From the Easy Chair

Is Freedom Wanted

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 173-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DN213

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DN213, Is Freedom Wanted, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 325, November the second, 1994.

In our first hour Douglas Murray, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss the subject: Is freedom wanted? Do people want to be free?

We are told regularly that the goal of peoples all over the world is freedom, that they want to be delivered from whatever bondage they are under and that freedom is basic to the human psyche. On religious grounds I do not believe that is true. Man is a fallen creature. He is a slave to sin. And our Lord made it clear that only if the Son of man sets you free are you free indeed. Of course, the Pharisees were very upset at that remark because they said they were not slaves, but our Lord made it clear they were.

Now is freedom desired by most people? I think the answer is emphatically no. They want security rather than freedom. And this is why one political order after another, while it may have a big season of freedom and that, in itself, is very rare in all of history, the United States in its earlier years was the most notable example. They very quickly sell out freedom for security.

Now I want to take a little while to go into this because one of the things that very early illustrated to me in a powerful way this dislike of freedom was the life of Catherine the Great of Russia. I read two or three biographies of her when I was a student. Since then I have read at least her memoirs and, very recently, a book newly published entitled Great Catherine by Cara Lee Erickson, published quite recently in 1994. It is a good book although it still doesn’t come to grips with the issue because, of course, its main purpose is biographical.

I would like to take a few minutes before we begin discussing the subject to go into why very early in my life as a student I saw the issue as critical and coming to focus in the life of Catherine the Great.

She was born of the ruling family of a small German principality. She was an intelligent, a thoughtful and a very perceptive girl. And she was quite young when she was chosen to be the bride of Peter the heir apparent of Russia. And so she went there knowing nothing of what was ahead of her, a devout Lutheran girl who was to marry the future czar. She got there and Elizabeth was empress and ruling all of Russia, not very well. And she soon found that Peter was retarded. It became apparent after their marriage that he was also impotent and had no interest in consummating the marriage nor any ability.

I go into this because Catherine went through a rough school. At the same time everyone viewed her with disfavor and irritation even anger and hatred because she was not producing an heir to the throne. And since she was the wife of a future czar she was to produce an heir however she could. So she did with someone who was allowed to get as close as possible and court her and so on.

Well, subsequently, Peter when he became czar and Catherine the czarina went from bad to worse and there was no hope for Russia because he was actually more sympathetic to Russia’s enemies than to Russia. So he was first imprisoned and then he was executed and she became the sole ruler of all of Russia.

Now Catherine had a background of very extensive reading. She was very familiar and a devoted follower of the French philosophs, the thinkers of France who were formulating a humanistic and liberal concept of government. And she felt that this was ideal, that she was going to take Russia and bring it up to the modern age by instituting all these reforms bringing self government to play, allowing the people to make decisions.

The secret police were a long time establishment of the Russian monarchy. She abolished them. But she quickly found that people did not want freedom. They did not want self government. They wanted simply to criticize, to subvert and to conspire to overthrow. So she had to bring back the secret police.

The tragedy of Catherine’s life after that was that she saw very clearly that freedom was not desirable to the people. Certainly not the Russian people and she increasingly doubted whether people anywhere really wanted freedom. And we would have to say that apart from a strong Christian faith people do not want freedom. They want security which is to say slavery.

So the life of Catherine the Great to me is a classic example of what happens when someone assumes that freedom is a natural desire of all people. It is not. They want security even if that security means a great many problems and hardships or change, in effect, real or intellectual change.

I think the problem that Catherine’s life poses for us is a very, very important one of us to consider because we face a people that is in revolt against freedom. We are in an intellectual revolution against our American heritage which represented freedom in favor of security.

When I was a child only a handful of people ever paid income tax. Property taxes were virtually nil. One’s contact with the federal government was nil, just voting every two and four years. The state government was insignificant. Sacramento was a village and every so often—I have forgotten now whether it was every other year or a couple of weeks a year—the legislators went there and quickly left because they did not do much. And it was a quite, sleepy little city.

