Reviewing Rushdoony’s “The American Indian” — Power

“The Indians originally venerated Cortes as a god. They respected strength, they were ruled by very powerful gods, and a man who could overthrow those who would be acknowledged.”

Patrick Marnham
So Far From God: A Journey to Central America — pg. 93

So, starts Rushdoony in his chapter on Power in his book “The American Indian.” The burden of this chapter is to reveal that in terms of worship what the Indian worshiped was “power.” In this context Rush insists the converse was true also in his experience. Because the Indians worshiped power, they likewise despised powerlessness. Along the way Rushdoony labors also to show that this worship of power is something that is now characteristic of American culture.

Rushdoony states the obvious in this chapter that men who will not Worship the God of the Bible, will inevitably worship naked power instead.

“If the omnipotent and all-gracious God of Scripture is not worshipped, men will pursue their adoration of power in other ways.”

Rushdoony notes that the disrespect for powerlessness that the Indians had was exhibited by their disrespect for blacks.

“Owing to this respect for power, there was a corresponding disrespect for powerlessness. The clearest expression of this was their attitude towards blacks…. to them, blacks were inferior and their feelings did not count.”

One wonders if this attitude was really about power so much as it is a mindless ethnocentrism that can be so typical among different people groups.

It is interesting though that RJR contrasts this with the attitude of the white man towards blacks as in telling a story about interaction between Indians and a particular black man RJR concludes,

“He (the black man upon whom a prank had been pulled) soon came to realize that no Indian would regard him as an equal, whereas some white men would and most white men would be reasonably fair to him.”

However after making these kinds of blanket statements Rushdoony turns around and admits that Indians could respect the black man if he was a warrior type,

“In some areas, blacks intermarried with Indians. I am of the opinion that this usually occurred where blacks fought back against enslavement and escaped. Such defiance would have earned Indians’ respect. The Indian attitude was not earned in terms of race or color but of warrior standards….What mattered was a man’s exhibition of the traits of the fighter and the hunter.”

Of course this refers back to the worship of power. According to RJR if any individual revealed power then they might be accepted on some level by the Indian. The best way that I can harmonize RJR here is to say as a general rule the Indian did not respect blacks but exceptions might occur if individuals blacks were to show a warrior spirit that bespoke power.

Rush even connected the peyote cult with the pursuit of power. He notes that the peyote drug creates “gives illusions of power.” At the same time Rush noted that many of the other Tribal members looked down upon the peyote users as being weak, thus showing again the power esteem.

As a brief side-note it is interesting that RJR reports that many of the Indians claimed that the use of peyote was a modern phenomena that was introduced by the country of Mexico.

Getting back to the power theme RJR spends time examining how modern American culture has likewise turned to the cult of power.

“This veneration of power was very notable to me, especially because I saw the characteristic becomem very prominent in the white American culture by the 1960’s. One aspect of it was the rise of ‘groupies,’ girls who eagerly sumbitted sexually to power figures in the popular culture. Popular musicians, athletes, film and television stars have since then been pursued with intensity by women, young and not so young, who feel it is an honor to be used sexually by them. Frankly, nothing I saw among the Indians matched in intensity this power worship that became so prevalent in the United States…. White American culture has far outstripped that of the Indians in its worship of power, with deadly results.”

Clearly, if man will not worship God he will worship that which he believes will give him power. As bad as this is it may be even worse when Christians worship God because of how they think they can bend God’s power to their own selfish use. Too often in the Church today God is worshiped, not because of who He is, but for what He can offer to the worshiper. If it is bad to worship naked power apart from God, how much worse to worship God for how His power can be channeled to serve our own selfish purposes? To often, in the words of Bob Dylan, we think of God as ” just an errand boy to satisfy our wandering desires.”

When are we going to wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

Perhaps a clear sign of Christian maturity is the willingness to worship God when He has determined to be God hidden. There are times in life when God’s providence comes as a severe mercy announcing a seeming powerlessness in some life event. When all seems without the necessary power we would summon will we still be a people who worship God?

In such times we need to remember with Rush,

“God’s being is more than simply power. He is justice, love, grace, law and more.”

