Our Threatened Freedom

Are We A Suicidal People? (03:36)

R.J. Rushdoony

Transcript:

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 Are we a suicidal people? This is RJ Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom. In the early days of spring the administration finally proposed an anti missile system which should have been proposed 20 years ago. The technology to provide a means of destroying nuclear missiles before they ever reached the United States has been known for some time. This is not all. The United States has no real civil defense system. We are open to and virtually helpless before a nuclear attack.

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:39 In addition to this, the proposed anti missile system called the High Frontier Strategy well actually make national defense markedly cheaper. All this and more has been spelled out by Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham in his book “High Frontier, A New National Strategy.” It is a sound reasonable and sensible system of defense. However, no sooner was this strategy announced in the press and letter writers began to attack it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:14 Having read “High Frontiers,” it was obvious to me that the critics had not read it, did not know what it was about and that they were expressing wild and hysterical reactions. In fact, I find the critics of “High Frontiers” more to be fair than the Soviet Union and its atomic or nuclear weapons.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:37 These people react with total suspicion towards any and every defense strategy ever suggested. To hear them talk, we have little to fear from Moscow and everything to fear from our own military leaders. I find this to be a paranoid reaction, to put it mildly. Moreover, it is certainly suicidal. Such people are hostile to any kind of defense and regard defense as a form of aggression. One writer said of the end time missile strategy, “I find it hard to believe that these new weapons are defensive.” The plain fact is that the “High Frontier” strategy gives us simply a device to eliminate missiles in space long before they reach our cities.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:29 They do not start another arms race, as someone else charged, but are an anti arms strategy. Another person objected to this “High Frontier” strategy because he said “It would not be,” he felt, “100% effective, but perhaps only 95% effective.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:50 Even if he were right, would it not be better to have only five missiles reach our cities rather than 100? There is no logic behind such thing. Such people claim to be against nuclear war on four peaks and against high military budgets in favor of cheaper one. What we have here a strategy to give them in five years, a good safeguard against nuclear weapons on a lower budget, and they react hysterically against it. Such a reaction is suicidal, and it insures death not freedom. This has been RJ Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965.  His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.”  He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder