The Charlie Kirk Show - How America Rejected Its Founders' Faith

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Tanda Charlie Kirk Sharp for the full hour is one of my favorite guests, Bill Federer.

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00:00:46.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:47.000 Here we go.

00:00:48.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:50.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:52.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:56.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:59.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:00.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:01.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:01:08.000 Turning point USA.

00:01:09.000 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.

00:01:18.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:30.000 Bill, welcome to the program.

00:01:32.000 Bill, I've really been enjoying.

00:01:34.000 Charlie, great to be with you.

00:01:35.000 Yeah, there's so much to talk about.

00:01:36.000 I've really been enjoying one of your incredible books here called Backfired.

00:01:40.000 I've never talked to you about this book before.

00:01:42.000 It's excellent. 0.96

00:01:43.000 And it is a nation founded on religious tolerance no longer tolerates its founders' religion. 0.96

00:01:51.000 And this Christmas season, I think it's a perfect topic to talk about.

00:01:55.000 On page 136, you have the state constitutions here where you talk about Georgia, 1777, we the people of Georgia relying upon protection, guidance of Almighty God, and so on and so forth.

00:02:06.000 Talk about the premise of this book and how we're increasingly a country that is intolerant of what our founders believed.

00:02:14.000 Well, we go back to Europe, and in Europe, it was all Catholic, and then the Reformation happened, and then the Muslims invaded, surrounded Vienna in 1529, and the king of Spain was faced with a double dilemma: Protestant Reformation on the inside of Europe, and this Islamic invasion by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent coming from the outside of Europe.

00:02:37.000 And so he makes a deal with these Protestants that it's called the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. 0.57

00:02:44.000 It's the first treaty ever to recognize Protestants.

00:02:47.000 And in the treaty is a little Latin phrase that had enormous repercussions.

00:02:52.000 The phrase was cuios regio ius religio, which means whose is the reign?

00:02:58.000 His is the religion. 0.58

00:02:59.000 In other words, look, Protestant king, believe whatever you want. 1.00

00:03:02.000 Let's just work together against this Islamic invasion because they sort of want to kill us all. 1.00

00:03:07.000 Well, it worked. 1.00

00:03:07.000 And the next century, though, different kings believed different things. 1.00

00:03:12.000 And so England became Anglican.

00:03:14.000 Scotland, Presbyterian, Holland, Dutch Reformed.

00:03:18.000 Northern Germany and Sweden were Lutheran.

00:03:20.000 Switzerland, Calvinist.

00:03:22.000 Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Poland stayed Catholic.

00:03:25.000 And of course, Greece was Greek Orthodox.

00:03:27.000 Russia was Russian Orthodox.

00:03:28.000 Serbia was Serbian Orthodox.

00:03:30.000 Romania was Romanian Orthodox.

00:03:31.000 You get the picture.

00:03:32.000 It was one denomination per country.

00:03:34.000 And what the king believed, the kingdom had to believe.

00:03:37.000 And if you didn't believe the way your particular king did, it was considered treason.

00:03:43.000 And you were persecuted and you fled.

00:03:45.000 Some groups didn't get their own country.

00:03:48.000 The Mennonites, for example, Menno Simmons, and it was sort of a Quaker, nonviolent farmers.

00:03:56.000 And they were invited over by the czar to Russia, who said, We've got some land here for you.

00:04:02.000 Well, they move over there only to find out it's buffer land between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and Russia.

00:04:08.000 So they got caught in a lot of wars.

00:04:10.000 They were called kulaks and became wealthy farmers until Lenin had them all killed off and a bunch of them fled to America. 0.71

00:04:18.000 But Europe, it was one denomination per country. 0.99

00:04:21.000 And this was the norm.

00:04:24.000 It was considered treason not to believe the way your king did.

00:04:27.000 Let's focus on England and interrupt me at any time.

00:04:30.000 I talk about this a lot.

00:04:32.000 It's great.

00:04:34.000 But in England, there was a Henry VIII.

00:04:36.000 He was originally Catholic and married to the daughter of the king of Spain, Catherine of Aragon.

00:04:43.000 After 18 years, she does not have a son, a daughter Mary, but not a son.

00:04:47.000 So Henry decides to divorce her.

00:04:49.000 The Pope won't recognize the divorce because she is, after all, the daughter of the most powerful guy in the world, the king of Spain.

