The Roots of America’s Civil Religion

Conversations That Matter

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00:08

Welcome, once again, to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, as always. I'm excited today because we have a special guest with us.

00:16

We have Dr. Richard Gamble, who is a history professor at Hillsdale College.

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He's also an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He has a website, richardmgamble .com, where you can find all his books.

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In fact, I have two of them sitting right here. I have A Fiery Gospel, and this is a book that I picked up a year ago and started reading.

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I thought, oh my goodness, the social justice issue that we talk about today is very similar to the reform movements that happened in the 19th century.

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It's a very similar battle that's going on in the church. I started reading this last week, another book by Richard Gamble called

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In Search of a City on a Hill. I thought, I have to have this guy on because he's way smarter than me on these topics.

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This is an area that I think we have touched on, we've teased, we haven't really gone fully into.

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That is civil religion on the right, on the left. We talk about it on the left a lot on this podcast, but we're going to talk about it some more.

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Does America have a civil religion? If so, is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? What should we as Christians, Bible -believing

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Christians, Orthodox Christians, how should we navigate this? Thank you so much,

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Dr. Richard Gamble, for joining me. I appreciate it. Thank you, John. It's a privilege to be with you, get to know you, and certainly a privilege to be able to talk to an interested audience who understands maybe what's at stake in these conversations.

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Oh, there's so much at stake. I just feel actually like I wish

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I had 10 hours with you because there's so much that we haven't been told. Not that we haven't been told.

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It's not like there's a sinister conspiracy. It's just forgotten. History is so often, I find, used for political purposes today that we don't have an understanding of the past as much as we ought to.

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You're someone who seems to understand the past, respect the past, and you view it as a foreign country.

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You leave it. You don't try to impose presentism, the assumptions of today, which I appreciate so much.

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First question for you. This topic of America's civil religion, in the fiery gospel, you talk about the battle of the republic in a city on a hill.

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You talk about John Winthrop's speech, city on a hill speech, they call it now.

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You trace these things and you show how these biblical images are used so often in political discourse on both the right and the left.

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What made you interested in that? That's just not a topic I see most people writing about. I'll have to do some some intellectual archaeology here,

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John, to answer you. My interest in the problem of how

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Scripture gets reused, gets appropriated, the way that the identity of the church gets appropriated for the purposes of the state, that goes back more than 30 years for me, and maybe in some ways back into my childhood.

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But when I first started graduate school, my Ph .D. program at the University of South Carolina, I was looking for a topic.

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What did I want to study for my dissertation? And I was interested broadly in the question of modernity, of theological modernism, of the liberal movement.

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In a lot of ways, I was on a pilgrimage myself toward confessional reform

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Presbyterianism and coming to understand what that meant for the life of the church, my own place within the church.

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And I hit upon the idea of looking at the liberal clergy in America and wrestling with the problem of why the liberal social gospel clergy in America who emerged in the post -Civil

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War generation, who talked about world peace and humanity and brotherhood and justice, and yet became some of the most jingoistic supporters of Woodrow Wilson and intervention into World War I.

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So I wanted to understand their minds. What made it possible for them to continue to see themselves as advocates of world peace, of permanent world peace, but also be interventionists, warriors, frustrated, sometimes frustrated with Woodrow Wilson, that he wasn't going far enough, fast enough.

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And that's what I worked on. That became my first book, The War for Righteousness, which you can add to your list.

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And that came out about 20 years ago now, but it's really based on work from about 30 years ago.

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Well, you have, I haven't read that particular book, but you have some excellent lectures out there. And I did listen to one that was hosted on the

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Abbeville Institute website from like 10 years ago, where you talk about this. And I saw another one on YouTube where you talk about this.

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And I find that fascinating. World War I is fascinating. And so if we have time, maybe we can talk a little bit about that.

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You'd go back though, even farther. You go back to the Puritans. Is that where this began? Where does this

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American civil religion, for lack of a better term, where does that start? Sure.

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You got to let me know, John, if I go off in too many directions simultaneously here.

