Bennett critiques the "empire of lies"—left-wing media, Hollywood, and academia—distorting reality through selective narratives like the Trump impeachment charade led by Adam Schiff, while exposing deep-state leaks (e.g., FBI/CIA under Obama) and dismissing polls as biased. He ties this to transgender activism, citing Texas’s James Younger custody case as "chemical castration," then pivots to Mark David Hall’s argument that America’s Christian founding shaped its institutions—federalism, checks and balances—despite secular constitutional language, warning modern secularism violates the founders’ vision of religion as essential for moral governance. The episode frames Western decline as a rebellion against its own cultural roots. [Automatically generated summary]
If there's one thing it's important for every American to know, it's how to play by the rules of politics.
Playing by the rules allows you to maintain an atmosphere of civility and dignity while the Democrats run roughshod over every norm of behavior and destroy everything good and true about America.
So, let's learn some of the rules.
When someone completely unassociated with Donald Trump produces a video in which Trump shoots his enemies in the Democrat Party and the media, that proves that Trump is degrading public discourse and inspiring violence.
When a sportswear company puts an enormous billboard in Times Square showing a woman tying Trump up and stomping on the president's face, then it's time to buy some new sportswear.
When Arizona's lady governor Jan Brewer pointed a finger at President Barack Obama and told him she needed some border security, that was called Fingergate and was an example of Brewer's racist disrespect for our first black president, who did I mention was black.
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stuck her finger at Donald Trump, that was an example of feminist independence and courage and time to buy some new sportswear and stomp on the president's face.
When Barack Obama's Justice Department and intelligence agencies spied on the opposing party's campaign, that was our heroic deep state protecting Americans from their incorrect decisions.
When Donald Trump suggested Ukraine examine corruption that might include opposition candidate Joe Biden, that was worse than Watergate, in which a president spied on the opposing party like Barack Obama did to Trump.
Finally, when the news media lie and distort in order to support a deep state coup, that's freedom of speech.
When Americans speak out freely against the media's corruption, that endangers the First Amendment.
You must follow these rules carefully, or else you could wake up and suddenly find yourself telling a power-obsessed bunch of baby-killing communist Democrats and media to kiss your butt and then go straight to hell.
And we wouldn't want that.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, I am here in Memphis, Tennessee.
I'm going to be talking at Mississippi State University tonight, and later this week, I'll be at the University of Memphis.
If you can come out, come out.
I hear that.
I saw they're giving away a little Andrew Clavin sticker.
So I'm really excited at Mississippi State, so I'm really excited to get me one of those.
Today, I'm going to talk about this absolute absurd impeachment charade that is being run by McCarthyite Congressman Adam Schiff.
And I also want to talk a little bit about this heartbreaking story out of Texas, in which a father is trying to stop the sexual abuse and possible chemical castration of his son in the name of transgenderism.
And now, both of these, these are two very different stories, but both of these to some degree concern what I call the empire of lies, the near monopoly by the left of America's storytelling machinery, the mainstream news media, Hollywood, and the Academy.
Buying into the self-serving and dishonest narrative this empire is selling has now come to be called being woke.
The left have always been good storytellers.
They live in their imaginations where stories are formed, so I guess they get a lot of practice.
This woke is really a powerful word.
It's really a good way to promote their narrative.
Woke suggests that all this time, all through human history, we've been asleep to the real nature of things.
We walk, sleepwalk in the everyday, but it's all an illusion.
And now suddenly we're woke and we see the evil substructure of oppression, racism, sexism, and stuff like that there.
All of history is now revealed to have been a massive conglomeration of these evils, and nothing that has been believed can be believed any longer.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, and now about as woke as woke can be, puts out tens of thousands of words trying to convince us that the Soviet Union was really the good guys in the Cold War, and the United States of America is nothing but a sort of side effect of its main purpose, holding black people slaves.
This is so insane and untrue that you barely have time to notice how simplistic and stupid it is.
And yet it's being taught to our children in public schools that are in the grips of corrupt unions that in turn hold the Democrat Party in their grasp.
But in order to be woke, of course, you have to be asleep to reality.
You have to forget the fact that it's the United States and the West that has led the long, slow slog of humanity out of slavery, out of bigotry, out of sexism, out of the limiting choices that minorities and women have had.