All that has changed. And it has changed because the people have demanded it. They prefer security and not freedom.

Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject?

[ Murray ] Well, I think we have to compare the ... the people that came to the North American continent versus the people that we have in the population now and they are really two different mindsets. The people that formulated this country originally most of them were fleeing oppressive governments for one reason or another either looking for economic freedom or religious freedom. And so that the bulk of the population were truly looking for individual freedom and for the least government.

But the majority of people it seems that are immigrating to this country now are coming from socialist countries where the socialist experiment has failed and cannot provide them with even meager subsistence and they look over the fence and see that we have it pretty good here and they want some of it.

So the mindset has changed completely 180 degrees among the bulk of the population. And that is really the ... the root of the problem. So many generations have passed now that the entire population has forgotten what individual freedom was all about. Nobody has ever experienced it in their lifetime and they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they had it and they are scared of it because it is ... it is an unknown. The people who came here and experienced personal freedom for the first time in their lives realized what a cherished treasure that it was and they strove valiantly to institutionalize it in the formulation of the American government. And giving birth to the government was... took considerable pain and considerable time.

They tried to avoid the possibility of falling back into the pit of slavery again and we look at the documents that these men wrote and analyzed their thinking and read their letters and their papers and how much agonizing they went through trying to avoid the mistakes that other cultures and governments have made in the past. And the people today no longer read those papers, can no longer understand them and it is as if we are now looking back at the remnants of a lost civilization and it has disappeared without a trace, but a few documents that have been enshrined that nobody understands or appreciates any longer.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, the whole idea of ... one of the.... the... the reason people are afraid of freedom is because they don’t want responsibility that comes with freedom. And that is why today something bad happens to you changes are you can sue someone and get something, because people have an idea that there should be no accidents, there should be no harmful consequences. If a plane crashes, somebody is going to pay for it. It doesn’t matter whether it was a wind shear or a hail storm, somebody is going to have to pay and pay dearly. And they don't’ want freedom. They want security, the whole idea of a safety net, something I should be able to fall back on, I should never have to suffer any consequences from being free.

[ Murray ] Well, this is a new form of theft. I mean it really boils down to getting something for nothing. And, you know, this is the basis of Marxism. Take it from somebody who has got it. And it has permeated our entire society.

[ Rushdoony ] If you question any group of people and ask them point blank: What do you prefer freedom or slavery? There is no question they will say freedom. But if you ask those same people in a series of questions whether they want social security, health care, anti smoking laws, a safety net in one area after another as Mark mentioned, or they believe they have a right to their job and their rights are violated if they are fired, the number of people who are suing when they are fired is growing. And when they sue they very often win.

[ Murray ] Well, the government has told them that it is ok.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And they have given them a long list of ... of tasks to apply to each different situation.

[ Rushdoony ] If... if you tell people that it is all right to steal television sets, they will steal them. And today the agencies of state are in the business of creating a new morality so they are ready to tell people that this and that which has always been regarded as morally wrong is now by some manipulation of the government legitimate and even morally right.

[ Murray ] Well, I think a lot of this is... has to be laid at the door step of the legal profession. I... I don’t want to do any bashing necessarily of the legal profession because there are good attorneys of... of unimpeachable integrity, but there is an awful lot of them out there who are scratching for a living any way they can and the idea of justice is totally foreign to them. They don’t even consider that that is their function. They don't consider the equity, what is in the best interest of both parties even figures in to the equation.

They have almost become, many of them, not all of them, but many of them have actually become co conspirators to steal. And the legal profession has got to reform itself, because it affects the politics of this country because the vast majority, 99.9 percent of the people who write the laws in this country are attorneys and the vast majority of the people who run for public office and in all branches of the government are attorneys and they are going to have to take a serious look at this, because it is corrupting the entire country from top to bottom.

