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July 22, 2025 - Stew Peters Show
01:00:39
Millstone Report w Paul Harrell: Supremacy of Jesus Christ: The Constitution’s Fatal Flaw?
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All right, folks, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for being with us.
As always, we can't do the program without you watching every single day.
We really very much appreciate it.
And this is the Millstone Report.
We've got a great show for you.
As you can see by the title of the show, well, it kind of depends because I rewrote the title for some platforms at the last minute to specifically, at the beginning of the show, we're going to focus on what Donald Trump just said from the Oval Office concerning Barack Obama being guilty of treason.
We're going to get to that.
But we're also going to talk a little theology or maybe I don't know.
I don't know how you would say this, the relationship between the church and the state.
We're going to take a look at what some people call the United States Constitution's fatal flaw.
We're going to do this later in the program.
That is not recognizing in the document what most everybody in the founding of the country believed, the supremacy of Jesus Christ.
And we're actually going to do that by taking a look at a letter that was written by a guy with the last name of Thornwell, who was a Presbyterian back during the Civil War and actually wrote a letter to the Confederacy urging them to do what the founders or the framers didn't do.
And it's absolutely fascinating, urging them to say, hey, look, now that we've got this new Confederacy, the one thing that you guys need to do there in Richmond, Virginia is you need to make sure that our founding documents, our Constitution acknowledges the supremacy, the lordship of Jesus Christ, and that the nations belong to him.
So we're going to talk about that later in the program today.
So if your title says that, just know we are going to talk about that.
But your title may also say something like this, which is Trump saying Obama is guilty of treason from the Oval Office earlier today.
Let's go ahead and get right into it because this is certainly an interesting development.
The very fact this is, I mean, this is going to be aired on television everywhere.
And here it is.
has submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
From your perspective, who should the DOJ target as part of their investigation?
What specific figures in the Obama administration?
Well, based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama.
He started it.
And Biden was there with him.
And Comey was there.
And Clapper, the whole group was there.
Brennan, they were all there in a room.
Right here.
This is the room.
This is much more beautiful than it was then, but that's okay.
I have nice pictures up.
They came out of the vaults.
They were in there for 100 years.
This is much more beautiful.
We have the Declaration of Independence now in the room, which wasn't here.
I guess people didn't feel too good about putting it here, but I do.
But you know what?
If you look at those papers, they have them stone cold, and it was President Obama.
It wasn't lots of people all over the place.
It was them too.
But the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama.
Have you heard of him?
And except for the fact that he gets shielded by the press for his entire life, that's the one they, look, he's guilty.
It's not a question, you know, I like to say, let's give it time.
It's there.
He's guilty.
This was treason.
This was every word you can think of.
They tried to steal the election.
They tried to obfuscate the election.
They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.
You've seen some pretty rough countries.
This man has seen some pretty rough countries, but you've never seen anything like it before.
So there you have it.
So now the question is, is that all we're going to get?
Is that all we're going to get?
Again, what's come out over the last four or five days has been just confirmation of what we already knew.
They framed him for treason, and it happened and was instituted at the highest levels of government, and it was a massive multi-year-long conspiracy that and I'll reiterate what I said because the more I thought about this, you know, this phony narrative,
this psychological operation about the evil Russians culminates with now at least a million Russians and Ukrainians combined dead and on a battlefield because Russia is bad, Russia bad.
It all goes, it really all goes hand in hand.
It's not like they did the Russia collusion hoax to take out Trump, but a derivative benefit of that is, oh, by the way, we're going to fight a proxy war with Russia, either in Syria or Ukraine.
And Ukraine was the winner.
And there are hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more, that are dead and continue to die every week because of this phony narrative that it was designed to stoke war.
And one of the reasons, I mean, the phony narrative was used.
It wasn't maybe designed, but it was definitely used to stoke this idea that we cannot have peaceful relations with another nuclear power, the Federation, the Russian Federation.
But that's just kind of my pet peeve on all this, because it's really disgusting when you think about how it's a real-life blood cost that you can actually attribute this to.
Having wicked people in office that are using their power in an evil way gets you evil results that spider web out, that fan out to so many other areas across the world.
And that makes me very sad.
It also makes me very, very angry.
So what happens?
Trump has called Obama guilty of this, that it's in black and white for all to see.
Will we get anywhere?
So Mike Davis, who is an attorney, former chief counsel for nomination, Senate Judiciary Committee, law clerk for Justice Gorsuch, he says this, to those on X screaming at Trump's DOJ team to do something, here's my response.
STFU, shut the F up.
He says crucial reforms have happened every day for six months, more so than any time in our history.
Get off your butts.
He says, well, I'm a nice Southern guy, so my mom listens to this show.
Get off your butts and do something yourselves.
They are in the fight every day.
You?
