From the Easy Chair

Moral Degeneracy Leading up to the Murder of Larry McDonald

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 150-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161D8

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161D8, Moral Degeneracy Leading up to the Murder of Larry McDonald, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 52, September 3, 1983.

A week from today I am to be in Atlanta, Georgia for a conference. The speakers were to have been myself, John Whitehead and Larry McDonald. The three of us have shared platforms before. As you all know Larry McDonald was shot down by Soviet Migs on his return from Korea. The sad fact is that this incident is not being honestly reported by the press. According to the information I have received which comes from good sources in Washington, DC, the plane was deliberately tracked and shot down. The Soviet Union knew that Larry McDonald, the leading anti Communist in Congress was aboard. Three squadrons of fighter pilots were sent. The plane was shot down with a missile and the pursued down to the water. Ships of Japan and other countries have been warned to stay out of the area and not to search for survivors. And yet we have withheld the full truth of what happened from the public.

Our press has been dishonest in its reporting. For example, I am holding in my hand a Thursday edition of a conservative western paper. The headline reads, “Soviet Mig Downs Jet: 269 Aboard. South Korean 747 had strayed over Russian isle.”

How do they know it did? The evidence indicates they are simply accepting without any word yet from the Soviet Union the Soviet version. As a matter of fact, on television a newscaster explained the Soviet action by saying the plane had strayed over Soviet territory and so this was the reason why they shot it. How did he know it had strayed over Soviet territory? Nothing had been released indicating that as of that date.

The simple fact is we are ready to cover up the truth and to apologize for the Soviet Union. Otto Scott remarked when the news came that the Soviet Union was obviously testing us and it was finding that we were as soft as hot butter.

Now this incident was an act of war. There is no getting around it. It was an act of war. It was a defenseless plane. Fighter squadrons were sent out deliberately. They followed the ship for some time and then they shot it down.

What the Soviet Union is determining is that there is no fight in the United States, no resistance, not even the capacity to tell the truth about what the Soviet Union is doing. We are at war and the simple fact is that the United States refuses to fight. As a result, the aftermath of this incident will be that the Soviet Union will be free to make whatever move it deems fit where it deems fit. It knows that there is no fight in Washington and that the federal government and the present administration is a paper tiger.

We should not be surprised at what is happening, because the daily paper tells us the story. We may have good men training for the Olympics. We may have excellent physical athletes in the various areas of the sports, but we have no moral athletes, no men of moral stamina or character.

Just the day before this incident the paper spoke of a man, 68, who when sentenced for child molesting had his neighbors raise a hue and cry demanding that he be given some kind of suspended sentence. The judge received 30 letters in support of the man. His neighbors said he was a kind man of good moral character who has always been an honest citizen. The defendant’s wife said she enjoyed a good relationship with her husband. She said her husband had a heart condition and termed any prison term a death sentence. However, the defendant’s wife warned the victim’s parents to keep the girl away from her father, according to the court records. Moreover, this was not the first incident as far as this man was concerned.

And yet the neighbors came to his defense. This is the kind of moral flabbiness that prevails all over the country. Talk to anyone who has been on a jury lately about what goes on in the jury. As a matter of fact, in one case where among some young hoodlums there was an act of violence, one of their number, angry at the other came into the apartment room where the others were involved in drinking and smoking pot and shot some of them. His finger prints were in the room. His finger prints were on the bullet. A number of things provided extensive circumstantial evidence of his presence there. As a matter of fact, of course, there were the witnesses of those who were able to testify who were in that room.

When the jury met one young man who claimed to be a Bible believing Christian held out for acquittal on the ground that he didn’t feel the evidence was clear enough. But it appeared that his attitude was judge not lest ye be judged. And we must love even the sinner, that sort of thing. And so after long deliberation the result was a hung jury.

