Wars of Religion (so called), II

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Wars of Religion (so called), II

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*This is an unedited and unoffical print version of R.J. Rushdoony’s lecture.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:01 -work at conning because in the process you prove yourself superior to all the poor suckers you con. This is why Latin America is not making any progress. You have in Latin America some very tremendous natural resources, but because of this Spanish tradition, which is anti- work, there’s no progress.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:34 You’ll recall Dr. [inaudible 00:00:38] commented on this aspect of Latin America. You can go to Brazil today and see the areas where there is industrial progress, and see areas of protestant growth. Those areas will be just like Los Angeles or San Francisco or any other American city. People walk faster and are more active on the streets in those cities than in the more purely Spanish tradition cities where the Catholic tradition prevails.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:24 Now, we shall deal more with France next time because we’ll be concentrating to begin with on Louis XIV, but France, very briefly now, is really several nations brought together as one to form a central state. We think of France as made up of one people. This is not true. It was once several nations. The Bergundians were a very powerful state for centuries, even more powerful than the French, and for centuries they were perhaps the wealthiest, most advanced country in Europe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:20 Then, many of the very advanced countries of the middle ages were what is now portions of southern France. The language of Paris in that area was made the official language for other parts of the country, and the languages of the others suppressed by force to make them all Frenchmen. The Britons to this day maintain their own language, although only this last year, 1971, did they finally get permission, legally through the courts, to name their children Celtic names because the Britons are related to the Irish and to the Welsh and to the Scotch.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:19 Their names are long ones closer to the Welsh than to the Irish and Scotch, and they were illegal until recently. On top of that, the reformation added religious disunity to France. It was divided into Huguenot and Catholic. The country was brought to unity by a Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, who ruled as Henry IV, who became one of the most popular rulers of all French history.

R.J. Rushdoony: 04:10 Henry IV, however, found that he could only bring unity, finally, by himself becoming a nominal Catholic. However, he did issue the Edict of Nantes guaranteeing freedom and religious liberty to the Huguenots. Even then, however, some of the fanatical Catholics did not trust Henry IV, and in 1610, he was assassinated by one of them. His son was Louis XIII. His grandson, Louis XIV. It was under Louis XIII, whose mother was Marie de’ Medici, that [inaudible 00:05:02] became the actual ruler of France and played so powerful a part.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:14 We will come briefly to the role of [inaudible 00:05:17] in a moment or two. To conclude, now, we will take more than a little time to analyze the 30 years’ war between 1618 and 1648, which brought about the disintegration of Germany. Germany, by 1600, in the 80 years or so after Luther, had seen a decline in the protestant faith, among Lutherans at least. There had grown to be a great deal of formalism and stagnation, as well as among the Catholics.

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:06 There had been a number of gains, religiously, in Germany by the Calvinists who had not existed at the peace of Augsburg in 1555. The peace of Augsburg said that each state could prescribe its own religion, and whatever the head of state prescribed would be the religion for that particular German state. Now, at the time, the peace of Augsburg was made in 1555. There were just the Lutherans and the Catholics. However, what happened was that the Calvinists moved in and very quickly began to make converts out of a number of heirs who became rulers of very key and strategic realms.

R.J. Rushdoony: 07:04 So you had a third element now in the picture, the Calvinist states, or kingdoms, or dukedoms, or principalities, depending on their size. Moreover, some of these were very important in the election of the emperor. The Habsburg power was very unhappy about this. On top of that, the Habsburgs began to feel that is was especially important for them both to keep the lid from blowing off in the Netherlands, which they were trying to make Catholic again, to have a solid land bridge from Austria clear across to Belgium and Netherlands, as we know them today, so that they would have a solid land mass across there.

