Systematic Theology – The State

Statism as a Religious Fact

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 35

Dictation Name: 35 Statism as a Religious Fact

Year: 1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

O Lord, our God, as we face the evils of our day and the powers of statism, we give thanks unto thee that we can do so in the power of Jesus Christ who is King of kings and Lord of lords. We thank thee that greater is he that is in us and with us than he that is in the world. We gather together, O Lord, in the certainty that ours is the victory in Jesus Christ. Guide our study that we might understand those things which thou wouldst have us to understand and that we might become more than conquerors in Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

Our subject this evening is Statism as a Religious fact. A scholar, R. G. Fox, in a study of preindustrial India, made a particularly important point. Namely, that civil government as it existed prior to the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, could not be compared to the modern state. In fact, the terminology of the modern state and its nature make up something radically different from what the state in pre-industrial Europe and pre-French Revolutionary Asia, Europe, and the Western world, the Far East, and every area of the world. Fox wrote, “R. E. Frykenberg has noted that the Western concept of the state is not readily applicable to governmental forms in traditional India. The state in Western political theory enjoys a monopoly of coercive force in the society and is the center of administrative decisions and judicial review. Frykenberg suggests that traditional politics in south Asia never controlled such centralized powers. Rather, administration, police, and civil activities often were disbursed, sometimes resting with a virtually autonomous or independent local overlords, and at other times with kin groups or civil servants.“

This was true, of course, quite generally, in Europe prior to the French Revolution. The rulers claimed divine right for themselves. They claimed absolute power, but in practice, their power was severely limited and the local units had a great deal of freedom. Taxes, for example, in pre-Revolutionary France were not great by modern standards, but even then, we would have to say that the French kings taxed more than they ruled. So that while their taxes were far less than taxes are now, their rule was even less than their taxes.

A great deal of the government of Europe was by private agencies, foundations, monasteries, which handled charity and a great deal more, but all sources of charity were seized by the state in France between 1789-93. Looking at the German kingdoms, prior to Bismarck, we must say that the German kingdoms, they were not states. In many ways, they were the complete antithesis of the modern state. They were not based on an institution but loyalty to a prince or a king. It was a personal relationship, not one to abstract concepts and institutions. As Strayer has written, “Security came from family and neighborhood and lord, not from the state.”

Since the French Revolution, however, the world has changed dramatically. We have large standing armies, something that did not exist previously. We have the military draft as a routine thing in most countries, and we have, in the 20th century especially, highly organized taxation. Prior to the French Revolution, the state was essentially the personal court of a king and his associates. He had a private guard, not a standing army. The development of the modern state is a religious and an anti-Christian fact. Strayer has said, “A state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its people. If they do not believe it is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life.”

Where did this all begin? Back in the 13th century during the Middle Ages, the shift began. People began to look to the state rather than to the faith and to the church for direction, and loyalty shifted, for example, in England from the family, the community, and the church to the state. This was a part of the revival of Greek philosophical thought which stressed the state as the ultimate institution, and little by little, the state began to usurp more and more of what belonged to the family, to the community, and to the church. Men who had balked at paying tithes began to pay much larger taxes. Moreover, loyalty to the state began to surpass all other allegiances in the Western world. Especially in the last two centuries, loyalty to the state has become so thorough, that to attack the state is seen as somehow treasonable. To refuse to believe that the state is the source of justice is a kind of modern version of atheism.

This shift from the family, the community, and the church to the state was a religious shift. It was a change of faith from Christianity to humanism. The state had become a necessity of life, and men began to see the state as the most urgently and supremely necessary institution. This was not so previously. To state, to all practical intent, did not exist. Moreover, another fearful change took place. With the Renaissance, of course, you had the revival of Platonism, and you had an intense dedication to everything that was in Greek philosophy. You had thinkers like Erasmus, Sir Thomas Moore, and Machiavelli, who wrought a revolution in that they said it was no longer necessary in order to create a good society, to have the redeemed Christian man as its foundation. You could take man as he was, without Christianity, and you could build a good society. Up to that point, men said to have a good state, you’ve got to have good people, regenerate people. Fallen man can only reproduce his sin in whatever institution he creates, but now, the pagan doctrine of the state was reintroduced. Temporarily, with the Reformation and counter-Reformation, this was pushed back, but after 1660, the Enlightenment and humanism triumphed.

