The American Churchman: The People Rejoice

Inauguration Day, Trump’s Return, and the Mood in America

Welcome to the American Churchmen podcast. I am your host, John Harris. We have with us, we have actually a guest and as well as my co-host, Matthew Pearson, but Tom Rush is our guest today. Welcome once again, Tom, you've been on before with us.

Yeah, glad to be here, John, Matt, good to see you guys.

Always good to see you.

It's a sort of a special day in America and that means a special podcast. We're not gonna do the normal format. We're just gonna talk about the inauguration and this first day and our impressions of it, what has changed in the last four years, not just in the country, but in the church landscape, Christian landscape.

I wanna start off with just maybe talking about the inauguration speech. Did you guys both watch that?

Sure did.

I watched about half of it. I was actually very busy that day and I was listening to a little bit of it, but from what I heard, it was good there. What I got through, there were no like calls for any unity or weird things like that.

It was sort of, he was saying it's time to fix it, which is good while they were all right there, the engineers of the mess we've been in.

Great, yeah, that was especially rich to watch Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, they're right next to him, hearing him blame them essentially for

They need to be blamed, it's largely their fault.

Yeah.

I mean, you can also blame the electorate who voted and put them in office, but it does, I think. It even calls into question the results of the election in 2020.

I think he said that right afterward because there were several speeches during the course of the day and I think he said it multiple times. I know I heard him at least one time say that the 2020 election was rigged, which I thought the whole thing was rich to have the CEOs there of these major tech companies who, two of whom, suppressed the vote in, or they at least tried to help the Democrats in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg being the first on the list.

Sure.

They're sitting there in support. That's the weirdest thing to me and the most surreal. I can't figure it out. My wife this morning was saying how much she doesn't trust all these guys like Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was there.

I think the CEO of Google was there.

And the guy who's the head of TikTok was also there.

I don't know what's going on. I'm optimistic on it. I just said, well, maybe they had a bit of a change of heart and they were realizing, because the tech world is so big on free speech and they don't care for the government, especially with Apple.

They don't like the government coming in and trying to get information from their phones and devices that they sell to us. Maybe that's what did it. I don't know, but

Well, you gotta hope that after watching the disaster of the last four years, that maybe people would wake up. Maybe somewhat of illustration, I was on another podcast last week where we talked about the article that's up on TruthScript about Jimmy Carter's failed presidency that I wrote.

And we talked about that and we talked about how the South has changed from blue to red. It is solidly democratic. And then we talked about the concept of the yellow dog Democrat, folks that had always been Democrats.

Now, my family is weird. Growing up 50s and 60s here in Georgia, I remember 1964, I was in the fourth grade and I had a three ring binder notebook with all my school stuff in it. And right blazing across the front was a Barry Goldwater bumper sticker.

So I was completely weird at school because how my family became Republicans or decided to be Republicans back in that day, I don't know. But people finally began to see the light and began to realize that we're not talking about personalities and we're not talking about the past.

We need to understand policy. And it's very interesting. One writer that wrote about Carter said that he though, he had this reputation as being a pious, devout, religious man who taught Sunday school and read his Bible.

Yet he was never able to capture the evangelical vote and specifically the white evangelical vote. And in my response to that was, evangelicals, regardless of their skin color, have learned that in the voting booth, it needs to be about policy.

Who's going to do what's best for our Christian values to be championed in the public square. And that's what Donald Trump did from 2016 to 2020 when he served as president.

Southern Identity, Populism, and Policy Over Personality

Yeah, yeah.

So you're both actually Southerners, right? Cause Matthew, well, Matthew, you're a transplanted. You grew up, you were born in Florida.

And yeah, I'm a native Floridian, fifth generation Tampa Floridian.

Okay.

I think it was one side of your family's from the Northeast, right?

Actually, no, on both my mom. So my dad is fourth generation. My mother's third generation. And so that makes me fifth.

So I'm talking about like way back.

We were probably talking way back. I have on both my mom and dad's side, people that settled in Virginia. And like I have ancestors kind of scattered throughout North and South. But I mean, that's a question though, of whether you consider a Tampanian or a Tampan.

I don't want to say the other name they call us. A Tampa Floridian is really a Southerner because we're pretty, it's like the further South you go in Florida, it's like the less South you really are. But I wouldn't say that.

