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March 1, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
33:08
America's Great Awakenings with Dr. Jerry Newcombe
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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America's Christian Roots 00:10:44
Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Dr. Newcomb joins us.
He has an amazing film, The Road to Independence.
We talk about is America a Christian nation?
Where do we come from?
And how do we solve the current problems in front of us?
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Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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Joining us now is Dr. Jerry Newcomb, serves as the executive director of the Providence Forum and as a senior producer, on-air host, and columnist for James Kennedy Ministries.
And he is a historian and an expert on all things revivals and the history of America's great awakenings, a topic I am passionate about.
And Dr. Newcomb, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
Great to be with you.
So, Dr. Newcomb, how many awakenings or revivals have there been that are notable in American history?
And when did they occur?
Well, you could define it in different ways.
And I would say, in terms of the real big picture, D. James Kennedy, you just mentioned the founder of D. James Kennedy Ministries, a noted author and so forth.
He said in the big picture of things, he looked at it this way: America was born because of the first great awakening.
That was in the 1730s and 40s in America, okay?
And that helped propel really the whole push for independence.
Then the second major great awakening was in the early 1800s.
And that pricked many people's consciences about the evils of slavery and the inconsistency of having slavery with a country that's based on the idea that all men are created equal.
And it really helped push ultimately the end of slavery.
Obviously, it happened through the Civil War, but there was a great deal of push for that.
And then he said, Dr. Kennedy, now we are in need of a great third great awakening.
We would pray for that.
Now, obviously, Charlie, we've seen many different sporadic awakenings, even in our own time, just in the last couple of weeks.
This amazing event at Asbury College.
And I remember about 20 years ago, there was an event like that at Wheaton College.
And my wife and I met at Wheaton Graduate School about 45 years ago.
By God's grace, I was so grateful for that.
But anyway, so there have been these little movements, but I would say I kind of tend to agree with Dr. Kennedy that in the big picture you're looking at, the first great awakening, the second great awakening, and now the need for a third great awakening.
But see, part of the difference is that sometimes these spiritual movements that happen here and there, they don't necessarily reform and transform great portions of the society and the people.
And that's, I think, maybe where the difference boils down to how you define a great revival or great awakening.
Well, let's talk about the first great awakening that led to the American Revolution.
What period of time was this?
Talk about the major characters, Mayhew, Edwards, Whitfield, and talk about how that led into the American Revolution.
It created the framework and the foundation.
Yes, John Adams said, our second president said that, in effect, the revolution occurred in the people's hearts a generation before the actual American War for Independence.
And he's referring to, in some ways, this whole push for the Great Awakening.
I would say that really historians would credit Jonathan Edwards, Reverend Jonathan Edwards, Calvinist preacher, Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a pulpit there.
And under his preaching on a series of sermons about justification by faith alone in Jesus Christ, that that's really when revival began to start taking place.
And that was in Massachusetts.
And the character of New England began to slowly be transformed into a place.
And then George Whitfield came over from England and he preached not only in Massachusetts, but up and down the whole North Atlantic coast in all the different colonies.
In fact, Dr. Paul Johnson, great British historian who wrote a book that's a wonderful book called The History of the American People.
It's 1997.
And he said that George Whitfield is likely the first American or the first American, first person, because he was British, not American, but the first person that we know of that visited all 13 of the colonies in America.
And it was for all this preaching.
So in effect, the whole thing begins with Jonathan Edwards and then spreads through George Whitfield to the rest of the colonies.
And there were different preachers that were involved.
You mentioned Jonathan Mayhew, who died, I believe, in 1760, but he was a minister in the Boston area.
And he had some very interesting things to say about politics.
And he even said in a famous sermon that when the king does so many evil things in tyranny, he does, for all intents and purposes, unking himself.
Now, he was writing this in 1760, and he was, I'm sorry, he wrote it in 1750.
He died in 1760, but he was actually referring to the 100th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, who was a tyrant.
And King Charles I was the one with the star chamber where Christians, Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers were being persecuted for believing in Jesus.
And, you know, it was a terrible, terrible thing.
In fact, there was a civil war in England, and it was brought about, frankly, through Charles I's intolerance and persecution of the Christians.
