Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Radical Student Movement

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Radical Student Movement

Genre:

Track: 18

Dictation Name: RR257A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s

[Audience] We are going to be hearing an address tonight on the subject of Student Radical Movements, which will be coming from, I’m quite sure I’m right in saying he’s the most respected authority on Christian self-government, particularly the responsibilities of those who are participating, which includes the generation that will be succeeding us, and I think that even though the topic may be a bit commonplace, or maybe too close for comfort, if any of you have been in Berkeley recently, and I was just a week ago, and walked that three-block stretch on Telegraph Avenue to {?} the gate, and although I like to think that I’m not a coward, I felt a certain feeling that was very, very strange. It was like that moment, almost, before a crisis, and if you haven’t been over there to see it, I recommend it if you have a change, you go. It’s quite a sight, those three blocks, along Telegraph Avenue to {?} Gate. Stop off and look in at some of the espresso coffee klatch places, and look in some of the stores to see what’s going on behind the decoration in the windows. Don’t miss the decorations in the windows either. But I can say this, that I don’t consider myself a chicken, but after I got through walking that distance, I wanted to look myself over for a few pin feathers and believe me, I found some. They’re really, it’ll shake you up, so I’m looking forward to hear what our speaker has to say this evening with regard to this very noisy, very much a minority, nevertheless it is, as we well know, this type of minority that is heard and although we are grateful for a small minority, maybe less than a hundred, in 1776 or thereabouts, they were heard also, and that we must consider the consequences of this noisy element that infects other universities besides California. I’m also happy to see the speaker’s wife here this evening. She used to be with us at meetings when we had them every Sunday. We still think about them, long for them, they’re not in sight yet, but we’re settling for one every month with no lapses in between. We had one of those and it was a very long stretch, going sixty days, so we hope that won’t happen again, and Dorothy, it’s nice to have you us, and Dr. Rushdoony, we are happy to welcome you.

[Rushdoony] Thank you. Disraeli once remarked that practical men are men who practice the blunders of their predecessors. It has also been observed that who do not know history are destined to repeat it, and yet, tragically enough, no where is history more despised today than in the academic community, in education. There is a contempt of the past, and this contempt of the past is the basic ingredient for intellectual respectability in most circles. Wisdom was born with us, is the basic theme of these thinkers, and therefore history has nothing to teach us except that the dead hand of the past must be destroyed, and so there is a characteristic rootlessness in all the radical student movements, throughout the intellectual, academic world.

The radical student movements are revolutionary but they are not new, and if we are to trace them to their origins, we must go back to Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy infected the western world by its basic presupposition, which was this: the autonomy of man and his rationality. As far as the Greek philosophers were concerned, man is alone in the universe. That there is no personal God, they were convinced. There might be gods who were struggling beings like men, but basically, man is alone in the universe, and his autonomous rationality is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, right and wrong, and so, the source of truth is man’s reason.

Now if autonomous man is ultimate, then there is no law, no truth apart from the will of man, is there? And so the logic of Greek thought, ultimately, as the logic of modern radical student movements ultimately, comes to one basic conclusion. Because there is no ultimate, absolutely sovereign God in the universe, there is no ultimate, absolute, sovereign law. No God, no law. No law, no crime. Therefore, anything goes. This was the premise of the first radical student movement in history which began in the fifth century in Greece, B.C., and it ended only in the sixth century A.D., and it was a part of the decadence of Rome as well as of Greece.

One of the major schools of philosophy, the Minor Socratics, had as one branch of it, the Cynic School. Now the word cynic is cognate with our word “canine,” so that the Cynic philosopher said, in effect, and this was the first premise of their philosophy, that the idea that there is a god and any ultimate law in the universe is a myth. Man is no different than the dogs. This is what it means to be a cynic, to hold to a canine philosophy, and therefore, just as a dog is under no law, man is under no law. A dog should fulfill that which a dog is and a man should fulfill that which a man is, an animal.

We’re familiar with the name of Diogenes, of Greek philosophy who died about 325 B.C., and we remember the story of Diogenes going around with a lantern ostensibly to look for an honest man. What we fail to understand is the point of that. An honest man was an impossibility because there is no such thing as honestly, nor truth, nor anything else. He lived, we are told, in a barrel, yes, because he denied that man should be so pretentious as to claim to create a culture to live in homes. Why should he live as the dogs?

