Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Revolutionary Art

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Revolutionary Art

Genre:

Track: 16

Dictation Name: RR256A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960-1970

Most of the persons here this evening, I believe, are acquainted with Reverend Rushdoony, our speaker, but for those of you who are new, if the others will bear with me for just a moment, I would like to give just a brief thumbnail sketch of his background.

The areas of special interest for Reverend Rushdoony are in theology, philosophy, history, and economics. He has, from U.C. Berkeley, a B.A. and an M.A. Now he went there a long time ago before they had this new degree, I think it’s LSD. He also holds a B.D. from the Pacific School of Religion. He writes a great deal and some of the publications for which he writes would include American Opinion, Freedom Press, Christian Economics, California Farmer, and News & Views. He also puts out a regular newsletter. He has written a good number of books. Some of them you will find in the rear of the room after the meeting is over this evening. I think you might be quite interested in them. Some of those, for example, are By What Standards?, Intellectual Schizophrenia, The Messianic Character of American Education, This Independent Republic, The Nature of the American System, and a very good booklet on the United Nations, A Religious Dream. Also, there is a nice, long list of tapes, most of which are on biblical topics, and I think that you might want to use this for some of your study seminars and various meetings of that type. They are excellent.

This man lectures across the country and fortunately, for our cause, he is able to get onto a number of the university and college campuses. For this, we are very pleased. He has the wonderful faculty of being able to take the events of the day and measure them against Christian standards. It is a great pleasure to introduce, bring to you Reverend Rousas Rushdoony.

[Rushdoony] Revolutionary Art is our subject this evening, and revolutionary art is an aspect of the religion of revolution. Before we analyze revolutionary art, it is important to note that modern art is basically an old movement. It began with the Renaissance. Prior to the Renaissance, the artist was a craftsman and a proficient businessman. He was a middle class merchant. He had a product to sell, he produced it, he sold it, and very often prospered. He did not think of himself as an artist in the modern sense. He was a contractor or a builder in a particular field.

With the Renaissance, the modern conception of the artist as a special kind of person, was born. To understand what happened that led to the modern conception of the artist it is important to know it was a rebellion against Christianity. Now, for Christianity, the triune God is sovereign over all things, and Christ is man’s savior, man’s priest, prophet, and king. With the Renaissance, there was a rebellion against the sovereignty of Christ, and there was every attempt on the part of men to claim the role of Christ, to usurp it. The state, for example, claimed absolute kingship, and the king came to be, as it were, the successor of Christ in the political sphere, so that the divine right of kings became a commonplace doctrine. You had in England, for example, the king’s touch whereby the King of England, as he approached people annually on a particular day, touched them and supposedly had healing power. He was king even in the realm of sickness, and you had, in various ways, the messianic kingship of the state and of its rulers asserted.

The university also claimed a portion of Christ’s power. The university claimed to be man’s true priest, the means whereby man was to know the true order. The spokesman for man. The priest through whom humanity was to find true expression, and so you had a messianic character in education also developing.

The other role of Christ, that of prophet, was claimed by the artist. The artist became a prophet as he rebelled against Christ. He seized the prophetic role, but he became the prophet in a pagan sense, so that instead of speaking for the biblical God, he came to be the spokesman for the divine powers in nature, the hidden chaotic impulses and forces, which he said undergirded all being, and these forces were to find expression in and through the artist.

Now in paganism, the comparable personage to the prophet is the diviner, who by divination, reveals things that are to come and the hidden secrets of the universe, and divination was through total surrender to these forces that are the master forces of being, so that in ancient times, the diviner fell into a trance, into fits, and in various ways expressed these blind impulses, and these were a revelation about that which was the truth about reality.

Now, the artist as he played this role, turned from becoming a respectable middle class businessman and priding himself on being this, to an outsider, prophesying to society, as one who expressed the inchoate forces of being in his own life, and so the artist made himself over from a middle class craftsman and businessman into the congenital and permanent Bohemian, a man whose hand was raised against all society, and who made it a necessary matter of principle to reject Christian morality and maintain a studied immorality.

