Faith Under Fire: Legal Challenges and the Christian Response with Davis Younts

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Banter and Show Introduction

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, of which this podcast is a proud member.

We are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life. And with that, we're going to get into a more interesting topic today. For some, it is going to be the issue of where our faith and the legal system reside, because some people tend to think there's somehow a difference that, as Christians, we shouldn't get into making laws or fighting what laws may be made, but we should just accept them.

Well, yes, I have differing views of Romans 13. My guest today is David Yance. Now, I met David at the Fight, Laugh, Feast conference. We also were on the Dead Man Walking podcast together. And David is, or Davis, sorry, is a distinguished scholar and thought leader at the intersection of Christianity and the American legal system.

With a robust background in both theological studies and legal theory, Davis has dedicated much of his career to exploring how Christian values have historically influenced and continue to shape our nation's legal framework.

His work delves into constitutional principles, ethical jurisprudence, and the challenges of maintaining a balanced legal system in a pluralistic society. Davis is known for his rigorous analysis, his ability to draw on historical context, and his commitment to fostering meaningful dialogue about the role of faith in public.

Life.

His insights provide a unique perspective on the dynamic relationship between enduring Christian principles and evolving the demands of modern legal and ethical challenges. Davis, welcome to The Wrap Report.

Thanks, brother. Really looking forward to it.

And, you know, give folks a little bit of a background first on, you know, what is, what's your journey? How did you, first, how did you become a Christian? Second, how did you get into law? Into the legal system?

Davis Younts’ Conversion and Path Into Law

Yeah, so I, yeah, I appreciate that opportunity to do that. And so I was fortunate to grow up in a Christian home, so I was exposed to the gospel at a very young age and accepted Christ, was baptized and raised in the church.

I went to Liberty University for my undergrad, and I was homeschooled most of the time. My last two years I went to a public high school, but otherwise I was homeschooled, went to Liberty, thought I was either going to be called into full-time service as a pastor or as a lawyer.

I know most people think those two would be diametrically opposed, but that, that's, I didn't know. I didn't know what God was calling me to do. And there was this moment that I'll never forget. I was a sophomore at Liberty, it was second semester, and it was the day that I had to decide, was I going to, for my junior and senior year, was I going to go the religious studies, the Bible path, or was I going to go continue the pre-law path that I was on?

And the last class I had was a psychology class, and the professor asked for prayer before the class started. And one of the girls in the class shared the story of a need for a pastor in her town to have a Christian attorney, and they were just having tremendous difficulty finding someone who was an attorney and a Christian that understood the issues that were at stake.

And I just remember looking around the room and realizing that the other guys in this classroom, all the other men in this classroom were all biblical studies or religious studies majors. And I just realized in that moment, I had this sense of, okay, I don't know exactly what God is calling me to do, but I'm going to stay on the pre-law track.

So after undergrad at Liberty, I went to Dickinson School of Law in Pennsylvania. While I was at Dickinson, 9 -11 happened, so I raised my hand and I joined the United States Air Force as a JAG, as an attorney.

Did active duty for 11 years before leaving active duty, moving with my wife and two daughters to Pennsylvania. And in 2015, I went fully into private practice and started my own law firm in 2019.

So it's interesting. Why do you think then that it would be important for someone to understand both Christianity.

And law?

You obviously, they were looking for a pastor that understood both. I kind of think I have an answer, but why not just say, hey, if you understand law, that's good enough.

Yeah.

Why Christian Faith Matters in Legal Practice

There is so much that God has taught me, because I've been practicing law for 22 years now, and there are so many things. We could spend a lot of time talking about that. But the most important thing, I think, is that the world is, we live in a fallen world that is cursed by sin, and the world, and there's a spiritual battle.

Everything we're dealing with is a spiritual battle, and the world is in a spiritual rebellion against God and God's law. And so if we abandon God and God's law, what we get is the chaos that we see around us.

But beyond that, you know, Christians, when they're facing the system, when they're facing legal battles, they realize very quickly, if they don't have someone beside them that understands faith as a primary motivation, it can impact the legal services they get.