Michael Flynn Jr. says, all due respect, Mike, but I will never shut the F up until this DOJ acts on the clear as day evidence produced by Tulsi Gabbard that treason was committed against a sitting president of the United States and his incoming administration in 2016.
It's our job as citizens to hold our leaders accountable.
And then we have Katie, who, the defender of the Republic here, who was on this program last week.
She responds to say, the American people are exhausted.
I think this is a really good post.
The American people are exhausted.
Since 2016, we've watched President Trump, his allies, and JSIC's patriots get wrongfully persecuted, relentlessly targeted while the real corruption remains untouched.
We were told no one is above the law, yet when it comes to the powerful elite, all we see are sternly worded letters and criminal referrals that go nowhere.
No indictments, no accountability, just theater.
We want to believe that justice will prevail, but faith without action is blind.
Trust is earned when consequences follow crimes.
And until those who have been referred for prosecution are actually held accountable, don't tell us to sit down and be quiet.
Silence would mean we no longer care.
Thank God we still do.
We will speak up.
We will demand justice because a nation without equal justice under the law is no longer a free one.
Exactly.
And that endpoint there is what I've been saying.
Many people have already come to the conclusion that we are not free and we are slaves.
This will be the test.
Will there be people actually indicted and arrested and convicted for what so clearly was treason, what so clearly was the subversion of the very bedrock of our system, getting to choose who our leaders are?
And that's really the case.
I mean, that's the crux of the matter.
And so then, it really is.
I mean, are we really free?
A lot of us think we're free, but I don't think we are unless we actually control the power structures of the people that govern.
Unless we actually control them and we put them in office and they actually do what we're sent them to do and rise above all of the criminal activity.
It's definitely something to think about.
Very much so.
Now, also we have, well, let's just go here just for a second.
Over at Matt Walsh blog, yesterday on his show, he reiterated this sentiment.
Listen.
So what are you going to do, Trump administration?
What are you actually going to do about this?
Maybe something will happen, and I hope it does.
But the pattern has always been that Republicans allege high crimes and misdemeanors only to punish precisely no one for them and to hold no one accountable in any way whatsoever.
And this has to change.
It has to change.
Right now.
Democrats just spent years trying to imprison the president of the United States for fake crimes.
They pursued fake charges shamelessly and relentlessly for years.
For once, Republicans should apply that kind of intensity towards pursuing Democrats, including Barack Obama, who have all clearly committed actual crimes.
Enough with the tough talk.
Go kick down some doors.
It's time.
Way past time.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it really is as simple as get him before he can get us.
The weaponization of the government against Trump for the bogus crimes that Matt Walsh is referring to here.
Trump rode the wave.
Trump survived.
The idea is you may beat the charges, but you won't beat the ride.
Well, the ride was intended to derail his presidency, the idea of a Trump 2.0, the idea of a second term, because they knew.
I mean, the Mar-a-Lago raid, you know, I've heard people say, hey, how come you can legitimately.
And I'm not saying I believe this, but I will say that there is, it is some, the Mar-a-Lago raid is certainly a data point you have to consider.
Because a lot of people are asking, how can the Epstein files be doctored, but the ones against Obama, Comey, and Clapper are not doctored?
Well, actually, those were the very documents that the DOJ, the FBI, and Biden and Obama were after.
The documents that Trump had, you know, it was within his power to take, of course.
But they wanted to know what Trump had.
They wanted to know if he had any of the stuff.
I believe it's reasonable to suspect that they wanted to know if they had any of the documents that Tulsi Gabbard is now releasing.
And they wanted to get those back.
And so you actually could make the case that they were going to do that and then alter or destroy them.
Maybe they'll destroy the copies they had in their possession, but they wanted the ones that Trump had.
At least this is open to speculation.
It's open to speculation.
But we'll see.
I don't know.
The Epstein story is still not going away.
I'm not going to let it die.
I'm not going to quit talking about it.
The Daryl Cooper Tucker Carlson podcast on it, again, I said this yesterday, but you need to watch it if you haven't.
I watched the entire thing, and it was incredible of the command of the facts that Daryl Cooper had, just about the whole situation.
Ghelane Maxwell's father was actually, I had no idea the history behind Ghelane Maxwell's father, other than I knew about the media empire stuff, and I knew about the Mossad connection, but I didn't actually know what he did in his younger life.
It was actually just a fascinating conversation all around.
So we're not going to let that die.
We're going to continue to, you know, the thing is, is the Democrats are obviously going to use it.
They're going to use it as much as they can to try to derail the Republicans for the midterms.
And that's why transparency is going to eventually have to be key here.
I really don't see any other way around it.
I think that's why you have Pam Body now sending a DOJ attorney to talk to Ghelaine Maxwell in prison to see if she has anything she wants to bring forth on third parties and that sort of thing.
But the idea of no more tough talk is exactly right.
