The World Under God’s Law

The School Under God’s Law”

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 05

Dictation Name: RR323B4

Location/Venue: ________

Year: _______

--Christian law association, which is one of the two groups which is fighting the cases. The other is a very brilliant older lawyer, Mr. William Ball, who has fought and won some of the great cases in the country. A younger man who is a baptist in Cleveland entered into the fight a few years ago and has been very important in it, and has cases that he is fighting in about fifteen states. Now, he has been joined by two other young men, one of them a very brilliant young lawyer who has been one of our group. His name, John Whitehead, may be familiar to some of you who have read his book on the first amendment. Now you can be on the mailing list to receive their magazine if you send a minimum of ten dollars a year. You may get one or two or three or four issues during the year - it comes out as they are able to get it out. But the rest of your money will help support these cases all over the country.

This particular issue which just came out is the second one they have published and it will give you the story of the battle in Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, in Nebraska, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and North Dakota. It will also give you articles by various men, a little bit about the Reverend Levi Wisner of the Wisner case in the Ohio situation. I’d like to read just a little sentence or two on one page here.

“It seems as though no matter which way we turn big brother is getting involved. For years, the last bastion of freedom was the church and the home, now all across AMerica proposals are in full flame to licence the church. But hold on -- there is now open talk of licensing parenthood! Layben Johnson, president elect of the {?} Virginia education association affiliated with the national education association, feels that parents should be licenced to have children. He is not alone - it’s a sizable movement. If it seems farfetched that either of these things will be done, remember, it was only ten years ago that people were saying it was far fetched to think that this country would ever legalize abortion.’ These people mean business.

There’s a great deal of money behind what they’re planning to do, and this is the group that is fighting on these issues. It does deserve your support and your prayers. Dave Gibbs, who began the work, is a marvelous man and he has (I know, because I’ve been with him at the time) gone to a state to work on a case there, spent all night sometimes, or until four in the morning, going over matters with one potential witness after another, gone to bed for two or three hours and then appeared at court by ten o’clock. It’s a miracle that he stayed alive. We’re glad that we now have enough funds to have two men helping him - the Christian law association has a very prominent Baptist pastor in Cleveland as its president, Reverent Doctor Roy Thompsons.

Some of you may know the name. Roy Thompson has a large church there of five thousand, seven hundred members, the congregation has said that they are ready to go on keeping him as their pastor, they love him very much, if he’ll preach there once a month. The other three Sundays he is out somewhere in the country fighting the battle for the Christian schools. The papers do not tell us the story, but there are ministers being tossed into jail and it’s no laughing matter. They’re being tossed their on a variety of thing. Because of the Christian school; in some instances the charges against the pastors are that they have a nursery in the church and the welfare department wants it licenced as a daycare facility. In other cases because they have decided that the area is zoned against schooling, and so the Christian school must no longer operate. Any number of reasons!

Now the department of benefits of payments is getting into the act against missionary organizations and the like, demanding unemployment compensation. Mr. William Ball tells me that he expects pressure in every one of the fifty states to begin against all such Christian agencies and organizations. On top of that, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, is insisting that Christian schools employees have the right to organize a union, and the union elections must be held.

Now, this is just a sampling of the types of battles that are raging. This is what the Christian law association has been organized to fight, because if they came after your church tomorrow, could you afford a legal battle? Especially if it cost a hundred thousand before it got to the state supreme court, with the state able to spend millions in it? This is an extremely urgent cause, and it does deserve our support.

Our subject now is the school under God’s law. One of the things that scripture often speaks about that we fail to understand is Molech worship. One of our problems today is that we are in the world of Charles Darwin. As a result, whether we realize it or not we have unconsciously picked up evolutionary ideas, and we think that those people back there were primitive and somehow not as smart as we are, and so they bowed down to sticks and stones because they weren’t as advanced on the evolutionary scale, so to speak, or in history, as we are.

And so we fail to understand what that idolatry was about. It was highly sophisticated, as idolatry is today; because man from the day God made him is no different than today. Just as smart then as he is now. And so, to believe that the old Testament times were a more carnal time, and were a more spiritual age or that religion then was something different than now, is wrong. What was Molech worship? And why is it very much like what we have today?