One scholar. Albert Mirgeller, in his Mutations of Western Christianity, has written, speaking of Western Christianity, “After it had struggled, also but still very thoroughly, at enormous moral, social, and political expense, to make man and his world endurable, the Enlightenment suddenly and with great pathos, presented it with the claim that the natural man, as Rousseau held, and even the Jew, as Lessing{?} held, and the savage, Sweem{?}, were better men. In other words that the thousand year old exertions of Western Christianity had brought about a merely negative result.” The premise now became, with the philosophers, beginning with Rousseau and continuing from that point to the present, that Christianity was actually a hindrance to the good life, not the means to it, and the state quietly began to place a distance between itself and Christianity.

The Middle Ages and the Reformation had seen the Christian man as the necessary unit for a good society. Now, he was seen as an impediment. The tragic fact is that this idea of the secular state as the best kind of state has been bought by many people who call themselves Christians, evangelicals, bought by many people who consider themselves conservatives and libertarians, and its essential point is that to have a good society you must abolish Christianity. You must abolish the doctrine that take good men to create a good society. This is one of the most amazing revolutions in Western thought. It in effect repeals twenty centuries of Christianity and says it was all a mistake. We must go back to the pagan man of Greco-Roman Antiquity, and we know where those cultures began and ended. We’ll come subsequently to the glorification and the misrepresentation of Greece, and how much it has perverted our time. Otto Scott will deal with the subject in detail at our Seattle conference. A very important thing to understanding what has happened.

The idea of the secular state was made popular in Christian circles. Precisely its denial that conversion is necessary for the good life was accepted, and so we have a great many evangelicals who are preaching you must be born again, going around saying, “You don’t have to be born again to create a good society. You don’t need Christian morality for a good state. If anything has ever denied the faith more drastically, it’s that concept. The modern state has popularized a world of slogans, which have had as their purpose, the erosion of non-statist government and the enhancement of state power.

You will recall much earlier we dealt with, and we’ll return to it this evening, the fact that there are a variety of governments and we cannot identify the state with government. For example, the self-government of the Christian man is the basic form of government. Then second, you have the family, an all-important for of government. Third, you have the church, a form of government. Fourth, you have the school. Fifth, you have your vocation which governs you. Sixth, you have society, and finally seventh, you have civil, one form of government among many, but in the modern world, the state identifies itself with government, and the state has sought to erode and eliminate all other forms of government in order to enhance state power.

The French Revolution is the dramatic instance of this, but it was a process taking place elsewhere. For example, Max Beloff{?}, writing with regard to Austria at the time of the French Revolution, says this: “Both liberty and equality were devices by which the state could be strengthened. If Jews and Protestants were to be freed from persecution and encouraged to come into Austria, it might be possible to rival the economic success which toleration was believed to have brought to Prussia. If the serf could be freed and allowed to choose his occupation, industry would acquire new sources of labor. Equality meant the breaking down of the groupings and orders into which the social and legal order was divided so that all citizens should be equally subordinate to a strengthened bureaucracy, and equally tributary to the royal treasury.”

Now, consider that. We think of liberty and equality, together with fraternity, as the slogan of the French Revolution, but before the French Revolution had begun, it was the slogan of statism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it means it used to break down the power of other governing units in order to strengthen the monarchy, the central government. As a matter of fact, everything was done to break down the power of the local lords, to break the power of various minority groups, to break the power of families, not only in Austria and throughout its empire, most of Central Europe, but in other states of the time. So that there was a move of which the French Revolution was the dramatic climax, to increase the power of the state at the expense of all other governing units. One of the books that Otto Scott is working on will deal with what is happening right now in Washington to do precisely that sort of thing. Thus, the modern state worked to free man from church, family, local rulers and customs in order to strengthen itself.

