Dr. RJ Rushdoony
“The Institutes of Biblical Law,” 1973
Muslim and Hindus as well as Jews and Atheists will support religious liberty not because they believe it in principle but because the concept of religious liberty both serves the interest of their minority group and because it affords the minority groups the space and time to become the majority wherein they can and will deny religious tolerance to Christians.
Because of “religious toleration,” formerly Christian America allowed adherents of other religions to attach themselves like so many parasites on once healthy body. Allowing for Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. into a country that developed in the context of Christendom is like allowing protozoa, helminths (worms), and ectoparasites to affix to your body. One just cannot develop a healthy tolerance to a parasite in your system because the parasite is trying to take over your whole body and kill it, while your body’s defenses spring to kill the parasite. The two are at war. Yet, by embracing the creed of religious tolerance the West has invited parasites on its body politique.
The full RJR interpretive grid for analysis….
First, law is in every culture religious in origin. Because law governs man and society, because it establishes and declares the meaning of justice and righteousness, law is inescapably religious, in that it establishes in practical fashion the ultimate concerns of a culture. Accordingly, a fundamental and necessary premise in any and every study of law must be, first, a recognition of this religious nature of law.
Second, it must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society. If law has its source in man’s reason, then reason is the god of that society. If the source is an oligarchy, or in a court, senate, or ruler, then that source is the god of that system. Thus, in Greek culture law was essentially a religiously humanistic concept. In contrast to every law derived from revelation, nomas for the Greeks originated in the mind (nous). So the genuine nomas is no mere obligatory law, but something in which an entity valid in itself is discovered and appropriated. … It is “the order which exists (from time immemorial), is valid and is put into operation.”
Because for the Greeks mind was one being with the ultimate order of things, man’s mind was thus able to discover ultimate law (nomas) out of its own resources, by penetrating through the maze of accident and matter to the fundamental ideas of being. As a result, Greek culture became both humanistic, because man’s mind was one with ultimacy, and also neoplatonic, ascetic, and hostile to the world of matter, because mind, to be truly itself, had to separate itself from non-mind.
Modern humanism, the religion of the state, locates law in the state and thus makes the state, or the people as they find expression in the state, the god of the system. As Mao Tse-Tung has said, “Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.”2 In Western culture, law has steadily moved away from God to the people (or the state) as its source, although the historic power and vitality of the West has been in Biblical faith and law.
Third, in any society, any change of law is an explicit or implicit change of religion. Nothing more clearly reveals, in fact, the religious change in a society than a legal revolution. When the legal foundations shift from Biblical law to humanism, it means that the society now draws its vitality and power from humanism, not from Christian theism.
Fourth, no disestablishment of religion as such is possible in any society. A church can be disestablished, and a particular religion can be supplanted by another, but the change is simply to another religion. Since the foundations of law are inescapably religious, no society exists without a religious foundation or without a law-system which codifies the morality of its religion.
Fifth, there can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance. Legal positivism, a humanistic faith, has been savage in its hostility to the Biblical law-system and has claimed to be an “open” system. But Cohen, by no means a Christian, has aptly described the logical positivists as “nihilists” and their faith as ”nihilistic absolutism.”3 Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law-system and to alien religious foundations, or else it commits suicide.
Thank you Pastor, well said!
In pre-modern times, the word “tolerantia” had the connotations of “pain tolerance.” Being able to tolerate something unpleasant and painful. So you might have to “tolerate” the presence of non-Christian populations like Jews as a lesser evil, not because it was something that was good in itself. But an irritating thing you had to “tolerate.” As in, “you live here on our sufferance.”
Sure doesn’t mean that any more.
“Tolerance” is thus very much an acquired taste, sort of like alcohol which originally tastes bad and unnatural. But many people can become addicted to alcohol as they grow degenerate, and likewise they or their societies can become “addicted to tolerance,” until they cannot even think of life without it, like a chronic drunk cannot imagine life without booze.
Excellent illustration.
The same logic applies to so many other forms of vice, unnatural sex included. At first, our God-given, Bible-sharpened natural instincts scream against them, but we can learn to suppress them.
“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
This same process happens with religious tolerance. A healthy, normal, Bible-believing Christian feels at first nothing but contempt towards such dirty idolatry as Hinduism for example, but if he is not careful to keep up his righteousness (with God’s help), he will find himself seeing it with more and more sympathy, as his fallen old nature begins to re-assert itself (in careless spiritual sloth if in nothing else).
Let me preface by saying that, theologically, I’m Protestant and Calvinist. However, I think there’s truth in the following quotes:
“Christianity resigned when the Church surrendered economics. The Medieval church distinguished between right and wrong in the economic domain. The ecclesiastical bureaucracy withdrew tactfully from any such endeavor. The baked meats were too rich to risk on a mere question of righteousness. p. 230. The “Church” declined and fell on this issue. Historians have left the politics of Luther and of Calvin in the blur of great ignorance. pp. 240-1. The Church slumped into a toleration of usury. Protestantism, as factive [i.e., presupposing of truth that serves as a complement] and organized, may have sprung from nothing but pro-usury politics.” p. 241.
Ezra Pound, ‘Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization’, ed. Noel Stock
“The Reformation was a schism in the whole soul of the West. In it appeared, as a symbol, the coming triumph of materialism: the system of Calvinism. Calvin taught the sanctity of economic activity; he sanctioned usury; he interpreted wealth as a sign of Election to salvation. This spirit was abroad; Henry VIII legalized usury in England in 1545. The old Western doctrine of the sinfulness of usury was rejected. This represented liberation for the Jew, accessibility to power — even if disguised, invisible power. In the Reformation time, the Jew was found everywhere fighting against the Church, and, as between Luther and Calvin, supporting Calvin — for Luther also rejected usury. The victory of Puritanism in England, an adaptation of Calvinism, gave the Jew favorable conditions.” p. 390.
Francis P. Yockey, ‘Imperium’
“We shall thus have to admit that the cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent, perhaps in the particular aspects with which we are dealing predominantly, unforeseen and even unwished-for results of the labors of the reformers. They were often far removed from or even in contradiction to all that they themselves thought to attain.” p. 21.
Max Weber, ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’
Ron,
Rome tolerated Usury long before Calvin showed up on the scene.
Also, the SECULAR, or pagan-origin, Roman Civil Law, which was codified by Justinian and started to influence Western Latin civilization from around 1100 AD onwards, explicitly permits usury:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Usury
“It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the influence of usury on the social and economic history of the Roman republic. In the provinces the evils of the system reached a much greater height. In 84 B.C. the war tax imposed by Sulla on the province of Asia was at first advanced by Roman capitalists, and rose within fourteen years to six times its original amount. It is interesting to observe that the old law of debt was not really abolished until the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, who practically adopted the legislation of Solon more than five centuries before; but it was too late then to save the middle class. About this time the rate of interest on first-class security in the city of Rome was only about 4%, whilst in the provinces from 25 to 50% were rates often exacted. Justinian made the accumulation of arrears (anatocismus) illegal, and fixed the rate at 6%, except for mercantile loans, in which the rate received was 8%.”
This secular Roman law was for centuries the highest social science known to Western man, the most prestigious guide on how to organize earthly affairs in an efficient and respectable manner. The Western bourgeois capitalist society was built on the foundations of Roman law.
And thus it was intellectually dishonest, “lying by omission,” for the likes of Ezra Pound to blab about just Jews and Protestants practising usury, while forgetting to mention this little gift that the ancient Roman civilization left for us.