00:04:57.000 And in 1527, the Spanish army invaded Rome and imprisoned the Pope for about six months.

00:05:03.000 So Henry VIII says, you know what?

00:05:06.000 I'm so far away from Italy.

00:05:08.000 I'm just going to declare myself my own Pope.

00:05:10.000 He starts the Church of England, puts himself on as the head, and goes on to have six wives.

00:05:16.000 And their fates were divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

00:05:21.000 So Henry VIII was not a really nice guy to be married to.

00:05:25.000 His advisors suggested if he was serious about breaking from Rome, he should stop using the Latin Bible, get himself an English Bible.

00:05:34.000 The German princes have Martin Luther's German Bible.

00:05:37.000 That helped them to break away. 1.00

00:05:39.000 He needs to get an English Bible.

00:05:40.000 He says, fine, get me one.

00:05:43.000 So it just so happens a few years earlier, he had William Tyndall burnt at the stake for doing what?

00:05:49.000 For translating the Bible into English.

00:05:52.000 But now he wants an English Bible.

00:05:54.000 Tyndall's last words were, Lord, open the king of England's eyes.

00:05:58.000 And so Henry, they take Tyndall's work.

00:06:00.000 About 80 to 90% of all English translations go back to Tyndall's work.

00:06:04.000 They take Tyndall's work, polish it up.

00:06:06.000 They call it the Great Bible.

00:06:08.000 Henry likes it.

00:06:09.000 He orders a copy of it, put in every church in England.

00:06:12.000 It's called the Great Bible.

00:06:14.000 It was huge.

00:06:15.000 They had to chain it to the pulpit because they were expensive.

00:06:17.000 They didn't want somebody walking off with it.

00:06:19.000 But this was the first time the common people of England could read the Bible in their own English language.

00:06:27.000 Henry dusts his hands and says, that's it.

00:06:29.000 We've broken from Rome.

00:06:31.000 And he thinks his problems are solved.

00:06:33.000 But the problem was people started reading the Bible and began to compare what's in the Bible to this king divorcing and beheading his wives.

00:06:41.000 And so a group starts that wants to purify the Church of England.

00:06:45.000 They are nicknamed Puritans.

00:06:48.000 Another group said it's beyond hope of purifying.

00:06:50.000 We're going to separate ourselves.

00:06:51.000 And we called them pilgrims.

00:06:54.000 And so you did not make up your own prayers in England because you could make up one that's wrong.

00:07:01.000 So the government wrote all the prayers down and put them in a book.

00:07:04.000 It's called the Book of Common Prayer.

00:07:06.000 You feel like praying, you just open it to the right page and read the prayer.

00:07:09.000 And if you're caught with a small group of people in a Bible study making up your own prayers, the police, like the FBI, will kick in the door and will handcuff you and arrest you and drag you to the star chamber.

00:07:21.000 It was a government hearing room, sort of like a January 6th hearing room, because they had stars on the ceiling.

00:07:26.000 And they would twist your arm and brand you on the face as a heretic with the letters SL for seditious liable.

00:07:32.000 And then they would cut off your ear or cut your nose in half and make you confess the stuff you didn't do.

00:07:37.000 And then even if you didn't say anything, they'd put you in contempt of court for not saying anything.

00:07:43.000 Then they would put you in a cell and they would let you waste away in this prison cell for days and weeks and months.

00:07:49.000 Could you imagine a government doing this to its own people?

00:07:52.000 And so a group of these people in Scotland, when they first read from the Book of Common Prayer in St. Giles Cathedral, a market woman named Jenny Geddes threw her three-legged stool and it whacked into the bishop and it started something called the Bishop's War.

00:08:14.000 And in Scotland, the king sent his army to force these churches to read from this book. 0.59

00:08:20.000 And they said, you know what?

00:08:21.000 We're just not going to meet in the church building.

00:08:23.000 And they would meet in the open fields.

00:08:25.000 They called them conventicles, where Jesus said, where two or more gathered in my name, I'm there in the midst.

00:08:30.000 And so they were like covenant, small covenant groups.

00:08:33.000 And so the government sent its army into the fields and chased these people down and arrested them and killed them.

00:08:40.000 It was called the killing time, right?

