The Charlie Kirk Show - March 01, 2023


America's Great Awakenings with Dr. Jerry Newcombe


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Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

158.84306

Word count

5,263

Sentence count

386

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Jerry Newcomb joins us to discuss his new film, "The Road to Independence" and to discuss the need for a third great awakening in America. Dr. Newcomb is a historian and expert on all things revivals and the history of America's great awakenings.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Dr. Newcomb joins us.
00:00:03.000 He has an amazing film, The Road to Independence.
00:00:06.000 We talk about is America a Christian nation?
00:00:08.000 Where do we come from?
00:00:09.000 And how do we solve the current problems in front of us?
00:00:12.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast and make sure your friends are subscribed as well.
00:00:18.000 And if these ideas interest you, check out turningpointacademy.com and get involved today.
00:00:24.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:25.000 Here we go.
00:00:26.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:28.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:30.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:33.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:37.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:38.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:39.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:00:40.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:47.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:56.000 That's why we are here.
00:00:59.000 Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
00:01:08.000 Joining us now is Dr. Jerry Newcomb, serves as the executive director of the Providence Forum and as a senior producer, on-air host, and columnist for James Kennedy Ministries.
00:01:20.000 And he is a historian and an expert on all things revivals and the history of America's great awakenings, a topic I am passionate about.
00:01:29.000 And Dr. Newcomb, welcome to the program.
00:01:32.000 Thank you.
00:01:32.000 Great to be with you.
00:01:34.000 So, Dr. Newcomb, how many awakenings or revivals have there been that are notable in American history?
00:01:40.000 And when did they occur?
00:01:42.000 Well, you could define it in different ways.
00:01:45.000 And I would say, in terms of the real big picture, D. James Kennedy, you just mentioned the founder of D. James Kennedy Ministries, a noted author and so forth.
00:01:56.000 He said in the big picture of things, he looked at it this way: America was born because of the first great awakening.
00:02:04.000 That was in the 1730s and 40s in America, okay?
00:02:08.000 And that helped propel really the whole push for independence.
00:02:13.000 Then the second major great awakening was in the early 1800s.
00:02:18.000 And that pricked many people's consciences about the evils of slavery and the inconsistency of having slavery with a country that's based on the idea that all men are created equal.
00:02:28.000 And it really helped push ultimately the end of slavery.
00:02:33.000 Obviously, it happened through the Civil War, but there was a great deal of push for that.
00:02:37.000 And then he said, Dr. Kennedy, now we are in need of a great third great awakening.
00:02:43.000 We would pray for that.
00:02:44.000 Now, obviously, Charlie, we've seen many different sporadic awakenings, even in our own time, just in the last couple of weeks.
00:02:52.000 This amazing event at Asbury College.
00:02:56.000 And I remember about 20 years ago, there was an event like that at Wheaton College.
00:03:00.000 And my wife and I met at Wheaton Graduate School about 45 years ago.
00:03:06.000 By God's grace, I was so grateful for that.
00:03:08.000 But anyway, so there have been these little movements, but I would say I kind of tend to agree with Dr. Kennedy that in the big picture you're looking at, the first great awakening, the second great awakening, and now the need for a third great awakening.
00:03:24.000 But see, part of the difference is that sometimes these spiritual movements that happen here and there, they don't necessarily reform and transform great portions of the society and the people.
00:03:39.000 And that's, I think, maybe where the difference boils down to how you define a great revival or great awakening.
00:03:46.000 Well, let's talk about the first great awakening that led to the American Revolution.
00:03:50.000 What period of time was this?
00:03:52.000 Talk about the major characters, Mayhew, Edwards, Whitfield, and talk about how that led into the American Revolution.
00:04:01.000 It created the framework and the foundation.
00:04:04.000 Yes, John Adams said, our second president said that, in effect, the revolution occurred in the people's hearts a generation before the actual American War for Independence.
00:04:18.000 And he's referring to, in some ways, this whole push for the Great Awakening.
00:04:25.000 I would say that really historians would credit Jonathan Edwards, Reverend Jonathan Edwards, Calvinist preacher, Congregationalist minister in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a pulpit there.