That can be everything from a criminal case to a Christian small business, and understanding those motivations. So there's this shared understanding of God's law and shared purpose that comes in working with a Christian attorney.

So there's a lot to unpack there, but that's certainly part of it.

Yeah, and I would say that for folks who may be listening and thinking for their own church, I'll say this. If your church doesn't have a Christian attorney to look at the bylaws, go get one quickly. Yesterday.

Yeah, yesterday, exactly right. Because look, when we were going through things, it was a question of, with the transgenderism, you need to have very specific language in there, because now you just say that a pastor has to be a male, and you don't restrict it to a biological male.

Anyone that thinks that the people who are enemies of Christ are not going to be willing to infiltrate the church to pretend to be something so that they could try to undermine.

It?

Well, that's just nuts. I mean, maybe you have a story on that or two.

Oh, unfortunately, many, I mean, and it goes for, you know, for churches, when you talk about bylaws, it has to do with, you know, facility usage and all of those things. Unfortunately, in the environment that we live in today, churches are extremely vulnerable in different parts of the country.

They're more vulnerable, but they're absolutely people just looking for an opportunity to come into a church, especially a church that's having an impact on the community. If you're involved in, you know, abortion clinic counseling or adoption services, supporting, you know, crisis pregnancy centers, if you're doing things like that, you know, God forbid you're praying outside of a library that has a drag queen story hour, your church becomes a target very, very quickly.

And people will try to exploit loopholes in a constitution or bylaws and even hold themselves out to be something they're not in order to get into a position to do damage to a church. So it's a, it's a reality of the world we live in.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I remember hearing about a church, the pastor was someone who would go on to local college campus and evangelize. So college campuses, you're dealing with the issue of homosexuality, transgenders and day in and day out, if you're going to do that kind of evangelism there.

And so what ended up happening was they had bylaws that allowed the public to use their church for weddings. And what ended up happening was two people of the same sex decided to, they didn't both come.

It was, they were very deceptive in it. And so it was a man and a woman that came and asked for use of the building. And on the wedding, it was, they discovered that it was two people of the same sex.

And the church basically canceled the wedding and got sued because their bylaws were not specific enough. And that's why I encourage, Phil, the, it should be things, everything should be with special exceptions.

So like, you know, in our church, we had a thing of that the church would only be used for members of the church, except for special exception. And so that way we can always say no to everything. But if there was a special case, we could, we could look at it.

Right.

Right. No.

And I've advised a lot of churches when it comes to facility uses, you know, limit it to members of the church. And then yes, you know, there are special exceptions that can be granted. So then you can do that.

But you know, one of the things we've, we've had to do, and people, people say I'm crazy when I advise pastors of this, but one of the things we have to think about, and this is just the way we have to think in a fallen world is, is this question, you know, when a pastor performs a marriage ceremony and they're signing off on the marriage license, there is an overlap between a spiritual function and a magisterial function that's authorized by the state.

Right.

This is fascinating.

Right.

So one of the things I've, I've warned people to be very careful of when it comes to being a pastor is at some point your state could say, well, you're performing a state function by signing a marriage license.

So you can't, you know, not do a same sex wedding or a wedding that you don't want to.

Do.

You, you have to do it because we say you have to do it under our state law. Now that's not something that's been challenged a lot, but it's a warning that I've given to pastors. And, you know, quite frankly, I say, why does the church care about that marriage license?

It's a spiritual covenant between the members of the church and the families and the people involved there. If that's a concern in your state, they could go and get a marriage license from a justice of the peace or however they want to do it.

And then you can perform the spiritual ceremony in your church. But some people look at me like I'm crazy when I say that, but we came very close in Pennsylvania to having to, to do that. And I was a pastor elder at a church and I said, look, there's, this is something we have to think about.

Nobody wanted to hear it then, but it is something that's on the horizon that we don't, we don't think through, but that's, again, we live in a world that is, there are many, many people engaged in a spiritual battle and they're hostile towards churches, particularly those churches that are involved in the community and actually acting out on their faith.