Then, having done this it began to move against the power of the individual. The individual was now without the historic protection of institutions. Before that, the individual had all kinds of institutions and governmental powers that stood between him and the central state. There was the power of the family and of the church. There was the power of the local lord who protected his people from the central government. Sometimes he exploited them, but it also meant that with many small units, you could cross borders easily which was a restraint upon the local lord. With the French Revolution, there followed a dramatic destruction, not only in France but all over Europe of all these independent forms of government.

One of the most dramatic was of the Benedictine monasteries. Now, the history of the Benedictines is important to an understanding of Europe. I’ve touched on this previously, but to summarize it briefly, the Benedictines who said “to work is to pray,” that there are churches and monasteries established a remarkable number of projects. They took care of the sick. They had infirmaries, and did a marvelous job. They took care of all travelers, rich and poor alike. They fed the needy and the hungry. They had fish ponds. They had chicken yards and duck yards. They had orchards. They had cows. They had a variety of things, not only to be self-sufficient, but to minister to the needs of the community. What they did was dramatic, and important. Moreover, they were often given by lords the poorest land, desert land, or swamp land, which they then recovered and turned into some of the most fertile areas of Europe. It was monks who began the building of the dykes in the Netherlands, reclaiming land from the sea. There were 1500 houses at that time in 1789. By 1814, there were only about 30, and they had been stripped of their lands, reduced in the number of men they had, and their libraries and their assets had been plundered.

It is significant that, at the same time, you began to see, throughout the Western world, a growing attack on another group who had been instrumental in creating foundations, schools, ministering to the needs of people: the Puritans. A tremendous assault on them. Precisely because of the same reason. They were a governmental force outside of the state. As of, I believe 1900, seventy-five percent of all institutions of educations in this country, colleges and universities, had been started by the Christian church, most of them by people of a Reformed background. Puritans. Scots, especially. So they were vilified. It is interesting that, at the same time, 1789 when this began, the French Revolution proclaimed its declaration of rights, and began to trample underfoot all rights as never before. Equality, fraternity, the rights of the people, liberty, land to the people, bread, etc., every kind of slogan humanism has propagated, as ostensibly for the people, but never have the people been more abused.

We’re just beginning to find, as a result of some scholars, how well off the peasant of the medieval era was, well-to-do and prosperous, but the history books have tended to portray that as an era of backwardness. He had a great deal of freedom. He had a great deal of power, but precisely as men have been enslaved, they have been told, whether in the Soviet Union or in the rest of the world, that freedom and slavery are one and the same thing. The language has been reversed. It’s Orwell’s newspeak. The old regime in France had claimed total powers, but the court of Louis XIV exercised very little powers compared to the French Revolution, and a good deal of the power was exercised in trifling etiquette and routine, such as taking your hat off when the king’s dinner was carried through the hall, things like that, but there was no control in the villages. There was no overall plan of taxation. Whereas after the Revolution, totalitarianism became substantial.

The French Revolution made society coterminous with the state. In other words, the state became the umbrella under which everything existed, and by which everything was controlled so there was no distinction between the state and society. The state now became total government. It now claimed total jurisdiction in every realm.

I said the roots of this go back to the 13th century. Civil government then began to be the new religion. Man’s hope of salvation became statist, and the church was increasingly held to be a private society with no public powers or duties. This was quite a change. Before Rome fell, church courts had provided justice for most people in society. Church courts were so important that non-Christians were going there because they knew that in the courts of Rome there was no justice, but in the church’s courts, they could get an honest hearing and justice. It reached the point where church officials were being named prefects and named to other positions by the Roman government in order to hide the fact that their officials were useless, that if they wanted to have any kind of control over government, they had to say, “Here, we’re appointing you this bishop,” or “this deacon to such and such office. So, we’re giving you the title for what you’re already performing.” After the Fall of Rome, the church was the government, but now, beginning with the 13th century, and especially in our day, the church is simply a private association that should have no public duties nor any public function. The fact that the church now is reentering education is viewed with bitter hostility.