This studied immorality became a religious principle with artists. After all, they were at war with Christianity. They were prophets of a new order, the order coming from below, from the dark unconscious forces behind mankind, and therefore, they could not tolerate law and order, and became a matter of self-conscious deliberate, and sometimes you find the word used, even today, a martyr-like dedication to immorality, and as we read the history of various artists, we find that it is done painstakingly and painfully, that in some cases, they have maintained mistresses and financed them when it was painful and unpleasant to do so, but you couldn’t be, if you can apply the word to them, a respectable artist unless you were doing something of the sort. You had to be a Bohemian at war with the world of Christianity.

As a result, this led to primitivism. If you were to expresses not God, but the forces in nature, then the closer you got to the primitive, the closer you got to the forces behind all being, in terms of their thinking, and so primitive art became a major area of interest and concern. Primitive art, supposedly, represented vitality and power that you couldn’t find in a highly developed, sophisticated culture. This also gave to the Negro tremendous prestige, because the Negro, in this kind of thinking, was a primitive person. He was closer to nature, closer to the blind forces of being as they had evolved, and therefore, the closer you got to the Negro, the closer you got to power, to vitality.

Similarly, interest in homosexuals and homosexuality, and every form of perversion began to abound, because these represented a closeness to the lower levels, to the level of power, because power came out of chaos, out of the underground, the primitive. Therefore, for true vitality, you returned to chaos. The goal was to create great and true art. The obstacle was Christian law and order, the Christian God. Therefore, work against Christianity. The method, chaos. Release the true vitality that lies below.

Now, Bohemianism began in the Renaissance, and Renaissance art was still close to classical forms of humanism which emphasized reason, so the Renaissance developed into the Enlightenment, but this rational humanism was too controlled and disciplined a thing, and because they were looking for their prophetic power below rather than above, reason, in terms of development, in terms of an evolutionary perspective, was a late development, and so therefore, reason was not truly expressive of man. Therefore, the rationalism of the earlier artist as prophet was abandoned for Romanticism in art, and although this would be offensive to modern art and modern artists to say so, what they represent is simply the culmination of the Romantic Movement in art. The Romantic Movement was in love with chaos. It felt a need for chaos, and it enthroned the most chaotic element in man: frenzy, the unconscious, the madness of man. It went in heavily for that which was esoteric. Folk legends became the earliest interest of romanticism; primitive art, poetry, mythology, horror, and in literary Romanticism, the gothic novels, the theme of incest, of murder, everything that would indicate primitivism. Wild emotionalism became central to the artist and the writer’s concern.

Now to understand Romanticism as it has existed from the beginning and as it is today, and to understand its development from its beginning almost two centuries ago, to the present, it is important to understand the two basic impulses of Romanticism. First, a basic impulse of Romanticism, whether in art or in literature, or elsewhere, is perversity, perversity in method, content, meaning, and style. Now, as this perversity revealed itself at first, it was rather trifling. For example, Madonna’s were painted to look like prostitutes and very often, with prostitutes as models. On the other hand, prostitutes were painted to look like Madonna’s. This was deliberately done by many artists to reveal their basic perversity. The desire was to be offensive, to shock, and so this love of shock, the perversity that leaves the artists perpetually to look for a theme that will be offensive to those who behold his art, is a basic element of Romantic art. Shock the person out of his morality, out of his customs, out of his state of rational ways, jolt him so that he will lose his inhibitions and he will see the power of these unconscious forces.

