Pastor Joel Webbin and Dr. Wolf dissect 17th-century New England persecution, arguing Puritans suppressed Baptists as political subversives rather than mere heretics, noting Roger Williams' banishment stemmed from charter violations. They trace religious liberty to Protestant coexistence over Enlightenment philosophy, critique the Antioch Declaration's white supremacist undertones, and refute the First Amendment as a secular mandate. Ultimately, they assert historical American identity required Christian nationalism within a federalist framework where states retained church establishment powers until the mid-20th century. [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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Roger Williams and the Antinomians00:15:20
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Okay, here we are.
This is a 10 part series.
I'm Pastor Joel Webbin.
This is part nine.
And Dr. Wolf has prepped me right before we started recording.
We've got an idea, roadmap of what the episode's about.
I forget virtually everything that you said, but I remember this.
We're talking about persecuting Baptists.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, and why we should do that all the time and bring it back.
But we are going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about the early American history being a pan Protestant movement.
You know, the immediate objection is, yeah, pan Protestant, my butt.
You guys were, you know, picking on the Baptist.
What's up with that?
And if you go back to being a Christian, you're going to do it again.
I'm Presbyterian, so a little bit different.
When you say congregationalist, you're talking about like a John Owen kind of like there's still Pado, but there's not a Presbyterian outside of the local church.
Yeah, like John Cotton, John.
Yeah, they were all a Baptist polity, but a Pado covenantalism.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Close enough.
Yeah.
I could get behind that.
Yeah.
I'm close.
Yeah.
I've been close for a while now.
Yeah, I think, you know, someday I'll convince you of the Presbyterian polity, but, you know.
Honestly, the most convincing thing of the Presbyterian polity is every time I go online and read the thoughts of other Baptist ministers.
Like, somebody needs to be in charge of these guys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes it can be bad because there's that good old boy system and a certain mentality that can prevent you from speaking clearly and truthfully about things.
Right.
Because then you have the heavy hand of a Presbyterian.
Well, I was going to say, you know, like.
And celebrities in a denomination can be very kind of informally influential at a Presbyterian.
At the time of this recording, like, honestly, my Baptist polity and congregationalism is one of the things that saved me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With a recent controversy, you know, like, and really putting a strong arm on, like, you got this, you know, this guy and he needs to be brought up on charges or church disciplined.
And because I'm a Baptist, I was able to say, take a hike.
Yeah.
I mean, it shows that, like, that, like we said before, that something can be good in structure.
Like, it's good to have a, The type of authority structure you have in a Presbyterian model.
But it can be abused.
But it can be abused and it can actually be harmful.
Yep.
That's what we're not here to talk about.
Okay.
Well, take us away in terms of early persecution and Baptists.
We want to be pan Protestant.
We actually think it'll work, even though there are some examples that can be cited to the contrary.
Yeah.
So the main point of this episode will be how you can be Christian nationalist.
You can be a good Christian nationalist and be a good American.
Okay.
Because there is that question of, well, wait a second, isn't the American tradition opposed to Being a Christian nation?
Didn't we found a secular republic or a secularist republic?
And don't we have a First Amendment and all that?
And one of the things I want to say is actually there is continuity from our Puritan past with the founding and beyond.
So people think that there was a major break, like the founders broke away in principle from their forefathers, particularly from New England.
And so I want to start the story in New England, in the 17th century New England, focusing on Massachusetts Bay Colony and particularly Boston.
So, that was, they were Congregationalists for our purposes.
They're Presbyterian back then.
They, of course, didn't, they wrote against each other on polity, but they were, generally speaking, 99% on the same side.
Right.
And so they all left and landed.
In what we call Massachusetts Bay.
And they came to what's often called an errand in the wilderness.
Before the Puritans, you had the Pilgrims.
So, there is a difference between the Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock, and Salem, but came to be kind of under the same colony.
And so, you have the.
So, anyway, I'm going to focus on the Puritans.
They found the Masters Bay Colony, they have their city of Boston, and they wanted to make it in what they said the congregationalist way.
So, that was the intent.
That was the people that came there initially, and most of the people that came there subsequently over the subsequent decades.
We were there because they wanted also to be a part of this congregationalist way.
They did believe that the civil magistrate could suppress religion.
They did believe, or suppress false religion, that they could prevent the building of new churches with contrary denominations like Baptists.
And we'll get into that.
But anyway, one of the first problems they had was by a guy named Roger Williams.
Now, to this day, a lot of Baptists.
And others and religious liberty people will look to, oh, well, but it happened to Roger Williams.
