Charlie was a huge fan of Thanksgiving, both because it was Christian and because it was distinctly American. The show discusses Charlie's love of the holiday and his argument for why America was a Christian nation. Historian Bill Federer and Dr. Jerry Newcombe of Providence Forum explore how both Thanksgiving and the American Republic go all the way back to Biblical Israel. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
My name is Andrew Colvin, executive producer of this fine show, joined by Blake Neff.
And we have two guests this hour for the whole hour.
One of them is Charlie's dear, dear friend, and I haven't seen him for too long now, Bill Federer, author and speaker.
You can find him at AmericanMinute.com.
And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, executive director of Providence Forum.
You can find him at providenceforum.org.
Gentlemen, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
So good to have you both.
Hey, great to be with you.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
It's wonderful.
Well, this is a so I wanted to do this.
I think we booked this like a month ago because I saw it coming down the pike here.
And I wanted to do this because Charlie's, I mean, it was like July 4th might have had it beat as far as Charlie's favorite holidays.
But it was July 4th.
He loved New Year's.
He loved Thanksgiving.
And he loved Thanksgiving because it is just such a uniquely American holiday.
It is, it's providential.
It tells the story of our people and of our heritage, of the spirit that is imbued in us as Americans.
And he liked it because it's giving thanks to God, which he always wanted us to do.
He always did, whenever anything good happened in his life.
Glory be to God.
Glory be to God.
Yeah, and you can actually see this in a tweet that he had just after we won the election.
He showed this up 208.
He posted this November 28th, 2024.
He said, Happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours.
We are thankful for the gift of salvation, our amazing children, and God's mercy on our great country this year.
Take a moment today to be grateful that we did it.
By God's grace alone, we took our country back.
Psalm 118, verse 1.
So, Bill, let's start with you.
In Charlie's honor, I am all about evangelizing the love of this holiday and the uniqueness to the American spirit it represents.
Tell us what makes Thanksgiving unique and so special.
Well, that America is an experiment of people ruling ourselves.
So, one of the things I did was go back and research every single century of recorded human history to try to find out what the most common form of government is.
And it's gangs and a gang leader with enough weapons we call a king or a pharaoh or a Caesar, Kaiser, Sultan Tsar.
And these kingdoms keep getting bigger because with the latest military advancement, kings can kill more people.
So, finally, the king of England had the biggest empire on planet Earth.
The sun never set on the British Empire.
He was a globalist.
He was a one-world government guy.
And America's founders broke away and flipped it and made the people the king.
It's a polarity change in the flow of power.
But we zoom in on the pilgrims.
Why?
Well, they were the ones that had the Mayflower Compact, this idea of people ruling themselves.
So at the time the pilgrims were founding America, you had Chinese emperors, Japanese emperors, Korean emperors, Indian Maharaja.
Raja means king, Maha means great, Russian czars, Mongolian Khans, African chieftains, kings of Spain, France, and the whole world's basically kings.
And here you have these little Christians starting their own community.
So one overlooked thing is they got their idea from ancient Israel that first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king.
So around 1400 BC, you have the Israelites, millions of them come out of Egypt.
And for four centuries, no king.
It's a total anomaly in world history that we don't appreciate.
But when you study it, it worked because everybody's taught the law and everybody's personally accountable to God to follow it.
It worked for four centuries until the priests went woke.
The Levi priests.
They stopped teaching the law anymore.
And you got Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the very tent where the Ark of the Covenant is in this line.
Every man does what's right in their own eyes.
Why?
Because the priest stopped teaching what was right in the Lord's eyes.
Turns into chaos.
They ask for a king and they get King Saul.
Why is this story important?
The kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and after.
And the Pilgrims and Puritans that founded New England looked to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible.
Both of them are looking to the Bible.
One's King Saul and after and the ones before.
So that's why they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard.
And so this little congregation, they were going to go to Jamestown, submit to the king's government.
They got blown off course, land on the shores of Massachusetts.
And the captain says, get off the boat.
And they go, well, who's going to be in charge?
There's no king-appointed person in our little group.
102 of us, nobody's been picked by the king.
They do something unique.
They take their little covenant church form of government and they make it their civil government.
It's called the Mayflower Compact.
We in you, presence of God, covenant ourselves together into a civil body politic.
That was the model.
And then in the next decade, you have what's called the Great Puritan Migration.
20,000 Puritans flood into New England, and you have pastors and churches founding cities.
