Michael Belch and hosts dissect the state's normative role in protecting true religion, correcting historical errors regarding Constantine's 330 AD attendance at Hagia Irene while defending state suppression of heresy against secular humanism. They argue that abandoning Christian nationalism has fueled modern crises like abortion and transgenderism, contrasting this with the structured faith of 1950s America. The discussion clarifies that Sunday worship emerged from early resurrection traditions rather than Constantine's decree, ultimately asserting that historic creeds offer superior societal order compared to individual interpretations or global secularism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Generational Divide in Christian Nationalism00:12:37
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Much credit is given to Constantine for his role in calling together the church at Nicaea.
And helping facilitate the foundational creed of the Christian Church.
But did you know that a mere ten years later, in 335 AD, at the Council of Tyre, Constantine exiled one of the fiercest defenders of the faith at that time, Athanasius?
See, Athanasius remained in exile until Constantine's death and was only welcomed back by his son, who restored him as a bishop, who then went on to exile him again.
A year later, Constantine the Great also continued to permit the continuation of pagan temples and rituals and retained the title Pontifex Maximus, meaning the great priest of the Roman cults.
Sounds a lot like America's principled pluralism today, doesn't it?
Now, at first glance, these facts are pretty inconvenient for someone who just recently argued that the state has a normative role in correcting the church.
If, after all, one of the greatest supposed examples was an emperor who exiled faithful bishops and continued to permit pagan worship, then the batting average doesn't look that great.
This is to say nothing of the countless martyrs of the Catholic Church, the supposedly terrible Spanish Inquisition, and even Martin Luther and other zealous reformers.
Now, if the state really is supposed to correct the church in certain matters, why all of the errors and excesses?
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So today, we're going to answer those questions.
We've made the claim.
Right alongside the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Belgic Confession, that the state has a role to play in suppressing heresies, protecting true religion, and safeguarding the Christian faith.
Now, we are going to defend this view against the most common objections that we've heard.
All right.
Welcome, welcome.
Michael is just being a humble servant and getting me a glass of water real quick.
GA, it is Friday afternoon.
It is.
We are very, very happy to have you all with us.
So, we, in the providence of God, produced, and the episode was written by our very own Wesley Todd.
God bless you.
You did a great job.
Got a couple dates wrong, turns out, that absolutely changes our overall argument.
How much?
We got one date wrong by 10 years.
So, really, scrub it.
Like, we need to pull this episode.
We need to pay millions of dollars to pull it everywhere it is on the internet.
Exactly, yeah.
So it changes the argument zero.
But the dates do matter.
And as soon as you feel like.
I'll give a correction here in a minute.
And who did you.
It was Michael Reeves.
Who was it?
Yeah, so just kind of setting the stage.
The first thing we talked about was Constantine and Constantine's conversion as the Roman emperor.
And it's in 330 AD, not 320, as I said, that he enters.
And he enters and goes to church in the Hagia Irene, which is not the Hagia Sophia, which I said.
The reason I said Hagia Sophia, and even in my mind, I was like, I feel like that's much later, is because one of the lectures I reviewed as I studied was from Gordon Conwell, professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.
He was a professor of church history, Ryan Reeves, who said, Constantine went into the Hagia Sophia.
So on that one, I was wrong, but I was wrong because someone else is wrong.
And so should have double checked that, but ultimately, wrong church, Hagia Irene, instead of the Hagia Sophia.
It was in 330 AD, not 320 AD, that Constantine attends church there.
Perfect.
So, yeah, so the overarching thesis that we presented is changed zero by that detail.
But the details do matter.
We want to get right.
And here's the thing, and I know it's shocking, especially for older generations, particularly the boomer generation.
They're like, we got them now.
We got them now.
Because there's a tool in our toolkit that sadly the older generation is completely unaware of that it even exists.
And it's called just admitting you were wrong.
Yep.
So that's, you know, it's like, I thought we had them.
I thought we nailed them to the wall and they're still going and people are still listening.
How?
What is the superpower?
The superpower is called an apology.
Yep.
Hey, my bad.
We got these details wrong.
Here's how we'll switch them.
If it actually did change the argument, then we'd reintroduce.
Okay.
So this is actually a decent counter, but it doesn't change the argument at all.
And any good argument is resting on tons of different pillars of evidence, it's resting on confessions, it's resting on reformers, upon.
Different history in the medieval ages, it's going to the modern time.
None of it is dependent on any single pillar.
So, if you take one of them out, well, my whole thing falls apart.
A good odd argument, especially on a topic like this, which we did, is going to be built on dozens of pieces of evidence that bolster it and strengthen it and give it its vitality.
Right.
And it's just something that I'm encouraged that there are plenty of weaknesses with the younger generation.
Like, no generation is faultless, every generation has its weak points and all those kinds of things.
And so, we're perfectly aware of that.
But that is something that encourages me.
In general, I do feel like younger generations are just more comfortable with saying, Oh, we missed that.
Whereas I feel like older generations, this doesn't mean each and every boomer.
I'm speaking in generalities, group dynamics.
There are always exceptions, and praise God for them.
But what we're saying is, in general, a lot of times, sadly, the older generation and even older Christian ministers, it's never an apology.
It's just a clarification or it's a doubling down or, you know, like, And I really think that's one of the reasons why, not the only reason, but one reason why I'm bullish on Christian nationalists is that most of the Christian nationalists, there is a generational divide.
So, most of them are on the younger side, most of them, you know, 45 years or younger, and, you know, just kind of returning to some older thought and older writers and those kinds of things.
And for whatever reason, the younger generation doesn't seem to have at least the same degree of aversion towards just saying, oh, yeah, I missed that.
My bad.
Let me fix that real quick.
And okay, let me, I'm going to weigh it now.
Does that change the substance of the overarching argument?
Yes.
Okay.
So, let's.
Go this way, or no, uh, it doesn't, uh, but it's still important to get the details right.
Sorry, I missed that.
Um, it's you know, a movement that that's um that's that's okay with admitting like ever that they were wrong is uh pretty hopeful.
Pretty hopeful.
We've never made the claim, like, notice the difference, for example.
So, we did an episode on genetics.
I have a bachelor's degree and I have a master's degree in health and biology and all of these things.
We probably spoke about genetics for about 40 minutes during that episode.
I maybe talked about Constantine for maybe 10.
I don't have a degree necessarily in church history.
So, none of us here have claimed we are the be all, end all authority on church history.
We can go deep on every single topic.
We are qualified to lecture all through the early church, into the Middle Ages, into the Reformation.
We literally don't do that.
We've never produced an hour and a half episode where we're just talking about history because at the end of the day, we're not church historians.
In fact, we've talked about how we would like to tackle some topics, but we just don't feel like we are expert enough or have the time to do the required amount of research.
Right.
There's plenty of things that we hope to get to eventually.
Yep.
But as our friend Dr. Stephen Wolf would say, do the reading.
You'll suggest great episodes, and I'll be like, that's great.
I just need 10 hours to make sure I'm informed enough to actually speak on it.
We'll get there eventually.
So, anyway, so we wanted to correct that right off the bat, but then we wanted to deal with some of the objections.
So, this was kind of the talk of the town for the last few days our episode.
It was a fan favorite, and the people loved it.
And when I say that, of course, I mean that people lost their minds.
The right people loved it.
Like, really did.
Like, they appreciated it and said, thank you for.
Like pointing out how historical this is.
Right.
A lot of people did appreciate it, but a lot of people were like, what?
This is backwards.
You know, this is completely untrue.
Tell me you've never read the Bible, you know, without saying you've never read the Bible.
Tell me that you don't know, you know, anything about church history.
Like, aren't you aware?
Like, remember the, what's that show with Tobias?
Arrested Development.
Arrested Development.
Yeah.
Remember the scene where he's like, there are dozens of us.
Like, that's what I always think of when it's like, you know, don't you know that they drown Baptist?
There were dozens of us.
Dozens.
By the way, Stephen Wolfe's tweet on that the other day was fantastic about how Baptists will be allowed to worship in the new Christian nationalism.
They can be Baptists.
But they can optionally, as an elective, sign up for persecution if they want to.
Which is perfect because that is the great Baptist dilemma.
Baptists are more terrified of persecution than anything in the world.
Being uniquely persecuted for being Baptist, which is not even close to happening.
So, like, their greatest fear is something that there's no signs of whatsoever.
And yet, and this is the thing that's so peculiar about Baptists, and yet it's also like their secret fantasy.
Their greatest hope.
Their greatest hope.
They're like, yeah.
So, it's like on one hand, they're like, no, Baptists would be persecuted.
And on the other hand, they're like, and the greatest desire of my heart is to be drowned.
To be like John Bunyan there.
Stephen Wolfe, as a wonderful Christian prince, you know, I think he mapped out a very.
You know, accommodating position where he said, You can have both.
Like, you have my word.
Baptists will not be drowned, but if you would like, you can be drowned.
You can sign up for afternoon drownings.
And that's exactly what Baptists, in their heart of hearts, that's what they want.
So, anyways, all that being said, we wanted to deal with some of the objections and bring a little bit more details to the floor.
But I've got to say right here, real quick from the outset if you want to live stream our conference, it's happening next week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
And we are really, really excited.
We've got 15 different speakers, everybody's flying in, everybody's making their last arrangements, and we're up to about 1,000 people.
That are going to be there in person.
It's like 950, 960.
So, really excited about that.
It's going to be a great time.
But for those of you who are unable to come in person and you'd like to live stream, have all the content made available to you online.
You need to, we're making it available, but exclusive for our Patreon members.
So, you need to go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
It's available only for our Patreon members, and you have to sign up for the gold tier.
Silver tier gets you ad free early access to our Friday special.
But this gets you the live stream for the conference if you sign up for the gold tier.
So, gold tier, patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
And also, we have for the very first time Michael Belch.
His book is sitting here on the table.
He's going to be signing and selling physical copies at our conference, but it's also available that you can purchase on Amazon.
Constantine's Political Persecution Tactics00:13:26
Do you want to tell them just real quick the name of the book?
Yeah.
The title is In Defense of Christian Nations, and you can find it on Amazon under that title.
We have it for Kindle.
Soft cover and hard cover.
If you're coming to the conference, it will be slightly discounted as a promotional rate at the conference.
So if you want to get a copy, wait and get it there.
It'll be a little bit cheaper for you.
Otherwise, yeah, it's available on Amazon right now.
Awesome.
Okay, Bess, go ahead and take us.
All right.
So with any topic, there's the objections that you just, like I said, like, well, this is a nitpicking point of history.
It doesn't really make a big difference.