Look, it happened to Roger Williams.
But they really haven't read the primary source documents on this.
Roger Williams was actually kind of a nut.
He was not what you think he was.
The reasons why he was eventually banished from Boston, or, well, I mean, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was because one, he refused the oath.
There was an oath that they were afraid that there was a bunch of bishops and Jesuits that showed up.
And so they required an oath to, and he refused and thought that it was a violation of the third commandment to have a required oath to live in Massachusetts.
That was one reason.
They thought he was subversive.
So again, it was about politics.
The other was that he thought that the charter that allowed them to be there to found the colony in the first place was invalid because he thought it was immoral.
So the very basis for the colony.
The basis for the king claimed to the place, and then with the magistrates there, the foundation of it was actually, he thought was immoral.
So, again, subversive.
And really, the main reason was not that the reasons for banishing was not actually religious liberty.
He did later on have this, like, he published tracts against the suppression of false religion, and John Cotton responded to him.
He eventually, by the time before he was kicked out, he was kicked out by his own church in Salem and he became like a family church.
Basically, the only members were him, his wife, and I guess maybe his kids.
So he was by his own church kicked out for basically being a nut.
So he really was, even though you could see he was an early advocate of a type of maximal religious liberty in a way, though it wasn't actually as maximal as you'll think, he was not kicked out for religious liberty.
It was mainly because he was subversive.
Of he was subversive to the system in place.
So that's the first thing to keep in mind when we, when he did that.
That's just on Roger Williams.
And he's really not what people think he actually was.
And the common theme throughout all these different, you know, quote, persecutions in New England was they thought these people were subversive, they thought they would destroy the civil discipline and the spiritual discipline of.
The place that they were in.
They said that we came here to organize ourselves, church and state, in the Congregationalist way for this purpose.
And if you come here and join us in that purpose, then you can stay here.
You can join the church.
And if you don't subvert it, you can be here all day long.
But the moment you begin to undermine that thing that we all came here to do, well, you're out.
The same thing with the antinomians.
You have Anne Hutchinson.
One of the fears of antinomianism was not just the theology, it was that antinomianism would undermine both the church discipline and the civil discipline.
Like if you start rejecting, The use of the law in terms of your sanctification and use of the law in your spiritual life, and just dwell on your justification and don't actually examine yourself with regard to your good works, then that will undermine the entire system we have set up here.
And so, Antinomians is a long story about that.
But the fear was not only theological, but it was political.
It was a fear that you're undermining the project we set out to do.
And so Anne Hutchinson was eventually banished, as was another guy named Wheelwright.
And Hutchinson and her family tragically were killed by Indians later on.
But so that was that.
So it was not simply like, hey, here's a bunch of heretics who are here and there and saying these things.
Let's round them up and let's whip them and beat them and punish them.
It wasn't like that at all.
It was actually a civil political concern wrapped up with.
These people.
And that justified to them to act against them.
And so that's the antinomians.
The third one was the Baptists.
Oh, actually, I could talk about the Quakers.
I'll just say the Quakers were nuts.
Yeah.
You always hear like, oh, they executed, what's her name?
Mary something.
I forget her name.
They executed her.
And they were absolutely nuts.
Like today, we think of the Quaker as like that nice liberal, or not even nice, but some short haired liberal woman who goes to a Quaker church doesn't believe anything.
It's a social club and a political activist committee.
They're harmless type people apart from their bad politics.
But back then, they would get off the ship, they start rambling and yelling at you.
And there was one instance that Samuel Sowell records in his diary or his journal that a woman shows up to church in blackface wearing a bag and just starts shouting at the minister.
So the Quakers were actually very crazy.
Their theology was not only bad, but their Public behavior was notoriously horrible.
And so they'd be banished, then come back, they'd be banished, they'd come back.
And eventually, after like the fourth or fifth time of this happening, they said, that's enough.
And they executed a couple of them.
But again, it was a matter of public disturbance, civil disputes.
They disregarded civil magistracy, you know, Christ, the idea of a Christian state and Christian.
So again, it was largely because of subversion to the project they had chosen to undertake.
And then the Baptists, it was the same way.
They would affirm that these Baptists were fellow believers.
So, this is a very important principle to understand about New England Puritans they didn't, like John Cotton and the other guys in New England, they were not saying that we are the only true Christians.
They would affirm that the ministers in the Church of England were true ministers, that they administered true sacraments and the word.
They would affirm this about the Baptists.
That they would even affirm this about antinomians as well, that they were Christians, just in error.
