From the Easy Chair

What Is Going to Happen to Us

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 207-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161W41

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161W41, What Is Going to Happen to Us, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 140, February the 13th, 1987.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to deal with the fourth of a series of discussions we have had about aspects of the modern world. Tonight we are going to deal with the future. What is going to happen to us?

Now we don’t to be prophets, but the future is really the present worked out and, therefore, when you look at the present, you have a good indication of what the future shall be.

In an Easy Chair of a year or two ago Otto Scott spoke of decadence as the inability to defend one’s self. Throughout the western world, in fact, through out much of the world, nations have lost the ability to defend themselves. In the United States the hostility to anything in favor of defense is staggering and yet in that respect we are ahead of western Europe. In western Europe they regard us as a saber rattling country. We have lost the ability, increasingly to defend ourselves in one country after another.

Let me add another definition of decadence to what Otto has said and yet it is a fact of the same thing. Eugen Rosentock Huessy, somewhere in one of his works said that the decadent have no concept of the future. If they think about the tomorrow, it is in terms of fantasy, not reality. As a result, any realistic thinking, any realistic planning, any realistic work to make the future is absent. Their thinking is in terms of fantasy, in terms of unreality. And this, too, marks our age. Existentialism says that you live for the moment. And Existentialism is the characteristic philosophy of this century, the one that has colored schools of though far beyond its perimeter.

And so because we are so existential, we have no future. We don't want to think realistically about the future.

Well, with these words of introduction, we will begin the discussion. Otto, would you like make some kind of statement now about the future?

[ Scott ] Well, the future is, of course, unreadable. Men plan, God disposes. And yet we perennially are told by various celebrities what they think of the future, the Orwellian future, which overshadows the expansion of totalitarianism, in my opinion, had a great defect, because George Orwell had no faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And therefore his vision of the future was that of a dying man, a sick man. And he saw nothing but darkness. I think what we project onto the future reveals our situation or reveals our position. I am always reminded of the Spanish philosophy which is centered according to Ortega y Gasset on the attitude that an individual assumes towards life, either cringing or defiant and he describes... the Spaniards describe a person’s situation as between the nice and the rock.

Now, again, that is an argument which has no faith. It doesn’t look outside of the human race. It doesn't look outside of the world that we know. It doesn't assume any intervention from any greater power. And yet the future is at the hand of God. And God always intervenes in ways that we can not perceive until the workings out of events themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] I think that is a very important point you have made, Otto. About 25 years ago out of curiosity I spent, oh, maybe half an hour to an hour glancing in the stacks of a library at the periodicals for 1900. It was very interesting, because the century was beginning and their issues for the beginning of the year, these various magazines of the day, had forecasts of the glories of the 20th century. It was most revealing because their predictions were very starry eyed and were based on a singular premise, namely science had developed to the point where there was nothing impossible for man.

So although at that time most people were nominally Christian, they were not viewing in these national periodicals the future from a Christian perspective. As a result, they were very bad prophets, very bad prophets. Well, for the same reason, you cited Orwell, very telling writer, very perceptive and yet because he had no faith, writing in the middle of the century, he was unable to see any future but a boot stamping argument human face forever, nothing but tyranny.

So our problem has been precisely whether the predictions have been rosy or grim, a lack of faith, and unwilling to come to grips with the fact that man is not a rational animal. Man is a religious creature. And therefore the future is going to be what God has ordained it to be.

I would say the future is clearly a time of judgment, because the Bible does give us the ability to predict in moral terms. The wages of sin are always death. And the century has shown a harvest of sins. So it is going to reap death, judgment.

But throughout the Bible, judgment is at one and the same time the means of salvation. The old has to be judged so that the new can be born. The world before the flood is judged so that the possibility of something better comes. We are judged as the old man, the old humanity, members of Adam on the cross of Christ in order that the new humanity might be born. And in the judgment we face in the days ahead in the next few years will be a means of clearing the ground whereby the way is prepared if Christians will make God’s Word their priority. Otherwise, the kind of judgment will continue.