I wouldn't really identify as a Southerner in that regard. I mean, I guess I'm in the South region of the United States, but no. But well, Fort Brook and Tampa, that was a Confederate holdout. So there's that.

Yeah.

I'm thoroughly Southern. In fact, my great-great-grandfather was in Owensboro, Kentucky. He's a Baptist preacher. And he moved to Atlanta because Northern Kentucky had really sided with the South. It was weird.

Southern Kentucky was kind of sided with the North and Northern Kentucky was sided with the South. He was in Owensboro. So he made his way to the South. He was a chaplain to Confederate troops. And so I would say, yeah, and my mom's side of the family, Georgia all the way back as far as we can go with our family history.

Yeah.

I think this election, and it's the same with Trump's first election, was, I mean, obviously Southern states vote for the Republicans in higher numbers in modern history, as you correctly pointed out.

But it was a lot of the working class, I mean, the people have identified it as a populist movement. I think that's right. It was more working class people against the elites. And my grandfather from Mississippi is, you maybe think of him because he voted Democrat.

I think FDR was the last Democrat though. Maybe, I don't know if he voted for Truman. Well, no one voted for Truman, right? Truman was just

Yeah, Truman just stepped in.

Stepped in.

So anyway, I think FDR was the last. And then he realized that he was wrong for even supporting FDR, voted Republican. He might've, now this is controversial, but he may have voted Dixie Cratt actually for the election in there.

But he was a strong Trump supporter. And I'm thinking of my wife's mother. He died last year. My wife's mother died a little over a year ago. She was obviously from New York. She's not the same culture at all, but very populist and loved Trump.

And when he went up there and gave the inauguration speech, I thought of both those people because I thought they were just diehard Trump supporters. They loved him just more than any other president in modern history.

They felt like he understood where they were coming from. And I just felt like it was some sweet vindication in a way because they had to die during the Biden years. Anyway, what he talked about though in his speech was just, I mean, there's things perhaps I wish he would have talked about more.

I mentioned education as one of them. I'm sure abortion, he didn't talk about that as much. I didn't expect him to though. But there's people who are upset that he didn't do that. But he talked about a bunch of things.

He mentioned God. I put out a little, I don't know if you saw like a, I don't know, 11 point list. America first and weaponize deep state. Remember God, deport foreign criminals, fight cartels, drill, less taxes, more tariffs, common sense and efficiency, stop censorship, merit-based society, recognize gender and COVID regime, peace through strength and a new manifest destiny.

Anything on there that surprised you, jumps out or maybe something you might disagree with and think, oh, I don't agree. I don't think he was going to talk about that. I'm upset he did. I mean, for me, I just thought that was a great speech.

It was a fantastic speech, John. And, you know, with my military background, just a lot of the things he said about clearing, cleaning house in the Pentagon, you know, using our troops to do what they're supposed to do constitutionally.

And that is protect our nation and to send them to the Southern border to end this nonsense that's been going on, this invasion literally of our country. And then designating the cartels as terrorist groups, which means we can take military action against them.

I'm ready to see that happen. It's time that we got serious about the problem at the Southern border. And, you know, a lot of our evangelical elite, you know, do this nonsense of, you know, take care of the stranger and all that sort of thing.

But, you know, I do believe that there's a biblical mandate to take care of your own first. And so the whole idea of America first really resonates with me. And I think it does with a lot of people. I think that's why Donald Trump is our 47th president.

Did you see the, Matthew might've seen this, the post that Megan Basham put out there from Marvin Olasky, who is now, I guess, one of the editors at Christianity. I think he's the executive editor at Christianity Today.

Did you see that?

I did not see it, no.

No, I didn't see that one either.

All right, so let me, this is Marvin Olasky. So obviously, you know, we're concerned with the church and with what Christians think about these things. This is the head of, or second in command, because Russell Moore's the editor-in-chief.

So Marvin Olasky's the executive editor. I have no clue how these positions relate to each other, but they're both very high up. And Marvin Olasky sent out a mass email to a bunch of different people, apparently, that he thought would be sympathetic to this message.

And he said, good morning. This note will seem like a blast from the past to several of you, but I'll let you in on my new perspective as executive editor of Christianity Today. We have, actually, you know what?

