Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Critiquing America’s Fads, Myths, and Heresies

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: United Nations, A Religious Dream

Genre:

Track: 001

Dictation Name: RR254A1

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960-1970

The poet Tennyson was a man who was deeply concerned about the intellectual currents of his day, and he was deeply infected by the thinking of Charles Darwin. According, although Tennyson tried desperately to cling to some semblance of Christian faith, and in many of his poems, gave expression to a kind of Christian affirmation, basically he felt that however good and beautiful the Christian story was, it was regrettably not altogether true. And he saw instead of a world governed by God, according to one of his poems, he saw this earth “a stage so gloomed with woe you all but sicken at the shifting seams.” He saw no permanency, only change and decay, only perpetual flux, mutability. Wherever one looked, one saw the erosion of everything, and nothing to give permanency, to give meaning, to give character to life. He expressed this conviction in his poem, “In Memoriam,” and he wrote, “The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form and nothing stands. They melt like mists, the solid lands, like clouds they shape themselves and go, nothing stands. Not even the ground beneath our feet has any permanency.” We live, he felt, in a world of flux, in a world of change and decay, a world without meaning, but man cannot live that way. He must have meaning in his life, and as he faces this world as sees the perpetual flux, the change and the decay, he requires for himself a source of certainty which is also an agency of control.

There have been those indeed who have ridiculed the quest for certainly. John Dewey wrote a book entitled The Quest for Certainty in which he ridiculed the whole concept, but on careful analysis, it appears that John Dewey ridiculed the quest for certainty in the supernatural, in God, but he affirmed certainty in the great society, in a world socialist order. So that when John Dewey said that the quest for certainty is absurd, he was only saying that quest for certainty in God is absurd, but not that quest for certainty in a world order. Man must have certainty, and he will either have it in God above, as his ultimate government, his ultimate source of truth and certainty or he will create it in a manmade order, and so it was that Tennyson, having declared that nothing stands, that God, if He existed, is not in control, a statement he made in his poem, “The Play,” had to posit some world order to give man that certainty, and so in Lockley Hall{?}, he gave his vision of that source of certainty, a world state, and he saw a world where the war drop thropped no longer and the battle flags were furled in the parliament of man, the federation of the world. There the commonsense of most shall hold a frightful realm in awe, and the kindly earth shall slumber locked in universal law.” He looked forward them to a world state.

I recall being told at the University of California, when a student at this indicated a prophetic vision on the part of Tennyson. Of course, they did not believe in any prophetic vision on the part of the prophets, but they were ready to credit it to Tennyson because he spoke of this world state, the parliament of man, the federal of the world, it was no prophetic vision on Tennyson’s part, nor was it any act of perversity. It was a logical necessity. Having ruled out God as the effective agency of certainty and world control, he had to have that somewhere on the human level, and the only logical place for it was a world order, a substitute god.

It is the logical necessity to have this, if you {?} God. This world order, like God, will be man’s source of salvation. It will be a saving order. Thus it is no surprise to read in the preamble of the U.N. charter that it begins thus: “We the people of the United Nations determine to save, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.” This is a religious resolve. It is a humanistic organization dedicated to the religion of humanity, dedicated by its own statements to humanitarian principles. Thus, the first and foremost way to understand the United Nations is not as a sinister plot. There are conspirators in it, but there are conspirators in the churches as well. It is a product of a religious hunger, of a religious need, and men, having turned away from the God of the Bible, are molding a god on earth.

Because man needs an agency of certainty and control to meet the world of change and decay, that agency is a substitute god, and every time in history, whether in ancient Babylon or Rome, or anywhere else, for a man who has turn from the supernatural source and sought it in this world, he has developed a theology of state. There was a theology of the Caesars. There was a passion liturgy, although we don’t hear much about it now a days, for Julius Caesar, and today, we have a developing theology of state.

Let’s examine the theology, the doctrine of god of the United Nations. First, the basic principle of any doctrine of God is that you must assert the unity of the godhead, and in the Christian faith, we hold to one God, three persons. The three persons, equal without any subordination, distinct yet equally ultimate.