[ Scott ] Well it is another way of saying a test.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Period of great testing. If we ... if we look at the United States in my opinion, we are looking at people who are sleep walking just in preparation of their ... it wasn’t much of a preparation because, you know, they are spontaneous and they don’t rehearse their remarks. They are not written out. I tore an article out of Omni magazine, a magazine I never read, but I saw it on a newsstand and it said, “14 or 20 Great Thinkers predict the future.” And it was irresistible. I had to get it.

[ Rushdoony ] And it didn’t include us.

[ Scott ] No, they didn’t. No. We are not great thinkers, you see. And I looked at the... from top to bottom, Barbara Aaronright, author; Timothy Leery, president of...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, my.

[ Scott ] ... of Boutique Software; David Byrne, head of Talking Heads; Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft; Virginia Johnson and, of course, Mr. Masters, of the Masters and Johnson Institute; William McGowan, CEO of MCI; Dr. Richard Seltzer, author; Andrew Greeley, author; Robert {?}, economist; Harvey Cox, professor of divinity: Tony {?}, president of Global Media; George F. Will, author ; and David Schramm, astrophysicist.

And I raced through. It took me all of 10 minutes to look at what they had to say. The chairman of Microsoft, of course, sees all kinds of wonderful new technical innovations in terms of communications, three dimensional television and all of that. And he also sees a disappearance of credit cards and checks which he says they have to go and passive entertainment will go. By that he means that you will be able to talk back to the television. I don’t know quite what that means or what good it would be if two other billion people are doing it, but there you are.

Global media, another one who keeps talking about technological improvements and we go on down to MCI which is a communications corporation and they are talking about more and bigger and better computers and he says by the year 2000—and I suddenly realized that their idea of the future is 20 years. They make it 20 years. They talk about the next 20 years as though it is an incredibly long period of time. But, of course, if you are more than 20 years old, if you are 40 years old, you look back, the last 20 years doesn’t seem to so long.

And, of course, Masters and Johnson talk about sex and I don’t really see how that subject could be exaggerated more than it is now in the future, but they hope so.

The author and professor of surgery at Yale Medical School thinks that we will overcome all anti... all... all... viral infections and vaccine and will wipe out many communicable diseases. Genetic manipulation, he says, will help us to dispose of congenital defects. And then he says now that we can grow embryos for 36 hours in a dish, why not grow the whole baby in a platter? He is quite serious about that.

Robert {?} a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, very {?}, but the New School, you know, is an open school. You don’t have to have any qualifications to go there. All you have to do is be able to pay the bill for the course. And he is very upset because he says we are losing basic industries and the ladder of... the ladder of advancement in the service industries doesn’t equal the old system. Mc Donalds, he says, has no ladders. Well, that surprises me, because I thought Mc Donalds had managers and I see no reason why he could say that.

George Will, a columnist whom I seldom get a chance to read turned out to be most interesting, the more interesting than any, because he said that he thought the division between the sea and the totalitarian world will become even more difficult because, he says, we will improve but the Soviet Union will not and we will be dealing with a bear with a tooth ache.

Andrew Greely, author, priest and professor of sociology says that the power of the Vatican will shrink. The Catholic Church will change.

Harvey Cox, a professor of divinity at Harvard Divinity School says that he now is confronted with over subscribed classes in religion and in the history of religion, psychology of religion and comparative religion that there is a shortage of teachers for these classes. And he sees a sort of expansion of this kind of religiosity in the next 20 years.

Finally, we have a professor of astronomy who sees more going on there. Barbara Aaronright, author and columnist, a new name to me, says that sex will be a big thing in the next 20 years.

And I think the whole series is fascinating because in the first place not a single one of them got outside the periphery of the United States mentally speaking. It is as though they are living on the other end of the moon and the world is where Mars is, the rest of the world, with the exception of George Will who obviously he doesn’t think our danger is very immanent. None of the rest mentioned a single other culture, a single other people, a single other geographical area of the world.