But I do want to say, like, there are people that have genuine disagreement with us and bring up good points.
So to the individual that would ever say, like, hey, I see what you're saying.
I understand where you're coming from.
Historically, I take a difference here.
I would say, by all means, you are fine to disagree with us.
The only ask would kind of be to say, okay, I disagree, but I do see where you're coming from.
I understand that's in the confessions.
I understand how other reformers taught that.
And so there were some good faith objections, and I kind of categorized it into three buckets I will treat here in these three segments.
And the first one would be the objection to Constantine, to his status as emperor, the things that he did.
There's some modern scholarship that really casts doubt on Constantine's status as a defender of Christianity, as a defender of the faith.
So it would be casting doubt upon Constantine.
We'll hit this here in the first segment.
The second one would be kind of a mention of under the Catholic Church, all of the persecutions that happened in the Middle Ages.
So, if you say, well, the state should be involved and the state should care and meddle even in spiritual affairs, well, we kind of had about a thousand years of that, and weren't there tons of martyrs and everything like that?
Spoiler alert, even on its worst day, honestly, it probably was better than what we have going on now on its best day.
So, we'll get into some of the statistics, all of that.
And then the final one, and it is valid, is well, you say all of this, but ultimately that's not our American.
Tradition that the American tradition has always had a bit of a firewall between church and state, never true separation.
There's always going to be a religious interest of the state.
But we have the law Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.
We have the ban on no religious tests for public office.
And so people will say, Well, that's not American, or even that's not Baptist.
I'm well aware of the Baptist faith and message, what it says about the civil magistrate.
I'm well aware of the 1689 and its differences from the Westminster Confession of Faith.
So those are primarily the deliberate choice of silence.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So we'll get into all of that, but let's start off with Constantine.
So, as I already mentioned, if you're just tuning in now, it was 330 AD, not 320 AD, as I said earlier this week, 330 AD that he attends church in the Hagia Irene.
Now, the Hagia Sophia, which actually was the Holy Church of the Apostles, which he did attend church at one point.
So, he literally went to the site that it eventually became.
The Hagia Sophia is not built until later on.
So, he attends church at the Hagia Irene.
One of the big contentions with Constantine is that ultimately, because he's an emperor and because he has a political interest, and this is brand new in church history.
I mean, the church has always been persecuted all the way up through Diocletian in the early 300s, like to varying degrees, some less, some more.
But she never has an establishment.
She never has any relationship to power and to political power.
And so there really is a view, and this would be more Anabaptist in those who would hold this position, that Constantine comes in, and in many ways, he ruins Christianity.
That Christianity was pure and it was home church and it was the church being the church and feeding the poor and caring for these.
But Constantine comes in and he begins getting bishops together and caring about articles of faith.
And he gives a political aspect to Christianity that has really, ever since the argument would be, since the 300s, since the Edict of Milan in 313, that it's always had a political bent to it.
Now, again, even some of our detractors, they wouldn't go so far as to say that.
But there certainly really is a perspective that, man, he just wedded the religious and the political.
And some would even go farther and say that Constantine, when he brings the church together, for instance, and where he claims to convert, that it wasn't genuine.
That what Constantine's really doing here is he's got these warring factions.
I'm going to do my best to steal the argument, but it's a bad one.
He's got the warring factions, he's got the pagans, and he has the Christians.
And to somehow get them to make peace with each other, he converts to Christianity, extends the olive branch so that his kingdom, I mean, remember, like the kingdom he forms by 324 when he defeats Licentius, it's a huge empire.
You've got a lot of people to keep happy with each other.
So he has these squabbles, he has these religious differences, and he makes kind of a half hearted conversion to Christianity.
He lets it onto the official roster of religions that can be practiced, and as an attempt, Again, not a genuine conversion, not because he really believed in the truth of Christianity, but because he was trying to make peace.
The best resource I have for this would be Peter Lighthart's book Defending Constantine.
He does a great job engaging with the scholarship on this.
And I'm going to read a couple quotes from this book that I think are helpful.
And so the first objection we'll get to right here is Constantine as the politician.
Didn't he come in and give a political slant, a political bent to Christianity?
Nate, you can pull up this first quote here.
So Peter Lighthart says this.
He, that is, Constantine, was a politician preacher, and his sharp language also pacified militant Christians in his empire who muttered that their pseudo Christian emperor was soft on idolatry.
His law against sacrifice was part of an effort to clear public spaces of that aspect of the pagan cult considered most unacceptable in the eyes of Christians.
And by the 350s, sacrifice was rare enough that it took some daring to perform one.
You're talking really only 37 years from the legality of Christianity to the point where sacrifice is becoming rare.
Constantine did not have to take up the sword against pagans.
His legislation created an atmosphere in which sacrifice gradually faded away.
People are always products of their time.
When we talk about the conversion of Constantine, which is a huge moment in the history of Christianity and the history of the West, it changes it forever.
We have to remember that Constantine is coming from a long line of emperors that literally were the head, not just of the state.
So it's not just the emperor and he has his political thing, and then there's pagan cults and there's gods and this, that, or the other.
Constantine comes in and the title he inherits is head of the church.
And, or head of the state and the church, that the emperor was literally considered the head of the pagan rituals, the head of the pagan cults.
And so, yes, he comes in as a politician.
And yes, as we mentioned in the Cold Open, he doesn't necessarily do away with immediately all the false worship.
He doesn't come in and shut down the temples.
I think of Josiah.
I mean, he raises them, he salts the earth, he executes the priest.
Constantine doesn't do that.
And it's funny because, you know, like we mentioned later on in our episode, we think a Christian prince would do something about false religion.
But there's a huge difference in an American context.
In a president, for example, I mean, every single one of our presidents, I believe, have been Christian, some Protestant, some Catholic.
All of them have been Christian.
So you have a line of presidents that have been Christian, a people that have been Christian, a society, a culture, and expectation.
There's a huge difference between a president or even someone stronger than that coming in and doing something about the Christian faith in that context, 2,000 years removed from its origin, to a literal pagan emperor who, from one day to the next, is converted, who is the inheritor of all these rights.
There just is a difference.
And so we give a strong defense of Constantine and yet understand that his sons and those that followed him would have to take successive steps.
And none of that means, well, he ruined it.
He came in, he didn't go all the way, he was like Josiah.
No, God did an incredible work through him that was intended to continue.
It wasn't just going to be, I mean, you think about Rome, you think about how big it was, how deeply ingrained the pagan practices were, other wicked practices, abandoning children, homosexuality.
I mean, these are ingrained in the culture for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Ordinarily, God takes time to fix things like that.
So, Constantine, I believe in his life, especially from the writings of Eusebius, Did an incredible job, was a faithful man.
He had his flaws, he had his shortcomings.
He exiled Athanasius, even that is in many ways political.
Different enemies of Athanasius got to him first, they convinced him, and even then, he doesn't excommunicate him, try to excommunicate him from the church or execute him.
He simply exiles him.
So, we're well aware that Constantine had his shortcomings, as I have my shortcomings, as all of us have our shortcomings.
But in the sum total, you look across his life and you really see, I think, an incredible man.
An incredible leader and one who, very politically savvy, very politically minded, set the foundation for the glorious Christendom that was going to be built later on in the Middle Ages.
Well said.
Even the Athanasius thing, I mean, there is, it depends on kind of how you read it.
Like you said, Wes, Constantine helped call together the Council of Nicaea, out of which the Orthodox doctrine of the nature of Christ came to be.
And still, the Arians didn't just go away, right?
They continued to push, to put pressure on the empire and on the emperor, both religiously but also politically.
And so, in one case, Athanasius was actually exiled five different times as kind of the winds of public favor switched and swirled and came back and forth.
And one of the times, he was exiled almost entirely on political reasons.
And the Arians were able to convince Constantine that, as the bishop of Alexandria, he was.
Pausing or halting grain shipments to Rome.
He was exerting his political influence as a bishop to keep Rome from being supplied by grain.
Another time, the Arians also claimed him of having murdered a bishop.
It was surprising to everyone when the bishop who was supposed to have been murdered showed up at the defense of Athanasius, still alive.
It was inconvenient for the witnesses.
That's right.
The point is, there were a lot of factors playing into some of the perceived persecution of Athanasius in the church.
Some of them, yes.
Were on theological grounds and heretics gaining political favor.
And some of them were just lies and outright political fabrications by Athanasius' enemies.
And all of that was part of the mix at the time.
It's very difficult.
When we espouse a principle, the real world application of every single principle is always going to be a little bit tricky, a little bit muddy, a little bit cloudy.
Even the principles of wives submitting to husbands, which we would all agree with.
In the real world, you start getting, well, what about this?
What about this situation?
What about, like, there are absolutely rock solid principles.
But the implementation of them sometimes gets a little muddy and sometimes even can be applied too far or not far enough.
That's all we're saying with this principle of whether or not the state has some vested interest and even authority to correct the church at times.
Yep.
I'm going to read this.
This is Peter Lighthart, Psalm chapter two, right?
It says, it doesn't just say to the people, right?
Peoples of the earth pay homage to the sun.
It says, rulers of the earth kiss the sun.
And so this is extended.
Nathan, I didn't give you the quote.
It's a little bit long.
But I want to read this as the end of the first segment where he really makes the case that.
That even in these excesses, which are true or even true of Constantine himself, they don't imply a structural deficit.
That in the structure of it, there's nothing implied there that this is wholly unworkable.
So it's a little bit long, but track with me here.
Peter Lighthar says this For Constantine and the emperors who followed him, after kissing the Son and Lord, Psalm 2, it made sense to do homage to Jesus by supporting his queen, the church, building and adorning cathedrals, distributing funds for poor relief and hospitals, assisting the bishops to resolve their differences by calling and providing councils.
Constantine did not always show restraint.
Sometimes he took business that belonged to the king and queen alone.
But if we want to judge Constantine fairly, we have to recognize that the queen often had her issues.
A queen's bodyguard ought to keep his hands off the queen.
But what does he do when she turns harpy and starts scratching the face of her lady in waiting?
Once they noticed there was a queen in their midst.
So his conversion, the Edict of Milan.
Some emperors and kings were not satisfied with kissing the son.
Some could not keep their hands off her.
Some wanted to steal a kiss or two from the bride and seduce her.
Plenty did.
There were plenty of excesses, but it is important to notice the difference.
Adorning and protecting someone else's queen, even protecting her from herself, is not the same as violating her.
And the queen had some responsibility to be true to her king.
She was not supposed to be flattered by the blandishments of a Constantine, or a Justinian, or a Charlemagne.