[ Rushdoony ] I would say the courts, the judges are the major problem in this sphere.

[ M Rushdoony ] I have... I have often thought that in California we have a voter pamphlet that comes out before each election so candidates are allowed to... especially local candidates are allowed to make a statement of why they think they are qualified. I have always thought that all judges should be required to make a statement. Maybe we would know something about them. But how often do you ever hear any type of a campaign statement at all from a judge, what he stands for, what his record as a judge is.

[ Murray ] You can’t find out. I have tried recently finding out about the judges that run for election and I have called all around and there isn’t a speck of information available on...

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is an interesting point, because when I was young there would be two, three, four people running for a judgeship. That this disappeared. In some counties you dare not be a candidate unless you have been chosen to succeed a judge. Even then, in some instances, the judge does not resign, but runs for reelection and then shortly after will say that I have to resign because of poor health and another man is appointed in his place. It has been a long time in the state of California that the... since there were two men running for a judgeship. And it has been with difficulty in recent years that we have been able to push through a measure allowing us when a judge’s name appears on the ballot—and on the current ballot there are a number of judges up—and you can now vote yes or no. You don’t have a choice between two men, but you can vote no. And I uniformly vote know for all the judges because they are the only name on the ballot.

[ Murray ] Well, to illustrate the degree of corruption on the news this evening in the state of Alabama they told about a judge on the state supreme court of Alabama who was canvassing leading members of the legal profession, particularly those that are involved in injury lawsuits where they make big, big money who even practice in his court who currently have cases pending in his court and he is canvassing these guys for campaign contributions to run for reelection. And it is legal in the state of Alabama.

[ Rushdoony ] And he may have no one running against him.

[ Murray ] No. So when it... when it reaches that degree of open corruption, open defiance, then the legal profession had better take a look at why they suffer such low esteem in the public eye. They get very indignant when people tell jokes, attorney jokes and so forth, but that is the tip of the iceberg. The ... the anger and ... and against the legal profession is very deep rooted, very deep seated. There are major companies that won’t even do business in certain states anymore because of lopsided decisions against insurance corporations and so forth. They are... they are getting milked like cash cows by the courts giving away these huge settlements and these companies just pull out of the state rather than continue to do business there.

[ Rushdoony ] That is true and sadly, though, it is against the legal profession as a whole rather than the judges. The judges are the problem. And I knew of one case not too log ago in one county here in California where this one judge was an alcoholic and everybody would avoid having him as judge because he resented having to be tied down to a courtroom. And so they would have the case transferred to the other judge and the other judge was a man who thought it was sad that he had to decide against somebody. He said, “I am going to make at least 50 percent of the people unhappy and sometimes all of them unhappy.” And that is all he could think about, how he was going not make people unhappy, not was he going to do justice.

So we have had incompetent people in the courtrooms, political hacks.

[ Murray ] Well, at the root of this is that the American Bar Association has a stranglehold on who can even become a judge. If you don’t have the ... the approval of the bar association in your state you don’t get nominated, period. And the American Bar Association has become so politicized rather than just dealing with legal issues, they have become politicized to the extent that they are making public policy statements and forming resolutions on social issues. In other words, prejudging which a judge is not supposed to do and that here is the same bar association as the gate keepers for who can become a judge. So it is just like picking a jury with jury consultants. They are picking judicial appointments, they are screening judicial appointments based on their attitude toward social issues. And this is prejudging cases before they are even heard. And this is a violation of the canon of ethics and yet it goes on.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Our supreme court should be made of the top legal minds in the United States, but, by and large, they are political hacks. And I believe most good lawyers know more law than the supreme court justices. I think we have a supreme court and, in some instances, state supreme courts, made up of an interior men, political hacks.

