Georgia's Abortion Law, Gen Z's Conservative Shift, Re: Horton on America's Founding, & More

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to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a number of topics and stories to get to today, so I am not going to waste your time with a lot of extra material here on the front end of the podcast, but I do wanna play one quick video for you.

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All right, check it out, resurrection .co forward slash matter. I'm not sure why the video didn't play, but you heard the audio there, and they do good work on website designs.

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I know that's the big thing now, right, for businesses. You have to have a website. You don't really have an option not to, and you also have to have an eye -catching logo or at least something that catches people's attention.

01:27

So with that, I wanna jump into things here. We have a lot to talk about, and the first thing

01:33

I wanted to get to is this bill. It is the HB441 bill, and that is in the state of Georgia.

01:46

And I'm not gonna read the whole thing for you, but essentially it's an equal protection bill, meaning that it protects people who are inside the womb just as much as it would people outside the womb.

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That's the intention, at least. So if you can't murder someone outside the womb, you shouldn't be able to murder someone inside the womb.

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You can check it out yourself. If you go online, just type in any search engine, Georgia House Bill 441.

02:12

Now, there was a hearing about this, and I saw some videos, no national news stories that I could see are covering this, but I saw on my own ex -feed some people who are putting clips of this out there, and this is one of the exchanges that got a lot of attention, and I wanna play it for you and talk about it a little bit.

02:30

So here it is from, I believe yesterday, the House hearing on this equal protection bill.

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I'm Esther Panitch, and you're not from here, so I'll assume you don't know, but I'm the only

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Jewish representative in the state of Georgia. Judaism posits that the life of the mother is more important than the life of an unborn.

02:55

Are you telling me that I don't have a right to my religious liberty? Well, no, everyone would appeal to an ultimate authority over all of us, and one of the things that I respect and admire about Judaism is that we share the same scriptures, the

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Torah, the Talmud, and, not the Talmud, sorry, the Torah and the law, the prophets, and scripture does teach, without question, that from fertilization, all human life begins, and that we are uniquely made by God, created in the wombs of our mothers, and known by God.

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And so, with that, Judaism, as well as Christianity, would teach that every human being must be protected and given equal justice.

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One of the laws of Moses that's repeated over and over is no partiality. We treat everybody equally.

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And the point that I was making, Representative, and I appreciate you asking the question, was the same point that can be used in terms of our

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Jewish brothers and sisters, where there was a time in history where there was a class of people that drew a circle around themselves, the

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Germans, the SS, and said that we can oppress our Jewish brothers and sisters, that we can treat them with abuse, we can kill them.

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My point, Representative, was that we've had this problem in history many times over, where a class of human beings says to another class of human beings, we can oppress you, we can kill you, we can murder you.

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And what we're saying with this bill is that every human being is made in God's image and deserves to be equally protected.

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Sure. Everyone valued, women, men, children. I understand that, but Judaism does not posit that life begins at fertilization.

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It says that it's like water until 40 days. And the way you know this is, look at Israel.

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Abortion is readily available, and it's free. So please don't misstate what my religion tells me is my duty, if I am at risk, if my life is at risk,

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I may not only be, it may not only be suggested of me to have an abortion, but required of me to have an abortion, because a life in being, my life, takes priority over something that is not, has not been born yet.

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So how do I exercise my religious liberty under your bill if it was adopted?

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Well, thank you for the question, Representative, but the answer to two of those main questions, the first one is that when

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I was referring to Judaism, that the Jewish religion is based upon the Old Testament scriptures, the law and the prophets.

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I am well aware, yes. There's no question that the view that came later you're describing is not in the law and the prophets, it's later

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Jewish tradition. That's just the point I wanna make to that. The next point is that this particular bill says nothing towards the case that you're bringing up, where your life is in danger.

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This bill is about equal protection for all human beings in the womb. It's about the preservation of life.

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If your life were in danger because of a pregnancy in very rare instances, very infinitesimally small instances.

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I'm not just talking about physically. Emotionally, psychologically, those are exceptions to, which allow a

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Jewish woman to have an abortion if they need one. If I may respond to that, that's a very good point. We wouldn't, in our current justice system, allow a woman who murders her six -year -old child by drowning him in the bathtub.

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To get away with the argument, I was emotionally struggling, I didn't feel like I could care for this baby.

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You know that's not the same thing. I'm talking about things, an unborn child compared to, let me finish my question, please.

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An unborn child versus a life in being, which would be the mother.

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So under your bill, could I exercise my religious liberty if I felt, along in consultation with my rabbi, that I needed an abortion, and my doctor, that I needed an abortion for survival, whether that's physical survival or mental survival.

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And the point I was making to you is that the human being in the womb is the same. This is something you can answer with a yes or no.

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Under my hypothetical and your bill, could I exercise my religious liberty?

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We don't believe that anybody has the right to, with malice of forethought, take the life of another human being in an unjustified manner.

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So equal protection for all humans means that nobody can say to another human being, I'm gonna take your life with malice of forethought in an unjustified manner.

07:24

Okay, so your answer is no. I can't, if I believe that I - You can't kill your baby, no. Okay. That's the clip that I saw going around, and it's a, there's several things in there that stand out to me.

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The first one is, I think Jeff Durbin did a great job, and in fact, taking advantage of the fact that this was someone who wanted to critique the bill from a

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Jewish perspective, bringing up the Holocaust was probably a smart move on his end, just to try to create a moral parallel there.

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But you quickly saw that this particular individual, and there was later a rabbi who came, and I won't play that video, both wanted to use their

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Judaism as the reason for why abortion should be legal. Now, I haven't looked at any stats.

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I'm actually not sure if there are stats on this. I know Jewish people of really any stripe, just about,

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I mean, the way that the polls are conducted are, they don't get into specific sects of Judaism, but religious

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Jews, we'll put it that way, overwhelmingly tend to vote for Democrats. There have been exceptions to this.

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I noticed with Donald Trump, for some reason, did make inroads into, even where I live in New York, to New York Jewish communities, and I think part of that was the experience of COVID, and you had to be here to see what happened during that time.

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We had de Blasio saying things like, my message to the Jewish people is stand down, and things like this, and because you had

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Hasidics in New York City that just said, you know what, we're not abiding by any of this, and would break the locks off of playground gates, and go use those facilities, and meet, and so I think there might be some shifts going on, but in general, those who practice whatever form of the

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Jewish religion they practice tend to be on the left, and most immigrants groups do, but I think what you just heard from that particular representative is the nub of the issue, and I think

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Jeff Durbin got to the heart of it, that yes, there's a shared understanding, the

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Apostle Paul even talks about this, that there is obviously shared revelation, when

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Jewish people, at least if they're practicing Old Testament type Judaism, when they talk about the

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God of the Old Testament, they are talking about the God of Christianity, but the issue is, since that point in time, there has been so much tradition, and the

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Talmud, of course, but just, I mean, you go into any religious Jewish person's home, and I've done this many, many, many times, you will see walls of, it looks like a library, there is just walls of books, and it's, if you ever ask, it's their religious writings, it's the traditions, it's what they're studying, it's, you know, you think, you think

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I have a big Bible here, it is nothing, it is nothing compared to all the writings that seek to interpret and reinterpret, and honestly, torture the meaning of scripture, and that's what you have there, and so this is just one thing

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I wanted to point out, there's a few things, first of all, I think that was a great job by Jeff Durbin, Pastor Jeff Durbin, and that's a great way to deal with this kind of thing, but the other thing was just to point out that when you hear a lot of these things in our political discourse, especially from, you might say, an older generation of people on the right about affinity for Israel and affinity for the

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Jewish religion, sometimes slipping into saying things that frankly are heretical, and I have heard things like, well, they're safe through keeping the law, we're safe through Jesus, I have heard that,

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I'm not kidding you, I'm not saying that's the common thing, it's not, but there is an odd kind of dynamic at play there, and when you heard this representative talk about Israel and how abortions are common, they're accessible, they're free, and she could have gone on if she wanted to and talked about homosexuality,

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Israel is a liberal state, and I know I've said this before, but I don't think most of the members of Congress or people who support

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Israel are even motivated by a dispensational framework or anything like that,

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I think maybe some justify it with that, but I think the bottom line is, it really comes down to this, and this is a point

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I made in my book, Against the Waves, Christian Order in a Liberal Age, liberalism is a religion in and of itself,

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I put out a video yesterday of this, and Israel, to some extent, represents what that looks like in practice, and that's why

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I think it's treated like a Western democracy, a Western liberal state in the Middle East, in a place where you have a lot of enthusiasm for a pre -modern arrangement, and so that's,

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I think, motivating the vast majority of this, it's what you just heard that lady, that representative articulate, these are the values of Israel, and of course, they put a religious veneer over the top of it to justify it morally, but fundamentally, that's what it's about, you can make your own decisions, you can pursue your own ends, and then you can sanctify it by claiming that it's somehow in keeping with your religion, but it really didn't matter what religion it was, because liberalism knows no boundaries, and can really infiltrate just about any religion, let me give you an example, because I saw some people online saying,

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Judaism is evil, this is Judaism, like sharing this clip around, and this is, but let me share this with you, and this is food for thought, is

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Reverend Emily Walker Cornetta, I am an Atlanta resident, I live in Fulton County, I'm an assisting priest at St.

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Luke's Episcopal Church in Midtown, I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today, for eight years,

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I worked as a perinatal hospital chaplain, ministering to pregnant patients and their families, grappling with serious fetal or maternal medical conditions, sometimes both,

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I would, over these years, I would sit with families of many different faiths, as they processed a situation, they never in a million years, thought they would ever have to face, they'd work their way through impossible questions, questions like if they continued the pregnancy, what would their baby's life be like, how much their child would have to suffer, whether they'd be able to parent this child, what this birth would mean for their other living children, and on and on and on, and over these years of listening, what

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I saw in these families was the opposite of indifference, I saw love, a weighty sense of responsibility, and a clear eyed awareness of the kind of life they would wanna give a child, and grief about what was actually possible, given the realities that they were facing, and all of this listening over the years taught me that women and families need to be trusted and empowered to make difficult moral decisions about pregnancy and their families, and I'll conclude with this, you all are hearing a lot of vocal Christians in here, preaching to you that Christianity teaches that abortion under any circumstance is a sin, and please understand, they do not speak for all

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Christians, not today in this country, and certainly not over centuries of Christian witness and practice, you're also hearing a lot about protecting life, and I believe that we must protect life here in Georgia, let us to do that, let us please invest in systems of care and support, rather than systems of punishment, this bill claims to be on the side of life, but it is demeaning and cruel, and it will only bring about more death.

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Okay, the voice you just heard there is from Reverend Emily Walker Cornetta of St.

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Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta, of course though, I understand she lives there, but she is also the

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Executive Director of the Episcopal Divinity School in New York City, and I actually posted on X, I said, this is what

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Yankee religion brought South looks like, so I obviously have my own biases and so forth, but you had several pastors in that room, some of them local, some of them not, all supporting this bill,

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HB441, and then you into that, saw a reverend, a female reverend, so -called, coming in to defend it on Christian grounds, and she was not the only one, by the way,

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I'm not gonna play the clip, but there was another representative, another female representative that was also claiming as a

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Christian, that she had to oppose this, and that there are circumstances in which abortion is morally good, and using that Christianity again to justify, and so this is the question

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I wanna pose to people out there, is when you're looking at this, I've noticed much of the discourse on X likes to break this down into one thing, and I don't think most people saw the clip

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I just played, but it's Jewish people, it's Judaism or Jewish religion, that's the enemy, that's the problem here,

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I saw others breaking it down into, no, it's women, it's women that are in clerical roles, that's the problem, or in political roles, leadership roles in those two occasions, and then there's another thought

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I wanna introduce here, I think there's something else, and of course I've just gotten off,

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I've stopped writing, I finished writing my book, Against the Waves, Christian Order in a Liberal Age, and I'm just now getting off the topic of liberalism,

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I'm kinda still on it, because I'm doing all these interviews on it, but it's been in my mind a lot, and I honestly think, you can look at things this way, the ways

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I just described, you can say that women are gonna have these maternal instincts, and when they get corrupted, they end up, there's this discussion about toxic empathy, and women tend to be more vulnerable to these things, and so they're gonna be more on the left, you could certainly examine religious

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Judaism, look at the polling numbers, look at how they live and think in Western countries, and they do tend to be liberal, but the thing is, you could have a

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Christian, you could have a Muslim, you could have all kinds of different religions come up there and make essentially the same exact argument, and say that their scriptures, their teachings justify it, what's the common thread?

