Leaving Liberalism: An Alternative to the Great American Empire by Jon Harris

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eat the culture, in other words, understand the times that we're living in so they can apply this word. And that's what
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I thought Alistair Begg kind of missed the boat on. He just wasn't thinking through the context in which we live.
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So he can look at the scripture, he can understand what it says, but how does he apply it to actual real life circumstances? And so I want to talk today about that, real life circumstances.
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And I want to challenge perhaps some of the assumptions that we have about the world in which we live.
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Assumptions that we have held perhaps since we were very young, that we've just grown up with.
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I call this the liberal society and the liberal order. And I think in the title, the great
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American empire is something else I talk about, because it's not just that we have a liberal society by default, or we think we do.
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We have this empire, as it were. The United States, not just through military might, but through the entertainment industry, affects the entire world.
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The other parts of the world, you travel to even a place like Turkey.
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I went to Turkey a few years ago, and they have some of their own Turkish music. But it's surprising when you turn on the radio to hear pop music from America.
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And we've influenced the world in some very negative ways, actually, like our pop culture here.
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And we've influenced traditional societies to get away from their traditions and to adopt more of a hormone kind of culture, which
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I think is consistent with liberalism. So I want to talk about that a little bit. And then what's the
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Christian alternative to this? And some of this is me really just giving my own thoughts on what
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I see and what I think we should do, because not a lot of people are talking about this. We're still kind of talking about social justice and wokeness, and these are their problems, for sure.
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But there is something, I think, underlying it, and it's exposed weaknesses that after 2020,
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I think many of us have started to realize. Because in 2020, all of us, I think, realized something's very wrong.
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Where did we go off the track, though? Was it 1965? You know, was it 1860?
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Was it 1776? Where was it that we got off track? And many people have different stories about what they think went wrong, because we all know it didn't start in 2020.
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Something had to happen before that. And so we blame various things. And I think a lot of those things culminate in this kind of liberal mindset.
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So I'm going to get into that a little bit, and I'll just periodically along the way open it up for questions.
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If something I'm saying is not understandable, I'd love to clarify. I have, I think, 25 pages here.
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There's no way we're getting through all of this. This is like four times the material I had yesterday, and I was rushing in my speech yesterday.
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So I'm going to just take bits and pieces, and then we'll leave it interactive. And Seth, if you wouldn't mind, five minutes before I need to end.
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I don't have a clock up here. I see one over there, but I might not. I might forget it's there.
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Just get my attention. You can even jump up, and I won't mind that.
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All right, so I'm going to just be kind of blunt and off the top.
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There's a lot of ministries out there right now that are experiencing fractures and splits. And these are ministries, some of whom took stands against the social justice movement.
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And I think many of us in this room realize if we were involved in any parachurch ministries or reading parachurch materials, we know that the gospel coalition,
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Together for the Gospel, Nine Marks, that some of these ministries are somewhat compromised with the
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WOCA agenda. But I think that it took some of us by surprise to see that there seems to be fractures happening with organizations like G3, and the
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Christian nationalism debate with G3. There's even fractures, as I understand, happening in Moscow, Idaho with Doug Wilson's group, with some of the young guys at even like Master's Seminary and places like that.
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And a lot of this has been channeled into, well, it's Christian nationalism versus what?
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And that what is what I want to talk about. What is Christian nationalism threatening exactly? Whatever Christian nationalism is, right?
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It's very scary. CNN tells us it's very scary, but so do some of these ministries that took strong stands against WOCA -ness.
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They also seem to be concerned about it. And what I'd like to suggest is the answer to the question of what is being threatened by Christian nationalism is,
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I think, the liberal order more than anything else. I don't think, this is my opinion, I don't think it's biblical fidelity.
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I don't think it's threatening the word of God somehow. I think it's threatening our assumptions about where we live.
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So individualism, the neutral society that as Americans we all think that we should, you know, religious pluralism essentially, it threatens that.
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It threatens that order that we've all come to expect from our country. And I think with social justice, it was easy for us, some of us at least, harder for others, but for many of us in this room, it was easiest for us to see that that was a problem because we had some
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Cold War era stuff to kind of pull on. And I would be, I guess I'm the last generation,
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I was born in 89. So, you know, when I was growing up, when I was a little kid, like the Rocky movies were popular and like really anti, you know,
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Soviet stuff. Cold War, they were still sort of the semblance of that. And if you're older than me, you remember the Cold War era.
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And so when WOCA -ness came up, it was sort of easy to make these comparisons and say, well, it's just like the Soviets, right?
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It's just, they're communists, that's what they are, they're Marxists. And so we kind of readily, I think, adopted that and thought, oh, yeah, those are the bad guys.
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But the interesting thing, I've read a number of books on this recently. One of them is Ryszard Lugato's book,
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The Demon in Democracy, The Demon in Democracy, I recommend that book. I think he's Roman Catholic, I don't think he's a
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Christian, but he came from an Eastern Bloc country. And this is his interesting observation.
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He says that when, he talks about liberalism, like Western liberal democracy versus the communism he grew up in.
