From the Easy Chair

Revolution

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 204-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161U38

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161U38, Revolution, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 136, December the twelfth, 1986.

Otto Scott and I are going not discuss revolution this evening. This is very closely related with the subject we did earlier on Romanticism. The two go hand in hand.

First of all, a few words of background information. In the Christian era revolution began with the Enlightenment or, rather, the seeds of revolution were laid with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment enthroned reason. And the key to the menace of the enlightenment was that the studied ruthlessness it cultivated, a rationalistic view of life means that everything is dissolved by reason. The past, tradition, family, all non rational things including Christianity are ruled out. Reason is to adjudicate all things.

As a result, reason cultivated a studied ruthlessness. The child of this age of reason, of the enlightenment was Romanticism. The same general outlook prevailed except it was transferred from the mind of man to the emotions of man. Now reason, as I indicated, requires a studied sense of ruthlessness. This is the essence of revolution. Revolution believes all that one has to do to create a paradise on earth is to sweep away the past, to destroy everything that existed before. And having destroyed these things, then a brave new world is going to come into being. Because of this background of the rationalistic ruthlessness, Romanticism stressing now an emotional approach to this, felt that by stirring up the masses, stirring up the people’s throughout Europe and destroying the past, a brave new world would be ushered in.

The roots, thus, are in anti Christianity. Revolution is anti Christian to the core. It seeks to destroy Christianity wherever it takes hold so that every revolutionary regime, whether it calls itself National Socialist, Marxist, Communist or Fascist is, inevitably, anti Christian.

As a result, the defense of Christianity requires opposition to the fundamental premises of revolution.

Well, with that, Otto, would you like to make some general statements before we get into a further discussion of the subject?

[ Scott ] Well, yes. I would say that the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, of course, was beautiful, very persuasive, called upon the highest ideals. But the reality of the revolution was that it was accompanied by terror and terror is the one great sin that renders all revolutionary arguments absolutely invalid, because you cannot bring about a better world through murder, through terror, through the annihilation of innocent people.

Now that is an aspect of revolutionary aspiration that almost all left wingers and liberals shy away from. If you bring it up, they immediately say, “Oh, we deplore violence.” But they admire the people who create the violence. And that particular contradiction really cannot be allowed to stand very much longer in the national dialogue.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is a good point. They refuse to acknowledge that there is an inescapable link between the concept of revolution and terror, total terror, nor are they ready to face up to the fact that men like Lenin demanded terror even more rigorously than, let us say, Robespierre did, because the only way to uproot the Christian faith, to destroy the past, they felt, was through total terror. And, hence, they applied it.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Robespierre and his colleagues were very interesting. First of all, before the revolution began they all had aristocratic pretensions or aspirations. Some of them gave themselves false titles of nobility. Robespierre himself was a petty noble. He had a D in front of his name. And after the guillotines began, after the terror began, there was no question of guilt or innocence. For the first time in history there was no question about guilt or innocence. The people who were sent to the guillotine were not sent to the guillotine because they had done anything wrong. They were sent because of who ... of what they represented in the minds of the revolutionaries. Now Lenin came along and studied the matter very closely and it was his opinion that the committee of public safety in 1791 had not applied terror with sufficient rigor. And he said, “We will not make that mistake.” Now what he did was to add a dimension to revolutionary terror so that terror which was used in the French instance to achieve power was established in the Soviet instance to maintain power. So terror is an ongoing part of the Soviet state and of every other totalitarian state. Every day in every way the people are kept afraid and their physical safety is absolutely abolished. You are not secure, either in your person or in your relationships or in your family. This is what the wonderful glorious revolutionaries have brought to the 20th century.

[ Rushdoony ] These revolutionaries have all favored the total control education by the state. Through education they seek to create a group oriented person who will be afraid to stand up alone, who will not be God directed, conscience, faith oriented. Then they use education also as a means of terror to terrorize people, to make them feel fearful of staying by themselves, of being something solitary, an individual, not a part of the crowd.