00:08:42.000 All throughout the 1600s.

00:08:44.000 And so this was sort of the backdrop.

00:08:47.000 The Presbyterians in Scotland did not want bishops.

00:08:51.000 But the king said, no bishop, no king.

00:08:53.000 He wanted a hierarchical form of church government where he was at the top, where the Presbyterians and the Puritans and the Baptists and Congregationalists, they liked the congregational model of church government, where it's the pastor teaching the body to do the work of the ministry rather than the clergy laity model where you watch the clergy do the work of the ministry.

00:09:15.000 And so the pilgrims, and they're the ones that we trace to America, they were a group of them sold their property and bought passage on a ship to Holland.

00:09:30.000 Holland was actually one of the seven Netherlands, and these were seven provinces that spent 80 years breaking away from Spain.

00:09:39.000 And they didn't always believe the same thing, but they were willing to have some give and take when it came to religion because Spain was wanting to kill them all.

00:09:47.000 In 1572, the king of Spain sent the Iron Duke of Alba to commit the Spanish fury and killed 10,000 Dutch Reformed in Antwerp, Holland.

00:09:58.000 And so the pilgrims said, you know what?

00:10:01.000 Let's go to Holland, the Netherlands.

00:10:03.000 It's the most tolerant place religiously in all of Europe.

00:10:07.000 And so right before the pilgrim, the ship left, the captain robs them and turns them over to the police and they're thrown in jail.

00:10:15.000 And then so another group of these pilgrim separatists, they arrange for a Dutch ship to sail up the coast and they would be in rowboats and they would row out.

00:10:24.000 Pilgrims show up a day early and the waves are rough and the kids are getting sick and the women say, can we just wait on shore?

00:10:30.000 Finally, the Dutch ship comes.

00:10:32.000 The men row out.

00:10:33.000 They're stowing everything and somebody snitched and the police came over the hill and captured the women and children.

00:10:39.000 And the Dutch captain says, I don't have an army with me.

00:10:41.000 And he pulls anchor and sails away.

00:10:44.000 Bill Fedder continues with us.

00:10:44.000 Hold that thought.

00:10:48.000 The world is in flames and bodynamics is a complete and total disaster. 1.00

00:10:52.000 But it won't ruin my day. 1.00

00:10:53.000 And that's because I start my day with a hot America first cup of blackout coffee.

00:10:56.000 Now, I've been trying to trim how much coffee I have, but when I have coffee, blackout coffee.

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00:11:13.000 By the way, I was traveling recently and somebody brought me a cup of coffee and it tasted really bad.

00:11:18.000 It was really bad.

00:11:19.000 I said, where's my blackout?

00:11:21.000 And they said, we didn't bring the blackout on this trip.

00:11:23.000 And I was really disappointed.

00:11:24.000 It was a tough day.

00:11:25.000 When you get used to blackout coffee, you know what I mean.

00:11:27.000 Go to blackoutcoffee.com slash Charlie.

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00:11:31.000 By the way, it's kind of coffee season, isn't it?

00:11:33.000 It gets dark around like 3.30.

00:11:35.000 It's cloudy.

00:11:37.000 It's not exactly the most uplifting weather.

00:11:39.000 You kind of need to pick me up sometimes around 2 p.m.

00:11:41.000 Go to blackoutcoffee.com slash Charlie.

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00:11:47.000 The taste is amazing.

00:11:48.000 It is smooth.

00:11:50.000 And people know that I need my cup of coffee in the morning.

00:11:53.000 Not too much, not over the top.

00:11:55.000 But if it's not blackout, then the mood is not so good.

00:11:58.000 Go south.

00:11:59.000 Go to blackoutcoffee.com slash Charlie.

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00:12:07.000 Bill, finish that thought, please. 0.86

00:12:09.000 So this other group of pilgrim separatists, the women are waiting on shore, and the Dutch captain sails away with the men. 0.66

00:12:18.000 And they take those women. 1.00

00:12:19.000 You can imagine those women and children watching that boat getting smaller and smaller and disappearing over the horizon.

00:12:24.000 And for two years, they pass those women and children from one court to another, one jail cell to another.

00:12:29.000 Finally, a judge says, you didn't do anything wrong.

00:12:32.000 Go home.

00:12:32.000 And they go, God, we sold our homes.

