The modern notion of separation of church and state is a disaster. It is radically different from the way that our founders understood how our Constitution would be structured. Ryan Turtipseed, a great and powerful understander of the American past, joins me to explain why.
00:00:33.500I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.560So the modern notion of separation of church and state is a disaster.
00:00:42.440It is radically different from the way that our founders understood how our Constitution would be structured.
00:00:48.380And the interpretation we have today leads people to believe that we should have these secular, neutral spaces everywhere that we go.
00:00:56.740But that's not the way that the Bill of Rights was structured.
00:00:58.760That's not the way that the Constitution was structured.
00:01:01.220And 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.
00:01:09.020Joining me to dive into all of this historical autism is a great and powerful understander of the American past.
00:01:16.860Ryan Turtipseed, thanks for joining me, man.
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00:02:48.380So 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.
00:03:05.340This is a giant violation of our Constitution.
00:03:08.860We're going to turn into a theocracy tomorrow.
00:03:11.780They'll be goose-stepping everyone to the gulags by the end of the week.
00:03:15.860This is how it's constantly approached.
00:03:18.540But it bears no relationship to the actual history of religion in the United States in the way that the founders understood it.
00:03:26.280For 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?
00:03:38.280And before even getting to the state churches, there's another concept that we should probably discuss as well.
00:03:43.780The 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.
00:03:56.620And they will be told that these pilgrims fled England in the name of religious tolerance.
00:04:02.060They wanted to practice their religions and be free from repressive state laws restricting their practice back in England.
00:04:09.540And that's why the Puritans came over here.
00:04:11.280So 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.
00:04:19.940I figured it'd be good to start there just real quick before we get to the state churches.
00:04:23.940Because this is a false narrative, quite frankly.
00:04:28.840This idea that English Puritans sought religious tolerance as an ideal in and of itself.
00:04:34.360When 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.
00:04:44.580They were seeking a place for them to practice their religion where they would not be inhibited by other people.
00:04:50.280And this is what they wanted to build their society around.
00:04:52.820So in fact, they were very intolerant, which is the connotation of Puritan.
00:04:58.800I think that calling them pilgrims instead of Puritans might have done a huge bit of damage to the understanding of our own history here.
00:05:06.640But this is why you get those tiny little states up in New England with weird borders, small exclaves, different charter regions,
00:05:15.500is because what would happen is these Puritans would kick out nonconformists, people that did not follow that charter's religion.
00:05:23.140And they would just go settle somewhere else.
00:05:26.160So you had multiple states where you could practice the approved religion in a very small geographic area.
00:05:33.860But there was no real tolerance except maybe in Rhode Island, which was sort of the outlier.
00:05:39.100It was the one outlier of that region.
00:05:41.020But this is like the first narrative I figured that we should just mash right here is the Puritans in New England.
00:05:49.720And this idea that we were founded on religious tolerance because of the pilgrims.
00:05:55.300But 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,
00:06:02.120oh, yeah, the pilgrims, we should honor the one thing that they cared about.
00:06:05.200Yeah, that should probably go ahead and be a telltale sign that, yeah, they are taking us on a rabbit chase there.
00:06:12.080It is really important that people notice what you're saying there, though.
00:06:14.900Originally, it's not about religious tolerance.
00:06:17.600It's about the freedom to go ahead and impose religious intolerance.
00:07:05.040If 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.
00:07:14.460They 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.
00:07:24.540They were all going to be literate so that they could read scripture.
00:07:26.960That was why they founded all these famous colleges later on as they developed their colonies like Harvard and Yale, originally divinity schools.
00:07:34.660It was so that they could be the exemplar of essentially a Christian theocracy.
00:07:40.180There was no separation of church and state in these charters.
00:07:43.380Now, 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.
00:07:58.280You could hold a variety of opinions so long as you were a Congregationalist Calvinist in the vast majority of these colonies.
00:08:04.160So, 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.
00:08:12.620But 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.
00:08:26.080These were the people that settled the Northeast.