Let me pull this up so you can see what I'm looking at, because this is public. I didn't even think of that. Hold on, let me just pull it up so everyone can see what I'm looking at here. Sorry to interrupt myself.

All right, here it is. So that's Megan's profile. So he says, we have reporters in New York, Chicago, Washington, and other cities who will be covering what happens to immigrants and refugees beginning on January 20th.

But I would like to have someone on the ground in or near cities like Minneapolis, Denver, Tampa, Atlanta, Nashville, San Francisco, Boston, and others that may experience raids on businesses or schools, separation of parents and children, hurried flights out of the country, churches declaring themselves sanctuary, et cetera.

So I'm casting the wide net writing to you because I have respect for your intelligence, honesty, and accuracy. If you see something in your own community, would you be willing to say something to our editor who will be pulling together information from around the country?

I'm not asking for any heavy lifting here, just an email note on an accident, on an incident you may become aware of. Let me know if there's something you could do and also indicate whether you might be willing to follow up if Christianity Today asks you to do some actual reporting for what's going on.

For which there would be compensation. So he is offering money for people to let him know, let Christianity Today know about the Trump's policies on deportations. And obviously he has a slant here. He wants to make Donald Trump look bad.

He wants the stories that are going to pull the emotional heartstrings. And there you go. So that's kind of, I mentioned before that we started recording. I think that there weren't a lot of Christian or evangelical reactions that I could see.

Christianity Today does have a story, but you go to the Gospel Coalition, there's nothing. A lot of these Christian evangelical pastors who were usually very quick to weigh in, especially when a Democrat was elected the last few cycles, and to talk about their prayers for Obama and that kind of, they're just silent.

They're not saying much at all, which I think is really interesting. But this is an exception. Although this was private, right? This wasn't even supposed to be read on public forums like this. So there is, I think, a strategy in play to undermine President Trump.

I really think that's baked into the cake. And I don't know if it'll be that different than the National Cathedral pastor. I don't even know what to call her, a pastor. Pastor, what do you call her?

Pastorette.

Pastrix, you know?

Pastrix, yeah.

Yeah, so, all right. Well, you can play that clip, but yeah, you're probably not surprised by any of this, I'm assuming.

No, no, you wouldn't be surprised by it. I'm not surprised. Alaska's been going downhill for a long time. I had been on the left edge of Christianity. It's really, it's sad to see it, that they want to undermine what President Trump is going to do.

And a lot of it, I think, John, is just really out of their hatred for him as a person. You know, Biden was asked when Carter, President Carter passed away. And then, of course, we know that Trump is coming into office.

And, you know, is there anything that you think that Trump could learn from the Carter years, the Carter presidency? And Biden had a one word answer, decency. And, you know, that's the confusion because Jimmy Carter was not a decent man.

And even worse, he meddled in foreign affairs. He was the most meddling former president ever. And, you know, championed a terrorist and hugged on him and loved on him. And it was absolutely ridiculous.

So neither Biden nor Carter were good men. And so there was no decency there. But they just despise Trump's personality. They despise his character. And does Trump do things that, from a moral standpoint, that we as Christians would disagree with?

Well, yes. But we're all sinners, right? You know, we're not electing the pastor of the United States. We're electing the president. And we're looking at policy, not personality. So this doesn't, this, you know, stuff coming from Christianity today and guys like Olasky and Russell Moore shouldn't be the least bit of a surprise to us.

Christian Policy, Evangelical Drift, and the Limits of Personality Politics

Yeah, I mean, what did they do when Biden was elected? Did he send out or did, you know, he wasn't that Christianity today at the time, but did Russell Moore send out a mass email asking for investigations and eyes on the ground because of gender policies?

And we need to really make sure that this is covered and we can, you know, get the moment that, you know, horrific things happen, surgical operations, kids separated from their parents. I don't think that happened.

No, it didn't. And they're more, you know, that's, they're more interested in looking good to the world. They want to be friendly with the world. They think somehow that they can, you know, do the gospel as a subtle influence.

If they'll kind of get along and go along with the world, that the world will like them. So it's kind of like having one foot in the world and one foot in the church. And all you end up in that situation is getting attacked from both sides.

Yeah.

Well, Matthew, I'll,.