The district attorney made it clear he was going to try the young man again. At that point, since the young man didn’t have any bail and he figured since those whom he shot were all going to survive probably he might spend less time given the time he had already been in jail for lack of bail if he pleaded guilty. So he said, “What the devil. I was there. I did it. Might as well serve the time. I won’t be in jail any longer.”

Now that is the kind of thing that is happening all over the country.

Let me give you another example of the reverse side. Given the lawlessness of the courts and of people generally, the response in many areas is becoming lawlessness also. In one situation where a child molester had molested children in the neighborhood and his own step daughter, the judge gave him probation. The neighbors warned his wife if she allowed him back into the house something would happen to him. She brought him back into the house. The neighbors got the man and beat him to death. No one apparently was a witness because the police said every neighbor said they weren’t there. That is lawlessness.

What we are seeing is that men are unwilling to work at the painstaking political processes. They are unwilling to develop the character that makes for righteousness in a community a godly character and they are taking short cuts and they are manifesting an indifference. We are a morally flabby country. And this is why we have the kind of thing that the episode that led to the death of Larry McDonald and a few hundred others represents.

Now to something which points in the same direction. A very important book was published in 1975 and reprinted in 77 and is still in print by the Cambridge University Press. The historian Owen Chadwick is the author of The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century: The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh for 1973 and 74.

What Chadwick calls attention to is the that the secularization of western society took place in the last century. Now he concedes that the Enlightenment, much earlier had proceeded to a humanistic culture. But the Enlightenment was for the few. In the 19th century the secularization was for the many. As a result, we have to recognize that the great change took place in the last century.

Before that three was, among most people a very thoroughly Christian perspective. In fact, the reformation that made all secular life, he says, into a vocation of God. It was like a baptism of the secular world. The Enlightenment was of the few. Secularization came for the many.

Chadwick then makes the point that society is impossible without law. And the whole purpose of this secularization was to undermine the foundations of law in the western world. The attempt was to create a new foundation. As a result, you had a systematic attack on everything that represented the old order. One of the facts that Chadwick refers to in passing and others have dealt with also is an understanding of the anti Semitism that arose in the 19th century and continued in the 20th. This anti Semitism went hand in hand with anti Clericalism as in France and elsewhere and anti Christianity. It was hostile to anything that stood for the old order, for a biblical faith. Therefore, orthodox Judaism had to be destroyed and Jews made Humanist. The Church had to be destroyed. Christianity in all its institutions and its influence, its formation of laws had to be destroyed. So we have to see, as a pattern, anti Clericalism, anti Semitism, anti Christianity. The sad fact is we have isolated these phenomena and have failed to see their identity and some scholars have—humanistic ones, of course—have tried to say that the anti Semitism was a product of the Church. The fact is it was a creation, a deliberate creation of Humanists.

Now Chadwick goes on to call attention to the fact that the people of the day distrusted anyone who was not Christian. For example, he says and this kind of thing continued in many circles, Catholic, in particular, into this century. In the 1870s, he writes, the people of Marseilles, by whom we may doubtless understand the middle classes of Marseilles, were said to have no confidence in lawyers unless those lawyers went to church and accordingly in holy week each year a black procession of men of law appeared almost a parade.

We can add that this kind of thing became ritualized throughout the western world and lawyers, even as they abandoned the faith wholesale, went to mass once a year and then had a parade in some countries to reassure the common man that they were still in the faith whereas all the while they were subverting it.

Moreover, we had the kind of thing earlier whereby men like Voltaire wanted nothing done to hurt the faith of their servants. As Chadwick points out, and I quote, “Voltaire refused to let me talk Atheism in front of the maids. I want my lawyer, tailor, valet, and even my wife to believe in God. I think that if they do, I shall be robbed less and cheated less.”

