Lesser Known and publicized quotes by RJR on the subject of egalitarianism that is now supported by Institutional Reconstructionism.
RJR speaking against proposed reparations in 1967. He is protesting in this statement and is being sarcastic.
“In other words, white America must pay a heavy tax for some time to come because of ITS INITIATIVE AND SUPERIORITY.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 615
“In any case, the goal is, whether directly or slowly, total destruction of Christian civilization. Some have called for … a long period of chaos and revolution, of anarchy, RACIAL AMALGAMATION, and the total destruction of civilization.
R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg, 618
“The demand of humanism (and of its child, socialism) is for a universal ethics. In universal ethics we are told that, even as the family gave way to the tribe, and the tribe to the nation, so the nation must give way to a one-world order. All men must treat all other men equally. Partiality to our family, nation, or race, represents a lower morality, we are told, and must be replaced by a ‘higher’ morality of a universal ethics.”
Rousas John Rushdoony
ROOTS OF RECONSTRUCTION — pg. 574
“The only logical conclusion of the present concept of civil rights is communism. It demands ‘full equality.’ And where does equality stop? Economic, political, cultural, racial, personal, and every other kind of equality is demanded….‘Full equality’ means that no differences can be tolerated with respect to race, color, creed, economics and all things else. THIS MEANS THE PLANNED DESTRUCTION OF THE VERY ELEMENTS OF SOCIETY WHO HAVE MADE OUR CIVILIZATION.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 581
Audience Member: — Is there a condoning of miscegenation in the bible or a direction against it or any remark about it?
Rushdoony Answers
Yes, the Bible requires us, and the Bible itself pays a great deal of attention to heredity and to genealogy. You have long genealogical tables because family is important. You have strict instructions given to parents, you have the prohibition for example of marriages with unbelievers, so first you have the prohibition of marriage with those who are not of the faith. Second, you have in the Mosaic law the prohibition of marriages with people who may be of the faith but represent and inferior background. There is to be in other words no integration with them even in worship. So that in the Mosaic Law some peoples were not to be included in any common congregation until the 3rd generation, in other cases the 10th generation. The 10th generation would be several centuries. Why? Because these people coming from a much lower, much inferior background genealogically, hereditary wise, it would take centuries of faith and of the standards of faith to produce genetically the same character and caliber and superior strength. So that, some people had to be kept out of the congregation till the 3rd generation, others till the 10th.
So the Bible is not at all equalitarian.Start at 31:00 minute
mark,http://chalcedon.edu/research/audio/prisoners-of-hope-2/
“St Paul referred to the broader meaning of these laws against hybridization… (Deut.22:10), in II Corinthians 6:14: ‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?’ Unequal yoking plainly means mixed marriages between believers and unbelievers is clearly forbidden. But Deuteronomy 22:10 not only forbids unequal yoking by inference, and as a case law, but also unequal yoking generally. This means that an unequal marriage between believers or between unbelievers is wrong. Man was created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26), and woman is the reflected image of God in man, and from man (1 Cor. 11:1-12; Gen. 2:18, 21-23). ‘Helpmeet’ means a reflection or a mirror, an image of man, indicating that a woman must have something religiously and culturally in common with her husband.
The burden of the law is thus against inter-religious, inter-racial, and inter-cultural marriages, in that they normally go against the very community which marriage is designed to establish. Unequal yoking means more than marriage. In society at large it means the enforced integration of various elements which are not congenial. Unequal yoking is in no realm productive of harmony; rather, it aggravates the differences and delays the growth of the different elements toward a Christian harmony and association. … Cross-cultural marriages are thus normally a failure… A man can identify character within his culture, but he cannot do more than identify the general character of another culture.”
R.J. Rushdoony,
The Institutes of Biblical Law:
“Moreover, if she is to be ‘a help as before him,’ a mirror, there must be a common cultural background. This militates against marriages across cultures and across races where there is no common culture or association possible.
