Rousas John Rushdoony Quotes

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Every law-order is in a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Love is total acceptance of everything. It means then that you have to accept everything, tolerate everything, it means that there is no discrimination with respect to good and evil, right and wrong. This is the modern definition of love, and of course it is thoroughly anti Christian.

Rousas John Rushdoony
To the humanistic mind these penalties seem severe and unnecessary. In actuality, the penalties, together with the Biblical faith which motivated them, worked to reduce crime. Thus, when New England passed laws requiring the death penalty for incorrigible delinquents and for children who struck their parents, no executions were necessary: the law kept the children in line.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The matriarchal society is thus the decadent and broken. The strongly matriarchal character of Negro life is due to the moral failure of Negro men, their failure to be responsible, to support the family, or to provide authority. The same is true of American Indian tribes which are also matriarchal today.

Rousas John Rushdoony
First of all we forget that one of the most common forms of divorce in the Bible and in all of history has been divorce by death, by execution. We are not used to thinking of divorce in such terms, but consider this. In the Old Testament, if a man were guilty of adultery, or a woman, they were executed. And we saw last week as we studied the New Testament teaching that adultery is in terms of New Testament law still a crime that calls for death. Now it does not exist, and therefore special provisions were made for those social orders wherein no such offense incurred the death penalty. As a matter of fact this is how the penitential system developed.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Adam was created mature, and we are born as babies and developed. However the basic nature that is in us is not one of immaturity, but of one of maturity! The idea of child psychology was totally unknown until a couple of centuries ago. And until that time there was no such thing as the kind of child we have today. But a modern child is a creation of the modern age!

Rousas John Rushdoony
We are moving towards a situation in which Statism wants to suppress in one area after another, the freedom of Christians to be charitable. In my lifetime, many, many of the things, institutions and agencies that once marked the Christian scene are now gone. They have been ruled out as unfit. Meanwhile the attitude of the state is an interesting one. It is less and less concerned with morality, with anything that deals directly and without restrictions with problems. I think we can see what is happening in one sphere after another, but perhaps best of all in the courts.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Well, we have a major crisis because Welfarism is failing. The Christian community must begin to reestablish Christian charity. I think every church could begin as a number of black churches have done, with the people in their area or their own members relatives, friends, who are in desperate need. If every church in this country, it has been said by a statistician, could take care of three families the problem would disappear. Well, there are big churches that could take care of more than three families. And those that can take care of only one or half a family, those churches could come together and accomplish a great deal.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The Western mind and culture, in all its advances, is a product of biblical religion. It is a religious, not a racial, product.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Homosexuality is thus very clearly presented as that sexual practice which culminates apostasy in hostility towards God, it is war against God. It is a denial of Gods natural order and law in the ultimate form.

Rousas John Rushdoony
... what is built today has as Saint Paul declared, all the earmarks of a homosexual culture. That is, a culture at war with God and God's reality, and is therefore under the judgment of God, who, knowing the judgement of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same but have pleasure in them that do them.

Rousas John Rushdoony
In the name of toleration, the believer is asked to associate on a common level of total acceptance with the atheist, the pervert, the criminal, and the adherents of other religions as though no differences existed.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The Negro moved from an especially harsh slavery, which included cannibalism, to a milder form. Much is said about the horrors of the slave ships, many of which were very bad, but it is important to remember that slaves were valuable cargo and hence property normally handled with consideration.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Whereas in Scripture all men are descendants of Adam, in evolutionary thought, all men are possibly descendants of very differing evolutionary sources. Common descent in Adam meant a common creation, nature, and responsibility under God. The idea of multiple origins proved divisive. The human race was no longer the human race! It was a collection of possibly human races, a very different doctrine.

Rousas John Rushdoony
An employer therefore has a property right to prefer whom he will, and he can prefer whom he will in terms of color, creed, race, or national origin.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Now we have New Age thinking infiltrating our law, our courts, our schools in that everyone chooses his own values and those are good for him. And the same was for a long time, but you could do anything you chose, just as long as you did not do physical harm to someone against his own will.

Rousas John Rushdoony
... at this point the Catholic church and the various other churches, and there are a number of them, that take the stand of no divorce are definitely not in terms of scripture, at this point they are trying to be holier than God, which I believe is a fearful offense. Now their point is that for these grounds separation is permissible, but this is not in terms of scripture, because scripture clearly permits remarriage.

Rousas John Rushdoony
... homosexual culture is bitterly hostile to the family and to small town culture, the stability. Today it controls very largely, this is recognized by many writers, the world of fashions and the world of publishing. And it uses these two media, communications and styles, to war against the family and small town culture against the law and against standards. The canons of homosexual culture today are the standards of the Jet-set, very emphatically, and more and more of all society. The homosexual culture today is infecting the world at large.

Rousas John Rushdoony
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.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The creation mandate was precisely the requirement that man subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it. There is not one word of Scripture to indicate or imply that this mandate ever was revoked. There is every word of Scripture to declare that this mandate must and shall be fulfilled. Those who attempt to break it shall themselves be broken.

Rousas John Rushdoony
If creationism is at all weakened, the doctrine of salvation is weakened. Thus it is that in evangelical circles today, because there is a pervasive compromise there is a progressive weakening and instruction of the doctrine of salvation. Creation and salvation are different sides of the same coin. God has created man, God alone can redeem him. If we tamper with the doctrine of creation we have proportionally weakened the doctrine of salvation. Thus in our understanding of both the doctrine of man and the doctrine of salvation we must begin with a class, if God in the beginning, created man by his fathomed word on the sixth day of creation brought him into being. Our history is sure, it is well known, it is fully declared in scripture.

Rousas John Rushdoony
All who are content with a humanistic law system... are guilty of idolatry... they are asking us to serve other gods.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life.

Rousas John Rushdoony
I, some years back, knew a couple of men who did go and who had all kinds of allusions about the exotic Far East, one a young man, college age, the other an older man. And it was a shattering experience for them that they suppressed, because it told them about the reality of evil and the reality of man as a fallen creatures which they did not want to admit. And I think their suppression of the reality marks our age. We do not want, as an age, to know what evil is, unless, of course, it was Hitler and we killed him and now we just mope up on a few of these extremists.

Rousas John Rushdoony
Love in scripture is the fulfilling of the law. It involves the keeping of the ten commandments. Love to God is keeping the whole ten commandments, love to our neighbor is keeping the second table of the law. To respect his right to life, to home, to property, to reputation; in word, thought, and deed. So that, as Saint Paul sums it up, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The only true order is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion.

Rousas John Rushdoony
... there are sometimes [in mixed marriages] some genetic advantages, there are sometimes genetic disadvantages, but there are generally markedly social disadvantages which tend to warp the child's entire life. And these social factors are extremely strong. So in countries where you do have this kind of group, they do represent a rather bitter and an unhappy group, a rebellious group.

Rousas John Rushdoony
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.

Rousas John Rushdoony
The Irish moved from semi-slavery in Ireland to freedom in America only a few years before the Negro gained emancipation. After a century and a quarter, or less, the Irish are a leading power in the United States, and the Negroes remain on the lowest strata. The basic difference between the Irish and the Negro has not been color: it has been character. The Negroes demand more aid, i. e., more slavery and slave-care, and dwell on their sufferings. The Irish have instead looked to the present and future and helped shape America. It is a significant difference that cannot be explained altogether by color or environment. The Chinese also came to the United States under very difficult circumstances and similarly overcame them.

Rousas John Rushdoony