Perversity became, therefore, a matter of faith for modern art. Perhaps a classic example of this which I think is so obvious a one that it is impossible to miss is Vincent Van Gogh, a very talented, a very able artist, but Vincent Van Gogh was as perverse as could be throughout his life. For example, he came from a good family, but he insisted on taking in a worn out prostitute and trying to marry her. The woman was both stupid, ignorant, perverse, and thoroughly broken down. She had two children whom she did not care for. She was, by Vincent Van Gogh’s statements, an unprintable thing. Even in the present editions of his letters, there are blanks left, and we don’t leave blanks very often today, and yet he portrayed her religiously as though she were a kind of saint. There is a picture of her entitled, and it is a nude. “Sorrow.” As a suffering saint, and in November of 1885, he wrote to Van Rabberd{?}, “I have to listen to her gossip as I am with her all the time, but I don’t worry about that. I’ve never had as much help as from this ugly [blank] and faded creature. For me, she’s beautiful, and I find in her exactly what I need. Life has marched over her body. Pain and visitations have marked it. Now, I can get something out of it.” Now this is an amazing statement, and it reveals the perversity of revolutionary art. For Van Gogh, she was a Madonna and a saint, although by his own statement, she was also an “ugly blank,” and yet he could still say, “for me, she’s beautiful, and I find in her exactly what I need.” Why this need? She was a total reject, and yet, with religious awe, he could write, “Life has marched over her body. Pain and visitations have marked it. Now, I can get something out of it.” Therefore, he depicted her religiously as sorry, as one whose life was a kind of a religious passion. There is a perversity about this, and insisting on marrying someone like this when her stupid talk was a headache to him.

However, she rejected him and returned instead to prostitution rather than to marry Van Gogh, but his life continued to manifest perversity. There were definite signs of sexual perversion. Later on, as you know, he severed a portion of his ear and gave it to a prostitute, and died a suicide.

This perversity is apparent in art and in artists, as a religious passion, because having given themselves over to this revolutionary art, they must reject law and order, they must bring out of the depths that which will progressively shock and destroy law and order, and so there is the necessity progressively to be more and more perverse, and so you proceed from one form of shock therapy, as it were, to another.

But perversity goes hand-in-hand with another basic ingredient of Romantic art and revolutionary art, because they are the same, and that is the love of novelty. Perversity requires novelty, because yesterday’s perversion becomes today’s convention. You’re all familiar with the fact that a narcotic addict requires a progressively heavier dose for the dosage to be effective. This is true of perversity, and perversion in any form. It requires a progressively heavier dosage of perversity for it to be perverse, and so Revolutionary Romantic art must have novelty. It’s pop art one year, but as soon as that is accepted, you go on to Op{?} art, and of course, the minute Op art catches the public eye, it has to be abandoned. There is perpetually a demand for a new form of chaos, a new assault on morality, law and order, new shocks for the mind and eye and the test of vitality is perversity and novelty, and anything that is traditional is seen as tyrannical, and a school of art today dies when it is accepted. Impressionism died the minute it caught the public eye and was accept4ed, and the same is true of every school that has succeeded it.

As a result, there is no room for skills, for masters. You cannot use the term “masters” today, because the development of a particular technique and skill is intolerable. There must be the perpetual search for novelty, and the abandonment of whatever is accepted. The issue in art is not realism versus non-representationalism, because much of the art in history has been non-realistic, but still expressive of a world of law and order. Now it is expressive of a world without meaning, without purpose. It is expressive of chaos.

Now, to give vent to this which they regard to be the basic power in the universe, the forces of chaos, to be the prophets of chaos, they must therefore be at war with meaning. So, the very concept of meaning is attacked. Primeval chaos must speak directly, freely, without inhibition. In the mid thirties, there was a major exhibition in San Francisco of futuristic, Dadaistic, and surrealistic art, and in the pronouncement, giving as it were, the manifesto of this art, it was made clear that this art was not aiming to have meaning, but simply to communicate the primordial forces of nature as they express themselves in and through the artist without contemplation. In other words, he expressed whatever impulse came without reflection, because reflection would make it a rational art. This is, of course, integration downward into the void, according to Van Til’s very expressive term. As one former surrealistic artist termed it, it is a deliberate meaninglessness, and this appears, of course, in more areas than in art, in painting and in sculpture. For example, Tennessee Williams, in his play “Camino Real,” has a character to step out of the action in the beginning of the play to say, “The mistake you make is trying to figure it out.” In other words, you belong to the passé world of meaning, and you insist that everything has to have a meaning. It has to have a purpose, and we say that the world is not like that.