Well, yeah, most people don't think about it until it gets in the news and they realize, oh, and we don't want to be the guy in the news.

You know?

Nice.

I remember when New Jersey was looking to do same sex marriage and I, so I went to the, they had an open forum. We could ask questions. You only had like 30 seconds to ask a question or whatnot, but I asked, I asked every one of them, do you believe in a separation of church and state?

They all agreed to a separation of church and state to which my response is then why are you discussing a church issue in the state? Marriage is a, is a religious ceremony to, to which they all, none of them gave an answer.

They just were like, thank you very much for your opinion and voted for it anyway, but it just showed the hypocrisy of it.

Right?

That's right.

Marriage is a state issue. It's not a state issue. It's a religious issue, but they, they want to be able to say how the church should do.

Marriage.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Christian Principles in the American Founding

So, so you got, you know, you have a, a background with, in, in Christianity, law, history. So, I mean, how do you view the, you know, the Christian principles that we have? How do they influence, you know, the, the early American tradition as far as our legal.

System?

Yeah.

So what is fascinating about our founding fathers is they really, and it gets brushed over way too often in modern history, but there were two books that were cited more by the founding fathers when it comes to the declaration of independence.

And you look at the continental Congress and the constitutional convention, and it was Montesquieu. They were heavily influenced by Montesquieu, but the other single book that was most quoted, most cited, most talked about was not just the Bible, but very specifically the book of Deuteronomy.

I'll think about that. That's, that's wild from our modern perceptions to think about how cited that was. So the reality is the founding fathers not only looked to biblical law and biblical principles and what they did, they understood English common law, which is very, very important because English common law was really did come from a biblical perspective.

And it looked at, you know, the common blessings of the law and how there are principles that go beyond written statutes that are commonly applicable, that should apply to all people. And it's not that they're ever carried out in England necessarily justly or equally, but that's what they were looking at.

But the other thing is, look at the entire idea of separation of powers in our, in a federal system. And that comes from this idea that men are corrupt, men are fallen, men are sinful. And if there isn't a check and balance on that fallen nature, then one branch will inevitably, you know, gain power and people will be tempted to abuse power.

And so everything about our system was set up with this recognition, not only of a creator God, but also of man's sinful nature and how government corrupts that and power corrupts.

That.

So there's really no way to take away biblical principles, biblical law from everything about our founding documents and the intent that our founding fathers had when they set up our nation.

I've heard a reporter argue recently that, well, the constitution, you know, our founding documents didn't mention God all that much. I think that she said, well, the constitution only mentions God four times.

To which I was thinking in my head, well, there's not a whole lot of words in the constitution. So if he's mentioned four times, that's actually a lot. But how much of the principles are in there that you get from the Bible?

And they did, I think that, so do you think that so much of this secular world misses that because they don't even understand the Bible?

I think that they do. And a lot of it too is just, you know, there is this idea and it's a myth, of course, but there is this fundamental lie from Satan that there is such thing as spiritual, religious and such thing as secular, right?

So there's this concept that you could even conceive of laws or a system of government that is divorced from worldview or from faith. And you and I know that that's just, that's a lie. That's a lie that Satan tells.

And it really comes from this idea that people fail to recognize we all worship something. We are created in the image of God and we're going to worship something. We're either going to worship the creator God, the one true God, or we're going to worship man, which is what Satan wants us to do.

And all idolatry, all false religion, all of it really is, comes from that idea that what we do when we don't worship God is we worship man. And it always ends in, you know, chaos and tyranny. And that's really what people fail to understand because they don't mind, you know, they'll say nice things about religion and they'll say, that's fine.

Just keep it in church on Sunday morning. Don't bring it into the public square. Don't bring it into the secular world. But everyone is influenced by worldview. Everyone is influenced by who they worship.

And so it's not a question of, you know, moral law. It's a question of what morals, what standard is of informing the law. And that's where we get into some of these really, really interesting debates.

But as Christians, we cannot continue to cede the public square to secular humanists because their religion is creating the chaos. And we cannot allow, you know, secular humanists' world to define these things because that's how we end up with the chaos and the tyranny that we see today.