The president of the United States, our president, is in the Oval Office saying Obama and the like are guilty and they committed treason.
The question is, do you do anything about it?
And people are going to say, you know, you can't do it because it'll tear the country apart.
Well, what do you think they were doing?
What do you think we've been through?
The country has already been torn apart.
Families have been torn apart over politics, over the media spreading bogus lies and dividing us.
Somebody has to answer for that.
Somebody's got to go to prison.
If we want to have even a chance...
You're going to have to bring the intel oligarchy to heal.
You're going to have to bring this weaponization, this surveillance state that Edward Snowden exposed to all of us in 2012 and the media just, meh, whistleblowers like William Benny of the NSA telling us the capabilities of this massive surveillance state that even back then had been turned against us, but now we know it's been turned against us.
We have evidence that it's been turned against, not just Donald Trump, but the entire country.
I mean, do you remember the Utah Data Center?
Do you remember everything we learned about all of these different programs and all of the backdoors?
I was hearing Tucker Carlson ask Charlie Kirk last night about, or bring up the fact that the government was able to see his encrypted signal messages.
Yeah, there's nothing out there that we have access to that the Intel oligarchy doesn't have a backdoor access to.
We learned that through Edward Snowden, that these tech companies are not really private companies.
They're being, at the very least, subverted by the government, and the government demands backdoor access to any new piece of technology or platform that's on there.
This program is being broadcast and recorded right now into an NSA server somewhere near you or in Utah.
I don't exactly know where, but I covered that extensively back in 2012 because it was just shocking.
It was absolutely shocking.
And all of that has been turned against, was weaponized against Trump, but it's been turned against us as well.
Something's got to happen.
You have to bring the intel agencies to heel.
And arresting Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and the like is at minimum.
I mean, in reality, as daunting of a task as it seems like to arrest somebody like Barack Obama, it's really just a glance in the right direction.
That's how bad it is.
We're really just asking for a chance to save the nation as we know it today.
So, definitely something to think about.
Also, earlier today, Donald Trump was asked about Jerome Powell.
This is what he said.
It's something you sort of have or you don't have.
The job he's done is just terrible.
You ought to raise interest rates.
You know, we should be at 1%.
We should be leading the world.
Instead, we're paying 4%.
And if you look at what that means, that's over a trillion dollars in interest that we have to pay.
That with the striking of a pen, we would be saving more than $1 trillion.
Is that right, Scott?
Do you have anything to say about it?
It's something you sort of have.
So he wants them at 1%.
There was supposed to be some sort of speech by Jerome Powell at 8.30 this morning, and I never saw it.
I searched for it a couple of times.
I've seen some articles of the mainstream media.
People are actually urging Powell to resign to preserve the autonomy of the Federal Reserve.
It's almost as if, like, maybe they're saying that because they're worried that Trump is going to come after the Fed in a different way than he is right now.
Right now, he's just nudging.
Right now, he's just urging.
Right now, he's just trying to convince.
But what does the President of the United States do when he is done urging and convincing?
Federal Reserve, man, this is the big one speaking about corruption.
I mean, this is the big one.
This over 100-year-old centralized bank that's a private bank.
I mean, let's all remember, let's all remember these things that used to be considered conspiracy theories.
The Federal Reserve wants to maintain its autonomy from the United States.
That's the truth of the matter.
And these people, these so few people actually understand how all this monetary policy works, so the opportunity for corruption is immense.
The smaller a group of people there is that understand a complex system, the more opportunity there is for illegal grift and corruption.
We know this.
Will Trump do anything about it?
What happened to auditing the gold at Fort Knox, by the way?
Back in February, we were hearing about auditing the gold in Fort Knox.
Is the gold still there?
And we didn't hear anything about it after that.
I haven't heard anything about it since then.
The Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is urging the Federal Reserve to do an internal audit, not of their books, but of their practices.
He's accusing them of mission creep.
He says, you need to disclose to us anything that the Federal Reserve has grown in responsibilities, like all the responsibilities that have grown outside of specifically fiscal and monetary policy.
You need to stop it.
If your mission is not fiscal and monetary policy and it's crept into these other areas, then you need to end those programs.
So we'll see.
I would imagine that the people that run the Federal Reserve hate Donald Trump.
I would imagine the people running the Federal Reserve hate the American people.
I believe they have open disdain for us.
I believe they think that we're stupid.
And I believe they think that it is their job to set the economy just right, exactly the way we set the thermostats in our homes.
And that is what they do, by the way, and this is what Trump is saying.
These people think that they are our economic overlords or economic deities, and they are not actually looking out for the interest of the American people.
I would also say this goes for corporations.
Later this afternoon, when the Paul Harrell program goes live on X American News at 4 p.m.
Central, we're going to be talking a little bit with my co-host Rob Spencer, just a little bit about tariffs, but specifically, we have a story out there where Walmart is, well, grocery stores are raising their prices.