Therefore, meaning is an obsolete concept, a concept that is no longer applicable, no longer valid, because art today must be beyond good and evil, and beyond meaning. Good and evil are concepts that belong to the old world of Christianity, and of the biblical God.

Therefore, we must transcend these concepts. We must be beyond law and order, beyond meaning, beyond good and evil, and one of the great figures in modern art since the Armory show when his influence became decisive in 1930 is Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, with his famous painting, “Nude Descending A Staircase,” which drew 100,000 viewers in a very short time at the Amory show in New York, issued as it were the manifesto of modern art. After awhile, he ceased painting. His work became that of an anti-art artist. For example, at one art show, he carted in a urinal and displayed it with the title “Fountain.” He was now the anti-artist.

Duchamp was trying to get beyond the whole world of law and order, good and evil and meaning. He decided, for a time, that even languages as they now existed were obsolete, because language has a structure: grammar. It is related to the world of meaning, and so he tried to create a language for the new world, the world beyond God, beyond good and evil, beyond meaning. Needless to say, he failed because language is communication with meaning, and can you create a language beyond communication?

He declared, “It is intolerable to put with a world established once and for all,” and he wanted a new world, totally created and totally controlled by man. The world as is exists is governed by God, predestined by God, and because God is an obsolete concept, it has to be totally controlled, totally predestined by man, and so here is a statement from one of his manifestos.

“Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes; air meters. Imprisonment and rarified air in case of non-payment. Simply asphyxiation if necessary, cut off the air.” In other words, you abolish God and all He represents in the way of meaning, and you govern man under the total predestination of man. Destroy God’s world by total chaos and then create man’s total world under man’s total control. In terms of this, Duchamp saw himself as the first man, the Adam of this brave new world, and had himself portrayed nude with his current Eve to depict Adam and Eve, the Adam and Eve of the new creation.

This movement, of course, is commonplace now, everywhere in the country. It represents art today. Not too long ago, in Pasadena, the prizewinning bit of art was a bloody, old shirt tacked onto a board. At another art exhibit, Alberto Greco waited and watched the people who had come to the exhibit, when the judges were going to give the prizes, and he pinned a label on one of the men, on his back, and he won first prize for the best art with that.

Showinsky’s{?} art is riding over a canvas with the car. One woman, Niki de Saint Falle, files on tubes of paint so the rifle to spatter the paint. Kline, Ives Kline gets on a big ladder, a huge canvas, and he has nude models, smeared with paint, hurl themselves on the canvas and roll around on it. Usiosha Nahara{?}, rubs, he gets a butch haircut and rubs his hair on the canvas after painting it, or he puts on boxing gloves and dips the gloves into the paint and pummels the canvas. Now, this is all done deliberately and self-consciously to declare meaning is passé. We are at war with meaning and we are working to destroy meaning, and the only purpose that art can have is to clear the ground of the whole world of meaning, to unleash as prophets, the new order.

These men are self-consciously the avant gard, the leaders, those who break with society who are the pioneers at every point with their systematic technique of assault for the new order.

Now, the first group of avant gard artists from 1885-1915, had a four-point concept of art, and the first was that the complete man is the child man, the primitive. The second was the enthronement of the absurd, a total negation of all values. The third point was to make dreams and nightmares, hallucinations, the principal of art, and the fourth point, ambiguity, double meaning and no meaning, so that a statement or a picture looks like it might mean something, but actually means nothing or can mean several things. This deliberate assault on the concept of meaning.