Now, in the U.N. theology, because man has taken the place of God, there must be similarly a unity of the godhead, which means the unity of man. Man is now the god we worship, and man is expressed in this world government. In terms of the U.N., man truly finds himself. Therefore, since there can be no division in the godhead, no disunity of the godhead, there must be a unity of mankind. Accordingly, you cannot tolerate, in this theology, anything that divides man from man. There must be an equality of all men. There must be a bringing together of all men. There must be total equality, total democracy, and equality means, and there’s no staking this in their thinking that there can be no discrimination with regard to anything, good or evil, right or wrong. To insist that there is a moral difference between men in terms of good and evil is to discriminate, and does not the U.N. charter call for a world without discrimination with respect to race, color, or creed? the concept echoed recently in California in the Rumford Act. What does this mean? It means certainly that there can be no distinction between races. They are all made equal. It means also that there can be no distinction between religions. We cannot say that Christianity is true and Mohammedism is false, because this is discrimination and this is illegal, or immoral. The unity of the godhead must be preserved. This is the basic premise of the first concept of a doctrine of god, and we find it in the U.N. thinking.

We find it also as a matter of American policy. President Johnson has made clear that our hope is in the U.N., and accordingly, since this is his basic theology, the religion of humanity which finds expression in a world state, he has no doctrine of sin, but in its place, he says that the real evil is war, and the causes of war are, according to his own statement, poverty and ignorance, misery and disease. Remove poverty and ignorance, misery and disease, and men will come together. There will be no wars. Wars are produced, he says, in effect, by these environmental conditions, not by sin, and they will be removed as man is united and these environmental conditions removed.

Unity is the basic faith, the unity of the godhead, for President Johnson. Thus, in his state of the union address last month, the 1965 state of the union address, President Johnson declared, “We are entering the third century of the pursuit of American union.” This opening affirmation set the temper of his address. This is a strange interpretation of American history. Certainly the goal of the War of Independence was not union. The purpose and goal of the War of Independence was to be freed from statism and from a statist invasion of the colonies, but according to Johnson, its purpose was union, and the continuing purpose of American history, according to President Johnson is union, union of the races, closer union of the states to the federal union. It is also civil rights, federal aid, the unity of man with the world he has built, the United Nations, the new immigration policy, and the Great Society. In his concluding sentences, fittingly for this religious affirmation, President Johnson ended the state of the union address with a doxology: “This is the state of the union, restless, growing, and full of hope. So it was in the beginning, so it shall always be while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.” So he concluded with this ringing doxology. But what was the faith that we should keep? Not in God, but in union, in man and his union.

The U.N. charter preamble declares that its purpose is to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to gain fundamental freedom for all, the first chapter declares, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion. Disunity is the one great evil. The godhead must be united, and this faith, which appears in the U.N., is a product of a grassroots faith. We see it all around us. We see it in the churches, in the pulpits. We see it in a multitude of private agencies which indeed very often outrun the U.N. in their enthusiasm for this one world state, this new god. But certainly it is a part of the United Nations program, and its immigration law is an expression of this policy, to unify mankind.

A tremendous volume of material has been produced by the United Nations on immigration. These documents ostensibly formulate only elements of a policy and provide data towards a policy. But very clearly, their program is apparent in much that they say. Thus, in “The Future Growth of World Population, a U.N. document of 1958, we are told: “A new process is about to begin, or has perhaps already been started, and the first signs of that socialization of the world which appears on the horizon may be significant in this connection.” What is this new process of socialization? Well, something of it perhaps appears in some of their emigration policy documents.

Let us examine briefly some of the statements in their document “Elements of Immigration Policy,” published by the United Nations in 1954, a most curious document. As with all such documents, it represents tremendous work, a great deal of care, and precision of language that reflects the lawyer. This particular one was prepared with help from the International Labor Office, the Food and Agricultural Organization, UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the Social Welfare Division, the Population Division of the Department of Social Affairs, the Division of Economic Stability and Development of the Department of Economic Affairs, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. This then, is a major statement.