00:08:28.520So everything from Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, all of these places up in the Northeast, the far Northeast, this was Puritan settlement.
00:08:41.080All but Rhode Island, very much religiously intolerant.
00:08:43.520And in fact, the oldest state church, the state church that lasted the longest.
00:08:50.120And 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.
00:09:05.920The 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.
00:09:15.740So 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.
00:09:28.720People 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.
00:09:38.840So 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.
00:09:52.140So that was in the Northeast and New England.
00:09:56.040And then just drawing upon some basic American history here, we can divide the rest into the Southern colonies and maybe the Mid-Atlantic.
00:10:04.120The Southern colonies were the other part of the English colonies that had established state churches that actually meant something.
00:10:13.560And these Southern colonies, very English, they were very cavalier, perhaps, in their heritage.
00:10:22.920And 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.
00:10:40.300And 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.
00:10:52.680So in the South, the state churches here were Anglican.
00:10:56.240Virginia had an established Anglican state church up until, I believe, right before the Revolution.
00:11:01.100I believe that Jefferson helped dismantle that.
00:11:03.860Most of the other colonies retained theirs until just after the Revolution, if my memory serves correctly.
00:11:11.540And these Anglican churches had some massive social weight in the colonies.
00:11:17.540So there were laws against not attending church.
00:11:22.300So you had compulsory church attendance, compulsory religious education.
00:11:28.620There was the way that the colonies handled divorce was just by church Anglican doctrine.
00:11:35.580So there's a historical meme that goes around that says that Anglicanism was founded to get divorces for the monarch.
00:11:42.420An honest reading of that kind of doesn't bear that out in reality.
00:11:47.740If you look at the colony of Virginia, for instance, going back to why I pointed out Albion Seed earlier,
00:11:53.680the colony of Virginia, the way that the Anglicans taught divorce there was so strict, so rare of an occasion,
00:12:02.100that the colony of Virginia, up until the 1720s, I think, only granted, I think, one divorce that entire time that they existed
00:12:10.100because of Anglican doctrine, this is a civil matter, as the Anglicans would say,
00:12:15.200but it was being informed by religious doctrine.
00:12:17.840And this one divorce was only because they feared for the woman's life.
00:12:21.120So out of these many decades that Virginia was established as a political entity,
00:12:27.880the Anglican doctrine of divorce and marriage, holy matrimony, informed this political matter.
00:12:34.540So this is just one example of the massive social weight that Anglicanism had in this one colony.
00:13:05.020They reject the idea that they can be state-supported.
00:13:09.080That was retained in Pennsylvania's identity.
00:13:14.120New York was originally founded by the Dutch.
00:13:16.700There was a lot of intertwined state and church politicking with the Dutch Calvinists.
00:13:23.060But 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.
00:13:34.680New 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.
00:13:45.020So 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.
00:13:55.380In each of these states, you would find edicts against homosexuality, against all these other things.
00:14:00.580And the proof or the reason for this comes from Christian doctrine.
00:14:03.880It's in law, but there is no established state church.
00:14:06.800But in the modern day, most people recognize that to be no separation of church and state because scripture is quoted in the laws.
00:14:13.740Even though there isn't an established state church, it's religiously tolerant by law.
00:14:50.240These are all the things that they don't like about the old system.
00:14:53.120And one of the things they don't like might be these state churches.
00:14:57.400So were the state churches imposed by British governance?
00:15:01.980And 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.
00:15:14.760Was that something they were speaking specifically to avoiding these Anglican churches or others that had been created and were buoyed by the.
00:15:25.140So to address this, going back to the northeast when we just discussed the Puritans, was this something that was just forced upon the people?
00:15:32.320They later turned around and rejected.
00:15:34.120Well, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully the audience can understand from what I was saying.
00:15:40.060The Puritans fled England to establish their own polities that were specifically congregationalist or Puritan is the name that we give them.
00:16:08.500And 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.