During the Berkeley filthy speech movement, one of the speakers, over the public address system, claimed the right for the students to have sexual relations openly on the campus like the dogs. Why shouldn’t they have the same liberty? This was one of the battle cries of the Cynics and their students, and in fact, they finally reached that practice so they were openly indulging in such practices. Diogenes and others of this school claimed the right to practice incest, and of course, there was an address at the University of California at Riverside this April, in which this was one of the central points made by the speaker before a large assembly, and it was put in very crude and blunt language, that I would hesitate to repeat. Again, Diogenes and the other Cynics said that cannibalism was good sense. Why waste good meat, when you had condemned men or dead men? They favored any and every kind of perversion and practiced them openly and publicly. They were unkept, unclean, shaggy of appearance, and given to every kind of revolutionary activity. This was their way of asserting their autonomy. They had to rebel at every kind of law and order. They were, in effect, applying that which Satan held out as the way to true freedom in his first great and continuing temptation. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing (that is, determining for yourself) good and evil.”

We know, of course, that the Cynics and their entire school of philosophy were finally defeated by the triumph of Christianity, but unhappily, this virus of Greek philosophy was reintroduced into Christian Europe. One of the leaders of the school of philosophy that reintroduced it was, of course, Abelard, and the culminating figure was Thomas Aquinas, a well-intentioned man but deadly in that which he did.

One of the great historians of Europe of today, Frederick Heuer, has said that this reintroduction of Aristotelianism into Western thought introduced into it a strain of anti-Christian humanism, which down to this day is the basic impetus of all anti-Christian thinking, of men such as Sartre, Geed{?}, and the others, Camu, the existentialists, the revolutionists of our day.

One of the most influential thinkers of the Middle Ages who fired generations of students was Joaquim Abbott of Fiora, and Joaquim, in his interpretation of theology, which was really the destruction of theology, denied that the trinity represented any absolute sovereign person. In other words, he questioned the very existence of God, and he said that there were three ages in history: the age of the kingdom of God the Father, the age of the kingdom of God the Son, and the age of the kingdom of God the Holy Ghost, while denying at one and the same time that any of these represented anything ultimate, absolute, and real, and the Old Testament world, he said, was the age of the kingdom of God, and it was a time of wrath and of law, and the age of Christ was the kingdom of the gospel of Christianity but this was ended now. We have reached the Death of God period, and the age of the kingdom of the Holy Spirit would be the time which, he said, was now dawning, when all men would realize that they are gods, so that they would not look for any God above and beyond, but would find it in themselves. The Abbott Joaquim, therefore, introduced the Death of God school of thinking into the heart of Europe and fired countless generations of students. It would take an evening to trace the influence of Joaquim’s thinking. It infected, for a time, the entire Franciscan Order, the so-called spiritual Franciscan’s were Joaquimites, students of this philosophy, and they had finally to be suppressed by the church.

But meanwhile, at this same time, another manifestation of this radical impulse Death of God school of thinking was the Goliard Movement. The Goliards represented another wing of this Greek philosophy as it had been reintroduced in Christian thought. The Goliards were the non-student wing, the professional non-students, who had dropped out of school, thousands and thousands of them. There are four thousand, of course, at Berkeley alone today, and they commute from campus to campus across country. The Goliards went from campus to campus, and they were professional, lifetime students. They were again unkept, and dirty of appearance, foul mouthed and obscene, delighting themselves in corrupting people, and they were especially prominent as folk singers. They went from campus to campus, from place to place in Europe to every college, singing their songs, and we do have a fair collection of them still surviving, some of them quite clever and attractive, some of them, indeed, rather beautiful, but all of them emphasizing what a wonderful life there is in living in terms of sensuality, and how repressive and difficult, and absurd it is to live in terms of biblical morality. The Goliards were then believed to be, and by scholars until the present generation, quite definitely held to be a vast underground, subversive movement. In recent years, of course, it has been denied quite extensively that the Goliards represent any such thing and that there was any conspiracy involved in the Goliard movement. Suffice it to say, they claimed to represent such a movement. They claimed to have a hidden leader whom they called their bishop, and they went from place to place propagating this, their faith.

So that we have first, the Cynics, a vast student movement of 1100 years in the Greek and Roman period. Then, in the Medieval period, the Joaquimites, the Goliards, and then, the students of the Scholastics. Thomas Aquinas was a man very devout, zealously concerned with the defense of the faith, and he thought he would use the tools of the enemy against the enemy, but he failed to realize that in adopting Greek philosophy, which he was going to use against Greek philosophy, he was also adopting the basic presuppositions of Hellenic thought, including the autonomy of man, and the fact of man’s natural goodness, and one of the basic principles on which he rested his philosophy, we find in book one of his Suma Theologica, in which he says, “All our knowledge originates from sense.” In other words, Thomas Aquinas adopted a basic empiricism as his basic philosophy, which is the basic premise of radicalism in every age. Man’s thinking, in other words, is a product of his environment, and the way to remake man and society is to remake the world. Since man is a product of his sense experience, then control his sense experience by creating a super-state which will govern all his experiences, and then you will automatically recondition, remake man.