I doubt if at any time any society of this size and complexity has ever been as insular as we have now become.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, you would expect that from a group of liberal pontificators, because they believe, as Job said of his false comforters, that wisdom was born with them and will die with them. And outside their circles, where is their wisdom? Who is worth thinking about? They certainly didn’t mention the world you and I live in.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] And obviously they were not aware of us, Otto, and very important.

[ Scott ] I am rather pleased about that.

[ Rushdoony ] At our staff breakfast I ... we learned something about each, Otto, that maybe we ought to share with people. Otto and I are both Kentucky colonels, legitimate Kentucky colonels, only Otto is way ahead of me. He is also a Kentucky admiral.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] So We will turn back to our thinking instead of what these Humanists have to say.

Well, to get back to thinking about the future and thinking about it realistically, I think we have to recognize that we are already in judgment and it is very serious. In the February 16, 1987 U S News and World Report I was interested to read that a group of medical experts, authorities in the field dealing with problems, were planning to hold a meeting to discuss the possibility of giving antibody tests for AIDS to all hospital patients, all pregnant women and all couples applying for marriage licenses.

Now this seems like a sensible step, a step to protect, for example, someone who is marrying. But immediately civil rights groups came out charging, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. And the doctors involved immediately backed off. They backed down. They said, “We simply have called together a group of experts to look at what options are available and what obstacles may prevent this from happening. Should we do this or that? And if we do, what are the problems? It has really been misunderstood.” In other words, we weren’t planning to do anything, we were just going to talk about it.

[ Scott ] Well, where was the ACLU when people, I believe, are still tested for syphilis before they get a marriage license.

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly. And that was ... when it came in more than a generation ago it was hailed as a major step to protect people, to protect unborn children, to protect the innocent party in a marriage. And I can tell you that before that ever became law, many ministers were insisting on it before they would marry a couple, especially if they felt they did not know both partners.

I know that back in the mid 20s my father, as a minister, was requiring that of prospective couples, especially if he didn’t know anything about both parties or one of the two.

[ Scott ] Those laws are still on the books.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They.... and... and what makes AIDS different?

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] I don’t understand the reasoning.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is this kind of irrationality that is indicative of an inability to defend ourselves, an inability to think about the future.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, there is an inability to think about society as a whole.’

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is really the biggest point. And that was the point which came true in the trivial people that I just quoted. They have no sense of the United States as a nation. Now we take, for instance the idea that a family is the creation of God and so is a nation. And to ignore this, to ignore what is going to happen to the nation is to fail to love your neighbor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, it is an interesting fact that in many languages of the world, over the centuries, there has been no future tense.

[ Scott ] That is true of the African native languages.

[ Rushdoony ] And the Chinese...

[ Scott ] ... because in the primitive world according to {?}, if you recall, nothing could be changed because the attempt to innovate would mean that you are trying to do something and get yourself in a better position than your neighbor. That would be an insult. Consequently, they were chosen through eons of time. Everything was to be done the same way by the... and so forth. So, therefore, if the future is not going to be any different there was no question of projecting. In the pagan world everything was cyclical. Everything was going to return as the seasons. Every experience in every life would be infinitely repeated forever and ever without end. This was... even Sartre portrayed this as a version of hell...

I don’t think he quite realized the connection. But in any event, Christianity has a future and has a goal. But no other civilization, so far as I know, until Christianity’s counterfeit came along, Marxism. And I was very struck by the argument of the inevitability of Socialism and the whole failed sect, the intellectual sect that it represented from the arsenal of Christian thought. I mean, first you had the confession which they had... they turned into open confession. Then they had the inevitability of their success and... and the inevitability of a better society. They... the commissars originally stole the austerity of the priests and the concern for the poor and so forth. So we are looking here at the counterfeit of the western civilization, or a great heresy, a great Christian heresy. Can’t even seem to recognize it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I recall some years ago reading something by a man who had been a Marxist who became a Christian. And he felt a sense of loss, because, he said, ugly and evil as he realized the Communist work. There was a sense of dedication, a sense of purpose in their lives, a readiness to work for that purpose, which he missed among Christians.