Now, of course, since they believe the artist is the prophet of the new order and of the new god, his art need have no relationship to anything but himself, and its purpose is to effect this revolution, to destroy the old order and bring in the new order, and the artist self-consciously today is working by his own statement, the underground artists have said that man is on a voyage of discovery to find himself. This requires total experimentation in every field, and so, almost as though they are scientists, they experiment with every type of perversion, deliberately, systematically, because this is the way to unleash the powerful forces that undergird the unconscious. They see themselves also, these experimenters, as martyrs and heroes of the new world order, rather than perverts, and they declare that the new world order requires blood, destruction, half the human race if need be.

Not only do you have, of course, the anti-art artist, but you have today the non-artist artist, the one who plays the role of the prophet of the new order, without even pretending to paint, or to do anything connected with art, the Beatniks. By their own designation, they are the holy Barbarians, and the term Beatniks comes from beatitude, a word cognate with beatific, holy, saintly, and they wear the beard as a sign of a prophet, because they are prophets of the new and true order. The jist of modern art is, of course, exactly what Van Til’s term declares the whole of the modern movement to be, integration downward into the void. It is revolutionary art, deliberately revolutionary. It is able to destroy the present order, and it is working very successful to that end, but it can create no new order. It can only bring judgment upon itself, and upon the society which tolerates it. Thank you.

[Audience] Three days from now, traditionally, we celebrate the wearing of the green, but at this moment, dear friends, it’s the sharing of the green. Our speaker has certain expenses in coming up here. So, at this point, we have the little arms basins. Reverend Rushdoony will be very glad to accept your questions now for whatever time he may have left.

[Rushdoony] Yes?

[Audience] Well, I would like to ask what is about legitimate art and another thing that comes to mind is, I have heard that the Jews never used to have, they had a rule of no pictures in their house because this would be a form of idolatry.

[Rushdoony] No, that is not true. The biblical requirement was that there were to be no pictures or works of sculpture used religiously in worship. This did not even abolish painting even religiously because we know, for example, that in the temple there were a number of things, the commandment given by God for the construction of the temple reveals, for example, the sculpture was to be on various things, the pomegranates, for example, that were carved on the pillars, the brazen bulls on which the great laver rested. So that there were works of sculpture and art in the tabernacle and in the temple. It was forbidden to use them religiously. So that in the Ten Commandments, one of the commandments specifically says that no graven images are to be made and used in art. So, this did not prohibit the non-religious use. That is, where it is not an object of idolatrous worship. It can be used and was used in the temple, in the tabernacle before that, and at the time of our Lord in the synagogue. A number of people were shocked some years ago when a synagogue, I believe in Capernaum, was excavated, almost certainly the one where Christ appeared, just portions of it, and there were evidences of decorative painting and the like, and they said, “Oh this can’t be,” but this was a misreading of the scriptures. Yes?

[Audience] Now these {?} are there teachers who teach them these perverse things?

[Rushdoony] This is a movement that has infected virtually the whole of the modern art world. They don’t have to go to a teacher to be taught these because this is so pervasive, nevertheless, this is taught, very definitely.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, wherever art is taught today, this type of theory of art is taught, very definitely. Yes?

[Audience]

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Rushdoony] {?} State College starting today and I think running for the next ten days, there’s the annual art exhibit, and if you want to know what Reverend Rushdoony is talking about, I think it would be worth your while to go. You go into black curtains, and the {?} and if you’ve ever been to the {?}. That’s it. These flashing lights {?} and you don’t know whether {?} or figure, a grotesque figure, some half body hanging from the ceiling, one with wings, that looks as if it’s distorted, a great {?} sitting on a bench, a dead man, or body on a tilted bed, another one lying on the floor, and so on. I think it would be interesting for you {?} by seeing whether it’s taught.

[Rushdoony] Another question?