00:04:40.000 And under his preaching on a series of sermons about justification by faith alone in Jesus Christ, that that's really when revival began to start taking place.
00:04:55.000 And that was in Massachusetts.
00:04:56.000 And the character of New England began to slowly be transformed into a place.
00:05:02.000 And then George Whitfield came over from England and he preached not only in Massachusetts, but up and down the whole North Atlantic coast in all the different colonies.
00:05:14.000 In fact, Dr. Paul Johnson, great British historian who wrote a book that's a wonderful book called The History of the American People.
00:05:24.000 It's 1997.
00:05:26.000 And he said that George Whitfield is likely the first American or the first American, first person, because he was British, not American, but the first person that we know of that visited all 13 of the colonies in America.
00:05:44.000 And it was for all this preaching.
00:05:46.000 So in effect, the whole thing begins with Jonathan Edwards and then spreads through George Whitfield to the rest of the colonies.
00:05:55.000 And there were different preachers that were involved.
00:05:58.000 You mentioned Jonathan Mayhew, who died, I believe, in 1760, but he was a minister in the Boston area.
00:06:08.000 And he had some very interesting things to say about politics.
00:06:12.000 And he even said in a famous sermon that when the king does so many evil things in tyranny, he does, for all intents and purposes, unking himself.
00:06:25.000 Now, he was writing this in 1760, and he was, I'm sorry, he wrote it in 1750.
00:06:31.000 He died in 1760, but he was actually referring to the 100th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, who was a tyrant.
00:06:41.000 And King Charles I was the one with the star chamber where Christians, Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers were being persecuted for believing in Jesus.
00:06:53.000 And, you know, it was a terrible, terrible thing.
00:06:56.000 In fact, there was a civil war in England, and it was brought about, frankly, through Charles I's intolerance and persecution of the Christians.
00:07:07.000 And so, anyway, bottom line is that God was working in different ways.
00:07:13.000 But I want to say this about Jonathan Edwards, because he really is the one under whom God really sparked the first great awakening.
00:07:23.000 Jonathan Edwards was humble.
00:07:26.000 He was brilliant, but he was humble.
00:07:29.000 And you know, Charlie, everybody knows, probably everybody in your audience could quote 2 Chronicles 7:14.
00:07:36.000 If my people who are called by my name, you know, will humble themselves.
00:07:42.000 And I think that's one of the key elements that we need today, you know, in American Christianity.
00:07:50.000 We need more humility.
00:07:52.000 I believe it was that humble spirit that God used in a very special way in Jonathan Edwards.
00:08:00.000 If I may, may I tell a quick anecdote about this humility?
00:08:02.000 Yes.
00:08:03.000 Okay.
00:08:04.000 Unfortunately, you know how it is, Charlie, sometimes with church politics or organizational politics.
00:08:09.000 You were just talking a moment ago about, you know, Project Veritas and James O'Keefe and so forth.
00:08:15.000 And here he's a victim in effect of office politics.
00:08:18.000 Okay.
00:08:19.000 Well, Jonathan Edwards, despite God using him in a special way, he ended up getting fired by his own church.
00:08:27.000 And this is jumping ahead to 1750.
00:08:30.000 He gets fired by his own church, and yet they didn't have somebody to fill in the pulpit.
00:08:34.000 And so week after week on a Saturday afternoon, there'd be a knock at his door and it would be one of the leaders in the church saying, you know, Reverend, I'm sorry, but we don't have anybody to fill in the pulpit.
00:08:48.000 Would you please preach tomorrow morning?
00:08:52.000 And he would do it a week at a time because that's what God called him to do.
00:08:57.000 And I just think that speaks volumes about him.
00:09:00.000 I think we have to get to a point where we have to humble ourselves before God and repent of our wicked ways.
00:09:08.000 And that's one of the elements of revival that is so critical and so needed.
00:09:17.000 That is beautifully said.
00:09:18.000 And I want to get into the detail of exactly what his most famous sermon was, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
00:09:26.000 And what was the case he was making?
00:09:30.000 And why did that resonate with the people of the colonies of America at the time so deeply and with such impact?
