The Auron MacIntyre Show - The TRUTH About Separation of Church and State ｜ Guest： Ryan Turnipseed ｜ 7⧸8⧸24

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00:00:30.120 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.800 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.500 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.560 So the modern notion of separation of church and state is a disaster.

00:00:42.440 It is radically different from the way that our founders understood how our Constitution would be structured.

00:00:48.380 And the interpretation we have today leads people to believe that we should have these secular, neutral spaces everywhere that we go.

00:00:56.740 But that's not the way that the Bill of Rights was structured.

00:00:58.760 That's not the way that the Constitution was structured.

00:01:01.220 And historically, that's not the way that the Bill of Rights was applied to the states, which is the most important part about what we're going to talk about today.

00:01:09.020 Joining me to dive into all of this historical autism is a great and powerful understander of the American past.

00:01:16.860 Ryan Turtipseed, thanks for joining me, man.

00:01:19.040 Thank you very much for having me.

00:01:20.640 Absolutely.

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00:02:48.380 So Ryan, the modern mind looks at separation of church and state, and the way that they read this idea is that if a schoolchild ever hears the name Jesus, the world is over.

00:03:05.340 This is a giant violation of our Constitution.

00:03:08.860 We're going to turn into a theocracy tomorrow.

00:03:11.780 They'll be goose-stepping everyone to the gulags by the end of the week.

00:03:15.860 This is how it's constantly approached.

00:03:18.540 But it bears no relationship to the actual history of religion in the United States in the way that the founders understood it.

00:03:26.280 For people who aren't familiar, could you lay out the relationship with many of the state churches that existed before we even had a Constitution?

00:03:36.660 Yeah, gladly.

00:03:38.280 And before even getting to the state churches, there's another concept that we should probably discuss as well.

00:03:43.780 The way that, or the only drop of Christian history that children will get in public schools explicitly is the pilgrims, the Puritans that fled to New England early in the 1600s.

00:03:56.620 And they will be told that these pilgrims fled England in the name of religious tolerance.

00:04:02.060 They wanted to practice their religions and be free from repressive state laws restricting their practice back in England.

00:04:09.540 And that's why the Puritans came over here. 1.00

00:04:11.280 So this is a, before some of the state churches were organized that would carry into the colonial era, this is like the first narrative you get told in school.

00:04:19.940 I figured it'd be good to start there just real quick before we get to the state churches.

00:04:23.940 Because this is a false narrative, quite frankly.

00:04:28.840 This idea that English Puritans sought religious tolerance as an ideal in and of itself.

00:04:34.360 When in reality, if you just read any given Puritan that settled in New England for more than five seconds, you find out that they weren't seeking religious tolerance.

00:04:44.580 They were seeking a place for them to practice their religion where they would not be inhibited by other people.

00:04:50.280 And this is what they wanted to build their society around.

00:04:52.820 So in fact, they were very intolerant, which is the connotation of Puritan.

00:04:58.800 I think that calling them pilgrims instead of Puritans might have done a huge bit of damage to the understanding of our own history here.

00:05:06.640 But this is why you get those tiny little states up in New England with weird borders, small exclaves, different charter regions,

00:05:15.500 is because what would happen is these Puritans would kick out nonconformists, people that did not follow that charter's religion.

00:05:23.140 And they would just go settle somewhere else.

00:05:26.160 So you had multiple states where you could practice the approved religion in a very small geographic area.

00:05:33.860 But there was no real tolerance except maybe in Rhode Island, which was sort of the outlier.

00:05:39.100 It was the one outlier of that region.

00:05:41.020 But this is like the first narrative I figured that we should just mash right here is the Puritans in New England.

00:05:49.720 And this idea that we were founded on religious tolerance because of the pilgrims.

00:05:53.620 It doesn't hold up at all.

00:05:55.300 But yeah, that just probably should have been a clue that there's a misleading narrative there when there's the one time that the left actually says,

00:06:02.120 oh, yeah, the pilgrims, we should honor the one thing that they cared about.

00:06:05.200 Yeah, that should probably go ahead and be a telltale sign that, yeah, they are taking us on a rabbit chase there.

00:06:12.080 It is really important that people notice what you're saying there, though.

00:06:14.900 Originally, it's not about religious tolerance.

00:06:17.600 It's about the freedom to go ahead and impose religious intolerance.

00:06:22.200 Okay.

00:06:22.740 This is our area.

00:06:24.060 This is for us.

00:06:25.300 We are a community.

00:06:26.520 We have the freedom in the sense that we are free to be a community centered around a particular moral understanding.

00:06:33.800 But once you are in that community, there is not pluralism.

00:06:37.400 It's not religious pluralism throughout our community.

00:06:39.700 Everybody has religious tolerance and freedom.

00:06:42.240 No, it's we have the right to establish this shared identity, this shared religious vision.

00:06:49.860 And once you are inside of that religious vision, you now need to conform to that.

00:06:54.020 We're not just, you know, we're not bringing in Muslims and Sikhs and Jews and everyone else to share in this amazing religious freedom,

00:07:00.700 which is what we really wanted when we came to the new world.

00:07:03.260 Right, exactly.

00:07:05.040 If you've ever heard the city upon a hill applied outside of scripture, applied to American history, English history, that's what they were looking for.

00:07:14.460 They wanted to be basically the Christian light to the world in their society because of how pure and how zealous every single person was going to be.

00:07:24.540 They were all going to be literate so that they could read scripture.

00:07:26.960 That was why they founded all these famous colleges later on as they developed their colonies like Harvard and Yale, originally divinity schools.

00:07:34.660 It was so that they could be the exemplar of essentially a Christian theocracy. 0.99

00:07:40.180 There was no separation of church and state in these charters.

00:07:43.380 Now, in fairness, some people go a little bit too far off the other end when talking about the Puritans as if they were some sort of a 1984 colony where you could only believe one opinion on any given topic.

00:07:57.100 That's not true.

00:07:58.280 You could hold a variety of opinions so long as you were a Congregationalist Calvinist in the vast majority of these colonies.

00:08:04.160 So, you know, you have a very, very limited scope of what you could believe, but there were differing opinions among the Puritans, just to be fair to them.

00:08:12.620 But this was not the only group that settled the East Coast in the U.S., not the only English heritage that we have, which was the only real European heritage that this nation draws upon in totality.

00:08:26.080 These were the people that settled the Northeast.

00:08:28.520 So everything from Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, all of these places up in the Northeast, the far Northeast, this was Puritan settlement.

00:08:41.080 All but Rhode Island, very much religiously intolerant.

00:08:43.520 And in fact, the oldest state church, the state church that lasted the longest.

00:08:50.120 And what a state church is, is this is a religious establishment, a church that is supported by the state through tax dollars, through religious privileges and law, by having doctrinal purity enshrined into legislative acts.

00:09:05.920 The longest lasting state church in the United States, the longest lasting state church in the United States, lasted into the 1830s or 40s, I can't remember which decade, was in Massachusetts.

00:09:15.740 So the Puritans, despite being congregationalists as well, this is for people that know church governance, congregationalism, it's kind of how the Baptists are organized right now in the South.

00:09:28.720 People tend to view that as sort of like a very non-state intertwined, sort of decentralized mode of governance, but it was how the Puritan state churches were organized.

