The crisis in modern law and politics cannot be solved by elections or new personnel, because it is rooted in false premises. Contemporary legislation is largely ad hoc designed to address immediate problems in convenient and popular ways, without reference to enduring moral truth. Such laws accumulate, create new problems, and remain in force long after their failures are evident.

Law, however, is never neutral. It is always an expression of morality and therefore of religion. Modern politics denies fixed moral standards, replacing them with pragmatic and subjective values in which each individual becomes his own lawgiver. This philosophy undermines justice, excuses criminal behavior, and produces moral and legal anarchy, even as governments spend ever more to control lawlessness.

Because legislation now aims to satisfy voters rather than uphold justice, morality declines while disorder and debt increase. Without a return to God’s law, no society can maintain a stable foundation. Courageous leaders may resist this decline, but lasting reform requires moral conviction throughout society, especially within the church. A people cannot be healed by borrowed courage; only a restored moral foundation can sustain law and freedom.

Modern politics, the author argues, is no longer constitutional but evolutionary. According to contemporary evolutionary thinking, man has moved from being shaped by blind natural processes to actively directing evolution itself through science and the state. Politics thus becomes the management of human development population control, eugenics, genetic planning, and biological regulation all justified as progress.

This worldview ignores decisive factors such as faith, family, and moral character, reducing humanity to material data and statistics. Social problems are explained biologically or environmentally, while the stabilizing power of religion and community is dismissed. As a result, policies such as abortion, population limits, and directed breeding are defended as evolutionary “goods.”

The essay concludes that evolutionary politics leads inevitably to total control of man by man through the state. Creationism, by contrast, affirms man as created in God’s image and accountable to Him, grounding freedom in divine authority rather than human planning. Unless churches defend creation and redemption in Christ, political evolutionism will steadily erode both faith and liberty.

The modern state is increasingly expected to save society from moral evils such as addiction, crime, and social decay, yet these problems are spiritual, not political or medical. Laws, science, and bureaucracy cannot supply character or regenerate man, but they are repeatedly treated as substitutes for God.

As morality is replaced by medical and social explanations, responsibility shifts from individuals to the state. Science and education serve this new faith, expanding government power under the guise of compassion. The result is a custodial state that claims redemptive authority.

Scripture denies the natural goodness of man or government, teaching that only God saves and sustains. As faith in the state grows, freedom declines and confusion increases. True restoration comes only by turning from this false messiah to God and seeking the city He builds, not modern Babel.

Modern politics is built on the false belief that the state can save man. As A. J. P. Taylor noted, socialism assumes human perfectibility, an idea that collapses once sin and human limitation are acknowledged. From a biblical perspective, man cannot remake man; only God’s regenerating grace can bring true change.

This political faith is a modern form of Gnosticism, claiming that salvation comes through elite knowledge and state power. Democracy and religion are kept in outward form but redefined by ruling elites, while those who reject political salvation especially Christians are increasingly treated as enemies. The state, meant to administer justice, has become a substitute savior, steadily expanding its control.

The result is disillusionment and loss of freedom. Politics promises redemption but delivers oppression, as men look to the state for what only God can give. True renewal comes not through revolution or political power, but through submission to Christ, who alone is the source of wisdom, justice, and life.

Elitism often goes hand in hand with equalitarianism, as seen in Marxism and in Plato’s Republic, both of which deny the biblical view of man. Plato’s model called for rule by philosopher-kings, the abolition of property and family autonomy, and total control of education and culture, all to suppress individualism and enforce obedience.

Modern elitism continues this pattern through state control, claiming that man is infinitely malleable, denying original sin, and redefining happiness as service to social goals. The elite present themselves as reason incarnate: agreement is labeled rational, while dissent is treated as deviance. Though they profess love for the masses, elitists privately despise them and resent the independence created by free markets and social mobility.

This mindset dominates politics, academia, and even the church, where abstract “principles” and esoteric interpretations replace obedience to God’s concrete commands. Elitism is ultimately a religious system rooted in Greek abstraction rather than the authority of the triune God. Scripture calls not for submission to elites but for faithfulness to God’s law, reminding us that true wisdom begins with “the fear of the Lord.”

Aristocracy means “rule by the best,” but history shows that societies have defined “the best” in very different ways. From philosopher-kings and feudal nobles to country gentlemen, saints, and intellectual elites, true aristocracy has rarely rested on power alone. At its strongest, it ruled by moral authority, honor, service, and example rather than force.

When aristocracies abandoned responsibility or developed contempt for the people whether among feudal nobles, Marxist rulers, or modern cultural elites they ceased to be “the best” and became destructive. Jefferson’s hope for a “natural aristocracy” based on talent and service in America eventually degenerated into an isolated and arrogant clerisy, illustrating how pride marks the decline of leadership.

In the modern world, celebrities and political strongmen function as a hollow aristocracy, while respect for authority has largely vanished. The paper concludes that societies receive the rulers they deserve: when people reject moral responsibility, rule by the worst follows. True “rule by the best” can only exist where men and women submit themselves to God’s authority and govern their lives accordingly.

Rushdoony argues that memory personal and cultural is essential to being fully human: when memory collapses (as in senility), a person can remain socially polished yet be stripped of identity, continuity, and direction. He extends that to cultures: history is “social memory,” and when a society becomes present-obsessed and contemptuous of the past, it heads toward cultural senility barbarism because “people who have no past have no future.”

He warns that modern humanistic education and media intentionally warp or replace historical memory. Marxists (and “neo-Marxists”) understood that to create a “new man,” you must rewrite the past; and he claims the broader humanistic project does something similar by swapping history for “social science” a naturalistic, God-purged framework that treats society as an experiment shaped by experts. The result isn’t a higher civilization but a population of “barbarians” people detached from inheritance, meaning, and responsibility made easier to mold into whatever elite rulers want (echoing Orwell’s themes).

His proposed recovery is explicitly theological: history must be approached as a theological science because God not man is Creator and Determiner; therefore genuine cultural memory begins with conversion, Scripture, and seeing man’s story (creation, fall, redemption) rightly. Only Christ restores true freedom and human wholeness (“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,” John 8:36), whereas amnesia leaves societies vulnerable to manipulation, “newspeak,” and decline.

This position paper argues that the Enlightenment’s exaltation of human reason has produced a recurring and destructive dream: the creation of a perfectly rational, planned society ruled by philosopher-kings, with the Turkish Empire presented as an early and revealing model of this ideal. Admired by Western romantics and humanists for its supposed order and rationality, the Ottoman system subordinated all people rulers and subjects alike to the state, treating human life as expendable in service to an abstract ideal of reason. This same vision reappeared in the French and Russian Revolutions and persists today in modern welfare-technocratic states, where terror is replaced by bureaucratic control through education, law, economics, and technology. In such systems, law ceases to be a transcendent standard of justice and becomes merely an instrument of state policy, while freedom is redefined as cheerful submission to managed servitude. The paper concludes that whenever God’s law and sovereignty are rejected, men inevitably substitute their own rational plans, producing not liberation but tyranny, and calls readers back to the biblical choice between serving the Lord or submitting to the nightmare of man’s “reason.”

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