And so, anyway, bottom line is that God was working in different ways.
But I want to say this about Jonathan Edwards, because he really is the one under whom God really sparked the first great awakening.
Jonathan Edwards was humble.
He was brilliant, but he was humble.
And you know, Charlie, everybody knows, probably everybody in your audience could quote 2 Chronicles 7:14.
If my people who are called by my name, you know, will humble themselves.
And I think that's one of the key elements that we need today, you know, in American Christianity.
We need more humility.
I believe it was that humble spirit that God used in a very special way in Jonathan Edwards.
If I may, may I tell a quick anecdote about this humility?
Yes.
Okay.
Unfortunately, you know how it is, Charlie, sometimes with church politics or organizational politics.
You were just talking a moment ago about, you know, Project Veritas and James O'Keefe and so forth.
And here he's a victim in effect of office politics.
Okay.
Well, Jonathan Edwards, despite God using him in a special way, he ended up getting fired by his own church.
And this is jumping ahead to 1750.
He gets fired by his own church, and yet they didn't have somebody to fill in the pulpit.
And so week after week on a Saturday afternoon, there'd be a knock at his door and it would be one of the leaders in the church saying, you know, Reverend, I'm sorry, but we don't have anybody to fill in the pulpit.
Would you please preach tomorrow morning?
And he would do it a week at a time because that's what God called him to do.
And I just think that speaks volumes about him.
I think we have to get to a point where we have to humble ourselves before God and repent of our wicked ways.
And that's one of the elements of revival that is so critical and so needed.
That is beautifully said.
And I want to get into the detail of exactly what his most famous sermon was, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
And what was the case he was making?
And why did that resonate with the people of the colonies of America at the time so deeply and with such impact?
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The Great Awakening Impact 00:06:10
Doctor, can you elaborate a little bit on the content of the most popular message by Jonathan Edwards?
Is that message the entirety of what he was sharing?
Should he be best known for that message?
Is that just the one that got the headlines?
Or do you think that is actually Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a proper summary of the message he was most well known to deliver?
Well, it's certainly his best known sermon.
You know, earlier I referenced Paul Johnson.
Paul Johnson said, ironically, while Jonathan Edwards is best known for that particular sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he preached more about the love and the joy of God, you know, than he did the other.
But the point of the sinners in the hands of an angry God is one that people should not forget, that if you are, You know, separated from God, which we are naturally, and you have not been born again, you have not been regenerated, you are in a precarious, dangerous state spiritually.
You are not covered by the blood.
I mean, if I could use an analogy from the Passover, 1400 years before Jesus was even born, God instructed the people of Israel about the Passover.
And He said, What you need to do is you take this lamb that's without blemish, you sacrifice that lamb without breaking any of its bones, and then you take the blood and you put it on the top and the two sides of your house.
Then, when the angel of death sees the blood on the top and the two sides of your house, you think I'm making the sign of the cross?
You bet I am because that's what they did, you know, 1,400 years before Jesus died.
And through faith in the Lamb of God, whom Jesus is, you know, when John the Baptist saw him, he said, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
And so, through faith in Jesus Christ, God takes away our sins and he passes over the judgment because we are covered under the blood of the Lamb.
God made him who knew no sin, that is, Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God.
The basic gospel message sometimes gets obscured, even in a church context, Charlie, where people may go to church week after week, and in effect, they think that essentially what they're being told is don't do this and do that.
And, you know, in a real sense, the message of Christianity isn't do or don't, it's done.
Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe.
And so, the bottom line is that when the true gospel just gets preached, even in simple ways or in sophisticated ways, it has a profound impact.
And in the case of Jonathan Edwards, he was focusing on how people were in their natural states in a very dangerous condition, even if they were church members.
So, the idea of repentance was a core theme.
Why is that so important?
Because a prideful nation seems to look at the idea of repentance with disgust.
Repentance is the precursor to an awakening, is it not?
Absolutely, absolutely.
And in fact, during the Civil War, President Lincoln issued a proclamation of prayer and calling for fasting and calling on God.
And it's a really beautiful proclamation.
It was, as I recall, March 30, 1863.
In fact, you can even just Google Abraham Lincoln prayer proclamation 1863.