00:12:34.000 So just to get them out of the hair, they put them on a boat, sent them to Holland.

00:12:37.000 They found their husbands.

00:12:38.000 They settled in Leiden, Holland.

00:12:39.000 After 12 years, they came to America.

00:12:41.000 It's a long story, but the bottom line was they came over here for religious freedom, freedom of conscience.

00:12:48.000 And they based their form of government on the Bible, but what part of the Bible, that first 400 years out of Egypt before King Saul.

00:12:58.000 And so this is called the Hebrew Republic.

00:13:00.000 And it's the first time in recorded human history where you have millions of people and no king.

00:13:04.000 And it worked because everybody was taught the law and everybody was personally accountable to God to follow the law.

00:13:10.000 But the king of England looked to the Bible for his authority, but he looked to the King Saul and on part of the Bible, the divine right of kings.

00:13:16.000 So King Saul, in a sense, is the divider between England and America.

00:13:22.000 And so the kings of England, the Bible is their authority.

00:13:25.000 They're the divinely appointed king.

00:13:26.000 America, we're the pre-King Saul period of a republic where everybody's taught the law.

00:13:32.000 I get into it all, but it's for freedom of conscience that motivated them to come over. 0.61

00:13:37.000 And then fast forward, every colony is founded by a different Christian denomination.

00:13:44.000 So Virginia was Anglican and Massachusetts was Puritan right after the Pilgrims came, Puritan.

00:13:51.000 And then Rhode Island was founded by Baptists. 0.70

00:13:53.000 And New York was founded by Dutch Reformed.

00:13:56.000 And Delaware and New Jersey were originally Swedish Lutheran, Gustav Adolphus of Sweden, and then sent over, but then it was conquered by the Dutch and conquered by the English.

00:14:07.000 Connecticut, New Hampshire were Congregationalist colonies, and Pennsylvania was Quaker. 0.88

00:14:13.000 And William Penn, who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London because he did not go along with the king's church, William Penn said, force makes hypocrites.

00:14:24.000 Tis persuasion only that makes converts.

00:14:27.000 And so Pennsylvania opened it up for anybody to come in who believed in God.

00:14:32.000 And so you had the first Catholic church, English-speaking Catholic church in 1735 in Pennsylvania.

00:14:42.000 You had a synagogue in Pennsylvania.

00:14:45.000 And so the idea in America was each colony had its own denomination, and they didn't really get along. 0.52

00:14:54.000 And you had the Puritans in Massachusetts burn witches, right?

00:14:59.000 19 of them, but that's small compared to what was going on in Europe at the time. 0.54

00:15:02.000 But the Puritans also killed four Quakers.

00:15:05.000 And they said, We're not going to have your Quaker stuff here. 0.97

00:15:09.000 And they said, If you come back, we'll punish you.

00:15:10.000 They came back. 1.00

00:15:11.000 They said, If you come back again, we'll kill you. 1.00

00:15:12.000 They came back and they killed them. 0.99

00:15:14.000 In New York, it was a Dutch Reformed colony. 0.67

00:15:18.000 They chased out the Lutherans.

00:15:20.000 Maine, which used to be part of Massachusetts, they tarred and feathered a priest and chased him out of town.

00:15:26.000 They literally dipped him in tar and covered him with feathers and then put him on a rail, which is like a two by four between two guys on their shoulders.

00:15:35.000 And they'd hold this guy's legs down and parade him around town and throw him out of the. 0.97

00:15:39.000 I mean, they didn't get along, but then the Revolutionary War started, and they all had to work together against the King of England, very similar to the Catholics and Protestants working together with King Charles V to stop this Islamic invasion of Europe. 0.96

00:15:56.000 So when the problem is big enough, then we work together. 0.73

00:16:00.000 And so in America, you had these different colonies did not get along.

00:16:04.000 But then when the revolution starts, there's an interesting story that a motion was made at the first Continental Congress to open with prayer.

00:16:13.000 And the Anglicans didn't want to hear a prayer from the Presbyterians, who didn't want to hear a prayer from the Baptists, who didn't want to hear a prayer for, and it was about to fall apart.

00:16:23.000 And Sam Adams stands up and he goes, I'm no bigot.

00:16:27.000 I can hear a prayer of any man of piety who at the same time is a patriot of our nation.

