00:00:47.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:54.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:42.000And what I am, I guess the reason I'm here on your program has to do with the theme of the Tucker interview.
00:02:51.000And that has to do with Christian nationalism, which is sort of a bugbear that the left is using to scare everybody.
00:03:00.000Christian nationalism is, according to them, the thing that's going to introduce a sea of red dresses for all the women and, you know, a handmaid's tale totalitarian situation where you have a bunch of Ayatollah weirdbeards only with reformed theology, reformed Christian theology, imposing their morality on everybody and making this a grim place to live.
00:03:31.000Those of us who are tired of Clown World are simply wanting to return to an earlier arrangement here in America where we recognized that we were a Christian nation.
00:03:49.000This was not, we didn't have an established church the way England or Denmark do.
00:03:54.000So the Church of England is the Anglican Church.
00:03:58.000The Church of Denmark is the Lutheran church.
00:04:01.000Our founders wisely said they didn't want to do that.
00:04:04.000So we didn't have a formal establishment, but we were informally very much a Christian nation and knew ourselves to be such.
00:04:12.000So that gave us the central moral consensus that we needed to be a coherent nation, a nation that hangs together.
00:04:24.000If you have a bunch of people, millions of people, as we do, and everybody has got their own worldview, and you've got 17 different worldviews, and those worldviews go down to the fundamental level, you don't have a nation.
00:04:45.000There has to be a shared consensus because no group of people can police everything.
00:04:52.000And if nobody has any shared assumptions, if we don't police ourselves through our shared consensus, through our shared assumptions, then it's just going to be anarchy, which we see headed toward us on the horizon.
00:05:08.000That anarchistic state is coming toward us because we don't have anything in common.
00:05:34.000I want to isolate one of the things you said, which I constantly battle with both pastors, Christians, and then the secular world.
00:05:42.000They'll say, what do you mean America as a Christian nation?
00:05:46.000Remind our audience about Holy Trinity versus the United States, the 1893 Brewer decision, which you educated me on in that podcast with Tucker, but also more broadly, make the case and present the evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation.
00:06:06.000The thing that in the peace treaty that was signed with Great Britain at the conclusion of our war for independence, the words of the treaty begin, in the name of the Holy Trinity, amen.
00:06:19.000So, which is not what you see in diplomatic communiques nowadays.
00:06:24.000No, it would be in the name of BLM or trans or some nonsense.
00:06:42.000Everybody was self-consciously Christian.
00:06:45.000Now, that does not mean that they were entirely Christian or consistently Christian or that everybody had internalized the themes of the Sermon on the Mount and everything was fluffy clouds and unicorns.
00:06:58.000No, it was, but there was a shared consensus.
00:07:02.000And so when the colonies were established, they were very committed to a particular theological framework.
00:07:11.000And even as late as the time of the adoption of the Constitution, when 13 colonies or states, by that time they were independent states, when the 13 states ratified the Constitution, at that time, nine of the 13 had official relationships with Christian denominations.
00:07:32.000So, for example, Connecticut was the official church of Connecticut was the Congregational Church.
00:07:40.000And that remained the case, tax dollars supporting the Congregational Church as the official mascot church of Connecticut.
00:08:39.000Now, if Congress establishes a church of the United States, then Congress would be violating the First Amendment.
00:08:48.000And if Congress declares war on Christians practicing their faith in the public sphere, they are violating the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
00:09:02.000They're not allowed to establish a formal church of the United States, and they're not allowed to interfere with us as we are worshiping God and influencing the political order according to the lights of our conscience.
00:09:15.000So at the very beginning, nine of the 13 colonies were formally connected to the Christian faith.
00:09:24.000And in the 1892 Holy Trinity decision, and I just need to set this, Congress had passed a law forbidding the importation of cheap labor for big businesses where the corporations paid their passage over and then used them on their project and then released them into the country after that.
00:09:46.000So there was a law against paying the passage of a foreign worker.
00:09:50.000There was a church in New York, Holy Trinity, that called a British minister to be their minister, and they paid for his passage over.
00:09:59.000An overzealous prosecutor went after them for that.
