong, the dominant force. So what he did was to destroy marriage and the family and money, those three things. You could not have a home. Men and women slept in separate barracks and came together only to beget children. The rest of the time they were encouraged to every kind if immorality and homosexuality, lesbianism were both encouraged. Then, too, the money was debased so that no one could resort—and money was controlled totally by the state—so that no one could rely on his family or his property or his money. He had to rely exclusively on the state.

Now that was a way of replacing traditional Spartan authority with the power of the state. And it led to the destruction of everything in the past so that we know less about Sparta than most of the Greek cities. It is also a pattern that we are repeating today. We are working to destroy sexual morality in order to break down the family, in order to encourage homosexuality, male and female. We have debased the currency so that we have paper money, not hard money and we are going to, by taxation, take the income away from the people and their properties, progressively so that moral authority is being replaced by the naked power of the state and there will be no change in this, not a drift, but a march into Totalitarianism without a return to Christian faith and the reestablishment of Christian authority in ever sphere.

[ Murray ] Why do people put up with it?

[ Scott ] Well, sexual license is confused with liberty and it substitutes for the lack of liberty in other areas for a great many people. On the question of Sparta it seems to me that the Spartans fell apart when they came in contact with the luxury of Athens, because the austerity of their lives was pretty deadly. Sparta won the war and lost the game. Much as we have won the Cold War and lost the game. We have forgotten the lessons of history. We didn’t have a depression after World War II because the war didn’t stop. We went from a shooting war into a cold war and we stayed in a cold war for 50 years. We finally won the Cold War at the cost of our solvency. We won the Cold War the way England won World War II. It went bankrupt and we have gone bankrupt winning the Cold War.

Now we are demobilizing our forces and we are going to have a depression that we didn’t have at the end of World War II and anyone who doesn’t know that has overlooked the lessons of all history both cultural and economic.

So it doesn’t really matter what solutions Mr. Clinton has. None of them are going to work because we will not have enough jobs to take care of our demobilized military and he says, “Well, we will reeducate them.” And this is a boy who got out of school like the average American who went through school and went through college. He will never forget it. He will tell you about it for the rest of his life, because he thinks it is the greatest experience he has ever had just to go to school. And he thinks that schools are going to get us out of this trip.

Well, when you substitute an institution, institutions... Rush at one time called education the American religion and he called schools the American temples. This is not a very good temple. There is no god in that temple. There is no higher power in the temple. The is nothing but a bunch of school teachers and pieces of paper.

[ Rushdoony ] Years ago, in the 30s, I became the youth worker in the San Francisco Chinatown church. And one of my most vivid and unforgettable memories is of one woman there in that church of whom I thought the world of. She had been sold as a young girl, brought over here on a ship, put into a house of prostitution and been rescued by Donaldina Cameron. She had no illusions about her country. Other Chinese, whatever they knew, might still be sentimentally inclined, but she had none. And she was regarded by a number of people in the church as rather hard and strident in her opinions and attitudes, but I found her to be a remarkably gracious and sweet spirited person. But she told me China has a long history of rebellions, of uprisings, of mass destructions by vast numbers of peasants. But they never add up to anything, because they don’t have a faith that will give them the ability to create something. They can only kill and destroy and they get nowhere. And she saw no future for China unless it became Christian.

Now that is our problem today. We have all kinds of people who have answers, so-called, to the problems and I get letters from people who tell me that if the Americans would only realize that this or that law lays in the... lies in the statute books, a federal law or a state law, and they would use it, they could beat this present establishment.

Well, this establishment is one of evil men. We still have substantially the same Constitution we did 100 years ago. We don't have the same people. And so because God’s authority is gone, there is no way by any kind of gimmick we can reestablish authority of any legitimate sort in this country.

[ Scott ] Well, the religious conversion is a highly individual experience. There are a great many people who would still be in the Church if the Church hadn't fallen apart before the congregation did. And most people, for that matter, are never converted. They don’t know what the word means. They accept authority as an early age if they grow up in an authoritarian situation. And they go to church like my grandfather or my father. My father didn't bother. But my grandfather Mc Givney went to church religiously every Sunday because it was the proper thing to do. I don’t think he had any deep faith. I don’t think it ever entered his mind to question the church. He simply accepted it as a stable fact of life and that was that. And that is, I think, the way most people take their religion. If they grow up in an area that is irreligious, then they are irreligious and we have, of course, been irreligious in this country for a long time, a long time longer than most Christians want to believe.

In the 1820s and 1830s the is country began to adopt a flavor, a type, a category of religion that was just simply cuckoo and called it Christian. I mean for most people to become Christians in the United States you have to send them to school for at least a dozen years. They have no idea of what the Christian faith consists of. This is the size of the task that you have.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Someone observed recently that the average person in their teens today is a barbarian. They have no awareness of the fundamentals of a civilized society.

