This passage warns that excessive regulation even over seemingly minor matters like lawn maintenance can erode personal freedom and lead society toward tyranny. Using the example of a proposed 16-page building code in University Park, Texas, the author highlights how fines for weeds, cracks, or unsound chimneys, combined with inspectors’ authority to enter homes at will, could pave the way for ever-expanding governmental control. The critique emphasizes that overregulation shifts citizens’ focus from their own responsibilities to policing each other, creating a culture of compliance rather than liberty. While regulations may produce orderly neighborhoods, the author argues that the cost to freedom is far too high, warning that small, innocuous rules can become a slippery slope toward a dictator-like state.

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In “Locale of Meaning” (Chalcedon Report No. 172), Rushdoony argues that the decisive shift of the modern age was the relocation of meaning from God to events themselves. Whereas biblical faith locates all meaning in the sovereign Creator—whose eternal decree gives purpose to every atom, moment, and event—modern thought claims that meaning arises from the relationships of events, human experience, or social processes. This shift necessarily transfers authority from God to man: if meaning is not given by God, then man must create it, and with it, law. Hence law becomes logic, experience, class power, or social consensus rather than divine revelation. Rushdoony contends that this is the essence of humanism and that many Christians unwittingly adopt it by seeking salvation from Scripture, meaning from sociology, and law from the state—thereby hollowing out the gospel itself. Against this, he insists that God alone determines meaning, law, and history; obedience to His law-word defines the meaning of events, while rebellion brings judgment. Meaning does not emerge from history—it governs history because it proceeds from God.

In “Providence” (Chalcedon Report No. 131), Rushdoony argues that Christianity is founded on God-ordained distinctions between good and evil, righteousness and sin, holy and profane while humanism destroys these distinctions by making autonomous man the sole standard. When man becomes god, all absolutes collapse, progress ceases, and meaning evaporates, because a self-deified humanity has no reason to grow, judge, or reform itself. Rushdoony traces this levelling impulse through Asian philosophies, Greek and Roman decline, medieval decay, and modern relativism, showing how the denial of providence leads inevitably to nihilism, stagnation, and despair. In contrast, biblical faith affirms God’s sovereign providence and holiness, calling for separation according to His law and the active exercise of dominion. Holiness, he concludes, requires both divine grace and cultural obedience; without providence, all values flatten into nothingness, and “equality” finds its truest symbol not in democracy, but in death.