00:10:03.000And the Supreme Court in 1892 decided in favor of the church in a very common sense way.
00:10:10.000It was delightful to read that opinion because here you have Supreme Court jurists making sense.
00:10:21.000They handled it in a common sense way.
00:10:24.000And then Chief Justice Brewer basically said, and while we're here, while we're on the subject, let us remind everyone that the United States is a Christian nation.
00:10:37.000And he went through the whole history, the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the original colonists, their faith, and all of the things that our nation had done to recognize the Christian God.
00:10:50.000It's not just a generic deity that is a placeholder deity, however you conceive him, her, it to be.
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00:12:06.000So Pastor, I want to read, of course, from the Declaration that commonly gets quoted by some secularists, but they say, no, you don't understand.
00:12:13.000This is not the God of the Old Testament.
00:12:16.000This is not, you know, an omniscient, omnipotent creator God.
00:12:19.000This is just an unmoved mover, like an Aristotelian God.
00:12:22.000Of course, it goes one in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
00:12:34.000What God was Thomas Jefferson and the founders referring to and literally signing on to?
00:12:43.000It is commonly said that the founders were deists.
00:12:47.000That is the standard operating line, that the founders were deists.
00:12:51.000Two of the founders, Jefferson and Franklin, were arguably deistic in their inclinations, but they were very bad deists.
00:13:03.000A deist is someone who believes in a clockmaker God, a God who created everything and then walked away and doesn't interact with the world at all.
00:14:01.000In the Constitution, I caused a stir here one time.
00:14:05.000There was a fracas in our newspaper, and I offered a $10 reward to any high school student at the government school who could find me the reference to the Christian God in the Constitution.
00:14:19.000And there was an uproar and a lot of people yelling and everything.
00:14:35.000That's just what, you know, they didn't mean it.
00:14:39.000Well, in the French Revolution, which occurred just shortly after our war for independence, it's more proper to call our war a war for independence and not a revolution.
00:14:51.000The French Revolution wanted to flatten the place, bulldoze, and start over.
00:15:25.000They ratified the Constitution in the year of our Lord.
00:15:28.000They prohibited the federal government from establishing a church, but they didn't prohibit the states from doing that.
00:15:36.000And a number of them just continued merrily on with that.
00:15:39.000So we had a very informal arrangement, a happy arrangement between different kinds of Christians.
00:15:48.000And the reason for this is if the United States adopts the national flower and then a state adopts a state flower, that's not likely to be a cause of contention or civil unrest or any problem.
00:16:02.000But if you have an established church, let's say the Episcopalian church as the national church and the Presbyterian church as a local state church, you're setting the stage for conflict.
00:16:15.000And they didn't want that kind of conflict.
00:16:17.000They wanted the Baptists and the Presbyterians and the Methodists to be able to play nice together.
00:16:24.000And that worked for an extended period of time.
00:16:28.000What they did not envision was colliding worldviews where they did not envision 30 million Hindus and 20 million Muslims and 10 million Jews and 50 million Christians all trying to work it out together.
00:16:45.000Because you get to a certain point where you don't have enough in common for the thing to cohere.
00:16:52.000Because some people believe that you please the Almighty by flying airplanes into skyscrapers, and other people believe that you don't please the Almighty by doing that.
00:17:03.000And that is a fundamental religious conviction.
00:17:06.000Or even more disturbing, people believe they are the Almighty, or they don't believe that the Almighty even exists.
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00:18:35.000So, Pastor, I want to isolate one thing you mentioned here, which included in that topic is immigration.
00:18:41.000And I think one of the great failures of modern Christianity has been the weakness and the unbiblical approach to the issue of immigration.
00:18:50.000I've spoken at over 150 churches in the last couple of years.
00:18:53.000It's that topic that even the most on fire pastors are a little uneasy about.
00:18:59.000They say, well, the scriptures say we must let people in and that we must love the refugee and love the stranger and love the sojourner.
00:19:06.000Now, that's not technically correct, but I want you to address that, Pastor, because if there's a topic where the Christian gets weak at the knees and wobbly, it's on border and mass migration.