So long as the argument kept out of the kitchen it does not quite meet our needs, that is, to define Secularism. The attitude went on into the 19th century if not beyond. {?} said to {?} at dinner, “Yes, you go to mass, but you are only a hypocrite. And you don’t believe any more than I do.” {?} said, “Sh. Look out for the servants. You can be cynical in front of the important, but not in front of the unimportant. Do you believe that I could make the governess and the cook understand the morality of my philosophy? It is easier if I appear to accept the form of their faith because at bottom I believe as they do, though in another form. In their faith they find the virtue to serve me honestly and devotedly.”

And so he says in the 19th century most people refrained from being Atheists in front of the maids. But then with popular education the maids and the workers could read and Secularism struck them all.

And the result was the humanization of society. Society became humanistic. And men began to abandon wholesale the forms of the faith.

As a result, the law of God began to give way to humanistic law. And it became human reason versus the law of God. Men began to take an increasing hostility towards everything connected with the faith.

By the way, on that point Chadwick has some very, very interesting things to say. He calls attention to the fact that mobs very often in the last century and earlier, going back before the French Revolution attacked churches, bishops’ palaces, pastors’ homes and the like. These so-called anti clerical right... riots usually began as an anti statist riot. And he says that, and I quote, “The mob had no leader, but men of the streets who stentorian cries and lurid aprons. It must wreak its wrath on something which is helpless. It is regarded as public property and is associated with government.”

This is the characteristic situation for an anti clerical riot. There may be a further element. In a few known cases, for example, the Paris revolution 1830, preeminently the Barcelona tragic week of 1909 commanders of one side or the other diverted the fury of the mob to churches to church property. For the sake of preventing them from attacking palace of parliament and therefore from facing troops.

In Paris the police consciously helped to direct the crowd to attack the archbishop’s palace in order to save the king’s palace. In Barcelona more than one intelligent man to whom the crowd looked for political lead diverted the smashing into churches and convents so that the demonstrators should not make hopeless assault upon an armed garrison. That is politicians, knowing that the mob must do something and seeing that revolution was vain, turned the passions of the people into a fury which ended in arson and destruction, but only in a few deaths, three priests of which one accidental, instead of a pitched battle with many deaths.

When we speak of the passions of the people we are not to take this literally.

Moreover, as he points out, the philosophy increasingly became statist. As a result for Hegel and for politicians and thinkers generally for humanists, the state, to the church, became the reality of the moral ideal. And they saw the state’s highest duty as to perpetuate itself, whatever the price.

The modern state, thus, has again and again, used the church as the whipping boy.

Moreover, as he quotes one philosopher in France in the 1880s, anything with a strong moral life has a will of its own. Anything with a will of its own embarrasses government.

Think that over. Let me read that again. Anything with a strong moral life has a will of its own. Anything with a will of its own embarrasses government.

This is why—let me add parenthetically—that Chalcedon has an influence far beyond our meager income and our small staff. We are putting a back bone in people, a backbone that comes from the Word of God and the Spirit of God. This is why the most important modernist periodical in the United States gave a major article to attacking us, why a major daily in the Midwest devoted an entire page to attacking us. We should not be surprised at this. Moral will is what the modern state hates.

Now this may seem like an extravagant statement, but I believe it. I believe that there are people in Washington, DC who are less concerned about what the Soviet Union did to Larry MacDonald and to the 268 other passengers than they are to what Larry MacDonald did and said in Washington, DC. They don’t like facing a strong moral will. And as a result they are ready to live with anything rather than that.

Well, there is a great deal more here in Chadwick’s book. It is an excellent one. It is still available and very definitely well worth reading.

Now along the same line I would like to cite just a little from a book no longer in print, Richard Winston, Thomas Becket. This was published in 1967 by Alfred Knopf. In this book the author points out very clearly the growth of Thomas a Becket and his recognition of the need for the freedom of the Church from the state and this was the heart of his resistance. Thomas a Becket personally owed a great deal to Henry. He was very friendly with the king although he knew his limitations. But he recognized that the issue was the freedom of the church. And Henry’s obsession was total power to control all things through the state.