[Audience] Can you name an artist, I mean, is there any known name of an artist that you would say is {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, there are a number of legitimate artists, very able men, but unhappily, the field is very much commanded by these others. For example, the artist whose portrait President Johnson rejected, Peter Hurd, is a very able artist, a very fine man. Wyeth, a very outstanding artist. There are a number of very fine artists currently engaged in painting, but it is not their work that tends to get the play, and when you pick up “Life,” for example, it isn’t their work that you see normally. Yes?

[Audience] What would you say will be the outcome of this movement?

[Rushdoony] The planned outcome of this is revolution, social revolution. This is what they’re working for. This is what they believe in. They’re trying to destroy our present society, and so far, they’re doing a very successful job of it.

[Audience] Would you say {?}

[Rushdoony] I’d think they are to a certain extent but they don’t need to help it along, because the basic impulse of this is humanism, and today, how much Christianity do you have in the country, or in the churches? There is very little Christianity in the churches. There are only a handful of churches today that are making a real stand for Christianity. So that we cannot pinpoint the responsibility. It’s so pervasive now. All you have to do is look around your neighborhood. Are these people making a good stand in terms of Christian faith? In terms of American Constitutionalism? In terms of law and order? And the answer is “no.” They’re content to let things go down and they don’t want to stick their necks out. They are the biggest helping hand that any subversive could want, so that you have a tremendous deterioration across country, and this is the real fact. No group of subversives can come and take over a country is the country isn’t morally corrupt. When this country was first established, and we didn’t have a hundred men under arms, the French Revolution broke out and boatloads of subversives were sent over here, all kinds of money expended, and apparently at least one member of Washington’s cabinet was in the pay of the revolutionists, but they did not succeed in spite of all the efforts, because while they did organize organizations and have a certain amount of following, there was enough moral resistance by enough people that the matter was stopped. You don’t have that moral resistance. Now, the difference between a healthy body and a sick body is not the presence of an infection. The bacteria are there, they are present everywhere. Pasteur once remarked, It is not the bacteria, it is the soil for the bacteria that is everything. So that one man, because he has no resistance, comes down with something, and another member of the same family doesn’t get it. Now, we are never going to have a world in which we are not going to have subversive forces, but the question is going to be are we going to have the health to resist that infection, that contagion? And the critical point is we do not have it. We are morally bankrupt as a nation.

[Audience] {?} present time the city council, there is a communist passing around {?} one of the seats on the council, and one of the very fine patriot neighbors said that {?} of course, as we know {?} and he said I’m not irate with that man, but I am about this fellow. He turned to a neighbor who said you won’t believe all this and walked away. That is one thing I wanted to comment upon. The other thing is how can you account for a man like {?} for instance, doing what he is on the {?} weakness, is it pressure?

[Rushdoony] I think it’s basically a moral weakness. This is basically it. Our problem is a moral weakness. Yes?

[Audience] How can lay people, what is your advice for them, for us, what can we do to be most effective?

[Rushdoony] What can lay people do that is most effective to counteract what is going on? I say the first thing to do is to get into the right kind of church. Now there are three such churches represented here tonight: the Anglican Orthodox Church, Norman Mill Bank, and if you don’t know him, get acquainted with him, Pastor Neff and the Grace Community Church, this church, the orthodox Presbyterian Church and no doubt, there are one or two others in the community that I don’t know about, but here are three groups represented.

[Audience] Well, I got out of the church I was in because {?} council of churches and got into one that doesn’t, and has the Bible and the Bible only as its {?}

[Rushdoony] Good, and that is an important step and this needs to be done by more and more people. Then, we need to support every kind of movement which will further a Christian Renaissance. Now a second, and extremely important kind of thing is the Christian school movement, and when you go out, you can pick up some material there, on the board near the door, on a Christian school in this area, and there may be others, but the Christian school movement is the most important area of victory against the enemy that this country has seen in this generation. Today, I mentioned this, I think, almost every month, and I’ll mention it again because I think it’s so important a fact. Over 25% of the children of America are not in public schools, that is, grade school children, and 10% of the high school children, and the percentage is growing all the time.