The new unit is a continuation of the old unit but an independent one; and there has to be a unity or else it is not a marriage. Thus, the attempt of many today to say there is nothing in the Bible against mixed marriages whether religiously or culturally is altogether unfounded. We do not have to go to the Mosaic law (Exodus and Deuteronomy) to demonstrate that, because here in the very beginning (Genesis) we are told that she must be a help meet—bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh—sharing his faith, sharing a common background, a common culture, a common desire to fulfill his calling under God. This, then, is the meaning of marriage in the Biblical sense.”
R.J. Rushdoony,
The Doctrine of Marriage
“Men remain feeling guilty, for a false sense of guilt has no cure save the truth, and this is not forthcoming. Since the citizens are now guilt-ridden because of their education and political indoctrination, they are more amenable to robbery, and even murder. If the white man feels guilty towards the Negro, he is less capable of defending himself against the Negroes who turn into a revolutionary rabble, bent on theft and murder. The state finds it easier to rob men when men feel guilty for what they are and have, and the state drones on and on about the needs of the poor of the nation and of the world.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Politics of Guilt and Pity – pg 46
“The U.N. position, ostensibly anti-racist, is no less racist than the most fervent champions of race in history. Indeed, the liberal, religion of humanity faith is simply a form of racism. There are two kinds of racism today. For the first, to belong to a particular race, white or black, Jewish or Arab, is all-important. Membership in a particular group is itself a mark of distinction and discrimination, and constitutes the dividing line. For the second form of racism, to belong to the human race is all-important. For both positions, racial membership is the test, the ticket of admission and the guarantee of status. Against this expanded or liberal form of racism, as against all forms of racism, orthodox Christianity enters a dissent. For the Christian, character, born of faith, is the test of man, not a particular race or the human race. Racial differences are recognized as real and as God-given, but the determinative fact concerning man is his relationship to God, not the fact of his humanity. This is the Biblical position; it is also the position which makes for progress by emphasizing quality. Quality is sought out and emulated. A people, discriminated against at one time, by emulation advance themselves, as witness the Irish in America. Therefore, in no uncertain terms, the orthodox Christian must regard the universal racism of the U.N. as a menace, destructive of the Christian faith and detrimental to man.
R.J. Rushdoony,
The Nature of the American System, p. 142
“Man is now defined as humanity rather than the individual, and this great one, humanity, to be truly a unity, must exist as one state. In this picture, any assertion of individuality, local or national independence, or the reality of races, is viewed with hostility and as a sign of mental sickness; it is an assertion of plurality which challenges the reality and unity of the universal.“
R.J. Rushdoony
The One and the Many, p.17
“That phrase (Judeo-Christian) should be anathema to any conservative Christian, because “Judeo-Christian heritage” involves a contradiction in terms. The Judaic heritage is Phariseeism. And this we have no part of. Nor can we ever subscribe to it. Whenever you have such a phrase, you have Modernism or ignorance. You have social gospel which is a form of Phariseeism. And no Christian should use this phrase.
The phrase “Hebrew-Christian Heritage” is acceptable. But when you say “Christian” you are talking about the Old and New Testament. So you don’t need to have a prefix. But Christian heritage, or the Biblical heritage is sufficient. But “Judeo-Christian” is nonsense. It is comparable to the expression “Christian Atheism” which is beginning to pop up. I was using that term a year ago to express the idea of contradiction, but I find now articles written about “Christian Atheism”. There’s nothing impossible with some people now a days.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Audio
Rushdoony cites,
‘This is George Crocker’s column for May 22, in the Examiner – Sunday Examiner. Once a week his columns appear.”
~ Rushdoony Quoting From and Reading George Crocker’s column,
Prejudice? Not at all. Why some of my best friends are liberals. I mean they talk liberalism. I mean I am invited to dinner parties at which charming people certify their own credentials as liberals. This is done by dropping into the conversations the stock cliches about ghettos and by going on record in favor of forced integration of public schools and residential areas. There was a gentleman sipping at cocktails munching on hors d’oeuvres as he expounded on the need to close the cultural gap. Integrated housing was the answer he thought. If different races live in the same block or apartment house they will observe how others deport themselves and all (indecipherable) will tend to disappear.
