R.J. Rushdoony wrote this little essay for The California Farmer back in 1976, and it reads like it could’ve been penned just yesterday. Man, some things never change!
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-fright-peddlers
It’ll only take you a minute or two to read, and then you tell me: Did he nail it, or what?
R.J. Rushdoony’s ministry, which he has passed on to us at Chalcedon–and to all who wish to take it up–centered on the extension of Christ’s Kingdom: and in this, every Christian can take part. It’s work for all of us.
https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/christ-versus-satan
I think he saved the best quote for last: “Every Christian and his home is a part of this extension of Christ’s Kingdom.”
I am not responsible for the headline supplied by Newswithviews.
How bad is education in America? It’s getting to some point beyond my verbal resources.
In 1997, at the National Governors Assn. Winter Meeting, Hollywood director Rob “Meat-Head” Reiner, who is not a governor, introduced a scheme for government “experts” to intervene in the development of every child from birth to age three, so as to ensure that everyone “develops” properly. Meat-Head then introduced a–well, a scientist, who “displayed two brains, one of a criminal and one of a healthy individual…”
Hasn’t learned a blessed thing in all these years…
Please tell me this was from a remake of Young Frankenstein. It was just a put-on, right? They had to be kidding. I mean, really, this was like a 1950s TV commercial for a new brand of mouth-wash…
No such luck. It was all too real, and you can read about it in Sex, School, and Politics by Donna Hearne, a former official in the U.S. Dept. of Education under President Reagan. (Published by the Constitutional Coalition, St. Louis MO, 1997)
With enough expert managing and supervision of family life, Meat-Head declared, there won’t be any more of those ugly-looking criminal brains. There will be only normal, happy, healthy brains. No more problems, no more crime–utopia at last! And we’ll owe it all to Science and the government!
Mrs. Hearne’s little book was written 20 years ago, describing the chain with which our betters thought to bind us. As Marley’s ghost might say, “And they have labored on it ever since. It is a ponderous chain!”
If you’ve already read R.J. Rushdoony’s The Messianic Character of American Education, in which the creators of our public education system testify against themselves in their own words, you already know the game plan:
Human beings are perfectible by government and science, using whatever degree of violence, duplicity, and coercion is necessary, with the objective of gaining total control over every aspect of every human being’s life–with unfettered sex provided as the anesthetic.
Conspiracies are hatched in secrecy. This is done in plain sight. And no one is stopping it.
Theologian R.J. Rushdoony believed the secular, statist order was dying and said so, and wrote so, many times. Rushdoony himself died in 2001, but his prophetic work lives on in his many books.
Rushdoony knew the secular order that bestrode the world would take a long time to die, and in its death throes do much damage. He would not have been surprised by what’s happenin’ now–eternal “protests” over nothing, riots all over, kids coming out of “education” a lot dumber than they went in, Democrats trying to get all the girls turned into boys and all the boys turned into girls… and so much more. And it does look like Team Satan is putting points on the scoreboard faster than we can keep count of them.
But think of some of the other things that happen, that the secular statists would surely stop if they could. Hillary Clinton was supposed to be president, and she isn’t. She was supposed to finish what Obama started, and she can’t. Football was supposed to mesmerize America into hating itself, and it can’t. Man-Made Climbit Change is supposed to be “settled science” and incontrovertible fact, and it isn’t. And even as Western peoples, beguiled and hornswoggled by their entertainment, education, and legal systems, fall away from Christianity, people all over Africa and Asia are finding Christ–multitudes of them. Even in the West, house churches and informal but tightly bonded Christians still hold high the torch of truth.
None of that would have surprised Rushdoony, either.
So the Devil’s wrath is great, because he knows his time is almost up (Revelation 12:12). He, through his servants, tries to do as much damage as he can: and then it’s off to the lake of fire for the lot of them.
Pray unceasingly.
Endure.
Delight in good works.
Be unafraid to speak the truth. God’s Word is truth.