Otto, you have developed very clearly the nature of revolution in your study of Robespierre, The Voice of Virtue which is still available through Ross House Books if any of our listeners are interested. Why don’t you tell us something about the meaning of a purge as the French Revolution developed it.

[ Scott ] Well, that was the first time the word was used in that sense. It has always been... it is an old medical term, of course, purge, a purgative. And when Robespierre and his friends brought up the phrase as a means of expelling what they continue... what they believe to be waste material from the body politic, they were actually referring to human beings as feces. And that is the way they thought of them. Some of them wanted to do what was later done by Pol Pot. They wanted to educe the entire population of France, 25 million people down to, say, five million who would be totally docile and governable.

The whole question of revolution, of course, is something that has been held up to all the young people of the United States and the western world ever since 1917 as the real goal, the most attractive, the thing that is ... the thing that evokes idealism and so on and so forth. Actually today I think the lure is toward power, toward becoming another Castro, another Lenin, another Mao Tse Tung more than it is helping anybody. But the rhetoric in the beginning was concern for the poor and all the rest. And the prototype, the French Revolution set up a formula which has never since deviated, never. The first state is to destroy the pride of the culture in its own history and in its own institutions. And that general takes quite a long time. In the case of the French it ran from, say, 1715 or so all the way to the 1780s. The United States, incidentally, has been undergoing such a campaign which began around 1900 and we are now in the 1980s. So the resistance of the American people has been quite remarkable. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn said at one point the way to destroy a people is to destroy their roots, to sever their roots with their past.

The second stage is to bring down the statist, the mystique of the unifying institutions of the culture. In the case of the French it was the army, the nobility and the church and the crown. In the case of the United States it is business and industry, the army and the defense establishment, the presidency and this... the church.

Now in ... in the case of the French there monarchy, of course, was the last to be attacked. It was covered with pornography, pornographic campaigns also many campaigns alleging various scandals, the diamond necklace case and others in which, although them monarchy was not directly involved, it was held to be responsible, because these scandals occurred in the court or in the environs of the court or among the nobility or among the higher prelates of the Church.

The courts, incidentally, of France went along with this because they wanted to assist in the reduction of the authority of the king or the authority of anybody else except themselves. And the judges were very surprised when finally at the very end the revolution began to attack them. That is when the courts were swept aside as being unjust, inherently inequitable and the people’s courts or the terror began. And that is the final stage.

If we were to put this formula down in a yard stick, I would say the we are at the stage where Louis XVI was deposed, because the effort, now, is to reduce the presidency to nothing, to make Congress supreme and not only Congress, but the left wing members of Congress because here you had in the French example parliament in France was divided into left and right and center and, as you recall, there was a series of efforts to weed out or to purge, to use that terrible term, all the moderates from that particular body.

So that is the... that is where we are. We are in the midst of the revolution and the American people don’t know it because nobody has appeared on television to say the revolution begin at 8:15 this morning.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I see the revolution in the courts all the time. We see an all out attack on those who take their faith seriously, who believe the Bible. And, in effect, a total war has been declared upon Bible believers. The sad fact is that most of them are not aware of this total war.

At the same time the liberals in the church, Catholic and Protestant, are indifferent to it. They themselves belong to the party of revolution. And, as a result, they could not care less what is being done to their brethren, because, after all, the faith of those who take their faith very seriously is an indictment to them.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a standing reproach. But it certainly not unprecedented for clergy to be part of the revolution. Let’s not forget that Talleyrand was a bishop.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Let’s not forget that Lenin, well, not Lenin, but Stalin was a seminarian, went to the seminary. And in the... in the... and incidentally, got fairly good grades in the seminary. The ... the fact is that some of our most vociferous mischief makers are members of the cloth.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Our seminaries are often seedbeds of revolution. Well, Kenneth Minogue in his study Alien Powers: The Purer Theory of Ideology makes the point that ideologists, ideologues, revolutionaries are hostile to Christianity. The reason, of course, is that they represent Elitism. They are the elite intellectuals, the men of reason. And the rest of us are incapable of their kind of thinking. Where as Christianity with its doctrine of grace is the opposite of Elitism. It says that it is not something that is of us, but of God. As a result, the elitists believe that they alone have the truth. They reject the individual and the person. All of us are to be reduced to masked men. They have a revelation of a naturalistic sort, Minogue says, which no one else is privy to. And they have a suicidal bent, because of their lack of reality.