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And in a situation like this, it's liberalism, that's what it is, it's because they are subscribers to another religion, and they will use things in their own religion to try to justify their greater commitment, and of course abortion is a part of liberalism, it is a sacred part of this, it's almost a ritualistic part of liberalism, you must have this, because there's nothing,

18:11

I'm learning this now, I have a nine month old, there are very few things that will limit your life more than having children around, because, and I mean limit in the sense of, like if you want total freedom to travel wherever you want, do whatever you want, obviously children are completely dependent, especially at early stages, and so if the highest good is participation in a vast array of choices in a marketplace, children will prevent you from that, and so they need to go, they need to get out of the way, if that's the highest good, and so you can watch the video

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I put out there yesterday on is liberalism a religion, and I go into more details on this, but that's the common thread guys, it's liberalism, it's this ideology, and because all these people are ideologues, they're somewhat trapped in their ideology, they are unwilling, and you saw that in the exchange with Durbin, this representative was not willing or able it seemed to even break out of the constraints of the framework that she was operating in, she couldn't even step out of them for one second to think about whether or not the examine the question, is the child in the womb a human being, does the child in the womb have the same rights as those outside the womb, it's not even something that can enter her thought process or else the whole thing comes crumbling down, so good job to Pastor Jeff Durbin there, and yeah pray for this bill, pray for Georgia, and anyway

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I'm gonna take some questions, and then we're gonna get into some other things including Gospel Coalition stuff, Russell Moore stuff, and finally

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DA Horton stuff, and some other cultural things that I have stored for you, so hi

19:56

John, I got your latest book, plan on listening in my upcoming flight to Las Vegas, says

20:01

Matt Ruff, thanks Matt, appreciate that, you can go to, what's for the best way, probably against the waves book .com

20:08

if you wanna get a copy, and of course it's on Audible, it's on Kindle, give it a good rating by the way, please give it a good rating, if and when you receive that book, because it does help drive more sales, and I really think this is a message that needs to get out there, liberalism is what

20:23

I'm trying to fight right now, so Carlo says that it's weak Christian men that allow this to happen, it's not the women or the

20:30

Jews fault, well look there's enough blame to go around everyone I suppose, but I would grant your point, that our number one issue is virtuous men are lacking in our leadership class, and how do we get virtuous men to return, that is the subject that I've been in deep conversation with many people about for the course of months, and it's a difficult problem,

20:56

I'm not gonna lie, but there are some things I think happening that will help change the dynamic, but the necessary thing, the needed thing is for those in pastoral roles and local community roles to start cultivating and discipling, just like Jesus did, the men that are under your care now, the young men, even the boys, because they're gonna be men, that process

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I think has been, I think that process is being not just attacked, but it doesn't even exist in some communities, and that's our biggest crisis in a way, you can't fight liberalism, you can't really do any of this stuff if you don't have a feeder supply of valiant, courageous, virtuous men coming behind us, and I think that we can celebrate

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Donald Trump, he's in office, he's gonna be there the next four years, but we need to make sure that the next class isn't just even on the right, politically or conservative, they gotta be virtuous, they gotta be good leaders, because if they're not, they could say all the base things, but once they get into a place where there's actual pressure, then they cave if they're not virtuous, that's a huge, huge thing, so, all right,

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Trudell says, we have feminist liberal Muslims here in the West, definitely a product of liberalism, that's so true, look in Congress, but still we're able to discern that's not real

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Islam, I don't think that's a no true Scotsman exactly, I'm not sure if he's referring to someone else, but yeah,

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I think, yeah, like that's not a real Christian, right? And regarding Judaism, there are a number of different sects,

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I would be curious, because most of my experience has been with Hasidic Ashkenazi Jews in New York, and then secular

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Jews, and they are very different, I obviously, I mean, I've lived in other places, and I know there are other sects, you have conservative

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Jews, but they're basically liberal, and I know there's other, in other parts of the world, there's other sects,

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I would be curious if there is a sect that is more or less pro -life,

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I don't know, but I've definitely gone to conservative events in the past, and you'll see up on the stage, you'll see your rabbi, your pastor, your

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Catholic priest, and they'll all come out and support pro -life, so it's funny how this is shaken out, because what used to be such a defining feature, including not just religion, but your denomination affiliation,

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I'm a Methodist, I'm a Baptist, you still see that in some heavily Christianized areas in the South, in the Bible Belt, but what used to be such a defining feature, now has almost become just, it's like an outfit that gets worn,

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I mean, I'm saying in the social political setting, and the bigger thing that defines you now in society is your political leanings, and your political, and you can't tell whether someone who has a clerical collar is going to support causes on the right or on the left, it's a very curious thing, and I think there's a lot of reasons for it, but all right,

24:07

I'm gonna move on, and as we continue the podcast, if you have any questions, or concerns, or cries of outrage, please let me know, now, let's switch gears,

24:17

I'm going to, let's see if I can show this, I'm gonna show you some articles that I think are important here, but I'm having trouble for some reason pulling them up,

24:29

I don't know, I don't know why I'm having trouble with this today, but I am, I can't quite get this video off, and hold on one second here,

24:38

I think I figured it out, there we go, all right, so I wanna go to a story, and we're gonna just do some culture stuff, political stuff, and then get into some like Christian stuff, but I think this is a good transition, since we're talking about leadership and young men,

24:53

Gen Z is the most conservative generation in decades, because they're a victim of the left's failures, the second part of that headline, is more important than the first, this is an article from the

25:04

Federalist, I've been published in the Federalist, I like the Federalist, and they, it starts out

25:10

Fox, a Fox weekend headline declared, that the data shows Gen Z, the most conservative generation in decades, the real question is why are we shocked,

25:18

Gen Z's lives have been entirely dominated, by the lies and failures that the left, and the democratic party have perpetuated, according to Gallup polling in 1997, 28 % of Democrats described their views as liberal, in 2023, 54 % chose that description,

25:34

Obama was elected president in 2008, and served for eight years of their lives, so basically the argument here is that, the left went really hard left, and those 12 years of Obama and Biden, encompass the majority of Gen Z's formative year, so when you are forming your view of the world, you're being attacked for being white, for being male, you're being bullied by mechanisms, that very powerful people, even in the

25:57

White House, are imposing upon you, and it's in Hollywood, it's everywhere, everywhere you turn, you're a bad person, because you're a white male, basically, or a male, and so the

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Me Too movement, was part of this, so I mean he just goes through, walking through the conditions, that Gen Z grew up in, and if you just spend the time,

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I've been thinking about this for years, and I have a lot of sympathy for Gen Z, you think about it, they grew up in some pretty horrifying conditions, especially if they were white males, as far as every narrative being, the narrative against them being perpetuated, by every social institution just about, even when they went to church, and of course this is gonna create a backlash, this is gonna create resent, this is gonna create, not in everyone, but weird ads on the

26:47

Federalist, I need an ad blocker or something, sorry about that guys, that's his argument, essentially in this article, and there's a lot that could be said here, but I think the important thing, that I wanted to say,

26:58

I wrote an article, Red Pills Without Roots, I talked about it on the podcast, this is being framed as a conservative thing, and really it comes down to this, they want order, they want hierarchy, and they like Trump, so you test for these things, mostly they're, who did they vote for, young men, now young college educated women, are harder left than they've ever been, but young men, going in the direction of Trump, the next question you have to ask though, is why is that, the conditions that have led to this,

27:34

I think J .T. Young in the Federalist get right, but does that mean they're conservative, and what does it mean to be a conservative, where are they gonna end up, and I think this is actually still a very open question,

27:48

I have my own predictions in my mind, about what's going to happen over the next decade, but I do think that a lot of these guys, are not entirely rooted, and that's part of the reason, that they're going to the right, politically, and they like Trump and stuff, is he's a man, he says it like it is, he doesn't cower to all the mechanisms, that have oppressed them in their minds, and they're looking for the strong leader, they're looking for masculine examples, and they don't have them, and Trump is that to them, but had they had, if they had had examples on a more local level, if they had had institutions led by men, who were virtuous,

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I don't know that we would see the same exact conditions, I think that people would be, young men would be going towards the right, but I think that it would be more authentic, rooted heritage, conservatism,

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American conservatism, Anglo -Protestantism, all of that, all of the stuff I talk about in my book against the waves, that I think stabilizes us, against the innovations of liberalism,

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I'm not sure that this generation is the most stable, and I think that is the biggest demand of the hour, is that older men especially, get involved with young guys in your church, in your community, make sure that you grant them, give them a stabilizing element, because otherwise,

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I'm just telling you now, it's not just that they've been attacked, it's that there's also been technology, they've had access to chat rooms, to 4chan, to chat groups, and this is where they have found community, they found narratives, that are more suitable for them, not all of them necessarily being good,

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I think there's a mixture of things, and I'm optimistic in some ways, but I'm very cautiously optimistic, about what this is gonna look like, if you want the restoration of authentic,

29:55

Christian, American tradition, ways of life, I'm not sure that we are on that ship exactly, it might feel that way, because Trump's in office, we're gonna know more in about 10 years, where things are really gonna go, and one of the things

30:09

I am noticing now, is there's a backlash from the liberals too, the liberals and some people, who aren't even liberal in every sense, they might have conservative instincts, that's a lot of Americans to be quite honest, they have like justifications, for their conservative instincts in liberalism, they try to use this fairness model, this neutral public square model, you know, like for a good example is like, you know,

30:31

Drag Queen Story Hour, or books in schools, they're sexually explicit, we should get them out, I'm not saying

30:37

I'm anti -gay, I'm just saying they're sexually explicit, when in meanwhile, it's like, you know that they're pushing perversion, right, that's why you wanna take, it's not about sexuality, maybe that's a secondary thing, it's about perversion, right, but people have to make the liberal argument of like, oh no, it's just sexuality,

30:52

I've got no problem with homosexuality, so anyway, that's a good example of it, but this happens all over the place, and there's a backlash going on, and it's starting, where there's people who think that the online discourse, especially, has gone too far, in too many different directions, that don't accord with who we are as Americans, and I'm seeing this in my own life right now, that there's a lot of polarization, there's a lot of overcorrection, there's a lot of shooting someone even slightly off from your position, because there's no stability left, there's just chaos, and people are trying to find stability, and they're not really finding it, and so I don't wanna be black pilling everyone here, but the next 10 years,

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I think are gonna be very decisive, and I think in the elite institutions, they still are liberal, they will remain liberal, probably for the foreseeable future, and the big question is, can we as traditional

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Christian conservatives, can we get some of our guys into some influential roles, and can we start some alternative institutions, and that's what we need to be working on, and I've been convicted myself in my own life of, okay, what am

32:10

I doing towards things that actually have lasting power and matter, not just giving my opinion on things, which