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And he said they're both pretty similar in some ways. He noticed that there's a lot of similarities. And one of the things he said, he said, in both systems, they're all encompassing ideologies and the world was, quote, like a machine to be perfected by new inventions that could free people from an oppressive past.
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So that's liberalism, that's also communism. They're doing very similar things here. He said, he talks about that in Western democracies, you have features such as the democratic process, now venerating minorities, free sexual expression as being like features now to what it means to live in a
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Western democracy. And people are required to replace whatever older obligations they have to allegiance to a certain political system.
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This is why you hear the left always talking about Trump threatens democracy. And you're thinking, how? You guys are the ones that rigged, can
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I, was this on YouTube? You're the guys that rigged the 2020 election,
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I'm just going to say it, Trump won. Anyway, you know, you guys threaten democracy, but they, no,
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Trump is very scary. He's threatening democracy. What, they have such an allegiance to, and Nancy Pelosi said on January 6th, you know, that those
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Christian nationalists threatened the temple of democracy. That's what she called it. Temple? This is religious language that's being employed here.
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What is this? You know, communists deified the state, but a lot of these liberal types, they're looking at the state in very similar ways and expecting from the state things that you would expect in a communist dictatorship.
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Whenever we have a disaster, a natural disaster, who are the gods we cry out to? FEMA, you know,
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FEMA, it's not National Repentance Day, what did, maybe God's judging us. That used to be, in America, that was, the assumption was
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God may be judging us, we better pray, we better repent, we, now it's, the government's not doing enough for me.
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Government's not acting fast enough. George W. Bush wants black people to die, remember that? Because FEMA didn't come in enough.
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Government is God, and we're not in Soviet communism. We're in supposedly western liberal free democracies, and yet we see the walls closing in around us.
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So there's a number of really good books on this. I can recommend more if you're interested in diving further, but there's some of these kind of similarities.
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I'm going to just give a few examples from both conservative and Christian, conservative organizations, or speakers in Christian ministries, where, to make this concrete for you, let me just give you an example, first of all, from, about religious pluralism.
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So in 2007, some of you might remember this, Mitt Romney was running for president, and he happens to be a
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Mormon. Do you remember this? Some people had a problem with that, right? He's a Mormon, I don't want to vote for a Mormon.
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So he gave this speech down in Texas, I think it was at the George Bush Library or something, but I remember
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Rush Limbaugh called his speech uplifting, optimistic, and inspiring. Sean Hannity thought it was unfortunate that Romney had to defend himself against people who were attacking religion by harboring reservations about the possibility of a
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Mormon president. And so the conservative, kind of political conservatives, were all in line with what
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Romney was saying. But if you listen to the speech, what he said was that America had a political religion, a commonly shared political religion, no matter who you were, because we have a religiously neutral common creed that privatized our religious beliefs and was the glue that kind of made us stick together.
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And so freedom of religion becomes like the American thing, right? Well, the issue that I see with this is that freedom of religion, when we talk about it,
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I think often what we mean is freedom to worship God according to the dictates of your conscience. But it's God, right?
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It's the freedom to worship God. He gives us a responsibility to worship him, so we should have the freedom to worship him.
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But what Romney's talking about is that actually we can have any religion in the
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United States. It doesn't really matter which religion it is, as long as the people who practice that religion don't take it too seriously, because they have to have this common creed that all
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Americans share, which is religious neutrality. And so these conservatives kind of all bought into this, but this wasn't historically an
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American thing. We were always pan -Protestant. We were always a Christian country in the sense that our social mores came from Christianity.
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We had some toleration going on with religious minorities. But we were generally
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Christian, and this worked out especially on the state level. Nine of the 13 colonies that were parties to the
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Constitution were overtly Christian. They had state churches, essentially, or religious requirements, and every single one of them, and I've looked at all their royal charters and their constitutions, they were all overtly
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Christian in their founding documents. So what is this common creed that says
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Christianity doesn't really matter? It doesn't really matter. The religion doesn't matter because we all share this other thing in common that societies never used to have.
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You see this also with immigration. We used to have a very Anglo -Protestant culture, and this was really the glue that kept us together, but now it's kind of like disembodied ideas are supposed to keep us together, so Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan both say things like we are a nation of immigrants to promote the idea that immigrants are crucial for our economic well -being.
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They share it because they share our belief in freedom. So it doesn't matter. They may speak a different language. They may have a different religion.
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They may have a different culture. They may have different ways of living, but because if they believe in freedom, whatever that is, then we should allow them to come in, at least, you know.
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Republicans are, who says this? I don't remember who it is, so I don't want to plagiarize, but someone did say, and I heard it recently that,
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I think it was Steve Dase, Republicans are just Democrats doing the speed limit, right? So it's like we're against illegal immigration, but you know, so immigration's great even in large numbers as long as people share freedom.
