Systematic Theology – The State

Legitimacy

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 06

Dictation Name: 06 Legitimacy

Year: 1970’s

Well, in our second session, our concern will be with Legitimacy. Now, legitimacy is an important question. It is normally not a problem for society. It is only when the foundations of a state begin to crumble that the question of legitimacy is raised, but the question is being raised today.

Moreover, the question of legitimacy is dealt with today historically. Some few years ago, I hesitate to use this illustration this evening, but a visitor, a very charming gentleman from England, set me straight, he felt, with regard to the American War of Independence. He told me it was an illegitimate movement from start to finish, and he proceeded to tell me why it was so. I called his attention to certain constitutional aspects of each of the colonies which I felt made it a legitimate resistance to an armed invasion. Then, I realized our entire argument was proceeding along historical lines, so I called attention to the various invasions of England by alien forces, to murders and usurpations of the throne, and the like. Well, by then, the argument was getting a little heated, and he called attention to what America had done to the Indians and the illegal seizure of a continent, but the fact is, of course, while a good argument could be made for that, the Indians could be charged with the same thing, because we now know that the Indians displaced a previous people who were pigmies, and we don’t know who it was the pigmies displaced. In fact, in England, in Ireland, there were apparently some pygmy inhabitants who were turned into fairy tales, and little people. There were a series of migrations and displacements in Western Europe, and in portions of the British Isles, the Basks, and the Celts, then Germanic tribes, and so on, and all of Europe has seen a series of displacements, illegitimate, every last one of them. Consider the Huns, the Latins, the Mongols, all of whom have invaded again and again. Who has title anywhere in the United States, of England, or Continental Europe, or Asia, or Africa anywhere, legitimately, to their land? Which of them can say, “I have the title deed that God gave to Adam, and passed onto my children that gives me title to this corner, or this continent, or this portion of a continent? The answer is no one has such a title, and if you look for legitimacy historically, you’re in trouble. Everyone is. We have to look for legitimacy from God.

Peter Drucker, who does not appear to be a Christian, has said that legitimate rule is rule which derives its claims from the basic beliefs of society. In other words, Drucker said, it is a religious issue, and so he went on to say, “No illegitimate ruler can possibly be a good or a wise ruler.” Why? Because, he said, an illegitimate ruler is against the basic faith of a society. He may be better than other rulers they’ve had, and the people may be wrong, but his rule is rootless. Legitimate rule is rule which meets the basic faith of the society. It is religious, and we would have to say that legitimacy, true legitimacy ultimately comes from God.

By living in terms of his law-word, by being faithful to him, by recognizing that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein,” and we have no right to use the earth or any of the inhabitants thereof apart from God. We cannot right the wrongs of the past. We can right the wrongs of the present. We have a duty to do so in faithfulness to God’s word.

But today, as Charles Bruckmeyer and others like him have held, knowledge and scientific technological progress have become the major basis of legitimation, so we look to our legitimacy now, not in terms of God and less and less in terms of history, but are we scientifically sound in our concept of society and in our operation thereof? The dream of modern humanism is the scientific socialist state. Scientific. That word has to be underlined there. This is what is believed to give legitimation, legitimacy, that somehow man transcends himself when he becomes scientific. He reaches a higher level and gives legitimacy to all his operations. Of course, we have nothing but a modern myth in this belief of the objective and valid nature of scientific legitimation.

Earlier, of course, and still very much present among most people, is the concept of “vox popli, vox dei”, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and it has been widely held that this gives legitimacy, and there are many who would argue that a thing is not valid unless it has the voice of the people behind it, and what has the voice of the people behind it is valid. I think the classic example of that occurred a few years ago when Senator Tunney of California was running for re-election, and he was cornered by some women who argued against abortion, and Tunney’s answer was it was entirely moral. He could not see any objection to it. Why moral? Because it was the law. They asked him if robbery is legalized, will it be moral, and his answer was, “Yes, because then it will be the law.” Now, that is the logical conclusion of “vox popli, vox dei.” As a principle of legitimacy, it enthrones whatever sin the people may practice.