00:19:20.000So the illustration I use to answer the Christian who's concerned about, well, doesn't the Bible tell us to be generous to the alien and the stranger in the land?
00:19:39.000The issue is the out-of-controlness of it.
00:19:43.000So, for example, if you had a Christian family that had three foster children, let's say four children of their own, and then they'd taken in three foster children, and they were doing a great job with their family, and the kids were thriving and happy.
00:19:59.000And let's say that one day the state showed up with a busload of 28 new foster children that had not been requested or arranged for and just dropped them off and said, okay, these additional 28 foster kids are now your responsibility.
00:20:15.000The father, who was taking care of three foster kids and four of his own, could go out and argue with them, and he could rightly say something like this.
00:21:01.000And so consequently, you're having all these people flood in, and they are flooding the system in a way that the system cannot assimilate them.
00:21:11.000There's no way to incorporate them in.
00:21:15.000And consequently, what you're doing is you're setting up the conditions for ethnic conflict, class conflict, crime.
00:21:24.000You're not helping anybody do anything.
00:21:27.000So yes and amen to all the good Samaritan sentiments that are there.
00:21:32.000The issue, however, is law versus chaos.
00:21:36.000And also, there is a very important teaching, Moses' farewell address in Deuteronomy, where there is a cautionary warning about if you allow too many foreigners into your land, they will become your masters and you will become their slaves.
00:22:30.000And that really is a moral obligation for Christians.
00:22:34.000But what's happening now does not resemble that in the slightest.
00:22:39.000So I think that Christians ought to stop being embarrassed about being nervous about or opposed to the chaos that is being fomented on our southern border.
00:22:52.000So let's now get into the day-to-day news cycle.
00:22:56.000As I mentioned, this published rubbish, the false white gospel, rejecting Christian nationalism, reclaiming true faith, and refounding democracy.
00:23:06.000I'm going to ask you to repeat sort of what you said earlier, Pastor, but I think it's important.
00:23:10.000If you were to give a definition, and you're an author and a thinker, of what Christian nationalism is, not what it isn't, but what it is, what would you say?
00:23:21.000I would say that if there is no God above the state, then the state has become your God.
00:23:28.000If there is no transcendent authority that overarches everyone, if that is not the case, then something overarches everyone, and that has now become this humanistic state that wants to govern us all.
00:23:43.000So we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.
00:23:49.000If you exclude the creator from your calculations, which the opponents of Christian nationalism want to do, they want us to simply have our rights to be handed us from Congress or the Supreme Court.
00:24:04.000But if that's the case, they're not rights.
00:24:20.000We need to have an authority over our lives that Congress cannot reach, that the Supreme Court cannot touch, that the president has no authority to write an executive order canceling.
00:24:34.000So I want a country where a man with an open Bible can say to the established authorities, you may not do this thing.
00:24:59.000What he's wanting to do is he's wanting to tar us with an implied racism smear that, okay, we want a lily white America and Christian nationalism is simply a dog whistle for getting rid of all the colored people, right?
00:25:18.000And this is what is so important about this.
00:25:21.000If there is no God above the state, then there is no problem with whatever we want to do.
00:25:29.000In other words, if there is no transcendent authority above a nation-state, then there is no problem with a racist nation-state.
00:25:40.000Okay, imagine there's no heaven, no heaven above us, no hell below us.
00:25:47.000The only thing that's above us is only sky.
00:25:51.000Imagine, right, as that inane song puts it.
00:25:54.000If we imagine that, then we are imagining a situation where democracy can be three coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
00:26:09.000And if you have a majority in the country that is of one ethnic group and they want to exile a minority ethnic group, or they want to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water, or they want to enslave them or exile them or commit genocide against them.
00:26:28.000If there is no God, what would be wrong with that?
00:26:34.000If there is no God, who could have a problem with what Stalin did to Ukraine?
00:26:40.000If there is no God, why is Pol Pot's behavior so wrong?
00:26:45.000If there is no God, why is Mao's behavior so wrong?