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I'm going to try to map this out. Some of my views have changed over the last 30 years.

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It would be a shame if I didn't keep learning. And I want to revisit this question of the

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Puritan understanding of church and society or church and state loosely, or the whole question of being

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God's Israel, having a messianic identity. I have rethought some of that, and I'll come back to that.

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But probably a fundamental question is what do we actually mean by civil religion?

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And this phrase gets used in two ways that are compatible with each other, but I think we need to keep them distinct.

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And I have more objections to one as a Christian, as an American, as a conservative than I do to the other.

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The more benign form of what we call civil religion is the affirmation of principles, heroes, experiences that bind us together as an

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American people. To think back to the colonial period, we talk about the need to return to first principles.

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Virginia talked about this in the Virginia Bill of Rights. So what are those first principles? And there's a sense in which those first principles help bind us together, give us a sense of community, of a common cause, a common life together.

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And if we take the original meaning of the word religion from the Latin, it means to bind together.

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So if that's all we mean by civil religion, that we want to affirm those principles, experiences, ways of living, our heroes, we want to affirm the things that bind us together, then

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I have no quarrel with civil religion. But it never ends there. And we have to think of this in contrast to the appropriation of the

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Bible and making it a civil religion for the purposes of our own nation state, our own identity, for our own consciousness as a people, for our own sense of what our role is in the world, what we owe ourselves and other people.

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If we take on the identity of the church, and particularly of the mission of Christ, then that's something that Christians have to be alert to, aware of, on guard against, and shouldn't feel awkward or be made to feel awkward or unpatriotic if they defend those boundaries.

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I'll add one other nuance to this. There's a way in which the affirmation, that first category

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I talked about, that first way of understanding civil religion, there's a way that affirmation of principles or documents like the

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Declaration of Independence or an ideology, an ideological point from the 19th century or from Cold War America, there's a sense in which that can be elevated to the level of the sacred on a level that competes with our

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Christian faith. Or an affirmation of a principle that's actually found nowhere in Scripture or nowhere within our tradition, and yet we embrace it and defend it as if it were a fundamental part of our faith.

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So this gets messy, but I think all this is going on simultaneously, and we need to be aware of what we actually mean by civil religion.

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And those who dismiss any concern about it, make light of it, as if we're just being too fussy about things, they might be thinking of civil religion in that more benign sense.

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Someone said to me recently, well, do you really have a choice?

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Do you really have a choice? You're stuck with civil religion. And I thought, well,

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I do have a choice, and I'm not stuck with certain manifestations of civil religion.

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I've called for this in print recently. We need to go back through American history and tell the story.

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It's never been told. Tell the story of those who resisted the construction of a civil religion that competed with the

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Christian faith. That story is out there, and that story needs to be told. That's excellent.

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And I'm glad that you wanted to define things before we jumped into the lineage here of where this idea came from.

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I think it would be good for me to just share for the context and for the audience, for their interest, kind of where we're approaching this from, our historical context.

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Because right now we have a controversy over Christian nationalism, as you know, whatever that is, there's a spectrum.

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And I've read a number of the books and they're not all the same. But it seems to me, you could correct me if I'm wrong, that those on the left, including the evangelical left, seem to react every time there's any fusion of American symbolism or patriotism with Christianity in any sense.

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And to the point that you get the impression they want a secular public square where we just don't even have in God we trust in courtrooms.

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I remember doing some of my early research on this topic and going back to Jim Wallace and Ron Sider and some of these guys who signed the

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Chicago Declaration back in the 70s. And that was their main beef was that there was this false religion.

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The first issue of the post -American which became sojourners was Jesus with a crown of thorns and this American flag draped over him.

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And this was a horrible thing that we're combining these things. And they wanted to return in their minds to the purity of a first century

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Christianity that was devoid of this influence. And yet they could not see in themselves how they were probably 10 times worse in fusing the power of the state and their own,

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I guess, leftist tradition in American history with their own

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Christianity. And that's what we have today, in my opinion, is we have this knee -jerk reaction against anything that's pro -American or patriotic, even the most benign things.