00:09:41.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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00:10:44.000 Doctor, can you elaborate a little bit on the content of the most popular message by Jonathan Edwards?
00:10:51.000 Is that message the entirety of what he was sharing?
00:10:55.000 Should he be best known for that message?
00:10:57.000 Is that just the one that got the headlines?
00:10:59.000 Or do you think that is actually Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a proper summary of the message he was most well known to deliver?
00:11:09.000 Well, it's certainly his best known sermon.
00:11:12.000 You know, earlier I referenced Paul Johnson.
00:11:15.000 Paul Johnson said, ironically, while Jonathan Edwards is best known for that particular sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, he preached more about the love and the joy of God, you know, than he did the other.
00:11:31.000 But the point of the sinners in the hands of an angry God is one that people should not forget, that if you are, You know, separated from God, which we are naturally, and you have not been born again, you have not been regenerated, you are in a precarious, dangerous state spiritually.
00:11:53.000 You are not covered by the blood.
00:11:55.000 I mean, if I could use an analogy from the Passover, 1400 years before Jesus was even born, God instructed the people of Israel about the Passover.
00:12:06.000 And He said, What you need to do is you take this lamb that's without blemish, you sacrifice that lamb without breaking any of its bones, and then you take the blood and you put it on the top and the two sides of your house.
00:12:20.000 Then, when the angel of death sees the blood on the top and the two sides of your house, you think I'm making the sign of the cross?
00:12:28.000 You bet I am because that's what they did, you know, 1,400 years before Jesus died.
00:12:34.000 And through faith in the Lamb of God, whom Jesus is, you know, when John the Baptist saw him, he said, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
00:12:44.000 And so, through faith in Jesus Christ, God takes away our sins and he passes over the judgment because we are covered under the blood of the Lamb.
00:12:56.000 God made him who knew no sin, that is, Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God.
00:13:04.000 The basic gospel message sometimes gets obscured, even in a church context, Charlie, where people may go to church week after week, and in effect, they think that essentially what they're being told is don't do this and do that.
00:13:20.000 And, you know, in a real sense, the message of Christianity isn't do or don't, it's done.
00:13:28.000 Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe.
00:13:30.000 And so, the bottom line is that when the true gospel just gets preached, even in simple ways or in sophisticated ways, it has a profound impact.
00:13:42.000 And in the case of Jonathan Edwards, he was focusing on how people were in their natural states in a very dangerous condition, even if they were church members.
00:13:52.000 So, the idea of repentance was a core theme.
00:13:58.000 Why is that so important?
00:14:00.000 Because a prideful nation seems to look at the idea of repentance with disgust.
00:14:06.000 Repentance is the precursor to an awakening, is it not?
00:14:11.000 Absolutely, absolutely.
00:14:13.000 And in fact, during the Civil War, President Lincoln issued a proclamation of prayer and calling for fasting and calling on God.
00:14:24.000 And it's a really beautiful proclamation.
00:14:27.000 It was, as I recall, March 30, 1863.
00:14:31.000 In fact, you can even just Google Abraham Lincoln prayer proclamation 1863.
00:14:38.000 And he basically talks about how, as a nation, we have been so blessed.
00:14:43.000 And one of the lines in that says, intoxicated with unbroken success, we've become too proud, too self-sufficient to call upon God.
00:14:53.000 And so he talks about how we need to basically repent and realize that we have offended God and get back right with Him.
00:15:06.000 Otherwise, the scourge will continue.
00:15:10.000 He called for that prayer.
00:15:11.000 And he said, by the way, that day of fasting and prayer should take place one month from now.
00:15:19.000 And so that was at the end of April, 1863.
00:15:22.000 And within two days, Stonewall Jackson was shot.
00:15:26.000 And, you know, that's an amazing thing.
00:15:28.000 Stonewall Jackson seemed to have his own personal relationship with Jesus, but he was born south of the Mason-Dixon line.
00:15:36.000 I don't want to get into the Civil War and so forth, but the bottom line is Stonewall Jackson was one of the best generals America ever produced.
00:15:44.000 And as long as he was alive, you know, the ongoing scourge of the Civil War continued.