And in some cases, they're raising their prices on things that aren't tariffed at all, all in an effort to hurt the American people, make us angry, and to hurt President Donald Trump.
And again, all of this is so that Democrats can take back control on the midterms and impeach him.
This is the goal.
This is why it's important.
This is why we need to listen to pollsters like Mark Mitchell from Ras Mussen saying, look, right now, the generic ballot nationwide is D plus 4.
Republicans aren't going to hold the House if this continues.
So we have to have continued economic wins.
We have to rein in the Federal Reserve.
We also have to rein in these corporations that are essentially arms of the government.
The line between these private and public companies is very blurry in many instances because there's a rotating door of board members and government bureaucrats.
So that's the news.
Obama says he's guilty of treason.
Will anything actually happen, though?
That is the question on my mind.
Oh, by the way, I forgot all about this.
Forgive me.
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All right, coming on to a new topic here.
We've got about four minutes until I want to switch to how nations owe our allegiance to Jesus Christ specifically.
But I do want to hit this for a second.
Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert, getting canceled.
His last show will be sometime in May of 2026, which is actually pretty good.
He won't be on the air for the midterms.
He's upset, and he tells Trump to go F himself.
The late show host Stephen Colbert responded to President Trump's post that celebrated the cancellation of the program in his opening monologue on Monday.
Why it matters?
He says.
Colbert wasn't just a vocal critic of Trump.
He also criticized CBS's parent company, Paramount's decision to settle with him.
In his first show, since CBS announced it would end the program next year, Colbert announced Trump's Friday post that stated, I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.
His talent was even less than his ratings.
I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next, has even less talent than Colbert.
So Colbert responded by saying, how dare you, sir, would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?
Go F yourself.
So this is one of the left's new conspiracy theories that they have.
By the way, I think that's the first time I've ever accused a left of entertaining a conspiracy theory.
But they think that Trump getting $16 million.
So CBS News settled with Trump.
He sued them for editing that interview with Kamala Harris.
And they settled.
Earlier this month, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a voter interference lawsuit filed by Trump last year.
Now, they settled because they didn't want to get to discovery, in my opinion, and they didn't want to actually out themselves for actively deceiving the American people.
And this has made people so upset.
It made Stephen Colbert upset.
But there are now people trying to claim, like this Charlemagne guy, listen to this.
This guy from the breakfast club, Charlemagne, is now claiming that there's an overarching conspiracy and that CBS News not only gave Trump $16 million, but threw in the firing of Colbert in response.
Never mind the fact that the show costs $100 million a year and is losing $40 or $50 million a year.
That has nothing to do with it, I'm sure.
But this is what the left is now claiming.
This is their next big conspiracy theory.
Let's call it what it is.
Paramount is looking for FCC approval for its Skydance merger.
Trump can block that if he wants to.
So canceling Colbert is an obvious move to appease Donald Trump.
And I need to tell y'all something.
If you don't think we are under a regime with an authoritarian strategy, then you are bugging.
This is textbook authoritarian rule.
Target your critic, centralize power in a few hands, intimidate through punishment or removal.
And you know what that usually does?
Shuts people to F up, okay?
Tightens control over public discourse, sends a message to all media outlets that criticism of Trump could cost you access, approval, editorial control.
I feel the need to interject here, ladies and gentlemen, that in the opinion of this journalist, if Kamala Harris was elected, even somebody with his small, I don't reach a lot of people, okay?
Obviously, I want to reach more people.
But even, I mean, and I had conversations with my family about this.
Like, if Kamala Harris gets in, anybody that disagrees, anybody that even has a podcast like mine could easily be targeted by this government to silence us.
I was ready for it.
I was expecting it.
Didn't really know what I was going to do other than trust the Lord.
Hey, you put me here.
I'm going to keep talking and we'll see what happens.
But I know other people on the right were thinking the same thing.
So this idea is just absolutely ridiculous that he, I mean, total ignorance of the censorship that the right has experienced over the last eight years.
Your job.
This is what authoritarian regimes do.
They weaponize legal systems to punish dissent and control messaging.
What happened with Paramount and Trump is intimidation tactics disguised as legitimate legal action.
I thought this was the administration that didn't believe in censorship.
I thought this was the administration that believed in free speech.
They do.
Until you criticize them.
Paramount and CBS should be ashamed of themselves, and you can't trust anything you see on Paramount.
They're eating their own, ladies and gentlemen.
They're eating their own.
It's ridiculous.
The idea that this is Trump censoring CBS when the show costs $100 million a year and they're losing millions of dollars.
They're not making any money because nobody likes it.
Let me tell you what this really is because all the late night shows are going away.
This is not CBS News kowtowing to Trump.
This is CBS News recognizing that if their propaganda arm is going to continue, they actually have to have listeners.