[ Murray ] Well they have become social engineers. Any time a court deviates from the written law and starts trying to compensate one group against another, whether they say that, well, for 10 years we are going to allow quotas in favor of some minority group to the detriment of another group, then they have lost their way. They are off the beam because when they get away from equity they have lost credibility. And right now the supreme court, I believe, has lost major credibility with the decisions that they have come down with over the past 30 years, because they have abandoned equity. And nobody trusts them anymore. Everybody can pretty well predetermine what their decisions are going to be. And that ... that shouldn’t be the case.

[ M Rushdoony ] There... there needs to be an organization of some kind that sets up some... some guidelines how... how we could go about reforming our judicial system whether it is going to be... by... in the case of the federal courts by amendment in the state courts, by... by legislation. There is something on the ballot now. We have a very inept and dishonest system of judicial ethics and they are trying to change it to something equally or even more corrupt controlled by politicians. Right now if a judge is accused of an offense other judges try the case and it is entirely confidential. It is entirely secret and they cannot release any of the proceedings without that accused judge’s permission. And obviously that is extremely rare. So very few judges accused of crimes are ever brought to any kind of accountability for it.

[ Murray ] Well, I got to arrest a judge for drunk driving one time and, I mean, he was sloshed, leading his car off the road and ... and he threatened us, my partner and I, threatened us with retribution and then tried to pay us off and then at the last when that... realized that wasn’t going to work he became like a whimpering child, you know, about to get a licking. And, you know, he was practically groveling on his hands and knees. We almost... we had to drag him into the station and book him. It was ... it was disgusting.

[ Rushdoony ] What happened? Was it taped?

[ Murray ] Well, I... you know, we... when you are a police officer you don’t get to ... you don’t get to follow up on that because, you know, there are so many cases go by, but the other officer made the appearance and I don't know what happened to him. He was probably released on his own recognizance after he sobered up and that was probably the end of it, but it was an illuminating experience.

[ Rushdoony ] There is an interesting sidelight on this whole issue of freedom as against slavery. We have quite a mythology that has grown up both pro and con about slavery in the South. And just as some have idealized it in the South, others in the North have demonized it. But there is an interesting aspect to southern slavery that is not often considered. Work on a plantation was not year round. There were seasons when there was less work than others and during the late fall, winter and into the earlier part of spring there was no work virtually on a plantation. So what the owners would do would be to lease the slaves to contractors. And the slaves would go into the towns and cities and build. Some of them became excellent architects and designers and some of the fine examples of southern architecture are really a product of slave architects and slave builders.

Now I mention this because the slaves were paid. They were able to accumulate a fair amount of money through this kind of activity. And some would save up to buy their freedom and the freedom of their family. The significant fact is that most did not. They found that having a cash enabled them to have luxuries or goods that they normally would not have and they chose to spend it on such things. All saying there were some slaves that were free in every state virtually. In Virginia at the time of the war in 1860, 10 percent of the blacks were freed and, in many instances, were themselves slave owners.

What you have to say in terms of this was that the others who were workers who earned money were not willing to pay the price of freedom, which meant that they were not willing to forego present pleasure for future benefits. And I think that is important because that is the mentality, the slave mentality of most of the country today. They want quick gratification. They are head over heels in debt for luxury goods and as a result we have an entire population in slavery through debt which is a form of slavery.

[ Murray ] I think this ... this ... you are at the core of the... the problem, because politicians, I believe... we have got enough smart men out there. I mean, there are some dummies, to be sure. But there is enough smart men out there who can very easily right the wrongs as far as running the government correctly, but they are not stupid. They are aware of this fact that people have this dependency and it is like a ... it is like a narcotic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You know, once people are captured by this and enslaved by this they can’t let it go. And all of this anger, this so called voter anger in the country that the media says is abroad in the land right now, is misdirected. To be sure, the politicians are feeding at the trough with both hands, the majority of them with the salaries and the perks and so forth and that enrages people who are not getting those salaries and those perks themselves and the ... the paid vacations and the million dollar retirements and the ... the multi million dollar retirements and all the rest of it. But the anger is misdirected because the politicians know how to solve the problem, but they are not going to solve the problem until the people themselves are willing to throw off the slavery or the enslavement of the... the things that they have asked government to do for them. They are just... people are just going to have to recognize that we are the problem.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, but...