32:18

I think sometimes is important to give, what I think scripture teaches, what accords with wisdom and common sense and all of that, but what can we tangibly do, and I would encourage you to think about that, that's kind of where I end my book, what can we tangibly do in your local communities, if you have the opportunity on a national level, what can you do, and for the vast majority, it's not gonna be starting a podcast, for some of you it might be, but it's going to be trying to gain some kind of upward mobility in these institutions, to actually gain influence and then use it for good, to love our neighbor, and to secure the things that we truly love, that give us identity, that give us stability, and of course,

33:00

Christianity is at the top of that list, so just wanted to make that comment about Gen Z, I'm optimistic, but I am cautiously optimistic about this, and just don't get too, don't think like, oh yeah, it's fine, like, yeah, wait 10, 20 years, and like everything's gonna be fine,

33:17

I don't have to lift a finger, no, like, this is a time to get ready, some of these guys are open, they're waiting for someone to guide them, and give them more prudence and wisdom, get involved, have young guys over, even if they're at your church, and you think like, these guys are this cream of the crop stable guys, have them over, okay, this is something that I've tried to practice in my own life, and just be invested, just be a normal person really,

33:40

I mean, that's really all I'm asking, I suppose, you don't have to do anything even that special about it, all right, let's,

33:47

I'll take any questions or comments on that, but I wanna, I just, I noticed this this morning when

33:52

I was doing my news, you know, going to various news websites, Shakespeare's decolonizers are making much ado about nothing, it's an interesting story also in the

34:00

Federalist, it was only a matter of time until William Shakespeare was decolonized, this was, there was a recent assertion of the

34:08

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, so it's like you had one job, right, honor the legacy of Shakespeare, it's an

34:14

NGO that owns several buildings in Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford -Upon -Avon, England, and a collection of personal documents of the writers, charged with overseeing the legacy of Shakespeare, the trust has concluded that the genius playwright's works promote white supremacy along with racist, sexist, and homophobic narratives, consequently, the trust will issue more trigger warnings about the plays downhill, so they go into some details here and like, now

34:39

Shakespeare's warning labels essentially, and I guess there's exhibits on like, trying to uncover the hidden stories in Shakespeare that reveal colonialism and so forth, and they're just ripping on Shakespeare, right, you can read the whole story if you're interested, and what

34:55

I wanted to say about this is I recently said, look, I went to the Thomas Cole Birthplace, great

35:01

Hudson River Valley painter and Catskill painter, he's my favorite painter at this point, like I love

35:08

Thomas Cole paintings, and I love that whole genre of Hudson River School stuff, especially when people took it out

35:14

West, just some, you know, the Remington paintings and stuff, they're beautiful, Thomas Cole though, the people managing his house are bent on doing exactly what

35:25

I just read you about Shakespeare, and I wanna let you know, this is happening everywhere, when

35:31

I went to the Thomas Cole home last year, they had turned half of it into a feminist art exhibit, an anti -American exhibit, alongside his beautiful paintings are things an eight -year -old could have done that just say things like America, KKK, and upside down pictures of the

35:45

United States, maps of the United States, they talked probably about as much about the slaves, or almost like a third of it was about the slaves who lived there and speculating about them when they know nothing except some census records, clearly what's happening at the

36:01

Thomas Cole house is a deconstruction, this is happening every single place I go, every historical place

36:07

I go, this is happening, and it is, I don't, I hate to say this, you can eliminate the

36:13

Department of Education, you can do all the things Trump is doing, which I totally commend him for, and I think it's,

36:19

I'm very happy with my vote on many of the cultural things he's trying to do, but here's the problem, that is, that's our identity right there, that's our past, that's our heritage, that's what binds us together, that's who we are as people, and when you have this massive attack happening at every level on our history, you can't go to a battlefield without being lectured about how terrible we used to be before even getting into the specifics of maybe were there heroes here, maybe they fought for some good things, you can't even get there in some places, that's the death, that's the smell of death when you see that for a civilization, that is cultural genocide, and it's happening right before us, now, of course, the example of Shakespeare is in England, England's farther along, if you wanna see the future, you can look to England, and yes, and I'm not an expert in English history, but I do know, especially during the 80s, now, not everything's exactly parallel, but especially during the 80s and early 90s, you did have kind of your like,

37:24

I don't know, it was like skinhead type thing going on in Great Britain, and you did have guys, you did have young male reactionaries to some of this stuff, and what's happened in England is they've overwhelmed the country with immigrants from other places, who, down to even religion, who was it just recently, the king, the king of England, like two days ago, is it

37:50

Ramadan, I think, this doesn't seem like a, was it Ramadan, let me just check, make sure that I'm not off on this, uh, it was a

38:00

Muslim holiday, I wanna say it was Ramadan, yeah, I think it was Ramadan, all right, so King Charles, yeah, okay,

38:07

I was right, just recently, chose to make this whole speech about the importance of Ramadan, it's,

38:15

I posted on X, I said this is, this is a country in ruin right now, this is, that's the end, that's the end, it's the smell of death when you see your figurative head, the king, declaring that Muslims are, what they're doing is important and really just as important as what

38:35

Christians are doing, and these wonderful virtues that they bring, and they're, you know, making that just as much part of who people in England are as Christianity, now, we're not quite there, you know, the

38:47

Trump administration is emphasizing Christianity, the office of faith, what,

38:52

I forget what they call it now, I just talked about it like a week ago, the, that office that Trump established, it's all

38:58

Christian leaders, you know, you might say some of them are heretics and so, but they're Christian in the sense that they're like, there's no

39:03

Muslims, there's not members of other religions, they wanna emphasize Christian holidays, they wanna do things from the government perspective that are going to privilege and honor our

39:15

Christian tradition, that's what you have to do, but you have to do this like now, everywhere, and especially at places that are linked to our own identity and heritage, you know, you can't go to Monticello and it be the

39:31

Sally Hemings Museum, which is what they've done, as soon as you do that, the seeds of your destruction are there and I'm telling you that is the number one enemy still, it is this sort of, this attack on our own identity, this attack on Christianity, this liberal deracinating impulse, that is still the main enemy and that's what

39:52

I see still out there and growing in strength, it's not slowing down, no matter what you see on X or social media, it's not slowing down, so we gotta be vigilant about these things and I would recommend, read some

40:03

Shakespeare, if you haven't read any Shakespeare, try to read some Shakespeare, this is a high point of our

40:09

English language, I mean, these are very important matters, Shakespeare, his stories are, they have been the lingua franca, they have been the stories we share in common, we understand

40:21

Romeo and Juliet, we know about the St. Crispin's day speech, you should know a little bit about these things and your kids should know about them, otherwise we lose it and the

40:32

Christianity is all throughout all of that, by the way, yeah, Mr.

40:38

Perry says, defender of the faiths, that's exactly right, he's not even the defender of the faith anymore, King Charles, he's a defender of the faiths, plural, once you lose that particularity, you're done.

40:48

All right, let's keep going here, I want to get into some other stuff from Christian publications, quote unquote, don't deport the constitution, says

41:00

Russell Moore yesterday in Christianity Today, we should deport Venezuelan gang members and any other criminals who are illegally in this country,

41:09

American Christians should not and probably do not object to that policy, so he starts off with, yeah,

41:16

I mean, and how can he not, right? I mean, that's just, everyone knows that the gang members are not, we shouldn't have a legal entry of gang members into our country, as Christians, we recognize that the most biblical justification for the existence of state includes the responsibility to protect, but then he goes on, he says, as Americans, we can see that our founders built into the constitutional public of which we are a part, the means for our government to do just that, that means prosecuting dangerous criminals, the what of that kind of deportation shouldn't be in question, nor should the why, we ought though, and here it is, both

41:52

Christians and Americans to recognize that we should also care about the how, so here it comes, what alarmed me about the recent posts of the sweeping deportations of alleged members of the infamous,

42:05

I'm gonna botch this, Train de Araga, was not that they were arrested or deported, nor was it at first about the question of due process for these alleged criminals, law enforcement is often charged with violating due process in some way or another, and usually these charges are met with government agents arguing why on the basis of the law, they have the right to act as they did, to some extent, that's what

42:28

White House borders are, Tom Homan did when pressed by reporters, as to whether the executive branch has the powers it's claiming under the

42:34

Alien Enemies Act to deport these alleged offenders to an El Salvadorian prison, he said, they do, and would fight for that right in court, that's perfectly appropriate, and that kind of question is what courts were able to discern, what concerns me is what he said next,

42:49

Homan responded to a question about due process with where was Lake and Riley's due process, where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TDA, where was their due process, how about the young lady burned in the subway, where was her due process?

43:06

Now, Russell Moore says, Lake and Riley, of course, was the nursing student murdered by an illegal immigrant, now, I'm glad, look at that,

43:12

Russell Moore uses the phrase illegal immigrant, which I thought Russell Moore wouldn't, so you could,

43:18

I don't know what this means, guys, this might mean that Russell Moore, he's gonna, he's reading the room and he's like, okay,

43:25

I gotta like kind of meet halfway here and then try to push it left or something, I don't know, but he says the cases

43:31

Homan mentioned are all criminal and should be morally outrageous, so he's gonna make a distinction, the rhetoric here, however, confuses categories in ways that could have implications for much bigger questions, if your neighbor is apprehended by the police for running a meth lab in her basement, that arrest is a good thing, you don't want to live in a society where you have drug runners running around unless you were watching

43:51

Breaking Bad, okay, well, ha, ha, ha, but what if your neighbor's meth lab is found not by suspicion or criminal activity followed by a legal investigation of it by the fact that the government has installed secret surveillance cameras in every house, is that what's happening, guys?

44:07

If you object to this kind of unlawful spying without warrant someone might say, what about the death dealers, meth dealers who were arrested, are you pro meth?

44:15

Of course, you're not pro meth, your objection to the police state would be an objection to the government not following the law, so here's he saying the government's not following the law and they're rounding up people.

44:25

Most of us take for granted that the system is just the way things have always worked, Jonah Goldberg, Jonah Goldberg, okay,

44:33

Jonah Goldberg who writes for David French's outlet have argued for years that we sought to recognize what a miracle this kind of project is, a nation that operates not out of the bounds of tribal loyalty, but according to a system of laws accountable to the people, that's liberalism right there, one that even protects the rights of minorities when the

44:49

Democrat majority wants to oppress them, that's liberalism right there, that's Russell Moore giving away kind of where he's coming from, that the only unifying thing is that we have these principles that we all share in common when that can't be the only unifying thing, at least that's not how it's worked through our experience in civilization and it's not how it worked in even biblical times, there's obviously other things that must bind us, we do need to agree on certain laws, right, but what's undermining some of these is people coming here don't respect those laws, why would that be?

45:25

Well, it's because they're coming from a complete different paradigm, they're coming from a different language, they're coming from a different culture, they're coming from a different way of life entirely and why would you expect them to, for people who have been here for centuries and have made arrangements that suit them over the course of time, why would they as new arrivals in large numbers coming into this arrangement, respect it, there's no reason to think they would.

45:54

These are things, these are ties that have bound us over the course of time in an organic fashion.

46:01

Anyway, let me just skip ahead here because most of this isn't that interesting. All right, let's get to sort of the end of here.

46:10

As Americans, we ought to care about the how and not just the what of any government action because we believe there's a constitution by which even the most popular notion must be constrained.

46:20

As Christians, we ought to care about the means as well as the ends because we believe that rendering unto Caesar does not include recognizing

46:26

Caesar as God, Trump administration rounding up these illegal migrants,

46:31

I guess that's recognizing Caesar as God. Venezuelan gangsters, Danish money launderers, Romanian human traffickers, we should prosecute them all and remove them from our country, those who are here illegally, but we ought to take care how we do it.