What had happened, beginning with the 13th century was that men were beginning to look to the state for salvation rather than the church. In this, the church had a responsibility. After all, it was the church which popularize Aristotle, and should they have been surprised at what men learned from Aristotle? The goal of the state became a total monopoly of power. It became the claim of sovereignty. The state was now the sovereign, or God walking on earth. It claimed universal jurisdiction, so that it usurped the right of every area to govern itself. Instead of providing justice within its specified area, it claimed total jurisdiction.

I’m going to quote Strayer again, a very important point which, as we conclude this section, will become the jumping off point for what we have to say. The statement I read earlier, and I hope you caught its significance. “A state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its people. If they do not believe it is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life.”

The modern state is beginning to falter badly. It’s reaching for more and more power, for total power, but at the same time, the number of drop-outs from the modern state are increasing. The tax revolt is an indication of this. We don’t have to agree with the tax revolt to recognize its significance. It means that people have lost faith in the state. The fact that the number of voters in presidential elections, the percentage of them, is declining. There’s another indication. People are beginning to lose faith in the validity of elections. A modern state is a god that has failed. When Christians again see the total crown rights of Christ the King, the threat of the state will collapse.

I said that I was speaking this evening on the state as a religious fact, and that’s exactly the point. The state is a religious fact, and when men go back to a truly Christian faith, then statism will collapse.

Now, as we begin again on our second section, I want to remind you of Strayer’s comment, the state is a religious fact. We have natural entities, to use natural in a specific sense, in families. There is a tie that binds families together. They are blood-related. The tribe has blood loyalties. There are a number of associations which, in that sense, have a natural character. Then we have supernatural ties, ties that Christians feel one to another. The early church spoke of itself as the Christian race. They saw themselves as the new humanity, a difference race, but let us look at the state. Why should a given state have given boundaries? Are there particular boundaries that make the United States, of necessity, a unit? Are there particular boundaries that make France a unit, or England a unit? Certainly the Welsh and the Scots wouldn’t agree, nor would the Britons and other groups, minority groups within France agree. Is it language? Well, the Britons are forbidden to use their language, which is a relative of Welsh. It’s a Gaelic language. All the German countries have their variations. I have heard Germans say to one another, “Ah, you’re a Pomeranian, aren’t you?” In their own circles, they don’t speak of themselves as Germans, but as Saxons, or Pomeranians, and the like, and they recognize the differences.

Switzerland, well, Switzerland has Germans. It has French and Italians, all three languages are used. Thus, there is nothing natural about a state. It is a power entity. It has been formed because someone has taken over an area by force, or by default, so the state cannot be called a natural entity in the same sense that the family is. Whether you like your brother or sister, or not, you are related to them. You have a natural tie with them, and historically, that natural tie has been important governmentally, but the state has no such natural characteristic.

Moreover, the state cannot be, as we saw earlier, identified with government as such. There are many forms of government. I named the various varieties. Many subheads could be formed under some of those. I mentioned vocation. Your work governs you. Now, within your specific work, there are all kinds of variations, from one vocation to another, in the forms of government. Take, for example, the world of trade. The world of trade has its own laws. Thus, if you pick up a phone and order so many shares of something, or so much in the way of commodities, give minutes later it could cost you $100,000 or $5,000 because the price has dropped, but you’re bound, bound by your word. A few years ago, in a gold purchase, a major bank in New York reneged when the price went down, and it was barred for some time until it made amends from the market, and it had to come crawling back. This is government. It’s government within a specific area of vocation. Its customary law. Nobody enforces it by a state decree, but it’s still binding law. It’s possible in the Western world because of the character that Christianity has created. It is a religious fact. Destroy the faith that makes a man’s word his bond, and binds him to it, and you destroy the free market. This is government, but it’s not statist government, and it’s precisely into this area that the modern state is moving and beginning to do a great deal of harm.