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We see this with LGBT movement, people like even Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk arguing for same -sex marriage, and that the,
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Kirk said that Republicans should be the party of freedom, that they should have all the same tax benefits as married couples, and if you remember, someone brought this up last night when
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Dave Rubin got, I don't want to call it a marriage because it's not, but his partner and him had a surrogate child, not only were people like Christopher Rufo, Matt Whitlock, Megan Kelly, and others congratulating them, but also the official accounts online of the
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Blaze and PragerU congratulated them. What do you do with this kind of thing? I mean, this is the
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CEO of the Daily Wire, and these people are all getting in on this, yet they say they're defending tradition. So this is kind of the circumstance
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I'm talking about. In 2015, I remember this, Glenn Beck had told his radio audience, I really think we have to start calling ourselves classical liberals, and it always stuck with me, and what does that mean?
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And for him, it meant appealing to people on the left who rejected the conservative label, but wanted to stop the government from violating their freedom.
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So freedom becomes kind of the overarching thing that makes you American. So freedom,
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I think for the right, it's freedom, for the left, it's equality, but if you ask them what is being an
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American, that's what they would say, they boil it down to that word, and these are very nebulous terms. So it's no longer kind of a rooted thing, it's not
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Anglo -Protestant, it's just freedom, and anyone, it's universal, right, not particular to who we are.
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So the Christian nationalism debate has brought this out. Scott Anial from G3 Ministries believes
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Christians should pursue public office, not so they can enforce Christian law, but instead to prevent pagans from enforcing pagan law.
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Anial believes that Christians still have a duty to uphold the Constitution and be active in the political process, but they should reject the establishment of cultural
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Christianity with its customs and laws. He called the Pilgrim's motivation in founding the Plymouth Colony for the glory of God and the advancement of the
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Christian faith unbiblical. And under this thinking, Christians should work towards a universal common kingdom of God, that's what he calls it, in which no religion is favored more than any other.
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So this is someone, and I have nothing against him personally, and by the way, he has great stuff on music and other things, but there's this allegiance he has and many
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Christian leaders have to a religiously plural country. That's what they want, and they don't want that threatened.
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They don't want Christians to set the tone, as Christians always have. Until very recently.
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Many other examples of this kind of thinking that I could give, Peter Lightheart, he talks about the border issue, and I'll just summarize.
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Basically, we should be very excited, Lincoln Duncan says the same thing. People from other countries are coming here, so we don't have to go there to witness to them.
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It's like, well, that's good, but when it gets into border policy, there's really no difference between Americans and other people.
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So the particularity goes out the window. And then this is consistent with the liberal order.
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You know, we have the same, the LGBT issue, we have, I mentioned this yesterday, issues with same sex attraction or orientation being justified in the
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Christian church. I see this a lot, you know, with groups like Moms for Liberty, which are great groups, but what the logic they've employed to try to get
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Drag Queen Story Hour out of schools is, well, it's sexually provocative. Kids shouldn't be exposed to that, and they're right, but they can't say
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LGBT stuff is wrong. Homosexuality is evil. They can't say that.
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They have to try to make this neutral argument that all sexualities are equally moral and fine and good, it's just that children shouldn't be exposed to that.
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Well, why not, right? There's really not, they don't have a lot of leg to stand on, unfortunately, even though I appreciate so much of their work.
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We have people in our church, part of that organization, and, you know, I stand with them, but it's like we're giving up the foundation, and that's part of the problem.
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George Marsden, when I was in seminary, I learned from George Marsden, in his book, The Twilight of the
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American Enlightenment, I think it's called, he says that we, Christians should adopt what's called principled pluralism, and this is an attempt to take the differences among varieties of both religious and nonreligious perspectives seriously, and what this looks like is,
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J .D. Greer's a good example. He said the fiercest advocates for dignity and rights to be extended to gay and lesbian people should be
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Christians. So, here's how it works. You're in a neutral society that doesn't favor any group.
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LGBT people can do their thing. Christians can do their thing. They're like, and they have bubbles around them. Essentially, the two shall not touch, you know.
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The liberal society's going to keep them from touching, and they'll both be safe, and somehow, the liberal society is neutral.
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It doesn't favor anyone, and so you can have any. You can have a Satan statue, right, at the Capitol, and that's perfectly fine.
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It's not bothering your nativity scene, and so I've seen this work out even on the local level in my town, where you have, it was a
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Christmas scene, but now it's like every religion has their thing there. Even, you know, Ramadan, it's not even during Christmas, but every religion has to have their thing.
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This changes the character of your town or your region. It's no longer, is the church steeple the highest thing, and the church bell is the thing people hear, and that sets the default setting for the region.
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It's every religion is equally true. It gives that sense, and the thing that's true for all of us, though, is the liberal order.
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When Uganda passed a bill penalizing aggravated homosexuality, Ted Cruz said it was a grotesque and abomination.
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Not the homosexuality, the law. You have Jenna Ellis wanting to defend Disney from the
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Florida Senate when they passed the parental rights and education law. You have, I mean, I could give you so many examples.
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Marcus Molinaro, an evangelical senator, actually, from my state, or a congressman from my state, voted to keep funding drag queen events at military bases, and the reason he gave was that he didn't want us to infringe on individual rights.
