Nov. 24, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
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| This is what you're fighting for. | ||
| I mean, every day you're out there. | ||
| What they're doing is blowing people off. | ||
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power. | ||
| Because this is just like in Arizona. | ||
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a corner and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
| This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged. | ||
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
|
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All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | |
| War Room Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome to Battleground. | ||
| This is our Thanksgiving season special, and I've asked Dave Bratt, the Dean of the Business School of Liberty University, to join me here tomorrow. | ||
| Of course, on Thanksgiving morning, we're going to have a two-hour special, and I've got Larry Schweikart, the author, the co-author of The Patriot's History of America, that's joining me there and going to go through Some of the background, history, motives of Thanksgiving. | ||
| Dave, you're down at Liberty. | ||
| I would argue that Liberty is the leading, if not one of the leading, Christian universities in this nation. | ||
| Also a huge believer in what your name says, Liberty. | ||
| That's the entire focus of the program down there. | ||
| Reverend Falwell won it when he started that as a very small college. | ||
| Now it's a major university. | ||
| And what people, I think, don't realize is the reach you guys have internationally. | ||
| I think somebody told me one time you have 100,000 students through your remote learning program. | ||
| That's just absolutely incredible. | ||
| So from your perspective in liberties, walk me through Thanksgiving. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm glad you're having a Patriot's Guide to Thanksgiving and the Judeo-Christian West because that will actually be the proper history of the U.S. | ||
| And so I just kind of want to go through the basics on Thanksgiving and why I'm utterly thankful. | ||
| I wake up with my health and things we all take for granted. | ||
| In the U.S., we still have first world problems. | ||
| We're fighting to preserve those first world problems. | ||
| But when you think to Thanksgiving, everybody of course goes to the pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact and coming over. | ||
| Half the people died on the voyage over. | ||
| There's a modern historical debate on why they came over. | ||
| When you cross the sea for three months, it's not for minerals, etc. | ||
| They came out of Amsterdam to UK and set out for the US for religious reasons. | ||
| And so when they got there and they set up the traditions that set up our country on the right footing, and we can get to those later, they gave thanks to God. | ||
| And so we go by that way too fast, right, in modern parlance. | ||
| Then we get to the turkey real quick and all that, which is great. | ||
| But it's thanksgiving to God for God's divine providence. | ||
| And those faithful people suffered like we cannot imagine suffering. | ||
| But through their faithfulness, they set up the new Jerusalem that we have had the privilege of living in. | ||
| And now the numbers are going down, right? | ||
| The Judeo-Christian tradition, the percentage of Christians are going down. | ||
| But I just want to encourage people, right? | ||
| When the numbers go down, that's not a call to give up. | ||
| That's a call for the faithful to be even more faithful. | ||
| You look at a small number of pilgrims that came over And founded just a new creation. | ||
| And so I just want to go just keep drilling down on it. | ||
| Why were they thankful, right? | ||
| They weren't thankful for, you know, a corn harvest, which was more in abundance than they expected. | ||
| And they were able to share finally some of a good bounty this year with the Indian friends they made. | ||
| And you know, that's the story. | ||
| But they were truly thankful to God Almighty for his providence bringing them over, but more thankful in the Christian tradition for Jesus Christ and the work he did on the cross, right? | ||
| So that's the utter thankfulness, right? | ||
| Everybody knows we're all sinful. | ||
| I'm proud of this show for acknowledging reality on that score. | ||
| And so the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is THE moment in the Christian history, of course, for which we are utterly thankful. | ||
| And then the rest of the Judeo-Christian West comes out of that. | ||
| And I say the Judeo-Christian West because in the Hebrew Scriptures, of course, the central event of the Hebrew Scriptures is the Exodus, which resulted in freedom from bondage and from the Pharaoh, etc. | ||
| And it's so central. | ||
| They say, when your son and now your daughters come to you, because the daughters are now part of our modern government, They tell them, tell your, what should we say to our sons? | ||
| You should tell them, hero Israel, the Lord our God is one. | ||
| He delivered us out of land of bondage into the promised land flowing with milk and honey. | ||
| And so that Judeo-Christian tradition has a few components that I want to just go over with you. | ||
| I know you're well acquainted with all of them, but first and foremost is the belief in a transcendent realm. | ||
| Hang on, hang on, hang on, before we get, ho, ho, ho, hang on, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, slow down, before we get there. | ||
| Why were they called the Separatists? | ||