Thus, Aquinas’ implication was that the human mind was blank at birth. In other words, man is not a sinner. All fundamental concepts are derived from the senses. Therefore knowledge is by inference only. It is inferential, so that even the knowledge of God, for Aquinas, was an inference, and third, knowledge is abstractive. So that the basic premise, you see, of the concept of autonomous man was introduced again into Christian Europe in full fledged form.

The next major step in the development of this philosophy, which in the teaching of the Scholastics, created student generations that immediately applied this philosophy, denied everything, and became revolutionists of the old order. So that you find in the latter part of the Middle Ages, every kind of movement you find today among students and among the general population. You find the Adamites, a communistic group, and a variety of communistic movements born of this. You find a variety of nudist movements, a variety of free sexuality movements, and so on, all springing up out of the premises of Scholasticism, and the Enlightenment took these premises, without the theological apparatus, and developed them further. John Locke, in his psychology, adopted Thomas Aquinas’ epistemology and psychology, and he further developed the idea of the mind as a blank piece of paper, a clean tablet, and this again was made the basic principle of revolution. Science also is based on this faith. The scientific attitude is one of total rootlessness, the blank tablet approach, but of course, no thinking exists or it possible without presuppositions, and you either begin with the presupposition of the autonomous man and his autonomous rationality, or you begin with the presupposition of the triune and sovereign God. But this concept of autonomy, of autonomous man, of his total rootlessness, is the precondition of intellectual respectability in the modern world, and it is the essence of humanism, atheism, and every kind of contemporary movement.

Kantianism emphasized this faith even further. Existentialism and nihilism are applications of this. In the last century, to cite another example of the student movements, before we come to the present, the Russian nihilists, a student movement, rigorously applied this. They practiced every kind of practice that would make them deliberately objectionable to the society at large. They wanted to emphasize their total rootlessness, their total break with the past and the world around them. So, the women wore their hair exceedingly short, the man wore their hair exceedingly long, and they had every device to impress people immediately with their difference, going unkept and shaggy, unclean. Wearing, by the way, long, oblong blue spectacles as a kind of badge, and so on.

On top of this, the Romantic movement of the past, almost two centuries, also contributed to this sense of autonomy, because Romanticism and the Romantic movement contributed this element to the whole of the radical student movements, that the essence of intellectual respectability, the essence of that which is interesting, exciting, and desirable, involves novelty and perversity. So that, for the Romantic poets, for example, there was nothing more distasteful than someone you loved and who loved you. After all, there was no novelty in an established relationship. So that the Romantic poets were always panting with passion for someone they couldn’t get, and the minute they attained the relationship, there was no desire for it.

Shelley, one of the most ridiculous, I think, examples of the Romantic poets, and the perennial adolescent, was always exalting, as a goddess, some woman he was interested in, and she was nothing but an old witch the minute he won her, but on top of this, Romanticism felt that novelty was not enough. It had to be perverse, so that an element of perversity was added to it. Mario Praz, in his very thorough study, The Romantic Agony, has traced the long history of continual exploration of the abnormal, the perverted, on the part of Romanticism, so that autonomous man, as he moved into Romanticism, felt he had to emphasize his independence, his autonomy, by deliberate acts of perversity, abnormality, to further emphasize his total autonomy of the past.

Now this concept of autonomy, of course, is basic to our modern academic world, so that the function of the teacher and the function of the professor is to make the pupil as rootless as possible, so that there is a steady attempt to break the home ties, to ridicule everything that constitutes any kind of stability in terms of background. When you realize, for example, that sociology which claims to study man, neglects the basic sociology, the sociology of the family, you realize their hostility to roots, and of course, in modern grade school education, everything is being done to prevent any possible teaching by the parents of the children. Separate them from the family, and this is one of the functions of the new math, to make the child all the more rootless by breaking the connection between the generations. And you find very commonly that educators speak about the desirability through a kind of intellectual shock treatment, to jolt the students out of every allegiance to family, to country, patriotism, to God, to church, to community, to your nation, to your race, to anything, to create this total rootlessness, this total sense of autonomy, and of course, the modern existential movement has emphasized this to the “nth” degree, because existentialism, which is the reigning philosophy on most campuses, says that the only truth for man, the only reality for man, is the dictate of his biology. So that, apart from our biology, no truth exists for us, and our biology must be completely unfettered by social prejudices, cultural morays, religious concepts, or anything else. So that the dictates of your biology, in a total rootlessness of context, are truth for the existential movement.

Thus, the modern radical student movements have a long intellectual history. They are also extensively controlled, or created, by Marxists and Fabian socialist groups. This is, of course, very commonly and regularly denied. It is denied first of all for strategic purposes, and second, to emphasize their sense of autonomy and freedom, because if it the emphasis of your philosophical creed to emphasize total rootlessness, total independence, you aren’t going to say you belong to a ruthless and dictatorial party, and follow a party line. You have to emphasize as part of your intellectual pose, your pretended freedom, that you are uncontrolled even when you are the most abject of party followers, and yet it’s ironic that no generation of students in recent history has been more dependent on its parents than the present college generation.