46:43

A liberal democracy slows down a lot of things we might like to do, but we will miss it when it's gone.

46:49

The rule of law is fallible, but it's a good idea when we cannot afford to deport.

46:55

So he just assumes in this article that the means being used are unconstitutional.

47:02

And I mean, where is he getting that is the question, right? The idea that people he says must be given attention not just to lawful ends, but also lawful means, he keeps saying this, but what's going on?

47:14

Now, obviously, if you're paying attention to the political discourse, it has to be the fact that you have these judges that are telling the president, the executive branch, no, you can't do this.

47:26

You can't deport these people. And this is part now of our democracy and our constant, and all the legends, all the lore, all the mythos that you are used to, that honestly, we do need that justify our arrangement, that justify our government authority.

47:44

They are all now recruited to undermine the very people that those mechanisms are intended to protect.

47:52

The constitution is now assumed and recruited for the purpose of justifying these federal judge usurpers and condemning

48:04

Tom Homan and Donald Trump, and not even just condemning, but let's put a little Christian veneer over it for a

48:10

Christian audience, and let's insinuate they're following false gods. Let's do that.

48:15

That's what Russell Moore is doing. So he couches the whole thing. And it's, I think it's serpentine in a way, like it's clever.

48:24

He couches the whole thing by reiterating about five or six times, we should deport people who are here in a criminal, who are here as criminals or gang members.

48:35

And a lot of people who want that are gonna read an article like this, and you might even hear it from your pastor if he's influenced by guys like this.

48:42

And they'll hear that part and they'll say, oh, good. My pastor, my spiritual leaders, they want to get rid of the bad guys.

48:49

Here's the thing, not really, not really. Now, are you questioning their motivation, John? Yeah, kinda, actually.

48:56

I do think it may be in principle they want this, but the mechanisms that are used to do this, they want to gum up.

49:04

And they want to do it by putting up a shield that says the constitution prohibits this, our way of life prohibits this, our very identity as a people bound together by laws, and our very identity as Christians who do not worship idols are standing in the way of actually practically doing these kinds of things.

49:24

There does come a point where the government has to do its job. And there's emergency scenarios that even pop up where the arrangements that were previously made must be altered.

49:37

By the way, there's a mechanism in the constitution for that, we barely ever use it. They must be altered though in order to meet current threats because the law is supposed to serve the people.

49:49

So here's the thing. There's these universal principles that exist out there, right? There you have the 10 commandments, you have the nature of God, right?

49:56

These are universal, they're true, and no matter what context you bring them into, and people are bound by them because they're bound by a relationship to their creator.

50:06

Their creator expects certain things of them. They have obligations. They have obligations to their families, they have obligations to their communities as well.

50:14

They're born into this. They don't get to choose some of these things. There are unchosen obligations. There's obviously obligations you enter into that are chosen by you, but you also have unchosen obligations.

50:25

This is the way that God set up the world. And when you create an arrangement for the good of people in their pursuit of fulfilling these obligations, and they are met with a threat that maybe was not taken into account, that is the cue that you need to now start figuring out what arrangement you are going to need in order to meet that threat.

50:50

The man was not made for those kinds of laws. These laws that are in, these are laws,

50:57

I'm not talking about, you know, Malum and Say. I'm talking about Malum Pro, I'm sorry,

51:05

I'm not talking about Malum Prohibitum. I'm talking about Malum and Say. Those kinds of laws are meant to serve man.

51:11

Now, in this case, I disagree with Russell Moore. The judges are the ones that are stopping this kind of thing.

51:16

They are the ones that are outside the boundaries of the constitution. They have no power to do this.

51:22

This is something that the executive branch actually does have granted to them by the constitution, the power to address.

51:29

And in this case, when you have the scale at which that we have these problems, then you are getting into territory that, and I've said it before, where it's an invasion.

51:41

It's not even immigration policy so much as you are now, you're fighting gang lords here.

51:48

You're fighting members of basically paramilitary groups from foreign countries.

51:54

This is a much different thing. And with the support of some of those countries. So Russell Moore, I don't think knows what he's talking about on this, but even,

52:02

I'm saying, even if so, even if you want to throw up this arrangement and say, you're violating it in the means, or that's a suicide pact at that point.

52:10

It's like, even if we just kill Lake and Riley and other people like her just keep dying, but we were forced to live under these constraints because frankly, it's not the constitution, but because we've gotten to the point where judges have gained this much power.

52:26

Again, that's the smell of death. That's the smell of death right there. And it's liberalism, once again, that is causing this.

52:36

So you can tell I don't care for liberalism that much. One more thing, and then

52:41

I'll take some questions before we get into the Horton stuff, which I'll leave for the end. This is just hysterical in my opinion.

52:48

It's TGC at its finest, right? You love TGC for these things.

52:53

How God uses Indian traffic to sanctify us, March 19th. I miss this somehow, but Indian traffic tests our patience.

53:02

It reveals our self -righteousness and serves as an instrument of God's sanctifying work in our hearts. You can't make this up.

53:08

Whether you are navigating the bumper -to -bumper madness of Bengaluru, dodging potholes the size of baptismal pools in Chennai, inching through Mumbai's never -ending sea of honking chaos or breathing in more dust than oxygen on Delhi's pollution -choked roads,

53:26

Indian traffic has a way of revealing what is really in our hearts. You didn't know you needed some

53:34

Indian traffic, but you're hearing it for the first time on the Conversations That Matter podcast.

53:40

You need some Indian traffic to sanctify you. The unpredictable lane changes, unspoken battles for the right of way, and the ever -present urge to honk can test even the most patient among us.

53:51

Okay, so, okay, I gotta keep reading. According to a report by TomTom, the great source,

53:59

TomTom, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and, I don't even know if I'm saying these names right, are the second, third, and fourth slowest cities in the world.

54:08

In Bengaluru, for instance, the average speed is 17 .6 kilometers per an hour. But driving or simply, what would that be in miles?

54:17

See, I'm so American, I don't even, I'm even trying, yeah, I know, I've learned all this stuff.

54:22

Now I gotta copy, and like, how many miles an hour is, some of you know off the top of your head, but I, okay, so that's like 10 miles, 11 miles an hour, all right.

54:33

That's pretty slow. It's not just a logistical challenge.

54:38

It's one of those practical tools the Lord uses to sanctify us. You didn't know this, guys, but living in America, you are missing out on your sanctification.

54:46

You've gotta go to India and find the most, one of the most practical tools the Lord has ever invented to sanctify you because it exposes your impatience, your quickness to judge.

54:56

I can't even, all right, I'm not even gonna keep going. Talks about patience is a fruit of the spirit, self -righteousness on the streets.

55:05

Often Indian traffic makes us moral commentators. It is astonishing how quickly we evaluate the character, intelligence, and even worthiness of other people based on their behavior on the road.

55:13

The auto driver swerving, unpredictably careless, the two wheel cutting in selfish, the pedestrian crossing at the wrong place and indisciplined.

55:22

Meanwhile, I am a law -abiding citizen. I am, well, what if that's true? Like, what if you are abiding by, like, here's the thing, like, this is so hysterical.

55:33

I've been, I've never been to India. I have been in other cultures and I have seen the way that,

55:39

I've been in Turkey. I've seen the way they drive. I mean, oh my goodness. I, you know,

55:46

I've been in other American contexts where I've been in Mexico a bit, like, but I've been in other American contexts that are so different and the drivers are so different.

55:54

Drive around LA or drive, I've driven around Mexico too, but like drive around LA for a little bit.

56:01

And you'll start noticing the thing that he's talking about here. I've, it's probably much worse in India, but yeah, these people aren't following the rules.

56:08

They're trying to get ahead. They're trying to get, they're selfish. They're, they're, they're, they're, they don't respect

56:13

I mean, and I've seen this since the nineties. You go to California in the nineties, much better than it is today.

56:19

It's clogged up. You could say there's more people, but it's also people don't follow the rules as much. There's cultural things at play here.

56:26

So what if it's true? What if you're, you're trying, you're not the person who's going to, you know, the, the left lane and then trying to get ahead so you can merge, so you can save a little bit of time.

56:38

I mean, when everyone does that, it does gum up everything. So like, I just, but, but the way that this is piously framed is like, you are not being sanctified if you do these things.

56:51

He says, every time I judge the bad drivers around me while overlooking my own impatience, entitlement, or lack of grace,

56:57

I'm behaving like the Pharisee. There you go. You're the Pharisees. Pharisees, thank God. And he is not like other men.

57:03

The truth is we all break the rules in some way. Look, I'm not saying you can't be, you know, have road rage and act like a

57:11

Pharisee and not apply the standards to yourself and be a hypocrite. But I'm saying, what if you like are actually following the rules and other people aren't?

57:19

Is it okay to acknowledge that? And, and this is the main, so here's the main thing. This is one of the reasons

57:25

I wanted to bring this up. Why is the Gospel Coalition carrying an article like this?

57:31

Like, just think about it. And I don't know what was in Emmanuel Elias' heart.

57:36

I don't know why the Gospel Coalition, like I don't have a document in front of me that's saying why the Gospel Coalition would publish like this.

57:42

I'm just throwing it out there. This is the, this is the Gospel Coalition. And it's featured, okay, so I guess it's,

57:48

I didn't actually notice this till now. So it's TGC India, but I didn't find it through TGC India. I found it featured on TGC.

57:56

So it was on the front page of TGC. So, so I guess it's also for Americans and it's written in English.

58:05

So just ask yourself, what, what's the purpose of something like this? And I have a suspicion that I know maybe why in our current political environment, this would be featured on TGC America's website.

58:21

Oh, I'm actually curious now, is this featured on TGC Canada or Australia or any,

58:26

Canada would be the main one that I'd be curious about. Let's see. Cause if it's featured there, then it would really kind of drive my point home,

58:35

I suppose. I'm searching right now to see. Okay, I guess not.

58:42

So interesting. It's featured on TGC America, but not Canada. All right, well,

58:48

I'm just thinking in the situation we are in now and TGC having a long history of being, let's just say what

58:59

Russell Moore just posted, that's something he could have posted at TGC not long ago. I don't know where TGC, I think is having their own kind of identity crisis, but they have a long history of supporting left -leaning immigration policy.

59:15

And what would be a big object? What would be a thing? Like if you're upset about differences and your community changing, traffic's one of the first things that you notice when that stuff happens, by the way, what would be one of the things that someone who's coming, trying to convince you from a

59:31

Christian perspective that you ought not stand up against this stuff, what would they tell you? TGC's been a leader in framing things in these pious ways.

59:42

Like, well, things are changing around you. That's good, the nations are coming here and you have this opportunity.

59:49

What are you, are you objecting to this opportunity? Oh my goodness. Like, what kind of a Christian are you? Are you objecting to being sanctified by terrible traffic?

59:59

What kind of a Christian are you, right? This is the, and he doesn't say this in the article. Like, I'm just saying, it's an odd thing to feature, you would think at the

01:00:10

TGC. I mean, even for TGC India, like the way it's written and everything is just a little odd to me.

01:00:15

Now, again, I don't, I'm not in India. I'm sure the traffic's terrible. And maybe, yeah, maybe people need a little guidance with dealing with anger or something like that.

01:00:24

But the way it's framed is like, you shouldn't blame people for not following rules and so forth.

01:00:32

Like you shouldn't, you shouldn't get down on them because look, this is what God's trying to do. This is like one of the greatest mechanisms apparently for being sanctified.