He says of these revolutionary ideologues, and I quote, “In pronouncing the rottenness of the civilization, it is actually declaring a war, a hatred of any possible human life. What it proposes is the cosmic equivalent of a suicide pact,” unquote.

So no good can come out of what these men are doing. It is suicidal. It is a war against humanity and against life. Shafarovich in his book on Socialism said that in the final analysis Socialism is a war against life.

These people see the motor of history—to use Minogue’s term—as themselves. They are self nominated as the mouthpiece of history.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. Well, nobody... I haven’t heard anybody in the United States communications sector wondering when Fidel Castro is going to hold an election in Cuba. The whole purpose here is to have unlimited power over other human beings. Now one of the reasons, of course, that they have to get rid of Christianity is because of the Christian sanctions against murder and against various and sundry other capital offenses, terrible sins. Once you remove those barriers, then everything is permitted.

I wonder how long it will take the Christian community of the United States to realize that, for instance, in the Philippines today while the press is jubilating over Aquino’s administration, Christians are making plans as to how they are going to survive under the increasing terror to which they are being exposed.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and some pastors have been murdered by the Communists, precisely because they have witnessed to the whole counsel of God.

Marx at one point said, and I quote, “The task of history, therefore, once the world beyond the truth has disappeared, is to establish the truth of this world. In other words, the only truth is what is.

[ Scott ] Well, you have...

[ Rushdoony ] And they are going to establish what is and the truth will be inseparable from it. In effect, they are saying, “We are the truth.”

[ Scott ] What they are saying is pretty much what Mr. Emerson said and what Nietzsche echoed. Emerson talked about the higher law beyond the laws that bind other people. And it is always interesting to me to reflect upon the fact that it is the reverend Emerson. He was an ordained minister. And no one ever refers to him as the reverend Emerson, because I guess they are embarrassed by the connection. I don’t know. In any event, Nietzsche went around with Emerson’s essays in his pocket underlining all kinds of passages, especially those that discuss the business of being beyond good and evil. In fact, that was Nietzsche’s... one of the Nietzsche’s books was entitled that, because Emerson fell into this Hinduism as he understood it. And as you know, Shiva, the god of creation in Hindu mythology is also the god of destruction so that in Hinduism virtue and vice are equal. Either one will lead you to nirvana. No crime is unthinkable or undoable, because it doesn't interfere with your chances of going to heaven in that particular religion.

This is what attracted the reverent Emerson and it attracted Nietzsche and it attracted Lenin and Stalin and the others. I have just got through reading a biography of Stalin, by the way. And it is interesting by De Young, Alex De Young. He made it his business in the course of his rise to power to have killed every man who ever at any time not only contradicted or differed with him on any subject at any time no matter how trivial it is.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Your point about Ralph Waldo Emerson is very important. What he did was to take Unitarian thinking and make it, as it were, the Catholic faith of America and of western Europe. Emerson’s thinking did develop into revolutionary implications of a life beyond good and evil. Now the interesting thing is that Emerson took so many biblical concepts and simply naturalized them and people have failed to see what he has done. The intellectuals of Europe and of this country picked up on the dangerous implications of his thinking, but other people naïvely did not. For example, one of the great verses of Scripture, Romans 8:28, says hat all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

Now the plain statement there is that all things work together for good only to those who are the called of God. They do not work together for good to those who are evil.

[ Scott ] No, of course not.

[ Rushdoony ] They work together for evil, for judgment for them. But Emerson took this and used it endlessly in a naturalistic sense. He went so far in a lecture in London and even Carlisle couldn’t stomach this statement as to say that even when a man visits a brothel he contributes to the future betterment of the human race.