00:16:32.000 And so they get Reverend Jacob Duchet come and they open with prayer.

00:16:36.000 And so the beginning of our country was this idea of we may not agree on everything, but the threat is so great, we need to work together so that we can each have the freedom to do what we think is the best way to heaven.

00:16:50.000 And so the reason I asked you to lead all of that, and it's beautiful, is that there's this narrative, Christian nationalism, America was never a Christian nation.

00:16:59.000 And I want you to respond to that from a historical perspective.

00:17:02.000 You do a beautiful job.

00:17:04.000 And also, you have a great history of Islam.

00:17:06.000 So I want to talk about all that together.

00:17:09.000 But this book is excellent, Bill.

00:17:10.000 You know, I have all your books.

00:17:11.000 I haven't read them all.

00:17:13.000 And it's on page 165.

00:17:15.000 Tolerance, but only for the politically correct. 0.80

00:17:19.000 Religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother. 0.89

00:17:24.000 Quoting Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. 0.62

00:17:26.000 Isn't that beautiful?

00:17:29.000 The holidays and big family feasts are upon us.

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00:17:54.000 It'll handcuff pharmacy benefit managers who are currently saving millions of Americans an average of $1,040 a year.

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00:19:01.000 Bill, respond to that. 0.81

00:19:03.000 America was never really a Christian nation.

00:19:06.000 It doesn't say Jesus in the Declaration of Independence.

00:19:09.000 Connect all this together and respond to this whole narrative out there.

00:19:13.000 So I read through every state constitution and every revision, every amendment to every state constitution.

00:19:19.000 It was a couple year project and found some interesting things.

00:19:22.000 Nine of the original 13 state constitutions required all office holders to be Protestant Christian to hold office.

00:19:30.000 Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey.

00:19:34.000 And they thought they were being very generous by saying Protestant because before then, you had to be a particular denomination of Protestant, right?

00:19:41.000 And then you had three states in 1776.

00:19:45.000 All they did was require you to be a plain Christian.

00:19:49.000 And so you had Delaware's original 1776 constitution said every office holder had to make a declaration, a belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his only son, the Holy Ghost, one, God bless forevermore.

00:20:00.000 And you think that that was generous?

00:20:02.000 Yeah, because you could be a Protestant or a Catholic and say you believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost.

00:20:07.000 Ben Franklin signed Pennsylvania's Constitution, and it required all office holders to believe in God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good, the punisher of the wicked, and acknowledged the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.

00:20:24.000 In other words, Ben Franklin signed the Constitution and said, you not only had to say you put your hand on a Bible, you had to swear you believed in the Bible.

00:20:32.000 And one state had zero religious requirements to hold state office, Rhode Island, founded by Baptists. 0.91

00:20:39.000 They said if you required someone to be a Christian, they could say they were, even if they weren't, they would be hypocritical.

00:20:43.000 So just vote for the best Christian person you know.

00:20:46.000 So there's different states.

00:20:48.000 They're different denominations. 0.73

00:20:51.000 I got to cut you off, Bill. 1.00

00:20:52.000 I'm sorry.

00:20:52.000 This is such a powerful point.

00:20:54.000 Nine out of 13 of the state constitutions required office holders to be Protestant Christians. 0.86

00:20:59.000 And then how long did that stand?

00:21:01.000 That's very powerful because that does reinforce the point that at the founding, we were a Christian nation.

00:21:08.000 Yeah.

00:21:08.000 So 98% of the country was Protestant at the time of the revolution, 1% Catholic.

00:21:14.000 So there are 3 million people, 30,000 Catholics, 1% Catholic, excuse me, yeah, 1% Catholic and 1 tenth of a percent Jewish.

00:21:23.000 There's only seven synagogues in the whole country.

00:21:25.000 So 3 million people, 98% Protestant, 1% Catholic, about 30,000, and then 1 tenth of a percent Jewish, around 3,000.

00:21:35.000 And so they had one overriding fear, and that was that the federal government would choose one denomination and make it the national one, which is what every other country in the world did.

00:21:48.000 Holland was Dutch Reformed.

00:21:50.000 England was Anglican.

00:21:51.000 Scotland was Presbyterian. 0.94

00:21:53.000 The Ottoman Empire was Muslim.

00:21:56.000 And so they were afraid.