The same, that's how they considered Baptists to be Christians, but in error.
And they even allowed, Cotton says that within their churches, they allowed antinomians and Baptists to be full members of their churches.
And there were actually members of their churches, but they were just told, you know, you can't talk about the Baptist thing.
You can't do the antinomian thing.
That stuff's bad, but you can still, as Christians, have every right to the word and the table and the sacraments as all the rest of us.
That's how I treat Arminians.
Yeah, okay.
Right.
But that recognized that's a really important early sign of Protestants.
And this is even like you read this in Althusiasts and older writers where.
There are differences that you consider important, but you can still recognize that, yes, I consider you an heir, but also a brother in Christ.
They would not extend that to Roman Catholics and some notorious bishops and Church of England, but your everyday Church of England minister, they wouldn't say you're false, like you're not a gospel minister.
In fact, one of the disputes with Roger Williams that I didn't mention was that Roger Williams would say that if someone goes to England, let's say he's a merchant, And he attends a Church of England Anglican service, then he needs to come back and repent because that's a false church, according to Roger Williams.
And what John Cotton says, people don't realize, is John Cotton the Puritan.
What he says is actually, you know, Roger, you're wrong.
Like we still affirm that there is true gospel ministry occurring in the Church of England.
We just think they're these heirs that by conscience we can't participate in.
So we're, you know, we came out of there.
So, Roger Williams was the sectarian.
Like, he was a sectarian to a pretty extreme degree, where the Puritans were not.
And so, you could do that, come back and still be a full member of a New England church.
So, anyway, so yeah, like extension of brotherhood of true believers.
Now, with the Baptists, it wasn't simply that they were Baptists that they were persecuted.
It was that the Baptists wanted to erect their own churches.
And in doing so, It was, they were considered subversive of the project because Baptists would not recognize anyone else's baptism.
They wouldn't recognize the baptism of the civil magistrate.
They wouldn't recognize the baptism of the church ministers around them.
That's the difficulty that we experience today it's not a two way street, it's a one way stream just by nature of the position.
Now, I've found some workarounds in our local church, but just the nature of the position is it's far easier for a Presbyterian or any.
Pado Baptist to accommodate a Credo Baptist than it is for a Credo Baptist to accommodate the Pado Baptist.
Now, I, you know, I have most of my friends at this point are Pado Baptist.
And so even locally, I have Pado Baptist friends.
Americanizing Catholic Loyalty00:15:04
And so with families that are of the Pado persuasion, I, you know, I send them down the road and they have their babies baptized and I close my eyes and, you know, and welcome them back.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
And that's precisely, that was precisely the problem back then, is the Baptist would very, Openly say that you're not, basically, you're not a true church.
You're not full of true Christians.
And in the words of like Cotton Mather, he said that they would de church or unchurch the churches around them, including the ministers, the magistrates.
And so if you consider it's a small population, they came here for congregationalism, and now you have people coming there who are not welcomed or invited, who are now creating.
Essentially, established institutions of what considered subversive to that.
Not just that they have their own churches, but those churches are denying the whole fabric of everything else.
Yeah.
And they're not just doing their own thing.
They're doing their own thing while publicly decrying and denouncing everyone else's false.
Yeah.
And to the Puritan, to the Congregationalist perspective, like I said, they were willing to receive Baptists as church members in their churches that could not be reciprocated.
So all the things could be reciprocated and these things accommodated.
Like I think that Cotton, I forget if it was John Cotton or Cotton Mather, said that they would even allow like Baptists.
To dismiss themselves when there was an infant baptism.
I could be wrong about that, but I recall something about, okay, this violates your conscience.
We'll accommodate you.
So if this bothers you, you can depart when we baptize the infant.
And so there was accommodation.
But then once you create the church and it's established and now you have Baptist flourishing that then could be subversive of the broad.
So that was then suppressed.
And the magistrate said, no, you cannot have a church.
And that went on for many decades.
There was like whippings and things like that that went on.
And To try to prevent that.
Years later, you have Cotton Mather, who's the son of Increase Mather.
So, Cotton Mather's writing about the early 1700s.
And he actually did not like persecution of heretics or of the Baptists.
He didn't consider Baptists heretics, but he did not like persecution, as he called it, of these people.
But he did say that the reasoning behind for the Baptists was there's a reason behind it.
And it wasn't simply because they were Baptists.
But anyway, the point being is I think the fundamental principle is that people were acknowledging each other's mutual faith.
But they had a political concern that is not simply political.
It's also related to everything else.
But that's why they suppressed these people, including the Baptists.