One of the things we need to recognize is that one of the motives of the modern age is to substitute the state for the family. The family was seen as the great road block very early. Religion, from the Enlightenment on, Christianity, in other words, was held to be the province of women and children. And when I was young—and maybe this is still true in European Catholic countries—it was held by the men that the church was good for women because it taught them their place, but it was definitely not the place for a man. The boys should go there, but as soon as he was of age, that was it. And among Protestants was not quite the same attitude, but the idea was that a man went to church because it was a good institution, important to the community.

Well, in Authority and its Enemies Thomas Molnar quoted from Condé Pallen’s book Crucible Island, 1919. The catechism that he felt children should memorize as soon as they were capable of reading. And here is the heart of the catechism. By whom were you begotten? By the sovereign state. Why were you begotten? That I might know, love and serve the sovereign state always. What is the sovereign state? The sovereign state is humanity in composite and perfect being. Why is the state supreme? The state is supreme because it is my creator and conserver in which I am and move and have my being and without which I am nothing. What is the individual? The individual is not only a part of the whole and made for the whole and finds his complete and perfect expression in the sovereign state, individuals are made for cooperation only, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.

Now this attitude, of course, was expressed in some of the catechisms of the Soviet Union. In their belief in a ... and the analogy they used a society that was comparable to a beehive in which consciousness was gone and there was only function left in the individual bee and, by analogy, in the individual person.

This was the goal of Karl Marx who felt that consciousness was a kind of alienation of a person from his true being. We have had the same kind of thinking in this country on the part of the sexual revolutionaries such as Henry Miller who felt that we needed two centuries of the time of the assassins during which reading and all knowledge would disappear, libraries would disappear, morality would disappear. Then, after two centuries of this kind of total moral anarchy mankind could emerge freed from morality and religion and live in a paradise.

Well, all such thinking presupposes a doctrine of man in which man is naturally good and only needs to be freed from Christianity to realize his potential. And what has happened, of course, is that hell on earth has been created by these people.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, it was Christianity which argued that the individual had authority. And it has been the Socialists who have argued that the greater good is what all individuals should ascribe to. And the greater good in... under Hitler, the grater good under Mussolini, the greater good under Stalin was considered the duty of every individual, should consider the greater good. So you could sacrifice a generation or two in order to bring in a better society. That was the... that was the rationale of the Fascists, the Nazis and the Communists, all of whom were sort... varieties of Socialists.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, John Dewey felt emphatically that the family was bad for children. He felt that Christianity was bad. He felt that our historic American education produced self conscious individuals and he was for the obliteration of self consciousness in favor of group consciousness. By the 60s—and I got this from students including university students—the teaching, while on the university level in classes, psychology classes—was directed against inner directedness in favor of group directedness and a variety of terms were coined whereby the focus of the individual would not be on himself. To have such a focus was to be at war with society, to be regressive. At the same time it encouraged self expression in a lawless way so that you could not think in terms of family and private property and the integrity of yourself as an individual, only in terms of a lawless sexuality, a hostility to the family and a hostility to authority could you be free, only by merging yourself into the group.

[ Scott ] Well, part of this, of course, was the rebellion against Christianity and Christian culture which began in the 19th century and continued on until our own and now, of course, is well advanced. Modern art, modern music, modern writing, writing without coherence, without chronology, without moral backing, standards and so forth, abstract expressionism and so forth. All this was an attack against the Christian authority in cultural areas and a great many Christians went along with it. In my opinion, a lot of protestants helped it by the fact that they despised art and artists. They almost excommunicated, you might speak, the artistic community. It wasn’t up to their standards and with the exception of literature and they didn’t do too much to defend that, but it did last longer than the others.

When you have the central culture, all the values, not just the family, but the whole thing that makes a family, I mean, the moral values inherent in a family, when they all go then, of course, you have a civilization that is in the process here for a while, a long time, I thought it was simply declined. Now I think it is more in the line of transformation. This is being changed into something else. We don't know yet whether it is going not collapse. It is too easy to say it will collapse because even Rome didn't collapse immediately. In fact, in some ways Rome never collapsed. It is still with us.

We have high tech which is getting higher and higher and more complicated all the time. We have engineering on the level that the world has never dreamed was imaginable... was ... was capable could be done and we are exploring space and we are going to continue to, I am sure.

So what we have here is, you might say... I once called the Greeks elegant barbarians. We are barbaric, we are becoming barbaric in cultural terms and certainly in traditional terms. But there are new things coming up. There is now an effort being made to a simple father and a simple mother is not enough. It is a biological father. It is a biological mother as separate from a legal father and a legal mother.

