United States Constitution

Seminar; U.S. Constitutional Questions

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Constitutional Studies

Lesson: 05- 05

Genre:

Track: 05

Dictation Name: RR182C5

Location/Venue:

Year:

Alright, as long as my voice holds out we’ll continue, yes you had a question?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Given what?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. You cited Roe vs. Wade and civil disobedience. I’m certainly not against the demonstrations at the birth control centers and its very clear that these demonstrations have prevented many people from getting an abortion. But what we have to remember, that that’s just a delaying action. What we have to work for is changing the people. There are too many out there to whom abortion isn’t that important. They’re mildly against it or mildly for it but they don’t have any strong opinions on anything, they need to be converted. So we need to get to the center of things, the heart of things. We need to challenge the whole premise of the courts here. Because what we forget is that Roe. Vs. Wade was followed by another decision in New York State which has not been overturned. And that decision in looking at Roe vs. Wade made the obvious deduction: life is not a matter of medical definition but of legal definition. So that at any time they can say six weeks or six months or eight months or nine months or fifty years or sixty years, in other words, the door has been opened since the state now has the power to define a person, to declare all the sick to be non-persons as has been done in the Netherlands.

And in several countries to all practical intent is under way. Or somewhere down the line to say all the sick that are on Medicare are non-persons, or all Christians are non-persons. So we have to start telling people God created life and it can only be taken according to God’s word. Life cannot be defined by the state nor taken by the state’s fiat. You are one rebel, what’s to prevent the courts somewhere down the line from defining you as a non-person? A friend of mine, Charles Rice, who teaches law at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has predicted that if Christians do not turn this country around by 1999 various groups of persons will be declared non-persons. So you see there are bigger issues at stake and we have got to hit not only on the local front, this particular abortion bill, but what it represents, the potential killing anyone the state chooses to eliminate. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The way to prevent the state from doing that is to create a Christian community that will change the nature of congress and the courts and we have to wake up to our…

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] If we do not as a people change they are going to kill not only the unborn but the born, the young and the old of different classes and the only way to prevent that is for the Christian community to stand up and be counted. To organize in one way or another in terms of political action. To organize by taking over various spheres of activities, we are taking over education, I think by the way, that between one fourth and one third of the school aged children are no longer in the Christian schools.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Oh yes! Sooner or later you are going to have to restrain the unbeliever because he is saying only my will can be done. Today they are saying it’s the Christian who has no rights, he has no right to express himself but the ungodly can, the gays can, everyone else can, in any society to have civilization somebody has to be restrained! And we’re saying people who are able to commit crimes have to be restrained. We don’t like murderers and thieves running loose, we don’t like people who say that certain people can be killed because they’d like to have them killed in power, we’ve seen what happens when people assume that power as Stalin and Hitler did. Now in every country in the world we are moving in the same direction. Arbitrary power to create arbitrary laws to take human life at will. And it’s never done openly, it’s done by indirection. Another question, yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well from any eschatological point of view the commandment of our lord remains the same: occupy till I come. So that applies to pre-mills and it applies to amills, it applies to everyone. However as a post-mill I believe that the postmillennialists have the most logical position to implement that. And we would have to say that the puritans were and there was a revival of the same position under Jonathan Edwards and a historian like Bushman has said that the War of Independence was made possible by the revival of postmillennialism. People were not going to submit, they were going to resist evil and become free people under Christ, who did not feel that they were duty bound when men are lawless to put up with it. But they were going to do it lawfully and did so. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well first we’re very close to having a call for another Constitutional convention given the nature of the men who would go to that convention we can only expect great evil from it. We will be in serious trouble. Justice is simply another word for righteousness, the same word in Hebrew is translated as righteousness and justice and we believe that there is no justice apart from God’s law. Any other idea of justice winds up as a way of saying my will be done and yours be damned. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The question of human rights is a very prominent one in our day, the whole of the discussion comes from humanistic sources and the people who propound it act as though no one ever thought about minorities and people before they did. We must remember that in the days of Louis XIV, for example, there was a large and active group in France and all over Europe fighting for the rights under people of God. Well, the human rights movement today basically is humanistic and they do not include anything within their definition that we would recognize as true freedom for the Christian because their concept of rights is that they are derived from the state. We believe that God is the author of our liberty. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Of course there is a backlash; there is a backlash when people open their mouths! The world would rather have us shut up and die. There is a backlash against all preaching so to be governed by backlash is nonsense! We have to be governed by what God requires us to do, to be governed by a backlash is to say that the word of men governs us. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Oh I’ve heard that, fear of losing their tax exempt status. Well, a few years ago we had here in California several churches that lost their tax exempt status when they came out against gay rights. One church in Marysville just had an ad in the paper ‘What the Bible Teaches About Homosexuality’ and they had a number of verses. They lost their tax exemption. They fought and finally got it back but that’s going to happen again, however if we don’t fight we are going to lose our right to exist because that is what is at stake. If as I heard on Tuesday morning the Bible is a child abuse handbook how long is it going to take them before they say if they win that no child should be exposed to the Bible. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Our Lord says that we’re going to be persecuted for righteousness or justice’s sake! And if we’re not being persecuted then there is something wrong with us. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, [laughs] I think armed resistance is ridiculous. Over half the born again Christians in this country don’t even bother to vote. If they all registered and voted they could take the country over very quickly but they don’t vote!