It begins on the first page by disclaiming any policy of its own. We are told, “No attempt is made to propose solutions for the problems stated. The present study is not to be regarded as an argument in favor of immigration or against it.” This then, merely gives the (according to the title) the elements of immigration policy. It does not formulate the policy, and yet when we examine these elements, certain very disquieting aspects appear. Notice, for example, this passage, which on first reading, seems curious, but on repeated readings becomes more and more disturbing. Notice, too, as I read this paragraph, that the populations take a passive verb. They do not move. They are moved.

“A point which may count in favor of immigration when the cost of settlement is considered, lies in the avoidance of duplication of overhead capital. In the case of transfer of local population to developing areas, the services and housing already provided in the areas of outmigration might be left unutilized, or underutilized, thus causing wasteful duplication. In the case of immigration, such waste is avoided since the local population will continue to utilize the services provided for them. Equally, of course, waste could be avoided if, at the same time, that the local population was transferred, immigrants were moved in to take the place of the transferred local population and to utilize the housing and services already provided for them. In that case, immigrants could be settled to take the place of the transferred population without undue cost of settlement. Where the receiving country is underdeveloped, however, the provision of general services in the area of outmigration will often be insufficient to begin with.”

This is a curious picture. These populations are not moved. They are transferred, and then another group is transferred into their homes so that these facilities might be utilized. This does not fit in with any pattern of known population movement that I know of. It is indeed a strange picture, but let us continue with another paragraph so that we can see what they have in mind.

We read further, “A distinction must be made between the settlement of new lands and the placement of farmers on lands already cultivated. Where agricultural immigration is encouraged as a part of a program for reorganization or diversification of agriculture involving the transfer of lands already under cultivation to the hands of immigrant farmers, the methods of effecting the change need to be planned in such a way as to produce the least possible disruption of agricultural operations, as well as a minimum of social disturbance and hardships. Schemes may have to be devised to enable the population formerly engaged in the discontinued types of agricultural activity to be absorbed in the new forms of agriculture in conjunction with the immigrants.” Again, this is a strange picture. When people migrate, they do so because they are no longer able to support themselves in the home country, or because they are fleeing from a statist tyranny, or from religious persecution. They do not move out of operating farms into another area, and going towns and home into another country, and then have another population transferred into those homes and into those operating and successful farms in such a way as to avoid a disruption of activities. This is a curious picture.

We are further told that there will be problems with this kind of immigration, that indeed, there will be racial tensions. However, the assurance is given in this study of the elements of immigration policy, that this problem will be taken care of with the second generation. There will be less prejudice there against interracial marriages, and the great agency to effect this loss of prejudice will be the schools. This will be the main weapon. This is not surprising, of course, and in my two books on education, Intellectual Schizophrenia, and Messianic Character of American Education, I have pointed out that the school is a statist, a socialist institution. It was created for that purpose, the state-supported school, and you cannot object if the state asks for your money and your property, if it demands that they be socialized if you have already consented to the socialization of your children.

If you believe in freedom, you must begin with the freedom of the child. The child belongs to God, and under God to the parents. We need more free schools, private schools, Christian schools, parochial schools, and incidentally, this is the one area today in which statism is being defeated. In every other area, conservatives are being driven backward. In this one area, they are going forward. Today, one out of four grade school children is in a non-statist school.

But to return to the elements of immigration policy. The immigration policy for which these elements are being set forth certainly does not appear to be a happy prospect. Do we see any evidences of this policy itself being formulated, or potentially taking form? There are signs of this in this country at present. On October 2, 1964, President Johnson, in Proclamation 3620, declared 1965 to be International Cooperation Year, dedicated to international cooperation and the strengthening of world organization. A further step towards that end, which it is hoped will be accomplished in 1965 and the present prospects are quite favorable, is the passage of the Kennedy-Johnson Immigration Bill, which has been introduced into the senate by Senator Hart, S1932 and into the house by Celler, HR7700, to repeal the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952.