Siblings, which is a term that only scientists once used regarding animals is now a common social sociological term used by the social sciences. The social sciences, which have done so much to bring this debacle to us are now so entrenched that it is going to take almost a revolution to get rid of them.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the key figures in the destruction of authority was Charles Darwin. When you look at the evil men of our time—Marx, Freud, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and some in this country on high places and in England—you find that they were Darwinian to the core. And Darwin himself said about his own theory that he didn’t know whether he could trust the opinions of a higher ape like himself.

Well, such an opinion is radically erosive of all authority and as a Dr. Chilton, an American educator said about 10, 15 years ago, one of the deadly books in this country was The Naked Ape by, was it Desmond Taylor?

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] Desmond. Because it was used for several years in high schools across the country and he said that it was very effective with students in convincing them that they were a clothed ape. But that is all, that no moral premises, no right nor wrong, nothing had any validity except the appetites of an ape. So he said we should not wonder at what we see all around us.

[ Scott ] Well, we have new crimes I once wrote about, if you remember, in which a social scientist could conduct experiments with living human beings and ... in the name of professionalism, where psychiatrists can publish the secrets of what amounts to the confessional, revealing the secrets of their patients.

And then, of course, they make up things and pass them off as Freud did as valid. And anyone who believes Freud, believes in Santa Claus, in my opinion. And the ... so the question of authority takes on a sort of a complex nature here. What are we supposed to do when confronted with fraudulent authority or false authority?

[ Rushdoony ] Very good question. It has been in more than one study shown that a high percentage of all the scientific experiments reported in the scientific periodicals is fraudulent. Nothing is done about it. After all, if there is no authority whatever you can get away with is good, especially if it promotes you.

[ Scott ] If you win.

[ Rushdoony ] If you win yes. That is the only test.

[ Murray ] Well, it is done to raise government grant money.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] All of these things that, you know, global warming and ... and ozone holes and all this has turned out to be baloney.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And, you know, 10 year studies. And it is obvious it was constructed to simply get grant money to... to continue research and continue people’s paychecks.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The book Apocalypse Not by two Cato scholars goes into the whole series of environmental scares that we have had for the past 30 years or more and reports that they were all fraudulent.

[ Murray ] One of the latest ones is, you know, cellular telephones have a little antenna on them and you have to put them up beside your head to use them. They are just like a telephone handset, only they are completely self contained. They put out a very minute amount of ... of energy, but they now have studies going forth that are costing millions to determine what the long term effects are going to be on people. Well, I know fellows... I have known fellows all my life in the electronics industry. Many of them are in their 80s and some are in their 90s and they are all chuckling and laughing over the stupidity, because they have all worked around power levels that were thousands of times greater than what the cellular telephones generate with no apparent ill effect.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] How can you figure out in the short run what the long run effect is going to be?

[ Rushdoony ] The authors of Apocalypse Not quote a prominent scientist as saying that the whole point of a game is to scare people. And what happens when you scare people? They then are ready to have the authority of the state take over and control another sphere of life.

[ Murray ] Well, it is a giant game of trick or treat.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You remember that Peter Beckman resurrected a campaign headed by the New York Times against electric... electricity. It was going to kill the horses and do all kinds of terrible things. And he put out a very amusing pamphlet in which he reproduced the headlines in the Times and the news reports that after heavy storms, the power lines had fallen and killed a horse here and there and so forth and so on, electricity.

The whole attitude toward nuclear energy, for instance, is very similar to the attitude of being against electricity because it is used in the electric chair.

[ Rushdoony ] The second President Harrison would sleep in the White House with the lights on at night in the bedroom because he had been convinced that if he shut them off it would leak down onto his bed and harm him. So he spent his entire presidency...

[ Scott ] In the light.

[ Rushdoony ] In the light. Yes.

[ Murray ] Was he from Arkansas?

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] Well, we are surrounded by fake authorities. Now we have here a paradox. We talk a great game of rebellion in this country, but this is actually a very docile population. It will accept authority from almost anybody. And Solzhenitsyn spoke about this. He spoke about the famed independence of the western journalists who were very brave until a local policeman in the Soviet empire would say, “Shut up and move along.” Then they would shut up and move along. And we hear a lot of authority against tradition, a lot of rebellion against tradition, but not against actual authority excepting in the ... what they now call not the lump and proletariat, but the underclass, which is an even worse term and then with the help of drugs.

[ M Rushdoony ] The whole world believed in the invincibility of the Soviet Union.

[ Scott ] And was afraid of it.

[ M Rushdoony ] Then there was a... then there was a chink in their armor.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And then the people said, “No more.”

[ Scott ] Right. Well actually the gate was opened. I don't think that was a genuine revolution. Gorbachev was dumb enough to open the gate. And the bird escaped. These crowds that appeared in Hungary and Poland and East Germany and everything else only appeared after the Soviet Union decided that it wouldn’t try to hold them down any longer.

[ Rushdoony ] Couldn't afford to continue its vast expenditures.

[ Scott ] It ran out of money. And then it decided that...