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So, then, individual rights has become this way that we justify depravity, and Christians can even logically get to the point of justifying evil and depravity and that kind of thing.
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So, these are some concrete examples. Let me kind of give you some understanding of what liberalism is.
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John Stuart Mill believed that the only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others.
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I think that's kind of a liberalism in a nutshell. That's the idea. Russell Kirk, who's perhaps the most important American conservative intellectual of the mid -20th century, critiqued this argument.
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He said that experience showed that allowing this kind of liberty only worked under certain conditions, namely, accompanying a high level of public virtue.
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And this is what I think is confusing for us. If you grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, it seemed like it was a pretty good place in most areas.
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And we had a lot of this liberalism going on, but we also had alongside it a
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Christian default, an understanding that this was still a Christian country for the most part. And because of that, it seemed like liberalism would work, but as soon as Christianity became, was not dominant anymore, and we live in a negative world now, all of a sudden, the liberalism is becoming a big problem.
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Because now, it's actually, it applies to all kinds of different groups that are here.
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And if you go down to Minneapolis, you'll see what I mean. Mill argued that unthinking obedience to the dictates of custom was a big problem, because he thought that these held humanity back.
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And humanity was constantly getting better and better, and eventually, representative government and humanitarian reform and material progress would subdue the dark passions of the human heart.
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And you hear what's going on here, with Christian theology glasses on. Essentially, underneath all this is this idea that, you know, man's actually perfectible.
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Man's good. You put the right system in place, man will behave. And we're making progress. He failed to accurately assess real world behavior.
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And the problem is, when you have a choice, when you have unlimited choice, unlimited options in a free market, what does man generally choose?
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Well, man, in his evil state, chooses vice, not virtue. And this is what the founding fathers warned about so often, that they created a government that was very suited, and I don't actually buy that it was completely a classical liberal government, that's another discussion.
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But they did have a lot of individual freedom, but it was under the understanding that we would have morality and virtue, and that virtue came from religion.
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And if you didn't have religion, there was no reason to have a society that allowed people this much opportunity to work in a market, because they're going to choose vice.
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They're going to ruin their society. And that's kind of what we're seeing now. You have Immanuel Kant assume that if only freedom is granted, enlightenment is almost sure to follow.
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It's classical liberal. Ayn Rand, in her novel, The Fountainhead, she talks about a libertarian, she's a libertarian philosopher, but she sums up this sentiment with a statement that, quote, all that which proceeds from man's dependence upon man is evil.
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I'll say that again. All that proceeds from man's dependence upon man is evil. So we should never depend on anyone.
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You're born as a blank slate. You have no connections to anyone, no obligations to anyone. You're an autonomous individual.
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So some of the good guys that we think of in this, and I like actually certain guys in this,
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John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, not Rousseau as much, but some of these liberal thinkers, classical liberal thinkers, they wanted to preserve certain semblances of Christianity in the
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Anglo -American, not for Rousseau, he's French, but the others for the Anglo -American tradition by universalizing them.
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By trying to distill them into certain ideologies, or I should say principles.
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For John Locke, the civil magistrate's role was to establish the defense of life, liberty, and property, and to ensure that no man was subjected to the will of an authority of any other man without consent.
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So consent becomes the only basis for, eventually, for political government and other social groups which, that doesn't conform to human nature.
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There's a lot of things that we, we're born into a family. We didn't get to choose them. Some of you wish you did, but you didn't. And, and that's, that's some of the flaw in this,
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I think. Thomas Hobbes believed that seeking peace and defending oneself against the claims of others were fundamental laws of nature that legitimized the formation of a leviathan state to preserve order.
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Rousseau argued for a social contract based upon mutual choice that protected people from threats to their individual freedom.
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And so what you see coming out of all this is an emphasis upon individual freedom that, and not all of it bad, by the way, but eventually leading to, and, and taken by people with nefarious motives,
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I would say, to get to the point of, whenever you hear the term rights come up, it's generally in defense of some evil.
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It's generally in defense of some group that wants to take from the common treasury or to practice some sexually explicit thing.
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And, and so this is kind of the, the world we live in where the language that we used to use to defend ourselves is now all being used against us.
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So classical liberals at the end of the day, I think, for, this is what conservatives want to, many political conservatives want to call themselves now, they think that there's impediments to human flourishing that are part of an unchosen environment that violates human freedom and produces conflict.
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Traditions reinforce these things, and only freely chosen associations could, should be considered legitimate.
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So this erodes tradition, this erodes communities, and this is where we come up with slogans like love is love, my body, my choice, and all the rest.
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And so I see the, the conservatives today, the political conservatives, many of them are trying to conserve a liberal order that was, that the progressives were pushing 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, but now they're the conservatives.
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Have you noticed that? Conservatives seem to be getting more and more liberal, right? And, and so we have to say no at some point.
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Christians have to realize what's going on, the play that's being made on them. Because pretty soon the conservatives, like in 10 years
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I'm thinking like, okay, they're going to be defending the transgender stuff probably. And they're going to be against the transhumanism, but they're going to be defending the transgender.