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And this adoption, though, of things like we have a temple of democracy in D .C.,

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which shall not be violated by the one -washed masses on January 6th. It's like, what is that? Or one final example.

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I remember Sam Smith, who I studied under at Liberty University, pointed out to me, he goes, start talking about dividing the

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United States up, that some regions shouldn't be with other regions, perhaps because they can't get along.

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And he said, you will have both sides come after you as a traitor. And I said, why is that? Think about it.

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It's weird, isn't it? It's odd that we view the union as something sacred at the level in which we would view perhaps most of our dearly felt theological concerns.

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And so I hope I'm tracking right with what you're saying, but these are some concrete examples of what I see happening in regards to civil religion out there.

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Yes. And, John, you're right that there are so many things at play all at once right now.

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And I've gotten involved in controversy over Christian nationalism, what we mean by it.

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And one of the most difficult things in trying to communicate with others and trying to teach is the nuances of questions of how and how we're using words like Christian nationalism and where this came from.

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And I can make a point, raise a concern about the way

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Christians talk about their nation or the way they worship in their churches and sometimes seem to be worshiping

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America. And I can sound like the left. And one of the things that's been frustrating for me and I think so urgently needed is we need to open up space for a patriotic

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Americanism that is also very guarded in what it says about the identity of America that polices the boundary between our

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Christian faith and our love for America, that is able to understand hierarchies of love and we don't love

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America the same way we love Jesus and we don't love it the same way we love our families, to open up a space in which

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Christians can talk about the demands that the nation makes upon them, that the politicians make upon them, that civil religion makes upon them, and distinguish that from their own

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Christian faith and not feel guilty or I should say not feel forced into a position of defending

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America in extreme terms because the left is condemning it in extreme terms.

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There have to be other options out there. There have to be other options in which serious orthodox confessional

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Christians who love their country can talk in a way that is historically informed, can talk intelligently, and to be alert to what's really going on.

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And I can say more too, if you want to follow up on this, there's a blind spot out there now.

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Thinking back to my work on World War I, so many people think or pretend to think that Christian nationalism is somehow a recent invention of the

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Christian right. It's only MAGA Republicans who are now guilty of this

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Christian nationalism when it would be so easy to demonstrate that the things that they object to the most were actually part of their movement.

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And in another way, strange way, kind of still are part of their movement, but going all the way back to left -wing evangelicalism in 19th century

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America, those guys perfected Christian nationalism. And the left needs to own that, needs to be forced to own that, that the things that they worry so much about are actually, a lot of it is a product of the left.

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Well, I was doing some research on this, on Google Books, looking back to see what's the earliest time we can see that term used.

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And it seems to be the most popular, I think it was an Ngram search I did where you see the term used, and there's this little blip in the early 1900s, and people were using

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Christian nationalism, and then you don't see it for a while. And now, of course, now you see it all over the place. And I wondered, what was that little rise at the beginning of the 20th century?

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And it's these Bellamy clubs that were avowed socialists, and they use the term

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Christian nationalists of themselves. And I thought, well, that's curious, because that seems like the opposite of what we're being told it is now, at least.

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Man, I want to trace the lines a little with you, and I know we don't have time to get into detail on everything, but, and as a good

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American, right, I want the good guys, bad guys, the black and white, which I need to fight, because there isn't clear cut lines on that.

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But I'd love to know where you think this springs from, on both the left and the right, this fusion, this syncretism, if you will.

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Is it the Puritans? Does it go back before them? Is it some kind of mystical pietism?

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Where does this start, this story? John, how many days do we have here? Oh, my goodness.

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You can find, I want to choose my words very carefully here, and perhaps too carefully for the patience of your listeners.

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But there are elements of, like, making the nation sacred that go way back into medieval

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Europe, late medieval, early modern. You can read about how people were talking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England, and her as the

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Deborah of her people, drawing from the Old Testament judges, talking about this little

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Israel in describing England of the reign of Elizabeth.

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I think that phrase might even appear in the dedicatory preface of the Geneva Bible. And what to make of all that is not easy to know.