Now that was a naturalistic concept of Romans 8:28. In other words, when a man goes into a brothel if a man does anything that is sinful, he still contributes to the future and the betterment of the human race. What if you have total terror?

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] You are contributing to the betterment of the human race in the future. And it was this type of thing that Emerson said that people did not pick up on. They did not see the implications of it.

[ Scott ] Well, they didn’t watch Mr. Emerson either after the Civil War or during the Civil War when he fell into the same blood thirstiness as his colleagues.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the Abolitionists, as we know, at least a half a dozen of them hired John Brown, a murderer, whom they knew to be a murderer, who did something quite original. He and his sons and his son-in-law and a neighbor in the Kansas territory went to the homes of five poor farmers, dragged them out of bed in the middle of the night and took them out and killed them and said he did this in the name of anti slavery.

Well, the ... the press at that time using the high speed telegraph which was new, was able to send line dispatches back East saying that he actually committed these murders, they said, in self defense. It was a pitched battle. And they... they rationalized and idealized it and so on. So then six wealthy Abolitionists said to ... to John Brown, “Come to Boston.” He went there and they put him on the payroll.

Our historians have always said, “Well, John Brown fooled them. They didn't realize that... that he was... that he really meant what he said.” But, of course, when I looked at the evidence I thought, if he fooled him, why did they give him guns? The whole case falls on the fact that they provided him with guns and ammunition. And you don’t do that for somebody who is simply a rhetorician.

In any event, Mr. Emerson knew these men. Mr. Emerson was also one of the supporters of John Brown as was Thoreau. When John Brown was finally captured, Emerson finally said, “Well, I think the old hero went a little bit too far that time.”

[ Rushdoony ] And that was to extricate himself from any guilt, probably. They knew what they were doing when the hired a man who was a horse thief and whose prophetic mouthings were hypocrisy.

[ Scott ] Well, we have here, I think, the original formula for modern political terror. It consists of only three elements. One, a murderer capable of killing innocent people in the name of a noble cause; two, a press that will rationalize those murders to help that cause; and, three, wealthy and influential people who advance the money and the guns to help the cause. So here you have it.

Now Lenin and Robespierre were more honest in their day. Once they had the chance they killed everybody in sight and the ... all the noble rhetoric fell to the floor. They paid no further attention to that. And all the wonderful brave journalists of Paris who had attacked the king suddenly fell quiet just as the Russian socialists and liberals and intellectuals suddenly shut up when Lenin got into power.

[ Rushdoony ] You named the three ingredients. Let me add a fourth. Simple minded Christians who don't want to think and who don’t read their Bible intelligently, ready to take any superficial statement made by someone and say, “Oh, he is a Christian. Therefore, we must be understanding of what he is trying to do.”

We have seen this in politics. I recall the indignation of someone when I tried to tell him and another man who was very knowledgeable in Washington was documenting what I had to say. And this was some few years ago that Jimmy Carter was anything but a Bible believing Christian, that the men of faith whom he exalted were existentialists and modernists, that all his real associations were with anything but Bible believers. This person was indignant. How could we say that given the fact of what Carter had said that he was a born again Christian. He refused to believe that this was purely a political ploy.

So that is a fourth ingredient, simple minded Christians who refuse to grow up, who are babes in Christ and refuse to be mature men and women.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, if Christianity had been composed from the beginning of that sort of person, it would never have... never have traveled anywhere.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The early church was made up of men, many of them with rather sordid backgrounds, because they were converting people out of every kind of environment. But they were not guilty of illusions about the kind of people they were working with so that this is the ingredient that is missing today. Too many church members are more like hot house plants than mature men and women.

In a previous Easy Chair I was citing something from a book by Theodore Shank, professor of dramatic art at the University of California in his book American Alternative Theater published, I believe in 1982. Well, what professor Shank who is very favorable to the contemporary theater points out, quoting from a contemporary dramatist, “Life, revolution and theater are three words for the same thing, an unconditional no to the present society,” unquote.