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:05 To them, this was a part of their grand strategy to conquer that area. So, they began to take moves to conquer that domain. With this began the 30 years’ war. The Danes and the Swedes moved in to protect the protestant parties and others moved in until all Europe was involved in it. The French moved in also, although Catholic on the protestant side under Cardinal Richelieu, because Cardinal Richelieu did not want to see the Spanish power predominate. This is why when I spoke earlier of the so-called wars of religion in this century and a half that is was so-called because very often the line up was very peculiar, and Richelieu, a Cardinal, was working against the Catholics because he knew that a Catholic victory was really the victory of Spain, and he preferred a weak Spain and a strong France.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:33 Now, one of the tragedies of the war, the 30 years’ war, was of course that all of Germany became the battlefield for 30 years. The armies, then, were mercenary armies. It didn’t make any difference whether they were supposed to be Catholic or protestant. They were hoodlums out of the slums. Most of their pay they figured was to be gotten by conquest, and so you had the ugly picture of both sides ravaging the country, and raping and murdering at will so that when they would go through the … whether they were supposed to be a protestant or Catholic army, they raped and killed everybody, irrespective. The nuns would be raped by Catholic troops as well as by protestant troops, and the protestant villagers, the same way. What happened to Germany in the 30 years war I think can best be described by going to a couple of books: one, the Cambridge Modern History, The 30 Years’ War, this entire volume deals with. Just to read a couple of pages of summing up some of the damages.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:12 But the political losses and gains, which the peace of Westphalia entailed upon the empire and its princes sink alike into insignificance. Even the undeniable advance towards religious freedom marked by the adoption of that peace of the principal of equality between the recognized religious confessions is obscured when we turn to consider the general effects of the war now ended upon Germany and the German nation. These effects, either material or moral, cannot be more than faintly indicated here. But together, they furnish, perhaps, the most appalling demonstrations of the consequences of war to be found in history.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:06 There have been worse wars in history, in the amount of people killed, in the total devastation. The Jewish-Roman war is the worst war of all history in its total effect, but this is unique in that here was something sustained for 30 years. The mighty impulses, which the great movements of the renaissance and the reformation had imparted to the aspirations and efforts of contemporary German life were quenched in the century of religious conflict, which ended with the exhausting struggle of the 30 years’ war.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:51 The mainspring of the national life was broken, and to all seeming, broken forever. The ruin of agriculture was inevitably the most striking, as it is the most far-reaching result of this all-destructive war. Each one of those marches, counter marches, sieges, reliefs, invasions, occupations, evacuations, and reoccupations, which we have noted, and a far larger number of military movements that we have passed by, were accompanied by devastations carried out impartially by friend or foe.

R.J. Rushdoony: 13:33 Well, the peasants who dwelled upon the land, there was no personal safety except in flight. Their harvest, their cattle, the rope over their heads were at the mercy of the soldiery. As the war went on, whole districts were converted into deserts. Bohemia, where the war broke out, had the earliest experience of its desolating effects. Above all, [inaudible 00:13:59] tribe northwest of the kingdom, but its sufferings reached their height long after the Bohemian rising had been crushed, as it seemed, forever.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:09 Early in the last decade of the war, the destruction of villages from which most parts of the empire suffered was probably here carried to the most awful length. Of a total of 35,000 Bohemian villages, it is stated that hardly more than 6000 were left standing. Of 35,000, 6000. The sufferings of Moravia were in much the same proportion, and even more protracted. Those of Silesia only ended when it was made over by a Saxony into the emperors care at the peace of [rock 00:14:54].

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:55 Upper and lower Austria also enjoyed some relief during the last part of the war. The main anxiety of the emperor was to keep it out of its hereditary dominions. The inflictions to which Maximillions [electric 00:15:10] was subjected during the victorious campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus and a subsequent invasion of Bernard of Weimar were followed by a far more grievous treatment by the troops of Bonaire and [inaudible 00:15:25].