You have to forget that whole history and believe that the spoiled, do-nothing, half-baked beneficiaries of those centuries of Western effort are the real heroes of humanity because they have nothing better to do than whine without risk about the fact that the great strides the West has made have not led us to Nirvana.
In Washington, they want to remove a duly elected president.
In Texas, they want to legally castrate a child.
Obviously, again, two different stories, but both are woke.
Both are acting as if the old rules don't apply because they see a new world and they want to impose that world on us.
This is a powerful, powerful empire of lies pushing this agenda.
They have the news media, they have Hollywood, the Academy.
Investigation Into WineLeaks00:17:22
They have so much power.
And all we've got to start a revolution with is the truth.
So let's get started.
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Also, Another Kingdom, you want to check out Another Kingdom?
The latest episode is now available to everyone.
First thing I want to begin talking about, because we're really talking about the way stories are told and the way people's minds are twisted, okay?
The way people's minds are twisted to accept the extraordinary and the evil as the good and the normal.
That is the way stories work.
They can turn your imagination around.
They can infect your imagination with a virus.
And so you see things that just aren't true and you believe things that just aren't true or think it is a good thing to pretend you believe them.
First thing I want to talk about is anonymous sources.
And this is really important because every anonymous, the thing about an anonymous source is every anonymous source is a person with an agenda, a person trying to sell a story for his own purposes, right?
That's why in the old days, like when I was a newsman and a reporter, you didn't use anonymous sources.
What you did was if you had an anonymous source, you used him to go to someone who would go on the record.
An anonymous source was usually in those days someone who's afraid of losing his job if he told the truth.
So he would tell you something, but then you used what he told you to go to an actual official source and say, look, I have a source who's telling me ABC, is that true?
And then you got that official source to go on the record.
Now they have left out the official source.
So it is just anonymous sources.
And so of course these guys have figured out, oh, if I leak this information and not that information, if I say this and not that, and the news and the news media run with it, I will be able to set my agenda.
So for example, I talked about this yesterday.
Right now, there's somebody high up in the GOP trying to spread the story, to float this story that the Republicans might abandon Trump as this impeachment drive speeds up.
So Chris Wallace fell for this hookline and sinker.
He was talking to Mick Mulvaney, the chief of staff, the acting chief of staff, on his show.
And this is what Wallace said.
And I talked to a very well-connected Republican in Washington this week, somebody whose name you would know well, who says that if the House votes to impeach and it gets to a trial in the Senate, there is now a 20% chance, he believes, obviously it's just an estimate, now a 20% chance enough Republicans will vote with the Democrats to remove the president.
So Greta Sustern, who used to be on Fox News, she sent out a tweet saying Chris Wallace should know better than to use anonymous, well-connected Republican.
He should name names or not say this at all, as without the identity, what is a well-connected?
Its purpose is merely to smear and cause trouble.
Name names or don't say this at all.
And then people attack Greta for smearing Chris Wallace, which is nonsense.
She was talking about good journalism.
The person who said this is floating a story.
The person who said it just succeeded the minute Chris Wallace opened his mouth.
And the thing about it is, is the story might be true.
It might not be true.
But the point is you can't tell because you don't know who the source is.
So you can't say, oh, well, that's this guy.
That's Mitt Romney or what is his name?
Delecto, Premier Delecto, his Twitter feed on which he defended himself on Twitter.
You don't know who it is.
And so you can't tell what the agenda is and you don't know where that information is coming from.
So that makes it not news.
That makes it pure propaganda manipulated by the sources, right?
If this yesterday, so think about this for a minute.
Yesterday, the House voted, the Republicans pushed a vote to censure Adam Schiff, Congressman Adam Schiff, who should be censored.
He has been a McCarthyite.
I mean, it's embarrassing to watch the press who railed and railed about Joseph McCarthy because he didn't present his evidence support Adam Schiff in this star chamber investigation of the president leaking information, constantly saying, well, we've got this, we've got this, we've got this, without proving a thing, just like McCarthy used to do.
I mean, it's almost like McCarthy came back to life.
So they vote to censure him and the vote fails, but every single Republican supports it.
So if the Republican wall is breaking, if the Republicans are no longer supporting Trump, how come every single Republican voted to censure Adam Schiff?
And, you know, just by the way, just with the evidence of your eyes, I don't know if you're watching some of these Trump rallies.