Well, let us read first what one of the passages in the law has to say about it. There are several. But Levitus 17:1-7 declares, “and the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, ‘Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons and unto all the children of Israel and say unto them: This is the thing which the Lord hath demanded, saying, What man soever there be of the house of Israel that killeth an ox or lamb or goat in the camp, or that killeth it out of the came and bringeth it not--” Excuse me, I have the wrong passage! [chuckles] It’s, ah, 20. Leviticus 20:1-5

“Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Again, you shall say to the children of Israel: ‘Whoever of the children of Israel, or of the strangers who dwell in Israel, who gives any of his descendants to Molech, he shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. 3 I will set My face against that man, and will cut him off from his people, because he has given some of his descendants to Molech, to defile My sanctuary and profane My holy name. 4 And if the people of the land should in any way hide their eyes from the man, when he gives some of his descendants to Molech, and they do not kill him, 5 then I will set My face against that man and against his family; and I will cut him off from his people, and all who prostitute themselves with him to commit harlotry with Molech.”

Now, what was this idolatry that in particular invites the fearful judgement of God? Of which God speaks in sharp returns than most things else in scripture... The word Molech, which we also encounter as Moloch, or Melech, or Melcum, and which we have in the modern name Malcom, means very simply: King. King. So what was Molech worship? It was the worship of the state in the person of the king. Now, for what we know of Molech worship, what was required of parents was, when the child was born they were to take that boy to the sanctuary and there before the altar to hold him above the altar fire. The child was not executed (that could happen in an emergency) but what they were saying was, This child is the property of the state, of the king.

They passed their seed through the fire to Molech. They signified thereby that if need be they would sacrifice their children to the state. Does that sound like something primitive? Or does it sound something like what we have today? When, in courts and in statutes we are told that our children are the state’s children. That the state has the right to determine their destinies, and that we must commit our children into the hand of the state and we do not have the right to educate them in terms of a Christian schooling that is free of state control. It is again Molech worship. That’s the issue.

The issue then was, will you give your child to the state - to Molech - to the state personified in the person of the king. Would you submit your life as a parent and as a family to the state? Because Molech is the Lord, and so God speaks very strongly against this as a particularly fearful abomination. He requires the execution, the death, of all who give their children unto Molech in the statist form of baptism; because that’s what it was. They took their infants to be baptized on the fire for Molech, because what does baptism signify? Why, baptism signifies that we are God’s property - we are baptized into the name, into the power, in the authority, and into the Lordship of the Triune God. Passing children to the fire, over the fire before Molech meant they were being baptized into the ownership and the life of the state. This is the issue today: Molech worship.

Molech worship. And the state is again demanding the same kind of sacrifice of Christian parents. How did this begin? To understand how it began we have to go back more than a century. A hundred and forty (or more) years ago, to Massachusetts the home, - once, of the Puritans - but then in the 1830’s, of Unitarianism. And the Unitarians felt very strongly that the Christian school was a menace that had to be eliminated in order to eliminate Christianity from this land. Charles Sumner, the famous Massachusetts senator, said it this way when he spoke of Christian education and its control of the children of America, he said, “We must remove the serpent’s coils from around the lives of our children”. And by the serpent’s coils he meant the influence of Bible believing Christianity.

Horace Mann and James G. Carter spearheaded the battle to bring in statist control of education, an idea they borrowed from Prussian socialism. They were both leading Unitarians with a tremendous desire to destroy Evangelical Christianity - Biblical faith! James G. Carter spoke of it in these words, “statist education is a mighty engine to sway the minds of the people.” Now that’s an old fashioned term for what we today call brainwashing. This is the way they sold the idea to unitarian leaders in the pulpit and in the press and in government, civil government. They said that statist education was a tremendous force whereby to brainwash the children and the people of the future and to eliminate Biblical faith from the land. It has succeeded, has it not?

The other goal was, these men were what they called then centralists. We would say statist. They believed that the state should control every area of life. They believed in this! They were evangelical unitarians! And by evangelical, they felt that this was the good news for man. To be saved from Christ! To be saved from Biblical faith! Paul (Spann?), when we spoke of the glorious future if we got rid of Christianity, if we put all the children in statist schools, would wax most eloquent and lyrical...and he would say, “A hundred years from now”, this was at the beginning of the 1830’s, “our descendants will look back on us and wonder how we could be so superstitious and foolish, and prisons will have disappeared from the land except those that will be kept as museums so the Americans of the 20’th century will know how foolishly their ancestors lived.”