The Depression college students were, by and large, independent of shear necessity. They had to work their way through school. Those of the late forties and much of the fifties were going to school on G.I. funds, but now, more than every in history, the overwhelming majority of students are completely dependent upon their parents, but they are most anxious to pose as independent, a very sizable percentage of campus radicals and non-students live on checks from home. The others live on scholarships.

Basic to the demand of the radical student movements, in line with this long history of Existentialism, because Existentialism is simply the modern name for the conclusions of Greek philosophy, is this demand for unlimited freedom. It is really a demand that the world be made safe for parasites. There is an unwillingness of these people, these students, to leave the university world, and this is symptomatic. There is a flight from reality, a dream of total freedom with total subsidies, and because they are less responsible, they are often the most dangerous of radicals. It is significant that on various campuses in answers to questions, often by very friendly liberal reporters, the heroes of the student movement are not men like Marx and Lenin, but Nyechayev and Castro.

Let us examine first of all Nycheyev. Nycheyev, in his revolutionary catechism declared, “The revolutionary enters the world of the state, of classes, and of so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only because he has a faith and it’s quick and complete destruction. He no longer remains a revolutionary if he keeps faith with anything in the world. He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place or any man in this world. He must hate everything and everyone with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has in the world relationships with friends, parents, or lovers. He is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.”

It is significant that one of the most prominent leaders n the student movement at Berkeley, in the free speech movement and other movements remarked: “What these Trotskyites don’t seem to dig is that Nycheyev is the key to the whole Russian revolution. He was an instigator, a bridge between the theory of Marx and activism of Lenin. Without him, nothing could ever have happened. Nothing.” Nycheyev then, pure destruction as a way of affirming your liberty. This principle and this man represent one of the ideals of the radical student movement.

The other, again, by common consent of a number of reporters and of a number of the books put out by the student movement at Berkeley, the other hero is Castro. It is significant that it is Castro rather than Kosygin and Brezhnev. The latter two are Soviet bureaucrats, but Castro represents the socialism, the Marxism of Nyecheyev. He grew up a pig. His name at the university was “the ball of greasy fat,” totally unclean and dedicated to it. Although a very brilliant student, he was totally incapable of learning anything that ran against his presuppositions. When he was still in high school, he attempted to murder a teacher because he didn’t like the grade he received. He was definitely involved in the murder of students at the University of Havana whom he disliked. In every respect, Castro represents the dream of Nyecheyev; total rootlessness, and hence, the fact that he is a hero.

Michael Miller, Hal Draper, and other leaders at Berkeley have said that if the radical students would take any label, they would call themselves Existentialists, the one label that is accepted. Again, significant, because Existentialism represents this total rootlessness and total revolution.

Herbert Gold, in the Saturday Evening Post of June 18, 1966 observed, in a very friendly article: “In their rage against the past, and dread of the future, some of the Berkeley radicals would like to obey no rules but the ones they make themselves.” Thus, amoralism is a major part of recruitment for the cause. There must be an open and an obvious break with the family, with the past, with the faith, with decency, with morality, and there must be an advocacy of all-out revolutionary hostility towards these things. In Los Angeles, for example, the Students for a Democratic Society, the SDS, has conducted, since the beginning of this year, a retreat for its students at which they were given instructions on guerilla warfare in cities, with Robert Tabor, of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and author of the book, The War of the Flea, as their instructor.

The purpose of these radical student movements is not to gain some rights but to seize power. The more concessions are made by faculties and administrations, the greater the demands become, because there is no desire to be satisfied with concessions, because concessions only lead them to demand all the more. So that, as one writer has observed, from John Poppy, “The students want 1) to use the campus as the base for off-campus political and social action without fear of punishment by the university; 2) to make faculty and students the sole judges of educational policy, reducing administrative officers to housekeepers, raising money, cleaning sidewalks, providing rooms for us to work in, as Salvio put it.” Now, you can see why Dr. Strong, one of my former professors, himself very definitely on the left, couldn’t go along with these students. It was not that he agreed in principle with them as far as their radical ideas was concerned, but he could not agree to turning over the university to the students and to the faculty. He was a part of the Administration, and he felt the Administration should be the Administration and not, as Salvio said, those that raise the money and clean sidewalks. But this is the dream. The total control of the academic world by the faculty and the students, and this total control must go together with total support by the state.

Moreover, another basic aspect of these radical student movements is the desire to condition the country to the use of force as a means of political debate, and to make violence an acceptable and respectable tool, for the cause of civil rights, and to use these things to create total socialism.