They have to have minds to mold.
If they're going to be a propaganda outlet, they have to be an effective propaganda outlet.
And Stephen Colbert, obviously, if they're losing that much money a year, spending $100 million, losing $30, $40, $50 million a year, or whatever it is, then when you've turned on Colbert or Fallon and you're watching for a little bit and you're like, who is watching this crap?
You were correct.
No one.
The answer is no one was watching.
And this is a problem, okay?
We're a long ways away.
We're a long ways away from Jay Leno and Johnny Carson and David Letterman.
Those were effective platforms because people actually watched and it was really more based on actual entertainment than politics.
It was a Way to just kind of zone out for a little while at the end of your day.
And if they wanted to interject something there, they could, and they did.
Not as much, Carson.
But the point is, this is a regrouping.
This is CBS admitting: if we're going to influence the next generation, we've got to reinvent the wheel.
And this late night TV stuff, the whole cable thing.
I mean, it's just not working anymore.
It's just not.
And so that's really what's going on here.
It's not some conspiracy.
But hey, let them have their fun, right?
Let them have their fun.
Let them be in la la land that that's actually going on.
He does talk about, though, this Oracle negotiates a $100 million cloud deal with Skydance.
So they're going to piece this together and they're saying this is what Paramount is firing Colbert because they want Trump to okay this merger.
So in response to this, Stephen Colbert's best buddy, Jon Stewart, viewer discretion is advised.
Kids, parents, if you've got kids, there's a lot of F-bombs in here.
These are uncensored F-bombs.
Viewer discretion is advised.
Jason Whitlock took offense.
He says, someone who doesn't accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior uses a black Christian tradition to profanely mock their adversary.
Puppets used to blaspheme God.
Another or anything for a dollar.
You stand for nothing.
You fall for anything.
So Jon Stewart on his show, because he is, you know, he's owned by the same company that owns Stephen Colbert.
This was his response.
Go fuck yourself!
Wait, wait, wait.
Bring it down, bring it down.
Let's bring it down.
A little bit quiet.
Fuck, fuck, fuck yourself.
Just go fuck yourself.
Everybody!
Fuck, fuck yourself.
Just go fuck yourself.
Go fuck yourself.
Oh fuck yourself.
Oh fuck yourself.
So I think it's safe to say that Donald Trump really has broken the minds of the left.
I mean, that's not only is, I mean, not only is it not funny, it just, it looks, it's not even funny in the absurd.
It's just the ramblings of lunatics at this point.
Whitlock's upset and says, you know, you're using a black Christian convention here to essentially profane, I guess, the art or whatever.
I don't know.
Megan Kelly, those who thought Jon Stewart might quit last night over Colbert didn't have it quite right.
Instead, he protected his millions, his vanity, his pathetic dollop of power, and sang a mean song.
That's exactly right.
All right, no, shifting gears here.
Now we're going to get to the portion of the show that I have wanted to talk about.
We're going to talk about nations.
We're going to go down a little bit of a historical rabbit hole.
Something that I think is we need to read history.
We need to know history.
Specifically, we're going to read a letter written to the Confederate States of America by James Henley Thornwell.
Yes, James Henry Thornwell.
So, this is a petition.
It's actually from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, 1872 is the date here.
So we're going to go through this because to me, it was educational, and I want to share it with you, and it's my show.
So if you're bored with this kind of thing, but let's just dive in.
The title, Relation of the State to Christ.
We're going to talk about this idea of potentially what is the fatal flaw in our own Constitution.
And so in order to do that, we're going to listen to somebody write about the Confederate States and the opportunity that the Confederate States, the brief opportunity that the Confederate States had to write what many at the time believed was an error, the Constitution of the United States not fully recognizing the divinity and lordship of Jesus Christ.
He says, the petition of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America now met and sitting in the city of Augusta in the state of Georgia to the Congress of the Confederate States of America now met and sitting in the city of Richmond in the state of Virginia respectfully showeth that this assembly is the supreme judicatory of those Presbyterian churches in the Confederate States,
which were formerly under the jurisdiction of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, that it comprises Presbyteries, synods, and members, that it represents a people devotedly attached to the Confederate cause and eminently loyal to the Confederate government.
Now, I need the audience here to separate all of the complexities that were going on between the states in the Civil War and specifically slavery, because obviously the war was fought over states' rights, not slavery.
We know that.
Many people still get triggered by that assertion.
But put that away because that's not what the purpose of this is.
We're talking about political theory here.
The changes which your honorable body has made in the Constitution of the United States and which have been ratified and confirmed by the various states of the Confederacy have received the universal support of the Presbyterian population of these states, and none have been more grateful to God than themselves for the prudence, caution, moderation, and wisdom which have characterized all your counsels in the arduous task of constructing the new government.