| I want to go back so people understand about the lived experience of these people. | ||
| The Church of England was formed in part of the Reformation by Henry VIII because of a host of reasons, Henry VIII and the wanting assets, etc. | ||
| But one of it was they wanted more control of the Church by the political authorities in England. | ||
| So you had the Anglican Church was very Catholic in its services and much of it, except that the Archbishop of Canterbury reported to the king. | ||
| The Puritans and the Pilgrims rejected Catholicism, but they also rejected the Anglican Church, and they were more congregational. | ||
| In other words, they were more from the grassroots up. | ||
| They did not want a hierarchy in their church. | ||
| Tell us about the Puritans and tell us about the Pilgrims, because their beliefs were so powerful, so strong, that it was able to get them through Just horrific conditions, horrific conditions on the sea voyage, the 50% of the people dying, barely hanging on to the small coastal community. | ||
| This had a tiny foothold in a hostile, you know, primeval forest, right? | ||
| And able to hang on because of this deep belief that this was the New Jerusalem. | ||
| So walk me through who were they and tell me about their religious beliefs. | ||
| Yeah, well I think the major, major revolution which stands right underneath them and right before them was Gutenberg and the printing press, right? | ||
| And then you have the Protestant Reformation and Sola Scriptura, you know, the Bible is the key. | ||
| And if you look at any of those pictures of the pilgrims and the history, the guys you'll have on and the women experts you'll have on, These people were people of the book for real. | ||
| I mean, they knew the book. | ||
| They taught the book. | ||
| And once you read the book, it's very liberating. | ||
| And so the Catholic Church has a rich tradition. | ||
| You're saying that the Gutenberg Bible was that they could actually print the Bible in the language of the people. | ||
| Not the Vulgate Latin of kind of the elites of the Catholic Church. | ||
| Everybody knew how to speak Latin, but you actually got it in your native tongue, whether that was German or whatever. | ||
| That revolution, you're saying, caused a revolution that led to the Reformation and led to this kind of different aspect of Christianity? | ||
| Yeah, and you know, the Catholic Church and the Protestants still share, you know, the Apostles Creed, the Bible, the Nicene Creed, all these formal statements of the faith are shared. | ||
| But the governance piece, and you know, we're all fallen people, all churches are fallen, but there were debates over church governance and monopolies, right? | ||
| I'm in general not against monopolies in the corporate sector, etc. | ||
| And so you've got good popes and you've got bad popes, etc. | ||
| And you've got central command. | ||
| And then in England, you had THE church. | ||
| And the founders, you know, that's one of the hugest misconceptions over here, this separation of church and state. | ||
| What they all meant back then was they just did not want a monopoly church. | ||
| They wanted the freedom to choose the church they wanted. | ||
| Because in the Jewish and the Christian tradition, it's vertical, right? | ||
| The relationship is between you and God. | ||
| And as later folks, Luther, the bondage of the will, or even Kant in the secular tradition, Kant would go to say, and he was a son of a pietist minister, very religious, you'll never hear that these days, but he said in secular terms, the only thing that is categorically good is the good will. | ||
| And the only one who knows the heart and your will is God Almighty, right? | ||
| And so you can put on, you know, an act and Machiavelli and all these guys would say to put on an act. | ||
| And, you know, that sets up the modern world we're all living in. | ||
| It's hard to determine who the good guys and who the bad guys are on a certain day. | ||
| But that freedom to read the book, interpret it for yourself, have your own preacher, and then Christian education, of course, blew up, right? | ||
| Harvard was founded not too far distance, 1640 by John Harvard, a Puritan, trained in at Cambridge, a Christian university that was founded by the Catholics. | ||
| And so you just get this historical continuity that I just want everybody that doesn't know this story to encourage the young ones at home to get all over this. | ||
| If you don't know every name I'm naming, this is just the 101 course, right? | ||
| You got to have this stuff down cold to be an informed American. | ||
| This tradition has given you all the great universities, all the great hospitals, all the great culture, music, art, everything. | ||
| It's not some god of the gaps. | ||
| This Judeo-Christian tradition is the West which founded science and freedom and the Constitution and everything we take for granted. | ||
| We just think it came easily in this modern world and there were tremendous price paid for each of those moves. | ||
| Walk me through this concept. | ||
| You said they came here and one of the reasons they sacrificed, they thought they were founding, they thanked Divine Providence, right? | ||
| And one of the things they thanked for is that they believed, and there was a very small number of these people, it was not a large number, but they believed they were founding a New Jerusalem. | ||
| What does the concept of New Jerusalem mean? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's the third temple for the Jewish people where, in the Christian terms, you're waiting for the coming of Christ, the second coming of Christ. | ||