Now notice the correlation there. Life is equated with revolution and theater. This means that these people are not living in a real world. That is the world of shadows, of not real people. You are not really alive unless you are a part of the revolution and the theater. I recall about 15, 16 years ago at a meeting near a campus, a Christian service, a student on drugs standing at the doorway as people left shouting insults, pornographic insults to one and all and declaring that they were the living dead. They were not alive. This its eh kind of thing that prevails quite widely. To quote, again from someone else, again, from Shanks book, “Acting is not make believe, but living exquisitely in the moment,” unquote.

In other words, the people on the stage are not the actors. They represent reality. And those of us who are in the audience are not really alive, because we are not a part of the revolution or the theater.

What you have to say, given this type of rhetoric which prevails among your avant garde people in the media and among your revolutionaries, is that they have lost all hold on reality. These are the people who are today commanding society in one country after another. And they are insane. It is a loss of any sense of reality and it is suicidal.

[ Scott ] Well, we are watching the revolutionary theater, for instance, in South Africa. People are being burned alive and they are being used as living symbols of the revolution. This is to light the fires of revolution. They are using human beings. And not human beings who have done anything, who are in any way guilty of any crimes, but simply because they are there. They are available. They are vulnerable and because the revolutionary, the theater of the revolution requires this sort of terror. It is as though the actors in the stage suddenly begin to shoot people in the audience at random and at the same time others keep saying to the audience, “This is perfectly good. Don’t object. Don’t become a counter revolutionary. Let them come and kill somebody in your family because it is all in good cause.”

Now, obviously, obviously there is a collapse of reality not just on the part of the revolutionaries, but on the part of the audience that is so docile.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There is a collapse in the Church, because while Christians are being murdered all around the world, the Church is unaware, indifferent. The ... the bishops recently were talking about economics. They weren’t talking about the prisoners of their faith in various parts of the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the theater today is a means of laying down the lifestyles for tomorrow and the ideas for tomorrow. It is interesting that in many of these avant garde theaters men and women dress indiscriminately. That is, some men may be dressed as women, others as men. And the same is true of the women. The whole effort there is to break down the world of every day life, to break down distinctions, not only between good and evil, but between all things. And this is the kind of thing that modern education is part and parcel of. The schools today are determined to break down good and evil.

[ Scott ] It is a very interesting point. I saw a program the other night or part of a news program, you know, they intersperse... they don’t give the news. The intersperse it with little lectures and little propaganda playlists which they devise. Once in a while they slip sideways and they say something that is interesting and they were... there was a film of violence in the schools. And some schools the students have to be searched and weapons removed and they have guards, armed guards. Teachers have been murdered. And here you have a confusion of relation in the theater because they... in the theater this is all they see and they go ahead and do it because the individual in front of them doesn’t probably seem any more real than a motion picture.

But I come back to this strange sort of frozen position of the majority of the people. It is not particularly new. In Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution he mentioned the fact that while the guillotine was going on in Paris and in Lyons and in other cities in France, the average citizen got up and got dressed and had breakfast and went to work. The revolution didn’t engulf everyone all at once. All it involved is these little core groups operating on the periphery of society. But in time they take over. And then, of course, everyone is in a cage. From them on, life is different.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. One of the things that you and I have both seen, Otto, in our life time thus far is a very major change in the character of peoples. When we were boys the number of games we played were endless. No sooner was school out than in every vacant lot a group of boys would have some kind of game going, Games we invented or baseball, any number of things. We played. But today the youth are spectators.

[ Scott ] Well, that is...

[ Rushdoony ] And...

[ Scott ] They are either spectators or they are supervised.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The endless variety of folk games that were legion that had existed in this country from early days have disappeared.

[ Scott ] Well, they are...

[ Rushdoony ] They are unknown now.

[ Scott ] ...all sorts of things have changed. We used to send valentines, often anonymously, I suspect, somebody that you admired very much and were afraid to say hello to. Now I understand the kids are ordered to send valentines to every one in their class, which, of course, destroys the whole point of a valentine.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, they said, we don’t want anyone to feel bad.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you have television providing games instead of people playing them. And violence is what is making football increasingly popular so that you have a people with a joy in violence who are increasingly less and less able to do any fighting themselves.