R.J. Rushdoony: 15:26 Then he goes on to describe how, utterly, one area after another was destroyed. The population diminished by at least 2/3 from over 16 to under 6 million. Now, part of that was by immigration. People just left. A lot of it through murder. As a result, the area was, for a long time, in ruins, but I think you still cannot get the picture, and I [sought 00:16:14] to quote now from another work by Gardiner on the 30 years’ war.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:23 What a peace it was when it really came at last. Whatever life there was under that deadly blast of war had been attracted to the camps, the soldiers’ camps. The strong man who had lost his all turned soldier that he might be able to rob others in turn. The young girl, who in better times would have passed on to a life of honorable wedlock with some youth who had been the companion of her childhood in the sports around the village fountain, had turned aside, for a very starvation, to a life of shame in the train of one or other of the armies by which her home had been made desolate.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:08 In the later years of the war it was known that a body of 40,000 fighting men drew along with it a loathsome following of no less than 140,000 men, women, and children, contributing nothing to the efficiency of the army, and all of them living at the expense of the miserable peasants who still contrived to hold on to their ruined fields. If these were to live, they must steal what yet remained to be stolen; they must devour, with the insatiable hunger of locusts, what yet remained to be devoured. And then, if sickness came, or wounds and sickness was no infrequent visitor of these camps, what remained but misery or death? Nor was it much better with the soldiers themselves.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:07 That’s a grim picture. 140,000 camp followers after an army of 40,000, all waiting for a chance to move into the next city so that you can imagine what it was like whenever they conquered a city. One after another, every city fell. Germany was ruined. It took a long time for it to overcome. With a generation or two, there was of course peace and order, but vast areas still depopulated, uninhabited and wild.

R.J. Rushdoony: 18:56 The 30 years’ war has long been seen as a kind of model of gorilla warfare, and so it has gained a great deal of attention in modern times by people who see it as, in a sense, the kind of thing that could happen again. There are certain differences, however. One of the things that marks the most notable difference is this. In those days, armies moved on their feet. This has ceased to be true in the western world. Especially in the last 30 years, the armies of the western world have lost all ability to move on their feet. They move by truck and by jeep.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:56 The last army that could still move on its feet in the western world was the Russian, and that has been thoroughly mechanized now. The average army recruit throughout the western world no longer has the capacity to march. The majority, now city boys, were not used as far boys are to long, long marches on their feet. They can’t take it, are not drilled for it. They aren’t put on maneuvers now that take them on long marches.

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:38 This is passe. The only western army that still has a sizable element of farm boys who can move on their feet is the Russian, but even they do not march. They have trucks. There’s only one army of any consequence today that goes on its feet, and that’s the Chinese, so that the ability to march, which was once characteristic of armies, is gone, which is one of the things in thinking about military strategy that every militarist has to recon on today. The modern army, if it took a long march, would very quickly be so foot [inaudible 00:21:30] would be out of commission.

R.J. Rushdoony: 21:33 It would have blistered feet, which would become quickly infected, and it would be unable to move. This is why the modern military strategy for gorilla warfare is primarily urban, where there are short distances, lots of roadways, and ready maneuverability. There, the type of strategy of the 30 years’ war and gorilla warfare can be readily applied. The 30 years’ war was thus the kind of classic in warfare. It was a classic in the kind of total destruction that can be locked.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:23 It was a classic in the senselessness of a protracted war in which motives and counter-motives get so involved that finally nobody knows how to quit until finally everyone became exhausted. The settlement, finally, did work to a degree to the same end that had been purposed at the beginning. Each area was given the right to choose its own religion. So that nothing was settled, it was back in effect to the status quo. It remains a landmark in the history of Europe of what war can do to set back a civilization.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:23 Our time is just about up now, just briefly before we continue. It marked also the transition to a secular approach in that however much when the war began, Spain had in mind a religious conquest of those areas. It also had a powerplay in mind also. Before the war had proceeded very far, it was the political motive, which began to predominate rather than the religious concern.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:10 Europe was moving rapidly, and in this war, it came to the [fore 00:24:15] to a humanistic orientation which was going to dominate the future. That humanistic orientation appeared most openly in Louis XIV, and we shall spend a little while on Louis next time. Let us pray.

R.J. Rushdoony: 24:36 All mighty God, our heavenly father, guide us, we beseech thee, in the days ahead that we may restore things to their proper place an obedience to thee, and conformity to thy word so thy praise and glory. Oh Lord, our God, use us mightily to establish thy word in the sovereignty of thy kingdom in our lives and in our times. In Jesus name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Speaker 2: 25:30 It’s my understanding that their [inaudible 00:25:47]. How do you answer people who say then [inaudible 00:26:03]. They’re always fighting. [inaudible 00:26:05] deny this yet it happened.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:09 Yes. Well, first the answer is, they don’t want to see that at all. It’s like these student speakers I read at the beginning. Nothing is more obvious from reading history that the renaissance saw the rise of tyranny, that they see it as the birth of a freedom. This one student said it was the birth of freedom for the individual and the growth of the power of the state, as though the two could both happen.