00:16:19.760They want to have universal religious tolerance or something like that.
00:16:23.960And to think that that is in there would violate a few, it would be an anachronism for a few reasons.
00:16:29.880Number one being there was no unified sense of identity of the colonies when they first seceded, when they declared independence.
00:16:37.480So to say that all colonies wanted their state churches gone would be heavily anachronistic.
00:16:43.300They are still very regional, provincial, if you will.
00:16:45.920They have separate polities that don't want to give up power to the other ones.
00:16:49.980And in fact, we're going to see in the Bill of Rights, that's going to be a reason for one of our amendments,
00:16:56.100is that the state churches in some of these regions don't want to give up power to the other ones.
00:17:00.540The Anglicans don't want to be under a Puritan system.
00:17:03.260The Puritans don't want to be under an Anglican system.
00:17:06.060The people in the Mid-Atlantic, the smaller, more minority denominations, the Quakers, the Dutch Reformed, the Lutherans, all these other types,
00:17:14.360they don't want to be subject to any of them.
00:20:58.440But as for religion, we eventually come up with a compromise for this federal structure, which is the Bill of Rights.
00:21:06.900The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
00:21:10.620Most people probably learned that in their civics class.
00:21:13.220What they did not learn is probably what most people were thinking at this time as to why it would be needed.
00:21:18.280So 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.
00:21:27.420That's not quite how most people were thinking in the 1790s, really until a few decades ago, really.
00:21:34.060This was a very 1960s view superimposed on the past.
00:21:38.980Rather, the reason that you see Congress shall make no law establishing an official religion or church,
00:21:46.560that 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.
00:21:55.700So basically, the Puritans are not going to be forced to convert to Anglicanism.
00:24:18.540All right, Ryan, so you were giving the context for where the First Amendment comes from.
00:24:24.280And this is incredibly important because we mentioned this briefly, but we should reiterate it.
00:24:29.220The First Amendment did not apply to the individual states.
00:24:32.820None of the Bill of Rights actually applied to the individual states in the way that we understand it now.
00:24:37.880And so when they said Congress shall make no law, they really meant specifically Congress.
00:24:44.220Only the national government would not be able to establish a church in this way
00:24:49.100because they were the ones being limited by the Bill of Rights.
00:24:53.060The Anti-Federalists wanted the Bill of Rights to limit federal power, not state power.
00:24:59.660They were interested in retaining that state power, including the state power to establish a church and support a church.
00:25:06.820And so when the First Amendment is being written, it is not a blanket affirmation of religious freedom to every individual in the United States.
00:25:15.720It's a specific defense for the states against a larger incorporated church created by the federal government.
00:25:24.680The 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.
00:25:33.620Exactly. And you can you can kind of if you put yourself in the shoes of someone at the time, like a politician, say,
00:25:41.340how are you going to get this federation of colonies to stay together?
00:25:44.980Well, 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,
00:25:55.060the Constitution, the Declaration and all this other stuff that drafted these things.
00:26:00.320Clergymen were involved at every step of the way and they weren't all from the same denomination.
00:26:04.020The first Speaker of the House, I don't think he was a clergyman necessarily.
00:26:10.320I know that he was heavily involved in theological works, though, was a Lutheran.
00:26:14.880There 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.
00:26:27.700Anglican clergymen were heavily involved in all of this as well.
00:26:31.900These were some of the most well-learned men of the colony.
00:26:34.540So 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.
00:26:41.500You know, this wasn't a they weren't claiming a continuation government necessarily.
00:26:45.380They recognized they were starting something new, but they also were drawing upon their shared heritage.
00:26:51.740Well, number one, people that read and number two, people that read historical works.
00:26:55.940And at this point in time, that's going to be clergymen are going to be your top profession for most of this stuff.
00:27:02.020So 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?
00:27:16.580Well, you give them a guarantee that there won't be a church that will force them to flip their religion.
00:27:21.100That is the purpose of the First Amendment.
00:27:22.820It'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.
