CR101 Radio - Podcast Network

R.J. Rushdoony reviews books illustrating moral, cultural, and societal trends. He highlights John Morgan’s Prince of Crime on Catholic dominance in urban politics and crime, A. Craig Copetas’ Metal Men on large-scale corporate corruption, and Major Henry Darley’s Slaves and Ivory on Africa’s moral and social challenges. He also notes cultural degeneration in 19th-century France, historical insigh...

Claims that Christianity borrowed from ancient mystery religions rest on superficial similarities and miss the real contrast. The mysteries offered secret rites, mystical experiences, spiritual escape, and vague hopes of immortality, with little concern for history, morality, or transforming society. Christianity, by contrast, proclaimed a public, historical faith grounded in God’s revealed Word,...

In “Loss of the Past” (Chalcedon Report No. 320), Rushdoony argues that modern society’s deliberate forgetting and moralizing distortion of history has severed us from reality, leaving us ignorant of both the past and present and therefore incapable of shaping a sound future. By erasing figures like Patrick Henry and Stephen Decatur, caricaturing European history, and indulging in shallow denuncia...

A country pastor once caught his dozing congregation’s full attention by telling an obvious lie about a sow that gave birth to green pigs, then rebuked them: while he preached God’s life-giving truth they slept, but when he told nonsense they were all ears. His point remains strikingly true far too often even Christians respond more eagerly to gossip, slander, and foolish talk than to the Word of...

Gideon stands above 135,000 warriors with 300 men and no visible swords. The Lord sends him down to overhear an enemy dream — a barley loaf tumbling into a tent — and Gideon weaponises their fear against them. Trumpets, torches, one cry, and the camp cuts itself to pieces in the dark. A study in Spirit-empowered leadership, the sword that proceeds from the mouth, and how God still topples empires...

This opening to a study on the biblical doctrine of the family argues that modern society is fundamentally at war with the family because it has replaced God’s order with statist and naturalistic thinking. Scripture presents the family—not the state, church, or school—as God’s primary institution, with marriage as the first and basic religious vocation, governed by God’s Law rather than personal d...

My daughter once called home distressed because a classmate claimed George Washington had fathered fourteen illegitimate children and died of venereal disease pure slander without a shred of evidence. I reminded her that such lies arise because depraved people delight in dragging the righteous down to their own level, just as Solomon said, “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to h...

Biblical purity is not the untouched innocence we commonly associate with the English word, but a condition produced through testing, refining, and separation by God’s grace, for the Hebrew terms translated as pure speak of what is cleared, refined, beaten, freed, acquitted, and tried by fire. Scripture presents purity not as something preserved by avoiding life, but as something gained through li...

Just as some people obsess over their physical health, religious hypochondriacs obsess over their spiritual health constantly taking their “spiritual temperature,” fretting about imagined sins, and becoming so absorbed with themselves that they accomplish little in obedience. Like the man who carries a thermometer or the woman who neglects her household while brooding over her faults, they focus m...

This passage examines how well-intentioned social and labor programs can be exploited, often favoring the wrong parties. The “Burglar Cops of Hollywood” case illustrates law enforcement officers who committed theft while on duty yet received overtime pay during interrogation and even claims for disability due to the stress of being caught. Similarly, in a sex-discrimination lawsuit, the plaintiff...

In a 1993 Chalcedon Report, R.J. Rushdoony warned of rising anti-Christian hostility in America, tracing it to Supreme Court decisions eroding Biblical foundations of law since the 1950s, the rise of humanism as an unofficial established religion promoting moral relativism, media bias against Christians, and growing intolerance toward Biblical morality—while hypocritically accusing believers of ju...

The word hypocrite comes from the Greek term for an actor one who wore a mask and played a part and the meaning has not changed: a hypocrite pretends to be something he is not. Today’s hypocrite hides behind moral postures, claiming to champion equality while believing himself superior, preaching charity with other people’s money, professing Christianity only when it is socially convenient. Our Lo...

This passage argues that modern Christianity has drifted into practical polytheism, affirming Christ with words while denying His Lordship in politics, education, economics, science, and daily life by surrendering those realms to humanism. When God’s Law-Word no longer governs every sphere, man enthrones himself, the state, or institutions as rival gods, reducing salvation to mere “fire insurance”...