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] No it’s never too late, never too late. I can recall not too many years ago when it seemed hopeless to fight the educational establishment but we’ve been doing it for some years and our schools and homeschools are increasing. When [unknown] took office almost eight years ago one of the first things he did violating all his promises was to move against homeschools. Well he quickly found out there were a lot of them, at least a hundred and ten thousand in California in 1981 I believe it was. That means about two hundred and twenty parents, voters. So he quickly backed off and said it was one of the men in my office without my permission who started this and this is what’s happening as Christians are expressing themselves, we’re beginning to win some battles. But we have a duty to do that and that’s what we should consider, not the consequences. On some things our Lord says be practical, if they will not hear you in one city, go to the next, don’t stay around to be beaten to death but on certain things there is no retreat, we can’t surrender our children!

So we make a stand, well we’re winning! There have been cases where some have gone to court and have been sentenced to jail. But we’re still fighting and we’re winning more battles. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes in Nebraska they made it a matter of prayer that those who were responsible for the persecution by judged by God and a number of them, now I’ve forgotten the details, a couple of them dropped dead and others were voted out of office. Our God is more powerful than the enemy.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The remark, I don’t agree with you but I will defend to the death your right to believe it, is attributed to Voltaire who never said it and it is regularly used by people who have no intention of ever defending your rights. First of all that remark has to do with your right to say something, not to do something and it’s a far cry from saying that a person has a right to a legitimate expression of opinion, political or religious, to the right to be a homosexual, to murder, to steal or to do what he pleases. In other words, one’s interests and one’s crimes are not rights and that’s what we are increasingly saying in effect that these are rights and they are not. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Forget it. First of all long before all this present hoopla about the new age movement came along I was fully aware of it, I had read their literature back in the fifties.

They were a dying movement until some woman in Michigan decided they were a big problem. They had one little office, a volunteer helping mail out answers requesting material and most of the material was left over from the fifties to the eighties. And when Christians got alerted to it then yo had all the hoopla from coast to coast and Christians made the new age movement rich because they were ordering by the ton the materials of the new age people. So the new age movement became quite wealthy in a hurry and began to exercise some influence.

[Break in tape]

[Unintelligible talking]

[Rushdoony] However if someone were secretly trying to subvert the covenant people of the community that was another fact. In other words that law was against subversion. If that person just walked over and said I’m going to worship Baal after this that was a different matter. But if he went around in his family and his community secretly trying to undermine faith in the covenant god and from within subvert and destroy that was treason. So it was a totally different thing. The law was not aimed against the unbeliever it was aimed against the subverter in the ranks of the believers.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well to give you an illustration of the present day application of that all the mainline churches were once very strong and bible believing, they were all subverted from within. The people who did this knew they did not believe an article of that church’s doctrines. In fact, I can recall as a student here in this one person who was going to take an examination on subordination and he was telling some of his friends laughing I’m going to affirm all thirty nine articles of our church and I don’t believe a one of them and he thought it was a big joke. Now that is the kind of evil [unknown] and that’s what we have not ever dealt with in this country, the churches have just been subverted by that kind of thing. Yes you had a question?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes but a great deal is being done by church people outside the church. Women organizing a study group in their homes to deal with the problem [becomes unintelligible]. So that this is an important way of Christian optimism…[unintelligible] but it simply saying it is a duty that God places on us, not just the church. So very often the best way to proceed is on your own, together with a few other people. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well since I’ve not I didn’t go to the conference and I don’t know exactly what was said, just the comments generally. Basically our confidence is not in the state, so as we look at the future we have to say we have to take back government from the state. The basic government is the self-government of the Christian man. The basic institution is the family. Then as a church, it’s a school, it’s the vocation we are in and the institutions [unknown]. All these are powerful agencies. One of the things that has happened in our time that is far reaching in its implications is that business firms no longer except on rare occasions gives anything to Christians. You turn on PBS and you’ll see that this or that was funded by this or that corporation. They are ready to give to everything except anything that’s Christian. Or the modern Avant-garde art galleries. Their major purchasers are corporations. Corporations are trying to gain respectability by buying Avant-garde art. They have it all over their offices and hallways and stored in their storehouses. They are trying to gain respectability. Well, we can begin in our families and in our businesses however small if the Lord has blessed me I owe something to the Lord, I should give to Christian causes. Now, the giving [unknown] today indicates that Christians are poor givers. The middle class is defined by statisticians as those who receive between twenty five and a hundred thousand dollars a year. They are the poorest givers. 30:58]