You go to the 1690s, and now after you have the English Bill of Rights, now it's religious liberty is the official law of the land from the king on down.
And so the charter of Massachusetts was revoked.
And basically, what was put in its place was the religious liberty doctrine.
So from there on, there was no formal.
Persecution apart from all these people.
Now, so moving on to the narrative, in the 17 teens, you have Cotton Mather still there and Increase Mather, his father, is still there.
Increase was part of the persecutions of the Baptists in the 1670s and 80s.
But now you have Cotton Mather, a Congregationalist minister, giving the ordination sermon for a Baptist of the First Baptist Church of Boston.
Hmm.
So you see a change.
So you went from, yeah, we're brothers, but you can't have your own church, to I'm going to give the sermon where you're ordained for this church called First Baptist Church of Boston.
And so you see a change.
And that event, I think, is really significant in our history, even though very few people know about it.
It shows that brothers in civil life can say, look, we have our disagreements, but we can actually get along.
Like this project of Christian civilization can operate with us despite our differences and no need to throw out, you know, to attack each other physically and through law.
So the idea of religious liberty then in the American context was not simply reading John Locke or reading Enlightenment philosophers about the history of, yeah, about religious liberty and freedom of conscience, nor was it even about simply.
You know, preventing the wars of religion.
Like, that is part of it, certainly.
But it's also a more positive development, I would argue, between brothers saying, hey, we can do this together.
Like, this can be something we can do as Protestant brothers.
So, religious liberty in the mind of the founders, you're saying, was not for the purpose of like the church of Satan?
No, no, absolutely not.
Yeah.
I thought that's what it was all about.
Yeah.
It's so bizarre that, like, when you.
When you see, like, yeah, because people think that it's this abstract enlightenment notion that came from nowhere from just the brains of someone sitting on his desk in an office somewhere.
But it was really largely a product of just experience.
It was Protestantism in affirming that we could be mutual brothers despite our differences.
And then the experience with each other of saying this could work as a civil.
As a sort of pan Protestant project together.
So that was all, that was early 18th century.
And then you get into like the founding period.
And by then, every colony had adopted religious liberty.
There still were establishments.
You got like a kind of Church of England dominant in Virginia, you got congregationalism in Massachusetts and in Connecticut.
Like religious liberty places like Rhode Island, like a non-establishment like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.
So it's kind of a mixed diversity, but broadly speaking, they're all inheritors of that experience of Protestantism.
So even with an established church in Massachusetts, you still had Baptists and Presbyterians, and I don't know how many Anglicans were there, but so yeah.
And this is how we have to then come to understand like the First Amendment.
Right.
What's the first amendment?
Like mutual denominations of our common Lord, or how does the phrase go?
You mean in like the, oh, you're talking about the revision of the Westminster Standards?
Yeah.
So that comes about.
Do you remember the wording?
I think it says that, the, I think you quoted it.
Yeah.
Like of our common Lord.
Yeah.
I know the of our common Lord.
I can't just, I can't quite remember verbatim the preceding part.
It's like multiple denominations or expressions of our, of worship of our common Lord or something like that.
Yeah.
And that, that I would say is an, is, I think that the American revision, it, it actually is not as much of a substantive change as people think.
Think it is.
I think there are some changes that are probably changes in substance, but it's also bringing Presbyterianism into the American context.
And it's in a way updating, even though I don't affirm that confession, I affirm the other one, but I would say it's in a way updating the confession for the American context in light of the development of religious liberty.
But it still permits, and most people to that day believe you could still suppress atheism, you could still grow some piety.
It does not like permit the Church of Satan.
It's not going to permit the like, it doesn't in itself say you can't like suppress Islam or like non Christian religion or something like that.
It's talking about how we as a churches of our common Lord are not to attack each other on the basis of that.
It's not speaking about false religions or atheism.
It's speaking about let's not be jerks to different Christian denominations.
Yeah.
And I would say, like, even back then, they would probably, many of them would exclude Church of, you know, Church of Rome or Roman Catholicism.
Yeah, they would have.
From under common.
I think some, like, people like John Witherspoon, yeah, I think he would exclude it as well.
But there was a, it was kind of a, there were a lot of anti Roman, anti Romanist or anti Catholicism sentiment at that time.
That's true.
But still.
Yeah, no, I mean, it was actually very common.
John Jay was very anti Roman Catholic.
And throughout American history and into the 19th century, there was a fear that Roman Catholics could not be fully loyal to any country that they were in because they have a dual loyalty.
They are loyal, not even a dual loyalty.