[ Scott ] Well, Whitaker Chambers ended his life in the belief that he had joined the losing side. And he was the one who said, “Conservatives don't rescue their wounded.” Well, of course, now they don’t have any wounded because they have stopped fighting.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and Christians no longer are geared to action. They are geared to feeling. Their whole attitude is that Christian faith should make you feel good.

[ Scott ] Well, yes, it is supposed to make you feel all warm inside. But I think when we get down to it we are living in a rather crucial period, a critical period. We are coming toward the year 2000 and there are many, many signs of decay around us. You mentioned Europe and its loss of the will of sight. Well, of course, you know, my feeling about that is that we pushed western Europe off the face of the globe. We worked day and night to do it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We insisted that the western European nations divest themselves of their colonies and withdraw their navies and their armies and their administrators and turn themselves into nothing commercial traders, merchants and so forth. And we said we will protect you. You don’t need an army of your own. We will take care of you. Our atom bomb, our nuclear power will protect you. So we spent 40 percent of our defense budget in maintaining an establishment in Europe. And the Europeans said, “Well, if you are going to defend us, we don’t have to defend ourselves.”

Now they still trade with ex colonies and they make money off them, but they are not longer responsible for their hospitals or their bridges or factories or roads or agriculture. So, therefore, the colonies can sink on their own. In the meantime we are also going to defend Japan. We are also going to feed the third world and we are going to be something unique in the history of the world. We are going to be an immense charitable enterprise.

But the burden has now grown heavy. The American people may not be as well acquainted with all the details of these matters as we are, but they do know something has gone badly wrong with the brave new world that the United States is going to create. And the tax burden is getting very heavy. A lot of people are going to be astonished next April the 15th to discover that the tax reform bill has done what it was put together to do. And that is, quite simply, to increase our taxes. They are going to have a big bill at the end of this year, much bigger than they have ever had before. Ands there are going to be something like 10 or 15 million people who will not have to pay any income taxes at all, because they will be considered too poor and they won’t have to pay any income taxes.

So from a variety of approaches the year 2000 is beginning to loom up and the period between now and then is beginning to loom up as a tremendous challenge. But my feeling is that with our back to the wall, which we will pretty soon feel, it is possible that the whole country will undergo a great reversal of attitude, because society is confronted with the end like an individual who suddenly realizes that he can die or that he is in a situation where he will either have to stand up or die to make a convulsive effort. There is such a thing as conversion to reality. And I think that could very well occur here.

[ Rushdoony ] Years ago in the early 30s I heard a missionary—and I won’t go into the specifics of the country and all—but he described the fact that the country in which he was working and in which there were a small number of converts, not too many thousand, suddenly faced persecution. And he was very disheartened because he felt the whole church was going to disintegrate. Too many of the people seemed to be nominal in their faith. Many of them had come, been converted and then become very casual in their faith. But the thing that startled hi was when the crisis came how many of them stood. And he described his shock when one of the people whom he had regarded as indifferent make an eloquent stand for the faith, refused to surrender it, was buried alive and killed and stood staunchly for the faith. He said it was the most staggering experience in his life, because he said he never would have guessed it. So we don’t know what the power of God going to do in the lives of the believers in the days ahead.

[ Scott ] Well, on that note, I think you have a great deal of historical evidence in favor of what you just said. The Mohammadens, for instance, were on the verge of falling apart out of sheer prosperity after their great wave of conquests. They began to split into different cults and groups and their leaders began to luxuriate and all sorts of new found privileges and so on. And they were on the verge of falling apart when the pulled themselves back together and they made heresy or dissent a capital crime. They froze their culture and maintained their conquest for many centuries and it is an interesting thing.

