All Episodes
Feb. 12, 2025 - The David Knight Show
11:31
Why and How Christian Beliefs are Foundational to Political Liberty
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Back in the day when I wasn't shadow man, a lot of people say, how can you be a Christian and libertarian?
And I said, well, that's why I called it libertarian.
Because I'm about liberty.
I'm not about the libertarian party.
I don't think these two are opposed to each other, being libertarian or Christian.
So in fact, I don't think you can.
You have to have both of those.
You can't have liberty away from Christ.
Freedom is in Christ.
Outside of Christ, you are enslaved to whatever it is that you serve, whether it is money or power or sex or drugs or whatever.
You've got an enslavement to that.
But it's also the fact that the founders of this country understood and said, we have a form of government that will only be able to be sustained if the people are moral.
And so this article from Kevin Shroom, an American reformer, says, What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
In other words, if Jerusalem would represent in the old days a metaphor for a spiritual center and Athens would represent the political, you know, what do the two have to do with each other?
So we used to need God, but now that science and modern medicine, this is the argument, right?
We used to need God, but now that we got science and modern medicine and we got AI, we don't need God anymore.
We've been set free from the need to believe in God.
We believe in science and self and in the state.
And what will take Christianity's place, he says?
It's not going to have its place taken by atheism.
No, you're going to serve someone.
You're going to worship something.
The heart is an idol factory.
If you look at Bob Dylan, during his short Christian phase, he said, you're going to serve someone.
You're going to serve something.
We're always out there looking for something to idolize, aren't we?
So he said, it's going to be a new paganism.
As many people have pointed out, the return of the so-called strong gods of antiquity.
Mysticism, the dark arts, and scientism is a part of that.
Science as a religion, not as a thought process, not as a way of proving the physical reality of something, or of disproving something that somebody has said.
That's equally important.
No, no, no.
We're not going to look at data.
You can't see the data.
You can't see the data from Fauci.
You can't see the data from Pfizer.
You can't see the data from Michael Mann.
You can't see the data, period.
You just do what they have to say.
It's an argument from authority.
These are the people who are our high priests.
And whatever they say, we must follow.
The ability to refashion human nature, in other words, to make a biological boy into a girl, to even turn men into gods, or basically to create life without having two parents, being able to genetically modify a baby, hatch them, and so forth.
This is playing God.
And when you look at this, the whole aspect of...
Well, we're going to join with machines, and we're going to become cyborgs, as the Baphomet billionaire Elon Musk wants us to believe.
And we're going to become powerful.
We're going to merge with AI and the robots.
And we're going to live forever.
That's what he's selling.
That is the transhumanism.
But, of course, transgenderism is an important part of that.
If you can become a different sex, which you can't, And what they do is they mutilate people.
They butcher people.
It's a Frankenstein approach.
And all of this stuff about brain-computer interfaces and the singular and all the rest of the stuff, this is heinous Frankenstein type of science.
The kind of freedom that is often pursued these days is dangerous and elusive.
It's dangerous because once it is obtained, it's often misused and abused.
Freedom.
Freedom turns to vice if it is not disciplined.
That's why the founders talked about happiness.
When they talked about happiness, it wasn't just a, oh, great, I feel good today.
No, no, no.
They were talking about happiness in the philosophical and the rhetorical world in which they lived.
Happiness was about achieving a state of virtue.
It wasn't just about, you know, Satisfying whatever your animal instincts were.
No, it was about pursuing virtue.
True freedom begins by being set free from sin.
Set free for a relationship with God and Christ, reminding us that he is God, not us.
The original bondage is the bondage to sin.
Made in God's image, we have stiff-armed God.
We have sinned against the one who made us.
Sin brought spiritual death, alienation, bondage, spiritual confusion, a disconnection, From reality.
If you disconnect from God, you have disconnected from the ultimate reality.
In his infinite mercy, God chose not to leave us in bondage, but sent his son, the God-man, Jesus Christ, on a rescue mission.