[ Murray ] The politicians, in effect, are doing our bidding and... and the people are unwilling, unable to recognize the fact that we are the problem. We ask government to do more for us than... than it should. And there is always somebody out there that wants more every day. It ratchets up another notch, another notch, year after year until finally the federal government is gargantuan and out of control.

[ M Rushdoony ] A good example of that is how many years have the Democrats made mileage out of saying, “Well, if the Republicans are in office they are going to reduce social security.” And it has always worked. It has always been very effective. And the Republicans have been so afraid of it years ago they stopped criticizing social security.

[ Murray ] Well, I would love to see somebody call their bluff just one time and it will scare them to death. Absolutely they will be terrified if somebody calls their bluff, because if that is all they have got, then they don’t have much.

[ Rushdoony ] The lust for security is like a drug. And just as addicts get hooked and keep demanding more and more in the way of drugs to satisfy their habit so people who have a lust for security can never get enough of it.

[ Murray ] It is the sin of gluttony.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You know, once people become a slave to anything—I don't care whether it is eating too much ice cream or whatever it is, when you can’t walk away from it, then it owns you.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, this is what destroyed Rome. What had been a virile, pagan republic steadily became a socialist state with a lust for security, with bread and circuses for the mobs, with increasing demands for more. And it was so bad that when Valerian came along with so much already given to everybody he had to go into the future with his promises. He said that no child of any welfare recipient would have to go though the trauma of applying for welfare. It would be his right on birth.

Well, that was 275 AD. With that he ran out of promises. And, as a result, all he could do then was to look vainly for something and he was killed in the next year or so. There wasn’t much more they could ask of him.

[ Murray ] Well, you know, I keep... I... it has been a puzzle to me for many years why people can’t see the obvious. And, you know, I keep asking myself year after year: How long is it going to take before people recognize, well, you know, where the... where the real problem is. And, you know, we have seen over the past few years this anger and this frustration gradually build and gradually build and the ... the ... the advent of Perot and this focusing of this discontent with the two major parties and you have got to ask yourself. Is the discontent because people don’t think they are getting enough from either the Republicans or the Democrats so that they are willing to go to an independent third party? Or do they truly want reform of the federal government and a downsizing? I mean companies are doing it. Major corporations when business is down, they downsize. They let people go. They get their house in order, their economic house in order so that they can survive. Our government has no intention. They feel that as long as they can print money they can survive. But there is... there is an end to that game that has been proven over and over through history and yet nobody wants to... to recognize it.

[ M Rushdoony ] One of the interesting things about Perot’s popularity was people really didn’t know what when stood for. He was... he was not the establishment. He was an alternative to it. But he didn't really say what he wanted to do or what he believed. But they were... they were grasping at something as an alterative, but I think they liked the fact that he wasn’t very specific.

[ Murray ] Well, he is... he has got people buffaloed now because he came out in a... supporting Governor Anne Richardson in Texas who is a Socialist. And now he is going not to go up to Washington and campaign in favor of the guy who is running against the Speaker of the House, Foley. I don’t know whether he is doing this for effect, just to throw people off guard or whether he has some kind of a plan, but as... whatever the plan is, its inconsistency seems to be the underlying thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, of course, inconsistency is built in to the population’s attitude. There is a great deal of resentment across country towards other people’s entitlements, not theirs. What they are getting they deserve. But what other people are getting they have no right to.

[ M Rushdoony ] Yeah. When... when the system collapses, ok, let’s say it is an economic collapse that... that... that causes our system and... of entitlements and ... and ... and such political system to basically stop functioning, short of a change in the attitudes of the people, based... based on a faith, there is really not much for them to change to. Are we going to end up like Russia with a system that doesn't work, but we don’t know what we are going not institute in its place and it is just a period... go through a long period of stagnation?