Pretty soon he's going to have to hold these rallies.
Stadiums are not going to hold.
They already don't hold the people he's bringing in.
He's just going to have a rally in Delaware.
It's going to be the entire state of Delaware.
If people are abandoning Donald Trump, man, it sure doesn't look like it to me.
All right, so now, pushing this story, the New York Times, a former newspaper, runs a story today.
Democrats slow impeachment timeline to sharpen their public case, right?
House Democrats, once eyeing an impeachment vote by Thanksgiving, now conceded they may have to go slower as they plan public hearings to drive home their case.
House Democrats have resigned themselves to the likelihood that impeachment proceedings against President Trump will extend into the Christmas season as they plan a series of public hearings intended to make the simplest and most devastating possible public case in favor of removing Mr. Trump.
Democrat leaders had hoped to move as soon as Thanksgiving to wrap up a narrow inquiry focused around Mr. Trump's dealings with Ukraine, buoyed by polling data that shows that the public supports the investigation, even if voters are not yet sold on impeaching the president.
But after a complicated web, I've got to give this a dramatic reading since it's all crap.
After a complicated web of damaging revelations about the president has emerged from private depositions, secret depositions, in other words, unfolding behind closed doors, Democrat leaders have now begun plotting a full scale and probably more time-consuming effort.
Let me translate this for you.
They got nothing.
They have got nothing.
The public isn't buying it and they know it.
And this thing about these polls, these polls have been dishonest.
Listen, not all polls are dishonest.
Some polls are trying their best.
Some polls are just kind of searching in the dark.
But for instance, the Pew Research Center said 54% approve of opening an inquiry into the president, right?
And they sampled 3,500 randomly selected adults.
So first of all, only about half of registered voters vote.
So now you don't even know if these people are registered voters.
It means nothing.
It absolutely means nothing.
Then who does it turn out was in this random selection?
1,400 of them leaned Republican, 1,900 of them leaned Democrats.
So that's 42% Republican, a 14-point difference favoring Democrats.
And they came out to support just opening the investigation, not impeaching Trump, and certainly not removing Trump.
So the entire poll is just a propaganda tool trying to convince people that this thing is really gaining steam.
And oh boy, now, now, oh boy, they're coming out and they're going to do these questions and this questioning in public.
It's nonsense.
It is just nonsense.
So all of this stuff is like a bath of disinformation that you are being plunged into for the purpose of convincing you that the president you elected, the president that was elected according to the Constitution, is somehow, for some reason, going to be thrown out because he said something.
Never mind the fact that everybody's working.
Never mind the fact that we're at peace.
Never mind the fact that everything's going fine.
He said something to some guy in the Ukraine and you've now got to impeach him, right?
And of course, by the way, when you look at these polls, they're different in swing states.
In the swing states, the ones that matter, the people support the president.
And obviously, most Republicans support the president.
And that means, remember that Nancy Pelosi's majority depends on people who won in swing states, on Congresspeople who won in swing states.
And those are the people.
That's why she's got poor Adam Schiff out there doing his McCarthyite thing in front of the cameras while the other people are hiding.
And later they can say, well, we just wanted to do the inquiry, but it may have gone too far, right?
When they go back to run again.
That's why Nancy Pelosi is playing this the way she's playing it, because she knows that if they go full out impeachment all the time, they're going to get creamed in the next election.
So it's all just a construct.
And the thing about this is, it's there because the Derm investigation, this is the Department of Justice investigation into how the investigation of Donald Trump by the Obama administration, how the spying plot on the Trump campaign got started, that investigation is spreading out, okay?
And this is also a sourced story, but the reason that it's a little bit more believable is because John Brennan himself, the former CIA director who had a big hand in starting the spying campaign against Donald Trump, he says, I don't know why they're investigating me.
This is bizarre.
He says it's bizarre.
The word is that the Attorney General and John Durham have expanded their examination of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
And Durham has increased the size of his staff and has pushed out his timeframe.
This is what prosecutors do when they think they've discovered a crime.
And Durham will be interviewing John Brennan and former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, along with other current and former intelligence community officials.
This is what, as Kimberly Strassel told us, this is what this whole thing is about.
It is about casting aspersions on these guys, right?
Making you think, oh yeah, but it's not as bad as the Ukraine, having spies tap Trump's phone and actually infiltrate his campaign.
