Liberating Planet Earth

For political religions, for humanism, evil is in the environment,
and the state’s power to change that environment is its saving
grace. The state must remake man’s physical and spiritual environment
in order to change and save man. Social change in terms
of the state’s plan is statist grace in operation. The bad environment
must be destroyed in order to free man. This evil environment
sometimes involves persons and institutions, such as the
bourgeoisie, capitalists, the clergy, Christians, churches, private
organizations, private enterprise, and so on. All these may have
to be, and frequently are, “liquidated” or destroyed as part of the
process of salvation. Those persons remaining must be “reeducated”
in terms of the new creed and out of Christianity.
For Biblical Christianity, the answer to the problem of evil is
God’s grace, the grace of God through Jesus Christ and the restitution
of all things. Man’s problem is not his environment but sin,
man’s desire to be his own god, his own law and principle of ultimacy.
Man cannot save himself, either by politics, works of law or
morality, or by any other means. Jesus Christ is man’s only savior.
Man must live under God’s law order in order to live freely and
happily, but the law order cannot save man, nor will that law
order long survive, if there be not a sizable body of believers
whose life is the law of God. Basic to true order therefore is grace.
Without grace, man lacks the character to develop his potentialities,
capitalize his activities, and order his life.
R. J. Rushdoony*
* Rushdoony, The Founaidiom of Social” OrG%Y (Fairfax, VA: Thoburn Press
[1968] 1978), pp. 222-23.