00:15:52.000 So bottom line is Lincoln was saying we need to repent.
00:15:55.000 By the way, I believe Stonewall Jackson personally would have said, yeah, we need to repent.
00:15:59.000 You cannot get to a place of repentance if you think that you're doing everything right.
00:16:05.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
00:16:06.000 When Roe versus Wade fell as the law of the land last year, all it did was increase what pro-abortion states are doing to entice and mislead women to abort their children.
00:16:16.000 States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.
00:16:20.000 It's become abortion trafficking.
00:16:22.000 So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.
00:16:29.000 Ultrasounds save babies because ultrasounds give the truth at a time everyone else is saying it's not just a baby, it's just a clump of cells.
00:16:37.000 When you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you are giving her the truth at the most important time of her life.
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00:17:02.000 I'm a donor to it.
00:17:03.000 Check it out: preborn.org.
00:17:07.000 Let's play a piece of tape here.
00:17:09.000 It is from Dr. Newcomb's film that he helped produce, Cut 47, The Road to Independence.
00:17:15.000 Please play Cut 47.
00:17:17.000 The Great Awakening was a spiritual movement with political consequences.
00:17:21.000 It reached its zenith with George Whitfield, but this powerful series of religious revivals all began with a humble Calvinist minister named Jonathan Edwards.
00:17:31.000 His life and his preaching helped bring about what's called the First Great Awakening in America that led to the salvation of up to half of the South and one-third of the North.
00:17:42.000 The ideas of the Awakening, as historians say, laid the foundations for what became the Revolution.
00:17:49.000 The Awakening was the sowing of seeds for what became the freedom of the revolution.
00:17:56.000 So I'm a great admirer of Whitfield, and Americans should appreciate his immense contribution.
00:18:03.000 Anyone who's able to get Oz Guinness in a documentary or a film deserves great credit.
00:18:07.000 Dr. Newcomb, how do we watch that film and tell us more about it?
00:18:10.000 Oh, thank you very much.
00:18:11.000 And there are other great guests, too, also in this whole series: Dennis Prager and Rabbi Daniel Lappin and Janet Ellis and Eric Metaxas and my good friend, Bill Federer, and as well as Bill Peter Lovak.
00:18:26.000 Yeah, yes.
00:18:28.000 Bill is one of a kind.
00:18:30.000 In fact, I remember when Bill and I first started to get to know each other in the early 2000s.
00:18:37.000 And I said to him one time, we were walking on the streets of St. Louis.
00:18:40.000 That's where he used to live.
00:18:42.000 And I said, you know, Bill, the more you study America's true history, the more you realize how the Christian faith, the Bible, played such an incredibly pivotal role.
00:18:54.000 And he said, yeah, it's like digging in a well.
00:18:57.000 And the more you dig, you know, the more and more, or like a mine digging in a mine, the more you dig, the more you come out with all this, you know, gold and so forth.
00:19:06.000 And it's true. 0.56
00:19:07.000 It's true when you read the original sources and so forth.
00:19:11.000 So yes, I really appreciate that.
00:19:14.000 Providenceforum.org is the website where I have a clearinghouse of information on the whole series of films.
00:19:22.000 It's called the Foundation of American Liberty series.
00:19:26.000 And if anybody asks me, well, what's the foundation of American Liberty?
00:19:29.000 It's our Judeo-Christian heritage.
00:19:32.000 And there's a seven-part series.
00:19:34.000 One of the most recent ones to come out was called We the People.
00:19:37.000 It deals, of course, with the Constitution.
00:19:39.000 Later in the summer is endowed by their creator, of course, dealing with the Declaration of Independence.
00:19:47.000 But the bottom line is the goal of the whole series is to show how the Bible played a pivotal role in America.
00:19:54.000 We often forget that, even in the life of George Washington.
00:19:58.000 I love that.
00:19:59.000 In government schools, though, where I grew up, I was taught the founding fathers were deists or they didn't have much fascination with religion.
00:20:09.000 Is that true?
00:20:11.000 No.
00:20:12.000 No, it's really not.