That's nowhere near as bad as mentioning Joe Biden to somebody in Ukraine, to the Ukrainian president.
And the thing is, we now know that these leaks, these anonymous sources, right, is how they got this investigation steamrolling.
We know this.
And we know that the CIA and the FBI would leak to the New York Times and other Democrat venues.
And that's what got the whole thing, you know, something about the president, this about the president.
So Senator Ron Johnson, right, he did a study.
He had his staff go out and do a study.
Peter Strzok, you remember Peter Strzzok?
He's the guy who was lovers with Lisa Page, and they were sending these text messages back and forth.
They were in the FBI, and Strzok wrote to Page, I think our sisters have begun leaking like mad, our sisters being the CIA, right?
Our sisters have begun leaking like mad, scorned and worried and political.
They're kicking into overdrive.
And Johnson saw that, and he did a study of these leaks, and he told Mark Levin on Fox what he found.
One of the things I had my staff do, this was, I think, July of 2017, we issued a report because of all these leaks.
And so I had a seasoned reporter on my staff from the Washington Post, one of the few conservatives.
And, you know, we looked with Alexa's search, so let's take a look at all these news stories that are talking about a leak.
And in that...
This document here?
Yes.
Yes, in just 125 days, 126 days, there were 125 leaks into the news media.
62 of those had to do with national security.
And that compares to, in the same time period, nine in the Bush administration and eight under Obama.
62 national security leaks.
And this is where this whole narrative began back in December with Trump, the campaign being aided by Russia and then finally turning into Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.
Okay, so that's Mark Levin, obviously the great one letting him tell his case about how these anonymous leaks in collusion with the media, how they got this false story of Trump colluding with the Russians into the paper, into the press to give, and they're trying to do it now with this Ukraine thing.
They're doing the exact same thing.
That New York Times story I just read to you, it's the exact same thing.
Now, here's what happened.
And I played a little bit of this before, but I want to play it again just so you know, when Senator Johnson tried to tell that same story to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, here's what happened.
I have my third letter in to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Committee asking to just confirm, just confirm, are you investigating those leaks that Peter Strzok talked about in the United States?
No, that's a setup.
It is entirely relevant to this point.
Why a Fox News conspiracy propaganda stuff is popping up on here.
I have no idea.
I have no idea why we're going to be able to do that.
That is Asking and lying exactly why President Trump is upset and why his supporters are upset with news media.
Okay, this is not about the media.
Senator Johnson, Father Johnson, please.
Can we please answer the question that I asked you instead of trying to make Donald Trump feel better here that you're not criticizing?
So it's a Fox conspiracy theory.
This work that they did researching these leaks that we know happened and that Strzzok said were happening and that Strzok himself said were political.
That's a Fox News conspiracy theory, but the story is not about the media.
This is like, don't interrupt my narrative with your facts.
Don't interrupt my narrative with your facts.
Of course it's about the media because you're because Chuck Todd is lying.
He's lying.
He's defending this process of the deep state.
And you heard me talk about yesterday how the New York Times is running article after article saying, oh, the deep state, how wonderful they are.
They're defending us from this president, but no one tells us what evil this president has committed.
Yesterday, Beto O'Rourke said he's like Hitler.
And I thought, you know, if he were like Hitler, you couldn't say he was like Hitler because he'd be like Hitler and you'd be gone, right?
That's how you know he's not like Hitler.
They keep amping up the descriptions and the attacks because they've got nothing.
They've got nothing that he's done.
Meanwhile, Trump has been hounding Joe Biden the way he does.
He's hounding Joe Biden over the fact that Biden's son had this job at a gas company in Ukraine and he has no expertise.
He was basically playing off his father's name because his father was vice president.
And the story that you remember where Biden said he was not going to give Ukraine a billion dollars in aid unless they fired a prosecutor who at the time was supposedly investigating Hunter Biden.
Now, we don't know whether he did that because he was investigating Biden or if he did it because the prosecutor himself was corrupt.
We just don't know.
Okay, so, but it's politics, right?
Trump is playing his side of the story.
And here's what he said to Hannity about if this were one of his kids, how the story would be covered.
If that were me, he declared his innocence.
If that were my sons that took $168,000 from this very questionable company, an energy company, and they knew nothing about energy at all.
He knew nothing about energy.
And he has a bad record, bad track record, including getting thrown out of the Navy.