But when we have said these things about the radical student movements, we must hasten to add that they are simply the tail, and the tail does not wag the dog. The dog wags the tail, and the real source of the problem, the real root of the problem is not what the students are and what they are doing, but it is our educational institutions from the lowest level on up. This is what they have been teaching. Are we surprised if they find the students beginning to believe what they are taught and to put it to practice?

Just a few weeks ago, in Los Angeles, there was held a major educational conference with 1400 college presidents, trustees, deans, chancellors and some professors attending from all parts of the country. The speakers included Robert M. Hutchens, Justice William O’Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court, Walter Lipman, and U.C. President Clark Kerr, among others, and the conference, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported it, very favorably and with approval, on May 15, 1966, had as its major address a lecture by Sir Eric Ashby of Cambridge University, Master of Clare College, one of England’s foremost educators, and Ashby’s thesis was simply this: “1) the true function of a university is not to preserve and consolidate the social status quo, but the question and disrupt it. In challenging society, it encounters a danger of dependence on outside influences, the influence that, in Medieval times, was the orthodoxy of the church, and is now the orthodoxy of alumni or the state legislature; 3) {?} the proper obligation of the modern university is to place the administration of human affairs in the hands of educated men.” Now, this is the thesis of the radical student movements. The purpose of the university is to bring about total revolution, and the university must be placed in the hands of the faculty and, the students would add, the students as well.

At the same time, another educator, Dr. James M. Hester, President of New York University, the largest private university in the United States, has come out saying that educational institutions that are out in the country or in small towns cannot educate, because how can they, and this is the jist of his position, educate students in social revolution when they are not located at the point of revolution: the cities, where the cause of civil rights is being fought. Then again, we have Chancellor Martin Meyerson, who in his baccalaureate address a few days ago, relatively, at the University of California before he departed for the East to spread his gospel, quoted Isaiah from a modern translation, “From birth you were called a rebel.” Now, in Isaiah, this is an indictment of the people of the kingdom of Judah, that they are rebels against God and against all law, but Chancellor Meyerson cited this as a commendation, as a praise, and he went onto say that, “I only ask that you do not lose that quality.” When you find that educators praise the cause of revolution as the prime function of the university, and commend revolution and rebellion in students after a long series of revolutionary actions on a campus, can you be surprised at what has happened? We can only say indeed that the students have been very slow, and most of them a little bit lazy in applying the teaching they have been getting.

Moreover, when you examine the anti-poverty program, the higher education and urban redevelopment programs of the federal government, and a number of other programs, you realize that they have objectives very similar, if not identical, to those of the radical student movements.

Thus, the Deboy{?} clubs, in their 1966 statement, were quite accurate in saying, “We are really asking nothing new of the government,” and as they went on to say, we are simply asking the federal government to carry out, to its logical conclusion, the socialism the federal government has begun and professes. In other words, Washington, be consistent to all you profess. You have started a revolution. Carry it to the logical conclusion, that’s what we’re asking.

Moreover, let us look again to the elders of our students, the politicians. Governor Brown, in commencement address at the University of Santa Clara declared, “College administrators must face up to their public function. Gone are the days when school spirit meant hazing the freshmen, eating goldfish, and raiding the sororities. May I propose that all college administrators help tell our people what college study really means, what we must demand of our students if we hope to make them active Americans, make our people safe for students with ideas and you will be performing a real service for America. You will be halting the epidemic of social hysteria that is spreading across our nation under the libelous labels of secret societies. Far from discouraging your students’ social and public interest, I propose that you positively exploit them. Here is an honorable source of college spirit. Here is a worthy unifying and organizing principle for your whole campus life. I say thank God for the spectacle of students picketing, even when they are picketing me at Sacramento and I think they are wrong. For students protesting and freedom writing, for students listening to society’s dissidence, for students going out into the fields with our migratory workers, and marching off to jail with our segregated Negroes. At last, we’re getting somewhere. The colleges have become boot camps for citizenship, and citizen leaders are marching out of them. For awhile, it will be hard on us as Administrators. Some students are going to be wrong, and some people will want to deny them the right to make mistakes. Administrators will have to wade through the angry letters, and colleges will lose some donations. We governors will have to face indignant caravans and elected officials bent on dictating to state colleges and faculties, but let us stand up for our students and be proud of them. If America is still on the way up, it will welcome this new impatient, critical crop of young gad flies. It will be fearful only of the complacent and passive.”

Now, if we think there is more hope on the other side of the political fence, let us remember that while the republican candidate for governor, Mr. Reagan has criticized the Berkeley movement away from Berkeley when he was on the campus. He did tell the students that when he was a student, he had led a student strike and got the college president kicked out, and he records this in his autobiography, so that we do not have any ground to feel too hopeful anywhere as we look across the political scene.