In one incident after their quarrel when Thomas and Henry met the author writes, “After chatting with Thomas in their old tone of familiar intercourse, he reverted to his obsession that Thomas should serve him in a secular as well as a spiritual capacity. ‘Why is it that you will not do as I wish?’ he asked. ‘If you did, I would certainly put everything into your hands.’”

Afterwards telling Herbert of his off Thomas remarked, “And when the king said that to me I immediately remembered the words of the gospel. All these things will I give thee if thou wilt bow down and worship me.”

Well, that was the issue then and it is the issue now. The state is demanding of its church what Satan demanded of Christ. All these things will I give thee if thou wilt bow down and worship me.

That we cannot do.

Another interesting work that I read of late was George Duby, D U B Y, The Three Orders on feudal society. This was published in 1978 by the University of Chicago Press. It is an interesting account, but of the things that I thought most interesting was this. Earlier in the Middle Ages everything was tied to the idea of position so that even charity was seen in terms of status. That is, if you were a knight obviously you needed far more and deserved for more than a peasant.

The beginning of the breakdown of that was when men moved by compassion began to see human need as human need so that, in a sense, they were buying what others saw as heresy. Recognizing the equality of peoples. An equality of need, but very alien to the society which preceded it and to which it did not adapt.

And so Duby speaks of the new form of alms giving, a different conception of charity.

And he said that now in the cities, specifically the compassionate feelings awakened by the spectacle of indigence bore within them the seeds of heresy. In the form of an aspiration to justice a justice that would bring about equality, heresy was undergoing a revival. This desire to abolish differences and to live among equals in friendship was exploited by the wealthiest, the most active inhabitants of the cities, whose initiatives were hampered and whose accumulation of wealth was slowed by the sensorial system. They loudly voiced egalitarian claims in their struggle against the urban lords.

Well, the point there is a very important one. Now by being reactionary instead of thinking through the implications of the faith, medieval society began to resist the kid of sentiment that led to a concern for the poor. This is not to say that the monasteries had not earlier shown it, but now that it became a part of the social order and accepted thing whereby human need was human need and you did not give just a slice of bread to the poor because they didn't deserve as much as the rich or the knights, but you treated them all equally. That had revolutionary implications. It had revolutionary implications because there had been a resistance to the brotherhood within the faith which Christ commands.

Community was limited. Earlier a king or a nobleman was what he was in terms of a service he rendered. But before long it became an attribute of blood. And therefore when compassion began to exert itself it worked against the pride of blood.

Well, to go to another work again dealing with the medieval era, this is one published in 1980 again by the University of Chicago press Jacques Le Goff, capital L E, capital G O F F Time Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. This is an interesting book because it gives us a perspective on the Middle Ages which is, you might say, rather hum drum, not exciting, but is full of very meaty information for anyone interested in history.

I would like to call attention to one point because I am going to deal with it further. In the thirteenth century and by the end of the thirteenth century certain things were happening with regard to the worker. The workers were asked that the working day be lengthened. Now that is an unusual fact. Can you imagine guilds or unions now demanding a longer work day? Well, this was a way of increasing wages. It was what we would call a demand for overtime. But it had behind it a faith which the Le Goff doesn’t go into sufficiently, but is apparent. It was a faith in the necessity of work, the cultural importance of work. And the fact that work is basic to society.

Now that is a critical point, because I am going to turn now to another book by a man I have just met casually Robert Lee, a book no longer in print published in 1964 by Abington Press. The title is Religion and Leisure in America. Now Lee who is professor at the San Francisco Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian... United Presbyterian Church and has been on national council committees makes this statement. It is not original with him. It is common place in university circles.

I am quoting from page 19. “Leisure is no longer confined solely to a social and aristocratic culture. Although leisure has always been a fringe benefit in the history of mankind, now it is moving into the center of life, threatening to replace work as the basis of culture. Literally a revolution has occurred, a turning around. For what was on the periphery is now at the heart of man’s daily existence,” unquote.