She was not to look wistfully at the emperor's court, as she too often did, and remodel her own couriers in the image of the emperor's.
If the emperor tried to steal a kiss, he should be greeted with a good hard slap.
That happened, as we have seen, but did not always happen.
And at times, the queen was only too happy to take a tumble with the emperor, provided he paid her handsomely for the pleasure.
There's a good biblical word for that.
See, Revelation 17 and 18.
And neither Wycliffe, nor Dante, nor Luther was afraid to use it.
All of these were real and often horrific acts of unfaithfulness, but they do not imply a structural flaw.
Once the emperor has kissed the sun, should he not honor the sun's bride?
I think that was really well said.
Spiritual Sword and Family Banking00:03:01
That's a really, really well-waited way to put that.
The state, we said it in the first episode, the state has been given a physical sword, and it's not for decoration.
Paul literally says, Don't think he holds this in vain.
And the church has been given a real spiritual sword.
The church has not been given the physical sword and the state not given the spiritual sword.
So, in physical matters, like Paul even says, I've handed over Hymenaeus and Alexander, real flesh and blood, physical people that they would be taught not to blaspheme.
He doesn't say, I've handed over the spirit and the idea and the entity of blasphemy.
Real people handed over to Satan.
He says elsewhere in Corinthians about the adulterer, handed over for the destruction of the body.
That power, that sword, Has been given, as we know from Romans 13, to the state.
That's not Locke.
That's not Hume.
Like, well, maybe the state does this kind of thing.
God established it that way.
The state does not wield a spiritual sword, but he does have a physical one.
He can go too far, but ordinarily, when he enforces the first table within his bounds, he's doing what he's called to do.
Yep.
Let's go to our first commercial break and we'll be right back.
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Spanish Inquisition Historical Context00:15:48
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All right.
So moving on to the second common objection, I think it's a good faith objection, or at least it could be good faith.
Is okay, you've said that the state has an interest in spiritual things, but what we've often seen again and again is what would be seeming abuses of that is that when they get into it because they're imperfect, they go about and they persecute men that we find in the final analysis.
Well, hang on.
We love that guy.
I think of John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress.
He spent 12 years in prison under the authority of the British crown.
He wasn't even, it wasn't even like it was a Catholic.
Catholic crown, and he was Protestant.
He was Protestant.
They were Protestant, but he didn't have the authority to be a preacher.
He refused to step down from his views, and he spent 12 years in prison.
And I mean, he wrote Pilgrim's Progress, so obviously he was busy while he was in there.
But we look at those, and I get it, and it's hard for people to fathom, but wait, we see the abuses.
We see this going on.
Shouldn't that mean that we just leave that be?
But it's the classic conundrum.
It's not whether, but which.
The state will always have its interest in morality.
And by extension, religion.
So you look at that, and here's what I want to do.
So you look at that, and you say that's bad.
But here's the question.
Okay, bad in comparison to what?
A hypothetical perfect world, a world with no sin, a world with no fallenness, a world of a perfect state?
Well, of course, the state executing Wycliffe, for example, its persecution of Luther, of course, those are bad things if our comparison is to a perfect sunny day where nobody sins.
But guys, we live in a fallen world and we will until the return of Christ.
And so let's use this example the Spanish Inquisition.
So in Spain, late 1400s, the Pope, and he was compelled to do so, But he, by holy writ, wrote to the civil leaders for the carrying out of an inquisition.
The inquisition was basically testing people's faith.
We want to see professions of faith.
We want to see the avoidance of heresies through all of today, what we would call Spain.
And it lasted a good amount of time.
It lasts until the early 1800s.
It was like 400 years.
It was about 350 years, depending when you kind of mark it.
And of course, we always hear about it like, well, you know, things are bad now, but I mean, like the Catholic Church and the Spanish Inquisition.
Let's actually get into the numbers.
Nate, you can pull this source up.
There's a bunch of different, a bunch of back and forth, but I think this is the best summary of the different things I read.
This is quote number four.
So, quote number four this is from William D. Rubinstein back in 2004, and he says this The Inquisition was only formally abolished in the early 19th century, early 1800s.
Yet it also seems clear that the number of victims of the Inquisition can easily be exaggerated.
Juan Antonio Llorente in the 1700s, a fierce enemy of the Inquisition, whose critical history of the Inquisition of 1817 and 1819 remains the most famous early work attacking everything connected with it.
So, this guy, Juan Antonio, big critic of the Inquisition, estimated the number of executions carried out during the whole of the period that the Spanish Inquisition existed 300 years from 1483 until its abolition by Napoleon at 31,912 individuals, with 291,000 condemned.
To severe penances.
Most recent historians regard even this figure as far too high.
We were talking about before the break, there's sometimes, what is it?
I've heard millions?
Yeah, millions.
Even thrown around.
That during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was executing millions of supposed heretics.
I read that somewhere.
I don't have the source for it.
The way it's described, it's kind of like you remember during George Floyd and people were like, there must be thousands of unarmed black men being shot by the police in the street.
The number was literally 19.
Which is about equivalent.
To probably the number annually that the Inquisition actually formally executed.
I heard 34.
For heresy.
The highest estimate.
34 people a year.
The highest estimate would be about 90.
If we went with those 31,000 figures, most estimate between 30 and 40 individuals across the whole kingdom a year executed for heresy.
And most of them executed for heresy were not individuals that was like, oh my goodness, they called me to recite the Apostles' Creed.
I stumbled over the words.
I called the Son a created being.
Within 15 seconds, I was up in the scaffolding.
These were hard hearted heretics who had repeatedly.
Obstinately refused to be corrected.
So, even in those cases, we have, I mean, the church and the state wedded together.
They're going through, they expose Jews out of the land, Muslims.
They're going through not just Christians, like, well, you say you profess Christ.
We want to hear details and we want to test your life.
And there's a grace period they kind of gave.
So, they would come to a town and they would have like 40 days where someone could come forward and they were promised the punishment would be lesser.
But it was often not clear who was actually accusing them, what they were being accused of, what their recourse was.
And so, certainly in that, we could say, well, There were some things maybe that were done wrong.
But compare 40, 50, 90 at most, 90 executions across a whole year.
The population is estimated at about 4 to 5 million.
So, pretty small percent.
Obviously, it's smaller than our population now.
Population of what?
Of Spain?
Population of Spain at the time.
So, four to five million.
So, you had 40 to 90 about a year executed formally by the church, by the state for heresy, inquisition, coming to people's house, grilling them on doctrine, all that.
Compare that to the body count of what we have today.
Compare that to the body count of abortion.
I mean, right there is an easy one.
Compare that to the body count, I mean.
Which is about a million.
Which is about a million annually.
60 million across the time since Roe v. Wade.
Compare that even to children that are castrated through surgeries.
Those numbers are in the thousands for each state of transitions a year, 10, 20 times multiples.
Compare the death count right here in Austin, Texas, about three weeks ago.
An illegal immigrant was driving in the early hours a semi tractor trailer and was intoxicated, plowed into A section of stopped cars killed an infant, killed a four year old.
I think three or four other people.
He shouldn't have been here, he shouldn't have been driving.
And that's just here, right here in the last two weeks.
We obviously, there's the Lakeland Rileys of the world, the individuals, but by the sheer numbers, like, okay, like I get it that the Spanish Inquisition, yeah, maybe we don't go to people's homes and grill them on doctrine.
Maybe we assume the best of their confession.
And so, well, not the best look, but guys, you have got to get.
A grip of the picture when we talk about that.
It would be better, all else being equal, if these are the only two options to choose from.
A bit of an overzealous church and state.
They're a little, as Peter Lighthart said, they're a little entangled.
They're a little close.
They're taking too much of a romp together.
He's not protecting her.
Even in those cases, better that than the state telling, dictating these precepts that we have now that have body counts, not in the tens, not in the 20s, not in the hundreds, but of thousands of things that would have been.
Unthinkable in that time that really would have, yep.
Not to mention, aside from just like abortion and uh transgenderism and all those kinds of things, but um, just thinking of 2020 alone and you know the state shutting down every single church in America for right weeks and weeks, and then you know, and then some states you know for months, um, like we're like, oh man, we can't you know, we can't have Christian nationalism, we can't have you know, the state can't have the kinds of powers that.
And here's the deal.
Like, we did this in the episode that we did on Monday.
We didn't just say, oh, here's what was going on with Constantine.
But we quoted the Westminster confession, not the American confession, but, you know, the former confession, which the difference is what?
Like, about 100 years or so prior?
Yeah, Philadelphia.
I think it's even, maybe even later.
Yeah.
So, the Belgic confession as well.
The Westminster confession.
And the Hell Velik.
And so, like, and all of these, you know, like with the Westminster especially, you know, it says that.
Is the civil magistrate's duty to suppress all heresies and blasphemies?
That the state actually has an obligation under God and a vested interest in helping to keep the church pure.
Now, that doesn't afford to the state the ability or the right to minister the sacraments or to preach from the pulpit or any of these things or even to dictate the forms of worship of the church.
You know, like when you had the original covenanters and, you know, people, you know, Puritans that were coming to America, the civil magistrate at that time in England was, he wasn't suppressing Trinitarian blasphemies like Arianism, but he was telling them that they had to, that it was mandated that they read, you know, the scoreboard out of the sports almanac, you know, on Sunday morning in their worship.
So he was just trying to.
He was just being a troll.
He knew that that offended their conscience in a breach of the Christian Sabbath to talk about sports and recreation from the pulpit on a Sunday morning during the worship service.
And so he was abusing his power.
Let me use the example of the King of England now.
So you had a king then who was abusing his power.
We would agree.
Those have no place on the Lord's day in public worship.
But the King of England right now has largely abdicated his role in relation to the church.
And what he's basically served as is a rubber stamp for all the terrible reforms that the Church of England has undergone.
He's been supportive of its inclusion and giving of blessings on same sex marriage.
Same thing with, it was, I think, in the 70s that the Anglican Church, at least in England, began to ordain women.
And the king stood right along and let it happen.
So, in these systems, again, like, okay, well, he had some problems there to be sure.
Those actually pale in comparison to even today's king, not in their positive doing, not in his actual reforms that he's instituted.
But the duty, he's abdicated.
So you have the king there and he has a responsibility.
In this case, he took it too far.
He was errant.
Totally get that.
But today, he's largely abdicated and the result has not been.
And because he's abdicated, he's stepped back.
He's not restraining, he's not suppressing.
Man, the church in England is doing really well.
It's doing terrible.
My brother in Christ, England and the church, especially as the king, at least in that context, and not every nation, not every country will have this setup, will have a monarch reigning over the church.