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That was a time when there was an established church, controversy within the established church.

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The queen was the head of the church on earth. There's a melding of identities already in place that made it very easy to speak that way.

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And some of that the Puritans bring with them to North America.

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And there's, I'm doing more work right now. One of the reasons I'm hemming and hawing right now is that I'm immersed in further work on the

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Puritans and what they brought with them, their understanding of themselves, of the church, of the

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Christian faith that they brought with them. I think, this is current me.

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I might later disagree with current me, but my sense now is that in the 20th century, we started exaggerating the

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Puritan messianic consciousness in America. My hypothesis is that the new left in the 1960s, in its opposition to the

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Vietnam war, in its counter -cultural movement, as they went around diagnosing pathologies, the

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American pathologies, and kind of self -loathing movement, rejecting

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America, rejecting what America had stood for. There are lots of reasons to have lots of different views of Vietnam, but the hard left that tried to trace

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American involvement in Vietnam back to like the American DNA, the

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American genetic code, that this is who we've always been. We've always been crusaders, messianic people.

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It's my hypothesis right now that a set of scholars in the 1960s, some books

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I've actually used in the past, and used to depend on a lot, were actually creating, even if they didn't know it, were creating a false memory in America, and ended up making the

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American messianic consciousness, just for a shorthand here, more typical of the

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American past than in fact it actually was. Making manifest destiny more characteristic of the

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American past than it actually was. Now to undo that narrative, or to test that narrative, would require a lot of work.

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And I think thanks to Perry Miller and others, the way they wrote about the Puritans in New England, they created a false, fake news, they created fake news.

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And people get trapped in thinking, and I think this happened after starting in the 1960s as well, that because the left was attacking this story, this identity of messianic identity, manifest destiny, that there were those on the right who felt obligated to defend it, neither side realizing that we might have gotten the story wrong.

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Now that might be too complicated a line of inquiry for us to pursue right now, but this is my concern, that we have been saddled with a fake story, and that Americans were much more level -headed in the 19th century than we give them credit for.

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We have gone back and quoted the most quotable, which is what we do all the time.

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It's just like current news. We go back in history and we quote the most quotable that proves our point, and we have missed the way ordinary

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Americans were actually thinking about their nation, their people, their place in the world.

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That's fascinating. You point some of this out in A Search in the City on the Hill, that it wasn't until,

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I don't remember what time, in the 20th century, that people focused on that particular phrase, even calling it the city on a hill speech, whereas before that wasn't considered significant.

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We don't even know if it was delivered. We don't even know if this was actually a given as a speech. I always thought it was.

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I had this image in my mind of John Winthrop on this hill, almost like a sermon on the mount type situation, and that may have never happened.

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You do though see in that some of the, I don't know, the roots of this though, don't you, where he is fusing these understandings of the church and the community that the

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Puritans were establishing. Right, and certainly the ways in which that is going to be used, right, and made a precedent.

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This is part of my point in that book and my subsequent thinking over the last 10 or 12 years.

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The uses to which the model of Christian charity and Winthrop, the uses to which that will be put as a authenticating precedent for the way we're talking about America now.

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I think that's the real story. John Winthrop and countless others of his generation do open the door for that.

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But one of the things to remember with Winthrop, and I hammer away at this with my students, is that he was talking to a tight -knit group, a highly homogeneous, tight -knit group of Christians for whom, and for him it was normal for him to address them as if they were a

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Christian congregation. He was interested in catechizing them. In fact, my new line of inquiry about the model of Christian charity, that it's actually in the form of a doctrinal lecture.

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He begins with the doctrine of providence and that he is drawing heavily from the catechisms, especially the catechisms on the

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Ten Commandments. The very vocabulary, I'm giving away my good stuff right now,

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I'm telling my secrets, that the very vocabulary that he uses in the model of Christian charity is coming right out of expositions of the

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Ten Commandments. The whole section on giving, lending, forgiving, this is language. It shows up later in the

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Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechism. He's drawing from a common heritage there.