00:27:34.640It, as you mentioned, has no application to an individual.
00:27:38.300If 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.
00:27:47.920At least the first eight or so amendments have absolutely no bearing on me because it has nothing to do with individual people.
00:27:55.140It is limits on the federal government so that the federal government does not do something to the states.
00:28:00.600So, and this is what the Supreme Court as well reaffirmed in the 1830s.
00:28:08.000This 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.
00:28:17.160This is one that's in there, but you don't get it with the context that we just laid out.
00:28:21.200So, it's a little bit strange as to why it's in there.
00:28:25.020This is the, the Marshall Court's one of its only sort of restraining decisions that it put upon the federal government.
00:28:32.580Usually, this was a court renowned for strengthening federal power.
00:28:37.380This is one of the few decisions it took where it actually severely limited the federal power.
00:28:41.540And the case was, Barron, I believe he was a harbor master in Baltimore, something like that.
00:28:48.480And Baltimore had rerouted a bunch of the rivers that were going into the harbor.
00:28:53.840Barron sued the city of Baltimore for taking his property without compensation.
00:28:59.300And 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.
00:29:10.080But it didn't apply to the state of Maryland.
00:29:14.400He was a citizen of Maryland, not of the federal government necessarily.
00:29:19.000So, 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.
00:29:27.760So, the Supreme Court ruled against Barron.
00:29:32.460And this was basically just saying, yeah, the Bill of Rights only restricts the federal government.
00:29:39.000Congress will not make any laws establishing this, that, and the other.
00:29:43.200The right to bear arms is not something that the federal government will rule on.
00:29:48.800All of these things are given to the state.
00:29:50.620This was a very wide-reaching Supreme Court decision, given the perhaps menial object of what was brought to it originally.
00:30:00.000But 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.
00:30:13.640The federal government will not impose upon them.
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00:31:28.220There are plenty of creations that protected the rights of the church, that enforced the church's doctrine, their moral vision.
00:31:36.900This 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.
00:31:46.740But very explicitly, as Ryan just pointed out, it did not.
00:31:49.920And so, therefore, even if that had been the interpretation of those statutes at that time, it would not have applied to the states anyway.
00:31:58.700But when does this start to shift, Ryan?
00:32:01.600What is the key moment that really starts to push us towards the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the wider national body politic?
00:32:12.860Right. 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.
00:32:23.340In fact, I believe that's the decade where the last one gets disestablished.
00:32:28.360That'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.
00:32:35.320So 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.
00:32:54.220But this is rather this is just saying tax money is no longer going to the churches.
00:32:58.900In every single state, you still have blasphemy laws, you have obscenity laws that are entirely based upon Christian morals and of the Protestant tradition.
00:33:09.940And these these would all be retained well into the 20th century.
00:33:23.940It'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.
00:33:36.620The society has remained cohesive, organic.
00:33:40.220Different regions have their own variations.
00:33:42.300So the Northeast, the Puritan churches remain through the Great Awakenings.
00:33:46.580And the South, the Southern Baptists and the Anglicans are still battling it out demographically.
00:33:52.320Will the South be Anglican or Baptist?
00:33:54.860And in the modern day, you can kind of see who won that.
00:33:58.000But this is a this is sort of just the way that things were.
00:34:01.780You had very religious Christian laws on the state on the state's books.
00:34:07.600But most of the state churches were abolished before the Civil War.
00:34:11.840But then the Civil War does whirl around.
00:34:13.640And 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.
00:34:26.380It wasn't involved in any anything foundational or necessary to what was being done.
00:34:31.300Read 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.
00:34:55.100But this is a this is very much a religious war on top of everything else.
00:35:00.900And this is not just one side versus the other.
00:35:02.980Even internally, you had religious conflicts.
00:35:05.180There were Puritan Puritan defenders of slavery in the north, for instance, in Massachusetts, even.
00:35:12.480You can find those pretty easily, these speeches.
00:35:14.900And 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.
00:35:27.520You can find abolitionists in the south.