And even the way he got in the Navy is interesting in his position.
If that were Don Jr., if that were Eric Trump, who are very outstanding young men, it would be the biggest story of the century.
You know, he's got a point.
Never mind whether his kids are fine young men or not.
He has got a point that Anderson Cooper asked a question saying, oh, this during the Democrat debates, saying, oh, this is a false story.
We know there's no evidence of this story.
Trump took out an ad on Facebook that said Biden threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine until they fired a prosecutor who was investigating his son.
Now, that's true.
That is exactly what happened.
But it doesn't mean that Biden did anything wrong.
It doesn't mean, although it was a quid pro quo, and this is the thing that they're now saying is the evil is the quid pro quo.
We don't know whether he did it to protect his son.
We really don't know that.
It's like when Bernie Sanders says there are people living in mansions and people living in the street.
That's true, but it doesn't mean the two things are related, okay?
So it doesn't mean that you need socialism to solve that problem.
Zuckerberg's Claims About Woke Culture00:07:44
But Lester Holt and all the Democrats, Lester Holt is the anchor man on NBC, ABC.
He wants Mark Zuckerberg to censor the ads, take Donald Trump's ad down because it's untrue.
And listen to the way he phrases it in this interview.
The move to call out foreign actors comes as Facebook is embroiled in controversy over political ads at home, criticized for refusing to pull a Donald Trump ad that contained false claims about Joe Biden.
Zuckerberg saying it's not their role to fact-check candidate claims.
Do you feel like you're giving a green light to politicians that I believe that it is important for people to be able to hear and see what politicians are saying?
I think that when they do that, that speech will be heavily scrutinized by other journalists, by other people.
I'm sorry, that is NBC.
Lester Holt is NBC.
That's the Chuck Todd network.
So that's a very, very left-wing network.
MSNBC and NBC are sister stations, and you can't really tell them apart.
But basically, they want Zuckerberg to take the president of the United States off for lying when he's not lying.
That's not lying.
That's playing politics.
There's a difference between lying and playing politics.
All politicians do this stuff.
Trump does play fast and loose with the truth.
He does say things, and he's got that Carney Barker's way of exaggerating everything.
But it's not up to Mark Zuckerberg to censor the president.
It's not up then to censor anybody, really.
You know, obviously, he can take up pornography and real hatred stuff.
But is Mark Zuckerberg supposed to be the guy who determines what you see and hear from the president of the United States?
I don't think so.
So this is the controlling atmosphere of narrative that the left is trying to create and that we are here at the Daily Wire and in other places fighting against.
This is what we're doing every day.
This is why we're doing it.
Which brings me to this Texas story.
And I want to be careful about this story because I only have it from one side.
I have it from LifeSight News, which of course is a very powerful pro-life site.
And I know I've covered trials as a reporter, and I know that what people hear in the jury box is not what people hear when they read the newspaper.
Okay, so sometimes the jury makes a decision and everybody goes, that makes no sense at all.
And it does make sense.
It would have made sense if you had been there.
So I want to be careful about it.
But what I've got so far is that there is a man named Jeff Younger who is trying to protect his seven-year-old son James from his mother, who has, they're obviously apart.
And the mother, Dr. Ann, I think it's called Georgoulis, is transitioning him into a female.
This is a little boy.
This is a little boy.
And the jury decided that they would not give the father sole custody.
And the judge still has to come out with more of this decision and how this decision is going to work it out.
But it could result in this little boy being given hormones, which will essentially chemically castrate him.
It is a terrible thing.
And the father claims that this mother is a loon, okay?
The mother sends him to school and treats him like a girl and calls him Luna.
The father claims that the mother would frighten him about being a boy, would tell him that there were monsters who would come and eat him if he was a boy, but he'd be protected if he was a girl.
She claims that the fact that he liked frozen means that he's a girl.
And here is him, the father in this interview, talking about what this experience has been like for him, trying to get custody away from this woman who may destroy this child's life.
And imagine that your ex-wife has addressed him as a drag queen to talk to you.
He has false eyelashes and makeup.
His hair's got glitter in it.
He's wearing a dress.
Now, imagine how you would feel seeing what I believe is actual sexual abuse.
I believe this is not just emotional abuse, but is the very most fundamental form of sexual abuse, tampering with the sexual identity of a vulnerable boy.