[ M Rushdoony ] This is a form of weakness.

[ Scott ] Yes. And then it decided that it couldn’t really command the military forces it had created in a nuclear war against the West, because the West, despite our press which pretended that we were weak and that they were strong, we still had a military power which they didn’t really believe they could overcome.

[ Murray ] It seems like there is a crisis of authority because people can no longer recognize good authority from bad authority.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true. That is... that is well put. And partly because they are confused by the media and the schools. The schools indoctrinate the children. They get the children to write to letters to business companies and to the government and to governmental officials on political issues which it is really something they should not be allowed to do.

[ M Rushdoony ] A form of an emotional abuse which ...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... they... they... they profess to be against.

[ Scott ] Well, they say...

[ M Rushdoony ] It is manipulating children for their own purposes.

[ Scott ] Send... send environmental letters to refineries saying, “Why are you poisoning the atmosphere?” While the teacher drive them to and from school in a big smoky bus.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, someone who called me today said we are seeing how far the language has been debased by the media and the schools in that a justice Ginsburg is called a centrist and a moderate when her opinions are definitely very much to the left.

[ Scott ] She was a former ACLU attorney.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] She campaigned in favor of the ERA amendment. And in no way is she anything excepting a member of NOW, real... but they are afraid to even criticize her.

[ Rushdoony ] Only three senators voted against her.

[ Scott ] It will go down on their record for the next 50 years.

[ Murray ] Chisel it in their grave stones.

[ Scott ] It really will. He voted... he voted against her or she? I have forgotten....

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...grammatically speaking.

[ Rushdoony ] Against her.

[ Murray ] Are you sure?

[ Rushdoony ] You are...

[ Scott ] I just said that for the fun.

[ Murray ] Only her hair dresser knows.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think we can see clearly the very, very critical seriousness of the problem. No society can exist without authority. It simply collapses into raw naked power, totalitarian power. And we are in the process of moving into a Totalitarian regime here in the United States. We are, I think, further advanced than most people realize.

The only turn around from anything like that comes from a restoration of the faith. When we look back at the Renaissance and realize the tyranny that was all over Europe in that time, the very arbitrary power that monarchs had so that no one, not even a queen, as in Henry VIII’s case was spared if they just displeased the monarch.

And yet all of that was overthrown by the Reformation in due time.

[ Scott ] In one generation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Because now there was another authority and, of course, every kid of cynical appraisal is made of the Reformation. We are told that Luther did not say, “Here I stand. I can do no other, so help me God.” But that was apparently his position and there are some who believe that it was his statement. But in any case, he stood, one man, against the entire Holy Roman Empire. And look at what happened so that what he represented was a restoration of authority and Calvin pushed the same thing further.

Had they not done so, not only would we not have the Reformation, we would not have a Catholic Church because the Catholic Church was in process of degeneration because it was controlled by the monarchs and the Holy Roman Emperor. And Maximilian planned to be the next pope. He seriously considered it.

[ Scott ] Don’t forget that both Luther and Calvin redefined the faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And going back to what I said earlier about the fact that cuckooland became Christianity here. The faith here has to be redefined.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is no longer the faith of the Reformation. It is comparable to the late medieval mysticism which was only concerned with the individual. Am I going to be saved, not what happens to the world. Let the world go to hell. And so you had a vast lay movement which was going to turn all men and women into kind of lay monks and lay nuns. And this is what the Reformation challenged, especially Calvin. And very few people have called attention to the fact that he challenged that purely personal selfish orientation of the faith. And it began with a mighty personal faith on his part which then went out to the whole world.

So when we see that it won’t take many years to turn things around. So we have that to look forward to because I believe God is at work again. We have only two, two and a half minutes left. Is there any last statement any of you would like to make?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I just wanted to say we... redefining the faith is going to be an extra challenge today because the authority of Scripture has been compromised by the Protestant church and the multitude of... ...

[ Scott ] Translations.

[ M Rushdoony ] of... or paraphrases is what they really are of Scripture. You look at a... a catalog of... of Bibles and there is all sorts of translations. The King James, which has been the traditional version for throughout the last few hundred years is... has a lesser and lesser part apparently of sales because the area in catalogs is getting smaller and smaller. And Christians can’t even agree as to what Scripture says because they all have a different Bible.

[ Scott ] We started out that way, the first century. There were dozens of gospels, hundreds.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we are seeing the kind of anarchy that some of the letters I receive from people who are curious about our position. Do you mean you really believe the Old Testament? Do you mean you believe this or that in the New Testament? To them it is only a ticket to heaven and, maybe, for a lot of them, also a ticket out of this world with the rapture and that its he extent of their interest.

[ Murray ] Well, people ask me that question I ask them in return: What do you have that is proven to be better?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And they have no answer.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is up. And with that excellent statement thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Scott ] That is a good comment.

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