00:35:30.000This 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.
00:35:38.600But as we all know, the south loses, the north wins.
00:35:44.080But then after that, the way this gets taught, usually, is that then reconstruction happens.
00:35:49.040Basically, the south loses and you just get reconstruction.
00:35:51.460The military is put in charge in the south and they start going about reworking society.
00:36:32.480All of the former slaves are now free.
00:36:34.840And 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.
00:36:50.460The northerners, and this is perhaps the strongest argument that they weren't just true believers.
00:36:56.000They were also politicians, realized that this was a bad thing.
00:36:59.480They 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.
00:37:14.340Then 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.
00:37:29.960And 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.
00:37:45.840I believe we went over that on this channel before.
00:37:47.680So this shouldn't be new ground to some of our more regular viewers.
00:37:56.640The 14th Amendment, though, is what we're going to be focusing on today.
00:37:59.420This 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.
00:38:09.680So 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.
00:38:20.580And in the 14th Amendment, there's there's multiple parts.
00:38:24.820And the one that we're concerned with today is the due process clause.
00:38:31.220In fact, there's another clause in the 14th Amendment that was probably intended to do what we're about to talk about.
00:38:36.360But the Supreme Court during the Reconstruction era was actually very pro-southern, very localist.
00:38:44.140And they they got a clause that that was supposed to do what we're about to talk about.
00:38:48.660So and that's the slaughterhouse cases for anyone that wants to go look those up.
00:38:53.500In the 14th Amendment, you have the due process clause, which says and this applies against the states protecting individuals within the states.
00:39:00.800The due process must be afforded to every single person.
00:39:07.260But this is the that's the gist of it.
00:39:09.440This guarantee had not been provided in law before in U.S. history.
00:39:14.400This is an entirely new invention alongside birthright citizenship and all these other things that come along with the 14th Amendment.
00:39:21.700And 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.
00:39:34.580But actually, it radically reworks how the country functions, but only a few generations after this 14th Amendment is passed into law.
00:39:43.440So you have due process being guaranteed to the South.
00:39:48.120At the time this is written, this basically just means every person in the South can vote.
00:39:52.860And 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.
00:40:01.640This is very much saying the slaves, the former slaves will now vote.
00:40:05.700They voted in their governments in the South.
00:40:07.580Most U.S. history textbooks will remark upon them as the most corrupt governments that the South have ever seen.
00:40:14.320They got immediately voted out by the people that originally voted them in.
00:40:18.460This is not a great time for the South.
00:40:20.240This is what this due process meant when it was written.
00:40:22.200A 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.
00:40:33.160Two separate groups, but for our purposes, they go towards the same goal.
00:40:38.140You have in 1919, you have Gitlo versus New York.
00:40:48.380Gitlo was a socialist in New York State.
00:40:54.020He was a distributor of left-wing propaganda manifestos.
00:40:57.880He 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.
00:41:11.920For those of you as well that know your U.S. history cliches, this is the first Red Scare.
00:41:16.460The Bolsheviks in Russia are winning their civil war.
00:41:22.240There 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.
00:41:35.340Maybe there's a communist that had been led into the country.
00:41:37.800And just a couple of decades earlier, President William McKinley was shot by a socialist anarchist in New York as well.
00:41:46.260So the state of New York was very much against the socialists, especially the ones that were propagating violent revolution, like Gitlo.
00:41:55.620New York had passed its own law that basically banned socialist literature, revolutionary socialist literature.
00:42:01.260It was banned by law, and it was considered treason and sedition.
00:42:05.000We had federal versions of those, the acts that were passed during the Wilson administration during World War I.
00:42:11.720This is your clear and present danger doctrine articulated by the Supreme Court that upheld these laws.
00:42:16.420But then when you get to New York, who makes their own laws as a state, they imprison Gitlo.
00:42:23.320He serves two years in Sing Sing, the prison.
00:42:27.080And then his case makes it to the Supreme Court.