Every single day, you have to see your son sexually abused and you have to maintain your calm.
You have to be the one who's calm because the courts are not going to be fair to you.
And the only way you can survive this and get your son through this alive is to calmly allow your son to be tortured right before your eyes and outlast the opposition.
It's a heartbreaking, heartbreaking story.
And the thing is, the only reason it's imaginable, The only reason it's imaginable is because of this empire of lies, the news media, Hollywood, the academy, selling this garbage.
The fact that Democrat candidates, all the Democrat candidates would stand and pretend to be charmed instead of horrified by dressing little girls up as boys during one of that gay LGBTQ town hall on CNN and saying, oh yes, my little girl is really a boy.
I mean, that that would happen.
Procter ⁇ Gamble announced that it's going to remove the female symbol, you know, that the circle with the X underneath.
They're going to remove that from its sanitary napkin packaging in Europe because trans activists object because men can have periods too.
In England, and there's a crazy story.
In England, if you say that a man is not a woman, the police can come to your house and question you about it, as it might be a hate crime.
It's a crazy story in the sun about a woman who's a man who was asked to be in porn.
And then when they found out she had a penis, they said, oh, no, we actually wanted a real woman.
We don't want you to be in porn.
And she's saying that's a hate crime.
And she reported that to the police.
The thing about this is it is so degrading to women.
It is so, I mean, in spite of being incredibly dangerous to children, it is so degrading to women to essentially strip them of their identity and say anybody who raises his hand and says, ooh, me, I'm a girl, gets to be a woman too.
I mean, you don't just sign on to be a woman.
They are stripping women of their identity, of their unique experience of life, of their unique womanhood and what that means to be a feminine person in the world.
They're stripping that away from women and saying it belongs to anybody who just claims it.
And that, have you ever noticed, have you ever noticed this?
That all this woke stuff that pretends to be attempts to hurt the powerful and bring the powerful down, it always, always, always winds up hurting the underclass.
If I may call women, you know, the people who are less powerful than men through history, it hurts women.
It hurts children.
It hurts unborn children.
All this woke stuff always ends up hurting the weaker half.
And why is that?
The reason is, is that woke is a complete rebellion against Western culture and Western culture.
It's Western culture that has helped the little guy step by step.
It's not true every day there were black slaves, there was prejudice against blacks, but it is true that every day things got better because of Western culture, not because of woke, not because of these kids who are running around today protesting and shouting and putting on masks and hitting people.
They did nothing, zero, zip.
It was all Western culture that led us to the freedom we have today.
And what they are doing is they are waking up from that culture and they're going to find themselves in a nightmare of their own making.
Christian Founding Debate00:13:11
And I don't want us to be in that nightmare too.
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All right, we've got a great interview with Mark David Hall.
He's the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University.
His new book is called Did America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth.
It debunks the assertion that America's founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state.
It's a really interesting interview.
He has a very subtle and nuanced point of view.
Let's hear from Mark David Hall.
Mark David Hall, thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
So did America have a Christian founding?
So this is a question I hear argued about all the time.
We obviously we've heard of Thomas Jefferson cutting the miracles out of the gospels.
Well, let me ask you, did America have a Christian founding?
I argue that absolutely it did.
And I spend a good bit of time defining what I mean by Christian founding.
And just to cut to the chase, what I argue is that America's founders were deeply influenced by their Christian convictions or by the ideas developed within the Christian tradition of political reflection.
Okay, so could you unpack that a little bit?
What does that mean, the Christian tradition of political reflection?
Yeah, so some of these ideas are not uniquely Christian.
One could come up with the theory that tyrants ought to be resisted, that they may be justly resisted and not be a Christian, but it just so happens in the Christian West, particularly in the Protestant tradition, these ideas were developed by the Protestant reformers, by people like Calvin and Knox and Ponet and Rutherford.
And this tradition had a deep impact on America's founders from north to south, particularly in New England, but even in the mid-Atlantic or southern states.
So they rose up and resisted King George in large part because of their Christian understanding of the right to resist political tyranny.
I then go on, it's very common, as you know, to say America has a godless constitution.
And of course, God is really not even referenced except in the dateline in the year of our Lord 1787.
But I argue that there's very substantive ways in which the founders in Philadelphia and the ratifiers were influenced by their Christian ideas.