| But the New Jerusalem just stands for God's ultimate sovereignty and providence and promises for redemption where you can live out the law In freedom, worshiping God Almighty, right? | ||
| And, you know, the founders were geniuses and were great. | ||
| They may have made a mistake. | ||
| They made the sovereign in our Constitution is we the people, right? | ||
| And this is right aligned with that. | ||
| They gave sovereignty to we the people under the assumption that this Judeo-Christian tradition was so strong it could never Falter. | ||
| And now it's faltering, right? | ||
| In our major Ivy League institutions that call themselves elite, they cannot answer the fundamental question of why is there something instead of nothing, right? | ||
| They can't answer the primary. | ||
| What is ethics? | ||
| What is morality? | ||
| What is freedom? | ||
| Is there freedom? | ||
| Are we locked in a deterministic void of Newtonian mechanics? | ||
| Or is there a realm of transcendence and a realm of freedom? | ||
| and a realm of morality. | ||
| And this isn't new to me. | ||
| I'm not making this stuff up, right? | ||
| This is the Judeo-Christian West, from Moses to Jesus to Plato. | ||
| In the Greek, Plato had the transcendent, without which you do not get morality and without which you do not get freedom. | ||
| And then, of course, that continues into great philosophers like Kant, who was awoken from his dogmatic slumbers by David Hume. | ||
| who was an empiricist, and they were serious back then, right? | ||
| So he was locked into Newtonian mechanics, which does, if you're a straight empiricist and knowledge is limited only to sense perception, there's no realm, there's no possibility for moral freedom. | ||
| There's no realm for a transcendent God. | ||
| There's no room for morality. | ||
| And so the smart people out there, right? | ||
| The folks in the suburbs, I hope I'm hitting right now, who think they know this stuff, but if you don't know where the sense of transcendence comes from, you got some homework to do. | ||
| And everybody believes it, right? | ||
| At the time you're born, you see the miracle. | ||
| Everybody knows that's a miracle. | ||
| When it's time to die, everybody knows. | ||
| Time to focus a little bit, right? | ||
| Everybody knows there's an up and there's a down. | ||
| Deep in their souls, But in the meantime, we create false gods that we look at in the mirror all day long. | ||
| And so this country has been given all of this tradition, which has been examined by the greatest minds in theology and philosophy, and it's the only system left standing. | ||
| And I think that drives some folks on the crazy lap. | ||
| But hang on a second, hang on a second. | ||
| You talked about the products of the Judeo-Christian West and how today people have taken it for granted and they think it was too easy, but all the great architecture and art and music and literature and philosophy is all informed. | ||
| It came from that framework of the universities in the learning. | ||
| And this is why I want to go back to the Puritans and the Pilgrims and why that voyage It's so important, it's such an inflection point in human history. | ||
| Of all the stuff that's going on, it's one of the most important things. | ||
| And they're hanging on, barely, in that vast wilderness, in the deprivations they had in those first couple of years. | ||
| And then the act of Thanksgiving. | ||
| They would say to you, Dave Brat, yes, the art, the architecture, the literature, the music, yes, that forms a culture and civilization. | ||
| But we reject that. | ||
| In fact, if you look today, one of the concepts in America today, the modern world, modernity is the mainstream. | ||
| These people are outside the mainstream. | ||
| You know, these deplorables are outside the mainstream. | ||
| You could not get More outside the mainstream. | ||
| England was a Christian nation. | ||
| It had a state church. | ||
| That state church had the Anglican church. | ||
| If you just go back to the Queen's burial of all the pageantry and all the music and how beautiful it was and how everything that The Pilgrims, or the Puritans, absolutely, totally rejected it. | ||
| Not only did they reject, essentially because they were part of Cromwell's, you know, what informed or the basis of the Civil War, of rejection of even the Cavaliers, which essentially was Jamestown, the freebooters, the entrepreneurs, that entrepreneurial spirit of the English, the freebooter spirit of the English, the pirate spirit of Drake, and all the, you know, great English sea captains, right? | ||
| They rejected that. | ||
| They rejected your theory of art. | ||
| They rejected your theory of that. | ||
| In fact, they said all of the forms of this, they were the ones about the stripping of the altars, not like Henry VIII to basically steal the assets of the church for himself, for more of his personal depravity, right? | ||
| These were people you couldn't even have, I think in many cases, they didn't want a cross on the altar. | ||
| and they wanted a, they had a, they had a such a, a austere view of their religion. | ||
| And what strikes me is that I'm not sure that you could have survived up in Massachusetts in those winters to actually form this. | ||
| Unless you had that intense, intense belief that you had the answer, and that answer rejected you. | ||
| Just once again, remember, in all the beauty of English society that we know, and everything's been passed down in the pageantry and the great literature and everything that informed our mother country, Our revolution was against the economics and the politics of it all, the oligarchs and the landed gentry. | ||
| These people at our bases rejected the thing itself. | ||