Have you looked at the,.

By any chance the, what do you call it? Why am I blanking on this? Executive orders?

Yes, I was, I was pretty pleased with a lot of them, especially the pardoning of the January 6th political prisoners. That was good because you saw like a lot of naysayers because there was a whole contingency.

Of people on the right.

Who were counter signaling President Trump and just being very negative, especially like the likes of Nick Fuentes and his followers saying like, oh, Trump's not gonna do any of this. He's not gonna. And, you know, day one pardons the political prisoners.

And there's this one guy who makes these little comics. He's like a right-wing comic maker. His name is Stone Toss. And there was like a Stone Toss little piece he put out where it was like a picture of Trump getting sworn in and like the January 6th prisoner watching from the sideline.

And then, you know, it's like that very clearly did not come to pass. And another thing I think of is the people who wouldn't vote for Trump because of his policies on abortion, things like that, thinking that he's essentially like fully pro-choice in a lot of regards.

But then you go to the United States, like a Department of Health and Human Services, their website, their official website about abortion, reproductiverights .gov. If you go on Google and you type in reproductiverights .gov, guess what?

Since Trump has been sworn in, you cannot access the website. It's down. So, oh yeah, I'm a very, very pro-choice president. Obviously, of course, he could, he'd do a bit more. You can be a little bit disappointed how he handles it.

But isn't that interesting though?

The abolitionists going, like getting upset today. I didn't, I was like, what? I saw a post from someone saying that nothing significant has been done to help save babies. And Trump's helping all these other people.

He's helping all the January 6th prisoners, but he won't help save babies. I saw that earlier today and I was like, well, I mean, I understand his policy was to leave that to the States and to, you know.

Whether you agree with that or not, you know, leave it to the States. I mean, you can't discount, you know, the change at the Supreme Court, which led to the end of Roe v. Wade.

Sure.

And there's a lot of work left to be done. There's a lot of work that all of us have to do. But now we have the opportunity to do it. Our religious freedoms are protected once again. With Biden and the Democrats in charge, our religious liberty was at stake.

And I don't think it's at stake right now. I think we've got at least four years where we have, we're going to see, you know, religious liberty protected. You know, for many years, my, if I was a one issue voter, it would have been on the issue of life.

But I've since changed that my number one issue is religious liberty, because without religious liberty, you can't speak up for the unborn. That to me becomes one of the most critical things that we have to deal with.

So, you know, there've been a few other times in history, going back to the 90s, where the Republicans had control and didn't do anything with it. They didn't do what we sent them there to do. So I am really hopeful and prayerful that they will get behind President Trump and actually make these things happen.

What's it, Tom?

That's a, that's a, are you going to go, John?

You just told us that actually he did do some things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I thought of the last thing Biden was doing before he left saying that now it's constitutionally protected to have abortion in all the states. That was literally one of the last things Biden said before he left.

Yeah.

And so anyway, go ahead. Sorry, Matthew.

No, I was going to say is, Tom, I believe you bring up a great point about how it's sort of impossible to just be a single issue voter, really, because you have to realize, like, how connected so many different things are with each other, like religious liberty with abortion.

I used to also say that my number one thing was abortion, but it's just, it's such a politically simplistic way to think, like, let's bring in another issue, immigration. If you have, like, mass unfettered immigration, both legal and illegal, and you look at the voting patterns, you look at the voting records, you look at how our country, you know, the very cultural fabric of our country starts to fall apart.

You're never going to be able to have, you're never going to be able to have an actual pro-life movement if you keep importing, like, all these people en masse who vote a particular way. Like, these things are all connected.

If you want to preserve life, you also ought to preserve American demographics when you look at the patterns. And it's like, you know, people don't realize how interconnected all these things are, and that, yes, you may vote for this person who is not as good on issue X than you want him to be, but on issue Y, if he's really good on that, and that sets up for the future improvement and progress with issue X, you, for dang sure, must, like, be willing to go all in with guy who's really good on issue Y so that issue X can one day be resolved by the grace of God, by him sparing us.

Because, like, let's just face it, we are, in a sense, under judgment and have been for a while. And so if God is giving us mercy, accept that mercy. Don't say, oh, we're already under judgment. We don't need mercy.

No, continue to take what God has given you and run with it.