It was a very very small prison population then. As a matter of fact, the average age of criminals was forty-five, in 1815. Why? Very interesting reason. Everyone had a thorough Christian education. They had a thoroughly Godly discipline in the school. It took them some years to outgrow that and go astray if their hearts were wayward, because discipline does leave its impact! By 1960 the average age of criminals in the United States was 19. The average age of all people convicted in the United States, 19.

Horace Mann’s dream has not been realized, it has turned into a nightmare. But this has not deterred the statist educators. They believe all the more emphatically that if only they get total power, then they will solve all the problems of man through their schools. Salvation by statist humanist education, this is the goal.

But something began to happen, around 1950, in 1950 most of the children of America were in statist schools. Only those children who were Catholic, Adventist, and Lutheran, with a few other exceptions, were not in the statist schools. Since then those {?} schools have by and large declined, in fact, for about ten years until recently Catholics were closing schools at the rate of two or three hundred a year as the liberal bishops worked against Christian education. But at the same time, Christian schools have grown so phenomenally that there are those statist educators who are afraid that by the end of this century the public schools will have disappeared and there will only be Christian schools. Now this has caused dismay! It has caused fear on their part, they are afraid because what will happen if even half of the children of this country become products of Christian schools in the next twenty-two years. It means that you will be turning out a population that is Biblically oriented, evangelically governed in it’s faith, and you will have a Christian America. This fills them with horror.

This, for them, is the ultimate evil. And so they have gone to court in the past few years in increasing number of cases to try to control these schools, they’ve had laws passed saying that the Christian schools must be controlled by the state and turned virtually into statist schools. In Ohio, first they went after the administrators; as with Levi Wisner, arresting him, sentencing him...took four years of appeals before Levi Wisner was vindicated. In the meantime he was savagely slandered, portrayed as sadistic man who stood over cowering children with a bullwhip! Something I don’t think Levi Wisner has ever seen - he’s a sweet mild mannered saint of God.

Then they went after the parents. They decided they would hold each of the parents who had children in a Christian school fo contributing to the delinquency of their minor children for putting them into minor schools. And they told the parents, as they issued a warrant for their arrest and brought them in, that their children would be taken from them and they would not be permitted to see them again, and to come to the hearing or the court or the trial with all the clothing of the children packed, so the children and their possessions could be picked up from the court session. You had better believe that their were parents who spent sleepless nights in tears. It was a hard battle, but they did fight that one too, and won.

But the same battle is now underway in Kentucky, and Kentucky has said that all Christian schools must use state textbooks! They must be governed by the state board of education, so that, to all practical intent they will be no different than any other public school in the state with the single exception that they’ll be allowed maybe fifteen minutes of Bible a day. And again, they plan to go after all the Christian parents in the state! They ask every school district to compile a list of every parent and every child involved in a Christian school. It’s sad to say that again, as in Ohio and elsewhere, there were Christian schools that compromised. And just as in the days of Rome, when the church were told, “just come up and say Caesar is Lord, and put a little incense in the altar and we won’t bother you. Technically it means you’re going to be licenced and regulated and controlled, but we won’t bother you.” In other words, just agree to the principle. Surrender the Lordship of Christ.

So in Kentucky, they told some of these schools, “Just buy the textbooks and put them up on the shelf. Don’t bother using them again, we won’t bother you.” In some schools they found as the mail came in the state mailed them an accreditation certificate. They said, “We’re not going to bother you, just accept this. Don’t mail it back.” Compromise! And in the courtroom cases as well as from the pulpit compromising pastors denounced those who made a stand! Hurled all kinds of charges against them and any of us who stood against them, as though we were compromisers, we were legalists...uh, not compromisers, we were social gospelers, we were legalists, we were trouble makers, and so on. They were ready to testify.

The one man I heard in Kentucky, and he turned and looked at us with resentment. His back was to the courtroom and all of the other people, facing the judge, but he turned around and looked at us with hatred and he said, “I believe in the Lordship too, but I don’t see any problem with doing what the state says.” Their hatred was real.