Their supreme loyalty is to the Pope, who has civil authority in a sense, in their minds, over all civil parties.
And not only does he have civil authority, and so a conflation of spheres and different jurisdictions with church and state, but.
Which is not a theocracy, but an ecclesiocracy for all intents and purposes, but also a dual loyalty or supreme loyalty to whatever nation, you know, by proxy that the Pope happens to be in.
It's like, because it's not like he's not, he's your Pope, but like right now, you know, it's like he's in Rome, you know, like he's in Italy, you know, and then he also is from a different, you know, right now, like what is it, Argentina that Pope Francis is from.
So it's like you got a guy who, Probably you would expect, you would even hope, has some sense of fondness for Argentina, but is located in Italy and yet has some kind of authority that's binding over someone in China.
It's not a great system.
Yeah, no, and this wasn't irrational.
I mean, we tend to think of Roman Catholics, we consider Roman Catholics today in light of Vatican II.
And when suddenly the Roman church discovered religious liberty, I think it's hilarious when these guys like quoting like the various papal statements regarding religious liberty.
It's like you guys were literally the worst.
Like people, the Calvinists were persecutors, but if you read like the Jesuits like Suarez and Bellarmine and some of the others, they said, no, like you cannot tolerate that, the heretic.
And by heretic, they meant anyone who does not submit to the Roman church.
Right.
And they were absolutely brutal.
And so, even Althusius in 1604 or 1603 is saying, like, you Jesuits are nuts, and that we Protestants can actually extend toleration to people.
Even to heretics, if you like, I mean, yeah, even heretics if we need to.
And so, yeah, it was the Roman Catholic Church that was absolute.
But in the 19th century, the fear was that, again, that their papal power meant that they can't actually have true loyalty.
And also, that they thought that if you're under a papal, if you're from a Roman Catholic country that is in a way submitted to the Pope, you don't have the political principles of freedom that make it so that you can properly assimilate.
So, if you're a German Catholic or an Irish Catholic, it wasn't because you were Irish or because you were German in itself, because there were German Protestants who actually assimilated and Irish Protestants who assimilated very well before that wave of Catholic immigration.
But it was the fear that you've been subjected to tyranny your entire life, and now you come here and you're not just going to suddenly adopt these Anglo Protestant understandings of liberty.
And you're going to actually influence the country for tyranny.
So, anyway, that was the 19th century.
But over time, even the Catholics, everything kind of became Americanized, and some of that could be negative, but I think a lot of it was positive.
And, like we were saying, the Westminster and its Americanized.
Revision, you know, taking some of what's innate and historical and traditional to America and fitting that within a Presbyterian scheme.
But even, you know, from a little bit of my reading and conversations, it sounds like that even with Catholicism as rigid as it is, that Catholicism in America was also Americanized, that over time, even the priest, you know, like there's a different flavor of sorts of Catholicism here in America.
And that's probably true of every country.
Like when you think of Catholicism in Mexico, which I've Witnessed on various occasions and trips, it's far more superstitious, you know, whereas American Catholicism is only a little stitches.
Yeah.
Well, and even the, you could say the native born type Roman Catholics, they like the famous, like the Carols were from Maryland.
So there are a lot of Roman Catholics in Maryland.
They were delegates to the various founding events and in the founding era.
And they actually were part of the school of thought that rejected papal supremacy over civil matters.
So, when I say Roman Catholicism, there has been a stream within kind of native born Roman Catholic Americans who, in a way, they wouldn't call it this, but essentially Protestantized their view of church and state.
So, actually, the Pope, I mean, one of the issues all the way back to like the 1640s and 50s when they were trying to establish in Maryland.
Was that the king of England required an oath that you will give supreme loyalty to me, the king?
And the pope said, No, if you sign that, I excommunicate you.
The Dumb Line of Equality00:05:30
Wow.
And so there was all of this drama, and there were attempts to try to how can I do both?
How can I sign it?
Can you revise it a little bit?
Because then I can sign it.
And the king was like, No, not doing that.
But they were of the opinion, even though they would get excommunicated.
But in privately, they were of the opinion that actually the Pope does not have the power to do that.
So there were those who believe that.
But the fear was that the immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Poland and elsewhere and later Italy, that those people would not have that, that they would affirm papal supremacy.
That was one of the fears.
I did the same thing with the Antioch Declaration.
I told my church members if they signed it, they'd be excommunicated.
JK.
That's not the point of our conversation.
