Victory Game Center

R. J. Rushdoony wrote: De Tocqueville said and I quote: “Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.” In other countries abroad, the drift into atheism and the spirit of the French Revolution was very very profound.

When just a generation later in Britain, Darwin 1859 produced his Origin of Species the entire first edition sold out on the first day of publication. Everyone was so happy to have a book that undercut the Bible. As a matter of fact most of the church welcomed it, Queen Victoria was glad she didn’t have to believe those stories in the Old Testament. By and large there had been very little faith, only one bishop really opposed Darwin. The extent of disbelief was very great. When we read about Victorianism, we are very, very much mislead by contemporary writers who don’t know what they are talking about. The Victorian age in England was really a very highly immoral and licentious period. It was given to fads and fashions which emphasized propriety. Now propriety is not morality. Propriety is doing things in a certain way. And if you don’t you are guilty of bad taste.

To give you an example of that, when I was a boy and when I was first in the pastorate in the 40’s and early 50’s, in the small towns of the west it was very commonplace for women to nurse their babies in church. And many a time when I’ve preached there were several women nursing their babies. And nobody thought that there was anything wrong with it. And yet about the same time I recall visiting and speaking at a Presbyterian church in the early 50’s in a city, and a woman from an out of the way ranching community came to church and nursed her baby, and everyone was horrified in the church, at what they thought was indecent exposure on her part. Today you would never, never in any place in the big cities see a woman nursing her baby. And yet, you see in some parts of the big cities like Beverly Hills and the Sunset district in LA and other places, women wearing see-through blouses, and I’ve actually seen in Beverly Hills one wearing a see-through dress. Why? That’s fashionable. Propriety. It’s fitting in terms of the fads and tastes of the time. But nursing a baby is not.

Now, it’s that kind of thing that the Victorian era was very guilty of. Now this may surprise you but at the beginning of the Victorian era nude bathing in England was commonplace. A few years later they went to the other extreme and they had suits that covered them from the necks to the ankles. You see it wasn’t modesty; it was the change in style. And that’s all. And the various forms of dresses emphasized the same sort of wild variation, from exposure to covering up. And some of the most indecent clothes worn were worn in the Victorian era. It was playing at being proper in terms of the fad of the day. But Victorianism was far, far from being moral. It’s a misunderstanding of today.

Well, this kind of spirit that prevailed in England at the time of De Tocqueville, yes, and later at the Victorian era which began shortly after De Tocqueville was in America, prevailed pretty generally in France also, and was even further out there in its departure from religion. And so De Tocqueville the United States was quite a remarkable place, because he recognized very quickly the strongly religious character of the American people, a very sincere one and a very, very intense one.