From the Easy Chair

Christian Reconstruction

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 209-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161X43

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161X43, Christian Reconstruction, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 142, March 18, 1987.

Tonight Otto Scott and I are going to discuss Christian Reconstruction. This, of course, is a subject very important to us because this is the purpose of Chalcedon. Very early in the history of the Church, according to the book of Acts, Christians were described as the people who turned the world upside down. I think that is an excellent description of the work of the Christian. The world is wrong side up. Everything is topsy turvey. Sin is on top and it is righteous, justice, which should govern a nation.

Recently I read a detective story which had a remarkably interesting title, Injustice for All. The ... the author made the point that given the nature of our society—and the author was not a Christian as far as I could tell—what he sees is injustice prevailing on all sides. But whatever the structure of society that you are involved with, what you are going to see is injustice prevailing so that the function of a modern humanistic state can be described as injustice for all.

Well, the purpose of Christian reconstruction is justice for all. And, hence, we have to see the focus of our work as Christian reconstruction as establishing God’s righteousness, God’s justice in one sphere after another in terms of his law Word.

With that introduction, Otto, is there anything you would like to say by way of introduction?

[ Scott ] Well, as you know, there was recently an article in Christianity Today which ascribed a number of goals to the Christian Reconstruction movement which were not accurate to say the least.

[ Rushdoony ] I have read the article, because I never bother to read articles about us. I don’t see any point whether they are for us or against us, wasting time with them.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Excuse me.

[ Scott ] Well, I...

[ Rushdoony ] Go ahead.

[ Scott ] I... I couldn’t keep from reading it. And I didn’t recognize the ... the image that looked back at me. But it did bring up the question that a great many people in the United States seem to associate the Christian order with almost everything that is evil. And on the face of it, this sounds pretty strange. Here you have a religion, Christianity which accepts the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, accepts people from every race, every ethnic background, every geographical location of ever condition. And yet Americans have been told that it is intolerant. And I find this part of the problem or part of the challenge, I suppose we should say, of working towards Christian reconstruction is that we first have to struggle past all sorts of barriers that have been piled up in our path.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I am regularly amazed at the attitude of people towards biblical law. They will cite something in the Bible and say, “Do you actually believe that kind of garbage?” And these are people who insist they believe the Bible from cover to cover. What they mean is that God was primitive in those days and he has since evolved to the point where he knows better and, therefore, is no longer guilty of such gauche statements as he makes to the Old Testament.

So we have a real problem in Christian Reconstruction in trying to get people to take God’s Word seriously.

Now to me one of the most important things in dealing with Christian reconstruction is the fact that the early church so very quickly became prominent far beyond its numerical strength, simply because of its impact on society. The fact that Christians were given to helping one another was important. Now in antiquity there were many fraternal organizations. We would call them, perhaps, lodges or religious groups when the members would, to some degree or other, help one another or at least affirm them, but to help others have a responsibility to the community at large and to strangers was unknown. And yet Christians did this.

Then they were exceptionally good at adjudicating legal conflicts between people, of coming together to settle a dispute through a church court. And this, again, they distinguished themselves.

As a result, they early attracted attention. And, in spite of a great deal of abuse, they began the reorganization of life from the bottom up.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, Christianity grew out of despair of the old civilizations. Rome had reached the point where the only quality that was respected was force, either the pressures created by a particular group or actual physical force. And then you have the idea of eternal recurrence which made everything you did seem ridiculous, because it was going to come back and you do the same thing all over again forever. There was no way out. It was a closed universe. Christianity was a breath of air and also the breath of freedom and individuality.

Now I have the impression that in the iron curtain countries, in the Soviet countries, in ten totalitarian countries there is a faith, an inextinguishable faith because people have become acquainted with the devil and learning the reality of the devil has turned them toward God.

Well, here the devil is a family friend. He puts on a good show. It doesn’t matter. Some inkling is creeping in, I think, on the edges of American society. This enormous number of abortions, for instance, betrays a fear of the future and a selfishness about one’s own personal possession. People, young people who don’t want to afford, but who want to share their lives with children.