Now, this does not mean that these varying forms of government necessarily give us good government. I said the key, for example, of telephone negotiations in the marketplace, is character. There are hints of erosion there. The key in any sphere of government is what man is. If you put your trust in something else, you’re involved in a fallacy. For example, the idea of checks and balances is a good one. We have it in the Constitution, but it also involves a fallacy which many men partake of. If men are evil, no checks and balances will prevail. If your administration, your courts, and your congress are evil, what good are the checks and balances? The result is that with no substantial change in the Constitution, we’ve had a substantial change in the country, and the checks and balances are not working because there is no check on the sin of man. The state now claims to be the government, the overlord for all of life and the result is that the corruption of sin is made total by the totalitarian state. Evil is a problem for all of society. The family is God-ordained, but some families are very evil.

A few days ago, the papers told about the conviction of a father in Los Angeles. He had forced his wife into prostitution. He had raped his daughters, assaulted his son, and forced drugs on all of them, plus pornography. The fact is, if men are sinners, every sphere of government will be infected by their sin. The individual, of course, the family, the church, the school, the vocation, society at large, and the state. We cannot circumvent the religious fact. If man is a sinner, then he only reproduces his sin in every area of life and thought.

So, we have to raise the question. What is the key, the governing unit on earth? Is it the redeemed man in Christ or is it the state? Erasmus, Sir Thomas Moore (who has been made a saint by the Catholic church, although he was anything but a saint), and Machiavelli all said you don’t need the Christian man. The state is, in and of itself, essentially good. That was their perspective, although they did not put it in so many words. Man’s hope. Man’s salvation they saw as through the state. This is why Erasmus held that the world was on the brink of a golden age, because the state was shaking off the powers of the faith and emerging in power. A more false prediction was never made, but Erasmus believed it. The world was on the brink of a golden age.

They believed that sin could be cured best by statist power. That was their fallacy, but if we are Christians, we must believe that the only cure for sin is in Christ. How is the good life possible? These philosophers and thinkers held that it was possible through the state, but how can the state provide justice without Christ and his law word? We are getting hell on earth by means of the humanistic state. After all, all men and institutions are subject to Genesis 3:5, to original sin, to the desire to be God without Christ, to be their own Christ’s, their own saviors. The modern state is profoundly and radically anti-Christian and most of the time not honest enough to say so.

Marsilius of Padua said that law is only that which is by consent. Well, we now have that concept of consent. Laws are made on the basis of consent. A majority can make law. I’ve called attention more than once to the fact that former Senator Tunney said that abortion was now moral because it was law. When he was asked if theft were moral he said, “No, because it is not law.” Asked if it would be moral if it were made legal, and he said, “Yes.” Now, that’s the premise of modern statism, and as a result, you have the idea that anything done by two consenting adults is valid, it’s moral, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s the doctrine of Marsilius of Padua that consent is what gives validity to an act. Consent.

We’re now seeing this doctrine applied within the sphere of children and their sexuality, and you’ve had a number of prominent people declare of late that if a child consents, is persuaded, there is nothing wrong. It’s only if there is no consent that the state should interfere. The doctrine of Marsilius of Padua is bearing some very ugly fruit, and of course, Marsilius transferred sovereignty from God to man, and church and state were both placed in the hands of men, and not under Christ, and the natural order was seen as the higher order. All of this was a product of the revival of Greek philosophy.

One of the monuments of this which I have is the History of Greece by George Grote, an English scholar. A book of many, many volumes, it was hailed in its day as a classic to endure. Grote saw even family relationships as pernicious to the body politic. He and others saw Greek society and the revival of interest in it as the means of moral transformation in their world. They held that the Greeks had a natural virtue. Matthew Arnold believed that Greek humanism was man’s hope, and the study of Greek and Latin thinkers became mandatory in the schools in England where the elite were trained, and the same study became commonplace throughout the Western world. Greek and Roman thought, Greek and Roman culture became a kind of second Holy Land and Bible. The state was seen as man’s hope and salvation, and many societies were dedicated to this faith, to promoting the thinking of Antiquity, of supplanting Christianity with Greco-Roman humanism. Many secret societies of elitist principles were established to further this.

End of tape