[ Murray ] I think that is a real possibility, a long period of stagnation. People ... things... events tend to... to move pretty quick once they go over the knee of the curve, but there is... it takes a long time to get there. And in order to develop a consensus for change within a country it takes a long time because it is a... it is a one at a time situation. And people have to change their mind one at a time until you can get enough people together to ... to push events over the knee of the curve of change.

[ Rushdoony ] It may be different here. After all, the Russian Soviet regime did not collapse. We propped it up. When it supposedly changed and Yeltsin took over, we propped it up again. The KGB is running the country. So they have not had a legitimate collapse, but who is going to prop us up?

[ Murray ] Yeah. I was just going to ask that question. I don’t see anybody standing in line.

[ Rushdoony ] I think they will rejoice when they see us fall because we have seen in the past few decades a growing arrogance on the part of Washington, DC towards the whole world.

[ Murray ] Well, there is a lot of animosity out there, a lot of anger out there. I was in a small lumber town in the Pacific northwest over this past weekend, a small town of 800 people. The only industry they had there was a lumber mill. They Endangered Species Act, the spotted owl Trojan horse of the ... the federal government which is in the process of using these fuzzy wuzzy issues to nationalize all resources in this country, 60 families were forced to move out of the town virtually over night in order to survive because they were living from paycheck to paycheck and it has decimated the town. Practically every piece of commercial property in town is up for sale at distressed prices. There is... the town is virtually deserted. There is very little activity going on. The people that are left there are very concerned for their future, but I read an article and... and the... the people don’t know why they are being singled out. And they don’t know what the end game is and I have talked to some of them and I said to them... I told a couple of them in business, local business people, I said, “I noticed an article in Investor’s Business Daily last week that said that there is a consortium of lumber mills in the Pacific northwest that have leased a million acres in Siberian Russia and they are going to start logging over there and slabbing these logs to a... to a ... a regulation size and shipping this... these planks over here and milling the lumber here in this country so that they won’t lose the investment that they have in the mills.” But I said, “These mills will be totally automated. They will probably be three people in the mill per shift and the labor, the cutting of the logs, the slabbing and so forth, this will be done by Russian labor.” So I said, that, you know, “The... the giant sucking sound of your jobs going overseas,” I said, “This is what the end game is.” And I said that, “You know, your... your anger and frustration is ... you... you have got a place to focus it now. It is at Washington, DC, because they, in effect, have engineered this situation to ship your jobs overseas.”

They can now regulate commerce world wide and regulate resources in this country anyway they want to and fine tune the economy any way they want to. And none of them had ever heard of this. You know, the mill didn’t tell them why they were shutting down. They just let the media tell the story for them that it was because of the Endangered Species Act and because of the spotted owl. But that is not the end game.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, cutting those ... into those forests in Siberia will be deadly for the old believers. They fled from the Marxists into the forests and had carefully concealed spots. Occasionally planes would go out and search for them over that vast tract of forest...

[ Murray ] And we have...

[ Rushdoony ] ... trying to spot them.

[ Murray ] We have the technology to find them 100 percent.

[ Rushdoony ] yes.

[ Murray ] ...unless they go underground. We have got infrared detection devices that can pick up a body six feet deep in the ground. So it is going to be pretty tough for them to escape.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, well, you see, they could escape from the Soviets. Now their refuge has ended and they are no more loved in Yeltsin’s Russia than they were in Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s.

[ M Rushdoony ] Have there been any precedents in history of a people having to assume freedom and responsibility against their wills? I can only think of two minor examples in... in the Plymouth colony and Jamestown colony and their experiments with communal living, but that was a very short experience ands they could fall upon... back upon their own abilities and their own experiences before they came here.

[ Murray ] Well, the problem now is that the world is virtually one community because of communications and travel. And so there is no place left to run. So we are confronted by an entirely different problem. You can’t immigrate somewhere where you can start a new country again. It is just...