One of the rituals of growing up when we were young was that...

[ Scott ] If you...

[ Rushdoony ] ... you had a lot of fights.

[ Scott ] Well you had to learn to defend yourself.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But...

[ Rushdoony ] But that is no longer true.

[ Scott ] ...but nobody was hurt.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Nobody was hurt. You might get a black eye. But I can’t recall any worse injury.

Lots of fist fights, but little boys really can’t one another very much.

[ Rushdoony ] And when two boys got into a fight the others stood around and if anything grew to be dirty, they intervened immediately. Now that type of fight no longer takes place. It is a gang picking on an individual. And you are either a member of a gang or you are wiped out.

[ Scott ] Well, we are going up and down the scale. We are talking about the collapse of many different sorts of values on many different levels. I was not too long ago in a large airport and I had to sit there for a while waiting for my plane. So I watched the people. And it occurred to me that nobody dresses anymore. That everyone wears a costume. And you could... you could almost tell who they were by the costumes. Certainly could tell the class by the costumes.

Strangely enough, most expensive rags, Anne tells me, are very expensive. I would see somebody that I looked as though in need of help and she would say, “Oh, no, that is a very expensive outfit.” And so that... that also occurred, you know, in the... just prior to the French Revolution when the court gave up all its fancy clothes and it began to dress down and to dress very simply. And Marie Antoinette played at being a milk maid and so forth. I mean, everyone was going to be in a sort of a false equality. Call me Jim, that sort of thing, you know, and the... you ... you shouldn’t take it too seriously.

But it means that there is... the ground is shifting underneath.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we hear a great deal against anti... against traditionalists and, of course, now the word fundamentalist. Bible believers, you mentioned before. In Carroll Quigley’s very interesting book Tragedy and Hope he was describing the Boers in the end of the 19th century who were broken out of their isolation by the great British Empire. And Quickly, who was a non believer described the Boers as ignorant Bible believers, Bible readers he called them. And I thought that is quite an interesting charge.

Now, of course, we... we ... we can go on. Look at the... the manner in which the university professors now the left wing professors are using the South African situation as a means to recreate the 60s.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. In any healthy culture those on the lower level seek to emulate those above them and to improve themselves intellectually, to improve themselves socially, financially, to improve their appearance. But what you have in a revolutionary ear is the reverse process. Van Til has described it on the intellectual level as integration downward into the void.

[ Scott ] Interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Interesting. Spangler put it another way. He said, “The return... the return of the {?}.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... in which you are... we are actually contemplating, we are actually contemplating this moment the possibility of a world that consists of an elite, a global elite and a global {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, Van Til said that in this century what we are seeing is men integrating downward to the lowest level. Then forsaking everything in their being except the unconscious, the triumph of the unconscious in man. Then integrating backward into primitive man and back to the lower levels of life and finally into the void.

Günter Stent, seeing these same things and writing as a scientist and without any Christian faith at all, said that he did not see how mankind could last 200 years. But the pleasure principle alone governed them and it would be increasing chaos and finally the death of man.

One of the reviewers said that he could not buy Dr. Stent’s optimism.

[ Scott ] Optimism?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Two centuries, he said, was too long a time.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] On the... on the other hand now Nadezhda Mandelstam after ... after her husband died and after she was excited to the provinces and teaching because she was very well educated and, of course, she was interesting to me because she and her husband were part of the revolution. And she had had an excellent background in education, very high level, very well educated and so forth. They rejoiced until, of course, the revolution engulfed them together with everyone else. And she was trying to earn a living as a Teacher, but her curriculum was very restricted to what the party line permitted. And she despaired of the young people. She said, “How are they ever going to recover even a little bit of what we had?”

And then, to her amazement, they began to come to her with the eternal questions and answers. And we know, of course, that there is an underground Christian community in that part of the world which is very sincere because it has seen the devil and it believes in God. And therefore I came to the conclusion reading her book that actually the human race is ineradicable. I think Stent, therefore, was wrong.