And probably even ideally, that's not the case.
As it is right now, that's what they've had.
They've had it for hundreds of years.
And right now, you have a king abdicating as the church is imploding.
The numbers of the Church of England, it is going to be extinct in 50 years.
The church of Martin Lloyd Jones, the church of John Stott, the church of the Westminster Divines.
So much great theology, so many wonderful architects, so many treasures of the faith that were handed down.
The king, as steward, is watching.
The royal family is watching as they all go down.
The drain.
And we don't look at that and say, well, thank goodness he stepped back from his role.
Thank goodness the state's not interfering.
No, the king needs to get in there and clean house.
Yes, I'm sure glad that there aren't going to be any abuses from the civil magistrate in England.
It's like there won't be Christianity in England.
Right.
The whole.
Those churches will be occupied by Muslims.
By Muslims.
Yeah.
Like they're all turning into Muslim mosques.
And so, yes, but that's what you said earlier is just important for the listener to understand.
It's not whether but which.
Not whether, but which.
You're going, so long as we live in a fallen world until the final physical return of Christ, you're going to have sin.
You're going to have abuses of power.
All these kinds of things are going to happen.
And when we look at a whole over Western civilization, you know, just in the last 50 years, 70 years, 130 years, and really stretching back even to the Enlightenment, you know, what we have is secular humanism.
And, you know, just like, you know, the scriptures that, you know, Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.
It's like, yeah, like sacralism has killed its dozens annually.
And it really martyred early reformers who were literally just trying to take the scriptures and put them in the common tongue.
Right.
That was wrong.
So, like, sacralism has burned dozens at the stake, and secular humanism has vacuumed out 70 million babies.
And that's just a start.
An entire millennium of Christendom is being leveled right now at the hands of secular humanists.
We all know it's easier to destroy something than to build something.
Wes, I have a question.
I'm going to give you a minute to think about it because I'm going to make another point, but.
There's an objection that people will raise.
They'll say, well, the person being, the people being run over by the illegal immigrant, that is not directly because of a state and religion connection.
So some of your examples were related to maybe people would categorize them as purely political decisions.
And so maybe it would be good to answer that.
But I wanted to mention one other thing about the Spanish Inquisition.
And, well, two things.
One is those numbers of 40 to 90 a year.
It is true that the Inquisition kind of came in cycles, and some popes would push for it and some popes would pull back on it.
And so it's not like they were meeting a quota every year, like a policeman is meeting a quota on the number of speeding tickets that he's giving out.
So there would have been times where perhaps the violence or the torture would have been more pronounced than at other times.
And so it is possible that you would look in the history of the Spanish Inquisition and you would see some times where it was more frightful.
More torturous things like that, and many more thousands that weren't executed were, yes, they were put to the question, as it were.
Yeah, but that proves the opposite, too.
That means that the Spanish Inquisition was not a constant in Spain for those 350 years.
There were times where that really wasn't happening much at all.
Um, now, still people will object and say, Well, it still makes me shudder that there were whole machinations of power and machinery of church and state, and they had you know these.
Places set up to interrogate and put people to the question, and they developed a whole theology of justifying torture because if you're tortured and you're righteous, God will preserve your faith, and you know, if you're not righteous, then you will die, and God didn't preserve you.
And that was admittedly a bad thing, you know, there was a whole machinery, as it were, that was set up.
Last, Wes, you mentioned remembering the time the Inquisition started, what, late 1400?
Dominion Mandate for Financial Planning00:03:30
1483.
Yeah, 1483.
The Reconquista historically didn't even end until 1492, officially, which was the period where Spain was driving the Moor and the Muslim back out of Spain, back into Africa.
They were literally still in the process of fighting for their existence as a people, as a religion, as Christendom.
And so, yeah, they were kind of jumpy about that at the time, right?
But they were coming out of what was it, 700 years almost of.
Literal, constant warfare, trying to win back and beat back the the, the Muslim invasion of southern Europe, like and typically Jews that were helping them, and that's correct why they went, then correct to expulse them, and so so the fact that they were trying to figure out how can we prevent this from happening again let's make sure that everyone in the nation is Christian was a political consideration, because they were fighting a political war as much as they were a religious war, and so the state said,
we have a vested interest in making sure that the people here are not Working with the Muslims to counter our efforts of winning back our country.
Yep, absolutely.
Let's go to our next commercial break and then we'll be back.
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Globalism Versus America First Ideals00:02:44
All right.
Well, welcome back.
Here's the last objections.
We tackled Constantine.
Real quick, let me just put you on the spot.
Right now, you snap your fingers.
Status quo, what we have today, secular humanism ruling the day, or Roman Catholic Christian nationalism, and you're not allowed to baptize your babies.
Or you're not allowed to do a believer's baptism.
You have to baptize your babies.
It's not even a question.
Not that both are perfect.
I have a conviction, but like.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
Like, that's what, like, I'm just, I'm watching the chat and I'm trying not to, because sometimes it's just.
Trying not to crash out.
Well, yeah.
I mean, there's a couple guys, most of the chat's doing a great job.
You know, they're taking care of our light work.
Right, right.
We've got, you know, Patriots in Control.
We've got, you know, true Christian nationalists in the chat dealing with the, you know, the guys who are NGMI.
Not going to make it.
But I'm reading it and I'm like.
What, like, what world?
I just don't understand it.
I don't understand, like, what world do you think we're currently living in?
You know, like, what we have drag queen story out, you know, like, we don't even have America first, we have Israel first.
We have, like, you know, like, we're, it's globalism.
It's, um, we're giving, you know, we're a tax farm for Ukraine.
And it's like, no, we're going to be America first.
Like, so we're not going to be a tax farm for anyone?
No, still Israel.
But not like, Grandma Swami, he's like, Campaigning and he tries to kind of take that America First slogan.
What does America First mean?
That means millions more H 1B visas because we have to fix our declining birth rate problem.
How is this American First again?
Can you help me out here?
Connect some pieces.
So, like, we have globalism, multiculturalism, tax farm for all the other nations of the world, transgenderism, drag queen story hour, LGBT mafia, and if all of that wasn't enough, you know, we have 70 million babies dead, you know, conservatively, just in the last half century, just in the last 50 years.
And Baptists are concerned that Christian nationalism might mean that, like, what if it's really bad?
And we have more than ever before.
We have 200 Baptists over the course of a century that die.
I'm like, you mean 200 million?
No, 200.
The worst case we've ever had in all of human history.
It's like, what are you talking about?
I don't get it.
Assurance of Salvation and Hierarchy00:04:45
Even fundamentally, I would say, Daryl Cooper makes this point how Christendom was formed, there was hierarchy built in.
There's hierarchy built into the Catholic Church.
We're not Catholic, but you have a pope who's the first among the bishops.
And then you have I mean, even the peasant coming into church, they come into church where it's not just an ordinary commoner who's preaching, but a man who's been to seminary and has a whole life devoted.
He's on an elevated stage above the people, giving out the words of God that they don't have.
And in many ways, as imperfect as it was, it just inculcated in a people the hierarchy and the orders that the spiritual was great and above.
And that's what we aspired to.
And that within those churches and within that, not everyone was the same.
Not all were capable of teaching.
Not all were capable of that life.
Not all were capable of being a pope.
The higher.
In service of the lesser, cared and stewarded.
And so that hierarchy that we had, the American one, we have it just in our bones.
Like the most successful denominations in the United States are very flat as far as their structure.
They don't, hardly any of them, have bishops.
If they do, it's like Methodism, where the bishops don't really have any local power.
They'll do a presbytery, one level, that's about it.
But honestly, like Methodist, Baptist, Assemblies of God, very flat structures that have no hierarchy to them has been the American experience.
And I'm not talking in the last 20 years.
Like 200 years.
Right.
Like those have been the ones that have succeeded most over and against the Roman Catholic system, or not Catholics, but a structure that did have higher and lower superiors, inferiors, structure to it.
And that also had substance rather than the subjective.
That was one of the things, one of the appeals still to this day, I think, with Roman Catholicism is the idea of not having to question and wonder.
You know, that like it's, you know, it's these robes and these tassels and this candle and this incense and this cathedral and this stained glass and this bread and this wine and this, you know, and it's, you know, you come and you do confession in this booth with this man who wears this, you know, these robes and, you know, like seven sacraments that are all very objective rather than subjective.
They're tangible.
You know, it's like, I'm, you know, my children are going to be baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.
Going to get married in the Roman Catholic Church.
I'm going to take the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic Church.
And I'm also going to do confession from time to time in the Roman Catholic Church.
I'm going to have last rites read to me, you know, when I die, you know, dying, being blessed by the Roman Catholic Church.
You would grow up in one church.
You would see a cemetery that your parents were buried in.
You would return to that cemetery to be buried there.
Cemetery.
Cemetery, yep.
And so there was an objectivity.
And, you know what, like to steal, man, that, like to give, you know, the most charitable defense of.
The federal vision guys.
That's what they were looking at.
Like, they were like, yeah, like, there's, there has to be some objectivity of the covenant.
There has to be some kind of something that people can look to and have some sense.
Well, it's, you know, it's kind of timely that, like, right now there's, you know, a clip going viral with John Piper, which honestly, I'm just kind of like surprised to see John Piper, you know, in the discourse again.
I haven't, you know, heard anything from John Piper in a very long time.
Yeah, he entered the chat.
It's been a while.
And, um, But it was basically, you know, him talking about the warning passages.
Like he was just quoting scripture, and it's absolutely true.
But like Hebrews 6, Hebrews 10, and just saying, like, be careful, you know, brothers, lest any of you, you know, should be found to have an evil, unbelieving heart that would cause you to fall away from the living God.
And he wasn't saying, he's not denying the doctrines of grace and saying that you would lose your salvation, but he's saying that you could prove that you never had it to begin with, like for people who are a part of the visible church, you know.
And he's saying, yeah, and then he says, you could fall away.
Any one of you could fall away.
And he's like, I could fall away.
And he's been consistent in that before.
And that's something I have never really liked about a particular point of Piper's doctrine that I've never appreciated.
Because he's basically saying that you can never really have assurance.
Right.
Not full assurance.
So, to be fair to Piper, he wouldn't say you can have, the Christian can only ever have no assurance.
But he would just say, You can grow in varying degrees of assurance, but you can never have full assurance in this life.
And he would say that for himself.
He's like, I could fall away tomorrow.
Constitutional Rights and Federal Laws00:12:50
Right.
And so that is one of the weaknesses of Protestantism: is that everything is examine yourself, the conscience, the private life of the individual.
You're standing before God.