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We have to say stop at some point. We have to say hold on, God made a natural order. There's a world that he created and he expects us to live in certain ways.
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So I have a whole section that I'm probably going to skip because we don't have time on how we got from liberalism to wokeness.
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And I think the, I'll just say one thing about that. The modern state promotes individual interests over local communities through policies like open borders, subsidized access to schools, medical services and housing, as well as loosening sexual morals through no -fault divorce and same -sex marriage ceremonies.
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This is all part of the liberal order. And this has produced, I would say, especially in schools and other institutions, this idea that as long as people can compete in the market, there's going to be equality of some kind.
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It's going to, in the 1965 civil rights laws were supposed to produce this. Even the
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Immigration Act, let's say 65 to 64. But the Immigration Act of 65 was supposed to produce equality in our law.
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Like equality became like the driving thing. As long as people had a choice, they could be equal. And the problem is that didn't happen.
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And that's where you get critical race theory coming up and saying, hold on. All these promises of, you know, we're going to be more equal and we're going to have success and stuff.
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We're not. We're worse off now than we were before. And we demand equality.
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We want it now. And so this drives you into the woke agenda because it sets you up for it, essentially.
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So here's what I want. I just want to talk about a better approach to this since we don't have a lot of time.
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And then I'll take some questions. Actually, you know what, let me take some. If anyone has questions about what
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I've said, let me take those now. And then let me talk about a Christian, what I think would be a better approach. In the back. Yeah.
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Bingo. Yeah, there's a, there's a,
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Patrick Dineen wrote a book about this called, I'm trying to remember the name of it now.
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But it's about liberalism. Why liberalism failed. He makes the exact point you just made, that he said, yeah, with the expanding of freedom, which we think is opposed to the big government.
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Actually, the government gets bigger because it has to, it now has to represent the, all these different interest groups that want their freedom represented on the national level and so forth.
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So if freedom's the only principle, then you have to have something else that's limiting that freedom, that's ordering that freedom.
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And that's where Christianity has always come in. That we, we direct towards a higher telos of what, what do we do with the freedom that we have?
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Well, we glorify God. That's what Christianity has always taught. God gives us certain freedoms or wants us to have certain freedoms to obey him.
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It's not to set up a Satan statue in your capital. It's to worship him. It's to obey God according to the dictates of your conscience.
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That's what the founding generation, the most liberals of the founding generation thought that. But we've come to the point now where expanding freedom is exactly what you said.
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So, yeah.
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Well, I don't, I don't think you need to modify the Declaration of Independence personally. And there's, so there's a theory called the poison pill theory which says that all this liberalism came in through Jefferson and the
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Declaration. I don't buy that. I think actually, if you read the Declaration of Independence, he's talking about mediated rights.
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They're not universal rights in the sense that every culture's going to look the same. These are, read the rest of the documents.
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We only quote the preamble, but read the rest of the document. The king is making us, you know, meet in inconvenient places and arresting our legislatures and violating our rights in this, this and that.
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What rights is he talking about? British common law. He's talking about rights mediated through culture over time and tradition.
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That's what he's talking about. And if you understand that, the Declaration of Independence doesn't become a universal kind of revolutionary document for all peoples everywhere.
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It becomes a very specific document for a specific time, a specific set of circumstances.
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And I think it's perfectly fine to leave it in that particular set of circumstances. But it's been used now, the left uses it all the time to, they always quote it every time there's a new interest group that wants rights or something.
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So I wouldn't modify it. Well, it's not law. It's not, it was a, it's a divorce, national divorce, you know, paper.
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It's a secession document. That's what it is. It's not a, it's often like, it's one of the founding documents, but it's not like the left wants to make it just the preamble of it, like the biggest thing, the most important thing in our history, and then they want to universalize it.
29:51
And it's an important document for sure, but I think, you know, we have other founding documents. We don't talk about, we never talk about the
29:58
Articles of Confederation, even though I was in the same founding document. We never talk about the anti -federalist papers.
30:04
We talk about the federalist papers sometimes. We don't, you know, the Constitution, we only hear bits and pieces of it that suit the left's agenda.
30:11
So, so yeah, I think I would probably say, well, it's not, that preamble and the way it's interpreted, not as important as some of the other documents, but I saw one up here, freedom of conscience, conscience.
31:31
Well, if I understand your statement, I think that those things were pretty synonymous at one time, that the freedom to worship was, it was, like I said, the
31:43
Pennsylvania Constitution says this, according to the dictates of your conscience. So, so of the nine of 13 original colonies
31:49
I mentioned previously, Pennsylvania's not one of the nine. Pennsylvania's one that's not
31:55
Christian, suppose. It's a more secular constitution, and they talk about worshiping God according to the freedom of your conscience, but there's still this understanding of it's
32:03
God. Even in the Virginia's religious liberty bill, there's, you read that whole thing in Madison's defense of it, and you, it's still this underlying assumption that Christianity is the default in your community.