00:09:38.840 So even this like main, this mainstay of separation of church and state, the SBC that we have now, its form of government is not actually contradictory to being supported by the state.

00:09:52.140 So that was in the Northeast and New England.

00:09:56.040 And then just drawing upon some basic American history here, we can divide the rest into the Southern colonies and maybe the Mid-Atlantic.

00:10:04.120 The Southern colonies were the other part of the English colonies that had established state churches that actually meant something.

00:10:13.560 And these Southern colonies, very English, they were very cavalier, perhaps, in their heritage. 1.00

00:10:20.520 They were Anglican.

00:10:22.920 And in fact, if you read Albion Seed, if you've ever opened the book, you'll know that it's just going through these parts of the country, the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and the back country, the Appalachians, and just going point by point through each of these social conditions in each of these colonies.

00:10:40.300 And if you get to marriage, in each of these four sections of the English colonies, marriage is intimately intertwined with the way that the church is established in these places.

00:10:52.680 So in the South, the state churches here were Anglican.

00:10:56.240 Virginia had an established Anglican state church up until, I believe, right before the Revolution.

00:11:01.100 I believe that Jefferson helped dismantle that.

00:11:03.860 Most of the other colonies retained theirs until just after the Revolution, if my memory serves correctly.

00:11:11.540 And these Anglican churches had some massive social weight in the colonies.

00:11:17.540 So there were laws against not attending church.

00:11:22.300 So you had compulsory church attendance, compulsory religious education.

00:11:28.620 There was the way that the colonies handled divorce was just by church Anglican doctrine.

00:11:35.580 So there's a historical meme that goes around that says that Anglicanism was founded to get divorces for the monarch.

00:11:42.420 An honest reading of that kind of doesn't bear that out in reality.

00:11:47.740 If you look at the colony of Virginia, for instance, going back to why I pointed out Albion Seed earlier,

00:11:53.680 the colony of Virginia, the way that the Anglicans taught divorce there was so strict, so rare of an occasion,

00:12:02.100 that the colony of Virginia, up until the 1720s, I think, only granted, I think, one divorce that entire time that they existed

00:12:10.100 because of Anglican doctrine, this is a civil matter, as the Anglicans would say,

00:12:15.200 but it was being informed by religious doctrine.

00:12:17.840 And this one divorce was only because they feared for the woman's life.

00:12:21.120 So out of these many decades that Virginia was established as a political entity,

00:12:27.880 the Anglican doctrine of divorce and marriage, holy matrimony, informed this political matter.

00:12:34.540 So this is just one example of the massive social weight that Anglicanism had in this one colony.

00:12:40.340 You can go down the rest.

00:12:42.400 The Mid-Atlantic is the only place where you really don't have state churches like you would see in the Northeast and the South.

00:12:50.920 And that's just because Maryland was founded to be sort of a safe haven for Roman Catholics.

00:12:55.440 It did not remain that way.

00:12:57.020 Puritans actually couped the state. 0.78

00:12:58.540 Puritan pirates, that's a fascinating episode in American history.

00:13:02.100 Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers.

00:13:05.020 They reject the idea that they can be state-supported.

00:13:09.080 That was retained in Pennsylvania's identity.

00:13:14.120 New York was originally founded by the Dutch.

00:13:16.700 There was a lot of intertwined state and church politicking with the Dutch Calvinists.

00:13:23.060 But upon the English conquest of New York, giving it its name, you don't really see that strong of an established state church in New York.

00:13:34.680 New Jersey and the Delaware Valley is somewhat similar because you have a whole variety of religious groups, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists, Quakers that were settling there.

00:13:45.020 So this middle part of the country is one of the few places where there are no established state churches, but that does not mean that Christianity does not inform the laws there.

00:13:55.380 In each of these states, you would find edicts against homosexuality, against all these other things.

00:14:00.580 And the proof or the reason for this comes from Christian doctrine.

00:14:03.880 It's in law, but there is no established state church.

00:14:06.800 But in the modern day, most people recognize that to be no separation of church and state because scripture is quoted in the laws.

00:14:13.740 Even though there isn't an established state church, it's religiously tolerant by law.

00:14:18.800 So that's the overview.

00:14:20.520 Yeah, a lot of hysterical libs would call that a theocracy right off the bat.

00:14:24.120 That there's no understanding that there could be any delineations between the different degrees of church involvement or any of that.

00:14:32.680 But let's go ahead and clarify for people who might be confused.

00:14:36.180 I think it's important to do that.

00:14:38.220 So as you stated, there are all these state supported churches before the revolution.

00:14:44.200 Now, a lot of people will look at the revolution and say, OK, well, that's just one of the things they're throwing off.

00:14:48.840 Right.

00:14:49.080 That we're there.

00:14:50.240 These are all the things that they don't like about the old system.

00:14:53.120 And one of the things they don't like might be these state churches.

00:14:57.400 So were the state churches imposed by British governance?

00:15:01.980 And if if, you know, if that's the case, how many of these carried over post revolution is the it was the when they went ahead and talked about the wanting to make sure we don't establish a church.

00:15:14.760 Was that something they were speaking specifically to avoiding these Anglican churches or others that had been created and were buoyed by the.

00:15:23.120 The state.

00:15:25.140 So to address this, going back to the northeast when we just discussed the Puritans, was this something that was just forced upon the people?

00:15:32.320 They later turned around and rejected.

00:15:34.120 Well, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully the audience can understand from what I was saying.

00:15:40.060 The Puritans fled England to establish their own polities that were specifically congregationalist or Puritan is the name that we give them.

00:15:46.900 No, these were something.

00:15:48.720 These were churches that were maintained, though there were parts of the population that rejected them.

00:15:54.680 But this was not the cause for secession from the British Empire.

00:15:59.380 And in fact, people can go and read the Declaration of Independence.

00:16:03.300 This is sort of the petitions for why.

00:16:05.620 Why would we secede?

00:16:07.000 Why would we declare open war?

00:16:08.500 And you don't actually see that the state church is a reason, that the United States, the colonists, just really want to have a lack of a state church.

00:16:19.760 They want to have universal religious tolerance or something like that.

00:16:23.100 That's not in there.

00:16:23.960 And to think that that is in there would violate a few, it would be an anachronism for a few reasons.

00:16:29.880 Number one being there was no unified sense of identity of the colonies when they first seceded, when they declared independence.

00:16:37.480 So to say that all colonies wanted their state churches gone would be heavily anachronistic.

00:16:43.300 They are still very regional, provincial, if you will.

00:16:45.920 They have separate polities that don't want to give up power to the other ones.

00:16:49.980 And in fact, we're going to see in the Bill of Rights, that's going to be a reason for one of our amendments,

00:16:56.100 is that the state churches in some of these regions don't want to give up power to the other ones.

00:17:00.540 The Anglicans don't want to be under a Puritan system.

00:17:03.260 The Puritans don't want to be under an Anglican system.

00:17:06.060 The people in the Mid-Atlantic, the smaller, more minority denominations, the Quakers, the Dutch Reformed, the Lutherans, all these other types,

00:17:14.360 they don't want to be subject to any of them.

00:17:16.800 So we're going to get there.

00:17:18.100 But if you take a look at our petitions for secession, abolishing the state church is not in there.