Now, here is another very, very important area. There is more that can be done in every area. We cannot, you see, content ourselves and this is where so many people make a mistake. They’re going to spend all their time documenting what the enemy has done, so in effect what they’re doing is to go around chasing the enemy and writing down what they have done. Item: Joe Dokes today engaged in this or that type of subversive activity, and so and so forth. So what? The answer is what have we done to create something, and this is where we are remiss. So, this is what we need to do. Every child who gets the right kind of Christian schooling is going to be solidly grounded as against all of these things. Well, we need to start more Christian school. We don’t have enough of them.

[Audience] In other words have more meetings{?} for children{?}

[Rushdoony] More schools, first and foremost. Education, from kindergarten up through college. We need to work, to sponsor, to help every such school that exists. These are two tremendous areas where a great deal can be done. Yes? Was there another question of here? Yes?

[Audience] I heard that the public schools were started as a means of {?}. Is this true?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I have a couple of books that deal with the subject: Messianic Character of American Education, in particular. I have a section in the Nature of the American System, and then Intellectual Schizophrenia. The founders of the public school system in this country were Horace Mann and James G. Carter. Their purpose was two-fold: to destroy orthodox Christianity and to bring about socialism, or to use the older language, the idea of a unitary state. That is, a state that controlled everything. The best way to accomplish it was to go directly to the child, socialize the child, and you’ve taken over the country, and they have accomplished the basic socialism. Now, through the Christian school movement, this is being counteracted. Yes?

[Audience] I’ve seen some articles in the paper recently, about a proposal to clear federal money to the pupil, rather than the school and it’s really a semantic difference in that Christian schools and thereby not violate the Constitution on the basic {?} not allowed to {?}, but along with this in the proposal is {?} teachers. Do you feel that this is {?}. Is this going to be the next test?

[Rushdoony] There is a great deal of pressure now to have that kind of federal aid to education. The answer that many have given and a very good answer is tax relief, for those who have their children in private and Christian schools. This is the logical step. But you see, if you give tax relief, you’re putting them out of your control, but if you give aid to the school or to the child, you’re placing this vast area under your control, and the idea today is not to get out of an area but to get into it more firmly, and so aid is an important instrument towards that end.

[Audience] Basically what I meant is this is obviously the intent. Do you think this has a chance of succeeding?

[Rushdoony] Yes, this has been put into effect in a couple southern states already, on the state level, so that there is a chance it may go through. Now, what the schools are finding out in the state that have gone through is this: you will find that the State Board of Education then says to the schools that are receiving it, and they know because the name of the school will be on the back of the check as the endorser, every school that has so many children receiving aid through these warrants, which the child’s parents receive and the child takes to school, must meet certain minimum controls to qualify as an aid-receiving school. So, you still have controls. Yes?

[Audience] {?} and they have complete authority, all the authority they need to {?} teacher of any school in this {?} that is not presently receiving any federal funds. So it’s a fact today, it’s not something {?} set up to do this.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The federal government has the power, the supreme court has made it clear that anything that receives federal funds is subject to federal control, and that’s logical. Are you doing to support something that you cannot have any control over? You wouldn’t do it, not if you have any sense, and no one will put up their money over something which is in no sense responsible to them.

[Audience] What are the taxpayers {?}

[Rushdoony] They’re getting exactly what they want. They’re asking for it, and they’re getting it.

[Audience] But they aren’t supporting {?}control, or knowledge {?}

[Rushdoony] They don’t want to have the knowledge. They’re content. The plain fact is the average voter in this country is content and thinks it’s a great country, and if you knock it, there’s something wrong with you. Yes?

[Audience] Do you feel that this really poses {?} over all?

[Rushdoony] No, because even if they have this plan you don’t have to receive it. It will affect some. Some will go for it, but there will be a sizable number that will not receive it.