32:16
Like, like the same year, okay, Thomas Jefferson, and, and, and who did I just say?
32:21
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, thank you. The same year that they promoted this bill of religious liberty, religious freedom, toleration in the state of Virginia, Jefferson also wrote the law to establish
32:34
Sabbath laws, that you could not, there's ordinances, you could not make disturbances on the Sabbath or you would get in trouble.
32:41
So he wanted to use the power of government to quell people who would violate the
32:47
Sabbath. The same year, he wants religious toleration. How do you, how does that make any sense? Well, it's because they still wanted to live in a
32:54
Christian country with a Christian default, Christian morals, all that kind of thing, but they, they recognized that there were different denominations, different interpretations living among them, and they, they, at the time, they didn't have significant populations of Muslims or that kind of thing.
33:09
I think some of them thought that they could extend to Islam, but it was always seen as like, this would be a very tolerated minority.
33:16
So this, Christianity would still be our character, in our state character. And, and so if, if you're talking about freedom of conscience in that sense,
33:26
I'm, you know, perfectly fine with that, freedom, freedom to, to worship, but the question is, in your public institutions, what, there's going to be a religion.
33:35
You can't have no, no religion. There's, right now, what do we have? We have supposedly secularism.
33:40
What do we really have, though? We have a new religion arising in front of us, right? I've argued social justice is a religion, and so we are seeing the gap left by Christianity filled by another religion.
33:52
And in some regions, you're not seeing social justice as much as you are Islam. I understand that Twin Cities is becoming this way in some regions, where they want a
33:59
Sharia law. The gap left by Christianity is being filled. If anything, I think the liberal order is just a, a very temporary, unstable, kind of transition period from one religion to another.
34:12
So we're going to, we're, in the area I live, I got like three witch shops I can pass in like 20 minutes, you know, from me.
34:18
They're, they're returning to paganism, because man worships. Man wants things ordered in, in a way that conforms to a higher purpose.
34:26
And we're going to have that, so, so if I understand what you're saying, I, I think
34:32
I agree that, oh,
34:47
I see, yeah, because the government, you're saying the categorizations are, they'll say, they don't recognize certain things as religions and other things they do.
34:53
Yeah, right.
35:06
Well, that's what I'm, I'm arguing, too. We should see these things as religions and, and challenges. So, one more question, and then
35:11
I, we'll take some more questions at the end. Yeah, sorry, this, this might, this might be long, but I, I hope it's not.
35:18
That, my question isn't, but the answer. So, practically, what, what would we do to, as just individuals here or within a church, to right the ship, and is it even too late?
35:30
No, I'm glad you asked. That's what, that's what I was going to get to, and then we'll, we'll go to, how many, much more time do we have?
35:39
Okay, well, maybe we won't have more questions. So, let,
35:47
I, I favored yesterday a localist approach. I still believe in that, not just for the church, but for general, you know, communities.
35:53
I think you have some of that here, by the way. This is a special place. You have a, a localist kind of vibe.
36:00
Even as I was talking this morning around the breakfast table of getting local meat, and knowing who your neighbors are, and participating in each other's lives.
36:08
I think something, you have something to conserve here. Don't let it die. Don't let it go away. So, so I'm going to talk about that a little bit, and, and what
36:17
I think, what I think we should do. So, if you ever watch, you ever watch
36:22
TV Land? Any of you have TV Land? I don't know if they still do, like, Andy Griffith, and some of these, like, Leave it to Beaver, these old shows, right?
36:29
That, way before my time, but my parents would remember that. So, in those shows, what did you see?
36:35
You saw a world where people could leave their keys in their car. Maybe you can still do that, and it's here. I don't know. Some of you do that?
36:41
I see someone laughing. You leave your keys in the car? My, my wife would, accidentally. That's okay, it doesn't count.
36:52
Yeah, just go get mine. Yeah, yeah. Well, we, I remember we moved to Virginia. I come from New York. My wife is like, she's shocked that there's people who still, in rural areas, leave their keys in their car, right?
37:01
Because they're not worried it's going to be stolen. The neighbors look out for each other. You don't need cameras. There, it's a high -trust society.
37:07
That's what it is. Well, that society is, is practically gone with the wind, right? There's certain pockets here and there where you have high -trust societies, but overall, that is dying.
37:19
And, and, and the question is why. I think the liberal order has a lot to do with this and the maintenance of vice and the expanding of, of privileges for vice and pornography and these other things.
37:30
And, and the way that people, I think on an individual level, their identities now, because of broken families and moving all over the place and so forth, you have, you know, video game forums, comic con events, shared allegiance to various performers that seem to fill the void left by broken families.
37:46
So, people are, are kind of like creating false communities that are not real around other things, other than God's created order.
37:54
Not the way God designed it. They're, they're like fur, furries. You ever heard of a furry? Okay. Like, like they're, they're finding their identity in these really weird things that you think, where'd that come from?
38:05
Well, where it came from is the family was broken down. And, if only the individual is the most important thing in your choice and your participation in an unlimited array of choices, then you're going to find your way to people who have these niche little interests.
