Reject the Proposition Nation
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https://www.worldviewconversation.com/product/against-the-waves-christian-order-in-a-liberal-age/
- 00:00
- Hey guys, John here. Just thinking about chapter six from my book Against the Waves, Christian Order in a
- 00:05
- Liberal Age. You can go to againstthewavesbook .com if you want to copy, but this is one of my favorite chapters that I had to write because I really wanted this information out there and I didn't see anywhere else that you could access this, at least in an understandable compact form.
- 00:23
- And so the chapter is on the proposition nation myth, this idea that the it reduces down to the notion of equality.
- 00:33
- It's this abstraction. You can put the United States in the Middle East by just introducing a little democracy, a little equality, and they'll just be like Americans.
- 00:40
- Anyone who immigrates here, doesn't matter what language or religion they have, they can be Americans because they'll believe in equality.
- 00:48
- It's a really low bar. And no other people has had this kind of reductionistic understanding of their own identity, but for some reason in the
- 01:01
- United States this has happened. And the more curious thing to me is how did this get into conservative circles?
- 01:08
- How come people who call themselves conservatives, who want to conserve the unique particular things that make
- 01:14
- America what it is, why would they reduce everything down to this notion of equality? And it really is that whole step was influenced by a guy named
- 01:25
- Harry Jaffa. And there's not a lot of at least accessible critique of Harry Jaffa or even tracing how he did this.
- 01:34
- And that's what I do. That's what I do in this chapter. And honestly it's probably worth the rest of the book, even if that's the only chapter you read.
- 01:43
- But I could say more, I'm not going to. I've talked about the proposition nation quite a bit on the podcast, but go check it out.
- 01:52
- AgainstTheWavesBook .com if you want to know the history on how this idea of the proposition nation became mainstream even in so -called conservative circles.