| Their pilgrimage is actually a world historical event, Dave Brat. | ||
| Yeah, well they're the most serious of the most serious real-deal Christians all over the scripture. | ||
| With the Jewish people all the way up to Jesus, and the teachings of Jesus, God always chooses the lowly. | ||
| God chooses the lowly and, you know, the seeming fools of this world, right? | ||
| That seem not to understand the pageantry and all this stuff that doesn't matter, but their hearts are pure before God, right? | ||
| The Bible is just a continuous story of God choosing The low over and over. | ||
| David, David was not the eldest son. | ||
| And he looks over all the Samuel to anointed King. | ||
| He says, where is this all you got? | ||
| And they pull in this ruddy little David guy. | ||
| And he's God's anointed and goofs up like everyone does. | ||
| But for some reason, and we know the reason, he had a true heart before God. | ||
| And so these pilgrims, And the Puritans who are mocked and scorned because they knew what the truth was, right? | ||
| And the Jewish people before knew what the truth was. | ||
| They have suffered and suffered over and over the Babylonian captivity for hundreds of years of bad kings, bad choices. | ||
| And when nations turn their back on God, God still loves us. | ||
| But when you turn away from God, you turn away from God. | ||
| And so the Puritans did not. | ||
| They were steel. | ||
| They were made of steel in their faith. | ||
| Something very few folks today, right, to get to that level of faith and determined, like you're talking, to be that determined to set up a true new church, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what they're going for, right? | ||
| They're going for the apostolic true church right off the bat when Jesus is teaching, doing the Sermon on the Mount and ethics that if you read that, right? | ||
| The Sermon on the Mount. | ||
| Everyone read that. | ||
| Try living that one out. | ||
| Love your enemies, right? | ||
| Man, it's hard enough loving your friends on a good day, right? | ||
| That's some tough, tough teachings and the pilgrims Believed every word of it. | ||
| I'm not resting my case on the music and that culture. | ||
| That's just the extra special sauce you get on top of it all that comes with the rule of law. | ||
| And the Puritans, again, as an example, they knew that true freedom comes from law. | ||
| Right? | ||
| From obedience to God, right? | ||
| In the Catholic Baltimore Catechism or the Protestant Heidelberg Catechism, which no kids learn anymore. | ||
| No one even knows what it is anymore. | ||
| But centuries of folks were trained in on these things. | ||
| And the Q&A, the first question in both the Catholic and the Protestant, what is the chief end of man? | ||
| And the chief end of man is to glorify God. | ||
| And so that It's not about me, you, anybody, right? | ||
| Every single thing we do here. | ||
| I heard a sermon last week in church. | ||
| A great sermon. | ||
| Even, you know, you have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. | ||
| Jacob was kind of a prankster and a trickster and goofed up. | ||
| But then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph comes along and is pretty good in human terms. | ||
| And even he Is made to live in a dungeon in a cell after he lives a godlike turns down the Queen of Egypt and her advances and delivers prophecies, but the guys forget about him. | ||
| He spends another seven years in there, but out of him and his suffering and his faith comes Israel and Moses and And the Judeo-Christian West, right? | ||
| So it's very hard for us moderns, right? | ||
| I'm an economist. | ||
| I like calculating what's the benefit, what's the happiness to me right now. | ||
| God's time ain't that time. | ||
| And the pilgrims knew it. | ||
| They knew it wasn't about being rich and having all the, you know, All the wealth and all the things that come with it, right? | ||
| They knew what really constitutes life on this planet and that's obedience and happiness in God, right? | ||
| It's not a down story. | ||
| It's a story of freedom and salvation. | ||
| And so they were utterly thankful and they wanted to set up an order based on that happiness. | ||
| Talk about the Thanksgiving. | ||
| You're saying they didn't, the popular opinion is that they had a couple of bad winters and then was it Squanto came up and he spoke English cause he had learned it from a merchant man and he'd actually gone to England, I think as a slave and you know, and he's with one tribe and there's a huge alliance, very complex. | ||
| There's a very complex alliance system and they were always at war with each other and they didn't see the whites as something they should fear. | ||
| They saw the whites as a potential ally. | ||
| And then they held on, and they had surplus in one year, and they decided to give thanks to God. | ||
| You're saying that's not actually the case, that that is a simplistic notion. | ||
| It wasn't about the surplus of their bounty, of the farming techniques that Squanto taught them, and this whole concept that they started as Marxists and communists, and they actually went to individual plots, and the young men who had been kind of laying around got More engaged. | ||
| You're saying they gave thanks for something deeper than that. | ||
| What is your theory of the case? | ||
| Yeah, good theory, right? | ||
| So you can go into sociology and psychology and economics and stay about as deep as a wading pool, right? | ||
| Those are secondary effects. | ||
| But if you want to look at the system, right, their system is very well laid out. | ||
| It's called Judeo-Christian theology, right? | ||
| And it had been around for, you know, 3,000 years already. | ||