38:16
And, not wrong to have hobbies and to share those, but those aren't your primary identities. And, that's kind of the point.
38:23
So, so I think this does start in the home. I think that parents need to really give their children a family identity.
38:30
That's, that's where this starts. And, then a community identity. And, then from that, you know, a national identity and the rest.
38:35
And, of course, if they do, can become Christians, then that becomes a primary identity.
38:43
Their faith in Jesus Christ. That is their primary spiritual identity for sure. So, so, so this is one of the things that we have to cultivate.
38:49
And, I think it's like a garden that has been so, you see your garden when, you know, animals come and they rip it up.
38:57
And, that's kind of what we are now. The garden's still there. We just have to cultivate it. We have to plant the seeds. We have to nurture it.
39:05
So, I think, let's see here. So, I only have a few minutes. I don't,
39:12
I think one of the things that we have to be careful of is cultivating too much of a separatistic instinct. We need to be separate from the world.
39:19
And, the world means the world, the flesh, and the devil. That's what I'm talking about. Not culture, necessarily. We need to ensure that we are involved in the people around us.
39:28
That's, I think, very key for this. Very tangible people. We need to look at the church as the primary institution in the community.
39:36
Hold community events. You know, use the church in this way. And, ensure that there's a hierarchy that emerges.
39:46
A natural aristocracy, Jefferson called it. But, a hierarchy that favors the church.
39:51
That shows the church is instrumental to this community. You, I think, told me this last time I was here. That you were on like a local radio program or something.
39:59
And, I was like, how did that happen? And, I said, well, because they still prize the churches. The churches hold a place of reverence.
40:06
We need to act like the church is a place of reverence. It means you don't do smoke machines and, you know, all the crazy things that are making the church come down here.
40:15
That's the big thing in the evangelical church is we want to make it so not sacred and so down to earth that there's nothing unique about it anymore.
40:24
No, the church is important to your community. So, and there's other institutions that are also important.
40:30
So, getting involved in civic organizations and institutions. Voluntary associations, I think, are a big part of this.
40:35
We don't have a lot of those veterans groups. Even sports groups can be part of this. But, you know, there's not a lot of like Elks Lodges or maybe there are here.
40:44
I don't know. But, in my area, you don't see even VFW halls. You know, young veterans don't seem to want to get together with each other.
40:50
Well, these are institutions that build a high trust society. Because, you know the people that live around you.
40:57
You have organizations that take care of the things that government wants to sweep in and take care of.
41:03
You don't need the government when you have friends. It's a Wonderful Life talks about this really. I mean, it's a great movie for that reason.
41:08
It shows, hey, a man who has friends doesn't need outside help. And so, I think building these organic communities, thinking local is ultimately the right approach here.
41:20
And I also think that with my last 30 seconds that we need to return to the political.
41:26
And what I mean by that is I think that, and I have a lot of examples of this I can't get to, but I think that during Christendom, so before pre -modern
41:39
Christendom we would call it, people agreed with Jesus and Paul's teaching that civil magistrates represented the rule of God.
41:48
Okay. And this is all across your Protestant, it doesn't really matter even what stripe of Christianity, but your
41:56
Protestant heritage is this. Government is important. The civil government is supposed to defend the honor of God.
42:05
That's what John Calvin said. He said, no polity can be successfully established unless piety be its first care, and that those laws are absurd that disregard the rights of God and the consult only for men.
42:16
Have you ever heard a politician talk about the rights of God? The rights of God.
42:22
He said, the rights of God come first. That is what orders our society.
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If you don't have God and the world he established and the responsibilities he's given to you, you have nothing.
42:35
This must be in the government. If it's not in the government, it will be something else. It will be
42:41
Allah. It will be autonomous man. It'll be something else. And this is,
42:47
I think, the heart of the Christian nationalism debate, to be quite honest with you. There's a group of mostly younger Christians who say, this liberal order thing isn't working out and this train is going to crash.
42:56
We need to get back to an order from the state even, recognizing that God is in charge and his rights matter.
43:05
And this returns us to, some people call this identity politics, but it returns us to the political, to realizing that the government's not a neutral institution.
43:15
It is an institution that favors certain groups. And if we as Christians don't coalesce and try to represent our interests, which are to protect and preserve and expand, not the rights of man, but the rights of God, and that ensures that man has the proper rights and they're regulated, we will not have
43:32
America anymore. That's my warning. But I think we can do this, especially in local areas. And I think this is a great place to do it, to be honest with you.
43:39
So I'm probably out of time, aren't I? Can I take a question or one? A couple?
43:46
Okay, question. John Calvin in the
43:52
Institutes. I think it's the last chapter. So, any other questions?
43:58
The Institutes of the Christian Religion, yeah. You know, even,
44:03
I have written down a bunch of things here, but our first charter, first charter in America, 1606,
44:09
Virginia, talks, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it talks about the Christian prince. And this is all in our legal documents, that Christian princes, the assumption is going to reign in the
44:19
United States. And it's like, you look at this stuff and you're thinking, man, how far have we come?