The best givers are those over a hundred thousand and under twenty five thousand. So the poor and the very rich are the very best givers except that now the rich over a hundred thousand are dropping out for a number of reasons. First a very high percentage in that category now…

[Tape drops out]

…television personalities and sports figures. Then another high proportion is made out of widows. Their husbands were entrepreneurs, made a lot of money, they were strong willed men and very often domineering around their wives so that now that they’re dead and the woman is controlling the money she tends to control it very, very rigorously and to throw her weight around. So she’s a tough customer to get any money out of and she is a poor judge very often. So it means that the very wealthy are not out of the giving category to anything that is Christian or conservative. This means that those who are making under twenty five thousand dollars a year are the main source of giving and their giving is in small amounts. I know that Chalcedon could not survive if the small givers quit giving, that is where most of our money comes from, gifts from one dollar to twenty five, thirty five, by numbers of people, many of whom are students, many of whom are very poor. So we need to restore giving. It is precisely the people hwo have it made in the middle class who get between twenty five and a hundred thousand who are always thinking of improving their standard of living, and of getting votes, and of getting a place in the country or in the mountains or who want any number of things or to upgrade their housing, who are going head over heels in debt and are giving less and less to the church. It is the person who makes fifty thousand who feels that giving five thousand to any number of Christian activities is giving too much and is more likely to make his top giving in a year to be only one thousand. That is the derelict element in this country. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Then the nation was a covenant nation, covenant to God. Today it’s the church that is covenanted to God and the subversion is in the church and the church does not have the power of the death penalty.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Oh you’ve got to clean all such subverters out of the church and especially out of the pulpit, that is where they are in the majority of churches.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The church will never have the death penalty, it is never given to it in the Old Testament or in the New. Let’s see, someone who hasn’t asked a question yet, have you, no.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] On?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] On Robert Bork. Well my views are not worth any more than yours, I have read some of his things, I am very impressed. He’s not a Christian but…no. But he is not hostile to a Christian perspective, he is mildly receptive to it, he has read a little bit of our material, he is the most intelligent of the judges on any high level in this country today, a man of remarkable intelligence. So I don’t think it’s likely we’ll see any man of equal caliber on the court.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Send a telegram to Senator Wilson expressing your support of Bork. At this stage praying and sending a telegram to Bork is about all we can do. Yes, someone else who hasn’t… I don’t believe you’ve asked a question yet, yes you over here.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The worst Christians what?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well I’m not sure I understand all the ramifications but this church was invaded by police on one occasion. It defended its right to be free under God, it did the right thing. It had a duty under God to stand up to the ungodly forces that tried to control this church. And we have a duty to do that and we’re not asking for special privileges, we’re saying that we have a right under God to exist and today the law is kinder to murderers than to Christians. I have seen Christians treated in the courts in a way that no man who is guilty of a crime could be treated. I’ve been in courtrooms and seen thieves and murderers on trial and no lawyer dare be in anyway offensive or bring up a question of their past or their record otherwise there would be a mistrial declared. But I’ve sat in courtrooms and heard Christians treated as if they were criminals, immoral, I was in a trial not too long ago of a Christian school and one of the parents was on the stand, he was a very fine man, I had chatted with him before and I was tremendously impressed by his faith and by his high order of intelligence. He was a Mexican. And the state attorney did everything but call him a dirty greaser. He did everything to humiliate him and to make him feel ashamed of his background and his lack of education although he was more knowledgeable on things as a good Christian and a man who read and studied than the state attorneys were, all of them. Now that’s routine, every attempt to humiliate and to degrade and to defame the Christians when they are on the stand. We’re not asking for special privileges but today that’s the way it is. If you are on trial and you’re a rapist you’re dealt with very gently but the woman raped is treated very savagely in almost every state in the country. They cannot go into the background of the rapist or the fact that he may have been convicted several times before of that same crime.