And he basically talks about how, as a nation, we have been so blessed.
And one of the lines in that says, intoxicated with unbroken success, we've become too proud, too self-sufficient to call upon God.
And so he talks about how we need to basically repent and realize that we have offended God and get back right with Him.
Otherwise, the scourge will continue.
He called for that prayer.
And he said, by the way, that day of fasting and prayer should take place one month from now.
And so that was at the end of April, 1863.
And within two days, Stonewall Jackson was shot.
And, you know, that's an amazing thing.
Stonewall Jackson seemed to have his own personal relationship with Jesus, but he was born south of the Mason-Dixon line.
I don't want to get into the Civil War and so forth, but the bottom line is Stonewall Jackson was one of the best generals America ever produced.
And as long as he was alive, you know, the ongoing scourge of the Civil War continued.
So bottom line is Lincoln was saying we need to repent.
By the way, I believe Stonewall Jackson personally would have said, yeah, we need to repent.
You cannot get to a place of repentance if you think that you're doing everything right.
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Let's play a piece of tape here.
It is from Dr. Newcomb's film that he helped produce, Cut 47, The Road to Independence.
Please play Cut 47.
The Great Awakening was a spiritual movement with political consequences.
It reached its zenith with George Whitfield, but this powerful series of religious revivals all began with a humble Calvinist minister named Jonathan Edwards.
His life and his preaching helped bring about what's called the First Great Awakening in America that led to the salvation of up to half of the South and one-third of the North.
The ideas of the Awakening, as historians say, laid the foundations for what became the Revolution.
The Awakening was the sowing of seeds for what became the freedom of the revolution.
So I'm a great admirer of Whitfield, and Americans should appreciate his immense contribution.
Anyone who's able to get Oz Guinness in a documentary or a film deserves great credit.
Dr. Newcomb, how do we watch that film and tell us more about it?
Oh, thank you very much.
And there are other great guests, too, also in this whole series: Dennis Prager and Rabbi Daniel Lappin and Janet Ellis and Eric Metaxas and my good friend, Bill Federer, and as well as Bill Peter Lovak.
Yeah, yes.
Bill is one of a kind.
In fact, I remember when Bill and I first started to get to know each other in the early 2000s.
And I said to him one time, we were walking on the streets of St. Louis.
That's where he used to live.
And I said, you know, Bill, the more you study America's true history, the more you realize how the Christian faith, the Bible, played such an incredibly pivotal role.
And he said, yeah, it's like digging in a well.
And the more you dig, you know, the more and more, or like a mine digging in a mine, the more you dig, the more you come out with all this, you know, gold and so forth.
And it's true.
It's true when you read the original sources and so forth.
So yes, I really appreciate that.
Providenceforum.org is the website where I have a clearinghouse of information on the whole series of films.
It's called the Foundation of American Liberty series.
And if anybody asks me, well, what's the foundation of American Liberty?
It's our Judeo-Christian heritage.
And there's a seven-part series.
One of the most recent ones to come out was called We the People.
It deals, of course, with the Constitution.
Later in the summer is endowed by their creator, of course, dealing with the Declaration of Independence.
But the bottom line is the goal of the whole series is to show how the Bible played a pivotal role in America.
We often forget that, even in the life of George Washington.
I love that.
In government schools, though, where I grew up, I was taught the founding fathers were deists or they didn't have much fascination with religion.
Is that true?
No.
No, it's really not.
I mean, for example, you take the Declaration of Independence.
It was 56 men that met in Philadelphia in 1776.
And of those 56 men, the vast majority of them, 52 approximately, were not only professing Christians, but they were involved in Trinitarian churches.
I say that as opposed to Unitarian churches, where you do begin with a bit of liberalism.
Now, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, I actually co-wrote a whole book about him with Dr. Mark Beliels.
It's called Doubting Thomas.
And the gist of the book, it shows two things, really, and documents it.
One, that is, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic.
Yeah, later in his life, he did entertain some serious doubts about core Christian doctrines.
And there's no, you know, getting around that.
But he didn't hold those views earlier.
So, for example, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, when he wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, which was adopted in 1786.