00:26:49.000Well, people say at that point, they start sputtering and saying, well, they go back and say, what about the Inquisition?
00:26:59.000As you say in Tucker's interview, they've been drawn on that thing for quite a while.
00:27:04.000Again, not diminishing the evil of the Inquisition, but it's nowhere near the horror that people think it was over the period of time that people realize in comparison to the secular atrocities.
00:27:12.000Yes, Pastor, I'm cutting you off, yes.
00:27:34.000We have a transcendent authority which enables us to protest against that inconsistency.
00:27:40.000When atrocities are committed in the name of Christ, true Christians can stand up and say, this is not consistent.
00:27:47.000This is not consistent with what we all profess to believe.
00:27:51.000But if a communist wanted to stand up against what Stalin was doing, or if a communist wanted to stand up against what Mao was doing, and remember that communists have killed 100 million people over the course of one century, 100 million people, and the Spanish Inquisition, a few thousand people over the course of a few centuries, not justifying it, but let's put it in perspective.
00:28:16.000That was Mao on a slow afternoon, right?
00:28:20.000And so why we should feel sheepish about the history of Christendom when the secularists, the socialists and the communists have, they don't have blood on their hands.
00:28:36.000This is one of the most ludicrous comparisons that you could possibly make.
00:28:42.000Not only that, not only have these totalitarian states been hell holes and genocidal hellholes, but there is no place to stand for a communist who doesn't like what Stalin is doing or Mao is doing.
00:28:56.000There's no place for him to stand to say what you are doing is inconsistent with true communism.
00:29:06.000There is no place to stand to rebuke it.
00:29:09.000The Christian does have that place to stand.
00:29:12.000So the Christian has a way of opposing atheistic atrocities, and the Christian has a place to stand when he's opposing Christian atrocities.
00:32:20.000And I'll put it this way: the prodigal son didn't run out of money his first weekend away from home.
00:32:28.000He had a lot of capital that he inherited first from his father, and he started to spend it on wild living, but he didn't run out of money right away.
00:32:38.000So that's what happened to the United States.
00:32:42.000We accumulated a great deal of moral capital, moral social capital, and then we started to spend it on our own lusts, spend it on our own ideas, spend it on our own wild time, and we didn't run out of money right away.
00:32:57.000And what's happening now is the checks are bouncing.
00:33:01.000And a lot of Christians are waking up saying, wait, wait, wait, they can't do that.
00:33:07.000So, and then the secularists look at us and say, why can't we not do that?
00:33:13.000Basically, what we're doing is we're in the position of the prodigal son, staring at the pig food, wondering how we got into this position, right?
00:33:23.000And so, what I want to do as a preacher is I want to call people back to Christ.
00:33:29.000I want to say, look, you can't have it both ways.
00:33:32.000You can't refuse to return to your father's house and have your father's blessing.
00:33:37.000We need to return to our father's house.
00:33:40.000We need to say, you know, this was a bad idea.
00:33:43.000Father, I've sinned against you and against heaven.
00:33:57.000A lot of them were living decent, middle-class lives.
00:34:01.000They thought, okay, all I need to do is believe in the gospel and go to church and keep my own nose clean.
00:34:07.000And they were not aware of how much the Bible talks about social and political and cultural things.
00:34:14.000One thing I do want you to talk about here is our audience, let's just say, is hearing a lot about a looming rapture and the end of the world.
00:34:26.000And for that, they believe there is no reason to contest for political matters.
00:34:32.000You have a different theological view and approach.
00:34:54.000Just very quickly, most North American evangelicals hold to what's called dispensational theology.
00:35:01.000And this is sort of a caricature, but it's like this world is God's Vietnam.
00:35:07.000And then there's going to be a rapture where God helicopters a few people out of Saigon, and then the whole thing falls apart.
00:35:17.000And so you have this, God made the mistake of getting into a land war in Asia, and then God's going to snatch his people out.
00:35:24.000I'm what's called post-millennial, which means that I have a very optimistic view of the future.
00:35:30.000I believe the nations will be discipled.
00:35:32.000I don't believe that everything is headed for hell in a handbasket.