I understand the sentiment and some of the points I agreed with, but then other points I'm just like, guys, it's like, I feel like statements and declarations and especially theological statements, I'm of the persuasion they should be timeless, you know, and not just a product of a personal particular.
Also, not contain like dumb things in it.
That's generally my rule too.
If it's dumb, then like, let's not.
The Aristotle line was pretty dumb.
I think even the Enlightenment line was dumb.
Yeah.
Because I think the.
Remind me that line.
I know we're like switching.
Where it says, like, it's not just the post war consensus.
Yeah, it's tracked.
Right.
Because if it was just stated in the negative of all the ills of the world can't just be traced back to the 1940s, sure.
Right.
But it actually made a positive assertion of like, and almost to say, instead, we believe that they can all be tracked back to this other event.
I would say that actually, for most of the collaborators, their theology and worldview.
Is rooted in enlightenment thinking and that mine's not like mine's rooted in like early modern Aristotelianism or you know, whatever, whatever you want to call it.
But there's absolutely is like rejection of natural theology is that's David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
Um, the uh, the idea of limited government that's very much of a Western enlightenment development through John Locke and and others.
That uh, let's see, um, the the uh, the the The rejection of natural truth or being able to acquire natural truth through your reasoning powers.
The idea that you can't actually kind of know the good apart from revelation, and that ultimately you are just a kind of a sort of bundle of sentiments and emotions that don't have a clear ordering principle that you can't know apart from something above you in scriptural, like for them, scriptural revelation.
That's just like Thomas Hobbes.
That's the Leviathan.
That's the anthropology of Thomas Hobbes.
So you just go down.
Like, keep going down the line on that.
So, I think like their system of thought is deeply enlightenment driven and deeply, like, in very nominalist, like, or, you know, William of Ockham sort of ways.
So, I mean, also, the economic system, like Adam Smith, like, their key guy for laissez faire capitalism is Adam Smith, who was a Scottish Enlightenment figure.
So, if like, that's not to say that they acquired all of their thinking from the Enlightenment.
But if all of that enlightenment is reflected in today, like, well, then they represent that version of it.
Just it just appears to be Christian.
Right.
Right.
To me, one of the lines that I thought was silly was just the notion that, and I think this is kind of an enlightenment thing also, like a weird application of egalitarianism that everything is team rolled and everything is equal, you know, in the positive sense, but also in the negative sense.
So the idea that, you know, we, I can't remember if they stated it as an affirmation or a denial, but we'll go with a denial.
Something along the lines like we deny that Talmudic Judaism is more of a negative impact than any other major world religion that's false.
But what was key there was you might have an argument if you were talking about in the eternal sense, like all falsehoods and heresies and blasphemies, apart from repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, are equal.
In the eternal sense of their ability to separate you from a holy God, they'll all send you to hell at a soul level, spiritual level, eternal level, but an earthly and temporal level, which is actually what they said in the statement was that it said in terms of their negative effects towards Christians.
So they're talking about temporal harms and effects in this earthly life for Christians.
And I'm thinking, like, put Judaism aside.
Like, the implication of that is that, like, all false religions in all places and in all times, temporally and their negative effects, particularly as it affects Christians, have been equal.
Funny Words in a Consensus Book00:05:23
And I'm like, I don't even know how you would begin to demonstrate that.
Like, how would you, like, I feel bad for John Travolta and Tom Cruise, but how would you argue that Scientology has been as harmful over the last 80 years, that that is an equal harm to 1,300 years of Islam?
I don't even know how I would begin to make that point.
So, anyways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, yeah, it was, it was silly.
I, I, I, I don't even know what to say.
I just thought it was like overall poorly done and in poor taste.
And especially in the context in which it was done, the timeframe was done.
So, yeah.
If there had been, you know, like genuine, you know, resolution, some time that passed, and maybe, and, and the biggest thing, honestly, is when you do statements like that, one, it should be, Very few and far between, if ever.
But in rare occasions, if something like that might actually be necessary, it becomes to me like all the more imperative, not just sheer number, but who is among that number in terms of collaborators and involvement.
Like, I think it actually would have been.
Now, I don't know if we would have said yes, but let's say that things were resolved and there was a generous and hospitable welcome given to you, me, Andrew Isker.
Brian Sauvay, you know, Ogden guys, to like come in also.
I don't know if we would have, but I'm just saying, but like, if they're, you know, if it's like, hey guys, what do you think?
Like, even a recognition, like, we recognize that you guys are not unhinged and that you guys are not harboring, you know, sinful malice and hatred.
You know, we don't like the, you know, we disagree with some of your doctrine.