00:20:14.000 I mean, for example, you take the Declaration of Independence.
00:20:17.000 It was 56 men that met in Philadelphia in 1776.
00:20:22.000 And of those 56 men, the vast majority of them, 52 approximately, were not only professing Christians, but they were involved in Trinitarian churches.
00:20:36.000 I say that as opposed to Unitarian churches, where you do begin with a bit of liberalism.
00:20:41.000 Now, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, I actually co-wrote a whole book about him with Dr. Mark Beliels.
00:20:47.000 It's called Doubting Thomas.
00:20:49.000 And the gist of the book, it shows two things, really, and documents it.
00:20:54.000 One, that is, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic.
00:20:58.000 Yeah, later in his life, he did entertain some serious doubts about core Christian doctrines.
00:21:03.000 And there's no, you know, getting around that.
00:21:06.000 But he didn't hold those views earlier.
00:21:08.000 So, for example, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, when he wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, which was adopted in 1786.
00:21:18.000 But anyway, he wrote that in 1777 that same year, 1777, as a layman, he was the person who helped found a church which called an evangelical minister, the Reverend Charles Clay.
00:21:35.000 And the name of that church was the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
00:21:40.000 It met in the local courthouse.
00:21:42.000 And this Charles Clay, whom they called, was an evangelical.
00:21:46.000 And in fact, in that book, by God's grace, we were able to put in print for the first time ever, to our knowledge, two of the sermons of Charles Clay.
00:21:55.000 These are sermons that Thomas Jefferson himself supported.
00:22:00.000 So point number one in the book, Jefferson was not a lifelong skeptic.
00:22:04.000 Point number two is that he did not believe in the separation of God and state.
00:22:10.000 So for example, when he was president, he went to church on a regular basis where?
00:22:16.000 In the U.S. Capitol.
00:22:17.000 That's correct.
00:22:18.000 They had religious services.
00:22:19.000 That's right.
00:22:21.000 Not just religious, Christian worship services there.
00:22:24.000 And I told that to a friend of mine one time who was an elderly gentleman at the time.
00:22:30.000 And he said, well, what about the separation of church and state?
00:22:35.000 I say, you know, well, that's not what the founders understood.
00:22:38.000 You know, they certainly didn't intend to have the separation of God and state.
00:22:42.000 And so it's, it's, as you were saying, it's also a, um, it's totally taken out of context.
00:22:49.000 Um, one liner in the letter to the Danbury Baptist Convention where he was actually giving them assurances the government would not come after them.
00:22:58.000 And it's not in the Constitution.
00:22:59.000 And it was what, readopathed by the Burger or the Warren Court, one of the two as just kind of reapplied in, I think, a very unconstitutional and sloppy manner.
00:23:08.000 So, but let me ask you, because the critique that then some Christians will say is, but these founding fathers didn't believe in their faith enough to put it into the founding documents, into the Declaration of the Constitution.
00:23:22.000 What would you agree with?
00:23:23.000 I would not agree.
00:23:25.000 Well, first of all, I wouldn't agree with that at all.
00:23:27.000 Number one, the Declaration of Independence.
00:23:30.000 The Declaration of Independence is really the founding document in the sense of explaining why we exist.
00:23:36.000 The Constitution is more the governing document.
00:23:40.000 This is how this government is going to work.
00:23:43.000 It's predicated on the Declaration of Independence.
00:23:46.000 And when people said, well, the Constitution doesn't mention God.
00:23:51.000 Well, it actually does mention God.
00:23:52.000 It mentions God in the attestation clause.
00:23:55.000 This is done in the year of our Lord.
00:23:58.000 And John Eidesmo, great law professor, author of Christianity and the Constitution, I asked him one time, what would you say to those who say, well, in the year of our Lord, that's a mere formality.
00:24:10.000 His answer was, that's like saying an attestation clause in a will is a mere formality.
00:24:16.000 It is not.
00:24:17.000 It is a part of that legal document.
00:24:20.000 But as far as the Declaration is concerned, it mentions that our rights come from the Creator.
00:24:25.000 It talks about the laws of nature and of nature.
00:24:28.000 Four relations to God.