[ Rushdoony ] I do, too, of course, because being a man without faith he saw the logic of the unbeliever’s position, that it is suicidal.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] That mankind will wipe itself out.

[ Scott ] Right, right.

[ Rushdoony ] But we believe there is a supernatural power that will regenerate man and that God is bringing judgment upon these peoples. God is allowing them to have their own way and their way is death. So they are eliminating themselves from the scene. But we can have nothing else until Christians make a stand.

Spengler, in the next to the last paragraph of his Decline and Fall of the Western... The Decline and Fall of the West said that power is never replaced except by another power.

Well, Christians have the greatest power of all as their resource, the power of God. And they can replace these evil, demonic, humanistic powers if they will only turn to the power of God and take it seriously.

[ Scott ] And if they will only stand up and look...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... at Medusa’s head.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You know, the... the great Roman Empire. I have forgotten which historian it was who figured that at its height Rome, Italy had... I have forgotten how many million people. And yet a few hundred years later it was practically vacant of humans.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There were practically nobody there and nothing but ruins. And yet the Christian faith came out of those ashes. I... I see this as a great repetition.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, I do, too. I feel that the present world is under the judgment of God and will perish. The Christians unless they take their faith in their God seriously are going to perish with this world. It was the sad aspect of Augustine’s life that though he was a great man of faith, he sold out Rome that he saw the fall of Rome as the end of everything. And it is not surprising that he did not survive the fall. He died as the Barbarians were at the gates of his city.

But it was Salvian, the presbyter, whose account of the fall of Rome in his book The Governance of God is the most telling account who said that ... that if Rome did not fall, it would mean there is no God and who described the obliviousness of people. He said Rome is dying and yet continues to laugh. He described the barbarians coming through Trier and nobody going to the walls to defend the city because the athletic games were on and they were all in the arena cheering their side. And the survivors of the city met after the barbarians went through burning and destroying, looting, raping and they petitioned the Roman emperor to build another arena ...

[ Scott ] A bigger one.

[ Rushdoony ] ... because they wanted their games.

[ Scott ] A bigger arena.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And... and... and in World War II we saw the old myth that men will automatically rise to defend their countries put to rest. The Dutch did not rise. The French did not rise. The Belgians did not rise. The Norwegians did not rise. The Swedes did not rise. And later on when the Soviets poured into the middle Europe those people stopped fighting.

Now on ... men will not fight unless they have something to fight for.

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly. And without faith men will not fight. They can be driven to battle...

[ Scott ] But they won’t fight.

[ Rushdoony ] But they won’t fight. And as faith has waned in this country with each successive war in this century, the fire power of American soldiers has decreased, meaning that a large number of them, an increasing number simply never use their weapons.

[ Scott ] Well, we have so many men in the rear. We have man after man after man in the supply and in the military police and in the clerks and so forth. The fellows who finally get up to the front line are pretty small. All the ... all the sharp ones get themselves a better job.

But I do see... I do see in younger people and older people, too, all signs... all kinds of signs of awakening. I think we were talking before we got on the subject about a publication that put out a special issue just looking at the religious right and suddenly found themselves inundated to their...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...almost to their horror because they had not thought these people were that numerous or that important. And although ACLU is trying to stamp out Christmas this year, I don’t think they are going to succeed.

[ Rushdoony ] People should start calling the ACLU the Grinch.

[ Scott ] Even the Wall Street Journal this morning had a... a comment about it. They said, “If a public official says merry Christmas to another public official will that be a conflict of church and state?”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you notice, as we go to town, it doesn’t say merry Christmas anymore. Happy holidays. The word Christmas is being dropped out. You told me of Elizabeth’s experience at school.

[ Scott ] Yes. They call it the winter holiday now.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they... Easter is the spring holiday.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, they want...

[ Scott ] But that is... that is... that is... that is officialdom.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And... and... and we have the very peculiar phenomenon of a government that is in favor of revolution. We have a government here that is funding revolutionary groups. Now I doubt if any government before has been quite that corrupt.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is the word for it, corrupt. And without faith men will be corrupt, because the logic of the fall takes over. As sinners they will go to corruption like a pig to slop.