44:26
So, any other questions? Here in the front. Can we work with them?
44:45
I do, but I think we can work with them on certain issues, like abortion and other things. I mean, we have to.
44:51
And there's going to be a great amount of agreement on a number of things. Even at the founding of our country, this is another thing we've gotten away from is federalism.
44:59
And I don't know, I'd love to go back to it, but federalism was this idea that you could have some shades of difference.
45:06
George Washington talks about this in his farewell address. He says, the United States has some similarities.
45:12
Common law, English common law, common heritage, common religion. But there's shades of differences.
45:19
In other words, you could have congregationalists in Massachusetts. You could have Anglicans in Virginia. You could have
45:24
Baptists. All these different Protestant sects. And there were also, in places like Maryland, there were minorities of Catholics who lived there.
45:32
And they could share a society in peace. Because I think part of it was, the jump between Protestantism and Catholicism on a national or a government level is not as big of a jump as the difference between Protestantism and Islam.
45:49
Or Protestantism and LGBTQ, right? So I think prudence dictates a lot of this.
45:55
And where we are, I think there's a lot of Lutherans, and I don't know exactly what all. So it's going to be prudential.
46:01
There's going to be a lot of practical give and take in politics. But hey, if they're willing to go with us on stopping the murder of children, we should do it.
46:23
That's a good question. I think there's a separation between politics and government. They are different spheres of authority.
46:30
They have different roles, right? The government is a minister of justice. There's a minister of grace. Seth is a minister of grace here.
46:36
But it doesn't mean that he doesn't speak prophetically about the issues scripture brings up, moral issues, to the government.
46:41
So the government, if there was someone in this room who's an elected official, maybe there is, and Seth gets up here and he starts talking about the word of God and what it says about some moral issue, and that moral issue is being debated, then the waters meet, in a sense, at that point.
46:55
But they are different roles. And historically, Christians, they haven't done what we call electioneering or politicking in the church.
47:03
This isn't an institution of the government or the state. It's a sacred institution. And I think the danger is once we start doing political rallies in the church, or I should say during a church service, the
47:16
Lord's Day church service, then what we've, in a sense, done is we've lowered ourselves.
47:21
And so that would be the danger that I see, one of the dangers. I didn't define it.
47:28
Sorry. I'll get there. Well, yeah.
47:41
Yeah, I think so. I think in the
47:53
Cold War era, we had one nation under God and we weren't the Soviets. And that became the political religion, in a way.
47:59
Like, hey, as long as we're all on board with one nation under God. And it seemed like there were groups of minorities who came here, religious minorities, who could live under that.
48:09
And we could trade with them. And it was fine. It's not the numbers we have now. It's the different conditions that we're under.
48:15
And I think a lot of the old guard in Christianity, they still want to live in this positive world. They still want to pretend like, oh,
48:21
Christianity's still the default setting. And the governments, they're not really going to come and persecute us. Like, we don't have anything to worry about a neutral government.
48:28
And I think the younger generation is getting, they have jobs now, where they're getting persecuted.
48:34
They're getting canceled. They can't. And they're saying something's got to give. We need Christianity to be favored.
48:41
It was kind of favored because of cultural momentum in the Cold War era. Because we had such a backlog.
48:47
We had a bank vault full of Christianity. And we could just keep taking it out. That bank vault is empty at this point.
48:53
And so we want to fill it back up. You know, we, and I don't really take the term myself. You asked about the definition real quick.
49:00
There are different definitions. I would say that Christian nationalism, to separate it from like the religious right, because there are similarities.
49:08
Christian nationalists essentially say, the ones who take the label on themselves, from what I've gathered, that the state should represent the interests of Christians and have a
49:19
Christian identity. That a Christian identity is okay. So you have Christian schools. You have Christian families. You have Christian conferences.
49:24
You have Christian, all kinds of things. Christian music. Why can't we have a Christian government? Right? That's what they're saying.
49:31
And this is the pushback. Is that, hold on, only people can be Christians. We can't have a Christian government.
49:36
That's got to be neutral. I think that's the battle going on. So do we have time for one more?
49:42
Or one more. Okay, good.
50:37
Praise God. So if you want to get involved. What's your name? My name is Kim Horton. Kim. You see
50:42
Kim. All right. All right. What was the last question? Do you want me to pray? Or do you want to, what do you want to do? Okay.
50:47
All right. Let's pray. All right. Father, this was probably very different than what many of us are used to hearing in Sunday school.
50:55
Lord, I just pray that this, kind of these new categories, this maybe new way of looking at things for some of us, this realization that maybe we've been thinking about things in certain ways that aren't the most helpful all the time, that this would produce a work of your spirit in our lives.
51:13
That we would see what's going on around us, Lord, and be very unapologetic that Christ is
51:18
Lord. He's Lord of the government. He's Lord of this church. He's Lord of all of our lives. And Father, I pray that you would just bless this community.
51:26
Bless St. Croix. Bless this whole region. Bless this county with men and women who are committed to your order, to your created order to also what you've told us in your word that is right and wrong.