| And it was getting more and more developed with the Reformation and the printing press and the reading, etc. | ||
| But that's what I was getting at in terms of the first principle of why we're all on the planet in the Judeo-Christian tradition is to give glory to God every day for everything we have. | ||
| And the rest are afterthoughts, right? | ||
| Some smart people on the Bible have said if you If you had all the host of characters in the Bible without God, it'd be, you know, a nice read of some history, but there's nothing to it, right? | ||
| The whole point of the biblical narrative is from Abraham. | ||
| Abraham wasn't even Jewish yet, and he got a call out of the land of Ur, and God calls him and says, get up and take your whole family, and out of faith he does this, right? | ||
| Like the pilgrims. | ||
| And then right on, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, just tremendous, tremendous sacrifice. | ||
| And then Moses was placed in a high spot in Egypt and gave it all up and had a passion for his people and came back and delivered them out of bondage. | ||
| And then Jesus Christ in the New Testament is born in a manger. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The whole thing is the high becomes low. | ||
| It's all inverted. | ||
| The logic of human thinking is inverted. | ||
| God Almighty becomes man and chooses to live in a manger for his birth. | ||
| The King of Kings. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The whole thing is upside down and that's meant to be that way because it's the only thing that'll shock us Out of our comfort systems, right? | ||
| We have a, you know, bad election cycle or something and everybody gets all upside down and bent out of shape. | ||
| God's working out his plan. | ||
| There ain't no thwarting that, right? | ||
| God's at work, for the good of his people. | ||
| And the faithful, there are promises in the Bible. | ||
| You don't know God's timing. | ||
| But if you stick to your faith, God will listen. | ||
| God hears the cries of the orphans, the widows, those in prison. | ||
| And God does answer, right? | ||
| Maybe not the way we expect or the way we want, but there is an answer. | ||
|
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And so the pilgrims are living out that logic. | |
| Hang on one second. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I want to get to that as a punchline when we come back. | ||
| We've got Dave Bratt, Dean of the Business School. | ||
| From Liberty University, and you know him as the economist that comes on here and talks capital markets and economics, but he also understands particularly the moral and political philosophy of the Judeo-Christian West. | ||
| We're going to get into it next. | ||
| How did these very austere pilgrims, how did their thinking blend with the children of the Enlightenment that led to the Revolution 170 years later? | ||
| Next, in the War Room. | ||
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War Room Battlegrounds with Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| War Room Battlegrounds with Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| Dave Brat is our guest. | ||
| We're having a series of specials over the next couple of days to really get to the meaning of what these holidays are about and how they inform the direction of the United States of America, our beloved country. | ||
| This concept of meta-time, or the concept of time, and I think this is quite important for you to take a crack at, to explain to the audience. | ||
| The Pilgrims thought, or the Puritans thought, in longer reaches of time, and that was because of their deep study of the Old Testament, and obviously the New Testament, but the Old Testament also. | ||
| Talk to us about, I call it meta-time. | ||
| You know, we get caught up in news cycles, and what's the latest, and we're on our phones, and what's up on Drudge, and Daily Mail, and what's breaking on Politico, and then a two-year cycle for midterms now. | ||
| The presidency's kind of chopped up in two-year cycles, not four-year cycles. | ||
| We're completely, we're the slaves of time. | ||
| They, to a degree, stood and tried to stand out of time. | ||
| Dave Brad, explain that to us. | ||
| Yeah, there's a built-in conflict there, right? | ||
| God's ways are not our ways. | ||
| Even the most astute of the pilgrims or Moses, Moses himself was not allowed to see the face of God, right? | ||
| So God is Infinite's not even a good word. | ||
| It is the sovereign beyond sovereigns, right? | ||
| Not graspable by our tiny finite little minds, right? | ||
| And so that said, the pilgrims had the right sense that history is for God. | ||
| It's God's history. | ||
| And so they knew that and so they lived out and did their part at their time the way they saw best to glorify God. | ||
| And so they're a good model for all of us, that basic step toward God as the first principle, because God's always been the first principle in the liberal arts since the Greeks, right? | ||
| The quadrivium and the trivium, all of that was based on, it was God-centered until very modern times when we hit the Enlightenment. | ||
| They view the long run of history in the building of the kingdom of God, right? | ||
| So the kingdom of God is in the first place in your heart, right? | ||
| So Jesus taught over and over and over. | ||
| The central teaching of the New Testament spent more time on the kingdom of God than anything, right? | ||
| The kingdom of God is like this. | ||
| It's like this seed. | ||
| The kingdom of God is like this. | ||
| It's just over and over and over. | ||
| So go read on that and you'll see most of its internal But Jesus had a ministry that was unique. | ||