00:17:24.800 And in fact, if you look at the reasons specifically for targeting the king as the recipient of the declaration,

00:17:33.220 it's that he's not upholding his God-given duty to protect rights and protect our civilizational modes of government.

00:17:41.220 They appeal directly to the power invested in him by the state church in England.

00:17:45.920 So you don't actually see that.

00:17:49.420 But what you do see is after the revolution,

00:17:52.000 for the states that weren't already disestablishing their church,

00:17:58.100 so people, you might know that annoying kid from high school or whatever

00:18:02.600 that would say like the longest word is anti-disestablishmentarianism.

00:18:07.140 People might hear that.

00:18:08.660 This is the topic.

00:18:09.920 It has a use.

00:18:10.880 We might be talking about that.

00:18:13.540 You had political movements, especially in the southern and northeastern colonies,

00:18:18.380 to disestablish the church, basically take the state church and cut it off from state tax support,

00:18:23.800 state legislative support, and all these other things.

00:18:26.160 They just weren't a majority by the time of the revolution.

00:18:28.820 This was not how most people thought.

00:18:31.100 And they used to be like strange and weird sort of offshoots or cults.

00:18:34.880 They would have some very questionable beliefs about, say, marriage, just for example.

00:18:42.880 Or they'd be Quakers, you know, pacifists. 0.84

00:18:46.040 Or they would be some other more minority faith that never really had a stronghold in the U.S.,

00:18:54.500 like, say, Lutherans.

00:18:55.740 They were never really establishmentarian over here.

00:18:58.300 Establishmentarian meaning wanting a state church.

00:19:02.140 So you then get tracts that go against these disestablishmentarians, which are then called the anti-disestablishmentarians.

00:19:10.260 So that ties in that word that most people probably heard from someone at some point in time.

00:19:15.400 But these conflicts will result in the south.

00:19:19.060 Some of the Anglican churches being disestablished.

00:19:21.520 I think we mentioned already Virginia disestablished their Anglican church before the revolution.

00:19:26.620 If, once again, if my memory holds true, if not before, during.

00:19:31.040 And these other states south of them, the Carolinas, Georgia, they won't actually retain their established church,

00:19:38.920 but they will retain a lot of the laws that were based around the religion held by the Anglicans.

00:19:44.260 So Georgia was originally founded to be a colony for the English poor only.

00:19:49.760 A lot of Georgia's laws would retain that ethos.

00:19:53.040 And what do the English poor believe?

00:19:54.940 They're usually Anglicans.

00:19:56.140 That's what their laws will reflect.

00:19:58.320 The Northeast, however, retained a lot of their established churches.

00:20:02.720 And since all of these colonies that have now seceded are going to form their own federal union,

00:20:09.140 that's causing a lot of friction for these people.

00:20:12.060 Because the question of what is the religion of this federation going to be hangs heavy in the air

00:20:18.400 over this heavily religious south and heavily religious north and the mid-Atlantic as well.

00:20:23.280 They were all deeply religious people, just in opposite directions within Christianity.

00:20:28.360 So what is the compromise or what is the structure that's achieved so that these people can come together

00:20:36.520 and form the polity that we now know as the United States?

00:20:40.040 Well, they agree on a federal polity.

00:20:43.500 So these local secular polities, so Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North South Carolina,

00:20:53.180 they can maintain their political independence in part.

00:20:56.760 So they have devolved authority.

00:20:58.440 But as for religion, we eventually come up with a compromise for this federal structure, which is the Bill of Rights.

00:21:06.900 The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

00:21:10.620 Most people probably learned that in their civics class.

00:21:13.220 What they did not learn is probably what most people were thinking at this time as to why it would be needed.

00:21:18.280 So most people read the First Amendment and they just think, wow, all these colonists just really cared about other people being able to believe whatever they wanted.

00:21:27.420 That's not quite how most people were thinking in the 1790s, really until a few decades ago, really.

00:21:34.060 This was a very 1960s view superimposed on the past.

00:21:38.980 Rather, the reason that you see Congress shall make no law establishing an official religion or church,

00:21:46.560 that is a guarantee to both the Anglicans in the South and the Puritans in the Northeast that the other won't impose their will on the other.

00:21:55.700 So basically, the Puritans are not going to be forced to convert to Anglicanism.

00:21:59.760 The Mid-Atlantic won't be either.

00:22:01.260 But also the Mid-Atlantic in the South won't be forced to be Puritans. 0.94

00:22:05.360 This First Amendment is very much an early modern compromise.

00:22:08.980 Yeah, and so this is very important because people don't have this context.

00:22:13.740 They just try to go ahead and portray this as the Founding Fathers wanting this free-for-all religiously,

00:22:19.700 that there would be no idea of what people would believe,

00:22:23.440 that everybody would just have this large religious plurality inside every community.

00:22:29.760 No, that's not the idea at all.

00:22:31.300 It's there to protect the religious communities.

00:22:33.340 The individual communities continue to impose their understanding of Christianity,

00:22:38.040 their shared belief, their shared moral vision.

00:22:40.860 They just don't have to worry about another community, another state,

00:22:44.000 a separate state coming in and opposing this for the entire country.

00:22:47.940 I want to get deeper into the Bill of Rights and how that got applied early on

00:22:52.440 because I think a lot of people have misnomers about that.

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00:24:18.540 All right, Ryan, so you were giving the context for where the First Amendment comes from.

00:24:24.280 And this is incredibly important because we mentioned this briefly, but we should reiterate it.

00:24:29.220 The First Amendment did not apply to the individual states.

00:24:32.820 None of the Bill of Rights actually applied to the individual states in the way that we understand it now.

00:24:37.880 And so when they said Congress shall make no law, they really meant specifically Congress.

00:24:44.220 Only the national government would not be able to establish a church in this way

00:24:49.100 because they were the ones being limited by the Bill of Rights.

00:24:53.060 The Anti-Federalists wanted the Bill of Rights to limit federal power, not state power.

00:24:59.660 They were interested in retaining that state power, including the state power to establish a church and support a church.

00:25:06.820 And so when the First Amendment is being written, it is not a blanket affirmation of religious freedom to every individual in the United States.

00:25:15.720 It's a specific defense for the states against a larger incorporated church created by the federal government.

00:25:24.680 The states were protecting their rights to have their churches, not abolishing the idea that any church would ever exist that was supported by the state.

00:25:33.620 Exactly. And you can you can kind of if you put yourself in the shoes of someone at the time, like a politician, say,

00:25:41.340 how are you going to get this federation of colonies to stay together?

00:25:44.980 Well, given the large amount of clergymen that are heading these polities, it's a large amount of clergymen signed the documents that we all know and love,

00:25:55.060 the Constitution, the Declaration and all this other stuff that drafted these things.

00:26:00.320 Clergymen were involved at every step of the way and they weren't all from the same denomination.

00:26:04.020 The first Speaker of the House, I don't think he was a clergyman necessarily.

00:26:10.320 I know that he was heavily involved in theological works, though, was a Lutheran.

00:26:14.880 There were quite a lot of Puritan clergymen from the Northeast involved in every step of the way from thinking about maybe seceding to establishing the new government after the colonies had declared independence.

00:26:27.700 Anglican clergymen were heavily involved in all of this as well.

00:26:31.900 These were some of the most well-learned men of the colony.