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So to answer your question, he thought of himself as giving pious advice to a

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Christian community about how to live together as brothers and sisters within the bonds of Christ.

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Now, what gets done with that is another story entirely. And as I said,

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I think the story of what gets done with that and the way that gets secularized or reappropriated, the way

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Winthrop gets reinvented in the 19th century, that's the big story for American civil religion.

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And as you know from the book, nobody read the model of Christian charity for 208 years.

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It's not until 1838 that it was published. So it's not even part of our American consciousness. Zero.

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Zip. Tocqueville doesn't know about it because it hasn't been published yet when he's in America and writing about the

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Go now today to covenantacademyonline .com. Check it out. I don't know if we want to go down this stream too far, but it's interesting to me that the

29:22

Puritans are by both sides, I guess, really the models that are focused on as far as the founders of the country, the first examples.

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When you had the Dutch, you had preceding them in Virginia, the colony there, you already had the

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Spanish in Florida, not that they were as influential, but it's not like the Puritans were the first. Plymouth predated them.

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I don't understand exactly why that still carries so much water. And I don't know if we have time to explore that fully, but is that because of what you just said,

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I'm wondering, because it was useful to appropriate their language for modern political purposes.

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Yes. This is one of my favorite topics. Another one of my favorite topics. You may have heard of the book,

30:08

Sam Smith may have recommended this to you. Kerry Roberts is a big fan of this book by Harlow Shidley called

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Sectional Nationalism. I highly recommend that book.

30:20

She there shows, without a doubt, the way that Boston, the publishing world, the academic world, the textbook world in New England mobilized in the early 19th century to tell a story about America that began with the

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Puritans. And this would be the only true authentic story. And part of this, it's a response to the embarrassment of New England's resistance to the war of 1812 and the convening of the

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Hartford Convention. And they did everything they could so they wouldn't be remembered as the first secessionists.

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And they deliberately, consciously wrote American history in a way to prove that they were 100 percent the real authentic America.

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And the other regions were deviations from that real America that takes hold in the 19th century.

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And we still it's still in all of our textbooks today. Chronology doesn't get in the way because you got to talk about the

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Puritans of 1630 before you talk about the Virginians of 1607. Tocqueville perpetuates this in Democracy in America.

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He this idea becomes the dominant narrative and it is incredibly misleading and it does an injustice, as you said, to the

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Dutch, to the Scots -Irish, to Southern Anglicans, to it does an injustice to so many other groups.

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Well, and one final thing on this thread, since I know I want to get back to the civil religion aspect of this, but in recent years, as you probably well know, there's been this, some people call it young restless reform movement now that they're not so young.

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So it's more like 20 years ago that I guess that was really starting. And I think the most probably recognizable figure in promoting the

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Puritans would be John Piper in that and getting people to read Jonathan Edwards and George Marston's biography of him.

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And all this seems to dovetail with some of that in my mind. I don't know exactly how, but the

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Puritans, not that we shouldn't study them, not that, I mean, you're studying them, not that there aren't things to glean, but they become exclusively the authorities on theology.

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So not just what being an American is, but also on what being a Christian is for many reform people today.

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I don't know if you have a comment on that before we get back to the... Yeah. And I think, I think we need a better understanding of the breadth of what we call the

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Puritan tradition. It's one of those labels that is so easily misused.

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As you well know, and your listeners know, Puritan was used as a pejorative label for narrow mindedness, sectarianism.

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But if we look at the broader reform tradition in England, we discover, and this is some really recent research, which is exciting, how indebted

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English Puritanism was to continental reform thought. We knew about some of the

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Lutheran influence, but if now we're understanding that the Heidelberg Catechism, Ursinus, other

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Dutch theologians, there is a broader tradition. And I think that broader tradition was actually brought to America.

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That's one of the things I want to demonstrate. More was brought to America than what you're talking about, than a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a

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Puritan. And there's a distinction between sort of an American character to the

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Puritans, and then that broader so -called Puritan tradition in England, and then its indebtedness back to continental

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European thought. I'd love to explore that more, but that's for another podcast.