00:24:29.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:24:30.000 And you really have to understand that laws of nature and of nature is God.
00:24:34.000 That gets back to Sir William Blackstone, who was very important to the founding fathers.
00:24:38.000 He was a British jurist.
00:24:40.000 He wrote four commentaries on the laws of England.
00:24:43.000 And he basically said there are two types of laws in the world.
00:24:47.000 There's the laws that God has revealed in nature.
00:24:51.000 But because nature has fallen and we need more special revelation, he has revealed himself through the holy scriptures.
00:24:58.000 So you have the laws of nature and of nature is God.
00:25:01.000 That's really what he's with.
00:25:02.000 It gets back to Blackstone.
00:25:04.000 And we developed that, by the way, in our documentary, Endowed by Their Creator.
00:25:09.000 Another reference to God in the Declaration of Independence is the supreme judge of the world.
00:25:17.000 Yep.
00:25:18.000 According to the Bible, and the founders knew this, according to the Bible, who is the judge of the world, Charlie?
00:25:24.000 In the Bible?
00:25:26.000 Yeah.
00:25:26.000 Well, the Lord, God, the one God.
00:25:30.000 Yeah.
00:25:31.000 And John 5, give me a name here.
00:25:36.000 Jesus Christ.
00:25:37.000 Right, but that's Jesus Christ.
00:25:38.000 He's the supreme judge.
00:25:38.000 That is correct.
00:25:40.000 Yeah, but he says the Son of Man has been given the task of judging because he is the Son of Man.
00:25:46.000 Jesus is the judge, and the founders knew that.
00:25:49.000 And so I think that's a very significant point.
00:25:52.000 And then finally, you have a reference to trusting in divine providence.
00:25:56.000 We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
00:26:02.000 And so, you know, God is interwoven in the Declaration of Independence.
00:26:08.000 And as far as the Constitution itself and the Declaration, both of them are beneficiaries of the covenantal constitutional making process in American history.
00:26:21.000 And it all began in the Mayflower Compact.
00:26:24.000 It began in the cabin of the Mayflower when the pilgrims set down an agreement for self-government under God, which they all signed as witnesses, the Mayflower Compact.
00:26:35.000 In the name of God, amen.
00:26:36.000 They talked about how they took this voyage for the glory of God in the advancement of the Christian faith.
00:26:43.000 We do covenant and combine ourselves into a civil body politic.
00:26:47.000 That Mayflower Compact, 1620, was the first of about 100, maybe more of these different constitutions, covenants, essentially, based on the biblical model of covenant that the pilgrims, the Puritans, the Quakers, Presbyterians, et cetera, came up with agreements for self-government under God.
00:27:07.000 And so by the time the founding fathers sat down to, you know, first of all, to declare independence in 1776, and then right up the Constitution, 1787, they had had about 150 years of constitution making.
00:27:22.000 And it all gets back to the biblical concept of covenant.
00:27:28.000 With us is Dr. Newcomb.
00:27:29.000 He asked me, why is Connecticut the Constitution state?
00:27:31.000 My only other guess would be: if my memory, something about the fundamental orders, you tell me, Doctor.
00:27:37.000 That's exactly right.
00:27:38.000 The fundamental orders of Connecticut.
00:27:40.000 That was the first fully developed constitution written on American soil.
00:27:44.000 Connecticut was founded by Thomas Hooker, the Reverend Thomas Hooker.
00:27:48.000 He led his followers from Boston, Massachusetts.
00:27:52.000 They had a minor disagreement among their fellow Puritans.
00:27:56.000 But as they created this settlement in 1638, he preached a sermon based on Deuteronomy 1.
00:28:04.000 And the gist of it was that the Lord God was giving them an opportunity that through their people, they would choose for themselves their rulers.
00:28:13.000 It was self-rule under God.
00:28:16.000 And then a year later, 1639, they developed the gist of what he said in that sermon into the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the first fully developed constitution on American soil.
00:28:29.000 And it talks about the reason they made this settlement in the first place was for the purity and liberty of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
00:28:39.000 And historians tell us that the fundamental orders of Connecticut is in lineal descent to the U.S. Constitution.