00:26:34.540 So you'd expect them to be doing things like forming a new government out of thin air, but still maintaining a lot of their heritage.

00:26:41.500 You know, this wasn't a they weren't claiming a continuation government necessarily.

00:26:45.380 They recognized they were starting something new, but they also were drawing upon their shared heritage.

00:26:49.960 Who knows about all these things?

00:26:51.740 Well, number one, people that read and number two, people that read historical works.

00:26:55.940 And at this point in time, that's going to be clergymen are going to be your top profession for most of this stuff.

00:27:02.020 So how do I get all these clergymen then to come together and form a union, a federation of states, without getting too scared and backing out that one state might be too powerful or one block might be too powerful?

00:27:16.580 Well, you give them a guarantee that there won't be a church that will force them to flip their religion.

00:27:21.100 That is the purpose of the First Amendment.

00:27:22.820 It's very much a binding or a glue to keep all the states together because it is an assurance for the states that no other state will take away their power to determine their religious laws.

00:27:34.640 It, as you mentioned, has no application to an individual.

00:27:38.300 If I'm an American citizen in the 1790s and the 1800s and I see these bills of this Bill of Rights being implemented, it has no bearing on me.

00:27:47.920 At least the first eight or so amendments have absolutely no bearing on me because it has nothing to do with individual people.

00:27:55.140 It is limits on the federal government so that the federal government does not do something to the states.

00:28:00.600 So, and this is what the Supreme Court as well reaffirmed in the 1830s.

00:28:08.000 This would be your, if you ever took a U.S. history class or perhaps an AP U.S. history class, you had to learn all these early Supreme Court decisions.

00:28:17.160 This is one that's in there, but you don't get it with the context that we just laid out.

00:28:21.200 So, it's a little bit strange as to why it's in there.

00:28:23.160 It's Barron v. Baltimore.

00:28:25.020 This is the, the Marshall Court's one of its only sort of restraining decisions that it put upon the federal government.

00:28:32.580 Usually, this was a court renowned for strengthening federal power.

00:28:37.380 This is one of the few decisions it took where it actually severely limited the federal power.

00:28:41.540 And the case was, Barron, I believe he was a harbor master in Baltimore, something like that.

00:28:48.480 And Baltimore had rerouted a bunch of the rivers that were going into the harbor.

00:28:53.840 Barron sued the city of Baltimore for taking his property without compensation.

00:28:59.300 And what the, what the court ruled, the Supreme Court, was that Barron was making an appeal to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and all this other stuff.

00:29:10.080 But it didn't apply to the state of Maryland.

00:29:12.840 It had no application there.

00:29:14.400 He was a citizen of Maryland, not of the federal government necessarily.

00:29:19.000 So, he didn't have all of these protections on him like the state of Maryland might against the state of New York or the federal government or something like that.

00:29:27.760 So, the Supreme Court ruled against Barron.

00:29:32.460 And this was basically just saying, yeah, the Bill of Rights only restricts the federal government.

00:29:38.020 They do what they say they do.

00:29:39.000 Congress will not make any laws establishing this, that, and the other.

00:29:43.200 The right to bear arms is not something that the federal government will rule on.

00:29:48.800 All of these things are given to the state.

00:29:50.620 This was a very wide-reaching Supreme Court decision, given the perhaps menial object of what was brought to it originally.

00:30:00.000 But this was sort of the Marshall Court, the Supreme Court of the time, that everyone just references back to him ever since, saying that the Bill of Rights is something, it's a guarantee for the states.

00:30:13.640 The federal government will not impose upon them.

00:30:15.540 Ooh, French Lavender Soy Blend Candle.

00:30:20.040 I told you HomeSense has good gift options.

00:30:22.600 Hmm, well, I don't know.

00:30:25.340 Mom's gonna love it.

00:30:26.680 She'll take one sniff and be transported to that anniversary trip you took to Saint-Tropez a few years ago.

00:30:31.620 Forget it.

00:30:32.180 She complained about her sunburn the whole trip.

00:30:34.880 It's only $14.

00:30:37.000 $14?

00:30:37.480 Now that's a vacation I can get behind.

00:30:41.440 Deal so good, everyone approves.

00:30:43.980 Only at HomeSense.

00:30:46.820 And a lot of people will look at American history, that's kind of pre-the incorporation, they'll say,

00:30:53.680 but Ryan, I still had the right to a jury, and there was still free speech and all these things.

00:30:59.460 And yes, guys, all of that did exist in many of these states.

00:31:02.820 Many states honored the principles that were often established inside the Bill of Rights,

00:31:08.720 but there was no formal application of those, no requirement in many cases for the state to actually go ahead and follow that.

00:31:16.980 And, of course, when we think of freedom of speech or establishment of a church, we have a much different interpretation.

00:31:24.740 There are plenty of blasphemy laws.

00:31:26.620 There are plenty of blue laws.

00:31:28.220 There are plenty of creations that protected the rights of the church, that enforced the church's doctrine, their moral vision.

00:31:36.900 This was very common, and this would not have been seen as breaching many of these rights anyway had the First Amendment applied to the states.

00:31:46.740 But very explicitly, as Ryan just pointed out, it did not.

00:31:49.920 And so, therefore, even if that had been the interpretation of those statutes at that time, it would not have applied to the states anyway.

00:31:58.700 But when does this start to shift, Ryan?

00:32:01.600 What is the key moment that really starts to push us towards the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the wider national body politic?

00:32:12.860 Right. And just to sort of be fair to the historical narrative that we're giving here, a lot of these state churches were not really retained past the 1840s.

00:32:23.340 In fact, I believe that's the decade where the last one gets disestablished.

00:32:27.360 But that's a state church.

00:32:28.360 That's because people didn't like paying taxes to the Puritan church that even a lot of its members had issues with for corruption and whatnot else.

00:32:35.320 So this is whenever you see state churches being abolished in the United States after independence, a couple of generations after the Revolutionary War, this is not some huge fist in the air, we're done with religious laws, especially not in the Northeast.

00:32:54.220 But this is rather this is just saying tax money is no longer going to the churches.

00:32:58.900 In every single state, you still have blasphemy laws, you have obscenity laws that are entirely based upon Christian morals and of the Protestant tradition. 0.97

00:33:09.940 And these these would all be retained well into the 20th century.

00:33:13.800 This is not the French Revolution.

00:33:15.380 They're not stripping the priests out and pulling the altars down and changing the calendar to make it secular.

00:33:21.460 Right, exactly.

00:33:22.580 None of that's happening here.

00:33:23.940 It's very much a it's a libertarian's best dream where basically all they've done is they've removed the tax money from the churches, but everything else has stayed the same.

00:33:36.620 The society has remained cohesive, organic.

00:33:40.220 Different regions have their own variations.

00:33:42.300 So the Northeast, the Puritan churches remain through the Great Awakenings. 1.00

00:33:46.580 And the South, the Southern Baptists and the Anglicans are still battling it out demographically.

00:33:52.320 Will the South be Anglican or Baptist?

00:33:54.860 And in the modern day, you can kind of see who won that.

00:33:58.000 But this is a this is sort of just the way that things were.

00:34:01.780 You had very religious Christian laws on the state on the state's books.

00:34:07.600 But most of the state churches were abolished before the Civil War.

00:34:11.840 But then the Civil War does whirl around.