00:21:57.000 So the states that required, for example, Massachusetts and Connecticut, they had required the congregational Puritan faith up until 1818 in Connecticut and 1833 in Massachusetts.

00:22:11.000 John Adams wrote Massachusetts' Constitution that required the state to have a tax for the public support of Protestant teachers of piety and religion.

00:22:21.000 That was John Adams, and that was in effect till 1833.

00:22:24.000 And so the states wanted to tie the federal government's hand so it would not pick one denomination to prefer it over the others.

00:22:32.000 I've actually talked to people who have written books on the First Amendment on the Constitution, and they pretend like they are experts.

00:22:41.000 I said, have you read the state constitutions?

00:22:43.000 And their face goes, it's like, what?

00:22:46.000 I said, yeah, you know, federal government, state government, the federal, the state governments created the federal government.

00:22:53.000 And so it's like playing cards.

00:22:56.000 And the states dealt cards out and they only gave the federal government a few cards, provide for the common defense, like borders, navy, regulate interstate commerce, have a secure currency so that we can do trade.

00:23:13.000 All the rest of the cards they kept close to their chest and laws that govern human behavior under state's jurisdiction.

00:23:20.000 So some states had blue laws where everything was closed on Sunday.

00:23:24.000 And like Massachusetts and Connecticut, but George Washington on his tour after being elected president was going through Milford, Connecticut on a Sunday, and the sheriff stopped the carriage and said, this is Sunday.

00:23:38.000 There's no traveling in a carriage.

00:23:40.000 And so George Washington respected their local laws, went to the nearest house and spent the day.

00:23:46.000 And so the locals were like, this was a big deal.

00:23:48.000 George Washington stayed here.

00:23:50.000 But in Virginia, they did not have blue laws because it was agricultural and it took a long carriage ride just to get to the church.

00:23:57.000 And so different states had different laws regarding religion.

00:24:03.000 So like today, some states have laws where there's prostitution, like Nevada. 1.00

00:24:08.000 Thank God the rest don't.

00:24:11.000 But back then, it was one or the other.

00:24:13.000 So in my book, I trace this progression where first it was the denomination that started the colony, then it went out to Protestants, and then there was an Irish potato famine in the early 1800s.

00:24:26.000 Millions of Irish died over in Ireland and millions died on their way over.

00:24:31.000 I mean, it was like they said if you were to put a cross in the ocean, wherever they threw an Irish person overboard that had died, you'd have a complete line of white crosses from, you know, Dublin to Boston and Philadelphia and New York.

00:24:44.000 But the Catholic population mushroomed in 10 years from 1% to 20%.

00:24:50.000 There was a big backlash.

00:24:52.000 There was the stoning of the Archbishop John Hughes's house in New York.

00:24:57.000 And you had the burning of Catholic churches in Philadelphia, the raiding of convents in Boston. 0.77

00:25:03.000 I mean, it was Catholics and Protestants did not get along.

00:25:07.000 But then after a while, it settled down, and they changed the states from requiring you to be Protestant to just requiring you to be a Christian.

00:25:15.000 So North Carolina, prior to 1835, you had to be a Protestant, but in 1835, they changed it to all you had to do was be a Christian.

00:25:23.000 And then there's a persecution of Jews in Bavaria in the early 1800s.

00:25:29.000 And there's an influx of Jews.

00:25:31.000 They go from one tenth of a percent to 1% of the population.

00:25:36.000 And then later they grow to 2% of the population.

00:25:40.000 And so Maryland, its original state constitution required all office holders to be Christian.

00:25:46.000 But in 1851, they changed it to add, and if the party shall profess to be a Jew, his declaration shall be of a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments.

00:25:57.000 So as of 1851, you could hold office in Maryland if you were a Christian or a Jew.

00:26:02.000 People say, well, what about the First Amendment? 0.94

00:26:04.000 Well, easy.

00:26:05.000 That was to tie the federal government's hands.

00:26:07.000 Have you read the First Amendment?

00:26:08.000 What does it say?

00:26:09.000 Congress shall make no law.

00:26:11.000 Well, first off, it's limiting Congress.

00:26:13.000 Nobody else, just the federal Congress, which was the only lawmaking body.

00:26:17.000 If they would have seen that presidents would make laws through executive orders, they would have said Congress and the president shall make no law.