01:00:40

So I would advise people, if you want that kind of sanctification, especially if you are a gospel coalition reader or an author, please move to India.

01:00:50

You know, go to India. That's where the sanctification happens, in traffic there. You don't, don't bring it here to the

01:00:56

United States. I mean, look, here's the thing. Like, I'm trying to be charitable here. The United States, I mean, we've been pretty bad.

01:01:04

We were, we have a past of colonizing. And I mean, look, we had, we had slavery.

01:01:09

We had, women couldn't even vote. We didn't even have public education. And I mean, we had young kids working for, you know, 26 hours in one day, 27.

01:01:20

I mean, they were, we, United States is a terrible place and they don't deserve sanctification.

01:01:25

They don't, like God has these gifts he's giving out. And look, we don't deserve any of those things as Americans because we've just been bad.

01:01:33

So I think we should let India have that gift of sanctification. And if you want to participate in that and be a true

01:01:40

Christian, that's where you need to go. That's my message to TGC readers out there.

01:01:46

All right. Had to put a little humor into the episode today. Let us get to the

01:01:51

Christianity and the founding stuff. Obviously that's how I framed the video and we're an hour in and I haven't even gotten to it.

01:01:58

So I'm getting to it. And before I do, I'll just take a few questions, kind of peruse. If I see that question mark, it helps me.

01:02:06

Have you guys gotten to Horton yet? Just about to, Jesse. We're about to get there. Our church has a missionary in Scotland who is a wordsmith.

01:02:14

He gave Charles the gospel tract after his coronation. Not sure if you read it. Oh, wow. So Prince Charles has heard the gospel.

01:02:21

He has heard the gospel. It's even in the liturgy. Even in the, it's still in the Anglican liturgy. Remind me where Moore was on this stuff during the winter of severe illness and death.

01:02:30

Yes. That's a great point. Russell Moore, defender of the constitution, unless it's his side that's violating it.

01:02:38

That's exactly right. Let's see what else.

01:02:45

All right. I don't see a lot of questions, a lot of statements though. So Puerto Rico, I have driven in Puerto Rico.

01:02:50

Carlos, thank you for pointing that. Puerto Rico is wild traffic laws are optional. That's totally true. I have been to Puerto Rico. I spent a week there or was it week?

01:02:58

Yeah, like, I don't know, six, seven days. Did a vacation there a few years ago and, or no, it was last year.

01:03:03

Last year, I guess I went to Puerto Rico. And I, man, red lights apparently aren't a thing.

01:03:12

And it's more dangerous to stop at one because you'll get robbed. I learned that early in the morning. So once day starts, then you stop at a red light, but not at night, not at night or early morning.

01:03:22

So when you're doing your commute, do not stop at a red light. I learned that. Yeah, and people do not use signals.

01:03:30

Or if they do, they really overuse them. But most people, yeah, the signals, they don't use them. They just merge wherever.

01:03:37

It's crazy. It is crazy. And yes, when I was there, I was very grateful to come back home and be in more sane traffic conditions.

01:03:45

And I think that's fine. And I didn't, I'll be honest with you. I guess I could have tried to lean into that sanctification when

01:03:52

I was there, but I did not. I was just like, wow, they're very different. In fact, I remember I went to the mall and some things were kind of cool.

01:03:59

Like I felt like it was back in the nineties almost because they had 31 flavors,

01:04:05

Baskin -Robbins, right? And those used to be everywhere. Now you only see them as attached to a Dunkin' Donuts, but there they had them.

01:04:11

It's like a big franchise in Puerto Rico. They had stores at the mall. I hadn't seen in a long time.

01:04:17

Even the models looked more traditional. Men look like men, women look like women.

01:04:23

But then you go outside in the parking lot and you are reminded very quickly, oh, and there's like a guard tower almost of this guy that's standing up there just looking around for shoplifters.

01:04:35

I'm like, wow, that's surreal. So yeah, but maybe I was just missing out on an opportunity to be sanctified.

01:04:41

I don't know. All right, we are gonna talk about Michael Horton, something he said about six months ago.

01:04:49

It's been in the queue. I haven't gotten to it. Now I'm getting to it.

01:04:55

I'm gonna play this clip and we're gonna stop along the way and just, I'm gonna respond to what he has to say and we'll go from there.

01:05:02

So here we go. Here is Michael Horton from the White Horsin. The secular nature of the constitution means that it, to describe the

01:05:12

United States as a Christian nation. I think Justin gets it. That's Colin Hansen from the

01:05:22

Gospel Coalition. That's the voice you're hearing there, by the way. This, when he says, to have an intellectually honest conversation, you can't talk about that.

01:05:30

You could say it's a nation that was populated by a preponderance of Christians.

01:05:36

But when people look back on the constitution, they remark at how shockingly secular it is.

01:05:44

And in fact, that comes at a very low ebb of American religiosity in our history.

01:05:50

A lot of people don't realize, they seem to think, kind of like what you're talking about, Justin, that there used to be this thing that we can get back to and it's just sort of been backsliding since then, but it's simply not true if you're intellectually honest about American history.

01:06:05

We do know, of course, though, that Christianity did profoundly shape the United States and it's not like all of these ideas emerged from some imagined secular neutrality.

01:06:16

That is certainly not the case either. So how does the United States, Mike, maintain its commitments to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness if most citizens don't share or at least acknowledge

01:06:29

Christian presuppositions? I know that's a complicated question, but it's really trying to get to the essence of how do we bring the best of Christianity to bear on a nation that is in many ways turning back on the

01:06:46

Christianity that did infuse this country with the principles that Justin's saying we could reclaim, that Abraham Lincoln reclaimed, that Dr.

01:06:54

Martin Luther King Jr. reclaimed in their efforts to renew the American project. Okay, I'm gonna say this up front.

01:07:02

Colin Hansen is coming from a liberal framework here when he does this. So it's a low ebb in our country's history, the founding era, apparently, and it's

01:07:12

Abraham Lincoln and MLK, those are the guys who really hard, they got it right, more or less.

01:07:18

And the founding generation, not as Christian as you'd think, but what does he do?

01:07:25

He takes this line from the declaration, and honestly, I can't go into all the details here.

01:07:30

You gotta get my book. You gotta get my book, "'Against the Waves' Christian Order in a Liberal Age," because I talk about this in much more detail, but read the whole

01:07:40

Declaration of Independence. Look at all the itemized complaints that the colonists have with Great Britain.

01:07:49

Put it in its proper context. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. We're talking about an arrangement that British citizens in North America enjoyed as members of Great Britain that they felt were now violated.

01:08:07

That's what the document's about. Yes, there's these inalienable rights.

01:08:13

There's these rights you should not be given away. The whole understanding of the founding generation was these are secured, protected, and mediated, though, in specific arrangements that are determined by tradition, by the context in which you live.

01:08:28

And you have these natural rights in a state of nature, but you give up some of these for the mutual good when you enter civilization or a public state.

01:08:41

You cannot understand the Declaration of Independence until you understand how the founders actually thought about these things.

01:08:47

So what's happened is life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, have been, everything's been reduced to that, and then that is intended, that's read through the lens of the

01:08:59

Emancipation Proclamation, and that's read through the lens of modern liberal thought, and it really boils down to equality.

01:09:05

That's what this is, right? So why reference Abraham Lincoln? Why reference MLK? Because they were instrumental, in the minds of people like Colin Hansen, in propelling the

01:09:15

United States into greater levels of social equality, and that's what that means. That's what the Declaration's about.

01:09:21

And so the liberal framework for the founding of the United States is that this was a novel and innovative thing, where for the first time in all of human civilization, you have a nation based upon an idea.

01:09:32

This is what Russell Moore was talking about earlier. We have these shared ideas, essentially, this shared common laws, but there are these ideas behind them that really bind us together.

01:09:42

It's not a shared tradition or experience. It's not shared culture. It's not any of the things the founders themselves said bound them to each other.

01:09:50

It is this, it's something that you can think of in an abstract way, and it really comes down to equality.

01:09:59

And so you first have to kind of denigrate the founding generation. Look, you know, that generation, they had some slavery going on, and women didn't have full participation in politics.

01:10:11

I mean, even men, many men didn't have the ability to participate in political power. It was a very few, kind of chosen few.

01:10:19

You obviously had all kinds of disparities going all over the place, depending on the region you're talking about.

01:10:25

Some people were still practicing archaic things like arranged marriages. You had those who were loyalists, who still wanted a king.

01:10:33

I mean, for goodness sake, they wanted a monarchy. Many people wanted Washington to be a monarch. These are the dark ages, guys.

01:10:41

This was not a time that you want to make your template. It wasn't a golden age you want to go back to, right?

01:10:48

Of course, the conditions were much different in many ways, but this is the liberal mindset.

01:10:53

I know it well, because you don't get, you don't go through all the education.

01:10:59

I'm not bragging or anything. I'm just saying like, you don't sit in classrooms, for 12 years in college and grad school and stuff and not get your full dose of liberalism.

01:11:12

This is how they conceive of things. So the United States though has these ideas, and then, but their arrangements just don't reflect this.

01:11:21

And so you need people like Lincoln to come correct the founders. That's what Harry Jaffa said. You need MLK to come correct the founders.

01:11:28

And now you're even seeing conservatives start to say, well, you know, you kind of needed Obergefell to correct the founders.

01:11:35

Even people who think of themselves as conservative think that, you know, drag queen story hour. Yeah, that's part of this too.

01:11:42

Like if that was the founder's ideas, you know, they obviously were too ignorant and bigoted to see, you know, the truth of how their ideas should be applied and the extent to which they should be applied.

01:11:54

But that's the blessing of liberty right there. Yeah, that's what Thomas Jefferson was really writing about drag queen story hour being in the public sphere.

01:12:01

So this is the liberal retelling, and that's what Colin Hansen starts with. That's the setup here.

01:12:07

And so if there is a Christianity to hearken back to for Christians, right? Because Christians still want to be proud of their heritage, sort of.

01:12:14

Christians don't want to be on the line. They don't want to be in trouble for the things that do not conform to the liberal order, the things that are out of step they don't want to take responsibility for.

01:12:25

But they do want to take responsibility for all the things the liberals say are good. And they want to say, that's Christianity.

01:12:30

That's basically what the apologetics industry does. That's their social, that's their social agenda is to convince you that Christians were behind all of these efforts at equality.

01:12:41

Frankly, even in, I don't watch the whole thing, but even in that hearing that I showed at the beginning, there were

01:12:49

Christian pastors who got in there and trying to like, you know, credit Christianity was really all about the abolitionists and stuff.

01:12:57

And this, right, trying to credit themselves with all of these past things that liberals applaud, but distancing themselves from all the things that liberals find odious.

01:13:08

And that's where this is coming from. I, that's what I see in this. And so the question is given by Colin Hansen.

01:13:21

What, like explain to me what happens when Christianity then leaves the scene?

01:13:27

How do we get back to the good things that we can credit Christianity with? And to what extent then, you know, do we as Christians see the future of these commonly shared things that we believe in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, equality, et cetera.

01:13:46

How do we see those things being preserved if Christians aren't there to preserve them?

01:13:51

So there's this credit given to Christians for those good things, quote unquote, good in the liberal framework, right?

01:13:57

That's what's going on here. All right, so let's keep playing it and let's hear Michael Horton's answer to this important question.

01:14:08

Right, renewing the American project is wonderful if it's not piggybacking on a pseudo

01:14:15

Christian narrative. That's our story. Brothers and sisters around the world of every ethnicity and background, that's our family story.

01:14:28

It can't be grafted onto the American story. And that's because, you know, there was a time when the church was a nation, a geopolitical nation,

01:14:37

Israel. And in Exodus 19, he says, if you obey me, you will be a chosen nation, a royal priesthood and so forth.