Again, things like the sinfulness of man.
Again, one could come to the conclusion that humans are self-interested and not be a Christian.
But in the late 18th century, the reason America's founders embraced this idea was because of their Christian convictions.
And this led them to adopt the rule of law, federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances.
And there are many other ways in which they were influenced by their beliefs.
So you're saying that they were thinkers in the Christian tradition, which I think has to be true, right?
You can't separate yourself from a thousand years of Christian tradition.
But were the theories, the political theories they were coming out, were they necessarily connected to their Christianity?
So for instance, while we know that Jefferson was not a standard Christian, what about the other founders?
I mean, were these guys who were saying, yes, we are doing this in the name of God or not?
I think it's a very important distinction.
And one of the reasons there's so much misinformation about this is we focus on these very important, very distinguished, very interesting founders like Franklin, John Adams, and Jefferson.
But these are very unrepresentative founders.
Those three spent a great deal of time in Europe.
Franklin spent more than half of the last 35 years of his life in Europe.
They were more influenced by the Enlightenment than almost any other founder.
So when we turn our eyes from these very fascinating men to the larger constellation of men and a few women, people like Roger Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and even founders like George Washington, I think what we see is a far more traditional approach to politics, an approach to politics grounded in the Christian faith and Christian tradition.
And to the extent to which they referenced thinkers like Montesquieu, they're using him to address a profoundly Christian problem.
What do you do with the sinfulness of man?
And even, as you know, Christians continue to struggle with the old man within, as St. Paul calls it.
And so we need to avoid these sort of utopian enlightenment experiments and concentrated government, government by the experts, and have instead have a very carefully limited national government.
You know, one of the paradoxes that seems built into Christianity is it demands that we kind of separate what render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.
And the government does seem to be a government that says we are not going to have a religious test.
We're not going to judge people by what religion they are.
Is there a distinction between that and judging, as Enton Scalia would have said, and judging between religion and irreligion?
Does the Constitution allow us to do that?
I argue, and I spent a good bit of time in this in my book, I absolutely demolished the myth that the founders desired to build a wall of separation between church and state, which is a metaphor taken from Thomas Jefferson, of course, but he played no role in drafting the First Amendment or ratifying it.
I think clearly at the national level, the founders did not want a national establishment.
But the first federal Congress almost right away said we're going to have legislative and military chaplains.
We're going to pay chaplains.
They reauthorized the Northwest Ordinance.
They decided to ask George Washington to issue a Thanksgiving Day proclamation.
So I think in no way, shape, or form did they desire to create a secular public square.
Now, with respect to religious establishments at the state levels, the founders very clearly left that up to the states.
States could have establishments or they might not.
And here I argue that the reason that many founders at state level started turning against establishments is because they decided that they hurt Christianity.
And because they cared about Christianity, they wanted to get the government out of the business of religion.
So if a state were to say, in the state of Maryland, I remember was Catholic at the founding, if a state were today to say we're going to be a Catholic state, could they do that, do you think, within the bounds of the Constitution?
Well, of course, the First Amendment originally only bound the national government.
Congress shall make no law.
But through the doctrine of incorporation, today the states are bound as well.
And so I would contend that an originalist understanding of the establishment clause would be to say a state cannot establish a church.
It cannot say the Baptist Church, the Catholic Church is the official church of the state.
But there's still a lot of latitude to fund private religious schools, to have chaplains, to have governors issue calls for prayer and fasting.
Now, some of these things may or may not be prudential, and we can debate them, but we should debate them in our legislative bodies, not have U.S. Supreme Court opinion and justices in Washington pass down dictates based on a very faulty understanding of American history.
Is there anything in the founding that you think is uniquely Christian that would not have been there if these were not men of Christendom?
I'm not prepared to say anything is uniquely Christian, but by way of analogy, I teach at a school founded in the Quaker tradition.
And some of my colleagues are Quaker pacifists.
Now, one can become a pacifist because one reads Gandhi.
One can become a pacifist because one experiences war and decides that it's horrible.
But I think if you're looking at my Quaker colleagues and you say, why are they pacifists?
The most logical explanation is because of their Quaker convictions.
In the same way, almost anything I discuss, separation of powers, checks and balances, the right to resist unjust authorities, one could come to those conclusions for all sorts of non-Christian reasons.
But in late 18th century America, Christianity explains the most.