But anyway, he wrote that in 1777 that same year, 1777, as a layman, he was the person who helped found a church which called an evangelical minister, the Reverend Charles Clay.
And the name of that church was the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
It met in the local courthouse.
And this Charles Clay, whom they called, was an evangelical.
And in fact, in that book, by God's grace, we were able to put in print for the first time ever, to our knowledge, two of the sermons of Charles Clay.
These are sermons that Thomas Jefferson himself supported.
So point number one in the book, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic.
Point number two is that he did not believe in the separation of God and state.
So for example, when he was president, he went to church on a regular basis where?
In the U.S. Capitol.
That's correct.
They had religious services.
That's right.
Not just religious, Christian worship services there.
And I told that to a friend of mine one time who was an elderly gentleman at the time.
And he said, well, what about the separation of church and state?
I say, you know, well, that's not what the founders understood.
You know, they certainly didn't intend to have the separation of God and state.
And so it's, it's, as you were saying, it's also a, um, it's totally taken out of context.
Um, one liner in the letter to the Danbury Baptist Convention where he was actually giving them assurances the government would not come after them.
And it's not in the Constitution.
And it was what, readopathed by the Burger or the Warren Court, one of the two as just kind of reapplied in, I think, a very unconstitutional and sloppy manner.
So, but let me ask you, because the critique that then some Christians will say is, but these founding fathers didn't believe in their faith enough to put it into the founding documents, into the Declaration of the Constitution.
What would you agree with?
I would not agree.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't agree with that at all.
Number one, the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence is really the founding document in the sense of explaining why we exist.
The Constitution is more the governing document.
This is how this government is going to work.
It's predicated on the Declaration of Independence.
And when people said, well, the Constitution doesn't mention God.
Well, it actually does mention God.
It mentions God in the attestation clause.
This is done in the year of our Lord.
And John Eidesmo, great law professor, author of Christianity and the Constitution, I asked him one time, what would you say to those who say, well, in the year of our Lord, that's a mere formality.
His answer was, that's like saying an attestation clause in a will is a mere formality.
It is not.
It is a part of that legal document.
But as far as the Declaration is concerned, it mentions that our rights come from the Creator.
It talks about the laws of nature and of nature.
Four relations to God.
Yeah, exactly.
And you really have to understand that laws of nature and of nature is God.
That gets back to Sir William Blackstone, who was very important to the founding fathers.
He was a British jurist.
He wrote four commentaries on the laws of England.
And he basically said there are two types of laws in the world.
There's the laws that God has revealed in nature.
But because nature has fallen and we need more special revelation, he has revealed himself through the holy scriptures.
So you have the laws of nature and of nature is God.
That's really what he's with.
It gets back to Blackstone.
And we developed that, by the way, in our documentary, Endowed by Their Creator.
Another reference to God in the Declaration of Independence is the supreme judge of the world.
Yep.
According to the Bible, and the founders knew this, according to the Bible, who is the judge of the world, Charlie?
In the Bible?
Yeah.
Well, the Lord, God, the one God.
Yeah.
And John 5, give me a name here.
Jesus Christ.
Right, but that's Jesus Christ.
That is correct.
He's the supreme judge.
Yeah, but he says the Son of Man has been given the task of judging because he is the Son of Man.
Jesus is the judge, and the founders knew that.
And so I think that's a very significant point.
And then finally, you have a reference to trusting in divine providence.
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
And so, you know, God is interwoven in the Declaration of Independence.
And as far as the Constitution itself and the Declaration, both of them are beneficiaries of the covenantal constitutional making process in American history.
And it all began in the Mayflower Compact.
It began in the cabin of the Mayflower when the pilgrims set down an agreement for self-government under God, which they all signed as witnesses, the Mayflower Compact.
In the name of God, amen.
They talked about how they took this voyage for the glory of God in the advancement of the Christian faith.
We do covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politic.
That Mayflower Compact, 1620, was the first of about 100, maybe more of these different constitutions, covenants, essentially, based on the biblical model of covenant that the pilgrims, the Puritans, the Quakers, Presbyterians, et cetera, came up with agreements for self-government under God.