00:34:13.640 And this is a if you try to make this idea that the United States has always been the secular, non-Christian society where Christianity was just something the people in power held to.

00:34:26.380 It wasn't involved in any anything foundational or necessary to what was being done.

00:34:31.300 Read any speech given by a northern leader during the Civil War, and you will find almost eschatological allusions about the nature of the war, about salvation being brought to all by the glorious and sacred bayonet of a blue-coated soldier.

00:34:51.980 John Brown and his consequences.

00:34:54.000 Yeah, right, exactly.

00:34:55.100 But this is a this is very much a religious war on top of everything else.

00:35:00.900 And this is not just one side versus the other.

00:35:02.980 Even internally, you had religious conflicts.

00:35:05.180 There were Puritan Puritan defenders of slavery in the north, for instance, in Massachusetts, even.

00:35:12.480 You can find those pretty easily, these speeches.

00:35:14.900 And they'll just basically just be saying, I don't know if full abolition by the by the rule of a of a of a federal law is really a great idea for the stability of the country.

00:35:26.440 That's what they'd be saying.

00:35:27.520 You can find abolitionists in the south.

00:35:30.000 This is a but every single side is going to be making appeals to a common faith of some sort, usually Protestant Christianity of all of its variations.

00:35:38.600 But as we all know, the south loses, the north wins.

00:35:44.080 But then after that, the way this gets taught, usually, is that then reconstruction happens.

00:35:49.040 Basically, the south loses and you just get reconstruction.

00:35:51.460 The military is put in charge in the south and they start going about reworking society.

00:35:56.900 But that's not actually what happens.

00:35:59.080 First, you get the 13th Amendment. 0.58

00:36:01.020 This is a this is the first thing that happens.

00:36:04.300 If I remember correctly, I don't believe the south had the same.

00:36:06.760 And this was passed in the north while they still did not have a senatorial or representative representatives.

00:36:16.140 That's a that's a redundancy from the south and in either chamber.

00:36:20.140 The 13th Amendment is passed.

00:36:22.660 But now that there's no slaves, the compromise, the three fifths compromise from the Constitution is no longer in play in the south.

00:36:31.260 They're free peoples.

00:36:32.480 All of the former slaves are now free.

00:36:34.840 And the next time that a reapportionment comes to the south, all of the electoral power from the north is going to fall into the south because suddenly you have two fifths more population in every single southern state for each slave that used to be there. 0.58

00:36:50.460 The northerners, and this is perhaps the strongest argument that they weren't just true believers.

00:36:56.000 They were also politicians, realized that this was a bad thing.

00:36:59.480 They basically if you just left it at the 13th Amendment after the Civil War went home and just let the south do whatever they want, you have handed over an electoral dominance to the south over the country forever and ever until the country falls apart.

00:37:14.340 Then you start getting reconstruction because basically after this 13th Amendment is passed, the north passes a series of laws with their electoral dominance still assured before any new elections or reapportionments come up.

00:37:29.960 And they give an ultimatum to the south where they basically just say, do these ultimatums that we are giving you, one of which is pass the 14th Amendment and will readmit you to the union until then you're going to be ruled by the military.

00:37:45.840 I believe we went over that on this channel before.

00:37:47.680 So this shouldn't be new ground to some of our more regular viewers.

00:37:56.640 The 14th Amendment, though, is what we're going to be focusing on today.

00:37:59.420 This was a necessity to be readmitted to the union if you were a southern state that seceded, except for Tennessee, because that was where the president was from after Lincoln was shot.

00:38:09.680 So all of these states must pass the 14th Amendment into law to get for it to be ratified, go through the proper procedures, proper procedures.

00:38:20.580 And in the 14th Amendment, there's there's multiple parts.

00:38:24.820 And the one that we're concerned with today is the due process clause.

00:38:29.220 There was there's a few other ones.

00:38:31.220 In fact, there's another clause in the 14th Amendment that was probably intended to do what we're about to talk about.

00:38:36.360 But the Supreme Court during the Reconstruction era was actually very pro-southern, very localist.

00:38:44.140 And they they got a clause that that was supposed to do what we're about to talk about.

00:38:48.660 So and that's the slaughterhouse cases for anyone that wants to go look those up.

00:38:53.500 In the 14th Amendment, you have the due process clause, which says and this applies against the states protecting individuals within the states.

00:39:00.800 The due process must be afforded to every single person.

00:39:03.580 And you can go read it for yourself.

00:39:07.260 But this is the that's the gist of it.

00:39:09.440 This guarantee had not been provided in law before in U.S. history.

00:39:14.400 This is an entirely new invention alongside birthright citizenship and all these other things that come along with the 14th Amendment.

00:39:21.700 And you might think that compared to birthright citizenship with what we see today with our immigration crisis, due process just sounds like a bunch of administration mumbo jumbo, pretty dry and boring.

00:39:34.580 But actually, it radically reworks how the country functions, but only a few generations after this 14th Amendment is passed into law.

00:39:43.440 So you have due process being guaranteed to the South.

00:39:48.120 At the time this is written, this basically just means every person in the South can vote.

00:39:52.860 And the way that this was then forcibly applied to the South, this means that if you were an ex-Confederate or something like that, you probably aren't going to get to vote.

00:40:01.640 This is very much saying the slaves, the former slaves will now vote. 0.88

00:40:05.700 They voted in their governments in the South.

00:40:07.580 Most U.S. history textbooks will remark upon them as the most corrupt governments that the South have ever seen.

00:40:12.760 Very nepotistic.

00:40:14.320 They got immediately voted out by the people that originally voted them in.

00:40:18.460 This is not a great time for the South.

00:40:20.240 This is what this due process meant when it was written.

00:40:22.200 A few generations later, though, in the 1900s, getting to the 1920s after World War I, you have a lot of socialist and communist activity in the country.

00:40:33.160 Two separate groups, but for our purposes, they go towards the same goal.

00:40:38.140 You have in 1919, you have Gitlo versus New York.

00:40:48.380 Gitlo was a socialist in New York State.

00:40:54.020 He was a distributor of left-wing propaganda manifestos.

00:40:57.880 He had written his own left-wing manifesto that was basically inciting violent revolution against the United States government to establish some sort of socialist utopia dictatorship, some sort of Bolshevik revolution, very similar to that in Russia.

00:41:11.920 For those of you as well that know your U.S. history cliches, this is the first Red Scare. 0.74

00:41:16.460 The Bolsheviks in Russia are winning their civil war.

00:41:20.500 They basically already won.

00:41:22.240 There is a huge fright that maybe all of these populations that have just been imported into the country from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe that are rapidly flipping to socialists, maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

00:41:35.340 Maybe there's a communist that had been led into the country.

00:41:37.800 And just a couple of decades earlier, President William McKinley was shot by a socialist anarchist in New York as well.

00:41:46.260 So the state of New York was very much against the socialists, especially the ones that were propagating violent revolution, like Gitlo. 0.94

00:41:55.620 New York had passed its own law that basically banned socialist literature, revolutionary socialist literature.

00:42:01.260 It was banned by law, and it was considered treason and sedition.

00:42:05.000 We had federal versions of those, the acts that were passed during the Wilson administration during World War I.

00:42:11.720 This is your clear and present danger doctrine articulated by the Supreme Court that upheld these laws.