Then we have all sorts of doom sayers now arriving all sides. It is almost like the ... the various periods of survival that Dorothy mentioned earlier, the prophets who would arise and say to ancient Israel, “You are going to go though a period of judgment and punishment.”

I mean, a man that I attended a meeting with about a year ago was telling me and we agree that the United States is certainly putting itself under the path of great suffering. And I said, “Well, of course, if we change our policies, if the government changes its policies as far as financial institutions change their policies it is possible that we could avert this calamity.”

“Oh, no,” he said, “We have to be punished.”

And I was quite taken a back. But that ... the more I thought about it the more I thought he was probably right, because we learn through pain. There is no way to learn a lesson easily, so far as I have discovered.

[ Rushdoony ] Human beings are slow learners. As Whittier said of us, “We are those who by shipwreck only find the shores of divine wisdom.”

I think one of the most striking aspects of the first century of the New Testament era is that it resembles our century more than any other in history, because the first century was a time of tremendous travel. The trade routes were open between Rome and China. People went and came regularly, routinely. Back in the 30s a book was written just a study of the trade between Rome and China. It was also a time of great cities. Civilization had become urban.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] And, again, we have an urban civilization so that you have, again, a ... a dramatic parallel. It wasn’t that urban life failed, but everything about urban life disillusioned man. It had amenities. It had advantages, but it became so associated with degeneracy that after the fall of Rome and even before it, people began to desert urban life. They didn’t want city life.

[ Scott ] Well, the cities became dangerous.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] There was a rise in crime. You couldn’t go out at night unless you could afford to have armed guards and... and servants with torches.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...lighting your way. Otherwise the robbers would take you and they would leave you dead.

[ Rushdoony ] Rome and New York.

[ Scott ] Well, there is not much difference.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] I have... I have traveled, you know, quite frequently recently.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And in every city, every city the ... the lights go out about 10 o'clock. Nobody goes out. The streets are deserted. the streets are empty. Everyone is afraid to go out on the street. And our government sits up there. The Supreme Court sits there. The department of justice is proud of itself and this danger exists from one end of the country to the other. And people pretend they can’t see it. It is not even a respectable topic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I can remember when after meetings, say, 11 to 12 at night in New York City you could walk into the bowery and other areas where the used book stores would be, because the rents were lower...

[ Scott ] Down on Fourth Avenue.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Lower Fourth Avenue.

[ Rushdoony ] And do some shopping. Some of those stores would stay open quite late. And you had nothing to worry about.

[ Scott ] Absolutely not. The city never went to sleep. And it was perfectly safe.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, there is another parallel between Rome then and our world today. Rome was beginning to feel that it was at the dead end, that life had lost its meaning, that there was not much hope, that the future was bleak because by the close of the New Testament canon you had an emperor like Nero. You had all the meaningless degeneracy that went with Nero and others as well, Caligula. And life had become monstrous. And, again, you have that same kind of thing, the rise of homosexuality, the prevalence of abortion, much, much more. The parallels are very striking.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, Christianity has gone through similar crises. Now that wasn’t a crisis for the Christians, but Nero brought them a crisis because it was your money or your faith, your life or your faith. The ancient world believed in honor even in corruption, so that it was expected that if you were asked if you were a Christian you would answer honestly even if any honest answer meant your death. I don’t see signs of that in the present day. But, at any rate, when we consider what the Christians did, the persecution lasted three centuries until Constantine, three centuries, 300 years. So we talk about 12 years of Adolf Hitler and 70 years of Communism, 300 years is an awfully long time. However, as I understand it many of the aristocrats became Christians because it was an intellectual religion. It ha been presented in recent years as a slave’s religion and as something that only the servants and the slaves flocked to. And that wasn’t so at all. It was very intellectual.

[ Rushdoony ] A great many lawyers and philosophers became Christian precisely because law without justice becomes worthless. And without meaning what is philosophy? It is an exercise in futility. And so you had an influx of men in the fields of law and of philosophy.