00:26:24.000 If they would have seen that the Supreme Court was making laws from the bench, they would have said Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court shall make no law, doing what?

00:26:31.000 Respecting the establishment of religion.

00:26:33.000 Well, respecting means concerning, means neither for nor against.

00:26:37.000 In other words, the subject of religion is hands off to the federal government.

00:26:41.000 So Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

00:26:47.000 Two handcuffs on the federal government.

00:26:48.000 They couldn't pick one denomination and make it the national one, and they couldn't prohibit the individual states from whatever they were doing.

00:26:56.000 And so Joseph Story was the Supreme Court justice appointed by James Madison, and he said the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to state governments to be acted on according to their own state constitutions.

00:27:12.000 But then you have the Civil War and many states rewriting their constitutions.

00:27:17.000 And then you have something called the 14th Amendment.

00:27:21.000 But in the mix of this, you have evolution and Charles Darwin, 1848, origin of species, descent of man.

00:27:29.000 And you had a guy named Herbert Spencer that wanted to apply evolution to everything, including law.

00:27:36.000 And so he had someone that he influenced named Christopher Columbus Langdell, and he's the president of Harvard.

00:27:42.000 And he takes evolution and puts it into his law school.

00:27:46.000 It's called the case precedent theory of law.

00:27:48.000 In other words, instead of going back and reading the founding fathers, you just take the most recent case and bend it a little bit.

00:27:55.000 And Harvard was the only law school in the country that taught case precedent theory of law.

00:28:00.000 Every other one, you go back and read the debates on the First Amendment if you want to know what they meant.

00:28:04.000 But eventually Harvard influenced the others.

00:28:07.000 And one Harvard graduate was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

00:28:12.000 He was notorious for in the Buck v. Bell decision where they decided to sterilize people they thought were genetically inferior. 0.99

00:28:20.000 He said three generations of imbeciles is enough. 0.98

00:28:24.000 Anyway, this Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., his biographer said he broke new trails of intellectual thought. 0.98

00:28:31.000 Instead of the law being something given by God, it's an ever-evolving thing adapting to the changing economic and social conditions.

00:28:41.000 It's like, I have no problem with it evolving, but it's supposed to evolve through the amendment process, not through a judge on a bench.

00:28:49.000 Amendment process requires two-thirds of the states and then ratified by three-quarters of the states.

00:28:56.000 It's a supermajority.

00:28:57.000 In other words, we're a country that's the government from the consent of the governed.

00:29:01.000 We have to make sure that the, and we can make amendments.

00:29:04.000 We did the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, right?

00:29:07.000 The 19th Amendment, letting women vote.

00:29:10.000 We did the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol, but then we did the 20th one repealing it.

00:29:16.000 We know how to make amendments.

00:29:19.000 And so you can have it evolve, but through the amendment process, not through a judge on a bench or Congress passing laws and leaving it to the executive branch to write the regulations to enforce the laws, but the regulations end up making all brand new laws themselves, like with the Obamacare.

00:29:38.000 So I sort of got off track there.

00:29:40.000 But you have the First Amendment was to prevent the federal government from establishing one denomination in preference to the others and then from prohibiting the free exercise of religion within the states.

00:29:53.000 So we worked our way from the colonies, which were different denominations founding them, to the revolution and the first set of constitutions where nine of the 13 you had to be Protestant.

00:30:04.000 And then the Catholic immigration with the potato famine and then states changing it from Protestant to just being Christian, then a Jewish immigration.

00:30:12.000 And so now they, and then after the Civil War, many states rewrote it to just say all you had to do was believe in God.

00:30:19.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk.

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00:31:21.000 Bill, close that argument out and just kind of land the plane here. 0.63

00:31:25.000 America has Christian roots. 0.73

00:31:27.000 Right. 0.66

00:31:27.000 So Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, right? 0.66

00:31:30.000 Republican Lincoln freed the slaves, and the Democrats passed Jim Crow laws.

00:31:33.000 And so the Republicans pushed through the 14th Amendment to force the southern states to give rights to the freed slaves.

00:31:40.000 Well, this 14th Amendment became a box of chocolates for judges, and they began to reinterpret the first eight amendments.

00:31:48.000 And so in 1947, the Everson case, some Catholic kids are getting bus rides to school, and some states say no.