Nor when we go to the church colleges can we find any hope. It’s scarcely necessary to go down the line of the Protestant colleges. We know what they have become, but let us look at one place in Los Angeles, which most people would not expect to be involved in this sort of thing; Immaculate Heart College, a girls’ school in Los Angeles, and I quote from a news dispatch of June 21, 1966. “A Roman Catholic nun, president of Immaculate Heart College here, Los Angeles, claims that Berkeley has born the brunt of the criticism and unfavorable publicity for all of us in education. It would be foolhardy, said Sister Mary William Kelley, to believe that any college is exempt from the pressures and forces which have produced the difficulties on the larger campuses. She blamed what she called a wave of anti-intellectualism and a rebellious younger generation dissatisfied with the present world. Young people, said the educator, are rebelling because of an insane kind of world, and added that there is a great deal of health and even solid spirituality in their wanting to give a new shape to it. To silence these youngsters, as if it could be done, are to root them out of our universities and colleges would be, in my mind, be to reject a challenge to survival, the force and clarity of which I have found nothing in history to match. Sister Mary Williams spoke at a banquet honoring the Golden Anniversary of the founding of the college. The audience included James Francis Cardinal McIntyre and Comedian Bob Hope.” Thus, the students are simply reflecting, mirroring their teachers’ faith. An education today is training in revolution, in rootlessness.

I think our situation was perhaps best described by a Berkeley Vietnam Day speaker, Felix Green, when he spoke about the real revolution that is going on today, and he said, “I’m not talking about revolution with machine guns. Those are the least important. The revolutions that are really important go on in people’s minds, and in the way they think and feel.” That revolution is taking place, the revolution in the minds of the people, and you find that revolution proclaimed in the state schools, in the church schools, in the pulpit and in the pew. You find it echoed in the press, and in the various communications media. The revolution has taken place.

Two civil rights leaders, Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey, in writing a handbook for civil action, made this statement: “Power flows to those who understand what is happening.” No man can contend with these forces unless he understand what is happening, unless he knows what the presuppositions of these movements are, unless he recognizes that it is a belief in autonomous man, rather than in God, and in a belief in man’s autonomous rationality, man’s law as against God’s law, and there can be no hope of changing this present revolution until we ourselves stand consistently, thoroughly and firmly upon our premise, the Christian faith. It is as Burke said 150 years ago, the last and greatest war of religion in Western civilization, between the forces of anti-Christianity and Christianity, and it is a war unto death. There will be no quarter given in this war. Are we prepared to stand on our ground firmly? We cannot fight God’s battles with Saul’s armor. Thank you.

[Audience] Thank you, Dr. Rushdoony.

[Rushdoony] {?} look at God rub. Rub, God, rub, and God made light and he looked at it said this is good. God was conceited, conceited, conceited, and that’s just the beginning and it goes on progressively more and more objectionable as it deals with various aspects of the faith, and this is as I say, nothing radical, nothing unusual. It’s one of the milder kind of student products, because one of the essential aspects of the movement is that it has to step up its pace. There is a continual escalation, so that each year, each issue has to outdo the one before it, and it has to get progressively a little bolder, a little more raw, and little more dedicated to perversion. So that, for example, you find it being said now that, well, first the Civil Rights Movement began with favoring the Negro, and the Negro was in, and the next step was the homosexuals so that it became “in” to be homosexual, and now they are going on in some places, and I have a file of such things to advocate various other forms of perversion, some which are hardly fit to mention, but one of the ones which is a little more, can be at least cited is necrophilia. It is a violation of our civil liberties to deny anyone the right to necrophilia. Look that up in your dictionary when you go home. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] What’s the role {?} Santa Barbara about this whole {?}

[Rushdoony] I can’t, oh, the Center at Santa Barbara, what it’s role is in this? I don’t think it’s too great. I think the Santa Barbara Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, of course, had an important part in this conference of educators. It sponsored the conference and provided the funds, but this is so pervasive that you can’t say some group that was just born twenty or thirty years ago is the cause for it, because the roots go back to pre-Christian times, to Greek philosophies, and they are so deep that they are present in everything. All you have to do, for example, and I have done it, if you want to read about it you can in my book on The Messianic Character of American Education, the educational philosophy for the kindergarten. Well, that far back they are concerned with all these things that flower when the kids grow up, so that this goes so deep that while some of our present institutions and groups are certainly egging it on, they’re not causing it. It’s causes are far deeper than any single group. They are in our education through and through, and have been for a long, long time. This is not to underrate the basic hostility of the Center to the fundamental premises of our Christian culture. It’s very definitely hostile to it, but they didn’t start it. They’re just one branch of a huge tree.