And there's not many external, visible monuments.
That you can point to, that you can lay hold of, that would provide a sense of certainty and confidence that this person is in, this person is out, this person is a Christian, this person is not a Christian.
And so, as you know, everything, so that's just at the matters of soteriology and ecclesiology.
But then beyond that, you know, like when it comes to clergy and ordination and those kinds of things, you know, like that's even my own story, which everybody now knows, you know, but like.
Yeah, like especially within Baptist tradition, not all Protestants, but particularly Baptists, it's like we have all these non denominational churches, and it's like anybody can just start a church.
Right.
You know, and has that been particularly good for the U.S.?
Now, but to be fair, like we've seen, you know, other countries that are Catholic, predominantly Catholic, and they suck too.
It hasn't been, you know, so I'm not saying that it's a fail safe because it's not by any means.
But the point is, whether it's Protestantism or whether it was Catholicism or even within Protestants, if we had Baptist Christian nationalism versus Anglican Christian nationalism or Presbyterian Christian nationalism,
what I want Christians to realize is I just want them to wake up and see that any form, literally any form of Christian nationalism, would be an immediate and massive improvement on no Christian nationalism.
Secular humanistic globalism.
That's the problem.
Go ahead.
And Wes, before we move to your point, the thing that, you know, as I've followed this discussion a little bit, what is so strange to me is that, Wes, you said it at the beginning.
You said it's not whether, but which.
Now, we learned that from the Christian national theonomists.
And to then imagine that the situation is this, that we live in a society where the church is not enforcing, or sorry, where the state is not enforcing a religion.
is false.
The point is every nation is fundamentally religious.
The state always enforces and promotes and protects a religious perspective and religious toleration or persecution to some degree.
It just so happens that our state currently is enforcing and promoting secularism and rapidly paganism.
And so when we say, yeah, of course the state has a role to play in the public expression of religion, We're taking that almost as an a priori assumption.
We're not even taking that necessarily as an art.
Like, we are arguing for it, for the historical position of it, but also that is just the nature of nations and peoples.
They have a religious perspective.
Whoever is in power in that nation will enforce and promote and defend a certain religious perspective.
It is inevitable.
Hey, it's almost like a black pill.
Like, really, it's this simple.
A lot of it is just downstream of political will.
Nate, can you show this, the one image that I have?
This is a great example.
Good brother flagged this to me on X.
This is from the Michigan Penal Code.
So the state of Michigan here in the United States.
On the books, section 750.102.
Still currently on the books?
As I understand it.
Still currently on the books.
Blasphemy punishment, section 102.
Any person who shall willfully blaspheme the holy name of God by cursing or contemptuously reproaching God shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
705.103.
Cursing and swearing.
Any person who has arrived at the age of discretion who shall profanely curse or damn or swear.
By the name of God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Ghost, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
No such prosecution shall be sustained unless it shall be commenced within five days of the commission of such an offense.
Now, as I'm sure in Michigan, they're patrolling the streets.
They hear you, the cop, get a little mouthy at the bar.
No, there's no will to enforce it.
The same thing with Arizona.
They had books, laws on the books for a long time against abortion.
Yeah, Oklahoma.
Nobody enforced it.
They had sodomy laws on the books, I think, all the way up until, I think, at least the 70s, if not the 90s.
And I hear.
Like, I don't think it's public information, but I've heard from some legislators that in the great Republic of Texas, we still have sodomy laws on the books.
But at the end of the day, we're not a nation of laws, as Steve Dace often says, but we're a nation of political will.
Right.
Yeah.
The Supreme Court overrode our laws.
The Supreme Court overrode our laws.
When we were in high school, you're telling me activist judges took it upon themselves to dictate morality?
Someone should look at that.
The state dictated morality.
The morality of a people?
Yep.
But the point is that, like, all these things that people think is just so outlandish and foreign and that could never happen and that would be terrible and I can't believe.
We're not, this is not a pipe dream.
This is not, this is not just some random hypothetical.
We're talking about something that has happened before and it happened here.
Yeah.
And not just hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
We're talking about decades.
Ancient world.
We're talking about decades ago.
Not that long.
Decades ago.
And then the question is, okay, so how, You know, let's just do a quick assessment.
How we've been doing, you know, like we changed courses.
We, you know, we stopped being a Christian nation and we started being a secular nation.
And how's it going for us?
Like, do we have, you know, like, are there less trusting, prosperous, happy, healthier than we had ever?
I would say.
So it's just, you look at that, it's like, what has the abandonment of Christian nationalism gotten us?
It's gotten us no borders.
A full fledged invasion of the third world that is R A P I N G, you know, women, children, abortion en masse, on demand, for any reason, at any time, LGBT mafia, exploitation of children, that like all, and done by, you know, it's gotten as human trafficking, you know, with surrogacy, right?
From like federal politicians bragging about it, conservative politicians.
Pundits, political pundits, bragging about it, and other conservatives writing, like, congratulations, this is great.
To Michael's point earlier, a lot of NGOs, non governmental organizations that were spiritually affiliated, and churches, particularly the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church, were heavily involved in the use of state funds to settle refugees and immigrants here.
So churches took it upon themselves to twist the scriptures and to be overly welcoming and to bring in as many people as possible.
They took the state's dime to do it.
Again, you have the state influencing the church.
These churches and these spiritual organizations took that money and shuttled them in by the millions and settled them and gave them everything they need and supported them and taught them the language.
Churches did that, they did it on the state's dime.
Yeah.
Nathan's back there eating chips because Wes just had a great point for about three minutes straight and the camera was on me the entire time.
You were nowhere to be found.
Nathan's just, he's like, I'm done.
I've checked it out.
Call it.
It's Friday.
Well, let's get to that last objection because it's a good one.
And then let's deal with the super chats also.
Yep.
Go ahead.
So, the final objection that we saw to that is that that's just not the American way to do things.
That in our history, we have been very conscious of putting a wall between the church and the state.
For example, again, the First Amendment, Congress.
Now, right there is Congress.
Unfortunately, there is a Supreme Court case that ruled that in Congress, there's actually implied as well state congresses.
So, it's not as though, well, federal can't restrict speech, but the state of Oklahoma could.
So, at the state and the federal level, we have the First Amendment, which does say Congress shall make no law respecting the free speech.
Expression of the other things they're allowed to exercise, and then religion being one of them.
Same thing, I think it's Article VI.
There's no religious tests required for public office.
And it's hard to face, and it's even sometimes hard to hold as a good citizen of the United States.
But ultimately, our allegiance is not first to the United States.
It's God, it's family, it's country, I think would be a good kind of ordering of those three.
And when the duty to God, the duty to uphold righteousness, the duty of the state to do good, when that conflicts with, well, what about my Constitution?
What about the will of the people?
And even the Constitution, it's just so silly.
It's like, what's the first word?
Congress.
So, Congress cannot determine we're going to have the Anglican Church of America at the federal level.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says that individual states could not determine.
And I'm not even saying that that's necessarily a good idea, but what I've advocated for years now, at least two or three years, I helped in writing the statement on Christian nationalism and the gospel.
But what I've advocated for is at the federal level, we should declare ourselves.
Formally declare ourselves as a Christian nation, and it should not be confessional but rather creedal.
It should be creedal.
And that would also, by virtue of being creedal, Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed, Chalcedon, it would necessarily include not just all Protestants, but it would include Roman Catholics as well.
So that's at the federal level, creedally, a Christian nation.
And then we should adopt formally some kind of preamble to the Constitution that publicly and clearly, explicitly declares the name of Jesus and the Triune God as a preamble to the Constitution.
And none of that would contradict the First Amendment.
You would not have to revise the Constitution at all.
The First Amendment, Congress, so then you don't have a federal national church of whatever, Presbyterian or Baptist or Anglican or Catholic or whatever.
But creedally, it is a Christian nation at the federal level.
Then individual states actually could, without any breach of the Constitution, could set up state churches.
I personally don't think that's a great idea.
But states could do that.
The point is, people don't realize.
People just don't know our history, not just Christian church history, but even American history.
They don't realize how Christian this country really was.
They're like, Well, you can't do that because of the Constitution.
It's like, my friend, the Constitution would allow state churches, it would allow the adopting of a preamble to the Constitution, it would allow a creedal declaration, not at the federal level a church, but still at the federal level Christian.
In a creedal sense, an adoption of a Christian preamble, state churches, and putting all the homosexuals in prison.
That's your constitution.
You're like, well, I just want the constitution.
Like, no, you don't want the constitution.
Blasphemy laws like Michigan, right?
Blasphemy laws like somebody calls Jesus the bastard son of a whore, jail.
Right.
Who would say that?
A lot of people would say that.
But jail right away.
Right.
Breaking the Sabbath, blue laws on the books in many states, still on the books.
Jail.
There's states where like shopping is not allowed in that county, Paramus, New Jersey, one example, not allowed on Sunday.
And that's my point.
That's what I want.
I just want the detractors to be honest and say, because they're like, well, we just love the Constitution.
No, you don't.
You love the de facto veil that has covered the Constitution since the Hart Seller Act, since the Civil Rights Act.
What you love is not America's founding.
What you love is not America's Constitution.
What you love is 20th century post war liberalism.
That's what you love.
Right Wing Watch is a subsidiary of People for the American Way.
We're People for the American Way.
Right.
Their American Way sounds a lot different than our American Way.
Right.
Natural Order Snaps Back to Culture00:15:32
And ours is more historical.
Who's in charge of this People for the American Way?
Who founded it?
Who funds Right Wing Watch?
It clips us out of context and tries to make us sound extremists.
I'm just curious who is it?
You already know.
Is it an every single time kind of situation?
It's an every single time.
Back in the 80s, and the ERLC.
I was hoping maybe it wasn't this time, you know?
Well, disappointing.
The ERLC actually collaborated with them during Clinton's administration for a religious liberty bill.
Guys, things have been bad for a while.
But the point is, to your point, Joel, they haven't always been.
It's not as though we were an agnostic, democratic, come as you are, open board.
We weren't that for a long time.
Amen.
And here's the point that we've been making for quite a while ad nauseum, but I'm going to make it again.
So, It wasn't that long ago.
It happened here and it happened recently.
Christian nationalism.
So here's the point.
Not only was it recent and not only was it here, but here's the other thing.
People think, like, yeah, okay, so you're convincing me that, like, yeah, this might be our history, and yeah, it might even be somewhat of our recent history, but it'll never happen again.
And this is the last piece of the puzzle that I think is a major white pill and that we should be encouraged by all of it got undone in the last 50 to 70 years.
Yep.
50 to 80 years.