May God be pleased to reveal to us the lie that the temptation to worship naked power is.

Review of Rushdoony’s “The American Indian” — Education

“One reason for the catastrophe which struck Indian tribes was that now, with the coming of the White man, there were alternative forms of education.”

R. J. Rushdoony
The American Indian — pg. 29

In the chapter on “Education” in RJR’s book we find Rush time and again writing about how damaging the White man’s arrival was to the American Indian and that culture.

“The White man’s arrival complicated education. It introduced an alternate lifestyle with many material advantages, including liquor…. One of the most devastating effects of the white man’s influence was that Indian children no longer grew into a set mold…. At an early age they (children) could work for the white men and be free of their people”

The constant returning to this theme by Rush reminds us that no civilization in history has been able to manage, for a sustained period of time, the presence of numerous different people groups, religions, and worldviews seeking to form one unified culture. A Diversity that has vast differentiation between people groups, religions, and worldvies is not a strength to social orders. Rushdoony reminds us repeatedly that the Indian was better served by remaining Indian. Of course Rushdoony insisted that the regenerated Indian builds a stronger social order and culture then the non-regenerated Indian but even then the Redeemed Indian culture will remain uniquely “Indian.”

As Rush continues to tell the story of the Indian and his Education, Rushdoony brings to the fore that the Indian idea of education was a education where the Grandparents instructed the children in the ways of the past.

“… that was education. It meant passing on the wisdom of the past and present to the future. These men saw the white man’s world as full of marvels. The radios were of interest to them and the white man’s guns and knives were wonderful. But for them the life link was gone. Their grandchildren were not linked to them but to the White man, and foolishly so.”

Clearly the American Indian, at least as represented by Rushdoony, had no interest in becoming white. Just as, doubtlessly, the white man had no interest in becoming American Indian. The Gospel of Jesus Christ can ameliorate the hostility that can arise from these people group distinctions as those distinctions are marked by the sinful dispositions of each. Further the Gospel will work so that differing Redeemed people groups work in harmony, but the Gospel can no more undo ethnicity any more than it can undo gender. Christ has come to save all the Nations and create a Spiritual Unity among them, but Christ did not come to erase the nations in favor of some New World Order amalgamation. Rushdoony’s book, by repeatedly noting and honoring these ethnic distinctions underscores this truth.

Rushdoony also criticized the American Indians for their faults. In this chapter he writes how the American Indian turned to his “whiskey religion.”

“The older men, who themselves often had problems with alcoholism, called drunkenness and alcoholism ‘the whiskey religion.’ I had never heard the term before. It was used by these older Indians very seriously, but some of the younger men used it as a joke. What the older men meant by it, they explained, was that what Christians looked for in Christ, Indians often found in a bottle. For them it was peace, and answer to problems, empowerment, escape, and more. There was another factor, too, as they saw it. Whiskey changed a man, like Jesus did, but in another direction. A bottle of whiskey was for them a religious solution.”

Further RJR notes the weakness of the American Indians in their refusal to frustrate their children through child rearing discipline.

“The saddest fact of my own experience with the Indians was the indifference of the children to the parents. The children were never chastised….frustrating the child seemed to them a white man’s cruelty…. Never to face frustration is no preparation for life. Not surprisingly, by the age of ten, alcoholism was common place; by thirteen or fourteen, fornication too. Self denial was an alien idea, and an inability to accept frustration was commonplace in recent years this had the highest suicide rate in the United States, a fact closely related to the nurture of children there.”

Rushdoony in this chapter is even handed in articulating the faults of both Whites and Indians as distinct people groups and in the doing so Rush demonstrates that while all men in all people groups are sinners not all people groups have the same predilections in terms of how that sinful peccadilloes manifest themselves. Different people groups have different besetting sins to which they are going to be more inclined. Similarly, upon Redemption, we can expect different people groups to have different strengths in terms of sanctification.

In the end though Rushdoony’s passion was for the American Indian to come to know Christ. In this Chapter he mentions pagan Anthropologists who came to study the Indian and whose only concern was to confirm a preconceived agenda.