Although Hitler was a very evil leader and led the Germans into the worst of debacles, the impulse that pulled the Germans together in the middle of the early Depression was a sound impulse. If they had had a decent leader the whole story would have been much different because they had gone through a devastating defeat in World War I, outrageous inflation. Then the terrible 20s, which really were terrible, because they were totally immoral and their culture was on the verge of complete collapse. And then a second great depression. They pulled themselves together in a convulsive effort.

And I... we see this as often... often we see empires begin from the very low points. Spain, for instance, before Ferdinand and Isabella was a mess. It was unsafe. Prescott tells us that you couldn’t... you couldn’t travel without an armed guard, day or night. No persons was physically safe in the cities of Spain. The Moors had half the country. The three races were really at odds with one another and yet from that terrible position they ... their whole impulse towards world conquests came. And it came with great abruptness. It came quite suddenly. It came within the lifetime of one man, let’s say, who would live to be 70 or 70 years old. It was enormous and it was unpredictable, unexpected.

In extremes people stand up. And it is interesting to note that in a period of war, for instance, the suicide rates almost vanish. People stop killing themselves. And, believe it or not, the effect of the heightened attention, the fact that life actually becomes more interesting. It may sound terrible to say, because we are taught as Americans that all progress comes through peace. It comes through social reform. The fact of the matter is the history of the world indicates that it is more apt to come through war. It comes through struggle which is another way of saying it. It comes through facing up to challenge. And one of our big problems in the United States at this point is that we are not confronting any of these challenges openly.

You mentioned AIDS. And I see articles about AIDS all over the place. I don’t read most of them, because none of them seem to have any answers. All of them are simply moaning at great length about how terrible it is going to be and as though we are all sitting here unable to move a muscle.

[ Rushdoony ] Very good point. You know, the two administrations in this country of President Monroe are often called the era of good feelings. And yet it was after Monroe that the country began to unravel. They had a false expectation after that that all problems should somehow disappear, that it should be this kind of blissful absence of problems, which an accident of history had created. And I think ever since then as a country we have looked for another kind of Monroe era of good feelings instead of saying, “What we need is something like Andrew Jackson, confrontation of the problems, an attempt to resolve them.”

We have gone in for the wrong kind of confrontation as of the Abolitionists, not toward the solution, but towards destroying somebody.

[ Scott ] Well, and absoluteness. Virtue, Absolutism in the name of virtue, authoritarian Socialism. Socialism comes accompanied with compulsion. If it sounds good, let’s make it compulsory. And you have... you have been traveling quite a bit recently, so have I. And I really think the constant litany of idiotic instructions that come out of the loudspeaker on the plane is really something. They practically tell you tie your shoe laces before you put your shoes on. They tell you that when you get to the airport there are ... there are monitors there by which you can check gates for your next flight, as though any air traveler doesn’t know that. They tell you how to fasten the seat belt. They tell you to put your goods over your head or under your feet. Where else could you put them? You can’t carry them in your lap. And there is a little stream of instructions which come boiling out and it makes me think of, oh, momma as bureaucrat.

But in the meantime there is a complete evasion of real problems. We are not facing up to the drug problem, but we are facing up to smoking cigarettes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Smoking cigarettes and jay walking are the two greatest crimes in the United States. We don’t have any other crimes. If ... if our police forces followed criminals the way they follow motorists we wouldn’t have any crime at all. But very big problems are looming up on the horizon. The Soviet Union is encircling the United States. It has in the 1970s, for instance, I think is a very good example. They shipped heavy armaments by air all the way fro the Soviet Union to Africa and then in other cargo planes they shipped tens of thousands of Cuban troops all the way from Cuba to Africa. They have a half a dozen armies fully equipped in Africa. And we couldn’t mount, at this point, two divisions.

That was a tremendous military accomplishment. I recall that the United States was very proud of sending an army to North Africa within a year after we got involved in World War II and we sent them by ships. But the Soviets have sent a half a dozen armies by air and nobody in the United States appeared to even notice it.

[ Rushdoony ] We are not told about these things. We are not supposed to know and be alarmed. We are supposed to believe that somehow détente will result.