00:31:54.000 And the Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, said that bus rides continue, but from now on, the federal government's in charge of religion.

00:32:01.000 And that was 47.

00:32:02.000 In 1957, the Ethical Society, Washington Ethical Society, wants tax exemption as a secular group.

00:32:09.000 And the court says IRS says no, but the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, says ethical culture is now a religion.

00:32:17.000 They get tax exemption.

00:32:18.000 And then Joseph Joe Torcasso wants to be a notary in Maryland, but the Constitution requires him to say, so help me, God.

00:32:25.000 He's an atheist.

00:32:26.000 And then the Supreme Court, Torcaso B. Watkins, says there are new religions that don't acknowledge a supreme being.

00:32:32.000 Among them are secular humanism.

00:32:34.000 And then you have draft dodgers, Vietnam War, wanting to be religious, conscientious objectors as atheists.

00:32:40.000 And the Supreme Court said, when someone holds beliefs with the same conviction as those who believe in a traditional deity, to that person, those beliefs constitute their religion.

00:32:48.000 So now an atheist is religious.

00:32:49.000 And so now when they kick God out, they're actually establishing a religion, which the First Amendment forbids, right? 0.61

00:32:55.000 Congress shall not establish a denomination or whatever.

00:32:59.000 And so here we have the Constitution is turned on its head.

00:33:02.000 I love the quote from Ronald Reagan.

00:33:04.000 He says, Sometimes I feel if Alice had, the First Amendment's gotten so twisted that Alice has never left Wonderland.

00:33:14.000 But this idea that it was supposed to protect people of conscience, now it's being used to forbid people to have their freedom.

00:33:21.000 I liken it to you see somebody on your front yard, you bring them in, you give them a meal, they don't have a place to stay, they sleep on the couch.

00:33:28.000 The next day you wake up, there's two people.

00:33:30.000 He let in his friend.

00:33:31.000 The next day you come home from work and there's a half dozen.

00:33:33.000 They're helping themselves to the icebox.

00:33:35.000 The next day you come home from work and your house is packed and they look at you and say, who's this guy?

00:33:38.000 And they shove you out on the front lawn and you're like, what just happened?

00:33:41.000 That was America. 0.98

00:33:42.000 So you had these Puritans and they let in other denominations. 0.50

00:33:46.000 And then you had Protestants and they let in Catholics and then they let in Jews and then they let in anybody that believed in any faith. 0.87

00:33:52.000 Finally, they let in the atheists and the Islamists and the anti-Christian and they're shoving the Christians out. 0.77

00:33:57.000 And they're saying, well, you Christians are intolerant. 0.62

00:33:59.000 It's like, we're the ones that came up with the idea, right?

00:34:02.000 America was not founded by Muslims trying to figure out how to tolerate non-Muslims. 0.76

00:34:05.000 It wasn't tolerated, founded by atheists or LGBTQ trying to tolerate non-that. 0.91

00:34:12.000 It was founded by Christians that didn't get along.

00:34:14.000 And they learned how to tolerate each other. 0.78

00:34:15.000 And then they spread that ripple out to tolerate all these others until where we're at today.

00:34:21.000 But we have this Christian founding.

00:34:23.000 And the most important part of it is we have rights from a creator.

00:34:27.000 And therefore, the government's job is to defend your creator-given rights.

00:34:31.000 If there's no creator, your rights come from the government.

00:34:34.000 And what the government giveth, the government can take it away of.

00:34:37.000 Amen.

00:34:38.000 I love the quote from Eisenhower.

00:34:40.000 He said, in some lands, the state claims to be the author of human rights.

00:34:43.000 If the state gives rights, it can and inevitably will take away those rights.

00:34:46.000 Our founding fathers had to refer to the Creator in order to make their revolutionary experiment make sense.

00:34:51.000 If every American could listen to this just last hour we did, Bill, we would be in a far better place.

00:34:57.000 God bless you, Bill.

00:34:58.000 We'll have you on soon.

00:34:59.000 Have a great Christmas if we don't talk before then.

00:35:01.000 Thanks so much.

00:35:02.000 Thank you.

00:35:02.000 God bless.

00:35:03.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:35:04.000 Everybody, email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:07.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:35:10.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 08, 2023

How America Rejected Its Founders' Faith

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