[ Scott ] Well, then Durant, who has always been a very entertaining writer, Durant said the great accomplishment of the early years of Christianity was to clear the forests, to conquer the wild beasts, to build the cities and the homes of Europe. By the year 1000 there was a more variegated and richer civilization than anything the pagan world had ever put together, unbelievably rich, the year 1000 which is, supposedly, the middle of the Dark Ages.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and the people they had to work with were people who had been barbarians, given to human sacrificed, given to all kinds of things that we would say today would have made them impossible to work with. And we have to remember that some of the first missionaries were men from North Africa, men of what we today would describe as a mixed racial background. And as they went north to England, to Germany and other such areas, their attitude was: How can these wild, barbaric peoples ever be Christianized and civilized? And yet the tragic fact is that North Africa regressed, because it went astray theologically and finally into Islam, whereas northern Europe became Christianized and became the center of civilization.

[ Scott ] Well, I think it is also very interesting to reflect upon the fact that after the year 1000 that is still another 300 year from the beginning of the Renaissance, the age of exploration, the secular historians prefer to call it. And I was always struck by Burkhart’s description of the Renaissance—it is a very long period of time, three or 400 years—as the decline of Christianity, because we had the paradox which we see today of rising wealth and falling faith. And as the Christians began to explore the world and to conquer various and sundry other places, new inventions, innovations, the recapture of the pagan past and so forth, Christianity was going to collapse. The Renaissance would have ended Christianity. Europe would have perished in a scent of cynicism had it not been for the Reformation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. A medical historian of some 30 or so years ago in studying the data as of about 1500 found that because of the collapse, morally, of Europe, that a third of Europe was venereally diseased.

[ Scott ] Well, if you are talking about syphilis, aren’t you?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... which was not, I think, in the beginning a venereal disease. It was a general disease.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It could be carried apparently by anything, by a drinking cup. It became a venereal disease later. But it is certainly true that the at least a third of Europe had syphilis and died.

[ Rushdoony ] And the birth of monsters was quite common then, extremely deformed persons.

[ Scott ] Well, James I was a mild monster.

[ Rushdoony ] And morally more than mild.

[ Scott ] And his father had syphilis. And so this would... this would follow.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This would follow. So you had what, in effect, was a plague. But the thing that captures my mind is the fact that the Reformation really restored Christianity. It was a restoration.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And although it didn’t last long, how long? A century? More or less.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Only three generations and yet it was enough to set the entire West on a new and higher level.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Up until very recently.

[ Rushdoony ] And you have to add to that the work of the Jesuits. They were responsible of the counter Reformation.

[ Scott ] The Reformation and the counter Reformation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, because Catholic Europe was insistent on going on its way into corruption in spite of the Reformation. And no Protestant ever gave a more horrifying description of the moral corruption within the Church than did the Jesuits. And they said this has to be changed. And with their military discipline they set about to do it.

[ Scott ] All right. I think—and I have said this before on other occasions—that the time is right for a new Reformation. We have instruments now of communication that have never before existed. Just as I... I don’t think the Reformation could have been accomplished without print, without movable type. Print really brought the Reformation into... into a global dimensions. Today we have computers. We have modems. We have telephone lines. We have the means to communicate messages around the world faster than the speed of light. And, therefore, we have the means to outflank the establishments of modern times which are carrying us back to primitivism. They are carrying us back to what Vogel called oriental Despotism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And therefore Christian reconstruction is another term for a new Reformation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And before we get into that, more specifically, I think we ought to know that one of the things that led to the decline of both the Reformation and the counter Reformation was Pietism. People acted as though God’s only concern in saving them was their own souls. As though their souls were more precious than anything else. But God doesn't save us because we are as the theologians of the last century said, of infinite worth in the sight of God, which is to exalt us as though we were like gods and so important to God.

God saves us that we might serve him and fulfill his purpose so that our personal salvation is just a starting point. It is not the end of Christianity it is the beginning place.

[ Scott ] All right. Your conversion, in other words, is for a purpose.

[ Rushdoony ] For a purpose, exactly.

[ Scott ] And... and so we are not converted because we want to be converted. We are converted because we are drafted

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If it was up to me I would never have been converted. And ... and I think God could have done much better. However, private, stand over here. And obviously it is because he is assembling an army for some purpose.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. As C. S. Lewis said who... well, never seen some points of doctrine clearly, nonetheless, at some point was tremendous. He said the morning after his conversion he was the sorriest man in all of England, because he knew the responsibilities that were now his. His easy life as an Oxford don was ended. Now he had a responsibility under God. And too few people see that.

It is astonishing because suddenly life takes on a purpose and a significance . And I don’t know who these people are who keep running around saying that we are trying to take away their liberties, but nothing could be farther from my mind. If God doesn't want them, I don’t either. I see absolutely no argument here with the liberties of anybody, especially when Christianity is based upon the idea of individual worth, not upon a bureaucracy, not upon a government, not upon a theory that if it is good it must be compulsory.

[ Rushdoony ] Man is the key, not the state. And it is the reconstruction of all things from the ground up, beginning with us as individuals and with what we make of our lives.

As a result, the focus is not on man, but the starting point is with man. And from there we go on to grow because we have to grow in order to be effective, just as you use the image of being recruited as a private. Well, that is exactly it. You are then put into basic training. And too few churches see the Christian as in basic training in the Church for action in the world.

[ Scott ] Well, it was not possible at the time of Luther to look ahead and see the shape of the Reformation. The only thing that Luther’s generation could see was to be liberated from the intellectual dominance at the Vatican, to purify the faith and so forth. It was not possible for those men to see the sudden spurt of science, the sudden spurt of literature and even of art during that period. It isn’t possible for us to see in detail the shape of the future. It is a very good thing that it isn’t. We wouldn’t want to know. It would take all the zest and flavor out of life, all of the uncertainty out of it and there would be no gamble left so to speak. And we do have to have something to keep us going.

But my opinion is that we have almost at our finger tips the possibility of creating a world beyond anything that man has ever seen.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, instead, we are bogged down like Gulliver with all these Lilliputians and their regulations and their rules and their arguments and their insistence that human affairs be stripped of religious significance.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We are faced, I think, with the most savage assault on Christianity in this century that all history has seen. I don’t believe in the days of the early Church it was as intensive as it is in the Soviet Union. The papers talk about Gorbachev representing a new leniency. They don't cite his statement calling for a renewed war against Christianity.

[ Scott ] {?} speech.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] One of his full dress presentations to all the commissars...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That they would have to renew their war against Christianity.

[ Rushdoony ] In that sense, Gorbachev is intelligent. He sees the real enemy.

[ Scott ] Well, the Soviet government recognizes Christianity as its most dangerous opponent. Here in the United States compulsion takes a different form. This is a country that has elevated money to a paramount position. Therefore, the tax structure is being used as a means to move against the churches. The argument has arisen that the church tax exemption is really a subsidy.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And then what constitutes church activities? What constitutes a church? What constitutes religion? We have no standard. Religion is anything that anyone wants to call it.

[ Rushdoony ] Now to get to the subject of Reconstruction more specifically. One of the things that marked the early Church and Christians for a good many of the centuries of Christian history has been the fact that every believer has had a responsibility wherever he is for the total reordering of things in his sphere.

Now this led very early to a wide variety of activity. I have often mentioned the fact that in the early Church the Church officers would go out, for example in Rome under the bridges where unwanted new born babies that had not been successfully aborted were abandoned. They would collect them and take them and pass them around among the members. They would have a ministry of relief towards pagans as well as one another. They would settle disputes, not only amongst themselves, but among non Christians.

The result was that another government was in action, a government that was replacing Rome. And this intensified the hostility of Rome, because the Christians were creating their own empire, their own government. And, of course, this is what Constantine recognized when he gave Christianity a legal status. It required all the bishops to wear the garb of a Roman magistrate, which is the bishop’s garb to this day so that people could to do them and find justice.

So what we are seeing now is the same kind of thing. We put out a special double issue, 1982-3 volume nine, numbers one and two of the Journal of Christian Reconstruction. In this symposium on Christian Reconstruction and the western world today, we have a large number of brief articles which give you the practicalities of a number of Reconstructionist works. Christians schools, ministries among minorities, among the poor, in prison, among delinquents and so on and on. And I think we just skimmed the surface with this book. There is so much more that is going on and new activities which are launched continuously.