[ Scott ] Interesting. It is interesting that you listen to all these talk shows. I... I... I avoid them, can’t... you can’t avoid them all. At how little of substance is ever said, how little of honesty is ever said.

[ Rushdoony ] And how they try to sound any Christian who gets on the show and speaks his mind.

[ Scott ] Well, Christians are... are practically barred from television. Radio, in my experience, is the most democratic sector left in the communications area.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... because at least on the radio you can hear some exchange, some unpopular opinions and some popular ones. The callers in will say things that upset the host and... and get cut off the air, but at least they say something.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the alternative to revolution is God’s revelation taken seriously and applied in the life of man and of society. And, of course, what we are trying to do here at Chalcedon is to lay down the framework for a Christian view of man and society, an outline for the future, because we believe more than others the situation is very grim. And we believe more than others that there is a godly answer to this.

[ Scott ] Oh, indeed. Courage and faith can change everything. Nothing in history was ever inevitable and nothing is in the future is inevitable. It is all within the hands of individuals. And a nation that ... a nation of cowards will, of course, be abused. I can recall in my father’s time I... I remember we were living in upper Manhattan and the garbage men were making a lot of noise and he called the mayor and he got the mayor’s office and do you know they switched the garbage hours after that?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now it was a... it was a good example to me. He didn’t know the mayor, but he was going to talk to him or talk to somebody as close to him as possible. And I don’t know really when. I can’t pinpoint the time when the sawdust began to run out of the American doll, when people here began to switch and began to feel that an honest controversy was upsetting and had to be hushed down immediately when the hostess wouldn’t invite you back or you wouldn’t... you wouldn’t keep your job if you got into arguments. We used to get into arguments all the time. We could be fired and be rehired. One fellow fired me twice. I quit the third time.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I read a book recently sent to me by someone who is a friend of Chalcedon. It is a book put out by a supposedly Christian organization and which is used as a study book in may churches. The group that puts it out is supposedly one of the strongest Bible believing groups. And yet the heart of the book is this statement, that our Christian duty is the unconditional love of every person living. The rapist, the murderer...

[ Scott ] Adolf Hitler?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The unconditional love of everyone. Now when that is presented by a highly respected group and that is used in the churches, you know there is something wrong. There is something radically wrong and God is going to judge the church as well as the world.

We are told in Scripture that judgment must begin at the house of God and it will.

[ Scott ] It certainly will to much... to those to whom much has been given, much is asked.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This has been a very fortunate country. It has not been invaded since the War of 1812 and that only very briefly and very overnight so to speak. We have not had the terror that has wracked other people. We haven’t had the same kind of tyrants. A great many Americans think that though the laws of historic gravity have been suspended in our favor, but they have not. All these perils are quite possible here if we continue to be somnombulous and if we refuse to stand up for our faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, people are going to have to wake up. The church members are doing to have to wake up. The business men and men of wealth are going to have to wake up. The teachers and professors, people in every walk of life who profess to be Christians are going to have to have a sense of responsibility. They cannot be content with doing their job. The excuse of the Germans under Hitler who pleaded that they were simply doing their job, didn’t wash with the world. No more will the excuse of those Christians in whatever walk of life they are of that I am simply doing my job wash with the Lord God of hosts when they come face to face with his judgment.

Well, our time is running out. Do you have a final statement of any sort that you would like to add, Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, I do think that we are in a revolution. I do think that it is long since overdue for intelligent Christian people to being not give very straight answers to some of these dialogues that occur. I think they should talk to their neighbors, to their editors, to their politicians, to their colleagues. I think they should take the trend of events a great deal more seriously than they do, because I regard the trend at this point as being quite sinister.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Christians were once defined the time of the apostles as the people who turned the world upside down. Now a teacup is about all they turn upside down. This must change.

Well, our time is running out. Thank you all for listening and God bless you and make you strong in his service.

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