We don't always like the ways that you word things.
You could even say, like, we think at times, if, you know, you're not Careful enough and it leaves the door open, even though you're not that guy, it may leave the door open for somebody who is that guy.
But still, by virtue of inviting the other side of the aisle, guys like us, to the table, that actually might have got a lot of support.
Instead, it got fake signatures of Aristotle, which is a shame.
It could have been a document, at least the attempt.
I don't know if it could have succeeded, but at least the attempt to have a consensus document between, especially in a time in which you and I, You and I don't want disunity with these guys.
I didn't write the book ever, even once thinking of James White or Joe Boot or any of these people.
Did you even know who they were at the time?
I don't think I knew who Joe Boot was.
I knew James White.
I didn't know Joe Boot.
I knew Samlin.
I knew he wouldn't like the book.
He didn't like me from a long time ago.
But yeah, none of us wanted to have disunity and certainly not to have a type of public brother war.
Right.
Things that could have handled privately should have been handled there.
That's a white supremacist slur, though.
Brother War.
Yeah.
Is that officially now?
I heard that argument.
To be fair, Nathan looked it up and he's like, oh, snap.
He was like, it's actually a little bit true.
The No More Brother Wars was something that white supremacists used to not fight against.
Funny that that's actually just kind of funny now because none of us knew that.
I didn't know that.
No one knew it.
And the thing is, we didn't even come up with it.
So I think I retweeted some things of other guys saying it.
But as far as my memory fails me, I think I'm pretty sure it was Ogden.
And particularly, I think Eric Kahn, I doubt he knew.
Then again, the fact that it's Eric Kahn, I could see him knowing and not being a white supremacist, but doing it just to rile people up.
Yeah.
Like a call for peace that he knows that those on the other side of the aisle will be offended by.
I could, like, that seems like an Eric Kahn thing.
I've learned so many white supremacist slogans because I've been accused of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like when the book came out, they're like, what is it, 13 words or nine words?
I don't even know what it is.
The 11 words?
11 words.
I don't even know what it is now.
And it's like, oh, yeah, that's in like, they literally counted the words of a statement in my book.
Like, and they said, it's 11 words and it has a certain ring to it.
That's what Wolf's alluding to.
And I had no idea even what that was.
I don't know that either.
Other things too.
Like, I used to.
I thought the 11 words was in reference to your Lone Bullwark.
Oh, I thought the 11 words.
I don't even.
No, no, no.
Well, that's in.
I think it's a 13 word thing that neo Nazis used.
Oh, I didn't see it.
And somehow they thought that a sentence in the introduction is in reference to that.
And I didn't even know what that was.
I have not even heard about that.
There are certain words that I used.
I used the word like instauration, which is an old word for restoration or recovery.
And they're like, oh, that's a far right word.
And I was like, dude, I'm learning stuff by you accusing me of all these things.
It's really funny.
It seems like you guys know more about white supremacy than you do.
I know what this stuff is.
But anyway.
How do we?
Oh, we got on that because we were talking about.
I brought it up.
It was my fault.
Christian Nationalism and State Taxes00:07:56
No, it's fine.
Spice things up a bit.
Declaration.
Yeah.
So we were talking about declarations and then, and, and I like, I was thinking of like confessions and things like that.
And I think there was something before I, well, let's just, let's go.
We got a few minutes.
So let's go.
Let's go to the First Amendment just so we can cover that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There you go.
That's a statement.
That's a declaration.
Yeah.
All right.
So the First Amendment.
Here we go.
The First Amendment.
First word of the First Amendment.
Yeah.
It's actually hilarious where I watch these guys, like, they'll attack.
Me and say, First Amendment, and they'll read it out loud.
And then they'll be like, That means that there can be no religion in anywhere in the United States.
Right.
And it's as if they didn't even read the first word.
The first word is Congress.
What the, you know, the First Amendment is not recognizing a universal principle for all levels of government.
It is a prudential statement saying that it would be.
It would be ill suited to have a national church at the national level because you have congregationalism in Massachusetts, you have religious liberty traditions in Ireland or Ireland, in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, and all that stuff were different.
So, the irrational fear, I would say, of the Anti Federalists, I think it was an irrational fear, was that someone would come to power and then the Presbyterians would make it a conventional state, something like that.
That's what they were afraid of, or actually, probably more likely, the Anglicans would have a Sort of like bishop episcopal thing that they establish.
So that was the fear, irrational, but nevertheless, that's what it was there to prevent.
It was not there to prevent the states themselves from having some relationship to religion, including having their own state churches.