We congratulate you on your success, but gentlemen, we are constrained in candor to say that in our humble judgment, the Constitution, admirable as it is in other respects, still labors under one capital defect.
It is not distinctly Christian.
It is not bigotry, but love to our country and an earnest, ardent desire to promote its permanent well-being, which prompts us to call the attention of your honorable body to this subject, and in the way of respectful petition to pray that the Constitution may be amended so as to express the precise relations which the government of these states ought to sustain to the religion of Jesus Christ.
The Constitution of the United States was an attempt to realize the notion of popular freedom without the checks of aristocracy and a throne and without the alliance of a national church.
The conception was a noble one, but the execution was not commensurate with the design.
The fundamental error of our fathers was that they accepted a partial for a complete statement of the truth.
They saw clearly the human side that popular governments are the offspring of popular will, and that rulers, as the servants and not the masters of their subjects, are properly responsible to them.
They failed to apprehend the divine side, that all just government is the ordinance of God, and that magistrates are his ministers who must answer to him for the execution of their trust.
The consequence of this failure and of exclusion, exclusive attention to a single aspect of the case was to invest the people with a species of supremacy as insulting to God as it was injurious to them.
They became a law unto themselves.
There was nothing beyond them to check or control their caprices or their pleasure.
All were accountable to them.
They were accountable to none.
This was certainly to make the people a god, and if it was not explicitly expressed that they could do no wrong, it was certainly implied that there was no tribunal to take cognizance of their acts.
A foundation was thus laid for the worst of all possible forms of government, a democratic absolutism, which, in the execution of its purposes, does not scruple to annul the most solemn compacts and to cancel the most sacred obligations.
The will of majorities must become the supreme law if the voice of the people is to be regarded as the voice of God, if they are, in fact, the only God whom rulers are bound to obey.
It is not enough, therefore, to look upon government as simply the institute of man.
Important as this aspect of the subject unquestionably is, yet if we stop there, we shall sow the seeds of disaster and failure.
We must contemplate people and rulers as alike subject to the authority of God.
His will is the true supreme, and it is under him, and as the means of expressing his sovereign pleasure, that conventions are called, constitutions are framed and governments erected.
To the extent that the state is a moral person, it must needs be under moral obligation, and moral obligation without reference to a superior will is a flat contradiction in terms.
If, then, the state is an ordinance of God, it should acknowledge the fact.
If it exists under the conditions of a law superior to all human decrees and to which all human decrees behove to be conformed, that law should be distinctly recognized.
Let us guard, in this new Confederacy, he writes, against the fatal delusion that our government is a mere expression of human will.
It is, indeed, an expression of will, but of will regulated and measured by those eternal principles of right which stamp it at the time as the creature and institute of God.
And of all governments in the world, a Confederate government resting as it does upon plighted faith can least afford to dispense with the supreme guardian of treaties.
Your honorable body has already, to some extent, rectified the error of the old Constitution, but not so distinctly and clearly as the Christian people of these states desire to see done.
We venture respectfully to suggest that it is not enough for a state which enjoys the light of divine revelation to acknowledge in general terms the supremacy of God, it must also acknowledge the supremacy of his Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds.
To Jesus Christ, all power in heaven and earth is committed.
To Him every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess.
He is the ruler of the nations, the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords.
Should it be said that the subjection of governments to Jesus Christ is not a relation manifested by reason and therefore not obligatory on the state?
If that were to be said, they're saying, The answer is obvious, that duties spring not from the manner in which the relation is made known, but from the truth of the relation itself.
If the fact is so that Jesus Christ is our Lord, and we know the fact, no matter how we come to know it, we are bound to acknowledge it and act upon it.
A father is entitled to the reverence of his son, a master to the obedience of his servant, and a king to the allegiance of his subjects, no matter how the relation between them is ascertained.
Now, now that Jesus Christ is the supreme ruler of the nations, we know with infallible certainty if we accept the scriptures as the word of God.
But it may be asked, he writes, how am I on time?
We got time.
But it may be asked, and this is the core of all the perplexity which attends the subject, has the state any right to accept the scriptures as the word of God?
The answer requires a distinction, and that distinction seems to us to obviate all difficulty.
If by accepting the scriptures, it is meant that the state has a right to prescribe, I'm sorry, there's a little typo there, a little pen mark there.
The state has the right to prescribe them as a rule of faith and practice to its subjects, the answer must be in the negative.
The state is lord of no man's conscience.
As long as he preserves the peace and is not injurious to the public welfare, no human power has a right to control his opinion or to restrain his acts.
In these matters, he is responsible to none but God.
He may be atheist, deist, infidel, Turk, or pagan.
It is no concern of the state so long as he walks orderly.
Its protecting shield must be over him, as over every other citizen.
