CRAIGforCONGRESS

Missouri's 7th District, U.S. House of Representatives

  
 

 

 

Liberty Under God
DEPENDS ON
Self-Government



Congress should
  • not equate government with "the government"
  • allow individuals to govern themselves

James Madison, "the Father of the Constitution," is reported to have said this:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves ... according to the Ten Commandments of God.

America's Founders were agreed that a large government was not only undesirable, but completely ineffective in creating or maintaining order among a people who were devoid of self-government as judged by the standards of Christian morality, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."

This is why education was important, and why the primary function of public schools, according to America's Founders, was to teach religion and morality.

Americans today turn to "the government" -- the State -- to create order and salvation because they will not submit to the Laws of God.

Read the words of America's Founders here.


Aspects of Self-Government

The Ten Commandments prohibit:

1. Idolatry
2. False Religion
3. Swearing a false oath
4. Refusal to work
5. Disrespecting parents and other authorities
6. Murder, violence
7. Cheating on your Wife
8. Theft
9. Slander
10. Covetousness

For more than 300 years -- roughly 1600-1900 -- "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- that is, the Bible -- permeated America's schools and American culture. These laws are the foundation of civilization. Industry, commerce, social harmony, charity, and education are impossible without them. More than a billion people on earth live in poverty and ignorance because their culture is rooted in magic and envy rather than true religion. By creating a Christian Theocracy, America's Founding Fathers laid the foundation for ordered liberty, economic prosperity, and peaceful, dependable social relations. "The Government" can safely be abolished if we have self-government, and it will only be those who cherish the liberty to government themselves according to the commandments of God that will obey the duty found in the Declaration of Independence to abolish tyranny.


"The Biblical Doctrine of Government"
By Rev. R. J. Rushdoony
(adapted from Politics of Guilt and Pity, The Craig Press, 1970)

One of the most revealing and deadly linguistic errors of our time is the equation of the word "government" with "state." When the average person, and indeed almost every man, hears references to "government," he immediately thinks of the state. This usage is a relatively modern one. There was a time when, in common usage, especially among the Puritans, the term for the state was "civil government." Government in itself was a much broader concept.

Government meant, first of all, the self-government of the Christian man. The basic government is self-government, and only the Christian man is truly free and, hence, able properly to exercise self-government. A free social order rests on the premise that self-government is the basic government in the human order, and that any weakening of or decline in self-government means a decline in responsibility and the rise of tyranny and slavery.

Second, next to self-government is another basic form of government, the family. The family is man's first state, church, and school. It is the institution which provides the basic structure of his existence and most governs his activities. Man is reared in a family and then establishes a family, passing from the governed to the governing in a framework which extensively and profoundly shapes his concept of himself and of life in general.

Third, the church is a government and an important one, not only in its exercise of discipline but in its religious and moral influence on the minds of men. Even men outside the church are extensively governed in each era, even if only in a negative sense, by the stand of the church. The failure of the church to provide Biblical government has deadly repercussions on a culture.

Fourth, the school is a government, and a very important one. The desire of statists to control education rests on the knowledge of the school's significant part in the government of man. For formal education to be surrendered to the state is thus a basic surrender of man's self-government.

Fifth, a man's vocation, his business, work, profession, or calling, is an important government. A man is governed by the conditions of his vocation or work. In terms of it, he will educate himself, uproot his family and travel to another community, spend most of his waking hours in its service, and continually work therein to attain greater mastery and advancement. Vocations are both areas of government over man and, at the same time, a central area of self-government.

Sixth, private associations are important forms of government. These can include a man's neighborhood, his friends, voluntary organizations, strangers he must meet daily, and other like associations. A man dresses, speaks, thinks, and acts in an awareness of these associations, with a desire to be congenial, to further a given faith or cause, or to enhance his social status. These associations have a major governing influence on man, but they can also be means and areas whereby he exercises his government over others, influencing or directing them.

Seventh, another area of government is civil government, or the state. The state is thus one government among many, and to make the state equivalent to government per se is destructive of liberty and of life. The governmental area of the state must be strictly limited lest all government be destroyed by the tyranny of one realm. The issue in the persecution of the early church was the resistance of the Christians to the totalitarian claims of the state. The Christians were asked to sacrifice to the genius of the emperor, i.e., to offer incense to him. This, in its earlier forms, was not a recognition of the deity of the emperor, because only the dead emperor was deified upon approval of the senate. It was a recognition that the state, in the person of the emperor, was the mediating and governing institution between the gods and men, and that all life and government was under the jurisdiction of the state. Religious liberty was available to the church upon the recognition of that premise. The Roman Empire, in other words, like the modern state, assumed that it had the right to deny or to grant religious liberty because religion, like every other sphere of human activity, was a department under the state. The church denied this. Christians defended themselves as the most law-abiding citizens and subjects of the Empire, ever faithful in prayer for those in authority, but they denied the right of the state to govern the church. The church, directly under God, cannot submit itself to any government other than that of Jesus Christ. This was the issue.

Abuses of order within the church are no more under the government of the state than abuses within the state are under the government of the church, and the same is true of every other realm of government-family, church, school, business, and the like. Reformed theologians restricted the right of rebellion against an unjust order within the state to a legitimate order within that state, i.e., to other civil magistrates, who in the name of the law moved to correct the abuses of civil order.

The various spheres are interlocking and interdependent and yet independent. Thus, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 deals with the death penalty for a juvenile delinquent. The parents do not have the power of the sword, i.e., of capital punishment. Upon reporting the incorrigible nature of their son to the city elders, the parents carried their governmental authority to its limits. The elders, upon confirmation of the charges, then assumed their jurisdiction, capital punishment for what was now, upon report, a civil offense. Clearly, the various spheres do not exist in a vacuum; they are interlocking, but the integrity of each is nonetheless real.


Rev. R. J. Rushdoony was chairman of the board of Chalcedon and a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical Law to society.


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Copyright ©2000 Chalcedon Inc., PO Box 158, Vallecito, CA, 95251

Taken from Publisher's Foreword: "The Biblical Doctrine of Government"
http://web.archive.org/web/20011222140532/http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/2000mar/rushdoony_doctrine_government.htm



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