So Christians are at work. They are taking back government. They are taking back education from the state. And I believe that the number of children in home schools and Christian schools today equals fro a fourth to a third of the school population of the United States. So things are happening.

[ Scott ] Well, if we could go back, as you did at the beginning. Lord Bower, I think it was, in his book on the third world and economics points out that Europe had no welfare system from outside. No greater power poured money into young Europe in order for the Europeans to build a great civilization. Everything that the West created, it created out of nothing, because Rome did not build great cities outside of Italy. It had relatively small places where their troops gathered and a few of their governors and that was about it.

So the Christian civilization does more than simply provide welfare and relief. The Christian civilization is a constructive approach toward life, which builds wealth.

I have yet to see—and I have forgotten who said this to me—somebody said it to me. He said, “I have yet to see a believer starve,” because there is a whole conjure of activities and attitudes that go with belief. You become constructive. You become organized. You become systematic. You are not wasting your time. Your pleasures become more rational. Your activities become more intelligent. And I think this is the big point about Reconstruction. It isn’t, in my mind that Christians have to run around finding people to help. It is the fact that they become useful and their usefulness begins to create a structure that supports many others.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I think it is interesting to see what Statism has done over and over again in history. For example, Italy, when Rome conquered it, was an area of very prosperous, hard working and successful small farmers. By the time Rome fell only a handful of men controlled all the land in Italy and even they were beginning to lose money, because taxes and the exhaustion of the soil were destroying the whole country.

[ Scott ] All right. What we are talking about here is the national wealth of the United States was accumulated by previous generations. In the last 15 years we have lost 30 million manufacturing jobs. We have a whole series of people, millions of people, 10 million people are going to be forgiven from paying income tax because they don’t earn enough money. Now at no time have we ever had 10 million people in the United States who were, in effect, outside or beneath the economy. That is not a Christian civilization.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] This is something new. This is something different. This is the Renaissance again.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Where... where the prince dispensed with all the welfare and all the jobs and all the positions and all the patronage.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, when people looked at Europe, let us say, France and Germany and other countries, they failed to recognize that it is a Christian product.

[ Scott ] They are ... all of them.

[ Rushdoony ] France, for example, had areas that were nothing but rocky wastelands, unfit for growing anything or swamps. But it was Christians who drained these areas, who leveled them, who cleared the land of rocks, who brought in water, who made it fertile. There is a network of canals going back to centuries past throughout France.

[ Scott ] Well, I think of Venice. They fled to Venice. They fled into the swamps in order to be safe from the pagans. And they built a city in the swamp. And it become a great world power.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the United States has lost a certain nerve. Our great international enemy the Soviet Union keeps probing this country trying to find its never and it hasn’t found any. It just finds flaccid flesh. It has lost its nerve because, I think—and this refers to our previous conversation about history. As far as I know there has never been a civilization that has survived its loss of faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I feel the faith is reviving and he hostility is increasing for that reason.

[ Scott ] Oh, no question.

[ Rushdoony ] Fifteen, 20 years ago there as no hostility.

[ Scott ] Well, there was very little faith.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right. And today we are seeing it and, of course, we are constantly under attack. In the past 15 years I have seen some months when every month there has been an article against us in some periodical or another.

Well, there is a good reason for it. For example, next month we will have our Seattle Christian Reconstruction conference which is under the auspices of Clint and Elizabeth Miller. One of the interesting things about that conference is that its impact is felt in other countries. Many of the people who came for the first ones are now too busy to come back, because they are involved in their own reconstruction activities so that the conference has become a source of vitalizing people, energizing them into Christian action. And this is exactly as it should be and, of course, this is one reason for the hostility.

We are shaking up people, Church people and non Church people. And it distresses them.

Years ago I recall a man who when I went to that church’s pastor was more than a little annoyed with me. In fact, before I was through there he became a militant and hostile enemy. And he once made the remark about my preaching that it had come to a pretty pass when a man couldn’t go to church and relax and sleep during the sermon. He couldn’t sleep when I preached.