00:28:48.000 It is, you know, the Constitution itself is derived in part from what you find in that fundamental orders of Connecticut.
00:28:57.000 That's why to this day, you see a license plate from Connecticut, a constitution state.
00:29:03.000 And it's so sad, by the way.
00:29:05.000 It was interesting to listen to Marjorie Taylor Greene about the politics in different states.
00:29:10.000 Unfortunately, Connecticut today, like most of the New England states, is very, very liberal.
00:29:16.000 It is not in any way faithful to the original ideas that helped give it birth and the freedom that they enjoyed initially because of the gospel.
00:29:27.000 Yeah, they are far from adhering to the beauty of the Constitution.
00:29:31.000 I want to just re-emphasize one part of what you spoke about, which is that 150-year period where the colonists wrestled with, toiled over this idea of self-government.
00:29:46.000 And then obviously the awakening revival leading to the American Revolution.
00:29:51.000 We might be seeing a modern day revival break out today.
00:29:56.000 What are the signs that history tells us that would say, yes, we are in the middle of an awakening or a revival?
00:30:02.000 Well, I think one of them would be the great interest in getting back to our true roots.
00:30:11.000 And I think there is an interest.
00:30:13.000 You know, Charlie, I mean, you think about this.
00:30:15.000 You're a very young man, and I thank God for your interest in these things.
00:30:19.000 By the way, I must commend you.
00:30:22.000 I was at the gym doing a workout and I was listening to Tim Clinton, Dr. Tim Clinton, filling in for Dr. James Dobson.
00:30:30.000 And they had interviewed me around Thanksgiving time.
00:30:34.000 And I pushed the wrong button and it ended up with a lecture that you were giving.
00:30:39.000 Some sort of, it was a speech, not an interview.
00:30:42.000 And it was like, well, this guy is fantastic.
00:30:44.000 It was really good.
00:30:45.000 Thank you.
00:30:45.000 It was a wonderful, wonderful message.
00:30:48.000 But that interest is great.
00:30:50.000 I remember when Peter Marshall, the son of the chaplain, he wrote a book or co-wrote a book in the 70s, the 1970s, The Light and the Glory.
00:31:01.000 And that was one of the first steps towards reminding Americans about our true history in the modern era, because so much of this was rewritten, not just in the 60s and 70s, but even as early as the 1930s.
00:31:16.000 You're probably familiar with Dr. Peter Lobeck, perhaps.
00:31:19.000 He and I co-wrote a book about the faith of George Washington.
00:31:22.000 It's called George Washington's Sacred Fire.
00:31:24.000 It's a real big, thick book about his faith and so forth.
00:31:27.000 But Dr. Lilbach was showing how even as early as the 1930s, there were some historians that were trying to, you know, miscategorize George Washington, take him out of the category of Christian and put him in the category of effectively unbeliever.
00:31:44.000 And then in the 1960s, that was definitively done through a book about George Washington's religion.
00:31:51.000 And in fact, our book, George Washington's Sacred Fire, really responded directly to that.
00:31:56.000 And I think one of the highest compliments I got, if I could say, tell this anecdote real fast, George Washington's main church went before he died.
00:32:05.000 It's where the funeral was, Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
00:32:09.000 It's a Episcopal church, Church of England.
00:32:12.000 And anyway, the docents there told my co-author, Dr. Lilback, when they saw him after the book came out and so forth, they said, We want to thank you because you gave George Washington back to our church.
00:32:27.000 We used to have to tell people, you know, well, the scholars say he's an unbeliever or, you know, a deist and so forth, but didn't really believe all this stuff.
00:32:35.000 You gave him back to the church.
00:32:37.000 Thank you.
00:32:37.000 George Washington had a copy of the book of common prayer that he made for his own, you know, and he read it all the time, read the Bible all the time.
00:32:46.000 And so anyway, we've been robbed of our history, Charlie.
00:32:49.000 Dr. Newcomb, wonderful job.
00:32:50.000 Come back anytime.
00:32:51.000 Thank you.
00:32:53.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:32:55.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:32:58.000 Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
00:33:03.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.