We utterly abhor the doctrine that the civil magistrate has any jurisdiction in the domain of religion, in its relation to the conscience or conduct of others, and we cordially approve the clause in our Confederate Constitution, which guarantees the amplest liberty on this subject.
But if by accepting the scriptures, it is meant that the state may itself believe them to be true and regulate its own conduct and legislation in conformity with their teachings, the answer must be in the affirmative.
As a moral person, it has a conscience as a moral person, it has a conscience as really and truly as every individual citizen.
To say that its conscience is only the aggregate of individual consciences is to say that it is made up of conflicting and even contradictory elements.
The state condemns many things which many of its subjects approve and enjoins many things which many of its subjects condemn.
There are those who are opposed to the rights of property and the institution of marriage, yet the public conscience sanctions and protects them both.
What then is the public conscience?
It is clearly the sum of those convictions of right, that sense of the honorable, just and true, which legislators feel themselves bound to obey in the structure of governments and the enactment of laws.
It is a reflection of the law of God, and when the law is enunciated with authoritative clearness as it is in the scriptures, it becomes only the more solemnly imperative, and as the eternal rule of justice, the state should acknowledge it.
Considered in its organic capacity as a person, it no more violates the rights of others in submitting itself to the revealed will of God than a Christian, when he worships the supreme Jehovah violates the rights of an atheist or an idolater.
What the state does itself and what it enjoins upon others to do are very different things.
It has an organic life apart from the aggregate life of the individuals who compose it, and in that organic life it is under the authority of Jesus Christ and the restraints of His Holy Word.
That, in recognizing this doctrine, the state runs no risk of trespassing upon the rights of conscience is obvious from another point of view.
The will of God, as revealed in the scriptures, is not a positive constitution for the state.
In that relation it stands only to the church.
It is rather a negative check upon its power.
It does not prescribe the things to be done, but only forbids the things to be avoided.
It only conditions and restrains the discretion of rulers within the bounds of divine law.
It is, in other words, a limitation and not a definition of power.
The formula according to which the scriptures are accepted by the state is nothing shall be done which they forbid.
The formula according to which they are accepted by the church is nothing shall be done but what they enjoy.
They are here the positive measure of power.
Surely the government of no Christian people can scruple to accept the negative limitations of the divine word.
Surely our rulers do not desire that they shall have the liberty of being wiser than God.
The amendment which we desire, we crave your honorable body to take note, does not confine the administration of the state exclusively to the hands of Christian men.
A Jew might be our chief magistrate, provided he would come under the obligation to do nothing in the office inconsistent with the Christian religion.
He would not be required to say that he himself believes it, nor would he assume the slightest obligation to propagate or enforce it.
All that he would do would be to acknowledge it as the religion of the state and to bind himself that he will sanction no legislation that sets aside its authority.
The religion of the state is one thing.
The religion of the individual who may happen to be at the head of affairs is quite another.
The religion of the state is embodied in its Constitution as the concrete form of its organic life.
He goes on Your honorable body will perceive that the contemplated measure has no reference to a union or alliance betwixt the church and the state.
To any such scheme the Presbyterians, and we think we can safely venture to say the entire Christian people of these states are utterly opposed.
The state, as such, cannot be a member, much less, therefore, can it exercise the function of settling the creed and the government of a church.
The provinces of the two are entirely distinct.
They differ in their origin, their nature, their ends, their prerogatives, their powers, and their sanctions.
They cannot be mixed or confounded without injury to both.
But the separation of church and state is a very different thing from the separation of religion and the state.
Here is where our fathers erred talking about the framers of the United States Constitution.
In their anxiety to guard against the evils of a religious establishment and to preserve the provinces of church and state separate and distinct, they virtually expelled Jehovah from the government of the country and left the state an irresponsible corporation or responsible only to the immediate corporators.
They made it a moral person and yet not accountable to the source of all law.
It is this anomaly which we desire to see removed, and the removal of it by no means implies a single element of what is involved in a national church.
The amendment which this general assembly ventures respectfully to crave, we have reason to believe is earnestly desired and would be hailed as an auspicious omen by the overwhelming majority of the Christian people of these Confederate states.
It is not due to them that their consciences in the future legislation of the country should be protected from all that has a tendency to wound or grieve them.
They ask no encroachments upon the rights of others.
They simply crave that a country which they love should be made yet dearer to them and that the government which they have helped to frame they may confidently commend to their Savior and their God under the cheering promise that those who honor him he will honor.
Promotion cometh neither from the east nor from the west nor from the south.
God is the ruler among the nations and the people who refuse him their allegiance shall be broken with a rod of iron or dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel.
Our republic will perish like the pagan republics of Greece and Rome unless we baptize it into the name of Christ.
Be wise now, therefore, O ye kings, be entrusted, ye judges of the earth, kiss the sun lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way when his wrath is kindled but a little.