Darwinian Ethics, Case Law, and Legal Precedent

How do you see the legacy of Christian thought impacting, you know, the contemporary legal debates? Especially when we look at things like religious freedom, civil rights, you know, there's a lot of ethical decision-making when it comes to things like abortion, social justice.

People might've heard of things like that, or COVID, I don't know, maybe not everyone's heard of this thing called COVID. But, I mean, there were a huge number of legal issues and I would say legal overreach into Christian life during some of these recent, you know, decade.

How do you see that Christian thought should be having an impact on these debates?

So one of the things we have to do is we just have to get a little bit of a historical perspective on the American system of law and what's happened. Because one of the things that happened was Darwinian ethics, right?

Darwinian evolutionary theory and ethics have woven their way into so much of society people don't even realize, right? And, you know, some biologists now will be like, oh, we're not really Darwin. But there is some merit to this whole idea of evolution and other things.

One of the things that happened is, you know, at the most prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale, you had professors like Christopher Columbus Langdale who wanted to apply evolutionary theory to the law.

So what happened in law school, and it was true the law school I went to, they abandoned studying the law, not just God's law, but they abandoned really studying the law. They abandoned studying the constitution and replaced it with case law theory.

So this idea that the most important thing in the law is really just case law and precedent. And that comes from this idea that as society evolves and people get smarter and smarter and people get better and better, the case law will be our way of evolving as a society and bring us, you know, utopia when it comes to the legal system.

So, you know, look at the overturning of Roe versus Wade, right? And what was the cry from secularists is, oh, they're overturning years and years of precedent. Well, that goes right to the heart of much of our legal system today, which is case law-based, which is precedent-based, not principle or really even law-based.

It's just, you know, bad decisions leading to, you know, precedent moving forward. So that's one of the things you hear. So so many of the legal questions and the legal battles we see going on are really based on this idea that the law is evolving.

So we have this Darwinian concept. And and so we don't really care what the statute says. We don't really care what the Constitution says. We don't really care what the abiding principles of the common law are.

What we're going to look at is where we have evolved societally. And then we can just sort of pick and choose. And, you know, maybe a judge comes up with a novel legal theory, but it's it's new and it's current.

So we're going to place more value on that. Again, so many of these issues you want to talk about come from that basis. And then they're just they're underlined with the idea of secular humanism. So when you look at covid, it's really easy to see how they would say, well, you know, are my safety, my personal safety means that that you have to do what I tell you to do.

And if that means the state's going to order you to take an experimental medical product and inject it into yourself or wear a mask everywhere you go or you can't leave your home, then that's that's an evolving notion of society.

We have to protect people. So since we worship man, that's what we're going to do. And it's the same. You know, the same is true of social justice or transgender issues or other things. Just look at this concept of the old the past, just like in communism, the past is evil.

They were Neanderthals. They were foolish. We're much more enlightened now. And we can evolve and the law should evolve with us.

I mean, is there any examples you have from cases maybe that you you've worked on that can that show this? And also, I mean, what you're making a distinction between the Constitution and case law for folks of us who don't have the background, like what is what is case law?

And then how's that? Because you're saying it's that's different than, I guess, constitutional law. What would be those differences? So two part question for you.

Constitution, Statutes, and Case Law

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So so the Constitution is the foundational law of the American system. And then Congress passes statutes which become the legal code for our system. And then case law is simply the outcome of specific cases.

So it could be a Supreme Court case, an appellate court case or even a local court case that forms a precedent. And then what all lawyers are taught to do in law school today is not so much read the Constitution, not so much look at the statute, but simply look at some case that supports the position that you have that you're advocating for.

And we rely on that precedent from a more recent case. So the more recent the case, the better, which I think logically you could flip that on its head and ask a question. Why is there a recency bias when it comes to case law?

But it's really this idea that, you know, whatever the most recent decisions are from some court on is what you should apply to your case. And that means more than the statute. That means more than the Constitution.