He died a substitutionary death, was buried, raised from the dead.
Knowing these truths, and knowing the person of truth, sets us free from sin, from death, from future judgment.
True freedom comes from truth.
Forgiveness and spiritual liberation.
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Freedom in Christ sets us free from the main bondage we experience, and that is the bondage of thinking that we are God.
That's exactly the opposite of what they paid big bucks to have Harrison Ford tell you.
Life doesn't come with a manual.
You've got to figure that all out yourself.
Well, no, actually, it does come with a manual.
And if you know Christ, you also get a helper.
Rather than the false freedom of play, God, we're set to free our true selves in Christ.
So, he talks about this in terms of the founding of America.
And he talks about it in terms of horizontal freedom.
He says, true freedom doesn't terminate in personal, individual freedom.
Personal freedom is not a spiritual cul-de-sac.
When a person is set free in Jesus Christ, they long to be free in other ways as well.
Politically, economically, educationally, socially.
One freedom follows another.
And this is why anti-Christian and anti-God cultures hate the gospel.
Cultures like North Korea, China, India, you name it, right?
They seek to suppress it.
Why?
Because politicians always want to see, of all people, Politicians want to see themselves as God.
They don't want to have any competition.
But they also don't want people becoming free.
They want you to be controlled by them.
For example, America can claim a Christian founding because the earliest settlers desired the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, without unwarranted government intervention.
Yet this led to more than just worship.
It led to settlement.
It led to societal development.
It led to the Protestant work ethic because of the belief that God has honored by the use of our freedoms an effort to build something, to create something, to fulfill the dominion mandate of Genesis.
America was and is a unique experience in human liberty because the freedom that produces and builds rather than tyranny, authoritarianism, and an all-encompassing government.
That was the mindset of the people there.
When people argue, was America a Christian nation or whatever?
This is not to say that the politicians were Christians.
Some were, some weren't.
It's not to say that the people who wrote down these basic philosophies were Christians.
Some were, some weren't.
But Christianity pervaded American society at the time, just as this kind of spectator Paganism, hedonism permeates our society today.
It's a very different society.
America is not anything like the America that was gifted freedom by God.
Because that's the other part of it.
It's not a spiritual cul-de-sac, but it's also not something that we do ourselves.
Our spiritual freedom, as well as these other horizontal freedoms, are gifts from God.
That was something that was acknowledged by our founders.
So America was and is a unique experiment in human history because of that freedom that produces and builds.
America was not a Christian nation in that it was a theocracy, like Israel was a theocracy.
However, it was and is, let's hope that I don't know, I don't think that it is anymore, a Christian nation in that its DNA was Christian from the outset.
Its founding principles were Christian.
In brief, objective, vertical freedom in Christ led many to seek freedom on horizontal levels, political, economic, social, educational.
This is why the Declaration of Independence says, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
By the way, it holds that the Creator is also self-evident, doesn't it?
And that is true.
We understand that the things that we see were created by things that we do not see.
We understand there had to be an intelligence behind the creation of things as complex as us, even as complex as our DNA. It has to be a creator.
It is self-evident, isn't it?
And that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The self-evident God and the self-evident God-given truths form the basis, Of the pursuit of a free society that is productive.
That is why you can't separate these things.
Hello, it's me, Volodymyr Zelensky.
I'm so tired of wearing these same t-shirts everywhere for years.
You'd think with all the billions I've skimmed off America, I could dress better.
And I could, if only David Knight would send me one of his beautiful grey MacGuffin hoodies or a new black t-shirt with the MacGuffin logo in blue.
But he told me to get lost.
Maybe one of you American suckers can buy me some at thedavidknightshow.com.
And David is giving a 10% discount to listeners from now until 2025. At that price, you should be able to buy me several hundred.
Those amazing sand-colored microphone hoodies are so beautiful.
I'd wear something other than green military cosplay to my various galas and social events.
Export Selection