So Pastor Roger Williams and the First Baptist Church founds the city of Providence, Rhode Island.
Reverend Thomas Hooker and the First Congregational Church founds the city of Hartford, Connecticut.
This is unique on planet Earth when the whole world's ruled by kings, and you got pastors and churches founding cities.
And anyway, so that's why we look to the pilgrims.
And the word federal is Latin for covenant.
We have a covenant form of government in America that can be traced back to these pilgrims.
I love that.
And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, you know, you run the Providence Forum, and your whole mission is to bring back Judeo-Christian values to the United States, make much of them.
And you have a place here.
You know, you say an article here on your website, America's First Thanksgiving.
You're talking about this First Thanksgiving that Bill just alluded to.
And you say that it's an annual reminder of our nation's Christians and roots and our godly heritage.
I do believe this nation is providentially founded.
When you look to the First Thanksgiving, you look to the story that's uniquely American.
What stands out to you that you want to call attention to for the 2025, our modern Americans?
Well, how much suffering the pilgrims endured just for the sake of the goal to be able to worship Jesus Christ and the purity of the conscience and be left alone.
When they started in England, it was a small little church.
The pilgrims were basically one particular congregation that managed to, when they began in a place in the Midlands in England, about 150 miles north of London, it was all secret.
It was illegal.
And so eventually they decided, hey, we could be tolerated at least in Holland.
So they were able to migrate that even there.
That wasn't an easy thing to do.
And then eventually, about 10 years later, they were able to come to the new world.
But through it all, they were suffering.
And in fact, in the book called A Plymouth Plantation, which their main leader, Governor William Bradford, wrote, he said at the very beginning, it is well known unto the godly how ever since the first breaking out of the light of the gospel in our honorable nation of England, Satan hath raised, maintained, and continued wars and oppositions against the saints.
And so they suffered one hindrance and persecution after another, but they went forward with their goal.
And when they finally got to the new world and they wrote the Mayflower Compact that Bill Federer was talking about, which was the first beginning of what would become the American constitutional process.
You know, 150 years later, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution would flow out of the same ideas of self-rule under God that were written down there right in the cabin of the Mayflower.
I mean, this is amazing stuff.
But they said we came, you know, for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.
And so when they finally were here, despite one hindrance and one setback after another, including the fact that half their number died that first winter, when the harvest came in 1621, they set aside time to give thanks to God in all circumstances.
And later on, when they would celebrate Thanksgiving, because they had gone through this period of starvation where the daily ration for each person would only be about five kernels of corn, they would sometimes take their Thanksgiving plate.
This is at later times of prosperity, and they would put five little kernels of corn on the plate to remind them of what they had endured during that time of starvation, where again, half their number died, but they gave thanks that he allowed them to flourish.
So Thanksgiving is such a great reminder of our Christian roots.
And a lot of people want to say, well, you know, okay, we can understand the settlers like the Pilgrims and the Puritans, they were Christians, but by the time you get to the Founding Fathers, they weren't.
They were, you know, basically unbelievers.
And that's just not true.
And anybody who takes Bill Federer's book, America's God and Country, and you look at these quotes from the Founding Fathers as well as the settlers, including, you know, George Washington and, you know, all the founding fathers, James Madison, you see the Christian faith played a very important thing.
Dr. Newcomb, we have a great clip from Charlie basically asserting the Christian roots of our founding.
And we'll might play that this hour.
We'll be right back.
More when we get back.
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Blake, you have some.
Yeah, by the way, gentlemen, just in case you're not aware, Blake is our resident historian on set.
Whatever.
No, I've talked with Bill.
We've taught.
That would come on when Charlie would talk before a few times.
It was a lot of fun.
Don't underscore it.
Don't undercut undersell.
We were talking before the break about the founders and the myth the founders were all proto-modern atheists and such.
And so I was looking at some of the early Thanksgiving stuff.
So George Washington was proclaiming days of Thanksgiving in the middle of the Revolutionary War, notably after the Battle at Saratoga, which was the victory that really opened the way for America to actually win that conflict.
Multiple, and then we had proclamations of Thanksgiving by the Continental Congress or the Confederation Congress during that fun period where we didn't have the Constitution yet.
And then this one really stood out to me as remarkable.
Basically, the day after the House of Representatives voted to advance the First Amendment, the Freedom of Religion Amendment, the one that people used to argue there's a wall of separation between church and state in our government.
You know, they declared us a non-religious country.