“You have a good idea there,” I said. “Think of all the people who could benefit by watching you and your family deport yourself. What a shame that your home is tucked away in Hillsboro. Now, Bill, I nominate you to lead the way.”
He glared at me as if I had struck a low blow.
There was the lady at my right at dinner who spent the entire salad course telling me about an article she had read. The author, a sociologist, had explained why defacto segregation in the schools must cease. In a mixed classroom the less bright children are stimulated by the bright ones but the latter are not slowed down at all. “The culturally deprived ones” (it was her term not mine) “acquire better habits while emulating the ones from better homes but the latter are not led into worse habits by associating every day with the farmer. Psychology has discovered this,” she informed me.
“Yes … yes,” I said. “I am familiar with the theory.”
She was chewing a piece of Belgian endive. My tone seemed to disconcert her.
The tempo of chewing decelerated…. then stopped. “Do you dispute it”, she asked.
“Tell me”, I replied, “don’t you think the theory should be tested by the people who advocate them and not by people who don’t believe in them?”
She put her fork down.
“Now I know what you’re getting at. Yes, we do send our Son to a private school. We can afford it and – well I don’t say it because I am the Mother; the Pediatrician as said it from the first, – our Son has a unusually quick mind and he should have special attention. And, well, we believe in integration and all that but ….”
“No need to explain,” I told her. “The Kennedys never do. Nor the Roosevelts, the Scrantons, the Lindseys , nor a thousand other rich liberal clans I could name.”
I was mistaken. Lindseys has been smoked out of the bushes. Last month, a heckler asked, “Why do you send your four children to private schools instead of New York public schools?” The Chairman quickly adjourned the meeting.
Last Sunday, Lindsey was ready when the question came on TV.
Because he is Mayor, he said, he wants his children to have the highest degree of privacy.
He neglected to mention that his children went to private schools before he was Mayor too.
The sociologists theory is being tested in this country but not on the children on the Lindseys or any of the wealthy liberals I know.”
-End Rushdoony’s reading of Crocker’s article-
Rushdoony comments
“Which I think is well put.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Audio
“No, there is no connection. They don’t pretend to be Biblical, they’ll just read something in order to say they’ve read the Bible. As a matter of fact, the early church was segregated. First of all, in New Testament times it was segregated between the Jewish believers and the Gentile believers. And there was… a good reason for that. The Jewish believers were so far superior that to integrate the two would have meant more often confusion. And when you realize that in, say the Corinthian church, they didn’t even know that fornication or adultery was a sin because in the Greek world there was nothing wrong with that. After all the chambers of commerce in Greece and Corinth and elsewhere… in Corinth the chambers of commerce maintained regularly around two thousand prostitutes for all visiting businessmen. It was a manufacturing town and so on… and no one thought there was anything immoral about that. Or about men having relations with prostitutes. This was all taken for granted. So in the Gentile churches the moral standard was pretty low. It was a lot of hard work for a couple of generations and more to bring them up to any kind of standard. Well, the Jewish congregations represented a far higher moral standard and Paul saw nothing wrong with that, nor did any other apostle. So the principle of segregation was present there from the beginning.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Audio – On Segregation
Today there are both liberals and conservatives that categorically deny that there is even such a thing as race. Now of course you and I have both encountered that. It is given the scientific respectability and a number of scientists ridicule the idea that there are such things as races. Well, some of the races of the world are championed because they insist on their integrity, and we’re told that we cannot believe in it. So it’s a very very absurd and contradictory situation.