[ Scott ] Détente was going on at that point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] At that point they were talking about détente and they paid no attention to the armies that the Soviets were shipping through the air. You know, the average American... I understand today young people aren’t taught physical geography. My daughter took a course in physical geography expecting to learn something about it. And what did they teach her? They taught her about the strata of the earth. They talked to her about geology. They didn't talk about what country is where. That apparently is not necessary to know.

Well, the Soviet Union is so large, physically speaking, that you can put India and China and the United States into it and have room left over. It covers 12 time zones. We cover three. And these are very ordinary facts of life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, one of the things that at our breakfast this morning, Otto, you mentioned was the move to lock up things. That is, state control. Now another way of describing that is total predestination by man by the state.

[ Scott ] That is an interesting way.

[ Rushdoony ] That is the goal of the modern state the world over.

[ Scott ] ... so they can determine the future.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They are going to predestinate all things.

[ Scott ] Since you... if they... are able to control... if they can control everything that everybody does, why, then, of course, the future will be what they mandate.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And this, of course, is Totalitarianism. It is also total war against God. They are declaring themselves to be gods, to be the gods of creation. They are going to have cradle to grave determination of all people and control all things. They have a master plan for every square inch of the earth.

[ Scott ] Well, then, this is what you might call the horizontal tower of Babel.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The tower of Babel was originally vertical. They were going to find heaven up. Now all they have to do is make it horizontal and we will have heaven on earth because everything will be mandated here.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And in the process they are defying God. And I think they are going to reap a tremendous judgment in the years ahead because of that. I think we can expect and that we are already in the early stages of a world wide judgment on these people. They plan to lock up everything, to predestine everything.

[ Scott ] Well....

[ Rushdoony ] The God who sits in the circle of the heavens shall laugh. He shall have them in derision, David tells us.

[ Scott ] Well, if we look at it from a materialistic viewpoint, you would ... we both have been reading all these hard money letters and various and sundry other things. And we know that every economist who dares to look beyond the next few months is predicting some sort of a financial crunch.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we know the whole West is in the same situation. The entire West uses fiat money. The entire West has heavy unemployment. The entire West is confronted with a possibility of a breakdown in terms of its economic and financial situation.

Now, of course, the breakdown, if such a breakdown were to occur the governments of the United States and all the other countries in the West would have to expand their authority because since the government is assumed by most people to be responsible for our situation, if the situation gets bad the government would take over all control in the name of helping all the people. And we might ... Anne read to me tonight, for instance, that some city here in California is mandating the number of people who are allowed to live in a house. If there is two bedrooms, no more than four people, that sort of thing. So if the government takes over, it will take over the same way it has taken over everywhere else. People who have a house with too much room in it will have to bring in somebody who needs a place to live, et cetera, et cetera. We will get rid of the homeless. We will distribute them around and so on. We will have the total control government, the managed economy.

Now that is the thing to watch.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It isn’t the financial collapse that should worry us, because we can always survive running out of money. You can go to work and you can get some more money. And everybody has ups and downs including the economy of the nation. But we could not survive somebody becoming our master, short of a rebellion.

Now we do have this. We do have in the United States, at least, we have the greatest number of skilled people of any civilization ever devised. We have indicated people in terms of electricians, engineers, architects, you name it. Beyond their skill they are worse off than their great grandfathers. They don’t seem to know hardly anything. So we lack what Hannah Arendt called conceptual thinkers. And we lack people who have an overall sense of the pattern of events or the trend of events. You know, I have had thoughts about Nes Nesbit, for instance, and his trends. Since he gets his trend ideas from the newspapers, I am sorry to say I think he has built the whole thing on sand, because you cannot... you cannot base any... any projection upon garbled mis information. But putting that to one side the assumption that these people are manipulatable to the extent that they will be docile under control is dubious in my opinion, but Marxism is one of these ideas that the ideas... it is a half idea, in the firs place, which seems to have run its course. Its appeal today to the young is no longer the moral appeal that it had when you and I were young, to help the poor and all that. Its appeal now is to the basest elements, to the idea that if you become a Marxist you will be on the winning side and you will wind up running somebody else’s life. And you know what happens to people who have that idea. They get themselves killed.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it seems to me that one of the things that these people like these experts in home, they never think about is that there is a new Christian community developing. The interesting things that come across my desk day after day are indicative of a totally new concept of a Christian life. People who are concerned not only with Christian schools, home schools, ministries to the delinquents so that we have homes being established all over the country by Christians that deal with delinquents, but now what to do about the handicapped, what kind of Christian ministry can we have to this problem and to that problem. Precisely as these people see that the state’s solutions are worse than the problem, they are beginning to try to do something about these problems. And they are isolated individuals all over the country and yet there are legions of them out there saying, “I have got to do something.”