Kenoticism turns Christianity into a religion of surrender, teaching that holiness means self-abasement, passivity, and acceptance of defeat. Borrowed largely from Eastern religions and filtered into the West through Pietism, Quietism, and modernism, it redefines virtue as submission to evil rather than obedience to God. By emptying Christ of power, kenoticism also empties the church of courage, r...

L. Ron Hubbard reportedly told a science fiction conference that the surest way to make a million dollars was to start a religion. In 1954, he did exactly that. In this episode, Andrea Schwartz tells her own story of being recruited into Scientology as a nineteen-year-old, spending a decade selling its lies to others, and the providential path God used to bring her out. She unpacks what the cult a...

Articles claiming we are in a “new sexual revolution” forget a simple truth: none of this is new. Every generation of sinners treats immorality as a fresh discovery and imagines it will bring freedom, just as Adam and Eve did only to find that sin is the same old slavery. From the 19th century to Mencken’s day to now, the supposed “revolution” has been mostly talk, promoted by those eager to make...

The Lord’s Supper is the Christian Passover, deliberately instituted within the Jewish Passover to proclaim the continuity of God’s covenant and to declare salvation as victory: just as Israel celebrated deliverance from Egypt and the death of the firstborn, so the church celebrates Christ, God’s Firstborn, who bears the covenant death-sentence to deliver His people and inaugurate the new creation...

Repentance is not mere sorrow for sin or regret over its consequences, but a God-wrought grace that begins with hating sin itself, involves a decisive turning from sin toward God in faith, and issues in a life of active obedience; it is the immediate fruit of regeneration and continues throughout the Christian life. True repentance is therefore lifelong, marked by daily confession to God, growing...

Many people today cry out for justice when they ought to plead for mercy. They focus on wrongs done to them while ignoring the wrongs done by them. As the saying goes, “He who lies down with dogs rises with fleas.” If we break God’s laws, we eventually break ourselves. Solomon puts it plainly: “Whoso breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall bite him” (Eccl. 10:8). In ancient Israel, hedge-fences sheltere...

A rookie basketball player earning $104,000 a year is praised, and entertainers making hundreds of thousands are admired. Yet let a small farmer earn $20–30,000 by hard work, or a businessman earn $50,000 by skill, and he is denounced as an exploiter. Why applaud one man’s success but hate another’s? Scripture answers: “Envy is the rottenness of the bones” (Prov. 14:30). Envy drives people to desp...

Kenosis falsely teaches that Christ emptied Himself of divine power and that true Christianity means self-abasement, passivity, and surrender to evil. Over time, it turned humility into victimhood, portraying holiness as nonresistance, poverty, and submission rather than faithful obedience and righteous action. This doctrine has produced a suicidal faith undermining justice, excusing sin, weakenin...

R.J. Rushdoony and Otto Scott discuss Christian Reconstruction as the biblical mandate to establish God’s justice and righteousness in every sphere of society. They emphasize that the Early Church became influential far beyond its numbers by helping one another, serving the community, resolving disputes, and creating a moral, functional order amid a corrupt world. Christianity historically transfo...

This Chalcedon Report argues that the humanistic dream of total justice is one of history’s most destructive illusions, because it seeks to create heaven on earth through coercion, demanding perfect people and absolute control while denying man’s fallen nature. From the French and Russian Revolutions to Cambodia’s killing fields, the pursuit of total justice has produced total terror, as ideologue...

Proverbs 27:21 teaches that “a man is tested by what he praises.” One man recently praised hippies as society’s most intelligent class, universities for destroying old ideas of liberty, and humanism as the path of progress while calling Biblical faith an obstacle. He thought he was judging the world; in reality, he was revealing himself, for fools must praise folly to justify their guilt. Yet this...

The modern church has softened the word "witness" into something polite and passive — but in Scripture, a witness was the one who cast the first stone. Andrea Schwartz and Mark Rushdoony examine R.J. Rushdoony's treatment of the Ninth Commandment and what it means that Christ is called the faithful and true witness. They discuss the inversion of the word martyr , the cross as the dividing sword of...