The trial this month was in North Carolina, there is another underway in Nebraska, the hearing has been postponed. What is the strategy? Well, it’s very briefly this: In the USSR, in the Soviet Union, in Communist Russia, the constitution guarantees freedom of religion. So why don’t all those underground Baptist churches come right out in the open? Oh yes, there is freedom of religion in the constitution...but it’s totally subject to permits, regulation, licence, and control. Now just try to go down there to the communist headquarters in your particular community and get a permit. Not unless it’s a KJB operated church that’s a front for stupid foreigners who are visiting who can be depended upon to go back and say, “I attended a Baptist or a Catholic or a Greek Orthodox service in Moscow, I don’t see what people are complaining about when they say there is persecution there.”

That’s the kind of church that can exist. Now, the goal is to do the same thing here! To bring everything under license or regulations, permits, controls, accreditations, certification, standards, and the like. To establish the premise that they exist at the sufferance of the state, not as a matter of obedience to Jesus Christ. So that, step by step, missionary organizations are to be controlled. There are three of them in California today that are facing the courts, and many more across the country. The churches are to be controlled, that everything is by permit, and what will happen then after everybody has submitted and accepted the principle of the Lordship of the State, why, the permits will be a little more difficult to get! Will they not?

And little by little they will be removed, because Humanism is at war with God, with Christianity, and it’s a war to the death! And we do not understand the situation until we grasp that it is a war to the death and it is going to be fought and won in the next ten to twenty years. The supreme court knows this. They expecting the major type of case in the next decade to be cases involving Christian schools.

There are over, as I said, over a hundred and forty cases in the courts right now across the country, and within five to ten years it will be by the thousands. And yet, no publicity. With the Wisner case, and the Canal Winchester school case in Ohio, the parents of Christian school children were so upset that they converged on the state capital in Ohio on Columbus. Ohio had never seen any demonstration comparable to these, or equal numbers! They were so frightened in the state capitol that they called out the National Guard. They had helicopters all over the area, a canopy of them! They had all the reserve police out! And Christian parents came, and everywhere they came the schoolmen and the pastors told them, ‘We are going there to make a witness and to ask the government to meet with our leaders. We do not want any disorder, and we do not want anyone under any circumstances to throw so much as a gum wrapper on the street. We want no-one blaming us for an unsightly condition, and a trashy condition, as after some of these student demonstrations.”

Well in a matter of minutes after they converged on the Nations Capital they called off the National Guard and they sent the helicopters back to the base. The police chief came to David Gibbs and said, with tears in his eyes, that he had never seen anything like it. Never seen a more orderly group of people, a more cooperative group. As a matter of fact, Columbus was never cleaner, because the people who came were so anxious that they be blamed for nothing that if they saw a gum wrapper on the street they picked it up and put it in their pocket to dispose of someplace. They swept the entire capitol area clean in that way.

And do you know, there are only two newspapers in all of Ohio that carried that story? None across the country. The same time as you see L.A. in Southern California, someone from Washington, a cabinet official, came out to speak and six socialist students picketed him. It was in the newspapers, with pictures of it on the newsreels that night.

They’re fighting to destroy us. Most Christians don’t know it, or find it hard to believe. I’m glad that you have copies of Ohio’s Trogan horse on your book table. It’s a book you should read and pass around, because it gives a grim and a vivid picture of what happened in Ohio, and is now being recreated on a larger scale in many a place. And believe me, it is grim.

I hesitate to tell you this...but a pastor was involved in another state who told me this, he said, “I made a stand.” This was a very fine baptist pastor, and he said, “I was terrified. I was terrified because I heard by the grape vine what was being said in the jail in town,” This was in a state capitol where he was a pastor, “that a gang of the hoodlums in the jail were looking forward to the day when I was going to be brought in and they were going to take a great deal of pleasure in a homosexual gang rape on that hardnose preacher.” But he stood. They were able to keep him out of jail, it was very close, but they were able to keep him out of jail. They lost the trial, but on appeal to state supreme court they won.

Now what is the strategy that is involved here? And we have reason to believe there is a strategy now - there are observers we know at some of these trials from other states, that there is a sharing of information, we do have some knowledge of. First of all, they are hitting the weaker schools, the new schools, ACE schools, small churches that start a school. Why? They avoid groups like the Lutherans, the Christian Reform, the Adventists, and the Catholics, because there is no point in hitting a group where you’re going to alert a major church body across the country and get them all worked up. But if it’s just one independent congregation that is weak and struggling it won’t attract as much notice, and if you win the case against them you establish a legal precedent which can then be used against the other major schools and denominations.