[Audience] I suppose this is a oversimplification in the form of a question, but what do you feel is a cure for this situation {?}?

[Rushdoony] What do I feel is a cure? First, we’ve got to have a return to a genuinely Christian faith, a genuinely Christian one. There’s practically none of it around. It’s practically non-existent. There are churches that are ostensibly good, sound churches, but when you look at them and see how trifling most of the members are, you realize how little there is even in them. I’ve mentioned this once before, I believe, but I think it stands mentioning again. One of the sickest things you see today is a lot of people who claim to be fine Christians, who will walk out a church, why? Because they don’t like some other woman in a church, or two women get into a fight with each other, and so they are pulled out of the church, and their husbands and their children, or they don’t like the looks of the preacher, or they don’t like the building, and nobody has a right to be in any church unless that church is consistently proclaiming the word of God, and nobody has any right to walk out of any church that is faithfully proclaiming the word of God. So, that when they stand in terms of these trifling things, in their membership and depart in terms of it, you know that their faith is not grounded on scripture but on purely personal tastes. So, first there isn’t much of a church. Second, our educational system is utterly and totally unsound. The child does not belong to the state and the child does not belong to the church. Therefore, education should not be church-controlled or state-controlled. It should be free and Christian, independent of all other institutions, and just as the state is not under the church and the church should not be under the state, so the schools should be under neither and dependent on neither for support. We need, therefore, free Christian schools which are dedicated to teaching this because you cannot train up a generation of children in a totally non-Christian and anti-Christian system, and then expect with a little bit of babysitting each Sunday morning to undercut the affect of that. It’s suicide. So, you have to have a totally Christian kind of school, which is an independent school movement, and you have to have a faith that makes for truly Christian churches, where people stand in terms of the faith and nothing else. Not the trifling aspects.

I was quite delighted recently to hear of one church that took a rather radical answer, but I think it was based on very sound thinking. A church board met, spent some time one evening, and then finally decided, by unanimous vote, I understand, to drop the Sunday School entirely. Every child was to be in the Christian school there, and they were to get it at home, in the school, and in worship every Sunday. Second, they abolished the women’s group, guild, or whatever it was it was called because they didn’t want anymore trouble with women squabbling and that business, and if they wanted to get together, let them do it on their own. They didn’t want their quarrels to be a matter of church quarrels. The church was there to proclaim the word of God, and their social life was their social life, and their female spats were their personal affairs.

Now, that may be a radical solution, but I think it has its real merits, and I see a lot of women nodding. Yes?

[Audience] What sort of guidelines do you have, if any, on removing yourself from the church? When you’re an individual you say, well, I go to this church and the minister is wonderful but the hierarchy is far-out, or vice versa. How do you explain this to people?

[Rushdoony] I would say the answer to that is, how wonderful is the minister? Isn’t he a party to that hierarchy? How long would he last if he really stood out against what that hierarchy represents? So that the minister may be saying sweet nothings to the congregation, but if he started proclaiming the real truth of God, he wouldn’t last in those denominations. They don’t tolerate them. So that they had better take a second look at the pastor. Yes?

[Audience] Doctor, I have a question that’s puzzled me for a long time. You are a product of the American school system, is that correct?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And so am I, and I’ve often wondered why, I come from Minnesota, and I went through high school, I’m the same nationality, went through the same high school and law school with the now Secretary of Agriculture. Now you tell me how {?} [laughter] I guess everyone is anticipating [laughter]. But how could it be, is there something inherently different about people, that makes them and their philosophy so diametrically opposite, and when we have the same background. I can’t figure this out.

[Rushdoony] A long time ago, someone facing a similar situation said, “There but for the grace of God, go I,” and that’s it, and there, but for the grace of God, go you and I, because certainly, we went through the system, and we were infected at various points, but by the grace of God we did overcome that infection, but why should our children have to go through the same thing? My children, because of Christian schools, are years ahead of what I was at the same age, and I had to undo my education, and in fact, when I look back on my university experience, I can only think of two professors from whom I really got anything, and I didn’t agree with them, but they were real scholars. Most of them are fifth rate minds, and this is not just my saying, but an Existentialist philosopher, Karl Yaspers{?}, in his book, The Idea of the University, has said that the one thing the modern university fears is excellence. It is geared to protecting mediocrity, because mediocrity prevails and predominates in the faculty. Now, when I look back, I realize that, well, the one man from who I consistently learned something at the University of California was Dr. Ernst Kantorowitz. Kantorowitz is one of the men who didn’t sign the loyalty oath by the way, and went later to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, but he was a great scholar. I did learn something from him. And I did learn something, not too much, from Dr. Strong in philosophy. The rest were a waste of time, and I was around for seven, eight years, I believe, and it was a waste of time, and I had to uneducate myself, and it was only the grace of God that kept me from going under to all that, and I think the same is true of you and others, and there is no need to put our children through that. We can put them directly under the grace of God in a Christian school context. Yes?