01:14:48

If, because the Sinai covenant, unlike the Abrahamic covenant, was conditional.

01:14:53

As long as Israel obeyed, it could remain in God's land. It didn't obey, it was kicked out of the land, exiled.

01:15:01

And that covenant is obsolete, the New Testament says. That covenant is obsolete.

01:15:08

So it's kind of, it's interesting, like theological liberals do this, right? Interpret the

01:15:14

Bible allegorically to say what they want to say because they don't like what the historical narratives actually say.

01:15:23

That's what we're doing. And that's what's happening even in conservative circles. If we forget, 1

01:15:31

Peter 2, 9 uses that very description of Israel for the church and no ifs, ands, or buts.

01:15:39

You are a chosen nation, a royal priesthood, a people for God's own possession.

01:15:47

And then just historically, you're - Okay, let's stop there for a moment because I want to get into more detail on the historical stuff here.

01:15:56

But what you hear Michael Horton saying is that the church itself is a nation that transcends these physical or political, natural arrangements that exist on the earth.

01:16:10

And so as members of that particular nation, that arrangement, that's a heavenly arrangement, then we can't fuse that.

01:16:19

We can't attach that, that Christianity, to any kind of physical nation. Now I've made this point a million times.

01:16:26

This doesn't make any sense. You would never do this when it comes to other institutions.

01:16:32

And a nation is essentially the extension of a family. Read Genesis 10 through 12. Would you say you can't have a

01:16:37

Christian family? You should never bring in Christianity and fuse that as part of the story of your family. Be part of the identity of who you are as whatever your last name is.

01:16:49

Because, well, that transcends. That's spiritual, right? No one would ever think to do this.

01:16:56

I mean, you would have to get rid of all the attachments. You'd have to excise Christianity from the public square.

01:17:03

And how far do you go with this? Does that mean we don't have Christian bookstores, Christian music, Christian conferences,

01:17:08

Christian schools, right? And I would say this too. In the Old Testament, yes,

01:17:14

God did have a nation, the nation of Israel, that was a chosen people and a royal priesthood, or the church is described that way.

01:17:22

But it is taking these descriptions of Israel and saying the church has this. I think there's continuity and discontinuity between the church and Israel.

01:17:32

But you go back into that framework, what was Israel supposed to do? What was one of their main jobs?

01:17:38

To be a light to the nations. Why? Why to be a light to the nations? So that the nations would do what?

01:17:45

Follow God's law. So the queen of Sheba could come and see the wisdom of Solomon, credit

01:17:52

God. It's the true God. We should get rid of our false gods. What are pagan nations in that context?

01:17:58

What were they supposed to do? Repent, read any of the prophets. I've been reading through Isaiah. Repent and get rid of your false gods.

01:18:06

He's gonna destroy you if you don't. With what? A neutral public square?

01:18:12

No, kiss the sun, honor Christ. This is crazy to me.

01:18:20

This is, it goes against nature and it goes against even the record of scripture we have and the assumptions in it.

01:18:26

The idea that you can have a group, a nation, and that nation does not have any default religious setting.

01:18:38

It can just kind of be out there neutral, I guess. And you shouldn't ever,

01:18:43

Christianity should be kept in a separate container never to touch that nation. You practically cannot do this.

01:18:50

That would mean Christians couldn't even be elected to public office. And I know there's guys who try to maintain this and say, well, you know, the

01:18:56

Christian can go and be about the public good. They just can't enforce their

01:19:01

Christianity at all or something like that. What is the public good? What is good? What's Romans 13 say about, okay, yeah,

01:19:08

I get it. The government job is to bear the sword for the punishment of evil. So what's evil?

01:19:14

As soon as you start doing that, you have to have a framework that makes sense of this.

01:19:21

And it's going to land you in religion no matter what. It's just inescapable. You're gonna have to end up doing some kind of religion.

01:19:28

There's some framework you're working out of to make sense of all of this. And we have lived for so long in a country that has a very

01:19:39

Christian framework. We don't even always recognize it. We have church bells. We have skylines with steeples. We have in God we trust in our court buildings.

01:19:47

We have statues in our nation's Capitol and state capitals of not just Roman and Greco -Roman figures, but also biblical figures.

01:19:57

We have invocations given at civil ceremonies to commend honorable things.

01:20:04

And oftentimes in the name of, and used to be exclusively in the name of Christ, or at least that the prayer was

01:20:11

Christian. We have Christmas displays. We have songs that reference

01:20:17

God and reference religion. We have national heroes that are now being despised, but who exemplified

01:20:25

Christian virtues and came from a Christian framework. And their motivations were crafted by the world that they came from.

01:20:36

You can't get away from these things. If you do, you attack the very identity of the people.

01:20:42

And then who are you as a people? I think the Christian, the whole Christian nationalist thing, like I've never taken the label.

01:20:48

I think that there's people who are of all kinds of different political stripes. They're on the right, but there's all kinds of different ways of conceiving of what that looks like and stuff.

01:20:57

But if you wanna boil it all down, the common thread for everyone who claims to be or is called the

01:21:03

Christian nationalist, it comes down to this. You just think the nation should basically do it.

01:21:10

Michael Horton is saying it shouldn't do. That nations or countries, empires, that they should have

01:21:16

Christianity as part of who they conceive themselves to be, as part of their identity. That's it. That's actually, 50 years ago, that would have been just called a regular ordinary

01:21:24

American. That's what Americans think of themselves. My parents grew up in that world.

01:21:30

Wasn't that long ago, where that's just what an American believed. And now it's this crazy fringe thing to believe that.

01:21:37

We've enjoyed tremendous blessing and we've enjoyed tremendous stability because of some of these rooted things.

01:21:46

It's in our laws. It's in our Anglo -Protestant tradition that comes through our English common law that filters right into America.

01:21:54

But we dump these things and we join the secular, we join the liberals in dumping these things.

01:21:59

We're doing their work for them. And that's why I'm concerned about this stuff. So yeah, theologically,

01:22:05

I don't think this makes really any sense. It's not like, what do you do even if you have a ruler who becomes a

01:22:14

Christian? What do you tell them at that point? You've just been converted, I guess, step down. Like, what do you do, right?

01:22:20

You have to operate from a moral framework. You have to start making decisions that are gonna come from a religious understanding.

01:22:25

That's gonna change how you govern. If Felix had converted, what would that have been like?

01:22:32

What would have happened? He went to Paul. He said, Paul, you've not only compelled me, you've convinced me.

01:22:40

Now what do I do? What are you supposed to say to that? Well, now operate on completely neutral, secular, liberal principles.

01:22:49

And no, because you're part of this other nation and the two shall not come into contact with one another.

01:22:56

I've critiqued this a million times. So I'm just doing this kind of off the top, but I think that's the effect of this.

01:23:03

And now he's gonna use the historical record or he's gonna, I think, botch the historical record to try to prove this.

01:23:09

So let me, I see some of your questions and I'm gonna get to them, but let me play

01:23:15

Michael Horton first here. You're absolutely right. You know, with it not being, in a treaty with Tripoli, George Washington said, since the

01:23:26

United States is in no sense a Christian nation, that religion will not interfere in our relationship with you.

01:23:34

Talking to a religious state, saying we're not a religious state, but it never would have occurred to Washington that it's not one nation under God.

01:23:45

And I think that's the thing that they all, many were deists. I mean, you have from Thomas Paine, who was an atheist, all the way to Patrick Henry and James Madison, who wrote the

01:23:57

Constitution. If you'll read the Federalist Papers. I'm gonna stop right there because he's getting into a few things.

01:24:06

He's already, he talked about the Treaty of Tripoli and then he talked about deists and I think overplays that.

01:24:12

So this is the interesting, so I don't think it's George Washington he meant to say. I think it's

01:24:18

John Adams he meant to say. It was during the Adams presidency that the Treaty of Tripoli was signed and it was, and there's a lot that could be said about this, but this, put it in context here.

01:24:29

The United States was essentially at war with the Barbary pirates. They were Muslim. They had enjoyed, but previous to this, the protection of the

01:24:37

British government. Now they don't have the protection of the British government. And so they're constantly getting raided, stolen from,

01:24:47

I think sold into slavery even, but people are being kidnapped. There's ransoms now.

01:24:53

The government has to pay to get their people back. And it was just a huge problem. This is one of the reasons,

01:24:59

Thomas Jefferson even had a copy of the Quran. A lot of people look back and like, oh, he was interested in the Quran. No, he had it because his enemies were

01:25:05

Muslims. He's trying to understand where they were coming from. And in that understanding, and Jefferson was part of this as well.

01:25:14

I don't think he, I'm not sure who exactly wrote it. I don't think it was Adams or Jefferson, but it was, they signed off on it.

01:25:21

And I think this was unanimous even in Congress, right? And there's, maybe

01:25:27

I'll even pull it up. There's a line, if you just give me a second, I'll pull up the exact line so people know exactly what

01:25:33

I'm talking about, if I can here. There's a line in the Treaty of Tripoli that essentially says that we're not a

01:25:40

Christian nation. And it's probably the one historical document I can think of that if you just had that document, you might start to think, well, maybe it is a secular state.

01:25:52

Maybe that's what the country is. All right, let me pull it up here. Okay, here's the line.

01:26:03

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Muslims.

01:26:16

And as the said states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any

01:26:22

Mohammedan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

01:26:32

Here's the deal. You have to put this in a historical context. You have Crusades. You have wars, especially in that area between Catholic France and Tripoli.

01:26:44

You have religious wars. The United States doesn't have any interest in any of that.

01:26:51

And they're not a religious nation in the sense of a Christian, they aren't founded on the

01:26:57

Christian religion in the sense that these other countries who have direct opposition to Islam on a battlefield have.

01:27:07

That's the characteristic that the United States does not share with them. They are not interested in a religious war.

01:27:14

Now this was translated, and my understanding is some of the translations say different things, and there were different drafts of this.

01:27:22

And I read somewhere, let me see if I can even pull it up. Yeah, I think

01:27:28

Mark David Hall talks about this. I'm looking at his book, Did America Have a

01:27:34

Christian Founding? And he even says that this particular line was actually eventually dropped.

01:27:41

I'm trying to figure out where he says it. But this is the curious thing, and this is the main thing to focus on.

01:27:48

And if the Treaty of Tripoli is your whole argument, that's not, you have a lot more arguing to do.

01:27:55

This is the Congress, the same Congress, okay? That decided that if you are a

01:28:04

Supreme Court justice, you have to make an oath, and your oath needs to include a

01:28:10

Christian element in it. So actually, let me pull this up, because I actually wrote a bunch of this down before I started the podcast.

01:28:19

So this is the same, this is the same Congress essentially, okay? So 1789, all of the stuff that I'm about to read for you happened.

01:28:28

Publicly funded Protestant chaplains. The Judiciary Act required Supreme Court justices to acknowledge

01:28:34

God in their oath of office. They renewed the Northwest Ordinance, which encouraged religion in schools as necessary to good government.

01:28:42

They issued an overtly Christian Thanksgiving resolution. This is only in 1789, and that's

01:28:49

Congress. That's not even, we're not talking about states, we're talking about Congress. The same Congress that does this, that has no problem with saying, hey, we're not founded on the

01:28:57

Christian religion. Maybe they meant something a little different by that language in the Treaty of Tripoli than we're imposing on it.

01:29:03

And I would submit to you, that's what's going on. We're reading into it what we think of as a secular nation today, and that's not what they were meaning by it.