00:42:16.420 But then when you get to New York, who makes their own laws as a state, they imprison Gitlo. 0.99

00:42:23.320 He serves two years in Sing Sing, the prison.

00:42:27.080 And then his case makes it to the Supreme Court.

00:42:29.480 And of the whole Supreme Court, it's a seven to two decision where, ironically, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who created the clear and present danger exception for banning subversive activity, used very well during World War I by the Wilson administration, is now dissenting, defending New York's law with Brandeis, which is a very nice historical irony there,

00:42:57.900 if you will, just given how perhaps their home's intentions was to save the country from subversive socialists and communists.

00:43:05.920 And the Brandeis Court, quite famously, might not have done so.

00:43:09.860 But it was these two on the dissent, and the remaining seven ruled against New York in favor of Gitlo.

00:43:16.920 And this is where you start seeing the Supreme Court saying that actually, because of the due process clause in the 14th Amendment,

00:43:27.520 all of the, or at least part of the First Amendment, rather, applies to protection of individuals against the state.

00:43:34.160 So they say New York was violating the First Amendment, specifically the freedom of the press, when it imprisoned Gitlo for distributing and producing anarchist revolutionary literature.

00:43:48.120 So the court basically here says, yeah, it says Congress won't make any law establishing or concerning this.

00:43:54.380 But actually, we have this 14th Amendment here that says it's not just Congress now that can't do this, but also New York.

00:44:00.860 The state of New York can't do this.

00:44:02.800 So this is what's called incorporation.

00:44:05.460 This happens across a whole series of court cases where the Supreme Court gets a case that gets articulated before it,

00:44:12.500 and they get to decide, do we want to say that Amendments 1 through 8 apply against the states in favor of individuals?

00:44:20.500 So now the First Amendment is not an early modern compromise to maintain the religious status quo of the colonies to make sure that they could form into union with one another.

00:44:32.520 Now suddenly the First Amendment is basically religious anarchy.

00:44:36.440 You can believe, say, print, whatever you want to at any point in time, in any place.

00:44:42.060 And when I say any place, I mean any place, including private property.

00:44:46.160 Marsh v. Alabama in the 1940s.

00:44:48.320 This is after the First Amendment, all parts of it were fully incorporated.

00:44:52.880 So now it's not just the freedom of the press, but also of religion.

00:44:57.620 You have the famously Congress shall make no laws establishing a church.

00:45:01.620 That's somehow applied against the states now.

00:45:04.760 We'll get into how that applies to our current situation later because this is the most important part.

00:45:09.600 But even private property rights are superseded by this incorporation doctrine.

00:45:14.680 Marsh v. Alabama in 1946 ruled that a company town where a private corporation owned every part of the town, the infrastructure, the housing, they controlled who lived there, who worked there, and all this other stuff.

00:45:28.680 They could not prevent Jehovah's Witnesses from proselytizing the people living there. 1.00

00:45:34.500 Even though they owned the roads, the lighting, the doors of the houses, the streets, squares, and corners, they could not tell the Jehovah's Witnesses, you cannot come here and proselytize. 0.74

00:45:44.680 This is a Christian town.

00:45:45.680 Because that would somehow violate the First Amendment, which said Congress shall make no laws establishing a state church.

00:45:54.240 And this is really important for people to understand.

00:45:57.020 This huge cascade of cases that go ahead and start incorporating the Bill of Rights is a massive power grab by the federal government.

00:46:08.000 This is why the 14th Amendment is the beginning of the end of the idea of federalism, the idea that states are going to have any rights at all.

00:46:15.840 Because once you make this switch, the Bill of Rights stops being a set of protections for the state against the federal government.

00:46:24.220 And it becomes a list of reasons why the federal government is allowed to go ahead and interfere in the actions of the state.

00:46:32.500 And so it goes ahead and flips this entire idea of what the Bill of Rights are for.

00:46:38.680 They were originally there to protect the states from the overreach of the federal government.

00:46:42.880 The anti-federalists were afraid that the centralization of power into this new, very large and more powerful government was going to override all of the ability of the states to govern themselves.

00:46:57.140 And so the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect those individual states and their decisions, their way of life, their local governments and communities.

00:47:06.060 And instead, what happens is now with this incorporation doctrine, the Bill of Rights becomes a cudgel that justifies any intrusion by the federal government into the workings of states.

00:47:17.060 And now there are no longer any state level decisions because all of them are now subject to federal interference through justifications of the Bill of Rights.

00:47:28.140 In many ways, this is the original civil rights revolution, because now all of your individual rights are granted and who's going to enforce them?

00:47:35.920 Oh, it's going to be the federal government, and that gives them now the right to step into every interpersonal interaction, every community interaction, because it is now their job to be this hypervigilant enforcer of individual rights, which ironically means that the government needs to become more powerful, have more reach, consolidate more power, and go ahead and shut down the ability of these regional governments to exercise their checks and balances on the central national government.

00:48:04.700 Right, exactly, and also something else that this does, and I believe it was Murray Rothbard that noted this most vigorously, is that now the government defines your rights, because if you have one sole source of power that is going to defend every single individual's rights throughout the country, it's going to be the one to define them as well.

00:48:26.600 And that's very important for us in the modern day, say, if you have a cake shop, and you're wanting to just operate your business normally, you might end up violating someone's rights if you don't violate your own religious beliefs.

00:48:43.000 This is what the system turns into.

00:48:45.380 But earlier I mentioned socialists and communists had a part in this, that was just the socialist side.

00:48:50.080 And I mentioned that the First Amendment would be fully incorporated.

00:48:54.180 Freedom of assembly was only incorporated because the state of Oregon banned communist rallies by the Communist Party, and they got sued in the Supreme Court side with the Communist Party that they had the ability to assemble in Oregon, despite what the laws of Oregon said.

00:49:08.780 So, you have the Supreme Court siding with socialists and communists in both of these events as for why the First Amendment now protects individuals instead of just the states against the federal government.

00:49:21.720 This is why you must now tolerate socialists, communists, and all manner of devilry, really, in your community, is because the Supreme Court sided with these people over really just the long tradition of laws that we had,

00:49:38.520 banning these things, banning leftist revolutionary activity, banning obscenity.

00:49:44.740 So, this, the First Amendment, obviously, is going to be the amendment most relevant, if it now applies to every individual, to being used to bring down obscenity laws.

00:49:53.520 So, if you have states that ban obscenity, say, on TV, being sold in stores, obscene materials, and whatnot else, the First Amendment says that you have a right to all of these things, if you can justify it as being expressive, as being assembling, freedom of the press.

00:50:14.020 So, if you can jerry, if you can jerry-rig it into one of those laws, one of those clauses, rather, then, by the Supreme Court's logic, it has to allow obscenity.

00:50:23.280 And this is mostly what it did with a caveat.

00:50:26.040 When I said earlier that the Supreme Court would have, or not, the federal government, of which the Supreme Court is at that level, now gets to define your rights.

00:50:34.100 This is what it does with obscenity.

00:50:35.680 Because you have all these weird, made-up tests, just sort of on the spot, where a Supreme Court justice has realized, well, do we really want, like, grocery stores selling pornography to anyone that comes into them?

00:50:47.840 Probably not.

00:50:49.400 But now we have just sort of kicked the ladder out from under us that would allow us to say, actually, you can ban that.