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you never had a real break into freedom apart from Christianity. You had a number of societies begin with freedom because they were not that organized and losing time. But we self consciously have seen freedom become a motive force in Christian civilization.

Now an interesting book on that subject which is not intended to be on the subject we are talking about was Stephen Ozment, O Z M E N T, When Fathers Ruled, written just a few years ago and possibly still in print. And it was about reformation Germany, the aftermath of Luther’s work there and then in some areas the work of the Calvinists is that fathers became heads of their households in an unprecedented way and they created a major social revolution. They created new... new center of governmental powers, the family. And all this was an act of faith. And Ozment rightly titles the book When Fathers Ruled. It is the antithesis of what we have today because the father is the person who feels most useless in the current families of today. The woman doesn’t have much respect for his authority and the children have less. So the problem is a major one in our society and there is not going to be a turn around apart from Christian faith.

This is why what Colonel Doner and Monty Hidden and Joseph Mc Auliffe are doing is so important. They are holding seminars for men with as many as 300 turning out on how to be men, how to rule their households, how to govern and men are hungry for that because they have been crowded out by our culture, the media, the Feminists, the schools have all made them feel as though any time they assert their manhood they are creating some kind of criminal offense.

[ Murray ] Well, secular schools that has been...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... you know, their foundation philosophies is to drive that wedge between the generation that they are teaching and the generation that they have come from.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, a tremendous area where people are choosing freedom is Christian education and home schooling and both are growing rapidly.

[ Murray ] That is...

[ Rushdoony ] Nobody thought it would take off. I recall in the early and middle 60s public school officials were proud that they were so tolerant of Christian schools. Of course, they didn't think they were anything but an exotic fact that was insignificant. They never thought they would get off the ground. In a few years they became very hostile. But what it did reveal was that families were taking back education and they were choosing freedom in education as against controls against slavery. And this, I feel, is one of the most hopeful signs of our times. I think you are going to see more and more of it because both movements are growing. The home school movement, in particular is making very, very rapid strides and its powers are startling across country.

As a matter of fact, some of the best areas of growth for our work has been among homeschool people because of their eagerness to learn, their eagerness to apply the faith, their eagerness to think about what it means to be a Christian and how to apply it.

I believe that the issues we are now putting out to call attention to our work and the sphere of Christian charity will meet with a very strong response from these people, because it is exactly the kind of thing they represent.

[ Murray ] Well, I think for people who feel that slavery is inevitable, looking at history and situations where people started out free and over a succession of generations have lost their freedom should examine the fact that since this country has begun to veer away from its Christian foundations, they have increasingly lost their personal freedom. And it is no coincidence. It is inevitable. But with the Christian foundation, if you maintain that Christianity is the bases of civilization, it is inevitable that you will maintain your freedom. And I don’t think very many people give that much thought.

[ Rushdoony ] Well our time is almost up. Is there anything further that any of you would like to add to what has been said thus far?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I ... I think people essentially have to make themselves free. You have to be free spiritually, as you said at the beginning. And they have to focus on not being walked into dependence on government, dependence on debt and I know a lot of people are working towards that end which means they can’t ... they can’t own a house, they are renting, sometimes under uncomfortable positions and situations and especially with large families and they are making great sacrifices because they don’t want to be a slave to a mortgage, a slave to... to the government and so they are thinking like freed men. If you think like free men and you assume responsibility for yourself, then that is a beginning.

[ Murray ] And, besides, it scares the politicians to death.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. When I was a high school student in one of the anthologies that was our text, there was a poem entitled, “The Slave” by James Oppenheim. And I have never seen it in any anthology in recent years. And the gist of it was Oppenheim said you can strike the manacles, the chains from off a slave, but you cannot set him free. Only from within can a man be set free from slavery. And that is our problem today. Slavery is an inner fact, an inner reality all around us and it will take a Christian renewal to bring about rebirth of freedom.

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

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