Now this means another government is developing, a government that is, on a grass roots level, that is concerned about problems and is not looking for handouts by the millions before it will touch a problem.

So the future, I think, is going to be determined by this kind of thing. The old fashioned Sunday Christian who went to church on Sunday and that was the end of his responsibilities, is going to disappear. We are not going to have the star system much longer, big name preachers in churches and everybody crowding in to be spectators and that is the end of it all. You are going to have the emphasis on discipleship, the responsibility of every believer to be effective where they are.

[ Scott ] Well, even in those people that I quoted, you notice that Harvey Cox said his classes are bulging at the seems, because he never anticipated, he said, when he started this in the 1965 that it would have to be turning away people who wanted to study religion.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And they are not going to get much there from Harvey Cox at Harvard Divinity School, but the more significant fact is that people are deserting the mainline churches for newer groups where there is a vital faith.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, it has been long over due, but it is a sign of seriousness. You know, most people don’t turn to religion until something drastic occurs in their life, until an event overshadows their complacency. But we now have something unique in our society. We have, I think, for the first time in the history of the world, a society which 85 percent of the people are not poor. I don’t believe any society has ever achieved that level of affluence...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... but... ever before. Inconceivable.

[ Rushdoony ] And we are more guilty of abusing ourselves when we have the greatest achievement in history.

[ Scott ] Well, it is... it is astonishing that his greatest achievement in the ... all of the history of humanity is always discussed as appalling because we still have poor people. We have 15 percent poor people. When Roosevelt spoke he spoke about the one third of the nation that was poorly fed, clad and housed and so forth. Well, now we are down to 15 percent.

[ Rushdoony ] And even that 15 percent is better off than, say, the people of the Soviet Union.

[ Scott ] Well, certain...

[ Rushdoony ] Or Red China and many other places.

[ Scott ] You could pick up six million people in Bombay and say, “Would you like to be the position of an American poor person?”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And you would have no argument there.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But the situation of affluence brings with it its own challenge. There is nothing that is more stark or more melancholy than to have a certain level of affluence and to realize that your life is empty, to realize that there is something lacking, something missing. And I see signs of that from one end of the country to the other. People are actually searching for meaning. They don’t get it. Our... our governing class is trivial, irrelevant, it has no idea what it owes the people of the nation. I was... you know, I told you I was in the executive office building a few days back and Mr. Reagan spoke and Bill Bennett of education spoke and Miller of O and B and Pat Buchanan spoke. Pat was most brilliant of the three, of the four. And then the door opened before the president arrived, though, and in came the photographers.’

Now everyone in this particular audience was well dressed, a middle class audience who was so pleased at going to hear the president, that they all got dressed for the occasion. In came men who looked as though they had just fallen out of a box car carrying cameras, the sourest expression I have ever seen. They didn’t look at any of us. They didn’t speak to any of us. Nobody said hello or good morning or anything else. It was unbelievable.

And yet, you know, these are very highly paid news people. But compared to the individuals in the audience, there was only a handful of them. They are living in the spurious world where they think they represent a multitude, but they are really only a handful. So it is almost like mirrors in real life. And I think that is affluent society which is suddenly discovering what no society has ever had a chance to discover before in a large way and that is that there is more to life than money. There is more to live than goods. And when you have so many I can’t help but think that within that there is the possibility of tremendous conversions.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I think they are taking place already. I think there is a growing hunger for a fait that moves mountains, that changes then world and a recognition that you don’t come simply because you want some needs satisfied, but because God commands you. And that is the difference.

