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In “Are We Using Language to Confuse Ourselves?” Rushdoony warns that statist categories—especially the IRS distinction between “profit” and “nonprofit”—have subtly reshaped Christian and cultural thinking, causing people to mistake tax classifications for reality itself. He argues that these terms obscure what truly matters: productivity versus nonproductivity, noting that families, churches, schools, and libraries—though labeled “nonprofit”—are among the most productive forces in civilization, while civil government, also nonprofit, is often minimally productive at best. By adopting bureaucratic language, society elevates administration over creation, form over substance, and pragmatism over theology, allowing the tax state rather than God’s law to frame how we think. The remedy, Rushdoony insists, is a return to Biblical categories and disciplined thinking that rightly divides truth before God, not the state.
#LanguageMatters #BiblicalCategories #AgainstStatism #ProductivityVsProfit #ChristianWorldview #GodsLaw #TruthAndMeaning #CulturalClarity
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CR101 Radio - Podcast Network — Are We Using Language to Confuse Ourselves?. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
0:00Are we using language to confuse ourselves? This is RJ Rushduni with a report on our threatened freedom. Too often in our time, the terms we used to organize our thinking are created by status agencies and served to mislead us. One such set of terms created by the Internal Revenue Service is profit versus non-profit. Profit-making activities are taxed, non-profit enterprises and agencies are not. People have come to classify activities in terms of these two terms, as though they described reality instead of a status-taxing category. Should it be not much more realistic to classify things without reference to the IRS? If the IRS were to disappear in the next decade, how useful would these terms be?
1:05After all, they have reference only to tax status. I submit that the terms productive versus non-productive are much more useful. Creative schools and libraries are non-profit, but they are at the same time among the most productive agencies civilization has ever known. To eliminate them would be to eliminate civilization. Civil government is emphatically non-profit. Often it is not productive of too much good, but one kept within its limits can be productive of social order. The family is a non-profit community, but it is most emphatically a productive agency, and its decay is the decay of society and civilization. Because we have emphasized the profit versus non-profit perspective, we have tended to falsify our view of light. In every area, intellectual, industrial, and personal, we have downgraded the productive
2:10man in favor of the profiting man. Production has thus been displaced by administration by the visible symbols of profitable power and church, university, state, and business, which have gained ascendancy over the productive mind and hand. Religiously speaking, this means that form has become more important in substance, and pragmatism has replaced theology. When we look at the world through categories governed by the IRS, we have beggared ourselves intellectually, and we have allowed the tax man rather than the Lord God to frame our thinking. We need to remind ourselves of St. Paul's words, study to show thyself approved unto God, a work that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. This has been RJ Rushduney with a report on our threatened freedom.
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