Otto Scott: Well, it’s much like Dr. Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley. When Berkeley said that “Nothing material is real”. Johnson kicked a stone and said “I refute him thus”. And those who say there are no races should look around. There are obvious differences in humanity which go far beyond the verbal. It’s bigotry to even mention the existence of the White race. The term arouses suspicion. And of course to say that you’re a Christian … means that many doors automatically close and many minds close as well.”
R. J. Rushdoony & Otto Scott
Audio – On Race
“Thus it would appear from the evidence of the law that, first, a restrictive membership or citizenship was a part of the practice of Israel by law. There is evidence of a like standard in the NT church: instead of being forced into a rigid uniformity, Gentiles and Jews were free to establish their separ…ate congregations and maintain their distinctive character. Moreover, Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem, makes clear that the differences in cultural heritage and stages of moral andspiritual growth made possible major conflicts in case of uniform membership. As a result, separate congregations were authorized. On the other hand, Jews were not barred from Gentile congregations, so that, while restrictive groups were valid, integrated groups were not invalid.”
~ Dr. Rushdoony,
Institutes of Biblical Law_, pps.99-100
“Identification [declaring all people identical] is used as a means of negating the particularity of the law, and of reducing it to nonsense by merging all reality into one inseparable unity. Unity, identification, is thus a substitute for law and truth by its erasure of all boundaries…
Justice then ceases to become the function of government, and identification by enforced equalization is the goal. In the Negro problem in the Southern States, the concern of federal action is less and less civil justice and more and more identification. That the Negro should have justice is certain, but compulsive identification is not justice and is actually injustice, and can obscure radically the Negro’s just claims before the law… The “freedom” which Dr. King envisions is not merely freedom from domination or discrimination but a freedom from difference. This is the heart of the matter, and in every stratum of society, there is a lust for “a freedom from difference” and a resentment against any who claim such a right…
As a result, the inevitable outcome of the practice of identification is the growth of moral detachment. Since the concept is basically anti-ethical, it culminates in an unconcern with moral issues. As yet, in the West, the Christian inheritance is responsible for an extensive hangover of moralism, at present used as a facade and justification for identification… It destroys the meaning of both particularity and universality… The particular loses meaning, in that the whole alone is real, and the whole, having no real differentiation, becomes an empty universal, and moral categories disappear in the face of moral relativism. The ultimate outcome, therefore, of identification in Western society will be, if its inherent logic triumphs, the rise of a radical inhumanity and the collapse of all true progress as total relativism takes over…
With most peoples there can and must be a separate but peaceful co-existence…
A nation bent on the world establishment of the concept of identification will operate on the premise that the goal must be unity or union and will work to that end, sacrificing itself constantly in terms of that hoped-for consummation. But a nation aware that some issues are irreconcilable, while avoiding any ungodly plunge into conflict, will recognize that there can be no compromise, and that peaceful co-existence in such instances is an illusion…
The biblical summons to holiness is thus a call to separation.
R.J. Rushdoony,
The Politics of Guilt and Pity, pp.80-86
“Paul…makes clear that mixed marriages between believers and unbelievers are forbidden. It is unequal yoking. For Paul the meaning of mixed marriages is religious. Men have often opposed marriages which bridge class barriers, i.e., the nobility and the commoners, or upper class with lower classes. Again, the mixed marriages problem is viewed racially. Paul concerns himself with neither; these he leaves to the realm of personal or historical considerations. It is religiously mixed marriages of believers with unbelievers which is forbidden as unequal yoking.”
R. J Rushdoony
Systematic Theology Vol. II pg. 971
This quote begins with a quote by historian Kenneth Stammp from his book ‘The Peculiar Institution,’ from there Rushdoony dissects Stammp’s statement.
“Today we are learning much from the natural and social sciences about the Negro’s potentialities and about the basic irrelevance of race, and we are slowly discovering the roots and meaning of human behavior. All this is of immense value to the historian when, or example, he tries to grasp the significance of the Old South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ I have assumed that the slaves were merely human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less. This gives quite a new and different meaning to the bondage of black men; it give their story a relevance to men of all races which it never seemed to have before.”