But when there is absence of legitimacy, there is then a revolutionary climate. Men will see as illegitimate any regime which does not meet their faith, which is out of line with their religious premises, and the crisis of our time is precisely this. We have a large group of people whose background and faith in some vague sense, is Christian. On the other hand, we have a leadership which is humanistic, and is altering the foundations of our civil order, and giving another principle of legitimacy to it, and as a result, there is a great deal of social instability, an inability on the part of people to understand what it’s all about. Now, the interesting fact is that a civil government can be very corrupt, but if it is not out of line with the basic premises of the people and the faith of the people, the people will overlook a great deal, but when there is suspicion about the legitimacy of the state, then people are very sensitive to corruption, and will see, in a radical sense, the social order as corrupt when it may be actually better than ones that preceded it. In every age of revolution, we have seen the challenging of the legitimacy of the Christian premises as the foundation of society. The French Revolution challenged it. The Russian Revolution challenged it. Every minor revolution since then has challenged the religious foundations, the Christian foundations of society, and we are seeing the same thing now, and it is creating a revolutionary temper.

On the other hand, that revolutionary temper is short-circuited in the modern world. We had a dramatic expression of the revolutionary temper up to a point in the 1960’s, in the student movement, a very powerful movement, but a short-circuited movement. Why? Millions of youth were involved in it. Neither the university administrations which submitted blindly, fearfully, and stupidly to the revolutionaries, nor the police, nor the federal, nor the state, nor city governments could cope with it, but they were impotent and they accomplished, in the last analysis, very little. They were instrumental in having us pull out of Vietnam, but beyond that, they changed very little in society, and fizzled out. Why? To overturn an old order, one must have a faith, and the modern mood has increasingly been nihilistic and anarchistic. Hence, it has an outlook which Dr. Harvey has called random direction. This was once the mood of the avant-garde throughout the Western world, of the art world. Random direction makes an island of every man. It emphasizes total autonomy, and its consequence is mass impotence. It leads not to revolution, but to protests, demonstrations, all things which precede a revolution, because some group with principles, however right or wrong, can then capitalize on a situation, but those who are marked by a random direction can only mount protests, not a revolution.

Legitimacy is a religious concept. If people believe in the foundations of a society, that social order can take many set-backs. It can survive many storms, but if it is doubted, if the foundations are destroyed, what shall the righteous do? Modern education denies legitimacy to all orders. It does create a radical autonomy, and a random direction. So it leads to a vast aimlessness and purposelessness in society. In Russia, the nihilists ate out the heart of the old order. When the Revolution came, it was engineered by a small group which had principles, however evil, but too many of those who had created the Revolution by their random direction and their protests became the victims of it.

A book wrote by Gerhardt P. Schroeder, an old man who lived not too far from here, in Lodi, and may be now dead, described his experiences in Russia during the Revolution. Schroeder was a Mennonite, a Mennonite pastor and a missionary. He tried, during the Revolution, the convert a prominent anarchist leader in his area, A Makhnovetz{?}, and the man turned on his and told him, “Do not try to change me with advice to read the Bible and to believe in God, or with anything of that kind of advice. We Makhnovtse{?} as partisana and anarchists, have only one program, only one desire and aim. To enjoy living off of somebody else’s property, to rob and to kill as we please. We will not change and we will be a menace to others as long as we live. Nothing will change us. Not the Bible, not God, neither hell or heaven. We will live this way so long as possible, and when that is no longer possible, we will commit suicide, and only when Mother soft earth has covered us will we be harmless.”

Schroeder gives a graphic picture of how these aimless protectors lived during the Revolution, by instituting total terror, living off of other people, robbing, raping, exploiting, and treating it all as a game. They were not interested in creating a social order. They had been the ones who were ready to demonstrate and protest, and now their demonstrations and protests were shear anarchism, and they professed anarchism as an ideal.