| We don't have that. | ||
| We're not called to die for the sins of the earth. | ||
| So there's a wonderful exchange where Christ takes our place for our sin and we get what's called the wonderful exchange where we get to live out life in history now. | ||
| And so that does pivot and God made that creation for a reason. | ||
| We're supposed to be building the kingdom on earth. | ||
| So we do have a responsibility in the earthly realm as well Where God is sovereign over every single piece of it. | ||
| And the pilgrims knew that full and well. | ||
| And that's part of their upset with the English royalty and whatever. | ||
| They didn't show quite enough due deference to the idea that God is sovereign over all of your wealth, your household, your family, your job choice, your health, every aspect of modernity that we just assume came along because we built it. | ||
| And so, you're right, as we flow through time our way, Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, at the end of the Enlightenment, saw this long-run arc of history, and he was not happy with what you call scientism, this misunderstanding Between rationality and reason, right? | ||
| Plato saw a lot of this with just secular glasses on, right? | ||
| He saw the realm of the good. | ||
| He saw a realm of transcendence, of freedom, of ethics, of morality. | ||
| Kant saw all that and tried to write up a secular system. | ||
| That would embed the Judeo-Christian system within a philosophy that did not degrade Christians from being fully reasonable, right? | ||
| But rationality took over, right? | ||
| This trying to reduce everything, all knowledge to just our sense perceptions. | ||
| So I won't get in the weeds on that, but folks that are interested, you can look up Bertrand Russell and the Logical Positivists and the Vienna Circle and Karl Popper. | ||
| And they were at least academically serious. | ||
| They tried to limit all knowledge to one-on-one matching between words and sense perception to get rid of God, right? | ||
| The intent of the Enlightenment was to get rid of God. | ||
| That was the first and foremost goal. | ||
| And it blew up on them because they had a little problem with this thing called science and the theoretical terms necessary to do science. | ||
| Have you ever seen a science? | ||
| If you have, please let me know what it looks like. | ||
| So there's a little summary snapshot. | ||
| Have you ever seen a hypothesis? | ||
| No. | ||
| Those are terms created that are necessary to do science, and the scientific folks don't seem to know their own limitations. | ||
| version, which they think is the is lived Christianity, right? | ||
| They think this is the version that everything else is encumbered by things that are not the thing itself. | ||
| And they're going to try to live among the precepts of the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. | ||
| And it's their interpretation of the teachings of Christ is that it's very austere and everything is is about the kingdom of heaven, which is quite internal. | ||
| But they're trying to build a new Jerusalem here as a framework that can propagate the kingdom of heaven. | ||
| But 150 years later, virtually on the same spot, remember Plymouth is just south of Boston, relatively south of Boston, and Boston in that area becomes the hotbed of revolution. | ||
| Obviously my beloved Commonwealth of Virginia is driving this and one of it, but the more revolutionary fervor at first It's clearly coming from Boston and that's the hot hits and the British know this, right? | ||
| And part of this is that Kevin Phillips' great book, The Cousin's War, that more of the English Civil War types went to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Bay Colony and more of the Cavaliers and the people who supported the Crown went to Jamestown and you had more entrepreneurs and freebooters there. | ||
| But 150 years after the founding, which they barely hang on, you have the children of the Enlightenment. | ||
| Right? | ||
| To really become the forefront of this revolution. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| How did you go from this austere belief in Puritanism as embodied by the pilgrims to really having the Enlightenment have such a massive impact on the foundation of America and particularly its revolutionary leaders? | ||
| Yeah, well the brief answer is Genesis 3 called the fall of man and women. | ||
| And the longer extended edition is the entire New Testament teaching of Jesus and Paul and everybody. | ||
| You die to your old self and you take on the new self in Christ, in this higher new realm of the kingdom of God. | ||
| Well, that's austere. | ||
| That is very demanding. | ||
| How do you go from that to full-on enlightenment? | ||
| And the answer is, the enlightenment was hugely successful. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| On the materialist plane, humanity saw economic growth, food abundance, energy, technological innovation, medical breakthroughs, educational breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs. | ||
| And if you'll notice, all those things are lacking any understanding of human nature, right? | ||
| So where the success happens is in the material realm. | ||
| Anything that has to do with human nature, like the politics and economics somewhat, the control of power, theology, deeper psychology than Freud and the simplistic drives, failed. | ||
| And so we're still living that out, right? | ||
| The abundance delivered makes it very easy to get lazy and just say, hey, I'm working. | ||
| I got a decent job. | ||
| I'm making a good check. | ||
| That's all there is to life. | ||