It's actually easier to go back.
It actually took billions and billions and billions of dollars.
To artificially manufacture and propagandize and lobotomize a nation of people to remove themselves from what comes logically, reasonably, naturally.
Like to convince people that boys are girls and girls are boys.
To convince people that, you know, a baby in the womb, well, I don't know.
I mean, is it really human?
Maybe, you know, maybe it's a snail.
Maybe it's a snail.
Yeah.
Maybe it's, you know, like who's to say that it's a human being?
It's human when it passes through the birth canal.
Yeah.
Like until then, you know, it's, it's, As far as we know, it's a potential, you know, blue whale, you know, or what, like, and that, like, do you know how much money, like, how much money from the universities to television programs to, you know, legacy media to, like, the medical establishment, like, and that's not even to begin to talk about, like,
the politicians and all, like, do you have any idea how much money and manpower and intentionality that it required?
In these last.
It's still only possible in the wake of a catastrophic world war that reset the entire world.
That's the only way it happened.
So, in these last 50 to 80 years, it's not just like, hey, we've had Christian nationalism here and we've had it recently.
Because that is encouraging, makes it seem less preposterous.
But the last piece of the puzzle is people could still say, yeah, but it'll never happen again.
It's like, no, no, no.
You know what people thought would never happen?
This.
Right.
70 million mothers murdering.
Their own children, transgender, drag queen story hour.
Like, if you had told people in the 1950s, stuff of nightmares, yeah, that this would have, they'd be like, no, yeah, no.
The men storming the beaches at Normandy, like, this is what you're defending.
And this is what you're fighting for.
You are fighting for principled pluralism so that we can have drag queen story hour.
Yeah, the British men, like, you're there so your country can be hollowed out 60 years later.
This is what you're fighting for.
And if you had told them that, they, like, I'm telling you, you think there's no way we could get back.
To a moral foundation.
But they never in a million years would have believed that we could have gotten to this because it's not just anti Christian.
It's not just anti Christ.
It's anti nature.
It's anti reality.
It's anti reason.
It's anti logic.
It's anti the natural world that God established.
It's a revolt.
What we've been experiencing is a revolt against the natural order.
And nature will not, like, nature won't.
Won't allow it, not perpetually, not indefinitely.
It will snap back.
The natural order will snap back.
Nature will find a way.
Nature will win.
And so it's going to snap back.
So the only question is when this happens, this great reversal, which will happen, it is happening, whether you like it or not, what is it going to snap back to?
It's going to snap back to nature, but will it snap back to a Christian view of nature or an Islamic view of nature or a pagan view of nature?
And because it's in our own history, and because Christianity happens to be true, the triune God is the real God, snapping back to Christian natural principles and natural law and Christian nationalism would be the most sensical.
It would be the most natural.
It would be the most fluid transition that you could possibly have.
But my only concern is that there's like 14 Christians talking about it.
Right.
Seriously.
Like, so all these people, you're worried, right?
You're Christians and you're saying, well, I'm worried that there'll be abuses of power or it's going to be Roman Catholic, you know, Catholic integralism, you know, where, you know, like, okay, well, one way maybe to avoid that is maybe you could help us out and we could have more than 14 Protestants talk about these things.
But right now, like, you're right.
Like, it's going to snap back to nature, but it probably won't be Protestant, Christian, natural.
Worldview.
It probably won't be that because every single Protestant has stood up and said, no.
Right.
No, we are like, there's a lot of things we're uncertain about.
There's a lot of subjectivity when it comes to Protestantism, but there's one thing that we universally and unanimously have decided together, and that's that Protestants will lose.
We've decided that.
We are committed to make sure that when things snap back to the natural order, by golly, we're doing everything we can to make sure that it's.
Muslim, pagan, or Catholic.
I'm like, this is your legacy.
This is Jeff Halfley.
This is the legacy of Protestant boomers.
Had a great quote.
Super chat.
And then counterpoint.
Let's do it.
Well, if you could go back, Nate, so I can see what he followed it up with.
So $4.99 super chat.
Thanks, Jeff.
Always great to see you.
Baptists complain about Christian nationalism, but as soon as 10, 20 years ago, it's like the 2000s, Baptists enforced bans on alcohol sales in localities where they were strong enough in number.
Go down.
They opposed Christian nationalism.
But have no problem in imposing Baptist nationalism or an issue that only Baptists feel strongly about.
It's a great point.
Like, of course they did it.
They just, they had the will then.
And what we lack now is the will to define.
But it was something they cared about.
That's right.
So, like, blasphemy, people saying that Jesus is a bastard of a whore.
Baptists don't care about that.
Right.
Drinking.
There could be dancing.
Right.
We're talking.
The drinking and the dancing could be happening.
Now they're dying.
No, seriously.
And it's sad.
We're Baptists, okay?
So we're not just trying to pick on the.
But, like, let's just admit that for a second.
Like, when it comes, like, Anybody can do, you can, like everybody is constantly saying, you can just do things.
That's right.
Like, if you have enough people with the political will, you can just do things.
So, when Baptists have political will, they just do things.
And what do they do?
They make sure that no one has a good time.
They have the political will to make sure that there is, you know, like regional misery.
Like, we want to make sure everyone's bored.
That's what Baptists have the political will for.
My own grandparents, you know, like my mom grew up, they couldn't, they would always play 42.
Dominoes, right?
They would have tournaments in the church.
People bet on dominoes all the time.
And they were betting on dominoes back then.
But dominoes were allowed, and Uno was allowed.
And Uno Brook.
That's right.
And Skip Bo.
Yep.
But not playing cards.
And it's not that they banned gambling, but the playing cards, even without gambling, just playing spades or playing hearts or playing, you know, or playing war, the highest card wins, weren't allowed to do.
And my grandfather, who is a wonderful Christian man with the Lord now in glory, who I deeply love and deeply respect, it didn't matter.
Like Baptists, when they had the numbers, and they actually still have the numbers, little known secret, but when they had the numbers and they had the political will, they joined together to do what?
To ban spades and hearts and playing cards and beer.
And to be fair, there were not as big of issues as we have today.
That's true.
So the drag queen wasn't rolling into the library and they're like, hey, don't go in there.
There's a book on alcohol.
To be fair.
But you are right.
Like, they knew how to wield power.
They knew how to be political.
That's the point.
They knew how to assert themselves.
They knew it.
People are political animals.
Everyone is political.
It's not whether but which.
Everyone is political, and you can stop something the moment that you want to.
Like with COVID, right?
Well, the science changed.
Nope.
The political science changed.
COVID and the lockdowns and the jabs and the mask, it all stopped when?
When there was a new strain that wasn't as contagious, you know, no.
It stopped the second that the American people said, eh, we're done with that.
Yep.
That's all it takes.
The moment the American people are done with something, eh, we're done with transgenderism.
We're done with wokeism.
We're done with it.
Yeah.
Yeah, seriously.
That's all it will take.
That's all it takes.
Which is already in about a two year process of people dropping it like a hot potato.
That's right.
Leaving the Human Rights Council.
The new Snow White movie is like bombed.
I think it's like the worst rated movie.
Second worst Disney bomb so far.
It's like ever in a hundred year history that Disney has been making movies, they've been setting money on fire lately.
I'll tell you what, some men just want to watch that world burn.
But the point is, like, the moment that you're it's political will, everybody is a political animal.
The moment that you're you're had enough that you're done with something, you can just be done with it, and you can do that with um, you can do that with bourbon or you can do it with blasphemy.
The choice is yours, you know, you can do it with.
Playing cards, you know, or you can do it with Drag Queen Story Hour.
The choice is yours.
This is a little bit of a white pill because it means that they could do it, right?
They could do it.
They know how to do it.
Always could have done it.
And they, again, being Christians, broader than just Baptists, but like Christians at any moment, you can just do things.
You can just wake up and say, no, yeah, we want a Christian nation.
We actually want a Christian nation.
We want public celebrations that recognize Christian holidays.
That are distinctly Christian.
And we can still have some of the things that are part of our heritage.
It's become a part of our culture.
Santa Claus, like each private family, they get to decide according to their conscience and what they're going to do.
And yeah, pastors probably shouldn't preach a sermon on Santa.
They should preach the scripture.
But in the public sphere, like we're going to have some Santa stuff, but we're also going to have Christ.
And we're going to have Santa bowing down to King Jesus.
We're going to reenact St. Nick punching.
Yeah, and it'll be Santa punching Aries.
You can correct behavior you don't want.
I was in the library, maybe about a month or two ago at this point.
Guy had a nasty shirt on, my kids were there, and I told him he couldn't come around there.
Like, you can't be in the kids section.
Yeah, and he went and changed it.
I stood up to him and I said, He's like, Well, that's just your opinion.
I said, No, it's not.
That is an objectively disgusting shirt.
Don't come around my kids.
You can start correcting people.
Don't play that language, don't or don't play that music.
Rap, beautiful.
Don't use that language.
Don't wear that shirt.
You're not allowed to do it.
Who says me?
Me, and every other parent agrees with me.
Like, we have young children.
We go out to eat, and if there's a transgender server who's like obvious in their attire, and turns out that they're going to serve our table, and they come up to the table.
Our family gets up and we leave.
Two men holding hands.
Hey, don't do that.
Not around my children.
Yep.
All it takes is the political will.
And there are millions and millions and millions of Christians in our nation.
And they just need to be encouraged that you can just do things.
You can actually have a Christian nation.
You're allowed to have a country.
You're allowed to have a Christian nation.
That is our nation's heritage.
Our nation's heritage is not just, it's not atheism.
It's not.
There were some deists in there.
There were some deists in there.
Although I read an interesting statistic last night that argued hard that it was maybe three or four, it was 5% of them.
And they went through the official registries of what church.
Some of them maybe went to church and didn't share the conviction, but they were members, all but three of them, of established local churches.
Right.
And that's just even that.
So, one, it was minimal.
And even that, that's at the time of the founding.
This is like late 1700s.
That's not even to begin to speak of.
People forget that American history stretches back further than just 1776.
Right.
Yeah, 100%.
So, you get to the Covenanters.
You know what I mean?
You get to the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
And you get into like the 1600s, you know, and earlier 1700s and the colonies, 13 colonies, and it's, there's no debate to be had.
It's distinctly Christian.
Oh, yeah.
Unapologetically Christian.
And for the most part, other than I think, what was it, Rhode Island or something like that was Catholic, other than Protestant?
Maryland.
Yeah, Maryland.
It's distinctly Protestant.
And so, yes, you can have a Christian nation in America.
That is its foundation, it's its heritage, it's its history.