R.J. Rushdoony: 26:39 Now, when people are blind, they will not see. All you can do is to hope that perhaps the person can see it and to say, “They were not wars of religion. They were political wars.” If they were wars of religion, why were sometimes Catholics fighting against each other and protestants fighting against each other? Was it because they were Catholics and protestants or because they were primarily statist, concerned with power politics?

Speaker 2: 27:22 [inaudible 00:27:22].

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:25 Right. They were Christians. In most cases, they were Christians in name only.

Speaker 2: 27:33 [inaudible 00:27:33].

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:35 Yes. Some of them were about as Christian as Martin Luther King. Yes.

Speaker 3: 27:42 What about the situation of Ireland today? It’s being called a religious war for Catholics and protestants. Can you say something about that?

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:54 Yes. The situation in Ireland today is called a religious war. But first of all, there is very, very little, almost no orthodoxy among the protestants, which means there’s no faith. Second, the Catholics have just about as much religion to them as the protestants, which is next to none. It’s a class warfare. It’s not a religious war.

Speaker 4: 28:26 Who’s instigating that [inaudible 00:28:28]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:28 They’re both guilty. They’re both seriously guilty. In the protestant circles, the orange men have a virtual kind of secret masonic grip on the country, and no protestant who is not a member of their society, and no Catholic is going to get anywhere without them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:54 On the other hand, the Catholic majority is by and large, you might say they’re the Negros of North Ireland. They represent an element that isn’t very ambitious, doesn’t have much drive, doesn’t work too well, but is demanding its rights. You’ve got two groups that see only the faults of the other, and none of their own faults. So, they’re going to go on destroying each other in their country.

Speaker 4: 29:30 I’m not saying [inaudible 00:29:31].

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:30 What?

Speaker 4: 29:37 Other outside influences. [inaudible 00:29:37].

R.J. Rushdoony: 29:40 Oh yes. Anytime you have people who are stupid and foolish, you’re going to have outside influences, but they don’t need those. They’ve got enough stupidity on their own to make trouble enough for a dozen countries. I think it’s a serious mistake that many Americans make. They feel they’ve got to pick sides, like India and Pakistan, and sides in North Ireland. So, one has to be right and the other wrong. A good deal of time in history, both sides are wrong, and in these two cases, they certainly are. Yes?

Speaker 5: 30:19 [inaudible 00:30:19].

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:35 Yes. The protestant leadership in the north has provided it with an industrial leadership. On the other hand, they have been faltering in recent years. In other words, the younger generation have not had the caliper of the older that made it. The south of Ireland wants that, and has for a long time. On the other hand, I think as things are now, while the indications are there’s no politician in the south of Ireland that wants to say we don’t want it because it would be political suicide, or a lot of them have nightmares at the thought of having to take it tomorrow if the British would say, “It’s yours. Take it. You try to bring peace there,” you see.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:22 In other words, the government of Ireland must maintain a position to satisfy its people if they want a united Ireland, but they know good and well they couldn’t cope with the problem there. The second, their own industrial power has been developing very rapidly lately so that there is a growing prosperity in south Ireland. The economic drain of trying to police that portion of Ireland, if they were to get it, would really sink them. It really is a situation where there’s no answer because neither side is ready to give in a bit or to listen to reason. Their attitude is, “Kill.” That’s the answer. Each side wants to wipe out the other.

Speaker 6: 32:18 See, this … Ireland has been behind about 50 years, [inaudible 00:32:25]. Why is it taking so long for [inaudible 00:32:31] to come to a head if these people did not have outside [inaudible 00:32:36]? Is it a gradual growth [inaudible 00:32:38] and so forth, and what caused them to wait for 50 years?