But they can go into the background of the woman and bring out anything they can to discredit her. Now it is high time we had equal rights with some of these hoodlums and criminals, that’s the issue today. Because we are steadily being denied the right to exist. We are treated as though we are socially evil and destructive, that the bible, the word of God is a child abuse manual ,the churches are divisive force in society and that Christian schools are divisive of the future of society and that homeschools are the epitome of evil and so on. All the abuse we are regularly subjected to is staggering. So it is not a question of us doing anything but trying to keep from being wiped out at this stage. To say that evil must not triumph, that is not the criminal who is to have all the rights in our society but the free man under God. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony]

Yes I’m afraid the Christians deserve what they’re getting because they have surrendered one area after another. I’m glad now that more and more Christians are beginning to fight. And it’s a big fight and it’s an expensive fight. To go to court takes a lot of money, fifty, seventy five thousand dollars, depending on how long it is. This trial I was in of these churches for child abuse because they believe in spanking is going to take three weeks, that’s the time the state is going to require to present a parade of psychologists and psychiatrists on how terrible the bible is and how evil its child abuse is because of its attitude towards children. So how are they going to fight this? Two homeschoolers, both former teachers, in one New England state on trial. That trial is going to cost fifty thousand dollars or better, they are only a young couple.

People are passing the hat in the community to help them, most of the churches are not ready to do anything. I was in another trial of two people who were street preachers and with this I will close because our time is really up. And the street preachers are being increasingly arrested, why? Because if a man is a good street preacher and not an unpleasant character the area of town he’ll work in is the downtown area and there’ll be a lot of porno shops around and there’ll, because that’s where there is a lot of foot traffic unfortunately, and there will be a number of houses of prostitution. So what happens when he starts preaching there, first the porno shop people, all of them up and down the streets will come out and tell him get lost. The prostitutes will make fun of him and curse him and so on but after a while if he is patient and thoughtful and kindly they’ll say well he is a pretty likeable guy, he’s just doing his work, and the porno shop people come out and tell him now look, you’ve got to understand we’re not the real villains here or the real nasty people, we’re just operating the shop for a real estate syndicate owned by the politicians downtown. Now if you were to expose that fact they would deny knowledge of what was happening with their money, they’d just say we invested in this real estate syndicate we had no idea how the money was being used. But they are liars, that’s how we’re protected. And the prostitutes would come and say look, I know I’m a hooker but if you want to know the truth I’m working the streets because those houses are so bad, they are owned by the politicians, by the real estate syndicates. And so on and on he’d get one story after another which would make him a dangerous man. And so they arrest them. Here were two fine young street preachers in this particular city back east. The attorneys could not get, it was a case handled by [unknown], they could not get a single minister in the city to come and defend them although a lot of them who professed to be bible believing said they are fine men, I really like them. And they said would you at least come and fill the court room? We can fill it with ministers and that will carry its weight. Well no, the city fathers would know we were there and it could mean trouble for us. Not a one was there. Not a one.

It was a very sad performance but that is a routine thing. But I’m glad to say more and more men are waking up and more and more parents, more and more churches. So the number of those who were ready to make a stand for freedom under God, the freedom to proclaim His word, is growing. About oh, eight, nine, ten years ago in this one state where they had just had some major demonstrations against a nuclear plant the governor in that state who has since passed away called in three or four of the Christian leaders who were there on behalf of the persecuted churches and Christian schools and he told them, he said, you know we have learned to count the cost when we go into court. Recently we arrested two, three thousand anti-nuclear power plant demonstrators but he said we knew one thing their protest was worthless. Because they were going to demonstrate and they were going to go to jail only as long as they were television news. On the day that the newspapers and TV stations lost interest in them they were ready to sign anything, plead guilty and get out. They were in it for the media coverage. But he said if Christians are ready to make a stand and go to jail and stay there you are going to find that the opposition will fold because the one thing they don’t know how to deal with is real conviction, real faith, people who are ready to live and die for their faith. And he said that’s why the Christians are going to win when they make their stand. I think he was right. Well thank you all and God bless you and prosper you.

[Applause]