And there were several state churches.
Which may or may not be a bad, good idea, but it would have been permissible.
Yeah.
And at that time, they were all very weak in the sense that the only thing was that you were taxed and that tax money would go to.
The church that the state recognized, or as the established church, or you can direct it to your own congregation.
So, if you choose, you can elect, you can through your own volition choose.
And I think in most states, it was like this: if you're Baptist, your money from the tax goes to that church or that denomination or something like that.
And the idea behind it was that, hey, you have these sparsely populated places.
They don't have a lot of money and they're probably not going to dish out a bunch of money to build a church and to have fun to minister.
Nevertheless, they need church, they need ministers.
And so, if you have this tax, this funds ministry so that everyone can have ministry.
That was the idea behind it.
It wasn't necessarily to replace your tithe or anything like that.
It was a way to fund ministry in the state because they consider religion not only good in itself as worship of God, but also good for the health of society.
So that was the idea.
And those lasted many years.
The last one was disestablished in the early 1830s.
But it did not establish a secularist principle that then went all the way down in the states.
The states, in Had the power to establish a church up until the 1950s and 60s, until they used the 14th Amendment to then apply the First Amendment to the states.
So that's how they get around the Congress word in the front they use the 14th Amendment to say, well, actually, all those rights now apply to the states, all the way down to the point where a football team cannot have a prayer before a football game on Friday night.
So, but yeah, that was a bad application of law.
But for most of our history, In principle, the states could have done a state church establishment.
They had blasphemy laws, Sunday laws, blue laws were very common throughout the country.
And so the idea that religion is separated from the state is absolutely false in the American tradition.
And so, in terms of Christian nationalism, I don't want to return to Geneva.
I know you don't want to return to Geneva.
No one I know actually wants to return to Geneva.
They are more pro establishment than I am.
But my vision is that a 19th century type of Protestantism with all its messiness, where we all say we are a Christian people, but we're a Christian Protestant people.
And so we're going to arrange ourselves in light of that.
That's my vision.
That'll look different in England.
The Christian Nationals would look different in England.
It would look different in Hungary and Italy and all these other places with their own traditions and institutions.
But we have federalism, which means that Idaho could have an established church, and, you know, so can Texas and North Carolina.
So, anyway.
Yep.
That's the idea behind it.
That's great.
And so there's no reason to say that to be a good Christian nationalist, you cannot be a good American.
I would say to be a good American, you need to be a Christian nationalist.
Because for most of our history, we thought of ourselves as a Christian people, even though it wasn't established explicitly in the Constitution, which I consider a mistake.
But among the people themselves, it was, we are a Christian people.
And this was always like, even in the early 20th century progressives, the progressive social gospel guys, this is how their argument for social policy went.
They said, if we are a Christian people, then we should have these social policies, XYZ.
And they affirm, we are a Christian people, right?
So, ergo.
So, that was their reasoning.
And so, their premise was, we are a Christian people.
Let's act like it.
So, even the left, you could call them the left on that side, said, we're a Christian people.
And it really wasn't until the last few decades when that was seemingly forgotten.
I mean, prayer was taken out of schools.
There was a strict separation of church and state, the wall of separation nonsense that came in there.
I know we're out of time, but last thing among the founders, Madison and Jefferson were not, they were in the minority when it came to church state relations.
If you read the Supreme Court documents in the last 80 years, they only cite Jefferson and Madison, but they were the minority position.
John Adams, George Mason, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, all those guys believed that a type of soft establishment for the states was not only okay, but it was prudent, it was right.
But in the end, over the course of history, really only from the last few decades, Madison and Jefferson have become the giants through which to interpret the First Amendment.
But that's totally false.
If you're going to interpret the First Amendment, it's better to look at John Adams, Roger Sherman, George Mason, George Washington, those guys, who all again, all affirmed.
That it seems right to tax people so they can fund ministry in the church and in the state.
So, anyway, that's what I'll say.
That's it, is that?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, this was episode nine.
We have our final episode to go.
So, if you're a part of this series, stay tuned.
We'd love for you to be able to finish off with us.
And our last episode, we're going to try to make it more practical, look at takeaways, applications, basically trying to answer the question in practical ways where do we go from here?
Yeah.
So, Christian nationalism, you know, for those of you who think we're crazy, then, you know, maybe tune out.
But for those of you who Like, hey, you might be onto something.
Okay, but how do we do it?
It actually might be the spiciest, you know, episode ever.
You just have to, I guess we'll find out.
Yeah, we'll find out.
So thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you in the next and final episode.