Yeah, you can't just look at one issue. You're exactly right, Matt. And, you know, another issue that sometimes we fail to throw up to the top that we need to is the economy. You know, going back to Jimmy Carter, I keep bringing him up, but you guys are too young to have set in gas lines back in 1979 like I did.

I mean, we had an energy crisis in 1979. It was caused by Jimmy Carter's failed Middle East policies. Everything that you go to the store to try to buy today is much more expensive than it was four years ago.

And we've got to get that under control. If you don't have the finances to take care of your family, how are you going to stand up for any of these other issues? It's going to become a matter of, you know, trying to make sure your family can survive and you've got the resources to feed your children and, you know, pay your mortgage and all that sort of thing.

So I think the economy has to be a very high issue for us as evangelicals.

The Economy, Energy, and the Interconnection of Political Issues

Yeah, I agree. I think the economy obviously is the word and it is an issue. It's just that when the left tries to bring that up, and I mean, progressive evangelicals, they'll say, oh, we should all think about the economy more.

They'll either frame it as a life issue and then it's socialism, or they'll say that, you know, socialism is what the Bible advocates, some form of that. And obviously what's happened in the last four years is when Joe Biden says he inherited a bad economy, he's right.

I mean, we had COVID and Trump. I don't know that Trump handled all of that good in every way, but here's the thing. Biden then put us into the Green New Deal and spent like drunken sailors, you know, allowed that.

I mean, we had all these Ukraine bills over and over and over. He depleted our national reserves of oil. I think he just put a moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of America, the Gulf of Mexico.

I mean, he did so many things to make the economy worse. And I'm scratching the surface there. And day one, Trump's already pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord. So that's going to save us billions of dollars.

And some of the ridiculous things, like for example, by 20, I think it was 32, then 70 of the cars needed to be electric. Stuff like that isn't going to happen now, which is really good news.

And that's good news for the auto manufacturers, certainly.

Yeah, well, for all of us, really.

And the idea that he's going to drill. So, you know, we've got the natural resources underneath our feet to take care of us for hundreds of years. And we need to be exporting that and making money off of it rather than being beholden to Middle East terrorists for our oil supply.

And so it's a very good chance that all of that is going to turn around. And the stronger that we are economically, the more that the church can do to spread the gospel. And there's nothing wrong with wealth.

The issue in the Bible is not how much money you have. It's how it's your attitude toward it. It's your love of it. You know, if you have resources, if the church has resources, because Christians are in a good economy and able to give, that makes all the difference in the world for the ministries that, and the missions that the church can undertake.

Yeah.

Executive Orders, Border Security, DEI, and Government Efficiency

Well, how about we do this? I'm going to go through the different executive orders Trump signed today, and we can talk about it. So the first is the military's role in protecting territorial integrity.

The president ordered the U .S. Northern Command to deliver its plan to seal the borders and maintain U .S. sovereignty. So this is the closing the border day one. And so, well, actually this is interesting because this is apparently, oh, okay, that's a heading.

Okay, that's a heading for a bunch of stuff. Okay, so securing the borders is one executive order. Ending the catch and release. Did you see that a bunch of people on online were photographing this woman in, where was it, Juarez or somewhere who said she had a one o 'clock appointment on MLK Junior Day, which apparently the office is closed.

So she couldn't have had a one o 'clock appointment. But I don't know if any mainstream organizations started reporting this. It was going around on leftist Twitter accounts though.

And

Well, we know that they'll lie about it, John.

Yeah, they're finding victims.

They'll make, if they can't find something that fits their narrative, they'll make something up.

Yeah, that was interesting. Rescinding Biden's executive orders on gender identity, DEI and more. And I thought this was a really, really good thing because this is like the meritocracy part of the inauguration speech.

I'm all for in-group preference among the citizens of the United States, which I think Trump is too. He's not gonna, that's the thing people need to understand who are upset about that. He's not saying that someone from India can come and take your job.

At least I don't think that's what he's saying because they perform higher. He's saying he wants Americans to be the best. And within America, within American citizenry, we don't need to be trying to put up a fake quota system so that people who are not as competent in these fields end up becoming in charge just because we want a diversity point or something.