Well, do you see the point? Today, as Lee points out very accurately, leisure is replacing work as the foundation of culture. Since he wrote that in 64 virtually 20 years have passed and we can say that now it has replaced work as the foundation of culture. And the demand is for more and more leisure to create culture. What we are creating is a sick and culture a deadly one, one that is destroying our youth and destroying our adults. It is a culture of irrelevance, a culture that is, in part, a form of suicide.

Now in the Bible the only foundation for culture is work. Work under God in terms of his law so that it is a moral fact and it is inseparably linked with a man’s vocation. It is a man’s calling that fulfills the cultural mandate.

And we have destroyed that. Since World War II leisure has replaced work as culture. And what is leisure now? It is spending all kinds of money for play. It is going to the concerts and to ballet and the theater in spite of the fat that all of these things are increasingly geared to expressing cultural goals that are alien to a sound civilization and to true culture. The theater, of course, has become an instrument of the expression of Humanism and moral decadence. We see similarly the triumph of Humanism in all the arts and musical theory, now, is something amazing in its contempt for what has historically been music.

So we have, as a result, the death of culture even as millions are being appropriate for it.

Well now on to something else, again, some of the reading I have been doing in the Middle Ages. This is a book that is still in print. It was published in 1982 by the Cambridge University Press. The author is Sandra Raban, R A B, as in boy, A N, Mort Main Legislation and the English Church; 1279 to 1500. Now this book is anything but one whose perspective we can appreciate or agree with. What it is dealing with is, of course, the kind of legislation that worked to prevent property and lands from going to the church. Because as people faced death they gave land, buildings and money to the church, the state increasingly became hostile to this.

Now we are given a great deal of mythology as to how much land was owned by the church at the time of the Reformation. This has been a part of the propaganda of statists to tell us how horrible the situation was. Well, the situation was not a problem with regard to land. It was a problem of theology.

Moreover, the federal government today owns 42 percent of the land in the United States even though the Constitution forbids the federal government to own such lands. As John Saunders Quaid is given to pointing out again and again, and rightly so, the Constitution limits the federal government to owning the land for buildings and military installations and that is it. And the law has been flouted at that point. Naturally the courts are federal courts.

Well, these properties were used for charitable endowments. They took care of the welfare of the day. But Raban points out that by the time of 1500 and I quote, “Far from swelling their endowments, many chanceries, guilds and allied bodies withered to extinction. In Essex and Wiltshire more than three quarters of those licensed in the first half of the 14th century had vanished by the dissolution,” that is Henry VIII’s act.

Insofar as generalization is possible, it appears that late medieval alienees were poor if more numerous than their predecessors. Thus, not only were there fewer licenses in absolute terms during this period, but they were spread among a larger and less affluent constituency. If this brought the question of amortization home to a wider public, it nevertheless resulted in relatively small amounts of land passing into ecclesiastical hands. The fall in excision suggested by the decline in licenses, albeit somewhat falsified by the large scale evasions associated with chantries was therefore equaled if not transcended by the fall in the amounts of land involved.

One of the most alarming features of mort main tenure had been the economic power of the larger religious houses. In this aspect at least the accessions of the late Middle ages posed no threat, end of quote.

So we see that the picture we are so commonly given is anything but honest and accurate.

Well, the point of all this is that we have a falsified view of the past. We have a falsified view because it serves the interest of humanists and statists to give us a falsified view. After all, every kind of crime including anti Semitism has to be laid at the doorsteps of the Church to hurt the Church. At the same time, it leaves the state free to go its own way and break down every group within the social order that has. Remember the statement by the French philosopher, a moral will of its own. This is the problem. The independent moral will is the enemy. This is why in the Middle Ages the empire and the states warred against the medieval Church and worked systematically to corrupt it and it did.