[Audience] I realize that I’m somewhat of a stranger here, but to answer the Christian question about the cure, how can we cure all these different {?} Rushdoony to get back to the Christian faith, and I pray to God that I {?} Christian college, and I {?} so visible or {?} disappointed in Christian churches, now I attended school in Minnesota, {?} back here because he is from Minnesota, but I have seen churches in this area, and other areas, that do not have the advantage of it. You know, I sincerely believe that Christians wake up and tell others about the law, and to tell them about the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, I believe they {?} far greater to put this faith to work.

[Rushdoony] Yes, Mr. Stafford?

[Audience] When you consider the inevitability of the law of cause and effect, are you going to have some sort of reaction to all of this? Or is it going on right now? You know, {?} reaction going on in the school {?} country?

[Rushdoony] Well, no because the parents while they don’t like the product, basically agree with the philosophy. That’s the problem, and I have seen, repeatedly, parents who are beside themselves because of what their children are getting in the schools and yet, refusing to challenge the basic presuppositions of that education because they liked it. So that, what they want is the same thing but not quite as radical, and they want it to go so far and no further. In one seminary in this area, and I think this illustrates it, about fifty years ago, a professor came who was the first man in that seminary to challenge the authority and the inspiration and infallibility of scripture, and he felt this was necessary. It was the greatest guarantee of Christian liberty and so on and so forth, and he had an eloquent justification for it, but he did believe in some measure that Jesus Christ was unique, but before he died, that man was a heartsick man because his pupils and his successors on the faculty didn’t stop where he stopped. They were ready to throw everything over for it. Now, it was his same principle, but he wanted to say go so far and no further. So, there isn’t going to be any possibility of a reaction until people react not against what the students are doing, nor against what the faculty is teaching, but against what they themselves stand for. When they begin to reexamine their own basic premises and realize, My basic premises are digging the grave of Christian civilization, because my basic premises are ultimately identical with everything I hate.

Now, I had quite a run-in about four years ago when I was visiting in Southern California and speaking, with a woman there who is quite a militant conservative, and you would know her name, because as one who had for a time, become involved in the communist movement, she was, at one point, jolted into rebellion when she saw the extent of its total contempt of man, its readiness to destroy man in the name of man, and so she turned against it, and the only alternative, of course, she could see was, ”Well we’ve got to get back to Christianity and Christianity is for things that aren’t so brutal and horrible,” so vaguely she {?} for Christianity, but there was nothing that angered her more than anyone trying to make conservatism Christian, and this inflamed her, savagely, because she did not want really to break with her communist past in her presuppositions. She didn’t like the communist conclusions.

Now, this is our basic problem today. People want to keep pruning the tree rather than chopping it down, and when you prune a tree, it only bears more fruit. Yes?

[Audience] {?} in concluding some of your remarks that the thing for an individual to do is 1) become rooted in biblical Christian faith, 2) to support or send one’s children to a really Christian school, and 3) to become associated with a church where, first of all, that follows the Bible, that teaches the Bible, and also to become active in that church in such as way as to {?} transformed?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I’d agree with that thoroughly. Our time is running out. We’ll have two or three questions more. Yes?

[Audience] Perhaps you heard that Dr. McIntyre has been reporting on the case at the University of Washington, where the Bible has been taught as literal word, and the case went against the {?} center faith, the traditional faith, and gone out of the appeal {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, I’ve followed some of that case, a very interesting one. Mrs. Fisk, you had a question?

[Audience] You mentioned that your daughter had gone to the {?} school and as we have just moved into this area, I’d be awfully interested in knowing the names of some, if there are any, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there’s, well, I see, well, where is Pastor Neff, if he still here? Talk to Pastor Neff. They have a school in San Jose near Campbell, and there are some others, but there are some good schools in this area. I’m afraid that Mr. Houser had his hand up first. Yes?

[Audience] I’d like to ask, in light of some of the questions I’ve heard recently, {?} that this {?} standard would be, not that I’m trying to set up rule breaking, but I’m trying to suggest the standard that you found {?}

[Rushdoony] Thank you for the opportunity for a plug, John. By What Standard does go into the fundamentals of a Christian philosophy and into this aspect as it develops the philosophy of Dr. Cornelius Van Til. My belief is he is the greatest philosopher for a couple of centuries, and it isn’t easy reading, so unless you’re ready to work, I don’t recommend it. As I go across country, I hear more static on that book than any other, because it’s assigned reading in some colleges and I’m always running into some student who tells me how he spent many a night swearing at me. So, I’m just a little hesitant about recommending the book, but I think highly of it myself. With that, I’ll close. Thank you.

End of tape