Now, I felt that was a compliment, even though it came from that character. But that is what a lot of people want.

Now I don’t say they all want to sleep during the sermon, but they don't want anything to disturb them and to tell them, look, you have a responsibility under God.

[ Scott ] Well, they have a real reason not to want this. After all, it takes a certain amount of courage to stand up, to take issue, to change your life. this is a very difficult thing.

Eric Hoffer wrote a book called The Ordeal of Change. And it is an ordeal. But it is very exhilarating once you get launched on it. And I think the government knows exactly what it is doing. I think the bureaucrats know what they are doing when the move against the Christians in the United States, because the Christians are the only resistance movement worthy of the name against total control by big daddy.

And this is a resistance which is not breaking the law. It is not an unethical resistance. It doesn’t consist of marching in circles with dirty placards with nasty slogans, with throwing rocks, with injuring people. But I remember years ago going down to the bowery mission for the Christian Herald. And the bowery mission was created in the days of Theodore Roosevelt when he was president. In fact, it was the Vice President of the United States that went down there and attended the funeral of a bum. And the newspapers were astonished and said, “Why are you here?” And he said, “He was a friend of mine.”

And dignitaries appeared at the bowery mission on its platform to speak and to give sermons. But when I looked at it 15 or so years ago the city of New York was vending every effort to outlaw and close that mission under the guise of various regulations and so forth and so on. It had all around it welfare programs of staggeringly expensive proportions. And yet look at New York City 15 years later. It is estimated there are 5000 homeless sleeping on its streets.

Now obviously Christian Reconstruction has its work cut out for it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You mentioned these rescue missions. All over the United States increasingly cities are trying to outlaw them, not because they are not doing their work, but because they want the state to take over. I know that in one California city, a very fine mission where I have visited was going to be zoned out of existence by the city council. Over 300 people appeared at that council meeting. They were the citizens of some prominence and some of no prominence, but all good, hard working citizens in the community and every last one of them had been saved through the rescue mission.

So the city council had to back off. But they are still working on another tack to wipe out the rescue mission.

[ Scott ] I wonder if the average American knows that it is against the law in the Soviet Union to issue personal charity.

[ Rushdoony ] No, they don’t, because the Soviet Union recognizes whenever you help somebody else, you are exercising Christian self government. And they don't any government except the Soviet Union and its power.

So, too, the modern state is moving against street preachers, rescue missions, anyone who is doing anything to alleviate the problem. This particular rescue mission in California which had a beautiful building, the best I have seen in any rescue mission and they did an excellent job. So when you walked into the lobby you though you were walking into a fairly decent hotel. The facilities were excellent.

And one of the charges they made was that it was going to run down the neighborhood. But across the street was the welfare office where crowds of people who were ready for a handout and were bums in a way that the people at the rescue mission were not, were always to be found.

So there is this... increasing hostility to rescue missions as to every kind of Christian ministry.

[ Scott ] Intolerance posing as tolerance. It is one of the earmarks of modern life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They will seriously discuss in the press and on the air about the threat to freedom which we Christians are posing.

[ Scott ] Well, terrible. Actually for people to announce themselves as Christians is considered offensive. Can you imagine any other group of people who have been told not to express their identity in public?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in court rooms when testify they try to disqualify my testimony and my status as an expert witness on the grounds that I am a Christian.

[ Scott ] You mean that invalidates what you have to say?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, if you are a Christian it is assumed that you are ignorant...

[ Scott ] That you have no education.

[ Rushdoony ] That you have no education, that you are incapable of thinking intelligently. That is a common place assumption. And the state attorneys will repeat your statements when you make it clear that is your stand with such contempt as though...

[ Scott ] You had said something outrageous.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes. As though you had confessed to rape or murder or incest or something like that.

[ Scott ] Well, I remember....

[ Rushdoony ] It is unspeakable in their sight.