The purpose of this law is threefold. First, it has been described by Senator Jabetz{?} as the civil rights legislation for the world. Now, had we so described the bill, we would have been accused of misrepresentation, but we have the authority of Senator Jabetz{?} that this bill is the civil rights legislation of the world. In other words it will establish, as a civil right of any person, anywhere in the world that they have a right to come to the United States, that immigration is no longer a privilege, a right which we hold and which we extend as a privilege to whomever we choose, but a civil right of anyone in the world. This then is its first function.

Its second function is to transfer immigration control from the legislative branch to the executive, so that the control of immigration, which has historically been in the hands of congress will be transferred to the administration.

Third, the law would be basically secondary to the president’s wishes, so that the basic law would be the will of the president, and it really would be a blank check. There would be no effective prohibition of anyone, whether subversive, mentally defective, a prostitute, a pervert, anyone would have the right to come into the country. There would be no effective {?}.

This then, is the nature of the Kennedy-Johnson bill. The likelihood of passage is very, very great unless a storm of protest overwhelms congress and compels them to surrender their present inclination to accept the bill. The purpose of this immigration policy then is to unify man, to bring about the unity of the godhead. Its purpose, and its premise, is not economic but religious. It is theologically rooted in this religious dream, the United Nations.

A second basic requirement of an effective doctrine of God is the concept of omnipotence. If God is not omnipotent then He is not God. If He is not sovereign, if He is not totally powerful, He cannot be God. Sovereignty and creative power must reside in the source of certainty and control. Today we see omnipotence steadily being transferred to the state, and from the state to the world state, and the Omni competence of the state is being affirmed. Today, the U.N. charter affirms that the United Nations has jurisdiction over every state, whether or not they are a member of the United Nations. It also affirms that every act or resolution adopted by the U.N. has universal jurisdiction, so that although we have not accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is still binding upon us, because it is an act of the U.N. The only reason why some of these things are not enforced upon us, is not because the U.N. does not claim the power, but because it does not yet have the practical power to force its will upon us. It claims the right. It is moving towards the development of the power to exercise that right.

The third aspect of any doctrine of God is that God be omniscient, all knowing. A true God cannot be God if He is not totally in control. If he does not have total knowledge of man’s every fiber and thought. Omniscience, total knowledge, is therefore, necessary and the concomitant to total government, to effective government. We believe, as Christians, that God knows our every thought, that there is nothing in us that is hidden to God, that every fiber of our being is known to God. It could not be otherwise, because if God does not know us thoroughly, He is not God. If we can shut him out of our mind and say, “The outside world belongs to God, but inside out mind, inside our being, we are completely independent of Him,” then, to that extent, God is not God and we are God in that private domain. Therefore, basic to scripture is the doctrine that God is all-knowing, and basic to every theology that has ever been developed, every doctrine of God, is this same concept of the omniscience of God, the total knowledge of God. No God can be truly God if He does not control the mind of man, and accordingly, the state and the super-state are moving towards this total knowledge of man, as a step towards total control.

Don Bell, on December 25, 1964, wrote of this fact, calling it in a brief passage of his report, “The Hateful Parallel.” “Followers of Christ know one thing, though we try to turn our backs to the fact that God knows our every thought, our every action. He knows all about us, past, present, and future. Though He looks no more on the past, which has been erased by the blood, we have an intermediary to plead our transgressions of the present, and He is able to keep His own for all future, but He is our creature, we are His slaves, and He knows our very thoughts before we think them and we cannot hide from God. ‘I know that thou canst do everything and that no thought can be withholden from thee,’ said Job. ‘Shall not God search this out for He knoweth the secrets of the heart,’ sang David. The eyes of the Lord are on every place, beholden the evil and the good. Hell and destruction are before the Lord. How much more then the hearts of the children of men?’ asks Solomon. The Lord told Jeremiah, “I the Lord, search the heart. I try the reins even to give to every man according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings,’ and Paul was very definite. “For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is the discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart.’ If we look to Christ Jesus as our savior and redeemer, then we know and accept the truth that we are slaves of Christ, and that He knows all and everything about us. This is His right.