This is why then they worked to corrupt the Reformation and the Counter Reformation and they did. This is why they worked to bring about the triumph of Humanism by revolution and by subterfuge and they have. And this is why there is no love of any one with a strong moral will such as Larry McDonald had and such as other men in Washington had towards whom the establishment and the media continue to be hostile. And this is why there is hostility against us and against you. If you manifest a strong moral will, I trust that we, all of us, manifest it graciously, that we manifest forbearance and patience as we present our position, that we manifest the grace of God unto salvation towards all men.

But as we manifest that grace and that power, we are going to be offensive. We are plainly told that the faith is offensive to the world. The Bible tells us that. The world tells us that. We have got to face that fact.

As a result, we have to work with renewed strength with patience, with endurance knowing that greater is he that is in us and with us than he that is in the world. We are not in this battle merely to suffer and endure as some foolish pietists say. The Lord has armed us for victory. This is our calling. This is the faith which overcometh the world even our faith John tells us. And so we have to be prepared to win. We have to recognize that no war is easy. No war is cost free. There are many who are paying the price for the stand they have taken.

We are all living on borrowed time. God’s time. God gives us life on his terms. It has to be used on his terms. And death is only a heartbeat away from all of us.

I realized that afresh the day before yesterday. On returning from Arizona as our plane was landing, a Cessna came within seconds of crashing into the side of our plane. Only the very quick and adroit maneuver of the pilot saved the plane. It was nip and tuck there for a moment.

Now, that was something dramatic. But all of us day after day are only a heartbeat away from eternity, a heart beat away from God’s judgment, from the final accounting. We have an obligation. Are we discharging it? Are we proving to be the Aarons and the Hurs to hold up the arms of those who are in the battle? Are we supporting with our prayers, our gifts those who are involved in the battle on every front? The Church front, the educational front, the political front, wherever the battle is. If not, we have got an accounting to render.

I am amazed at the casualness of people. They seem to think we are going to gain the goals that we are working for and the cultural achievements through leisure rather than work. It takes work. It takes hard work. It takes faith and more faith. It takes the Spirit of God. You had better find your place in this battle and you had better back up those who are involved in it.

I feel very deeply about what happened to Larry McDonald, both because I knew him and because I know what his death and the reaction in Washington to it tells us about the United States. Not only the Soviet Union, but God almighty is weighing us in the balances and finding us wanting. And when God finds a people wanting trouble ensues to put it mildly. We have very difficult days ahead. But I do believe that by the grace of God we can come through triumphant, but only if we obey him.

One of the greatest verses in the Bible is Zechariah’s statement as he describes the decline of everything, the hopelessness as men and the peoples generally are apostate and lawless. But then he says that evening time it shall be light. At evening time it shall be light. Because there is more in every battle than man. When we turn to God and when we work in terms of his law word, we can reverse things so that at that point when it should become the darkest, it can be a dawn at evening time. It shall be light.

Now that is the light we are working for in the gathering gloom. We are not in this for anything but victory. I do believe we shall triumph, but I do believe we are going to go through the wringer for a time, because people are asking for it.

What happened over the north Pacific when Larry McDonald was shot down was very revealing. When the papers came out I heard practically no comment. I was in an airport. People were reading the paper and turning to the sports page. I enjoy sports as much as anyone. But nobody appeared to be shaken. I have had a number of phone calls. I have raised the matter with them about the incident. Oh, yes, that. It is a trifle. It is going to be forgotten by the time you listen to this tape, I suspect. And that in itself will say something about this country.

We are told that not a sparrow falls but our Father in heaven knows it, that he is mindful of our every need. But how mindful will he be of a people that are heedless of monstrous evils? I think it is a time for a renewal of faith on the part of all of us.

Well, I have been a bit more serious than usual, but I trust you will understand why. Thank you for listening. I will be with you again the Lord willing two weeks from now.

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