[Audience] Do you know of any books that are available for children, all the way up possibly to high school, but is it possible to get them interested in reading, to counteract what they’re getting in school? I mean, in the line of history or anything else?

[Rushdoony] No, this is an area where there is not much done. There are not actually the good textbooks too readily available even for the Christian schools. They are gradually a few here and there being written, but the available literature leaves a lot to be desired. Yes?

[Audience] You aren’t really recommending, were you, that people who send their children to private schools and the tuition, or monies spent for this come out of their federal income tax or some other federal tax, were you?

[Rushdoony] Oh yes. Why shouldn’t a parent who pays tuition for his child’s education have an exemption on it? After all, he’s paying a double tax as it were. He’s paying taxes to the public schools and he’s making no use there, and he doesn’t support it, he doesn’t like it, it’s hostile to everything he believes. Why shouldn’t he get a tax allowance?

[Audience] The reason I asked the question, I don’t think the federal government ought to be involved in any shape or form, and I agree that getting the control off is better than having the funds and the control come from Washington, but to me, it’s just {?} control is kind of like saying it’s okay for a bank robber to come into a bank and take the money out, but they’d better not {?}. They lost the control. The immorality of {?} the tax go to other people{?}.

[Rushdoony] No, I don’t see that point because there’s no immorality. He is being doubly penalized for his convictions, and he is giving to something that is not a profit-making venture. It is a Christian school. It is a kind of a missionary project. Why should he when he is keeping that going with his money, and paying for his children’s education when he’s already paid a tax for their education, be given the privilege of having a deduction there?

[Audience] Well, {?} instead, all {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, I would agree, wholly. I have gone on record on that, but meanwhile, I think the steps that are being taken, and Goldwater, when he was a senator, fought hard for this a number of times, to get a tax exemption for school tuition payments. I think those measures are very sound, and they will help private education a great deal. In effect, the public school has the right to take your money, and what you pay in taxes is tax deductable, but what you pay in the form of tuition is not, and this is discrimination. Yes?

[Audience] {?} what do you know about South Africa? I understand it’s {?} and great chance for {?} I’m thinking of leaving and going there.

[Rushdoony] South Africa is a good country. It is one of the more conservative countries in the world today. It is still far more conservatively Christian than we are, but I would not advise migrating there. First, of late, they have been moving toward socialism themselves. This is very unfortunately, but they have. Second, it is a trouble spot of the world, because, in effect, the United Nations has declared war against it, and there’s no point in going where you’re going to be on the firing like. So that, while it is a good country, it is making progress, it does have an overwhelming problem.

[Audience] {?} strongly anti-communist {?} allow communists {?} right away ambassador {?} United Nations {?} taking away from {?} jurisdiction of {?} because they are strongly anti-communist, the second reason, of course, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes

[Audience] So we can fight over there if we weren’t fighting in Vietnam {?}

[Rushdoony] That’s possible. But the fact remains that it is one of the trouble spots potentially of the world, and scarcely a good place to be, and the controls are moving in very rapidly there because they are under pressure. One more question, our time is about up.

[Audience] May I go back to the school money situation. You said that the child would take the check to school, and thereby {?} control the school and the portion of the amount of money they accepted, and then wouldn’t this again {?} the Christian school?

[Rushdoony] Very definitely. It would destroy the independence of the Christian school movement.

[Audience] Well then, wouldn’t this be bad?

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, I’m very much against it. No, the tuition plan whereby the children receive warrants and go to the Christian school, I’m very much against it.

[Audience] Well, I’m confused. I thought you said you were for this tax deduction, or whatever it was.

[Rushdoony] No, those are two different things. The one is a federal aid, funds granted to parents to take them to the school of their choice and pay them in tuition. The other is when I pay or you pay out of your own pocket money to the school, but it is not tax deductable. You get no tax credit for it. The two are two entirely different concepts. Well, with that, we stand dismissed.

End of tape