00:50:55.700 So, they have to come up with these weird tests on the bench, where they just say, yeah, this sounds reasonable.

00:51:00.640 It's usually a standard of reasonableness, not like a hard line that you cross to where if the law is upheld or broken.

00:51:08.160 But the Supreme Court just says, yeah, that's reasonable, or no, this is unreasonable.

00:51:11.660 This is just the emanation of penumbra from Roe v. Wade, right? 0.73

00:51:15.300 You're just inventing words on the bench to go ahead and hope to do this.

00:51:20.220 Yeah, so we've got about five minutes left here.

00:51:23.700 We've run very long with the background here.

00:51:27.040 But I think we've covered the most critical parts of this.

00:51:30.520 Let's go ahead and fast forward to how this applies today.

00:51:33.800 Maybe give a quick overview of how this sudden individual right to freedom of religion destroyed any religion in the public square.

00:51:45.300 Oh, gladly.

00:51:46.520 And, yeah, this is the part that I grew up with, this sort of war.

00:51:50.020 I was raised mostly by my great-grandmothers, one of which was born in 1940, a Southern Democrat for all intents and purposes, very patriotic, very religious, voted for the Democratic Party while she still voted.

00:52:04.340 And her biggest issue right up until she died in the 2020s in this decade was, I can't believe that they took the Bible out of the schools.

00:52:15.780 And why was she saying this?

00:52:17.200 Because in every single school curriculum in the West up until very recently, classical, individual tutoring, homeschooling, which is a colonial tradition, not just some modern thing from the 90s, public schools, private schools, religious schools, charter schools, any form of schooling, the curriculum always had scripture in it.

00:52:37.300 And this wasn't just because they were trying to make great Christians out of everybody, although that was the intent of some of these schools.

00:52:43.040 It was because this is a foundational book to our civilization.

00:52:46.480 Right.

00:52:46.560 If you have, and I'll just use a very basic example, but something very surface level, if you have something like a house divided against itself, pearls before swine, shake the dust off of your sandals or boots, these sayings that you say in everyday life or that you've heard in famous documents, speeches, or whatnot else, all come from scripture.

00:53:06.600 Abraham Lincoln, in fact, did not invent the phrase, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

00:53:11.980 That's from the Gospel of Matthew.

00:53:13.360 So knowing these things allows you to understand your heritage far more than any other book, knowing scripture.

00:53:21.740 You can't understand Shakespeare without understanding the scriptural allegories.

00:53:26.880 You can't understand our poetry and our political writings either without understanding it.

00:53:32.640 This was just something that was taught in every school.

00:53:35.440 You've learned parts of the Bible.

00:53:37.640 It makes perfect sense.

00:53:39.580 It's a key part of our history.

00:53:41.540 The Magna Carta, common law, all of the existence of Harvard and Yale.

00:53:46.440 You have to understand the Bible to understand why these things exist.

00:53:50.300 So all schools taught this.

00:53:51.900 This is what my great-grandmother grew up with.

00:53:53.680 She was in school up until about the 1950s or so, as you would expect.

00:53:58.520 But then, since the First Amendment is now incorporated by the Supreme Court, you have Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, these people that are—most Christians would not consider them Christian due to their heterodox beliefs about the Trinity.

00:54:14.480 Saying that, well, if you require us to, say, learn the Lord's Prayer in school, have it prayed over the intercom, if you allow students to go train at their Catholic churches during school hours for school credit, that's actually establishing a religion now.

00:54:29.100 Because now, this Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, Congress would not establish a church or religion over the country.

00:54:37.840 This Establishment Clause now protects individuals against states and in every facet of individual life.

00:54:44.700 So all those things I mentioned, or the Gideons handing out Bibles at schools, public schools, this would be banned on the state level because the First Amendment somehow now banned these things from happening.

00:54:54.900 You had Schneck, the Schneck decision, quite famous—or, not Schneck, hold on, that might be wrong.

00:55:02.400 I can just quickly get the list here.

00:55:04.880 You have all these decisions where they just incrementally go about getting religion out of the school curriculums.

00:55:10.820 So, Illinois, X-Rail McCollum versus the Board of Education.

00:55:15.680 This is where the schools now violate the Establishment Clause by allowing religious education during school hours.

00:55:22.000 So, if you want to be a clergyman and your religion relies that, the public school can no longer allow you to study that on school time like you normally would have on any prior generation.

00:55:32.880 You don't get that freedom of religion because that somehow means the state is establishing a religion.

00:55:37.040 On the state level, Tudor versus Board of Education, a borough of Rutherford, New Jersey, said that the Gideons couldn't distribute King James' New Testaments to children in schools because that violated the religious protections and liberties of Jewish students and Muslims, whomever else might be there.

00:55:53.320 Engel v. Vital, that was the one that I was looking for, says that if you have a prayer over the school intercom, like, say, just the Lord's Prayer or something like that, that violates religious liberty.

00:56:03.740 I mean, can school district be shimp? That's what it was, shimp, not shink. 0.86

00:56:08.140 That says that if you read scripture without comment, then that's not allowed.

00:56:13.540 You must be discussing it objectively and secularly is the thing that the Supreme Court said you must do.

00:56:19.680 This is not us on the right saying the school's secularizing the treatment of Christianity in schools for historical purposes, religious purposes, or political purposes, whatever else.

00:56:30.120 This was the standard they set.

00:56:32.520 You can only discuss religious scripture if it is done so objectively and secularly, whatever that is supposed to mean.

00:56:39.060 That is a forcible law that has come down from the Supreme Court because the First Amendment was incorporated.

00:56:46.000 This is, quite literally, the Bible being taken out of your public school.

00:56:50.480 You cannot do that.

00:56:51.560 In some cases, you literally cannot distribute the literature itself.

00:56:55.080 And like you said, this is so core.

00:56:57.140 This is the canon, just the basic foundation of our civilization.

00:57:03.560 And you can see in many ways that today one of the reasons we don't have a culture anymore is specifically because this kind of binding text has been removed from the consciousness of many children.

00:57:17.140 And a lot of times, if you say even things like a David and Goliath moment or a Daniel and the lions, they don't even know.

00:57:22.740 They have no, there's no, there's no reference there.

00:57:24.780 And so just these basic phrases that used to be taken for granted in any, you know, cartoon, suddenly there's no reference to them anymore.

00:57:34.180 This is absolutely devastating to a common culture because if you don't have these shared narratives, if you don't have these shared archetypes and understandings, then you can't really communicate because human communication is archetypal.

00:57:48.940 It is done in these stories.

00:57:51.200 It is done in this understanding of a way of being.

00:57:54.140 It is not done by just communicating simple facts to each other.

00:57:57.880 And when you do that, when you go ahead and take out that binding doctrine, that understanding of what your society is, there's no longer a way to have those conversations.

00:58:08.720 And this is really what I want people to take away from this at the end.

00:58:12.400 A lot of conservatives today even would look at the idea of an establishment of a state church or teaching the Bible in a school and say, that's radical.

00:58:21.220 That's crazy.

00:58:22.980 That's some Christian theocracy. 1.00

00:58:24.600 That's the Christian nationalism we're all scared about. 0.99

00:58:26.560 That's not what the founding fathers believed in.

00:58:28.720 That is wrong.