00:42:29.480And 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,
00:42:57.900if you will, just given how perhaps their home's intentions was to save the country from subversive socialists and communists.
00:43:05.920And the Brandeis Court, quite famously, might not have done so.
00:43:09.860But it was these two on the dissent, and the remaining seven ruled against New York in favor of Gitlo.
00:43:16.920And this is where you start seeing the Supreme Court saying that actually, because of the due process clause in the 14th Amendment,
00:43:27.520all of the, or at least part of the First Amendment, rather, applies to protection of individuals against the state.
00:43:34.160So 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.
00:43:48.120So the court basically here says, yeah, it says Congress won't make any law establishing or concerning this.
00:43:54.380But actually, we have this 14th Amendment here that says it's not just Congress now that can't do this, but also New York.
00:44:02.800So this is what's called incorporation.
00:44:05.460This happens across a whole series of court cases where the Supreme Court gets a case that gets articulated before it,
00:44:12.500and they get to decide, do we want to say that Amendments 1 through 8 apply against the states in favor of individuals?
00:44:20.500So 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.
00:44:32.520Now suddenly the First Amendment is basically religious anarchy.
00:44:36.440You can believe, say, print, whatever you want to at any point in time, in any place.
00:44:42.060And when I say any place, I mean any place, including private property.
00:44:48.320This is after the First Amendment, all parts of it were fully incorporated.
00:44:52.880So now it's not just the freedom of the press, but also of religion.
00:44:57.620You have the famously Congress shall make no laws establishing a church.
00:45:01.620That's somehow applied against the states now.
00:45:04.760We'll get into how that applies to our current situation later because this is the most important part.
00:45:09.600But even private property rights are superseded by this incorporation doctrine.
00:45:14.680Marsh 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.
00:45:28.680They could not prevent Jehovah's Witnesses from proselytizing the people living there.
00:45:34.500Even 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.
00:45:45.680Because that would somehow violate the First Amendment, which said Congress shall make no laws establishing a state church.
00:45:54.240And this is really important for people to understand.
00:45:57.020This huge cascade of cases that go ahead and start incorporating the Bill of Rights is a massive power grab by the federal government.
00:46:08.000This 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.
00:46:15.840Because once you make this switch, the Bill of Rights stops being a set of protections for the state against the federal government.
00:46:24.220And it becomes a list of reasons why the federal government is allowed to go ahead and interfere in the actions of the state.
00:46:32.500And so it goes ahead and flips this entire idea of what the Bill of Rights are for.
00:46:38.680They were originally there to protect the states from the overreach of the federal government.
00:46:42.880The 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.
00:46:57.140And 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.
00:47:06.060And 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.
00:47:17.060And 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.
00:47:28.140In 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?
00:47:35.920Oh, 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.
00:48:04.700Right, 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.
00:48:26.600And 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.
00:48:45.380But earlier I mentioned socialists and communists had a part in this, that was just the socialist side.
00:48:50.080And I mentioned that the First Amendment would be fully incorporated.
00:48:54.180Freedom 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.
00:49:08.780So, 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.
00:49:21.720This 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,
00:49:38.520banning these things, banning leftist revolutionary activity, banning obscenity.
00:49:44.740So, 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.
00:49:53.520So, 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.
00:50:14.020So, 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.
00:50:23.280And this is mostly what it did with a caveat.
00:50:26.040When 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.
00:50:35.680Because 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?
00:51:46.520And, yeah, this is the part that I grew up with, this sort of war.
00:51:50.020I 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.
00:52:04.340And 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.
00:52:17.200Because 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.
00:52:37.300And 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.
00:52:43.040It was because this is a foundational book to our civilization.
00:52:46.560If 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.
00:53:06.600Abraham Lincoln, in fact, did not invent the phrase, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
00:53:51.900This is what my great-grandmother grew up with.
00:53:53.680She was in school up until about the 1950s or so, as you would expect.
00:53:58.520But 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.
00:54:14.480Saying 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.