So that's what I'm talking about when I talk about case law and case law theory. There are a lot of different ways to to apply that. But you you see it a lot just in the in the logic that is applied to how our government looks at issues.

So one of the big examples that I could get into because I dealt with it a lot where it was in in covid and we can even we could apply it to a lot of parts of society, but very specifically cases that I had involving military members and covid.

The simple fact is there's federal law under Title 10 of the United States Code that says the military cannot mandate that a service member take an emergency use authorization or experimental medical product.

It's a very simple statute. It's very straightforward. That's what it says. You cannot mandate that on a military member. The only way you can do it is if the president issues a very specific exemption.

Congress passed that in the 90s because the military had a history of experimenting on military members. There were some horrific experiments that were done on military members. And so Congress made that very clear in the 90s.

During covid, there was never an FDA approved vaccine, medical product, whatever you want to call it, that was available to give to military members. The bottles themselves. And at a lot of these cases, the bottles themselves said EUA.

And it was clear even in the applications for approval, the the vaccine manufacturer said, hey, the emergency use authorization product that we have billions of doses of sitting out here is legally distinct from the FDA approved formula, which we haven't started producing yet.

So it's very simple. So I would simply go to the military chain of command and I would say this is not a lawful order. You cannot order someone to do this. The president has not issued an exemption. The president has not issued an order to exempt anyone from from this statute.

And the military simply said, yes, but we're going to do it anyway. And you're going to have to follow that order. And it was just the reason that I bring up that example is there's this concept that while it's for the greater good or we're in a crisis or this is what the president is telling us to do.

And it was a simple fact that the military was ignoring federal law and statutory law. And believe it or not, the first court to actually rule consistent with what I've just said, the first federal court to do that didn't make that ruling until December of 2024, when they actually outlined the law and made that ruling and finally verified everything we were fighting for in that.

But that's that's just an example of how this logic of, yes, that's what the statute says. Yes, there's constitutional rights in there. And yes, it's very clear. But, you know, we're going to ignore that because we feel like this is for the greater good.

And that happens in the law all the time. And it's particularly we see it a lot. Anytime you're dealing with a federal bureaucracy, people don't always think of the military as a bureaucracy, but it is.

It's one of the largest bureaucracies. So that's that's where you see these concepts playing out constantly.

Yeah, I remember when a friend of mine got arrested for he was doing open air evangelism outside of a mosque. One of the more funnier cases when I finally went to court, the reason I think I went to court was because when the police officer showed up, the one female officer saw someone that was filming and grabbed the camera out of his hand.

And so that was would have been on film if they didn't erase it. Like they literally did a long road back to the police station where you could actually see the.

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The video is just black. You could see where they like went back to the beginning and hit record. And you hear the blinker in the car. You hear the road. So but but what was interesting was when they went there, the the lawyers were instead of arguing based on freedom of speech, as you're saying, with case law, they were arguing on all these recent cases.

Now, I say it was a funny case because I was sitting there in the courtroom and I think the judge realized basically before the defense attorney started to make his case, he already saw where this was going.

Like he's sitting there doing paperwork, shuffling paper. And so that made that made my friend's attorney like even more nervous, like thinking, oh, no, it's going against me. So he was trying to argue even harder.

But it was really kind of funny because it like it was they had they brought in all these witnesses from the mosque. And their argument was that he was right in front of the mosque. And it was it was the face act.

And they were they weren't letting people in. And they had mosque security and the mosque security was like, oh, yeah, they were kind of they were so far away. We didn't even we couldn't hear him inside.

We could like like the folks that were at the mosque where they were preaching to the people coming in and out of the mosque and the people in the mosque were giving a better defense than what we're my friends were doing was fine.

It was it was like I'm like, yeah, these guys, these prosecutors really didn't vet the people before they put them on the stand.

Like you should have thought about that.

But, you know, so much what you're bringing up is a Romans 13 issue. And, you know, during covid, this was a really interesting thing, how people were interpreting Romans 13. Right now, when we look at it like, OK, across the other places in the world, I could say it might be different.