01:29:11

They meant that they had an arrangement that was, they did not have an official state religion at the federal level, that you could have states that did that, because nine of 13 of them had religious tests at the time, doctrinal tests for even being in leadership in their states.

01:29:26

The other four had either Royal Charter still, or constitutions that were overtly

01:29:32

Christian. Even the Constitution of New York, some of the more, quote unquote, secular constitutions were overtly

01:29:40

Christian. The most, you could point to, a lot of people point to Virginia's religious toleration and Religious Liberty Act.

01:29:50

You look at that, and the effect of it is basically to disestablish the state church in Virginia, so that all these other

01:29:57

Christian and Protestant actually denominations aren't forced to pay for just the

01:30:04

Church of England. They can all practice. In the same year, the same guys, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, pass or support the bill that punishes

01:30:12

Sabbath breakers. You think those guys, and I'm talking about the most secular. I mean, if you wanna go even more secular, you could go earlier.

01:30:20

Thomas Paine wasn't, he wasn't involved at this point, but go back to common sense and Thomas Paine, who became enamored with the

01:30:26

French Revolution, read common sense. The deist Thomas Paine, using scripture all over the place in that document.

01:30:34

You could say, well, he's using scripture to persuade a Christian audience. Yeah, you're right, because it was Christian. That's the point.

01:30:40

His audience was Christian. You didn't get anywhere in the colonies at that point by making arguments if you didn't have scripture to appeal to.

01:30:48

Oh, this was a low point, Colin Hansen says. We weren't that Christian. Well, how come even the most ranked deist has to appeal to the

01:30:55

Bible over and over and over again to justify the political separation from Great Britain?

01:31:01

Why is that? That doesn't make any sense, does it? Thomas Paine legitimately would be a deist.

01:31:09

Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. I mean, these guys say all kinds of things that conflict with deism and do all kinds of things, calling the

01:31:17

Congress to prayer because we need divine guidance. That doesn't sound like a deist.

01:31:22

Ben Franklin must've been a bad deist. Thomas Jefferson relying on the teachings of Jesus, which was not the

01:31:28

Jefferson Bible. Please don't say that anymore. He wanted this life and teachings of Jesus.

01:31:34

In a document form, he followed these. He thought these were good moral principles.

01:31:42

A deist? I mean, he doesn't seem to be. I could read you a bunch of quotes.

01:31:48

Well, why don't we do that? I kind of advertise the episode as doing that. So let me pull up a few things here that I think are worth looking into.

01:32:01

My point is though that even the most ranked deists that could be thought of as deists, they weren't great candidates to use as deists.

01:32:12

They could have been, they weren't Orthodox Christians, but deists is a bit of a stretch. And then you have all the other signers that don't get brown.

01:32:21

It was John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush and everyone else who signed it.

01:32:26

Were they all deists too? Some of them were pastors. Some of them were members of the clergy. Following an extensive survey of American political literature, this is from Daniel Dreisbach's book,

01:32:38

Reading the Bible of the Founding Fathers. He says, the survey from 1760 to 1805, political scientist

01:32:44

Donald S. Lutz reported that the Bible was referenced more frequently than any European writer or even the

01:32:50

European schools of thought, such as enlightenment or Whig intellectual traditions. Indeed, the Bible accounted for about one third of all citations in this sample.

01:32:58

And according to Lutz, Deuteronomy is the most frequently cited followed by Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws. The Bible, the biblical sources figured frequently, sorry, biblical sources figured prominently in the study, even though Lutz excluded from his sample most political pamphlets and tracts, including many political sermons that had no citations or secular sources.

01:33:20

This significantly undercounted biblical sources because at least 80 % of the political pamphlets from 1770s and 1780s were written by ministers.

01:33:29

And yet Lutz included in his sample only about one 10th of the reprinted sermons. By contrast, the sample included about one third of all significant secular publications.

01:33:37

If Lutz had not excluded so many political sermons and had surveyed religious publications in equivalent proportion to secular publications, the percentage of biblical citations would have been markedly greater.

01:33:50

This is, I mean, St. Paul is cited about as frequently as Montesquieu in Lutz's sample, which is, and in his sample, what

01:34:01

Drysback is trying to say there, is Lutz's sample is skewed towards secularism or not secularism, but it's skewed towards non -biblical sources.

01:34:10

And even in that, the Bible is still the most quoted. And that's this political literature we're talking about, okay?

01:34:21

You also had many men in the founding generation who were members of the

01:34:26

Bible Society, like DeWitt Clinton, Simon Greenlee, Francis Scott Key.

01:34:33

You have the fact that the oath of office, this is where it gets into the constitution. The oath of office is imported from British common law,

01:34:40

English common law, and it was traditionally done the way Washington did it. And we've kept that tradition.

01:34:46

You put your hand on a Bible. You believe in a system of rewards and punishments after you die. Otherwise, taking an oath makes no sense.

01:34:54

The constitution was not, and this is what a lot of people I think get wrong. They assume it should be doing things that it wasn't meant to do.

01:35:01

It's an arrangement that is intended to help facilitate defense and trade in a federal system, which means that the parties to the document are free to have their own religious establishments, which many of them did.

01:35:19

So the federal arrangement does not have a religious establishment, but that doesn't mean that those parties to that establishment and collectively as a whole do not have some kind of a

01:35:30

Christian ethos undercurrent, and maybe even on local levels, establishments of religion, just that Congress shall not make it.

01:35:39

Congress can't have an establishment of religion. And again, historical context, they broke away from Great Britain.

01:35:46

They don't want a church that's an official church of the country, an ecclesiastical body that's an official church.

01:35:53

Doesn't mean they're not Christian though, in the sense that they don't have Christian influence upon them.

01:36:00

So you have to import all of this context and this understanding into the Treaty of Tripoli. Why would those guys, those same guys

01:36:06

I'm talking about, why would they approve of that kind of language? Because they understood it to be something different than people understand it to be today.

01:36:17

And the Jefferson stuff is, I think, completely overblown. I could just give you a lot of quotes on it.

01:36:22

Let me give you a few. The evidence of this natural right, like that of our right to life, liberty, and use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man.

01:36:37

We do not claim these under the charter of kings or legislature, but under the king of kings. Great deist.

01:36:44

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, listen to this, their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God, we are answerable for them to our

01:36:57

God. I could go on and on. Here's the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

01:37:04

That religion or the duty, which we owe to our creator in the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

01:37:12

And that therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience. And that is the mutual duty of all to practice

01:37:18

Christian forbearance, love and charity towards each other. Jefferson a deist? This sounds like a call to secularism.

01:37:26

I mean, even the religious freedom here to worship God according to dictates of conscience must be done in what? Christian forbearance.

01:37:32

We're talking to Christians. The inhabitants of the English colonies in North America by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the

01:37:41

English constitution and the several charters or compacts have the following rights. That they are entitled to life, liberty and property and that they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever a right to dispose of either without consent.

01:37:53

That's from the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress. There's a continuation happening here.

01:38:01

This isn't an innovative thing that's happening in the United States. They are hearkening back to an arrangement that preceded them in Great Britain.

01:38:10

If you don't understand that, you won't understand what America was and what America even is now.

01:38:18

There's so many quotes I have here. I don't have time to get into all of them but the general understanding I think of the way rights and responsibilities work which are now pitted against each other as if Christian responsibility and right can't mix or something.

01:38:33

The understanding was these things went together. George Washington said the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former by inculcating the practice of the latter.

01:38:48

Moral duty, moral duty was necessary if we are going to have human happiness.

01:38:55

And for Washington, that meant the practice of religion. It without religion and the founding generation pretty much universally believe this.

01:39:03

Without religion, you didn't have virtue. Without virtue, you didn't have liberty. That's what's happened.

01:39:10

That's the major problem in our country today is that we are losing this. And the more we attack religion in the public sphere or say that we shouldn't have it, the more you can guarantee you will not have liberty.

01:39:21

They are connected. John Adams, human passions unbridled by morality and religion would break the strongest cord of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.

01:39:35

Benjamin Franklin, I believe there is one supreme most perfect being. I believe he is pleased and delights in the happiness of those he has created.

01:39:42

And since without virtue, man can have no happiness in the world. I firmly believe he delights to see me virtuous.

01:39:49

George Mason, happiness and prosperity are now within our reach, but to attain and preserve them must depend upon our own wisdom and virtue.

01:39:57

And that no free government, this is another quote. This is from the Virginia Declaration of Rights. No free government or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

01:40:12

So here's the question. You need virtue to have actual liberty.

01:40:19

If you don't have it, your decisions will be bad and someone must limit them for order to be secured.

01:40:28

And you can't have virtue without a religious framework. The founders understood this.

01:40:34

Founders understood this. So mega jam. I'll just take this one question. What about the Thomas Jefferson Bible?

01:40:39

I already mentioned this. It wasn't actually a Bible. It was the life and teachings of Jesus. Go look it up. I've seen it on display.

01:40:45

I think it's at the American Bible Museum actually is where it's on display, but it's not, Jefferson did not intend for it to be a

01:40:53

Bible. This was a name later given to it. And you got to remember too with Jefferson, there was a strong, this is where even some of the

01:41:03

Sally Hemings stuff comes from. There was a strong antagonism to Jefferson on a political level.

01:41:08

And a lot of those same smears have been recycled today to smear him more. And one of the things was, he's gonna foist atheism upon us or something.

01:41:17

The only way that makes sense at all though is because it was a very Christianized society.

01:41:24

Today, Thomas Jefferson would be a radical Christian nationalist. That's what people would think of Thomas Jefferson today.

01:41:29

Like really radical Christian nationalist type of guy. If he kept all his same views and was just kind of transported into our arrangement.

01:41:37

Back then, he was someone that was viewed with suspicion. That he was, basically a lot of it came down to, he was a little too cozy with the

01:41:45

French Revolution. He had some high hopes at the beginning. Remember, he was a diplomat to France. But these were some of the things that were spread about him.

01:41:54

And so, yeah, it wasn't a Bible. It was his, the life of teachings of Jesus in a consolidated form.

01:42:02

And he valued the teachings of Jesus. And he just wanted to emphasize, he wanted those readily available to him.

01:42:08

It wasn't like today with computers and stuff. Like if you wanted to reference things quickly, it took a lot of work to put a manuscript together and to have it.

01:42:17

So that is my understanding of the so -called Jefferson Bible. I don't even call it that.

01:42:23

All right, we've been going. I don't wanna go two hours. So I wanna keep going with Horton here. Hear what he has to continue saying.

01:42:31

He got most of his theology from John Witherspoon at Princeton University, Princeton College.

01:42:38

Witherspoon, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. And so he talks about the two kingdoms.

01:42:44

For instance, he disagrees with Patrick Henry who wants to have tax exemption for churches and Christian schools.

01:42:55

Why on earth would he do that? Is he just a secularist atheist? No, he said, in light of the doctrine of the two kingdoms,

01:43:07

Christ's kingdom and the kingdoms of this world, Christ's kingdom is more important. What right does the state have to determine what a true church is?

01:43:21

And so, I mean, it's really remarkable how much the secularity of the Constitution is due to Baptists who fought for liberty,

01:43:31

Presbyterians who fought for liberty, Lutherans who came over and fought for liberty against state churches.

01:43:39

Okay, let's stop here for a minute. I think that he probably made a mistake. I wanna give him the benefit of the doubt because he had said before, he had said, oh, they're a deist and he mentioned

01:43:46

Patrick Henry. Obviously, Patrick Henry was not a deist. Patrick Henry actually rejected, he opposed

01:43:54

Jefferson and Madison's Bill of Religious Freedom.

01:44:00

And he did want an established Anglican church. So, and he's the give me liberty or give me death guy, right?