And so by the time the founding fathers sat down to, you know, first of all, to declare independence in 1776, and then right up the Constitution, 1787, they had had about 150 years of constitution making.
And it all gets back to the biblical concept of covenant.
With us is Dr. Newcomb.
He asked me, why is Connecticut the Constitution state?
My only other guess would be: if my memory, something about the fundamental orders, you tell me, Doctor.
That's exactly right.
The fundamental orders of Connecticut.
That was the first fully developed constitution written on American soil.
Connecticut was founded by Thomas Hooker, the Reverend Thomas Hooker.
He led his followers from Boston, Massachusetts.
They had a minor disagreement among their fellow Puritans.
But as they created this settlement in 1638, he preached a sermon based on Deuteronomy 1.
And the gist of it was that the Lord God was giving them an opportunity that through their people, they would choose for themselves their rulers.
It was self-rule under God.
And then a year later, 1639, they developed the gist of what he said in that sermon into the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the first fully developed constitution on American soil.
And it talks about the reason they made this settlement in the first place was for the purity and liberty of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
And historians tell us that the fundamental orders of Connecticut is in lineal descent to the U.S. Constitution.
It is, you know, the Constitution itself is derived in part from what you find in that fundamental orders of Connecticut.
That's why to this day, you see a license plate from Connecticut, a constitution state.
And it's so sad, by the way.
It was interesting to listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene about the politics in different states.
Unfortunately, Connecticut today, like most of the New England states, is very, very liberal.
It is not in any way faithful to the original ideas that helped give it birth and the freedom that they enjoyed initially because of the gospel.
Yeah, they are far from adhering to the beauty of the Constitution.
I want to just re-emphasize one part of what you spoke about, which is that 150-year period where the colonists wrestled with, toiled over this idea of self-government.
And then obviously the awakening revival leading to the American Revolution.
We might be seeing a modern day revival break out today.
What are the signs that history tells us that would say, yes, we are in the middle of an awakening or a revival?
Washington's Sacred Faith 00:03:05
Well, I think one of them would be the great interest in getting back to our true roots.
And I think there is an interest.
You know, Charlie, I mean, you think about this.
You're a very young man, and I thank God for your interest in these things.
By the way, I must commend you.
I was at the gym doing a workout and I was listening to Tim Clinton, Dr. Tim Clinton, filling in for Dr. James Dobson.
And they had interviewed me around Thanksgiving time.
And I pushed the wrong button and it ended up with a lecture that you were giving.
Some sort of, it was a speech, not an interview.
And it was like, well, this guy is fantastic.
It was really good.
Thank you.
It was a wonderful, wonderful message.
But that interest is great.
I remember when Peter Marshall, the son of the chaplain, he wrote a book or co-wrote a book in the 70s, the 1970s, The Light and the Glory.
And that was one of the first steps towards reminding Americans about our true history in the modern era, because so much of this was rewritten, not just in the 60s and 70s, but even as early as the 1930s.
You're probably familiar with Dr. Peter Lobeck, perhaps.
He and I co-wrote a book about the faith of George Washington.
It's called George Washington's Sacred Fire.
It's a real big, thick book about his faith and so forth.
But Dr. Lilbach was showing how even as early as the 1930s, there were some historians that were trying to, you know, miscategorize George Washington, take him out of the category of Christian and put him in the category of effectively unbeliever.
And then in the 1960s, that was definitively done through a book about George Washington's religion.
And in fact, our book, George Washington's Sacred Fire, really responded directly to that.
And I think one of the highest compliments I got, if I could say, tell this anecdote real fast, George Washington's main church went before he died.
It's where the funeral was, Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
It's a Episcopal church, Church of England.
And anyway, the docents there told my co-author, Dr. Lilback, when they saw him after the book came out and so forth, they said, We want to thank you because you gave George Washington back to our church.
We used to have to tell people, you know, well, the scholars say he's an unbeliever or, you know, a deist and so forth, but didn't really believe all this stuff.
You gave him back to the church.
Thank you.
George Washington had a copy of the book of common prayer that he made for his own, you know, and he read it all the time, read the Bible all the time.
And so anyway, we've been robbed of our history, Charlie.
Dr. Newcomb, wonderful job.
Come back anytime.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.
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