00:54:29.100Because now, this Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, Congress would not establish a church or religion over the country.
00:54:37.840This Establishment Clause now protects individuals against states and in every facet of individual life.
00:54:44.700So 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.
00:54:54.900You had Schneck, the Schneck decision, quite famous—or, not Schneck, hold on, that might be wrong.
00:55:04.880You have all these decisions where they just incrementally go about getting religion out of the school curriculums.
00:55:10.820So, Illinois, X-Rail McCollum versus the Board of Education.
00:55:15.680This is where the schools now violate the Establishment Clause by allowing religious education during school hours.
00:55:22.000So, 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.
00:55:32.880You don't get that freedom of religion because that somehow means the state is establishing a religion.
00:55:37.040On 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.
00:55:53.320Engel 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.
00:56:03.740I mean, can school district be shimp? That's what it was, shimp, not shink.
00:56:08.140That says that if you read scripture without comment, then that's not allowed.
00:56:13.540You must be discussing it objectively and secularly is the thing that the Supreme Court said you must do.
00:56:19.680This 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.
00:56:57.140This is the canon, just the basic foundation of our civilization.
00:57:03.560And 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.
00:57:17.140And 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.
00:57:22.740They have no, there's no, there's no reference there.
00:57:24.780And 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.
00:57:34.180This 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.
00:57:51.200It is done in this understanding of a way of being.
00:57:54.140It is not done by just communicating simple facts to each other.
00:57:57.880And 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.
00:58:08.720And this is really what I want people to take away from this at the end.
00:58:12.400A 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.
00:58:33.500So 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.
00:58:43.240But 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.
00:58:50.680You can't find it in the First Amendment or anywhere else in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
00:58:55.220But that idea that you have against the establishment of church or religion in the United States is completely revolutionary.
00:59:15.180And 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.
00:59:25.940The version of the secular state, as you understand it, is a modern fabrication, a complete distortion of history.
00:59:32.120It has no connection to America, our roots, or our values.
00:59:36.920And 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.
00:59:50.660It has no connection to your history, to your past, your tradition, to the beliefs of your founders or your founding documents.
00:59:58.380All you need to know is a little bit of history prior to the 1940s.
01:00:03.740And 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.
01:00:11.580And 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.
01:00:20.300Because if you don't understand this, you are so easily misled by modern narratives that are often even peddled on the right.
01:00:27.220And I think it's very dangerous and it's important for people to have the kind of context that Ryan has provided us here.
01:00:35.560Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
01:00:37.820Ryan, thank you so much for coming on, man.
01:00:39.360It's always great to talk to you and get your big brain going about the history that we need to understand.
01:00:45.780Is 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?
01:00:52.480Where would you like to direct people before we go?
01:00:54.920If 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.
01:01:06.920The article's title is Destroying Liberty Through State Protection, the First Amendment.
01:01:11.580That 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.
01:01:23.160I 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.
01:01:31.040The colonies, going through the 14th Amendment, all the way through all of these court cases that we just listed off near the end.
01:01:38.780And then if you want to go find any of my work, my channel, Brian Turnipseed on YouTube, has a lot of my streams there.
01:01:45.360Going over in similar depth of a lot of historical topics, political topics, religious topics, things along those lines.
01:01:55.080You can find my Twitter at Turnip Merchant or under my name, one or the other.
01:01:59.480There's a lot of discussions that happen there, usually to do with religious issues, shall we say.
01:02:08.300And 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.
01:03:13.160They did not know who these figures were in some cases.
01:03:15.960They just know that, I don't know, it's the star of the Bible.
01:03:18.440They don't actually know what they did.
01:03:20.040They don't know anything about the fall.
01:03:21.420They don't know about Noah, Abraham, or these other people in Scripture that was just taken for granted not six decades ago.
01:03:29.160What 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.
01:03:40.520If 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,
01:03:51.120you aren't going to have a civilization for long, and I think that you're seeing that out there right now.
01:03:56.200The 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.