You know, that's an excellent answer.
I mean, that is very clarifying.
All of the founders, so many of the founders said that when they wrote the Constitution, this is a constitution for a religious people.
It can govern no other.
If we are moving into a period of irreligion, if we're moving into a period where the faith is falling away, is the Constitution out of date?
Is there any way that the Constitution can remain in force if people lose their faith?
You know, the founders would be very, very worried by our shift away from religion.
It's just a founder syllogism that for Republican government to work, the people have to be moral.
For the people to be moral, they must be religious.
And although they use the language of religion, they really meant Christianity to a person.
They meant Christianity.
So I think they would be worried.
On the other hand, part of what I argue is that some of the things that the founders bequeathed to us-limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, these institutions and structures could still do a great deal of good, even for a people that is turning away from Christianity and even religion altogether.
So I think it behooves us to go back and look at the constitutional order that the founders left to us and then to figure out: you know, first of all, as a Christian, I might try to convert my fellow citizens and this sort of thing.
But even if that does not work, I think these political institutions still have a great deal to offer today.
And as conservatives, we ought to go back and insist on things like a president living within his powers.
We should attack the administrative state and its overreach and insist that we return to some semblance of federalism, whereby the national government doesn't get to just do whatever it wants.
We're talking to Mark David Hall, author of Did America Have a Christian Founding Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth.
What do you say when a student stands up in your class?
And I would bet cash money this has happened.
When a student stands up and says, okay, you know, you've made the argument, these are men of Christendom founding a government.
What has that to do with me?
Why is that relevant to my life?
Well, I would say it's relevant in a couple of ways.
First of all, it's important that we understand our own history, so that's worthwhile in and of itself.
Second of all, the U.S. Supreme Court has made it crystal clear that we must interpret the First Amendment in light of its generating history.
And so there's all sorts of implications for law and public policy, especially with respect to religious liberty and church-state relations.
Now, of course, I'm an originalist.
I'll bet you're an originalist.
Many people are originalists.
Some people aren't.
And I debated someone from the Freedom from Religion Foundation the other day.
And I said, look, you don't have to quit your job.
Make non-originalist arguments in favor of removing the Star of David from Ohio's Holocaust Memorial if you want to, but don't pretend that America's founders would have desired such an outcome.
So I think it does have very practical implications for our lives today.
When you look at the country today, aside from individuals falling away from religion, what is the thing that you see that you think violates the founders' vision most?
By far and away, with respect to politics, the shift away from the national government being one of limited powers to being basically unlimited powers.
Now, this, of course, goes back to the 1930s, but the founders would have been shocked, even the federalists, someone like an Alexander Hamilton, might have liked the direction the country has moved.
But most of the federalists, I mean, the vast majority of federalists really believed that they were proposing a limited national government.
And people should reread Article 1, Section 8.
This national government was to do very few things.
And almost everything that government does today, to the extent to which it should be done by government, should be done by state or local governments.
And even many of those things are probably better left to families and churches and voluntary societies.
So I think they would be very worried and they would see this as a vast departure from the constitutional order that they created.
You know, my last question is: when I read the federalist papers, one of the things I'm really struck with is the insight into human beings.
I'm really struck with, as you said yourself, the idea of this sinful human being and how he has to be kept in line by a system that will play his interests off each other.
When you deal with students, do you find that that idea is missing now, or do you feel that they naturally understand this?
You know, I teach at a Christian college, so I think most of our students get that.
I give talks at other places at the University of Wisconsin the other day, a couple weeks ago, actually.
Yeah, and I think that's probably, you know, we're drifting away from that.
People like to think that people are naturally good.
And this is, of course, the problem with all utopian thinkers.
People are naturally good.
If we just get the economic system right, if we just get the educational system right, all will be well.
Well, it won't.
Humans are sinful.
or self-interested if you prefer.
And any system built upon the premise that humans are perfectible here on this side of the escaton is doomed to failure and probably a bloody failure.
Mark David Hall, author of Did America Have a Christian Founding?
Thank you very much for coming on.
Really interesting.
I appreciate it.
Utopian Dreams Dissected00:02:08
Thank you very much, Andrew.
It's my pleasure.
All right.
Interesting guy.
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I wanted to deal with this Marvel comics movie controversy that's coming about because of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
I will try and get to it later in the week.
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