Then, second, they have taken cases to court that it’s obvious they’re going to lose because that sort of case has already taken place and they’ve lost. But there is a point to that. How much money, after all, does your congregation have or your Christian school have for a costly trial? And even a trial before a superior court can run into quite a few thousand dollars. Well, obviously, the answer is: not much! So the strategy is very clear: bleed the Christian schools to death. Bleed them to death.

One of the things that is very interesting in these trials is the strong faith of these state officials. They’re men of faith! If we Christians have a light faith in our Lord we would take over this country in a very short time. What do they believe in? That the answer to all problems is more controls by the state, so that no matter what problems are brought up, this is the answer. In Kentucky, one police officer got up - and remember, the parents and the schools are charged with contributing to the delinquency of minor children - and he said, “In my territory I have a number of public schools,” and he wasn’t talking about ghetto schools, and he said, “I have in those schools to deal with problems like rape, arson, assault, theft, drunkenness, narcotics, and much more. It’s a continual problem. I’ve got four Christian schools in my area, and I’ve never had a problem in any one of them!” And he said, “I’ve put my children into one of them.” Because he was concerned about the welfare of his children.

Do you think that kind of testimony fazes these state officials? No. If we have more money, more power, more ability to control these children, then we will succeed. We’ll be able to perform miracles. One of their proposals now is the campus school. What does that mean? Well, you take the children away from their families so there is no interference in the educative process.

We are in a battle. It is a war to the death. The enemy knows what the Christian school is doing, that already these superior students who are going on to the Universities, those who have a command of the language and of the basic skills of math and so on, are products of the Christian schools! They test out even in the weaker schools about two years consistently in advance of the state school students. And on top of that, they have character, and they are disciplined.

They’re superior. And who is going to dominate the future? Why, it’s obvious. These Christian school pupils, if their numbers continue to grow. They recognize the power that is in the movement. As a result they are out to destroy it totally, by taking control over it and gutting it step by step.

The Fabian socialist society was organized a good many years ago in Britain a good many years ago in the beginning of the 1890’s, the late 1890’s, and one of the leading members thereof was George Bernard Shaw. In the early 1900’s Shaw and some of the other Fabian Socialist board members were instrumental in having introduced through their members who were in Parliament, a bill to have state aid to all Christian schools in Great Britain. One of the board members resigned in protest. George Bernard Shaw wrote to him and said he was a (fool?). He said, don’t you realize what the result of this will be? If they start taking our funds they will lose the ability to fund themselves, and then they will have to dance to our tune and we will destroy them. Step by step we will alter them, until they are only religious schools in name.

The same strategy is being applied here. We face tremendous opposition from these statist, and from churchmen who are compromisers. This is why I feel that the issue is so urgent. Here we are being put to the same test as the early church faced: Who is Lord? Jesus Christ, or Caesar? Will our answer be with the early church, that Jesus is Lord? If we wait too long before we pay the answer, and make the proper answer, we will pay the price of persecution and suffering; when all the laws have been passed, and all has been settled and the only choice is martyrdom. But if we stand now, and if we support then men who are waging the battle, then indeed we shall win. And what the enemy fears will come to pass. By the end of the century this will be then a Christian recovery. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou hast raised up unto thyself parents, pastors, Christian school teachers, who are faced with warrants for their arrest, and trials, and even some of them prison...stand fast, declaring Jesus is Lord. Make us zealous, O Lord, and our faithfulness to this cause, instant in prayer, eager to aid those who are in need. Faithful fellow soldiers of those in the forefront of this battle. Make us daily, Lord, faithful to thee. In all things acknowledging thy sovereignty, rejoicing in thy government, living in thy grace. Grant us this, we beseech thee. In Jesus name, Amen.

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Well, the Christian law association is mindful of that, and as a table is going to help people in that and other things. The Reverend Joe Lewis has gone to court against the state of Ohio, charging them with giving funds to religious schools. The religious schools he has named are the public schools of Ohio which are teaching the religion of Humanism.

Any other questions or comments? Yes?