The day after they do this, Congressman Elias Boudino, Boudinot, I have no idea how they're going to pronounce that from New Jersey.
He had this House and Senate jointly call for President Washington to declare a day of Thanksgiving for, quote, the many signal favors of Almighty God in his favor for our country.
Yeah, Bill, you know, this is a debate that goes back and forth.
And Charlie, I think, had the ultimate slapdown video.
I think we're just going to have to play it when we get it.
Bill, was America a Christian nation?
Do we have Christian roots or are we just a bunch of deists that believe in a distant God?
What is the truth?
Yeah, well, Europe was Catholic and then the Reformation started.
And then you had one denomination per country.
So Northern Germany and Sweden were Lutheran.
Switzerland was Calvinist.
Scotland was Presbyterian.
Holland was Dutch Reform.
Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Poland, stayed Catholic.
And if you did not believe the way your king did, you were persecuted and you fled.
And a lot of those people that fled spilled over and founded colonies in America.
So I read through every charter of every colony.
Every colony was started by a different Christian denomination.
Virginia was Anglican.
You had to take the oath of supremacy, acknowledging the king as the head of the Anglican church.
Massachusetts was Puritan.
Rhode Island was founded by Baptist.
New York was founded by Dutch Reform.
Delaware and New Jersey were originally Swedish Lutheran and then taken over by the Dutch and then taken over by the British.
Connecticut and New Hampshire were Congregationalist Christian colonies.
And Pennsylvania, Quaker.
And I mentioned Maryland was founded by Catholics, Lord Baltimore.
But the idea in America was they didn't get along.
They tar and feather each other.
But then they all had to work together against the king of England.
After the revolution, their attitude changed to: we may not always agree on religion, but you are willing to fight and die for my freedom.
I need to let you practice your faith.
And so religion began to expand, but on a state-by-state basis.
So in 1776, 98% of the country was Protestant, 3 million people, only 1% Catholic, like 30,000 Catholics in a country, 3 million.
They were only allowed in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.
And then 1 tenth of a percent Jewish, only seven synagogues in the whole country.
And then I read through every state constitution.
And so nine of the original 13, you had to be a Protestant.
Three, you had to be a plain Christian.
And then there's an Irish potato family.
Millions of Irish Catholics come to America and they go from 1% to 20% in a decade.
And then states began to expand from requiring you to be Protestant to just Christian.
Then there's a persecution of Jews in Bavaria.
They come across and go from a tenth of a percent to 1%.
In 1851, Maryland changed its state constitution to say you could hold office if you were a Christian or a Jew.
And then after the Civil War, many states rewrote their constitutions to say all you had to do was believe in God.
But again, the First Amendment was simply to prevent the federal government from picking one Christian denomination and making it the national one, which again was what every country in Europe had done.
Wow.
That's thorough.
That is very thorough.
I wonder if Charlie.
So Charlie had this great exchange.
We're going to play it in the next segment.
But Bill, did you give him all of the, where did he get that from you, Bill?
Yeah, yeah.
We did an interview actually on that topic beforehand.
And then right after he recorded that, he texted it to me and he said, how did I do it?
Well, I think he did well because that clip was seen by tens of millions of people.
It really was an absolute masterclass.
Dr. Jerry Newcomb, when we play it for you, we'll get your review on how Charlie did.
But it's one of those clips that keeps coming back around again and again and again, especially after we lost Charlie, because I think it just was the exact type of moral clarity that the world so desperately needs.
And Charlie had a way of being patient, but forceful and firm and morally clear.
And I think it was a really powerful moment.
So we're going to play that.
We can open the next segment with it.
And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, we'll get your grade.
A through F. You're going to have to grade Charlie's take there.
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Okay, gentlemen, I apologize.
It's a longer clip, but Dr. Jerry Newcomb, I'm going to get your reaction to this on the other side.
I believe we have it, don't we?
We have it?
Yes.
Is it loaded?
I believe it's 214.
Let's try.
214.
Remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.
13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.
9 out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith.
Every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had, I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions.
Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
You asked about common law.
So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.
A common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.
So let's go to three principles of common law, due process, and jury of your peers, wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice.
We get that in the West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal.
Neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is where the idea of human equality.
These are all biblical ideas.
They're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time.
But more importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.
Well, that's a big deal, okay?
Laws of nature and nature's God.
The last paragraph of the declaration reads as a prayer.
It says, we appeal to the supreme judge of the universe.