God knows it’s hard. Be assured He will avenge His saints. If we are hated for His sake, so were God’s prophets hated once, and Christ’s apostles. Our very existence offends the secular statist Left almost more than they can bear. Just to know any of us still walk the earth is a grief and a provocation to them.
Endure. The Lord will come. Endure.
Obviously posed… I think
By now most of you know about the little 5-year-old girl in Britain who set up a sidewalk lemonade stand–only to have the local government go all Starsky & Hutch on her about it (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-old-socked-200-fine-154728017.html)
But really, things are bad in the Mother Country and have been bad for a while.
Is Britain Finished? is a magazine article I wrote for Chalcedon some ten years ago (https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/is-britain-finished). In it you’ll read of some extraordinary incidents.
*Babies (yes, babies) accused of being racists.
*Man stopped by police for displaying the English flag on his car–in England.
*Four full-time police officers “investigating” a 9-year-old calling another child “gay” on the playground.
I don’t know how to lift the whole article onto the blog, so to read it you’ll have to click the link. I strongly recommend reading it.
Meanwhile, let’s not get all complacent about such off-the-wall things not happening here in our country–because they are. In Our Threatened Freedoms (edited by yours truly), R.J. Rushdoony collected dozens of incidents of government at all levels going completely mad. My favorite was the news report of a little boy Out West selling fishing worms that he dug up himself–with five full-time government agents assigned to “investigate” it.
Government isn’t drunk with power.
It’s absolutely crazed with power.
Chris Ortiz has written a Chalcedon editorial, Christian Reconstruction vs. “Social Justice Warriors” (https://chalcedon.edu/blog/christian-reconstruction-vs-social-justice-warriors), which highlights the need for, and the duty of Christians to proclaim “a clear message of the sovereignty of God against all forms of sovereignty sought by man.”
The importance of this message speaks for itself. Are we to live under the sovereign lordship of an almighty and all-righteous God, or under the cobbled-together pipe dreams of flawed, sinful, and self-deluded human beings?
If you’re having trouble making that choice, take another look at what’s going on in our streets and on our college campuses; and while you’re at it, bone up on 20th century history.
I have had occasion to re-visit R.J. Rushdoony’s book, Sovereignty (Chalcedon/Ross House Books: 2010). Published almost ten years after the theologian’s death, it poses an urgent question.
Who is sovereign–God or man?
There’s no such thing as “sort of sovereign.” Sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. Either God is sovereign Lord of all, or He is not. Either God is the source of law, or He is not. And if He isn’t, who is?
Oh, well, the serpent told us that–we are! “Ye shall be as gods,” Genesis 3:5. And then we have to decide whether each and every individual is to be sovereign–nah, that won’t work!–or if our sovereignty is to be collectivized in the form of an institution: a state, for instance. Yeah, that’ll work!
Rushdoony, analyzing history, saw the modern state perpetually expanding its powers. He perceived clearly that “the state” has no life in itself, but is rather the creation of flawed and sinful men: that is, an idol. And because one of the chief flaws of statists is an insatiable lust for power, the state devours its citizens’ personal liberties–because those who do not acknowledge God as God are unable to conceive of any authority higher than the state’s, to which the state and its representatives will be held accountable. For them the state, not God, is sovereign. And this, Rushdoony discovered, is a very widely-held delusion: even churches succumb to it.
So the state is sovereign, and next thing you know, they’re dragging people off to forced labor camps. First they try to punish every offense, said Rushdoony, because every offense is ultimately an offense against the state. But that’s not enough for them. From there they go on to punish all dissent.
He did not live to see them go even one step farther than that. From punishing dissent, punishing refusal or failure to hop on the bandwagon, the priesthood of the idol of the state goes on to punish at random. Like the Ontario Human Rights Commission says, you can offend against the Human Rights Code without meaning to, without even knowing that you’re doing it.
The image that comes to mind is some poor sod being hauled off to the guillotine crying, “What did I do? What did I do?”–and getting no answer.
Inalienable liberty is possible only under the sovereignty of God. Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and if we believe Him to be such, then we can only view the government as being under Him.