Legitimacy today is everywhere weak. Religious faith is all too often weak. Legitimacy has been sought in humanistic premises, and they are proving to be sand, but God is the only source of true legitimacy in this world, and our Lord said in the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount, anyone who built his house upon a sand would not survive the storms of history, but those who built upon the Rock himself, Jesus Christ, no storm would overthrow them. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein.” Only the Lord God of Hosts can give the principle of legitimacy.

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] May be a little different {?}, but you read so much lately about {?} and then they give the attorneys, they try to justify this way of life, and I think if that continues that the world will be full of illegitimate children.

[Rushdoony] A very good point, because you see, today, the essence of legitimacy is to have open frontiers, to make everything permissible and possible, and there is something morally wrong with you if you will not, in terms of this humanistic premise, accept surrogate mothers, if you will not accept abortion, homosexuality, and so on. Now, all of this denies that there is any legitimacy or illegitimacy. Everything is going to be reduced to a common level, but when you do that, the ultimate conclusion is, and it has been logically pursued by men like the Marquis de Sade, no distinction between good and evil, nor between life and death. All distinctions are obliterated. Any questions now, further questions? Yes?

[Audience] Is there a difference between {?} as legitimate and saying it is legal, or is that the same thing?

[Rushdoony] Originally, the words legitimate and legal meant the same thing. However, the connotation is now different. That which is legal is that which is empowered by civil law currently in practice. That which is legitimate may be legitimate legally, but it means also morally legitimate. So, legitimacy has a somewhat broader connotation than legal. Legitimate and legitimation increasingly are coming to mean that which is valid in some higher sense. As a matter of fact, at the present time, some writing is being done, monographs and books, on the subject of legitimation, because it is becoming a problem. Whereas, no one previously questioned whether a civil order was legitimate or not. They were simply good citizens, and they obeyed. Today, everything is subject to question. So, legitimate has become a very, very important question. In fact, legitimation has become a question even within a factory. To what extent does the employer have any lawful authority in any moral sense, over the workers? Everything has been questioned, so legitimation is now a concern to sociologists. Yes?

[Audience] Could you comment please on the Falkland{?} situation in regards to what you’ve been speaking about?

[Rushdoony] Could I comment on the Falkland situation with regard to what we’ve been speaking about, legitimation. Well, historically, the Falklands were first sighted by an Englishman who was the first man, apparently, to set his foot there, or at least the first Western man. The English have had the Falklands for almost 150 years. Argentina didn’t have quite that long a history. It was originally a part of Spain, so its claim to the Falklands is invalid. It’s simply based on the premise that because it is within a certain distance of us, therefore, we should own it. I’m sorry that Otto Scott cannot be here tonight, because he has a great deal of familiarity with South America, and from his knowledge of South America, he says that while there may be a façade of compliance and agreement with Argentina on the part of the other, South American countries, in reality, they are very unfriendly to Argentina, because Argentina has claims on all its borders, and all its border countries. So, they take everything Argentina does with a grain of salt. Yes?

[Audience] Well, is it another Vietnam type of thing that nobody’s really going to win, and there aren’t any real stated objectives. I mean, I felt that Britain was really going to go in there and take back{?}

[Rushdoony] Well, they are trying to.

[Audience] Well, it sounds a little bit strange when I hear it on the news that it might be just sort of one of these {?} things and nobody’s winning.

[Rushdoony] Well, I don’t know enough about what is happening there, but I think they’re going through a great deal of show to act as though we’re all good peace-loving peoples, and we’re going to try to negotiate this, but don’t take us seriously and make us negotiate because we won’t. We live in a very war-like century, but one in which everyone professes peace while they are preparing to clobber you. Any other questions or comments?

Well, if not, we’ll take a recess and have a few refreshments before we continue.

End of tape