34:42

So thanks for giving your secrets all away. So now someone else can pick up these threads and throw your thunder.

34:49

All right. So we have the Puritans. We just talked about them briefly, and they opened the door, as you said, for some of this civil religion thinking.

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More so, I would assume, than those in Virginia, the Anglicans down there, the

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Presbyterians. And so that gets, as we chronologically go through the 19th century, does that translate into the

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Second Great Awakening and some of the reform movements? I'm thinking abolitionism, women's suffrage, anti -prohibition, anti -masonry.

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I mean, are these things also, do they come directly from that? John, you know,

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I can't give you a straight answer. I know. I know. Just give me the best you can. Let me think how to come at this.

35:39

And part of the complexity for me here is just how my own way of organizing this in my head is under assault right now.

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And I'm struggling. I just spilled paint on your very finely written papers, haven't

35:57

I? Right. Yeah. And to circle back to an earlier point, too,

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I think it's been my argument in the piece I published in October.

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I argue that there's an unexplored way to figure out where American civil religion came from.

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And my recommendation is that we find the points at which civil religion was being resisted, and that will help us see it in action, see it being created in real time.

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Now, we know about the big wars. The civil religion was a factory of American civil religion,

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America's redemptive identity, messianic America.

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That's where so much of it came from. But I think we can find it, you're right, that there's an element of this in the second

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Great Awakening. There's an element of it in the reform movements, in a certain understanding of what it meant to have a

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Christian nation, and Christianizing the nation through these reform movements, that a

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Christian America would not have any alcohol, tobacco, it would not have capital punishment or certain kinds of prisons, all those reform movements.

37:31

I think there's an element there that is easily woven into, or not woven into, but is evidence for, demonstrates a certain conception of a nation, what a nation is.

37:48

And to complicate your life and my life, we also have to throw in here that we have to deal with the rise of romantic nationalism in the 19th century, and the impact of European ideology on Americans who were eager to embrace that ideology.

38:09

And a lot of the key people of the abolitionist movement in New England were also great admirers of the romantic nationalist movements in Europe.

38:24

And I think there's another one of my hypotheses, given away my stuff,

38:30

I think that they consciously, some of them, some of the theologians and philosophers and literary people, consciously wanted to endow

38:43

America with a European romantic nationalist understanding of itself.

38:50

Too many adjectives there. So to make America more

38:55

European in its nationalist identity, that's never been, well, it's been explored in some ways, but not from the angle

39:04

I'm mentioning. So if we have a rise of a certain kind of civic religion and a certain kind of Christian nationalism, we have to do a careful study of nationalism and how that is actually fighting against a federated republic in the 19th century.

39:24

And here's one of my ideas I'll tease you with. Can you have a robust civil religion in a federated republic?

39:34

You need one. Are you asking me?

39:39

Yeah, I'm just asking you to ponder this. Can you have a, run that by me one more time because I'm trying to process it.

39:47

This could be a federated republic where the states have sovereignty, you're saying. So a decentralized federated republic, does that require a robust civil religion in the way a nation state does?

39:59

No, it shouldn't. It shouldn't. It shouldn't. So I think this is a factor as well that people who promote civil religion are much more likely to be centralizer nationalist types because they know that they need civil religion to glue all the pieces together the way

40:28

Italy needed one, the way Prussia needed one. Yeah. I see what you're saying.

40:34

Yeah. We have the illusion in our country of a federal republic, but it's not really that.

40:42

And this is part of the reason it's not that. If PhD students are listening, trying to consider what dissertation topic to pick,

40:50

I think you've given them about five different things that haven't been written on. So there you go. That's our free service to you.

40:56

I like, I like exporting, exporting my ideas. I don't like exporting democracy, but I like exporting my ideas.

41:02

Well, in this book, A Fiery Gospel, I just want to talk about this briefly, since we're on the 19th century right now, and we don't have much more time anyway.

41:10

And I think that's originally what I emailed you about was let's talk about this book, which we haven't talked about yet. You do trace the use of the battle hymn of the republic.