00:35:37.000Pastor, can you just lay out the biblical evidence for what you believe and why that, let's just say, connects to the view of history that you have?
00:35:46.000Because the view of history that many on our show that come on, friends of mine like Jack Kibbs, they will say that God has a plan.
00:36:28.000Many Christians, when someone becomes a Christian and they go and buy their Bible and they read through the Bible, they think, okay, where am I?
00:36:36.000Where's the X on the map that says you are here?
00:36:39.000One of the reasons they think that we're in the end times is they read a passage like Matthew 24, where Jesus says the sun goes dark and the moon turns blood red and the stars fall from the heavens.
00:36:52.000And they go out and look at the sky and the sun came up this morning and the moon's going to come up tonight and the stars are all still there.
00:36:59.000So they say, oh, this must be about the future.
00:37:02.000Because the Bible's true and they're all still there.
00:37:05.000This is going to come to pass in the future.
00:37:08.000But if you look at that passage closely, you see that Jesus has told the disciples at the beginning of chapter 24 that this city, this temple, not one stone is going to be left on another one.
00:37:22.000And the disciples are astonished and say, when is this going to happen?
00:37:26.000And Jesus starts answering their question.
00:37:28.000And in the course of answering their question, he quotes Isaiah 13, Isaiah 13, verse 10.
00:37:35.000And that's the sun going at, you know, what is called decreation language, what I call collapsing solar system language.
00:37:43.000But if you back up in Isaiah 13, 10, back up to verse 1, Isaiah says, an oracle concerning the king of Babylon.
00:37:52.000So this is not a prediction of the end of the space-time continuum.
00:37:58.000This is a prediction of the end of Babylon.
00:38:02.000And then Isaiah does it again in chapter 34, where it's the end of Edom.
00:38:07.000And then the same thing happens in Ezekiel, where he predicts the end of Egypt, or in Amos, where he's predicting the end of the northern kingdom of Israel.
00:38:18.000And it happens again in Joel, chapter 2.
00:38:21.000Every time the Old Testament uses this kind of collapsing solar system terminology, it's always about the judgment of a nation or a nation-state, always.
00:38:31.000And remember that Jesus is answering the question about when the temple is going to be flattened.
00:38:40.000And then Jesus takes the language of the Old Testament.
00:38:43.000And we know historically that all of that happened in 70 AD.
00:38:48.000So many of the passages that evangelical Christians take and apply to the end of the world are actually, I take it, as applying to the end of the Judaic Aeon and the beginning of the Christian Aeon.
00:39:03.000So with regard to the course of the Christian Aeon, how that's going to go, Habakkuk prophesies that the earth is going to be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
00:39:57.000But the kingdom of God does not take off like the space shuttle.
00:40:00.000It's not like every day and every way everything gets better and better because we see apostasies and declensions and fallings away and everything.
00:40:09.000It's more like walking from Nebraska through Colorado.
00:40:14.000You walk up and then down and down into a valley and then up a little bit and then down into a canyon and then up again.
00:40:21.000It's three steps forward, one step back, five steps forward, four steps back, that sort of thing.
00:40:26.000So the kingdom of God advances very slowly, but it's like leaven that you put in the loaf, Jesus says, or like a mustard seed that grows into a great tree.
00:40:37.000So long term, over the course of thousands of years, I'm very optimistic.
00:40:42.000At the same time, I believe that we need to be hard-headed and clear-eyed about the apostasies and the rebellions.
00:40:48.000I just want to say, when you said that on Tucker's interview, I kind of had to take a step back.
00:40:55.000I said, I have not heard somebody say the words, I am optimistic.
00:41:01.000And so it just, it was just kind of a category difference, right?
00:41:29.000But I just want to be clear because I have seen amazing dispensationalists that use the urgency that they see the Bible, they use that as urgency to do good.
00:41:40.000Then I see other dispensationalists that use it as apathy to flee and to do nothing.
00:41:47.000So the most important question that I have is, what does your eschatology inform you to do?
00:41:52.000Since you are an optimist and you see that the scriptures are going to go west before it goes east, right?