“From my perspective, there was another problem with the anthropologists. Their framework of reference was evolution. They viewed Indian culture in terms of myth, not in terms of taking an interest in a people whom God created and who needed Jesus Christ to attain their true potential. The anthropologist’s impersonal approach bred an instinctive hostility. The Indian is a person, not a scientific specimen. The anthropologist’s laboratory approach irritated the Indians. As a result, even when they gave correct answers to the scientist’s questions, the meaning and flavor of their lives was missed. To the Indians those questions sounded artifact oriented, not concerned with people.”

Note here how Rushdoony sees the Indian as a distinct “people whom God created,” and who, as a distinct people, could only find their true potential by being attached to the Lord Jesus Christ. For Rush, all people groups, as people groups, became more genuine as to their ethnicity and culture only upon being united to Christ. Christ does not strip men of their ethnic identity upon Redemption. Christ, in Redemption, makes our ethnic identity more genuine even as only in Christ do humans find their genuine humanity, even as only in Christ both Men and Women find their genuine Femininity and Masculinity. Being united to Christ doesn’t erase our corporeal markers. Being united to Christ brings those God given corporeal markers into subjection to Christ that they may be increasingly what God intended them to be.

Touching The Definition Of “Nation”

One of the earliest heresies in the Church was Gnosticism.

Ancient Gnosticism was laced with idealistic Platonism and viewed the physicality of our humanness as being sinful and evil. For the Gnostics the body was evil. What was really important about man was his spiritual nature. As such the Gnostics either were ascetics in order to choke off the corporeal pleasures of man or they were libertines reasoning that if the body isn’t important they could do with it whatever they pleased. The key choking point in terms of Christianity is that because of the Gnostic view of the inherent evil of the corporeal they denied the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

In every way the Gnostics diminished the importance of the corporeal, the physical, and the material.

We find an incipient Gnosticism in much of the Church in the West today among those who, though affirming the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, still at the same time deny that our physicality, our DNA, our lineage is of any consequence. Such men have arrived at the point where they insist that the generations that preceded us and who have passed on to us our corporeal heritage should not be considered as having an impact on the people we ourselves are and the cultures we build. For the Gnostic Alienists that which alone matters as it pertains to our humanness is our Spirituality – Spiritual nature. For the Gnostic-Alienist if we are born again spiritually then that overcomes any and all physical genetic realities, (except gender .. but they are merely being inconsistent at this point. In time they will surrender this physical distinction as well.)

The fact that there is a denial of our inherited lineage going on is seen in a recent comment by one of the current leaders in the neo-Gnostic Alienist Christian movement,

“In Biblical times and before that, the Greek word “ethnos” did not indicate genetic similarity but “people born under the same religious rites.” Genetic similarity was incidental, for religious rites were a family affair, and therefore everyone born within the confines of a home was a member of that home, whether he was genetically part of that home or not. Most of the time the children born within the confines of a home were indeed genetic offspring of the head of the home, but this genetic relation meant nothing. (Their genetic relation to their mother’s family was never considered true relation.) Adoption into the family, therefore, was common, for it was nothing less than passing under the same religious rite, and therefore becoming a member of the “ethnos.” On the other hand, genetic heirs born outside the home or outside the land were considered not part of the “ethnos,” for they had not been under the same rites…. family and ethnos were a religious entity, not a genetic entity.”

Such a statement is astounding in its clear and unapologetic Gnosticism. To suggest that ethnos does not indicate genetic similarity and that the genetic relation meant nothing but was only incidental completely makes hash out of texts like Genesis 10 which gives us the table of Nations. You will notice that the Nations are listed there as being comprised of those who are definite blood sons of distinct Ancestral Fathers. That which comprises a “nation,” is not, contrary to certain Alienists, those who merely share certain religious propositional allegiances. Now certainly, Nations, will typically share a common faith but to deny that which makes a nation a nation is a shared genetic bond is incipient Gnosticism. Now, nobody denies that one can become part of a “nation” via adoption but the fact that adoption exists does not mean that nations are not primarily comprised of a common genetic tie.

Given the ascendancy of certain Gnostic emphasis’ in the Church one wonders how it is that St. Paul was not a Racist because he could write,

3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers,[a] my kinsmen according to the flesh.