The people, the American people, the Christians in America absolutely have the ability, the potential to get that back.
It just requires the political will and people just saying, that's it, we've had enough.
To confront people, a little bit of will, a little bit of spine, and a little bit of testosterone.
The world doesn't end when you do that.
It's a little bit awkward.
And then life goes on.
Right.
Yep.
Let's see the super chats.
Super chats.
Here we go.
All right.
Jeremy Kearns, great brother.
Looking forward to seeing him at the conference.
$9.99.
Thanks, Jeremy.
Good afternoon, gentlemen.
I find some Baptists' impulse to cast doubt on the Roman Catholic Church and cultural Christianity goes against the classical reformers' argument that the Lord has preserved his church.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Like, we are not that kind of Baptist.
We actually think that there were Christians before Martin Luther.
Yep.
The bar is someone asked me, Roman Catholic, like, do you think I'm saved?
I obviously know their heart, but I said, Have you repented of sin and placed faith in Jesus?
Like, that is what's preached by the apostles in the epistles.
Repent of sin, trust in Jesus.
Obviously, we want to expand what that trust means.
Faith and repentance.
What Jesus, who Jesus actually is.
Well, he's the, you know, he's the creative being.
Like, whoa, hang on, we got a problem there.
Yeah.
But, like, that bar, that is the bar.
You and I have.
Generally speaking.
You're right.
You and I have had this conversation several times, and it's a distinction that most people don't notice, but when you see it, you can't unsee it, and it's vitally important.
Faith Alone Versus Doctrines of Men00:08:44
But there's a distinction in being saved by faith alone versus being saved by faith alone.
Faith and understanding and believing that we're saved by faith alone.
Right.
Saved by faith in faith alone.
Right.
Are we saved by faith alone or are we saved by affirming the doctrine of faith alone?
Right.
Like that actually is different.
Like there are plenty of people.
Well, no child would be saved.
Exactly.
They don't because they don't understand, they can't articulate, you know, the doctrine of sola fide.
But there are children and even before, you know, the Reformation, like plenty of people who had faith.
Saving faith.
And they were saved by that faith alone without ever knowing of the doctrine of sola fide and salvation by faith alone.
And so, like, that's what, like, when we get into soteriology, it absolutely matters.
We're not saying it doesn't matter, and we're not saying the Bible doesn't speak to it.
The Bible does speak to how we're saved, not just that we need to be saved, but how we're saved.
The Bible absolutely addresses these things.
Ephesians 2, you know, that we're saved by grace alone through faith, and this is the gift of God, it is not your own doing, so that no man can boast.
This is, you know, God's doing.
And so, like, the Bible speaks to these things, and we hold as Protestants these doctrines for a reason.
Yeah, like understanding being able to articulate the five solas is not, it's ironic actually.
It actually goes against the five solas if you hold adherence and understanding of the five solas as a prerequisite for salvation.
Right.
That actually goes against, because there's not a six sola that says, and the six sola is being able to affirm, understand, and articulate the previous five solas.
That's no.
It's faith alone, trust, faith in.
Faith alone is what saves when it's placed in Christ.
Right.
It's not like faith alone.
It's just, it's not other things attached to it.
It's faith is the only thing that counts towards Christ.
And people, wrongly, in time, there is a level of idolatry that we would see in the Roman Catholic Church.
They add some things on top of it.
For sure.
But those things don't, I would say, they don't necessarily invalidate the faith because it's faith, not even the strength of the faith, but the object of the faith.
That's right.
So it's that faith alone that in Christ actually saves and in his kindness in many ways.
In his kindness, he counts that faith even when it's marred with.
And I added this on top of it.
And I went to Mass every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
And I did the Hail Mary.
Like, those things can be added on top.
And someone still, not in every case, but they can still be saved because the object of their faith at the core of it is Christ.
It may be a weak faith, a faltering faith, a faith, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.
But that faith placed in the right object, jumping out with a parachute that actually works.
You don't have to know everything about it.
A divided faith, I believe, help my unbelief.
And certainly a small faith.
It's not, Jesus doesn't say the faith of a mountain.
A mountain sized faith could move a mustard seed.
But it's a mustard seed can move a mountain.
So, even so small faith, divided faith, weak faith, faltering faith.
But the question is simply is it true faith?
And what makes the faith true is its object.
Is it Christ crucified?
Do you believe that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God?
Do you believe that He lived a sinless life?
Do you believe that He died as a substitute, that He died in your place?
The wages of sin is death, and He took your sin.
And took your wage for sin, the punishment, the just punishment, the wrath of God in his death on the cross.
Do you believe that he bodily rose from the dead?
Do you believe that he ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty?
Do you believe that he's going to return to judge both the living and the dead?
Do you believe these things?
And are you trusting in Jesus?
And do you agree in what he calls sin?
And are you seeking, to the best of your ability, by God's grace and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, to repent?
Of your sin and to turn to Christ, knowing that you are a sinner and that you continue in this life to sin, but you're seeking to put your sin to death.
Do you believe these things?
So that doesn't mean every Catholic is saved.
Certainly not.
Every Protestant is not saved.
There are plenty of professors only who are not truly saved.
But when we look, all this back to Jeremy Kern's super chat, but when we look at church history, we don't believe that it begins in the 1500s.
We believe that God has preserved throughout all of time, He's preserved faithful remnant.
And even with, you know, when you look at Catholicism through the age, there are ages where there were extreme excesses, and then there were times where there were less excesses.
There are good times and there were bad times.
The time of the Protestant Reformation was a particularly bad time.
And it's not the only bad time.
There were also some other bad times.
But there were plenty of moments, centuries before the 1500s, where there were lots of faithful Christians who loved the Lord.
Yep.
All right.
Scroll up there, Nathan.
So we have Rubicon499.
Thanks very much, Rubicon.
As a Baptist, my independent fundamental Baptist dispy bros drive me nuts.
They are anti-knowledge and church history, Ruckman and his crowd.
Why is this and how to fix it?
Love the show.
Anti-church history?
Yeah.
You have to be to be an independent fundamental Baptist.
Well, that's, and he wants to know how to fix that.
I don't know how to fix that.
I don't think you can.
I think, like, you literally have to stop being independent fundamental Baptist.
Yeah.
Like, there is a reason, like, why IFB is particularly known as despising church history.
Right.
In many ways, like it's like, I mean, obviously, they would despise Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and those kinds of things, but in many ways, the great irony is that they share so much in common, right?
Um, that they legitimately believe that, uh, that basically, like, you know, everybody was faithless until all of a sudden, you know, in a very recent history, um, that we finally, you know, went back to the Bible, you know, and like, and we're the only ones who have, um, so yeah, I don't, no assumptions, no a priori is just right, we got to.
Right.
And that's what I always, you know, like that was one of the winning arguments for myself, even personally, and wanting to become confessional and creedal, was realizing, you know, like somebody, you know, helped me understand.
They said, Joel, everyone, again, it's the old adage, it's not whether but which.
Everyone's confessional.
It's either historic confession that's tried and true and written by better men than you, or it's your own confession that you're making up as you go along that's in your head.
And that's what I realized is because that's how the, you know, the independent fundamental Baptist wants to.
That's how they want to frame the debates.
And it's a false dichotomy.
They want to say, you know, on one hand, we have the Westminster divines.
And on the other hand, we have the pure, unadulterated word of God.
In the King James Version.
Words of man versus the words of God.
Which one of them?
They want to look for us in the King James Version.
And, you know, if it was good enough for King James, it's good enough for me.
And, like, that's not the debate.
Nobody is arguing the Westminster Confession or the 1689 over and against the Bible.
The question, and here's what they're saying.
It's just the pure Bible.
No, it's not.
Every time an independent fundamental Baptist steps into the pulpit and begins to preach, unless he's simply opening up the Bible and reading word for word the book of Hebrews or the book of Galatians, the book of Ephesians, and then without any interjection, any commentary, any addition, and then sitting down, unless he's doing that and calling that the sermon, then what he's doing is he's interpreting.
Everyone interprets.
It's so it's not on one side we have the Bible, and on the other side we have man's interpretation.
It's always man's interpretation.
The only question is which man, not whether, but which.
So, so that it's either Athanasius or Fred and George and Bubba in Alabama.
Do they do they know Greek and Latin?
Who who have why would you bother?
Like, yeah, that's right.
I mean, but that's like at the end of the day, like literally, like that you have to understand that, like when the independent fundamental Baptist.
It's the Word of God versus the doctrines of men.
No, it's the word of God interpreted by you versus the word of God interpreted by people who are intelligent.
Majority Belief Does Not Define Truth00:15:07
Ooh.
That's the difference.
So, no, you don't fix independent fundamental Baptist.
You leave independent fundamental Baptist.
All right, I'm going to go rapid fire since I think a lot of these are just thanks.
Jeremy Kearns, 499.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.
Psalm 33 12, King James Version.
Love it.
John Inman, great brother.
$20 super chat.
Thank you, John.
Love you, gents.
We love you too, John.
Hopefully, we'll see it's guys' night tonight.
So, yeah, maybe we'll see him there.
John, yeah, Jeff Hafley, uh, $4.99.
Since World War II, the Baptists fought the hardest to stop liquor and protect segregation, they almost privatized public schools to prevent the latter.
Yep, that's true.
But the Baptists they know how to potluck and they know how to mobilize.
I don't know what happened where we lost, and they know how to stop alcohol and stop, uh, right?
They wanted to keep segregation, right?
That's what they're fighting for, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh, five dollars from Rob, another great brother, met him here.
Great stream, guys.
Thanks, thank you, Rob, and then.
499, Jeff Halfley, mega red pill.
Considering that 90% of the population believes things on the basis of what they think is popular and will do them good in real life.
I don't know what the second half of it is, but basically, people are easily swayed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was funny.
It was Josiah Lippincott.
He said, like, really, honestly, like most people, it could be a Democrat party sign or a swastika in their front yard.
They wouldn't really care either way.
Like, people really are that influenceable.
So, you just have to win.
That's all it takes.
You just have to win.
And it does not take a majority.
To win, it takes a few powerful, influential, strategic, organized individuals to just win a popularity contest.
And then all the NPCs, which is 90 95% of the population, they'll just fall in line.
Like, I mean, you know, we've said it before, but I mean, the turnaround, how quick it was, the turnaround from she's so brat to doing the Trump dance.
And I'm not talking about like with conservatives, I'm talking like.
Like teenage girls in public high school.
I remember, I witnessed it.
I saw, you know, like, yeah, Kamala, Trump is colluding with Putin, you know, and like the Russian collusion, you know, back from 2016.