And obviously with that, the transgender stuff, my buddies in the military say it's awful. And it's, I think every branch now has Pride Month stuff that they are, if they're not required to participate in, they're surrounded by it.

So hopefully. Yeah, and 28 years in the military, we weren't having to put up with that. I mean, I retired in 2005. So I've been retired for almost 20 years now. But I question right at this point, our military's ability to do the things that Trump wants them to do.

But it's time for DEI to DIE.

Yeah, good way to put it.

So true.

The ability to policy influencing positions. So he's going to reinstate, I guess, a former executive order that he had that created, let's see, a new class of accepted service for career civil servants in positions of a confidential policy, determining policymaking or policy advocating character.

I'm not exactly sure what this means. Calls for guidance from the director of the Office of Personal Management about additional categories of positions. I think this must have to do with making sure that the people in these bureaucratic roles are actually doing their job.

So I don't know if you heard in the, I don't know if it was in the inauguration speech or afterward, because I listened to a few of his speeches yesterday. But he said that he's going to call all the federal workers to come into the office and they need to work full, put in full time hours.

Right.

This was a problem, apparently, for the last four years, where these bureaucrats were working from home without an accountability and just drawing a salary.

You know, there's plenty of accountable people who can work from home and do their job. In the private sector, they get held accountable for doing their job. They don't just get to sit on their rear end at home and goof off.

We all know these government agencies are fat. They're people being paid exorbitant salaries to essentially and are accomplishing nothing. And so I really think the whole idea behind this Department of Government Efficiency is an outstanding idea.

And I think that we can cut the budget and we can cut the number of people that are working significantly. And if they're genuinely qualified people, they're not going to have any problem getting a job in the private sector.

Yeah, yeah.

The only thing, my wife brought this up this morning, that I was like, oh, that's a good point. She goes, if he makes it really efficient again, then what if he's out of office four years from now and he hands over this really sleek, efficient government to our enemies?

And I thought of, I think Jefferson Davis was in that position, right? Because he was a secretary of war, helped build up the military. I know John C. Calhoun before him from South Carolina, helped really bolster the US military.

And then they end up, well, Calhoun had died, but Davis has to end up fighting the very military that he made such a well-oiled machine and he couldn't beat them. Partially because of his own good leadership in the role.

Right, right.

That's one of the considerations is like, what if Trump makes it so efficient that in four years, we have a government that's able to do great evil. But I mean, that's like saying, you know, we shouldn't make this church good or this home good or this business good because bad guys come in and they like...

I mean, that's just not how we live life. We're responsible to God accountable for everything that's given to us. So we gotta be good stewards, right?

Yeah, and the problem too is that like, you know, part of the reason we're in the mess that we are is because of so much inefficiency. And so it's like, okay, you could either fix the problem or leave the problem.

Because what if you leave the problem, then the bad guys have to deal with the problem. But, you know, you have to think, okay, we have to get as much done as we can right now. And if we do get like, if things go really well, and you get all these things done, and quality of life goes up significantly across the board, then you ought not worry too much about, you know, people swinging all the way the other side.

So, you know, do what you can show people that you're good at what you do. And then maybe you can win over the electorate. So that's sort of how I would think about it, at least.

Yeah, I think if we change people's quality of life, they're going to be pretty excited about that. I think people have more money in the bank and more confidence, faith in the future, you know, that the dollar is going to be strong and that their retirements are going to be secure.

I think that that gives people an awful lot of confidence in what we have. So, you know, one of the sayings that we had, you know, back when I was in the military is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Yep. That's good. There's a bunch of immigration stuff in these executive orders, a bunch of energy stuff. It's amazing how many of these things I mean, I don't remember this from even when I was young, all these executive orders being signed the first day.

This is somewhat new, I suppose, and probably somewhat unconstitutional to have the executive branch doing all this. But that's like I thought about it this morning. We like Britain has an unwritten constitution.

We have a written constitution, but we function like we have an unwritten constitution. In a way, at this point, because the executive branch has taken on a lot of responsibilities that really don't belong to it.

But that, I mean, how else are you going to reverse some of this stuff? That's the question. So anyway, more on immigration. I'm reading through a summation of this stuff. January 6th, obviously we just talked about that.

He, I know one of the things he's doing is in the military. If you were fired because of not receiving the vaccine, you will now be reinstated.

With back pay.