41:18

And I found the opening pages, like the term that's used out there now is red pill.

41:24

Like I was red pilled. I was reading these and I was thinking like, oh my goodness, this is what

41:31

I'm, I feel like I'm hearing the same exact thing today from the woke left in, you know, social justice evangelicals.

41:38

It's just change a few words. And and so the idea of we're going to mobilize the church to support the war effort through these hymns that are now sung like every 4th of July, even in places like Mississippi, I was surprised

41:54

I was there. I'm like, why are you singing this hymn? But it has nothing to do with or little to do with Christ and biblical theology has everything to do with the war effort.

42:07

And this is now just ingrained in our American psyche, a

42:13

Christian psyche, even in the United States to a point where you can't even challenge that. There's probably people listening right now who are offended that I even just said something mildly criticizing.

42:25

So, yeah, I was just, I guess I should probably ask a question in this little diatribe. What with the battle hymn of the republic and everything that surrounded that, that first war movement preceding

42:36

World War One, our first, I guess, national righteous war. Do you think that we're still in that same conflict, that that conflict never really resolved itself?

42:48

Because I'm wondering that. Are we still in a civil war over these same issues? And it is in a civil religion on one side and a decentralized form of government on the other.

43:01

Give me the complex answer. It doesn't have to be simple. I should just let you put a period at the end of that instead of a question mark.

43:08

OK, I. And you know how it is, I don't want to be misunderstood.

43:15

I don't want to be misquoted. There is a sense in which the civil war has been an unending civil war about much more than questions of.

43:30

Even more than questions of the Southern identity of questions about slavery and so on.

43:37

And there's a reason why. Yeah, I'm thinking on my feet here. There's a reason why the civil war became so important, so useful for the construction of a civil religion, why

43:52

Abraham Lincoln became the figure, even among the the

43:58

New South representatives like Grady and others in the South of the pushing the

44:04

New South agenda. Lincoln was this central iconic figure who was going to bind

44:10

America together, that he perfectly combined the Puritan and the and the

44:15

Cavalier into the true American. That started to happen right away. And you add that with the

44:22

Battle Hymn of the Republic and other aspects of that war.

44:30

It gives us, I'll trot out some more ideas that people can steal here. There's a book years ago by a

44:39

German cultural historian, comparative historian called Cultures of Defeat. Comparing post -war

44:46

South, post -Franco -Prussian war France and post -World

44:51

War One Weimar Germany. What do we learn when we do that? And I was so struck by that, that the words culture of defeat and what it would be like to live in a culture of defeat.

45:05

But I think that we ought to ought to recognize as well the companion idea of a culture of victory.

45:13

And I think the Union victory in the Civil War, the legacy of that is a culture of victory.

45:27

And that proved to be habit forming. And there's a reason why, and it's so easy for me to be misunderstood here, but there are reasons why every campaign, crusade, international war after that has been characterized as a war of emancipation of some kind.

45:54

Right after the war, some of those who were in the inner circle, the secret six behind Frederick Douglass, he was

46:02

John Brown, behind John Brown. By 1867, they're already forming the anti -alcohol party and saying explicitly that this is going to be the next abolitionist crusade.

46:21

So there's something about that. And if you know the old, I'd love to come and just talk about this short story with you sometime.

46:28

You know, the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, Earth's Holocaust. I know

46:34

Nathaniel Hawthorne. I'm not sure if I'm giving you homework here. You read

46:40

Earth's Holocaust and you want to talk about somebody who in 1844 understood the mentality of woke and everything else.

46:54

That whole story, the reformers end up setting the whole world on fire out of their good intentions and in their war against the past and all tradition.

47:06

It's an amazing story. And my students love, it's their favorite reading of maybe the whole curriculum.

47:13

And they understand their own time better because of the power of that story.

47:19

So there's something about that, that Hawthorne identified already in 1844. And one of the recurring phrases in that story is one heave more.

47:28

As soon as we throw this on the fire, we'll burn that up. One heave more.