Who's the judge of the universe?
Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne.
So in the Declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically.
Thirdly, as I said on the stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together Constitution, more than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone.
So the book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions, it was Moses' farewell address as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys.
Here's how you should set up your form of government.
But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said.
John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral, religious people.
It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other.
The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord.
One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible.
So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.
Boom.
Zing.
Great content.
Dr. Newcomb, your reaction.
Absolutely terrific.
And he's totally right.
We have this foundation of the nation that is based on biblical principles.
And that quote that he alluded to from John Adams, our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
When George Washington was leaving the office, he gave us the farewell address.
And he said there, of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.
Well, modern Americans today are saying religion and morality have no place in the public arena.
What are you talking about?
It was religion and morality, specifically Christianity, that gave us the freedoms we enjoy.
And those freedoms cannot be maintained for long if we undercut that Christian foundation.
Now, the foundation is still there.
It's attacked.
And people will bring out all kinds of different ways to try and cut us off from that foundation.
But the foundation is still there.
In a different context, John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things.
This is why the history is so important.
This is why at providenceforum.org, for example, we do so much to try and create these videos and programs like you do too at Turning Point with Bill Federer in order to educate people about our Christian roots.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is, human beings are sinful.
And that is a very important doctrine that the founding fathers fully understood.
You read the Constitution and you see the separation of power.
They did not want to give too much power to too many people.
You read the Declaration of Independence and you see the consent of the governed.
And this is because we have our rights from God.
So the fact that human beings are made in the image of God, that's enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
And the fact that human beings are fallen and sinful, that's enshrined in the Constitution.
And these have governed us very, very well.
When you look at countries like the communist countries, for example, in the 20th century and 21st century, even you see how they begin with this atheistic foundation.
There is no God.
And when there is no God and the belief of that, then there are no rights.
So even some liberal type founders of America, for example, Thomas Jefferson, he wasn't as un-Christian as he sometimes made out to be.
He was not a lifelong skeptic.
In fact, the year after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he helped found as a layman the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
And he even wrote up the agreement for the subscription for this.
And they called an evangelical minister, the Reverend Charles Clay, for this church.
And they said, we're desirous of gospel knowledge.
But even Jefferson, later, when he has some doubts and so forth about some of the doctrines, he still said that, you know, our rights come from God.
And if we ever forget that, I tremble for my country because how can we maintain our freedoms if we ever lose sight of God?
And the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, many nations have been soaked in blood because they began with the premise that there is no God.
There's no higher authority than the state.
The state is God.
So good luck with that.
So Mao has slain his millions and tens of millions.
And Stalin, too.
And the bloodline really, it hits.
And we have to be on guard about that.
And speaking of that, I think it's worth remembering that, you know, we've talked about the first Thanksgiving.
We talked about the founding era Thanksgivings, but the annual, you know, Thanksgiving as we observe it was born in the middle of the American Civil War, proclaimed by Lincoln 1863.
That's not the end of the Civil War.
That's the peak of the war.
That's right.
Tens of thousands of people are dying every month.
This is just a few months after Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in American history.
And that is when Lincoln issues his proclamation that we should have a national day of Thanksgiving.
And I think there's a lot of meaning in that.
Yeah, especially this year, given what we've been through.
Bill, on that note of what Blake's talking about, how did we get from Jamestown to 1863?
What was the American experience with Thanksgiving in between that time?
Right.
Well, now I do want to mention I have a book, and it's called The Treacherous World of the 16th Century and How the Pilgrims Escaped It.
So it gets the whole setting of what was going on in Europe.
What were the Muslims doing?
People forget that they were surrounding Vienna, Austria twice, and they had pirates capturing and they had whole Catholic orders in Europe called the Trinitarians and they would ransom back people for Muslim slavery.
And matter of fact, one of the pilgrim ships was captured by Muslim pirates.
In 1625, William Bradford said they saved up 800 pounds of beaver skins, sent it back to England, but it was captured in the English Channel by a Turkish man of war, carried off to solemn Morocco, and the crew was made slaves.
So even the pilgrims had to deal with that.
One other thing before we get off the pilgrims is they tried communism, right?
So they had no money.
They borrowed money from a London company that set up bylaws that said everything would be held in common.
Everything got by cooking, trucking, fishing shall go into ye common stock, and everyone's livelihood shall come out of ye common stock.
And William Bradford said they tried it and almost starved to death.