People have, until now, been going to church because they want certain needs met, not to be commanded by God. And the result has been an emptiness in the life of the Church, a selfishness. I think that is going to go before very long. I recall within the past couple of years a pastor who was very seriously ill and, in fact, he had cancer. And yet there was a family indignant about the fact that the minister did not call on them when the wife was feeling a little ill. And when told that he was facing surgery at that time for cancer, he may have to retire he is so ill. And their attitude was, well, if he is not up to calling when somebody is sick, he should retire right now.

Now that may be a slightly extreme example, but I don’t think it is too extreme. We have an older generation and we are not old, of course, Otto.

[ Scott ] Old people is anyone who is 10 years older than you are.

[ Rushdoony ] Fifteen years older.

[ Scott ] Fifteen, ok.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is better.

[ Rushdoony ] But these are the older generation who are spoiled. They have had it, the best of it. I recall some years ago after the war the definition of the privileged class was those who are born after plumbing and before taxes.

Well, those who hit their stride after World War II and got in on all the easy money from the years of inflation, struck it rich, thought it was their intelligence when it was ...

[ Scott ] ... the wave...

[ Rushdoony ] The wave of the inflationary economy. Those people are finished. They have no future now because they cannot understand what is happening to them. They recognize if they are capable if it, that it wasn’t their wisdom that gave them their money. It just came because they had some money to put into the market. So that age group is going to disappear.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] The others who are growing up in the face of problems are going to look at life a bit differently.

[ Scott ] Also there is a tremendous among of untapped ability here. George Keegan, speaking the other day, former head of air force intelligence and he said that the engineers working on, the scientists working on the SDI program have broke... broken through. He said it is almost like the a-bomb program. They have gone many times faster and developed many times more efficiently than anyone ever anticipated. He said, We could actually deploy that whole system and defend our country right now. And just as they reached that stage a spate of propaganda descended on them saying, “You can’t do it, because it would violate the ABM treaty,” the treaty that the Soviets have used to ... for terrible purposes. And ... and have made a farce out of it. And we can’t do it because of this, that or the other thing. But here it is within our grasp.

Now this is truly going to be a test.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because if you cannot stand up when you have the ability to stand up, you don’t deserve to survive.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

Well, the next few years are going not be very telling. I think possibly between now and 1893... 1993 we are going to see a great many of these forces of judgment overwhelming us...

[ Scott ] In six years.

[ Rushdoony ] At the most, I think.

[ Scott ] At the most.

[ Rushdoony ] Would you agree?

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Robert Jastrow said we have five years with which to move. If we don’t move, we will not be able to move. I think, yes. I think that we are moving into the... we are already involved in the greatest test period since the late 30s.

[ Rushdoony ] I think perhaps it is the greatest in all of history, because...

[ Scott ] It might be.

[ Rushdoony ] ...because it is world wide in its implications.

[ Scott ] It might be, because we no longer have great, rich allies.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] This is not like the 30s when France and Britain and the other countries were large as we were and as strong and as rich and we were just one power out of many, all of the sudden having pushed our old allies down we are facing Goliath alone.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. This is a crisis in which the whole world is going to be involved. It is going to be a crisis in the area of politics, economics, military crisis, a health crisis with AIDS and other ailments threatening the entire world. It is going not be a time of testing, really. And the Christians are the ones who are going to determine the future if it is determined at all.

[ Scott ] It will be determined.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There is no question about that.

There is no way that we can evade it. We... we have ... you can look it at the other way. We have an opportunity to do more for Christianity than any generation since the early generations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But we will be tested just as they were.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, our time is virtually up. I wish we had more time, because this is such a tremendous subject. Perhaps on another occasion we can select a particular facet and deal more with that.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you as you work to create a godly future.

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