This is a matter to which Christians need to give more thought.
Before the state kills and eats them.
The logo represents the crown rights of Jesus Christ the King of Kings, to which we devote ourselves.
I would be greatly remiss if I didn’t urge you, one and all, to check out The Chalcedon Foundation’s new, state-of-the-art website at https://chalcedon.edu/ .
Not that I know or understand much in the way of computer stuff. This morning I just found out that I’m a follower of my own blog. How dumb is that?
Chalcedon is an international Christian teaching ministry founded by the late R.J. Rushdoony–who, more than anybody else in America, secured our right to provide Christian home schooling to our children.
The new website is chock-full of articles on theology, book and movie reviews, historical writings, socio-political controversies, and more. It includes tutorial video to help you get started in using it, with continued access to the old site, plus archives–and it’s all free. Plus there’s the Chalcedon store, where you can order my books. (*!*)
It took a very long time and lot of very hard work to get this project done. (I was going to make a wee joke here, but something tells me that I’d better not.) As a contributing editor for Chalcedon–they also publish my books, and maintain this blog, not to mention hundreds of articles by me which are now to be found on the website–I invite you all to drop in and look around. You’re bound to find something useful!
I’ve got to write about this today because I have some skin in the game; and besides, the headline is provocative: “West Virginia Introduces Bill to Treat Homeschooling as Child Abuse” ( http://www.dcclothesline.com/2017/04/01/west-virginia-introduces-bill-to-treat-homeschooling-as-child-abuse/ ).
I am employed by The Chalcedon Foundation, an international Christian education ministry. Our founder, Rev. R.J. Rushdoony, probably more than any other single individual, championed homeschooling: he spent most of the 1970s testifying as an expert witness in hundreds of cases involving homeschooling, logging thousands and thousands of miles as he traveled the country back and forth, defending parents’ right to educate their children at home–and particularly the right of Christian parents to provide their children with a Christian education.
All of us at Chalcedon are committed heart and soul to homeschooling, and the ministry continues to labor on its behalf. We are glad to be able to say that homeschooling now is on a much, much firmer footing than it was in the 1970s, when government at all levels, and particularly the Jimmy Carter administration, tried to wipe it out. By and large, God’s people have won that battle, at least in America. But we do understand that it’s not yet time to head for the hammock and reach for the beer.
Now, back to West Virginia.
Alarmist headline aside, at least the news story contains the text of the bill and statements from its sponsors. Having read these, I don’t believe the intent of the bill is to criminalize homeschooling or to try to control what parents teach their children–although you can find those legislative goals enthusiastically pursued by Western governments outside the United States. Rushdoony would say we need to fight for homeschooling rights there, too.
Anyway, the purpose of this bill seems to be to stop parents from using homeschooling as an excuse for truancy. It says a “student is not eligible for either home instruction exemption once certain truancy related legal proceedings begin or after a conviction.” In other words, you can’t say, “Ooh-ooh, I just remembered! Johnny didn’t show up to school ten days in a row without a note from me because I was homeschooling him at the time. I mean, I meant to send you a note but I guess it slipped my mind…” None of that will be allowed, if the bill passes.
We do not deny that child abuse and child neglect exist. We certainly don’t want homeschooling used as a lame excuse for it. But we at Chalcedon stand for home education as an absolute right, and speaking for myself, I would like to see an end to state-sponsored public education–as an institution corrupt from its beginning, whose goals have always been unwholesome, and as a bad business that only gets worse by the day.
In the meantime, though, I don’t think this West Virginia bill is anything special to be afraid of.
P.S.–Not to hit you with a commercial, but I’ve long found the best single resource, in understanding the history of public schooling in America, to be R.J. Rushdoony’s book, The Messianic Character of American Education–available, like my novels, from the Chalcedon store (http://www.chalcedon.edu/store ). In their own words, Rushdoony lets the creators, developers, and theorists of public education condemn themselves. It’s powerful stuff! It’ll make your hair stand on end.