He ends we long to see what the world has never yet held, beheld, a truly Christian republic, and we humbly hope that God has reserved it for the people of these Confederate states to realize the grand and glorious idea.
God has wooed us by extraordinary goodness.
He is now tempering us by gentle chastisements.
Let the issue be the penitent submission of this great people at the footstool of his son.
And then this is the amendment they want.
The whole substance of what we desire may be expressed in the following or equivalent terms to be added to the section providing for liberty of conscience.
Nevertheless, this is what they wanted added to the new Constitution in the Confederacy.
Quote, nevertheless, we the people of these Confederate states distinctly acknowledge our responsibility to God and the supremacy of his Son, Jesus Christ, as King of kings and Lord of Lords, and hereby ordain that no law shall be passed by the Congress of these Confederate States inconsistent with the will of God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.
Again, this is the collected writings of James Henry Thornwell.
This was a letter written to the Assembly, the Confederate Assembly in Richmond, Virginia.
So I came across this letter last week and I read it all and I was just, I wanted to share it with you because I feel like it, I feel, first of all, it really is fascinating to read the thoughts of Christians, you know, a long time ago, you know, thoughts that were very much mainstream.
The criticism of the United States Constitution that we have today, failing to recognize the supremacy and lordship of Jesus Christ, is not a new criticism.
Obviously, in the 1800s, the Confederates were criticizing it, but even in the 18th century, even in the 1700s, when this thing was ratified or written in 1787, ratified in 1789, this was still a criticism amongst all of the, you know, there were people that thought, hey, yeah, we need to go back and do this.
And you can find different historical sources that say it was just something that was going to take too much time.
It was going to have to go back through the process or kind of start the process over.
And they didn't want to have to do that.
I think that's a rather lame excuse.
But somebody who's covered politics for a long time, I can tell you that I'm certainly not surprised by that.
Certainly not surprised that that was the case.
And I think this country, the country of old, the country at its founding, it was a pan-Protestant nation, and they all assumed that their convictions would stay the same from generation to generation.
They never envisioned mosques, Buddhist temples, even synagogues.
They did not envision that ever being an issue.
The idea that the legislators, the senators, would start to go...
This is the conventional wisdom.
But what they did not foresee was the courts.
What they did not foresee was the courts.
All of these courts, all these court decisions and jurisprudence, which is one of my least favorite words in the English language because it always means, forget about what the founder said.
This is the jurisprudence of today.
Had there been a clause in the Constitution that recognized, well, specifically, can you imagine if this was in the Constitution how the courts would have to deal with this?
You wouldn't have gotten, you wouldn't have gotten prayer out of school wouldn't have happened.
The false interpretation of the First Amendment with the accurate one is Congress shall make no law, but the idea that the states can't make a law.
Can you imagine?
Nevertheless, if this was in the Constitution of the United States, so much of what's happened in the 20th century to destroy this country from its Christian foundation wouldn't have happened.
Nevertheless, we the people of these Confederate states distinctly acknowledge our responsibility to God and the supremacy of his Son, Jesus Christ, as King of kings and Lord of Lords, and hereby ordain that no law shall be passed by the Congress of these Confederate states, Or in this case, if it was in our own Constitution of the United States, consistent and consistent with the will of God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.
I mean, if that was in the document, you would not have the judicial overreach.
You wouldn't have legislative laws either that also pushed the boundaries.
But you certainly wouldn't have had the courts.
It was the courts that destroyed the Christian consensus of this country.
And they wouldn't have been able to do it.
Or it would have been a lot harder.
I mean, they would have literally had to rewrite it.
They would have had to take it out.
They would have had to have a campaign to actually amend the Constitution to strip it of its recognition, which would have been a lot harder than just if it's not in there.
You've got this judge who's just, well, he just puts his own values on it.
And he says, you know what?
You know, women can kill their babies.
Women can murder.
None of that would have happened.
Prayer in school wouldn't have happened.
And so, and that's the thing.
Like, our schools, our schools were basically the public school system in this country, specifically from 1900 to 1950, they were essentially Protestant schools.
They were essentially Christian schools, which is one of the reasons why the Catholics created their own schools because they knew this.
One of the reasons you have Catholic schools throughout this country is because they weren't Protestant, and they knew the public schools were basically all Protestant schools.
So I say all that to say we need to know our history, and this was fascinating for me.
I don't know if it was fascinating for you, but you know what?
Doing a talk show host or being a talk show host is very therapeutic for me at least.
So I feel better.
I don't know about you.
I'm going to be back on the air at 4 o'clock Central for X American News.
We're going to talk more about this Obama thing.
We're going to talk tariffs and a whole lot of other stuff with my co-host, Rob Spencer.
You don't want to miss that.
And yeah, be safe out there.
And if you miss that show, just know I'll be back here at 12 Central on X American News.
And God bless everybody out there watching.
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