R.J. Rushdoony: 32:44 A good question. Why did this take 50 years to develop? One of the reasons that has made it come to a head in recent years is that north Ireland has been faltering somewhat. It has been a tremendous area of industrial development and growth. But of late, it has had, as all the world has had, an economic crisis. Now, add to that economic crisis the fact that you had a leadership that hasn’t moved ahead with the times and has faltered somewhat, and you can see how its own leadership would … I mean, its own position in the world economy was a little harder hit.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:37 The result is, everyone felt it, and the ones on the bottom felt it the hardest. There were fewer jobs for them. The consequence is, they’re all worked up about it. Just as [inaudible 00:33:53] has pointed out, the Civil Rights Act has led to the Civil Rights Revolution. The minimum wage law, it immediately meant that a whole world of Negro youth could no longer work, so they became revolutionaries. They were not fit to make as much as the minimum wage law said they had to make, so they could not be employed. Therefore, they became idle, welfare recipients, and they began to develop a revolutionary ideology.

R.J. Rushdoony: 34:37 The economic situation in Ireland immediately meant that you had a growing element of Irish youth, unemployed, ready to listen to revolutionary talk. SO the situation was right. And of course, it keeps feeding on itself. It’s already meant that economically, the north of Ireland, which was in the doldrums, is really in trouble. You cannot have that kind of civil warfare and have real production. How can you maintain economic leadership then? Economic development goes where there’s peace, where you can depend on labor and you don’t have to worry about having your investment bombed out.

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:33 This is why economic development is going to south Ireland, because there are no problems there so people are investing money there. So the south of Ireland will take it all away from the northern part. Yes?

Speaker 7: 35:53 [inaudible 00:35:53] problem? [inaudible 00:35:55]? [inaudible 00:35:59] grown up with this. I am a conservative in New York, and [inaudible 00:36:03]. They don’t want to join with the [inaudible 00:36:07] Ireland.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:10 I don’t think they should be because it is a different area. It isn’t a part of them culturally.

Speaker 7: 36:14 And these-

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:15 It would be tragic.

Speaker 7: 36:16 -people who are coming in, they’re invading the country and [inaudible 00:36:20], and they’re actually invading.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:16 Right. That’s right.

Speaker 7: 36:28 [inaudible 00:36:28] one people [inaudible 00:36:31].

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:32 Well, you know, when southern Ireland got its freedom, most of southern Ireland didn’t want it. The IRA was a minority group. The overwhelming majority of the Catholic clergy was against independence. They felt it would lead to secularization. Most of the political figures preferred union, but you had a minority, the IRA creating violence, leading to bombing, to sabotage and so on until Britain said, “We can’t be bothered. Turn them loose.” That’s how they got their independence, against the wishes of the majority.

Speaker 7: 37:16 That’s what they’re wanting to do now because-

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:19 Exactly, yes.

Speaker 7: 37:20 [inaudible 00:37:20].

R.J. Rushdoony: 37:21 Yes. Now, this always happens, you see. History is rarely dominated by a majority. Only by dedicated minorities. The lack of a dedicated minority with a faith for the future means that a revolutionary element can take over and command it in terms of pure hatred, you see. What is needed in Ireland is an element to stand in terms of a Christian faith and to spell out the matter in terms of economics and religion, and to get together with people of both sides, but there’s no one with the faith to do that. 20, 30 years ago, there would have been. Today, there isn’t because-

Speaker 7: 38:14 A lot of them [inaudible 00:38:16].

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:15 That’s right. Yes. This is the problem.

Speaker 8: 38:18 What about that, I don’t know, that was [inaudible 00:38:23]-

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:18 Paisley.

Speaker 8: 38:18 Paisley.

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:28 He’s a rival rouser, and in my books worthless. He’s an associate with McIntyre who’s a rival rouser. He has nothing to contribute except hated. He has to bear some of the responsibility for helping create this situation.

Speaker 8: 38:46 Isn’t he one of these dedicated Christians devout or-

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:49 As a Christian, he has one message: hatred. He has one message: hatred. He has never, never distinguished himself for preaching the gospel to the end that people may be seen. He’s never gone out to the Catholics with a message that Jesus Christ is the savior of protestant and Catholic alike, but this is what the Word of God teaches. He’s gone out to them with a message of the sheerest kind of hatred. I regard him as one of the most ugly characters in Protestantism in our time.