00:58:29.780 That is false.

00:58:30.900 You have been sold a false history.

00:58:33.500 So many even conservatives would be terrified of the idea of the basic things that happened in the 1950s being taught again today in the United States.

00:58:43.240 But you need to understand that the separation of church and state that you have that doesn't even exist in the Constitution, by the way, that's not where that phrase comes from.

00:58:50.680 You can't find it in the First Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

00:58:55.220 But that idea that you have against the establishment of church or religion in the United States is completely revolutionary.

00:59:02.440 It's completely novel.

00:59:03.980 It is not something that, like you said, your great-grandparents even believed in.

00:59:08.720 They wouldn't have known it.

00:59:09.720 It would have been completely alien to them if you had explained it to them when they were kids.

00:59:13.700 It would have made no sense.

00:59:15.180 And it wouldn't have made any sense to the Founding Fathers or the Puritans or any of the people that are currently used in the modern narrative to justify the idea of the secular state that we have today.

00:59:25.940 The version of the secular state, as you understand it, is a modern fabrication, a complete distortion of history. 0.80

00:59:32.120 It has no connection to America, our roots, or our values.

00:59:36.920 And so when conservative commentators or people who are warning you about the dangers of oncoming Christian nationalism are telling you about this and warning you about this, understand it is completely fabricated wholesale. 0.65

00:59:50.660 It has no connection to your history, to your past, your tradition, to the beliefs of your founders or your founding documents.

00:59:58.380 All you need to know is a little bit of history prior to the 1940s.

01:00:03.740 And you will all, and this is true of so many things, if you just have a little bit of understanding of history prior to the 1940s, the world is a very different place.

01:00:11.580 And so I encourage people who are unfamiliar with this part of American history, this aspect of American history, to go ahead and familiarize yourself with it.

01:00:20.300 Because if you don't understand this, you are so easily misled by modern narratives that are often even peddled on the right.

01:00:27.220 And I think it's very dangerous and it's important for people to have the kind of context that Ryan has provided us here.

01:00:34.640 All right, guys.

01:00:35.560 Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

01:00:37.820 Ryan, thank you so much for coming on, man.

01:00:39.360 It's always great to talk to you and get your big brain going about the history that we need to understand.

01:00:45.780 Is there anything that you have coming up that people should check out or should they go back and read the original article you did on this?

01:00:52.480 Where would you like to direct people before we go?

01:00:54.400 Oh, well, yeah.

01:00:54.920 If people want an article with a lot of hyperlinks to the actual decisions or summaries of the decisions that we've been talking about this whole time, I have one on this.

01:01:05.540 It's on Mises.org.

01:01:06.920 The article's title is Destroying Liberty Through State Protection, the First Amendment.

01:01:11.580 That name might sound strange to most people, but hopefully if you've watched this episode, now you can understand why I have such a seemingly contradictory title.

01:01:22.220 You can go there.

01:01:23.160 I have a lot of material that you can read over everything from where we started from on this video today with the 14th Amendment or not 14th Amendment.

01:01:31.040 The colonies, going through the 14th Amendment, all the way through all of these court cases that we just listed off near the end.

01:01:38.780 And then if you want to go find any of my work, my channel, Brian Turnipseed on YouTube, has a lot of my streams there.

01:01:45.360 Going over in similar depth of a lot of historical topics, political topics, religious topics, things along those lines.

01:01:55.080 You can find my Twitter at Turnip Merchant or under my name, one or the other.

01:01:59.480 There's a lot of discussions that happen there, usually to do with religious issues, shall we say.

01:02:08.300 And then the Old Glory Club would be another great place to go and look for other deep dives into these topics and America as it once was rather than as it is now.

01:02:18.640 You can go find that there.

01:02:20.280 I would say the dream is most certainly still alive.

01:02:22.560 The people are still there.

01:02:23.540 The heritage, it can't be undone because it's history now.

01:02:26.960 It will always be what it once was.

01:02:29.420 You can go and look at the Old Glory Club to find out what it is that you might be missing in that regard.

01:02:36.260 And I might say, just to cap this off, it wasn't too terribly long ago that I was in high school.

01:02:41.840 And we had to learn illusions for our English class.

01:02:46.720 And you mentioned that children didn't know what David and Goliath moments are and all this other stuff.

01:02:51.400 And I can't help but echo that here at the end, that this is absolutely true.

01:02:55.760 And it's an absolute crisis, as you mentioned at the end.

01:03:00.000 In my class, we had to go over basic illusions.

01:03:04.680 Adam and Eve, all of these other things that children just – these weren't children.

01:03:08.720 These were seniors in high school.

01:03:10.540 Just did not know the actual story.

01:03:13.160 They did not know who these figures were in some cases.

01:03:15.960 They just know that, I don't know, it's the star of the Bible.

01:03:18.440 They don't actually know what they did.

01:03:20.040 They don't know anything about the fall.

01:03:21.420 They don't know about Noah, Abraham, or these other people in Scripture that was just taken for granted not six decades ago.

01:03:29.160 What we discussed here today, though there was a lot of background in history, has a lot to do with the current dissolving of our civilization.

01:03:40.520 If people don't know the very same – the same basic facts about where you came from, why you do the things you do, why you believe the things you do, why the words you were saying have the meanings that they do,

01:03:51.120 you aren't going to have a civilization for long, and I think that you're seeing that out there right now.

01:03:56.200 The high school seniors wouldn't know basic things about, I don't know, where does pearls before swine or house divided against itself come from.

01:04:04.540 That stuck with me for many years.

01:04:07.000 It's indicative of a civilizational decline.

01:04:09.580 So thank you for having me on, Aaron.

01:04:11.860 Of course, and I think the point you make is so important.

01:04:14.320 If you have these people who say to themselves, well, I'm not religious, so why do I care if the Bible is not being taught in school?

01:04:19.960 I don't care if kids become Christian. 1.00

01:04:21.800 But you should care first because that is a critical part of life.

01:04:25.620 You should actually care about the salvation of your eternal soul and the well-being of the United States as a Christian nation.

01:04:31.840 But even if you don't care about those things, you should care about the fact that your heritage was stolen from you,

01:04:37.560 that your civilization was stolen from you, that the binding truth of your society,

01:04:42.560 the thing that builds it up and allows it to function, was stolen from you.

01:04:45.760 And the fact that that is gone, even if you aren't personally religious,

01:04:49.100 still has a massive impact on who you are and whether or not your country can function.

01:04:53.960 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

01:04:55.960 Normally, we'd have the questions of the people, but this is a prerecorded episode

01:04:58.940 because I'm actually in Washington, D.C. right now about to speak at NatCon.

01:05:03.760 So I'll be back here later in the week, but you're going to get a few prerecorded episodes.

01:05:08.880 And remember, guys, if it's your first time here, go ahead and subscribe on the YouTube channel.

01:05:13.520 Turn on the notifications.

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01:05:25.640 And when you do leave a rating or review, it helps with the algorithm magic.

01:05:29.980 If you'd like to pick up my book, The Total State, of course, you can do that on Amazon,

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01:05:37.820 Thank you so much for watching, guys.

01:05:39.220 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - July 08, 2024

The TRUTH About Separation of Church and State ｜ Guest： Ryan Turnipseed ｜ 7⧸8⧸24

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