47:33

So the Civil War, but also something older than the Civil War left us with that, that, that hope that if we just heave one more thing into the fire, then we will have a more perfect union.

47:52

Then America will be pure and right. And, and, and it will be.

47:58

And there's that Gnostic temptation there. America will finally be a place pure enough for me to live in it.

48:06

Yes. Well, it's, it's a utopian scheme is really what it is. And it seems like the transcendentalists before them.

48:14

And you know, I know we have to kind of end the interview because we've we've gone at about 45 minutes now or so.

48:21

I just, I do want to say though, that this is, there's so much more that needs to be talked about in regards to this written on this and, and not just in research, but distilling it down for the practical level for layman today.

48:36

Cause I think the obvious question for people listening is how shall we then live? What, what does this mean for me? Does that mean that I shouldn't be a

48:43

Christian nationalist? I know I shouldn't be woke. Probably most of the people listening to this podcast, at least know that they should.

48:49

And you know, what does that mean for me? And so for you, this is a very personal question, but how does this look?

48:58

What does this look like in your life? I mean, do you attend 4th of July parades or do you just keep that separate?

49:03

You say, yeah, I'm at a 4th of July parade, but I also know my Christian identity doesn't necessarily intersect as strongly as it does for say,

49:11

I don't know, the religious right in the eighties or something. Sure. Happy to answer that.

49:17

I do go to the 4th of July parade. It goes, I'm in a small town in Michigan and I wouldn't miss it.

49:25

And the whole town turns out and I go down just half a block from my house and I can sit and watch the parade, the fire trucks, everything.

49:36

It's the typical Midwestern small town, 4th of July parade. And that's something, that's something

49:44

I can easily participate in. My concern, my chief concern is that there not be confusion in the church, that we not confuse our love of America with our love for God, for Christ, for his church, that we monitor carefully the boundaries.

50:15

And if we had in front of us right now, some of the things that are published by conservative, by evangelical, by people who claim to be very conscientious.

50:29

If we looked at examples of the blending of American history and the

50:38

Bible, we would see that there is a problem out there.

50:45

That so many earnest, serious, conservative

50:51

Christians don't think carefully enough about the difference between standing up for America and standing up for Jesus.

51:01

Those are not the same thing. And we want to understand the, we could talk forever about this,

51:11

John. We want to understand that one is eternal, one is temporal, one is redemptive and one is not, one is the city of God and one is the city of man.

51:25

It's not the worst example of a city of man, but still a city of man. And Christians need to think carefully through all of this and not be gullible and not be complacent and blasé.

51:40

When, you know, sitting on a hill, that's one of the reasons I use as an example.

51:47

This is what Jesus called his disciples, said, you will be a city on a hill. And if we take that and give that to a nation state, and we do that so successfully that people can actually say to me, oh, did

52:03

Jesus say that? Something has gone very wrong. And if that were an isolated case, that would be, there probably wouldn't be worth writing a book about, but it's not isolated.

52:16

So much of the very vocabulary of scripture, the story of redemption has been,

52:32

America has been woven into that, folded into that. And as if America is indispensable to God's work of redemption in the world.

52:42

These are all things that Christians have to think about very seriously. And they need to be jealous about Jesus' work of redemption.

52:51

Defensive and about sharing that identity, because we don't want to water down that identity.

52:59

And we don't want to trivialize the identity of the most sacred things of all by cooperating with them being given to entities that don't have that identity.

53:14

They have a legitimacy, but we don't have to make

53:20

America sacred in order to love America. That's a good way to put it.

53:26

And this applies to those who would, on the right, who would have a more triumphalistic narrative of America, or those on the left who have this emancipationist narrative of what

53:36

America, 1619 or 1776 projects, both of them, not the projects themselves, but well, maybe the projects themselves, but they both, the people that are attracted to those things both had this tendency to sacralize

53:50

America and the left, especially the state itself. We probably need to land the plane, but I just want to let everyone know, if you want to find out more about Richard Gamble, you can go to richardmgamble .com,

54:02

pick up his books there. There's a number of great books, and I'm looking forward to reading of your books,