| I'm doing my calculations to see how much I got in my 401k to see when I can retire. | ||
| The choice of what I do on this earth is irrelevant. | ||
| What I counsel my kids to do, you know, I want them to just make a bunch of money. | ||
| If the market price dictates you have to leave your family in your city, that's what everybody does these days. | ||
| And so it was it we just made the modern moves without taking the meaningful analysis of life of what really matters into full context and building those into our cities and our nation, etc. | ||
| And now things are flying apart, right? | ||
| The bolts are flying off the machine and people are After COVID, having depression and anxiety and all sorts of terrible issues because they don't know where to go, right? | ||
| People are lost. | ||
| And so, you know, the church and the synagogue should be the first place of just welcoming people into this deeper community of commitments and responsibilities. | ||
| But unfortunately, even some of the churches have failed to deliver on that. | ||
| They're watching their money as well. | ||
| So, particularly with the younger generation, I mean, you do agree that if you look at any statistic, that there's less church attendance, less focus on religious matters than ever before in the United States. | ||
| They're actually referring to the United States as a post-Christian nation. | ||
| At the same time, they're arguing that the Trump movement and anything related to populist nationalists is really nothing more than a white supremacist Christian Nationalism. | ||
| We've gone through these periods here in America, in the United States, that have what are called great awakenings. | ||
| Those great awakenings. | ||
| A lot of it, I think, is an awakening to try to harken back to the spiritual purity and the spiritual energy and, quite frankly, the spiritual toughness of really our forefathers, which are the Puritans. | ||
| Is it to harken back to that? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And it's just a matter of, you know, what degree of of wreckage do we have to see to turn back, right? | ||
| The term repentance means to turn around and to turn back to God. | ||
| How could you get any more? | ||
| How could you get any more wreckage tonight than today? | ||
| I mean, they're actually questioning not just the foundational tenets of the Judeo-Christian West. | ||
| They're questioning the basics of biology. | ||
| I mean, you have gender affirming surgery. | ||
| You have the most radical. | ||
| I mean, what is being taught or being pushed by our elites In schools today for school children is not just indoctrination. | ||
| It's something that's more radical than the French revolution, more radical than Mao's revolution, the cultural revolution, which are probably the two most powerful cultural revolutions, more than even the Nazis or the fascists or the Bolsheviks. | ||
| These were, these, these radicals were absolutely, they wanted to change all of society deeply. | ||
| How do you sit there? | ||
| If you can't have, and look at this. | ||
| As a sentient being and understand that what is coming at you is so outside the mainstream, quote unquote, for what's ever happened in American society or culture and how that would not drive a new great awakening. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's every issue you just mentioned is very clearly a God versus no God issue. | ||
|
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|
All of them, right? | |
| You just go right down the list, right? | ||
| And this This attempt to mess with human sexuality, the left and the CCP and the Marxists know exactly what they're doing. | ||
| They got to get rid of any challenge to national globalist sovereignty, right? | ||
| And so the first threat is the sovereignty of God, and then you got the sovereignty of the family, and then you got the sovereignty of the Constitution and the rule of law. | ||
| And interestingly, all three of those are under attack simultaneously right now by the same crew. | ||
| And this sexual assault, I've never even read about anything on this level, but it's calculated because it's the one drive that if you get to the kid, right, through the school, through the leftists, it's powerful enough to drive them from their parents. | ||
| And so that's what we're fighting right now. | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| And the basic trade-off is still right there. | ||
| It's just a matter. | ||
| You can't go to God lightly, right? | ||
| If you go, you got to go all in, right? | ||
| And it's liberating, right? | ||
| That's what the left and the folks don't get. | ||
| There's no claim in the Judeo-Christian system that we're the holy rollers and everybody else is awful. | ||
| Christians still stay in sin and goof up regularly, and we don't make that obvious enough to the outside world. | ||
| We're just more thankful, so hopefully we have smiles on our faces. | ||
| But that's the move that when you say any sentient being obviously knows these things. | ||
| Yes, when they're getting ready to die, these sentient beings all of a sudden have what are called come-to-Jesus moments, right? | ||
| And we all pray for everybody in that respect. | ||
| And so, but while you're on the planet living out your life, you have a choice to make. | ||
| Kierkegaard, all the great thinkers, right? | ||
| Either or. | ||
| It's stark. | ||
| You got to make a choice to give up some of yourself to live for God first and then for others, which follows. | ||
| And that doesn't have to be being a Puritan, right? | ||
| It can be your calling in health care. | ||
| It can be your calling as a police officer. | ||