01:44:07

So, there was divergence of thought even in the founding generation on these points.

01:44:13

But what you hear happening now is Michael Horton wants to lean into specifically

01:44:19

James Madison's views, which he wants to credit it to Witherspoon. And that, you know, these notions that one should not be taxed to support a state church, that there should not be an official state church, that kind of thing.

01:44:36

That this is somehow, these are Baptists and Presbyterians. So, we can credit

01:44:41

Christians with doing this, but their fight is actually against establishing some kind of Christianity in the political sphere.

01:44:48

And this is the two kingdoms in his mind. Of course, he's an R2K guy. But what I would say to this is that you have to understand the context again.

01:44:58

This is a context in which, again, the same year he introduces a law against Sabbath breaking, right?

01:45:05

What's that about, right? He wants, they want a Christian society still. They still have blasphemy laws.

01:45:10

They still have laws in some colonies against witchcraft. They still have laws against profanity and these kinds of things.

01:45:20

And those didn't just go away. Those were supported by society. They just didn't want an established church.

01:45:26

And yes, there was this added element with Jefferson and Madison of conscience, of you should be able, and the way

01:45:34

I construct it is the way to construct it. You should be able to worship God according to the dictates of your conscience.

01:45:39

But it was God that you should be worshiping. It was not Satan. It was not false gods, right?

01:45:45

They had, there was a conception of God in their minds when they said these kinds of things. Now, this has been broadened as we've introduced more immigrant groups that have different religions and so forth, but their idea of this would have been a very thoroughly

01:46:00

Christian thing. And they're thinking of Baptists and Methodists and Anglicans and Presbyterians or Episcopalians, I should say at that point.

01:46:07

And they're looking at these different denominations and saying, look, all these guys, they're worshiping

01:46:13

God. They should be allowed to do it according to the dictates of their conscience. Now you did have your guys like Richard Henry Lee, who thought,

01:46:20

I think even Jefferson may have even said something one time about, I'm not sure, don't quote me on Jefferson.

01:46:26

I know Richard Henry Lee had said something once about, you know, even Muslims. Now, he's speaking from a perspective where there really aren't, that's not even an issue in their society.

01:46:37

They don't have Muslims. They don't have a large enough number of them at least to constitute anything, to have any arrangement that like, they don't have chaplains for Muslims.

01:46:46

They don't have anything for Muslims. So you could, someone could say that in the abstract, but he's the only one

01:46:54

I can really think of. Maybe Jefferson, but you know, this was not something that was, that fed into support for a bill like this.

01:47:01

That's not what they were thinking. It was these different denominations. And so this has been called a pan -Protestantism.

01:47:08

That's what I've called it. And others who seem to be smart have said, that's what America really had.

01:47:13

They had a pan -Protestantism. It was different colonies had their own flavors. And some of them had different levels of church participation taxation, civil involvement, that kind of thing.

01:47:30

But we were Anglo -Protestant, that's the main thing. And to take that paradigm and the laws that existed in that paradigm, and then to try to, into the future, kind of say that now the conditions being so different, we can take these arrangements and say that, yeah, like we, you know, any religion, you know, statues of Satan apparently in the

01:47:57

Capitol, sure. What's wrong with that? You know, and I remember Michael Horton was one of the guys at that time.

01:48:03

I think it was Michael, it was R. Scott Clark or Michael Horton is one of those guys. Maybe it was R. Scott Clark, who

01:48:08

I think works with Michael Horton. But yeah, like this was, this was wrong. This was, you know, like Christians shouldn't be taking these things down because this is basically you end up with a multicultural square.

01:48:24

Like it either has to be religious pluralism in this public square, or it has to be just zapped of any religiosity whatsoever, which we know technically is impossible.

01:48:33

And that's what you get with the R2K mindset here. All right, let's keep going.

01:48:39

And then I'll take questions and all of that. It was evangelicals.

01:48:45

Near that. And the reformation meant the enlightenment and they both kissed and embraced.

01:48:52

This is not just a reformation narrative or an enlightenment narrative. Jefferson was probably an atheist as John Adams accused him of being, even though John Adams himself didn't believe in the

01:49:04

Trinity or the deity of Christ. That's just recycling. Like I said before, the campaign, that's

01:49:11

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson's campaign smearing stuff and just recycling it.

01:49:17

No, Jefferson, to say Jefferson's an atheist, you're actually, you could make a better case that Abraham Lincoln was an atheist than probably

01:49:25

Jefferson. Jefferson was very much affected by the enlightenment. And yes, he's right to say that, you know, like John Adams didn't agree with certain

01:49:36

Orthodox Christian teachings. That is true. You can find this in many, I shouldn't even say many, some, just some of the founders, the vast majority would have been

01:49:46

Orthodox Christians on some level. But yes, even those guys though, like they supported

01:49:54

Christian culture, they supported Christian morality, they supported Christian teachings. A lot of them donated to Christian ministers.

01:50:02

They were thoroughly invested in a Christian society. So I just think that's sort of an irresponsible thing for Horton to say.

01:50:11

It was a mixed bag, just like it is today. So we've got to change our understanding, both of the biblical exegesis underlying

01:50:21

Christian nationalism and the bad history that you get from both sides these days.

01:50:28

The other side, you know, just writes out any Christian influence unless it's bad.

01:50:35

Just think about all that we have to try to untangle with George Washington himself.

01:50:42

Hey, I think that's Justin Giboney. I think that's Justin Giboney, if I'm not mistaken, from the

01:50:48

AND campaign. I just noticed this. So Colin Hanson from Gospel Coalition is interviewing Michael Horton from White Horse Inn.

01:50:55

And there's Justin Giboney over here from the AND campaign who's very left.

01:51:01

Interesting. I don't know, Jesus is greater is the tagline. So I don't know what kind of a conference this was, but I'm assuming a left -leaning audience.

01:51:10

The example that you gave there, the reason this is so complicated, and if you came expecting the

01:51:17

Gospel Bound podcast, you were gonna get a lot of easy answers. That's not really the brand. But if you think about Washington, you're dealing with somebody who not only does not occur to him that the

01:51:29

United States is a Christian nation, at the same time, it could not have occurred to him that Christianity was not a pervasive influence in the nation, and at the same time, not so pervasive that it would have made him question slavery, you know, or to confront that.

01:51:48

Look at all that we have to untangle. You know, you can honor Washington all you want, and I certainly don't have a problem with that, but look at the legacy that you have to untangle there.

01:52:00

Okay, well, this is just intellectually insulting a bit. So Washington's farewell address, let me just quote you from it.

01:52:07

This is what Washington wants to leave the country as he's leaving the public stage. He goes, with slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, hmm, religion singular, manners, habits, and political principles.

01:52:23

You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together. The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.

01:52:33

Wow, that's fascinating. George Washington seems to think that, it had to be Christianity, guys, that they have a common, they have manners, habits, political principles, religion.

01:52:44

This is what they share in common and experience. They've met certain threats. Of all the dispositions, same address, and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.

01:52:58

When he talks about religion, he's talking about Christianity, guys. That's the singular religion.

01:53:05

In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens, the mere politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them.

01:53:20

A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?

01:53:37

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on the minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience, both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

01:53:55

That's all George Washington. That's all just from his farewell address. That's one speech. George, and then the charge,

01:54:03

Colin Hanson, he says, well, you know, you had slavery, right? Slavery. Yeah, so I guess that means he's not a

01:54:09

Christian. I don't know what that means. Like he's just, we can't respect him. What does it mean, Colin? I'd like to really know because there's a lot of slave holders in the

01:54:18

New Testament and in the Old Testament. And the question really is, if you want to believe what Paul says, is how did they treat their slaves?

01:54:25

How did Washington treat the slaves that were under his authority? That's the question you need to ask.

01:54:32

But the very fact that, well, you know, he had slaves. I mean, I don't know if Colin, is Colin trying to, or is it going to be the modern

01:54:37

Christian apologist thing of like, oh, Roman slavery wasn't really slavery. Right, yeah, because they didn't have gladiatorial arenas.

01:54:46

They didn't have, you know, normalized sex slavery or abuse of slaves in a sexual way, which of course were both, these were common things that existed at that time.

01:54:59

I mean, obviously there's differences between these forms, but in some ways the Roman system was much worse. And what does

01:55:05

Paul say when he comes into that? Here's what you, here's how you behave as Christians. Did Washington conform his life to that?

01:55:11

Did Jonathan Edwards conform his life to that? Did Dabney conform his life to that? Did, you know, pick any historical figure you want.

01:55:18

That's the question Colin should be asking as a Christian, but we now can question their entire faith.

01:55:24

I think it was Mark Dever who had said years ago that he didn't even think Washington was a Christian because of this.

01:55:30

It's ripping down our foundation. It's ripping down our founding. It's smearing their virtue.

01:55:37

It's discrediting the Christianity they may have had when these pillars must be shored up.

01:55:43

Washington was right in his farewell address. Without these pillars, you don't have liberty. You need morality, you need religion.

01:55:50

And you unfortunately have guys at Gospel Coalition who want to participate with the liberals, the left and rip down some of these things.

01:56:01

And it's very disappointing to me. So I figured I would give you some thoughts on that. And we'll take questions at this point and go from there.

01:56:09

So, oh gosh, Carlos, is that, that's a hairpiece, right? I can't answer that with Colin Hansen.

01:56:15

I mean, hey, look, I'm gonna compliment Colin Hansen. If it's not a hairpiece, he's got a nice thick head of hair.

01:56:22

So credit where credit's due. I would, I'd love to have as thick of a head of hair as Colin Hansen does.

01:56:30

All right, what else? What about the, okay, so we already talked about Jefferson Bible. Franklin's obsession with Whitefield suggests he was probably a

01:56:37

Christian. You know, I don't think so. He was, you're absolutely right that he was very respectful of Whitefield and gave money to Whitefield.

01:56:49

But there's no evidence that he made a profession of faith. We hope that, we always hope that before someone's death they did.

01:56:56

Jefferson's someone that I really, I mean, I, one of my professors at college who loved Jefferson was like, I can't find evidence he was saved, but I still hope to see him in heaven.

01:57:05

I hope at the end of his life, we don't know what those discussions look like. And he was good friends with pastors and, you know, hopefully that he made a profession, but let's see.

01:57:17

What else? Other questions, get them in now because I'm gonna end the podcast here. I said I wouldn't go two hours and I'm only two and a half minutes from that.

01:57:25

Gary DeMar has a book called The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institution of the United States. Read that, and I don't know how any

01:57:31

Christian can argue we're secular. I haven't read that book, but there's a lot of good books. I already referenced Mark David Hall. I referenced

01:57:36

Daniel Dreisbach. It is true that yes, there are guys, David Barton would be one of them,

01:57:42

Peter Marshall, who I think have done us a disservice sometimes by using like in Barton's case, quotes that couldn't be verified, but other times overplaying kind of like the covenantal aspects that they see in American history that do make it seem like we're like an

01:58:00

Israel type of thing. And that's, you know, I don't recommend those things, but yes, those things also exist.

01:58:08

Your constitution seems to have godliness infused all through it. Am I wrong? No, the constitution, it's an arrangement.

01:58:16

It's a technical arrangement for a federal republic. So I don't expect, even if we were gonna have like a national covenant or something,

01:58:23

I don't even necessarily expect, you know, the constitution could have that, but those matters were more on a state level at that time.

01:58:32

That's just the context. We have to look at it from that perspective. All right, well,

01:58:37

I'm gonna end the podcast now, and I hope that that was helpful for all of you.

01:58:42

More coming, Lord willing, later this week. If not, we'll be back next week.