But what a lot of people don't understand in America, the president is not the law, the constitution is. And it's a hard concept for people to realize because they just think, well, if the governor says something, if the president says something, but in our country, at least, and you could when you speak more specific to this, but it's the constitution, that's the law, the land, not the president.

They're supposed to be submitting to the constitution. Is that correct?

Romans 13, Constitutional Authority, and the Military Oath

Yeah, that's that's absolutely right. And you you can even take it a little bit farther back than that and understand what the constitution sets up is an elected form of government that is a representative form of government.

So the ultimate law, the ultimate authority really is the people and the voters who have established a constitution. So, again, you know, a lot of my examples in this come from the military. But I think when we when we look at them, there's this interesting applicability that goes across.

So an individual military officer like I was swears an oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States. That is completely unique. There is no other nation that ever had a military oath like that.

The Roman legions would swear an oath to the state or to Caesar. You know, Hitler brought in military leaders and made them all swear an oath to the fuhrer. But ours says not to the not to the country, but to the constitution and to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

So what what we have to understand is the reason covid was such a crisis in so many ways in the military as well is is President Biden and the leaders that had sworn an oath to the constitution literally ignored federal law.

They ignored the federal law from 10 U .S .C. that talked about experimental use, but they also intentionally ignored the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is based on religious freedom in the constitution.

But the Religious Freedom Restoration Act says you have to make room for religious accommodations. And they simply chose to deny religious accommodations as a blanket denial rather than evaluating the individual cases.

And they admitted that in federal court. They said, well, we don't have to abide by this. We're not required to abide by it unless somebody sues us and then we can be ordered to. But otherwise we don't.

I mean, imagine that the executive branch under the authority of the president saying we don't have to follow. We don't have to follow that statute if we don't want to. We don't have to follow that. The only time we have to follow it is if a judge tells us to.

It just exists out there. There's no enforcement of it and holds no power over us unless a judge tells us we have to abide by it. So that's that's really the issue. So that's where Romans 13, you know, the analysis of Romans 13 might be different if there was just a monarch or a king or something else.

But the reality is there's the constitution, but it really is an elected form of government where the people are, you know, of the people, by the people, for the people that that means something. So when we look at Romans 13, we do have to look at the principles that are there.

We can't divorce those principles from the rest of scripture. And we have to understand what what is our what is our government, what is our system of government. And we we vote for these leaders and we can vote them out of office as.

Well. Wait, I. The media makes it really clear that it's Donald Trump who's destroying the constitution. You're saying it was Joe Biden.

You know, it was I mean, you know, people people laugh at me. I mean, listen, I had to get an injunction in federal court to get to 20 years of military service as a reservist because I failed to comply with an order to get a vaccine after, you know, after my religious accommodations, myself personally had been denied.

But but I, you know, I tell people this really is a form of a constitutional crisis because the executive branch is intentionally just ignoring a statute. They're ignoring two statutes when it comes to this.

And they're just choosing that those don't apply. And they're just saying, well, if the courts stop us, maybe maybe then, maybe then. And it's fascinating. But that that was you know, that was the Biden administration that did that wild when you look at it.

And I don't think as you know, the dust settles and we move into the Trump administration, I don't think history is going to treat very kindly what happened. I think there are going to be a lot of law review articles and other things that talk about what happened in the military during that time frame.

Well, more than just the military. I mean, we now know since, you know, people are now admitting we have the X files. We have the you know, there are Twitter files. We have the, you know, Zuckerberg all coming out saying, yes, the government was violating the First Amendment.

Right. They were censoring speech. We know we know now that, yes, the government, you know, Biden was looking for any kind of loopholes for the Second Amendment, like going into FFLs and just, you know, the number of FFLs, I think that were shut down prior to Biden was about like eight to 12 a year.

And it went up to like eight hundred a year, you know, under Biden. And it's like and they just shut them down. Then, you know, they force everything to go through an FFL. And what this what people don't know when an FFL is basically, you know, how you're going to transfer weapons, guns and whatnot, and where you're going to purchase from.