| It can be your calling being a brick mason, building beautiful things and giving glory to God every day you do that, right? | ||
| So there's no hierarchy of importance. | ||
| It's just that whatever you do, you do it for the right reason. | ||
| That your will is right, your heart is right, The Puritans knew that. | ||
| The Pilgrims knew that. | ||
| A lot of Americans still know that, right? | ||
| They're just quiet. | ||
| Our parents are not courageous right now. | ||
| They're letting it go by. | ||
| They're going, well, you know, it's just, you know, the Republicans take over for two years and then the Democrats do, and it's all honky-dory. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| This is way more serious, folks. | ||
| This is some deep, deep undercurrents cutting against you, your family, your God, your country, and it's time to wake up and get serious with our lives. | ||
| Over this Thanksgiving holiday where people will have a moment maybe to reflect or make time to reflect, what are the two or three things that Dave Brat would tell them to reflect upon that would prepare them, you believe, for the times ahead? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think you sit down and you read the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together as a family. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Open up the book. | ||
| Read the book. | ||
| Reflect on it. | ||
| Read a little bit about the pilgrims and see if it matches up with that book. | ||
| See what those stories tell you and your family and your heart. | ||
| Are you on track? | ||
| Are you off track? | ||
| But reflecting on, you know, just the big questions. | ||
| Why am I here? | ||
| Why am I on the planet? | ||
| Who created this thing? | ||
| The leftists have no answers for any of this. | ||
| Where did morality come from? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What is ethics? | ||
| Am I free? | ||
| Am I really a free person? | ||
| Is freedom important? | ||
| Is it just spiritual freedom? | ||
| Should we just get run over by political forces? | ||
| All of the founders said otherwise. | ||
| A ton of them were clergy. | ||
| The Civil War was a brutal, awful mess because there were great Christians on both sides. | ||
| And so we need to get serious And unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with eating your spinach, right? | ||
| The kids have these games in their hands all day long and all the cultural stuff. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not a Puritan to the extent that you got to get rid of all that. | ||
| But if you don't know what's driving all that, then your kid's in for a long, hard life of suffering. | ||
| And you don't want that. | ||
| And so it's just that basic moral education. | ||
| And by moral education, I don't mean morality. | ||
| It all comes from reading the good book. | ||
| That's what lit the Puritans and the Pilgrims up. | ||
| Their reading of that book lit them up and they set forth on a journey that none of us could imagine. | ||
| And the dedication and the endurance and the perseverance and the strength and the character of these people. | ||
| I look back and I don't know whether I could pull off half of it because they were just incredible. | ||
| And then they're called terrible. | ||
| It's just the world's upside down. | ||
| Don't listen to it. | ||
| Build a good faithful family and get into the book together and then get together with your church. | ||
| You do need to have a body of believers and friends around you to support you when the going gets tough. | ||
| And if you build that up in advance, you'll be very happy you did that. | ||
| What does Liberty, what type of resources, how can people get access to? | ||
| I know you guys have great learning there. | ||
| Where do people go besides just the reading of the New Testament Scriptures? | ||
| Where should people go? | ||
| Yeah, we have all sorts of resources and we're, you know, a technologically savvy school. | ||
| Everything's online on the web. | ||
| We have support, you can call the Divinity School, the Spiritual Support Centers, the Educational Centers, the K-12 Kids Schools or centers for support there. | ||
| The Global Outreach LU Send. | ||
| International Student Center if you're international and you want to talk to someone because you feel something going on inside, that something's resonating on this show or something you've heard about Thanksgiving or upcoming Christmas. | ||
| And you know there's something there, right? | ||
| Don't let it lay there. | ||
| Go explore. | ||
| And you can do a lot, right? | ||
| Find a friend to share with and that'll go a long way as well. | ||
| Dave Brat, where do people get all your personal social media? | ||
| Mainly it's Brat Economics, but there's a lot of worldview woven in there on the Judeo-Christian West, so Brat Economics on Getter, and then I'm on the third floor of the Divinity School. | ||
| I have a lot of your folks come up and say hi to me, and it's always with a smile, so keep doing what you're doing. | ||
| God bless you, God bless everybody listening out there, and let's get on the right track and take it all back to glorify God. | ||
| Dean Dave Bratt, former congressman, thank you very much for joining us over this Thanksgiving holiday season to lay this out for the War Room audience. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I want everybody to have a great Thanksgiving the entire weekend. | ||
| Thanksgiving Day and of course the days after the traditional Thanksgiving weekend. | ||
| I want to thank everybody in our crew, everybody in Memphis, and of course the crew here in the War Room. | ||
| Until tomorrow. |
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