Rushdoony next unmasks the universalist abstractions propagated by Stammp that wind up undermining, in fact denying history:
“If Negroes are only ‘white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less,’ then, conversely, white men are only Negroes with white skins, nothing more, nothing less. this means that all cultural differences, hereditary predispositions, and historical traditions are irrelevant and meaningless. It means, in other words, that history is meaningless. And how can one be an historian if it is his purpose to deny history?
The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture, and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires. Although the white man may reject this faith and subject himself instead to the requirements of humanism, he is still a product of this Christian past. The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity is governed by radically different consideration. Elizabeth E. Hoyt has cited Dr. Simon Biesheuvel’s comparisons, a deliberately extreme contrast, to pinpoint certain cultural ideas, African and Western. From Tennyson’s Ulysses is cited ‘a typically Western expression of man’s purpose’:
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought…
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars, until I die…
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
By contrast, illustrating what Africans call Negritutde, is “the following cry from Aimee Cesaire of Martinique’:
Hurray for those who have never invented anything.
Hurray for those who have never explored anything.
Hurray for those who have never conquered anything.
But who in awe give themselves up to the essence of things.
Not intent on conquest, but playing the play of the world.
This contrast is an oversimplification, and one designed to be flattering to both races, but it does indicate the reality of racial differences. Men like Stampp would, of course, seek to negate every historical citation of differences as merely ‘cultural differences.’ The men behind the respective cultures are the same men. It is therefore held to be wrong to cite histories against any race.
A more absurd position can scarcely be imagined. If you and I have our histories abstracted from us, and our heredities as well, along with all our cultural conditioning and responses, we are no longer men, no longer human beings, but an abstract and theoretical concept of man. No real history of us can then be written. Stampp’s Negroes are thus neither black men nor white men: they are an abstraction, but an abstraction to illustrate the devil in Stampp’s humanistic morality play.”
R. J. Rushdoony
20th Century Reformed Theologian
“The Biblical Philosophy of History” – pg. 88-89
“Ah, yes … uh, true, God has created the diversity of mankind and therefore each of the Christian cultures will begin with the sovereignty of God and the authority of His Word but there are areas where their particular talents and diversities will be expressed, so that, even as I, for example, have aptitudes in certain areas while a very dear friend of mine has aptitude in another area and is every bit as zealous for the Sovereignty of God as I am but when he talks in the area of sciences he loses me in about the second or third sentence. But he is applying the word of God in the context of his situation. Now that’s a little more extreme than cultures or nations, but there is no question that different peoples have different aptitudes and abilities. We tend today, just as I.Q. tests are today artificially constructed so that they will eliminate sexual differences (women will come out ahead in most fields except the two I mentioned) and racial differences because their are variations.People of one ethnic background will have marked abilities in one area and not as marked in other areas, but they don’t want to believe that there are these differences you see, therefore they try to eliminate them. Well, in a Godly culture we will consider those as blessings of God to be developed.”
R. J. Rushdoony
The New Absolutism – 44:00 minute mark.
” [The] Bible makes clear that God does not permit us to despise heredity and background. That God does not permit immediate integration of all peoples. For example, in Deuteronomy 23:2-3 the Amalekites and the Moabites were banned from the congregation to the tenth generation, because of their background and spiritual and moral degeneracy. The Edomites, verses 7-8 of Deuteronomy 23, were barred till the third generation. And yet at the same time the hatred of an Edomite was declared to be a sin in front of God.
Thus these people could not be detested, or despised or hated, but they could not be brought immediately into the congregation, they had to worship separately in some cases to the tenth generation, and others to the third generation. So that they have a background of segregated worship and of character for so many generation before they could be integrated with the Congregation of Israel. And this is a part of Gods law. “
Rousas John Rushdoony, “Tents of Shem”
http://www.pocketcollege.com/…/086%20…/RR115E10.html