“Now, let’s reverse this coin. If we look to state as our keeper, then state has every right to know all there is to know about us. We cannot serve two masters and if we accept gifts or aid from state, then we must serve state by letting state become the discerner of our very thoughts. We must allow state to substitute the IBM card for the book of Life, and we must confess to state all our sins and shortcomings, our strengths and our weaknesses, the thoughts and intents of our heart. We cannot have it two ways. Either we must accept Christ or state as our master, we must answer to God or to the IBM card. We must have our name written in heaven, or a number punched on a card at a data processing center. We can have one of two big brothers; Jesus or IBM. We cannot serve both, else we will hate one.”

The state today and the world’s state are seeking this total knowledge of man. They seek this total knowledge by molding him after their own image, by remaking man, first through education, state-controlled education. Second, through mental health programs, and third, through controls of privacy of every man.

But this is not all. Another aspect of any theology is worship and sacrifice, and incidentally, one of the best ways to know what a man worships is to find out what he sacrifices for and what he sacrifices to. Examine your lives and see what it is you sacrifice for and to, and you will know whom it is who you worship. We are increasingly, of course, compelled to sacrifice to the new god. Regrettably, too few today give tithes to the true God, but we are all compelled to give at least a triple tithe to the new god, to Washington, to foreign aid, to the U.N., so that we are, in effect, sacrificing and tithing to this new god, the world order, and increasingly, we have a doctrine, a developing doctrine still in its infancy, of sacrifice and atonement.

I referred earlier to the fact that the Roman empire had a passion liturgy, very much like present day Good Friday’s liturgies, to Julius Caesar. Today, we have hints of such a thing in comments with respect to the late President Kennedy. Just last month, a new book, edited by two men, Gikes and Schwaber, a collection of poems by modern poets entitled “Of Poetry and Power,” speaks of the late president as a martyr of this new world order, and of that faith. To cite just a few sentences from that volume from the poems. One poet calls Kennedy, a man but more. Another poem has, as its chorus, over and over again, “The man is gone on a Friday,” so that we are told that the world has a new “Good Friday.” Another poet calls him an Apollo, a Caesar. Still another, a “young god without wound,” and then goes on to declare that he has been killed by the priests of the old religion, and it’s very clear that he means by that Protestantism and Catholicism. I didn’t realize that we were responsible. Another poet speaks of him as an incarnation of democracy, who lived to be consecrated to demos, and still another declares he was nailed on the cross of a rifle site. The great sacrifice for this new world order, but there is one sentence in the book that I did like, and the sentence read simply, “We are stained by his blood,” and I thought this was very telling because we speak as Christian about the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanseth us from all sin, but in this new world religion, all you can get is a stain from his blood.

Again, another aspect of any doctrine of God is that He is the source of law. God is not under law. He is the law, the source of law, and so there can be no law that transcends Him, or is above Him, or is higher to Him. There is no higher law than God. Now, whenever law is stopped at any point, that point has been made God, and when a supreme court denies that there is no any higher law, and that its will is law, that point has been made god. The Constitution was written as Corwin{?} pointed out some years ago, and he was a liberal, the Constitution was written in terms of a higher law concept. That was basic to it. It was a law under God, not in contradiction to Him, but to try to bring about godly government, but whenever anything says that law stops with us, we are the supreme, the final court, and our word is the say-so, that point has been made god, and today, man refuses to allow any transcendental law. Law stops with man. For a time, it stopped with our supreme court, but now the U.N. charter carries superior jurisdiction and has prevailed, in one instance, over California law, so that the U.N. order represents the higher law, the source of law.