R.J. Rushdoony: 39:23 He was, for a long time, before the violence began, creating such an atmosphere of violence, but he was in essence saying, “I’m going to make it impossible for Catholic and protestant ever to talk together.” No, I’ll stand before God almighty and accuse that man of being one of the worst characters of our age. What he has done is fearful. He has spewed forth hatred. Put him and that Bernadette [inaudible 00:39:54] and some of those others together, and confine them to hell, which is where they belong. He’s a fearful character. I read a number of his talks that he gave when he came over here, which McIntyre published. He’s a hatemonger. He’s a hatemonger. The protestants and Catholics were living side by side there. They were living side by side in the south of Ireland. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been tensions, but to go out and whip up hatred deliberately, deliberately, the Bible says that such men are to be avoided. Solomon has a great deal to say on people of that character. Paisley is an ugly character and a rival rouser. Yes?

Speaker 9: 40:45 He’s a rival rouser, [inaudible 00:40:45].

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:48 He’s still around.

Speaker 9: 40:49 I haven’t heard of him [inaudible 00:40:51].

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:54 No, but you see … Yes?

Speaker 11: 40:57 Well, isn’t it the history … It takes a period of 50 years to secularize one generation against the other. When England gave up its colonies where they start all this revolution movement, until then we didn’t have a lot of peace going around, but we had greater control of the colonies. Is that right?

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:18 Well, to a degree, yes. Yes?

Speaker 12: 41:24 [inaudible 00:41:24].

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:28 For this reason, I have many times crossed McIntyre’s path as I’ve gone across the country. I have seen situations, I can cite one in some detail, because I know and still correspond with the people involved. There are a group of 75 professional men who had walked out of a church because it was modernist, went to him and said, “We want a church that will preach the gospel.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 41:58 He has not interested in doing more than when he met some kid in another city. “You want to be a pastor, Richard? Go over there and take care of those people.” He didn’t even bother to sit down and talk with the man, the young man. Now, he wasn’t interested in establishing a church of people. What he wanted to do in that city was to preach against national counsel, and to preach against this and that, and to collect funds and to pass on.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:27 Now, he could’ve done far more good in the long run by saying, “Here is a fine group of the finest men in this community who want a church. I claim to be connected with the Bible Presbyterian Church. Let me establish a church here amongst them.” He could’ve sent somebody responsible to meet with them. Now, this has happened not once, but many times, many times. He’s not interested in building churches.

Speaker 12: 42:56 Was that information given [inaudible 00:42:57]?

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:00 No, because that’s not his main interest. He’s more interested in promoting marches. He’s an organizer. With the kind of money, with the radio stations, the talent he has, in these years he could’ve established literally thousands of churches from one end of the United States to the other. Thousands, and he’s not done it. He has established a college or two, which have been beset by problems, and I have known people who have been on the faculty members, and they say that the biggest headache is McIntyre and his unwillingness to do anything but to have them to say he has them.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:42 But he can organize a big march on Washington every so often, and put a great deal of real talent to organizing that and getting people from California over there, and from Maine and Washington, all over to march on Washington, put on a big show. Now, he has demonstrated that what he wants to do, he can do. But to promote the work of Christ’s kingdom, he has not done and he’s raised millions of dollars over these years. What’s there to show for it? All he does is to preach against something or other all the time.

R.J. Rushdoony: 44:23 That’s what people apparently want, and they’re getting it and that’s why the country is going to hell, because it’s people like McIntyre and Hargis who get up who are preaching against this and that, and are not preaching the gospel, who are not going out and building things, Christian schools, Christian churches. The people are getting what they want. Yes?

Speaker 13: 44:46 I’m not particularly a McIntyre fan, but [inaudible 00:44:51] more than that because one man cannot do everything. The people of [inaudible 00:45:02] who want to serve, [inaudible 00:45:08] leader. If one man organizes the marches, why doesn’t somebody else organize churches? That’s not enough of a criticism. If we need a church-

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.” He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder

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