He says that the young man objected to doing twice as much work as the old guy, but got paid the same.
The women objected to having to wash other men's clothes.
And William Bradford said, after much discussion, it was decided that each man should plant corn for his own household.
This made all hands more industrious.
The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to plant corn.
Well, before they would allege weakness and to have forced them would have been great oppression.
So here the pilgrims tried everything owned in common and it didn't work.
One other thing that's overlooked is there were twice as many Indians at the first Thanksgiving than pilgrims.
There was like 90 Indians and only 52 pilgrims.
And get this only four adult women cooking for 142 people because all the rest of them had died in the winter.
And then one other quick thing is Squanto, who had been kidnapped by some unscrupulous people and taken and sold as a slave in Malaga, Spain.
He was purchased by some friars, given his freedom.
He hitchhikes his way back to England, works for the Newfoundland company that drop him off on the shores of America, only to find out that his entire tribe was wiped out in a plague.
And William Bradford says three years earlier, a French ship was shipwrecked there.
And evidently, one of the sailors that got ashore had an illness and wiped out the tribe.
But had Squanto not been kidnapped, he most likely would have been killed as well.
But here the pilgrims land and half of them die the first winter.
But the next spring out of the woods walks this Indian Squanto.
And you can just imagine the conversation.
Oh, you guys from England?
Yeah, I used to live there.
And then this place, I grew up here.
And so Squanto was their interpreter, showed them how to catch beaver and plant corn and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation, what William Bradford said.
And one last thing, when Squanto was dying, he says that a couple years later, they were exploring and they got caught in the freezing rain and Squanto fell ill of Indian fever, bleeding much in the nose.
And he begged Governor Bradford to pray for him that he might go to the Englishman's God in heaven.
All right.
So Squanto became a Christian.
I'm confident.
Anyway, so we looked at the Pilgrims because they had self-government, which inspired New England and then eventually turned into our Constitution.
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Got an email here from Kevin.
This is really good.
Blake, you want to read this one?
Oh, let me see.
Yes, I got it.
So he says, Charlie was right.
We should all strive to keep Thanksgiving going strong.
It's an American holiday.
It is a Christian holiday.
It's hard to make gratitude marketable, which is why other holidays get more attention for their commercial opportunities.
May God bless the Kirk family.
Thank you very much, Kevin.
Yeah, Kevin.
Well said, Kevin.
I love that.
It's so true.
I mean, the other holidays are.
They're dying for Thanksgiving to end so they can like slam the door and say, and now it's Christmas shopping season.
Go out for Black Springs.
This is what upsets me about celebrating Christmas after Halloween because you're just shortchanging.
The most American Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving is it is related to Christmas, but it is not Christmas.
It is a separate holiday.
Yes.
And we shouldn't just fold it in.
Yeah, I agree.
I completely agree.
Bill, connect the dots here.
We got to go kind of quick here between the first Thanksgiving and 1863 and that declaration by President Lincoln.
Right.
So they had an attitude.
When things were bad, you would have days of prayer.
And when things got real bad, they had days of fasting and prayer.
And when things turned around, they had days of Thanksgiving.
And they were on an as-needed basis.
And so, as Blake mentioned, you had days of fasting during the Revolutionary War and then days of Thanksgiving.
You had threatened war with France, and John Adams has two days of fasting and prayer, and then days of Thanksgiving when the British burned the White House.
James Madison had a day of fasting and prayer and then a day of Thanksgiving during a cholera epidemic in 1849 when 150,000 Americans died of cholera.
You had Zachary Taylor had a day of fasting.
And then Lincoln had two days of fasting and prayer during the Revolution.
And then he made, as Blake mentioned, the day of Thanksgiving an annual event.
But it was a relationship with God.
Now, from Lincoln till now, it's an annual event.
And matter of fact, it's the last Thursday in September, in November.
FDR wanted to move it one week earlier.
So there'd be an extra week of shopping before Christmas.
And that became a campaign issue that the Republicans are like, we're going to move Thanksgiving back to the original date.
But it's always been biblical.
It's always been thinking a monotheistic God.
So you're leaving out Buddhism and Hinduism.
And it's also that you have the freedom.
Like Jefferson had a day of Thanksgiving that the Continental Congress asked everybody to all the states to observe.
And he's governor of Virginia, so he has Virginia observe a day of Thanksgiving.
But it was voluntary.
So they didn't want to have to be forced, but they want it to be voluntary.