I know those people.
They believed it, they were passionate.
But here's the deal they didn't have any real conviction, they didn't have any real information.
And the moment that all of a sudden Trump won, Like all of a sudden, people were embarrassed.
People are still embarrassed that they voted for Kamala or that they said anything positive about her.
Like he won so badly.
Throughout the tweets.
Yeah, exactly.
So then it's just you change the chip in the back of the NPC's head.
That's what most people are.
They're non player characters, they're robots.
And all you have to do, you don't have to, right?
Like when you're arguing with people, you have to remember you're arguing with the television.
Like it's not a real person.
They're not independent, self thinking people.
That doesn't mean they're not made in the image of God.
That doesn't mean we don't love them.
That doesn't mean they don't have dignity, that we don't treat them with respect.
But you just have to realize if you think that through facts and logic and long conversations that you have to actually convince and persuade 51% of the population in order to enact change, then you don't understand politics.
You don't.
Jeff just said part two.
You will all change on a dime the moment that you win, and you do not need the majority to win.
Never have.
Jeff followed up that first half.
Another super chat.
We have to take control of the institutions of influence, otherwise, tens of millions of people will go to hell.
They follow the strong and popular.
Right.
That's right on.
Yeah.
And that's why Christian culture matters.
What?
Well, Christian culture, there's a bunch of people who have false assurance and think they're saved and they're not.
Uh huh.
Christian culture lends towards, you know, false conversions.
Uh huh.
Yeah.
But what does secular humanistic culture lend towards?
What does Islamic culture lend towards?
What does Jewish culture lend towards?
Well, what it lends towards in those is like, well, In those contexts, you know, the few, the proud, the genuine, the authentic Christians, you know, and their faith is purified, you know, like gold and like, yeah, that's true.
Uh huh.
There's, in those cultures, there are some people who are bold as lions with genuine faith that go to heaven.
Um, and 95% of the population goes to hell.
In Christian culture, yes, there are some false conversions and there is some false assurance.
Um, but the vast majority of people, and this gets back to like, what is salvation?
What does it take to be saved?
Faith.
Of a mustard seed.
In Christian cultures, I am of the persuasion, and I got so much flack for this.
We did that clip where it's like, more people will be in heaven than hell, and people lost their minds.
They're like, tell me you've never read the Bible without telling me, you're a heretic.
And then I just retweeted them and put a quote from Spurgeon.
And then, of course, what they did was they're like, well, I guess I was wrong this time, but you're still a wolf.
I'll get you next time.
Yeah, I'll get you next time.
The least genuine apologies I've, you know, like, you're still a wolf and you're going to hell and we hate you.
But also, yes, I guess you're correct.
Um, so but the but the point is like what Spurgeon Spurgeon believed that there were time periods uh where it was gin, you know, like the majority of people were Christian, right?
The majority, like the Jeff Halfley is absolutely correct.
The majority of people follow the what's popular, they follow whoever's in leadership and even believe what they're told to believe.
That's right.
Yes, better 20% of your populace is Christian, truly regenerate, and 80% profess it.
Then 20% is regenerate, and that's the only 20% professing it.
Same amount of people, heaven and hell.
But that 80% professing is going to make for a much better ordered society, orienting people towards, in the future, heavenly and earthly good.
And what I want to say is, I personally, I want to say it's even better than that.
I reject that premise.
I don't believe in the 1950s.
I just don't believe it.
I don't believe that the vast majority of people were professing only and that they're all in hell.
I actually don't believe it.
I actually believe that the average person.
Was a born again Christian.
And they may have not had the most robust doctrine.
They may have had like some legalistic, you know, silly things that we'd be like, that's not in scripture.
Where do you get that?
They may like, but a childlike faith, like you sit them down, tie them to a chair, and give them truth serum.
And they genuinely would say, even though a lot of it is just cultural maraise, and you know, like all, but they genuinely would say, yes, I actually believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
And I'm trusting in Him that He died on the cross for my sin.
I believe that.
I believe that when Christianity wins the day, in moments of Christendom, in the dark ages, you had all these people who were uneducated.
Most of them couldn't read.
They didn't know the ins and outs of Christian doctrine, but they knew that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because those battles were fought by the minority once upon a time and they won.
And then it became dominant.
And then all these post generations were able to take those precious truths for granted.
They believed.
The triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus is the Son of God.
He was born of the Virgin Mary.
He lived a sinless life.
He died on the cross for my sin.
He bodily rose from the dead.
He ascended to the right hand of God the Father.
And I'm trusting in him and repenting of my sin.
And those people were Christian.
And to live in a world like that again, where there's some bad theology, there's a bunch of Catholics, there's a bunch of independent fundamental Baptists who's to say what's worse?
But there's crazy views on all sides that we would disagree with.
But there's a universal sense of Christ is King, Jesus is Lord.
And yeah, that is a much better society temporally.
And it also is far more conducive to heavenly good eternally, genuine conversion.
Yep.
Tyler, thanks very much.
$4.99.
Looking forward to reading your book.
Thanks very much, Tyler.
We will look forward to seeing you too at the conference next week.
And Jeff puts a cap on his discussion.
$4.99 again from Jeff.
Kids believe because of the influence of their parents.
Nations believe because of the influence of the leaders.
The only thing I would add to that is ultimately, everyone believes because the Holy Spirit moves in their heart.
It just so happens to be that He often moves in the heart of children through the teaching and training of the parents and in a nation through the influence of the leaders.
Right.
We're not denying the way that God saves.
He saves sovereignly as a work of the Spirit, but the Spirit sovereignly moves through providence and human agency.
It's like, well, if it's just the Spirit, then why?
Why even evangelize at that point?
But we would all say, well, yeah, but the Spirit is pleased to work with the gospel being proclaimed.
So, the same way that the Spirit uses prayer, the Spirit uses evangelism, well, the Spirit also uses governments and cultures that are Christian.
Because, yes, it is.
You're talking about first and second causes, they're not pitted against each other, there's no contradiction.
So, in the ultimate sense, the Spirit.
But in the temporal human agency, human sense, People, culture, parents, Christian governments, school was it a Christian school or not?
And of course, that's true because if it's just a crapshoot, spirit, you know, like just whatever, you know, he just randomly does things, you know, and it's like, yes, he does sovereignly do things, but he does it through human means.
And if you don't acknowledge that at all, then what benefit is there in being Western?
Rather than being born in Iran.
So I guess there's literally no tangible or eternal benefits whatsoever in being born in a Christian country versus a Muslim country.
But we all know that there are.
Of course there are.
I want to acknowledge this question.
I'll say I'm not an expert, and so I'll not answer, but do acknowledge the question.
What do you know about the Catholic literature saying that they changed the Sabbath to Sunday?
Constantine made it happen.
I know that was one of the topics debated early on, it was the date of Easter.
As well as the transition from Saturday to Sunday.
But because I'm not well read enough on it, I don't have anything to offer.
But at some point, we could definitely talk about the Sabbath.
I do know that in the New Testament already, they were meeting on the Lord's Day.
Yep.
Which was the first day of the week.
So that we, yeah, I can't speak to, same as Wes, I can't speak to Constantine and what he did and how much he was doing.
But we do know that in the first century church, there was already the pattern of meeting on the Lord's Day.
And we see that even, you know, in scripture, you know, like Paul saying, like when you gather together on the first day of the week, Taking a collection for the saints.
So, like, we know that they were daily breaking bread, and that's not a reference to the Lord's Supper communion, but community and like potlucks and just being together relationally.
So, they were daily getting together to submit themselves to, you know, breaking bread, sharing a meal, the apostles' teaching, and prayer.
So, we know that the early church was doing that daily.
But then we also know that there was something particular that was happening on the first day of the week that was probably a larger gathering.
And that's why the apostle Paul says that that would be the most conducive context for taking.
This offering, and then of course, we also know that Jesus, the resurrected Lord, appeared to his disciples on the first day of the week.
He so he resurrected on the first day of the week, and then a week later appeared to them again on Sunday, the first day of the week.
So that's why we call it the Lord's Day, the day that the Lord rose from the dead.
And from that pattern of twice, not just once but twice, the Lord being resurrected and appearing to the apostles on the Lord's Day, first day of the week, and then doing a week later on the first day of the week, not on the Jewish Sabbath, but on the first day of the week.
And then Paul, still already in his lifetime, when Peter's still alive, you know, some of the many of the apostles still alive.
Is already referencing that yes, there's a daily congregating of believers that seems smaller and more organic, but then there's a more official, formal congregating of believers that happens on the first day of the week, and that's where it makes sense to take a collection of alms for other Christians that are suffering and are poor and in need.
This pattern was already well underway.
But what hadn't happened yet was the temple hadn't yet been destroyed, and so Christians were still.
Many of them, though, to be fair, had been progressively one by one, would get banned and kicked out of the synagogues and wouldn't be able to.
But for those who still could and hadn't been kicked out yet, they would be meeting on the first day of the week as Christians, but they would also be going to the synagogue on the last day of the week, the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday, so that they could evangelize and talk to their kinsmen according to the flesh, Jews, and tell them about the gospel and reason from the scriptures as Paul did.
He did that, you know, and would do that in any city that he was in, any Jewish city he was in, as long as they would have him until they would kick him out.
So I don't view it as like, for me, from what I've read, definitely theologically and in terms of historically, I'd have to study more, but I don't see it from the study that I have done as like this clear transition of it was Saturday and now it's Sunday.
But it was actually that in the first century church with the apostles, it wasn't that Sunday replaced Saturday.
It was that Sunday came alongside Saturday.
So you still had the Sabbath until 8070, and the final completion of that old covenant was wrapped up and done away.
So you had like this interim period of 40 years from the resurrection of Christ and his appearance to the apostles to the full completion and doing away with the old covenant given to Israel in 8070.
So you had a whole generation, 40 years of this overlap, and it was both days.
So it wasn't that Sunday just replaced Saturday.
Is Sunday for the Christians came alongside in addition to Saturday?
And then Saturday was done away with by force, by virtue of there's no more temple and we're all dispersed, and a bunch of us are, you know, a bunch of Jews are now dead, you know, as Titus has destroyed Jerusalem and the temple's gone.
And that just became the pattern.
Sunday Replaced Saturday by Force00:00:29
So, all right.
Well, thank you guys for tuning in, and we hope to see you guys at the conference this next week.
Very much looking forward to it.
April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
And make sure, if you're not able to make it, make sure that you're able to catch the live stream by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
Patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
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Sign up for the gold tier and you'll be able to live stream the conference.
Seven main sessions, three panels, all happening next week.