[ Scott ] Just before we moved from San Diego four years ago we had dinner at the home of the daughter and ... and son-in-law of a friend of mine. And he wanted to know my opinion of South Africa and I told him and at one point he said, “Why do you say that?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know, probably because I am a Christian.” He said, “Oh, I thought you were a free thinker. Now you tell me you are bigot.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I told someone once who wondered how I could be a Christian that it was because I couldn’t believe in miracles as he did. He was an Atheist. And is said, “I cannot believe that the whole of creation came up out of absolutely nothing.” All the order and design is just an accident.

[ Scott ] No...

[ Rushdoony ] I am not capable of such staggering miracles, believing in such staggering miracles. Now that is not an argument that they find appealing.

[ Scott ] It is astonishing, though, how many of the people in the media feel so lofty about the fact that they are totally ignorant about why they are here on earth or where they are going. One would think that such a situation would create a certain amount of uneasiness. I remember before my conversion that I really at times felt at a loss. Why... why struggle? Why keep working beyond the point of living comfortably? What is the purpose?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that is sensible thinking if you are not a Christian, because in terms of a non Christian perspective, there is no meaning. There is no purpose, No hope.

[ Scott ] And everything is accident and chance a lottery.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... A giant lottery. And Einstein resented that. He said, “God does not play dice.”

But, of course, with all his fabled brilliance, that particular comment of Einstein is not one his admirers often repeat.

[ Rushdoony ] No. Well, I recall reading a statement by a physicist, I believe, named Dunn, who at the end of the 30s said, “It was believed that when belief in Christianity was abolished, men no longer could look to heaven. They would prize this life knowing it was all they had and then prizing the brief span of life they had you would see a gentleness and a character coming to life such as has never existed.” And he said, “What those thinkers forgot was that once you say there is no God, no heaven or hell, then you have said there is no meaning, so why prize anything including your brief span here?” And he was right. Everything became meaningless.

[ Scott ] Well, these things are not properly presented. I picked up a second hand book recently published in 1928 of a debate between Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I recall that many years ago from the 30s.

[ Scott ] A marvelous little book in which Bernard Shaw talked about the great problem on earth was the proper distribution of wealth. He didn’t explain its creation. He didn’t explain where it came from. But his argument was that it should be totally, equally distributed. Of course, if this were to actually occur we would all starve to death within a month, because ether isn’t enough to go around, frankly. In any event, Chesterton, looking at this... this is what? Now that was 28. This is 88. So that is 60 years. This is 87. Almost 60 years ago. Bernard Shaw turned out to be a classic fool and Chesterton said, “At the end of all your eloquence, Mr. Shaw, you have been preaching slavery.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I can’t resist throwing in a little story about Shaw and his wife. He once told his wife that women were not very rational, in fact, had quite a inclination to stupidity, whereas men were intelligent. And she said, “You are probably right, dear. After all, you married me and I married you.” That was putting him in his place.

Well, our time is limited and I do want to take just a few minutes to deal with something in the way of very practical Reconstruction. With this tape, as you receive it, will come some material on CERT, Christian Emergency Relief Team, on what you can do to help the refugees from Sandinista oppression in Nicaragua. It is the shoebox for liberty project. I do hope you will take this very seriously and do something about it, because here in a very practical way, any and every family, any and every individual can do something to help those who are in need. And this is where Christian reconstruction begins, with little things that we are all capable of doing, help that we can render whether it is just something that takes four or five minutes as we deal with others or collecting things around the house to send to the Mosquito Indians. Whatever it may be, this is where reconstruction begins on our level.

So I do hope you will take this mail out very seriously.

Are there any comments that you would like to make by way of conclusion, Otto, on our general subject?

[ Scott ] No, excepting to say that I do not regard Christian reconstruction as a return to the past. I regard it as a pathway toward a larger and better future.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I think that is a very important point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I believe that while on the short run we face perhaps the grimmest time in all of history in the next few years, in the long run we face the most glorious time that man has ever seen, that under God we are going to have more freedom, more prosperity and a more godly life than we have known. Everything points to that.

All around us we see men moved by the Spirit of God taking steps to reorder their lives and their communities the world around them in terms of God’s Word. Our hope and prayer is that you will make this the focus of your life also.

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.