Didn’t St. Paul know that he didn’t have any kinsmen according to the flesh but rather that his kinsmen were according to shared Religious propositions?

The same chap referenced above could write elsewhere,

“In the Christian anthropology – whether Calvinist or Arminian – man is defined ONLY religiously. Man is a moral being, and therefore only his religion determines his culture, his character, his productivity, etc. His physical characteristics – or his economic position, or his nationality – have no bearing on his culture, or his character.”

Here we see the Gnostic error. For the Alienists of this stripe man’s morality is abstracted from his humanity, as if morality can exist apart from a person’s humanity. We see the Gnosticism again when it is insisted that man’s corporeal humanity has no bearing on man’s culture or his character. Really? So, the argument here is that a family that has produced generations of Bulgarian weightlifters, because of God given genetic disposition, will suddenly produce a child who will be a prima-ballerina? What we are being told here is that centuries of characteristics of people groups has been in error; Scotsmen as typical fighters, Dutchmen as typically frugal, Irish as typically hotheaded. All of this is sinful thinking and according to Alienist Gnostics this thinking is pagan. However, the truth is that this is alienist Gnosticism trying to pass off as Christianity. Who God has created us to be in our corporeal – genetic natures is real and is to be considered. Now, of course we don’t absolutize these physical realities but neither do we dismiss them as being not real for to do so would be Gnostic.

Nationalism As A Means To Arrive At International Socialism.

Doing a little reading that tells of the Communist blueprint to gather a International order of undifferentiated peoples. The reading started off with the Marxist policy on ethnicity. It seems that the International Socialist viewed Nationalism favorably as a means and a tactic to reach International Socialism (NWO). Lenin wrote,

“Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all the oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede.”

As such Marxist thinking was to stir up ethnic minorities against the Majorities unto either secession or Civil War and then immediately capture those movements once they got rolling and then turn them, once successful in overthrowing the Majority Rule, to a movement that will sink itself in the International community.

As such Marxism, consistent with their dialectic, both supports ethnic identity and Nationalism and oppose it as each serves their ends of a International NWO. The Marxist reasoning was that just as Capitalism is a necessary stage on the way to NWO International Socialism so Nationalism was a necessary stage on the way to Internationalism.

Here is another quote by Lenin that gives us a glimpse of this,

“The aim of Socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all National isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them.”

Of course, this supports the claim by some Biblical Christians that International Marxism has, as its ultimate goal, the sinking of the Nations into a undifferentiated human mass and so suggests, once again, that many expressions of Christianity in the West today are in bed with International Marxism as much current Christianity continues to push the undifferentiated agenda whereby Nations lose their unique identity. We have gotten to the point where much of Denominational Christianity in the West is doing the Devil’s work under the Banner of the Lord Christ by advocating for a Christian Internationalism that looks a great deal like Marxist Internationalism.

Sanitation Prayer For Plantation Mayor

In light of this,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtE7MvsH7Zw

Wherein this is part of what is publicly prayed,

“Free us from the shackles of partisan politics, political correctness and personal egos and agendas. Let the plantation called New York City be the city of God, a city set upon the hill, a light shining in darkness.”

The prevailing view of this prayer is that slavery is still a condition that exists in New York city. Words like “Plantation,” “Reconstruction Era,” “Auction Block,” “Shackles,” “Emancipation Proclamation,” “Bondage,” “Master,” “Civil Wars,” and “Chain,” characterize the Prayer. Clearly the minister praying has a kind of Liberation Theology and believes that oppression is widespread.

I thought I would offer some counter views by two other Black men and one white man.

http://manningjohnson.org/speech/transcript.html

This one is excellent and was Manning Johnson’s final speech before his death. Given what Manning says here it is not a wonder that he has been dropped down the memory hole. Manning Johnson was a black man who was a Communist at one point in his life but who eventually awakened to the fact that the Communists were only interested in using the black man and that the end result would be even more misery for his people.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362030/early-skirmishes-race-war-thomas-sowell // This one by T. Sowell

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/fred-reed/the-pursuit-of-forced-amity/ // This one by Fred Reed