It again represents the source for creativity. A Christian economics is an economics of scarcity. Its basic problem is one of supply. Man has given to him by God, so much is his portion, and his problem is to make the best possible use of it and to facilitate supply, but an economics in which man begins to play god becomes an economics of abundance. Man becomes God and he becomes creative. There is no problem of supply, only a problem of distribution, and so there is no problem in the new economics of state, and of the world organization. No problem of supply, only a problem of distribution. As soon as we gain total power with our creativity, we will be able to supply everyone and take care of anyone. There will be no question of resources because our power will be unlimited, like God they will be creative. This is the premise of modern economics, economics of abundance. In other words, economics that rest on the creative power of this new god.

Again, any doctrine of God must affirm the transcendence of God. That God is, while knowable, incomprehensible, because He is so far beyond us, we can know God truly because God reveals himself, but we cannot understand God completely, because it would take the mind of God to fathom the deep things of God. Therefore, we declare Him to be knowable, and truly knowable, but incomprehensible. Now, this doctrine of incomprehensibility, which has historically been a part of the doctrine of God, that word has lost its religious connotation and is now being applied steadily upward from heads of state to the world state.

Some years ago, we found this word creeping into American politics when Sherwood, in his Roosevelt and Hopkins, spoke of Roosevelt’s incomprehensible power, his incomprehensible power as a person. Lately, we have heard references to the complex and unfathomable personality of President Johnson, and some indeed have referred to him as incomprehensible, and of course we are being told that whatever the outward acts of the U.N., it is not for us to criticize because we cannot comprehend the wisdom and all the inner workings of this tremendous organization, so that we are fools as we criticize, being unable to fathom its incomprehensible wisdom and power.

This then is a religious faith. We are dealing in the United Nations as a substitute god, a manmade god, and its origin is not so much in the plottings of men, although plottings appear here, as everywhere, as in the need of man for something {?}. Tennyson said nothing stands because he had forsaken Christianity, and today, as men have been forsaking the faith, they have been going more and more steadily towards this, which is a logical need, a desperate hunger on the part of man for certainty and control.

Thus, declaring with Tennyson that “Nothing stands in the hills or shadows and they glow from form to form,” man, because he is a religious creature and created in the image of God, when he will not have God to be his god will make unto himself other gods, and that god now is in the making. The absurdities of the United Nations are many. It’s so easy to ridicule it. For example, just recently I was reading in an anthropological journal, the exasperated report of one anthropologist who was working in New Guinea, where the people who were, just until two or three years ago, headhunters, and are just being converted out of that by some missionaries so that the area just barely has an element of control. It is extremely backward, extremely primitive, but a U.N. delegate visiting there recently enquired critically why no university had yet been put up. Or again, the Institute for Defense Analysis, a private agency which works toward this world order and has many prominent world statesmen affiliated with it, this last month reported that intelligence gathering is a hostile act, and since men should not be hostile, they should be one, the world over. Therefore, to demonstrate our friendliness in this country, we ought to open up our intelligence files to the Soviet Union. This would thereby demonstrate that we believe in the brotherhood of man in a world order, and that at any given moment, the Soviets should be able to command a given number of our submarines to surface wherever they are in the world and reveal themselves, so that they can be informed of our friendly intentions.

These things, of course, are absurd, and we can spend day after day chronicling the absurdities of the U.N., but it would be futile because we are reckoning with a religious faith, and the only answer to it is a religious one. Indeed, we must fight such things as the immigration bill, we must have political action, but we must recognize that first and foremost, we can do nothing about this religious dream of the United Nations until men recognize that the only true god is the God of scripture, until we restore again to men the true faith.

In the last century, capitalism and industrialism brought to men, from the period from the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War, the greatest material prosperity mankind had ever known, but they brought it to man, did they not, with secularism, and man cannot live by bread alone, and so man forsook what was so obviously helpful to them; capitalism, and to turn to socialism, to the dream of a world state, because man cannot live by bread alone and they had to have a faith. They had to have an agency of certainty and of control. Thus, the United Nations meets apostate man’s religious hunger for more than bread, and the dream of the United Nations will not abate until man surrenders himself and his every hope, and his every institution and order to the sovereignty of the triune and only God.

End of tape