And so voluntary worship of God is clearly Christian.
It's not in Islam.
And so they're referring to a God of the Bible.
And of course, many of them have proclamations and scriptures in there as well.
That's great.
Really, really well said, Bill.
And I love what you were talking about, those presidents that were between Washington and Lincoln and how they had days of fasting and days of prayer and days of thanksgiving.
I mean, how amazing would that be if the president of the United States called on a day of fasting and prayer?
I mean, that would just be a complete paradigm shift from our current moment.
And I'm sure it would be incredibly controversial and all of that.
But we should.
We absolutely should because America is unique among the nations.
We are a providential nation that was founded on Christian belief in God.
And I think our origin story really demonstrates that.
I'm going to play this clip, one of Charlie's favorites, 194.
They knew that they were going to face hardship.
Hardship, like you and I don't know.
But paramount importance to them was living freely and worshiping God according to the dictates of their own consciences, their own beliefs.
That's what they were denied the freedom to do in England.
But because of the biblical precedent set forth in scripture, they never doubted, because of their faith in God, that their experiment would work.
They never doubted they would get to the new world.
They never doubted that once they got there, they would thrive.
During that first winter, remember they arrive in November.
During that first winter, half of them, including William Bradford's own wife, died.
Spring finally came.
They did meet the Indians, the Native Americans who were there, who did help them.
You know, Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives.
It wasn't that.
That happened, but Thanksgiving was a devout expression of gratitude, the pilgrims, to God For their survival and everything that was a part of it.
Dr. Jerry Newcomb, well, the Pilgrims were a small group of Christian who were basically Christians that were outcasts in their own society.
And all they wanted to do was worship Jesus and the purity of the conscience.
And as Dr. D. James Kennedy once noted, America began as a church relocation project in the sense that the Pilgrims were the ones he's talking about.
They went from this place north of London, about 150 miles, then they made it to Holland where they could at least be tolerated.
And then eventually they made it to the New World.
So in that sense, in the sense that the Pilgrims cast a long and positive shadow in what would become the United States of America, that's a fantastic observation.
They began that whole process of self-rule under God that we've talked about with the Mayflower Compact.
They had a form of socialism imposed on them by the people who made the loans so they could even have the voyage.
And they got rid of that and instead gave free enterprise.
And they flourished as they made God the center of their whole settlement.
And just one last observation.
In a film I made about this, about the Pilgrims, and Charlie, by the way, commended one of the films I made, you know, in this whole series called the Foundation of American Liberty series.
And Bill Federer is a major, major guest.
Anyway, so I interviewed the direct descendant of the de facto pastor of the Pilgrims.
His name was William Brewster.
And so I interviewed this descendant, and he said, Suppose one after things got real stable in Plymouth and they were starting to thrive and flourish, you know, under God.
Suppose one of their children said, Do I have to go to church?
He said, One of those parents could easily say to that child, What do you mean?
Do you have to go to church?
You have no idea how much we sacrifice so that you can go to church.
America was begun by people who wanted to worship Jesus and the purity of the conscience.
Then that freedom was extended to everybody else.
And now, at least in some quarters, they're trying to say, No, Christians are not allowed to have that kind of freedom.
That's crazy.
There's a reason we're called, even to this day, our national motto is, In God We Trust.
Yeah, well said.
And Bill, I just want to commend you as well.
Thank you both for coming.
You are a wealth of knowledge.
American Minute, I want to make sure I got it right here.
AmericanMinute.com.
I just so encourage everybody to sign up for your newsletter.
The work you do there is tremendous.
Dr. JerryNewcombe, ProvidenceForum.org.
I got it right.
Final 30 seconds to you, Bill.
How can people follow you and get involved with your history lessons?
Yeah, well, matter of fact, turningpointed.com.
If you go to resources and scroll down, you see how we got here.
And so I do a weekly video for Turning Point Ed.
Charlie had he and Rob McCoy and Mikey, we went to dinner together.
He's like, I want you to be a big part of this.
And so I write it.
It's about seven minutes long, and anybody can sign up for it.
It's particularly homeschoolers and Christian schools and classic schools.
But it's turningpointed.com.
Look at resources and how we got here.
I love that.
Thank you, Bill.
Bill Federer, author and speaker, AmericanMinute.com.
Dr. Jerry Newcomb, Executive Director of Providence Forum, ProvidenceForum.org.
Thank you, gentlemen, and happy Thanksgiving to you both.
