Bill Federer and Dr. Jerry Newcomb join Charlie and Andrew to talk about the importance of Thanksgiving and why it's one of the most important days of the year. Charlie talks about why Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday and why we should all be thankful for it.
00:00:59.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:12.000All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:15.000My name is Andrew Colvin, executive producer of this fine show, joined by Blake Neff.
00:01:18.000And we have two guests this hour for the whole hour.
00:01:22.000One of them is Charlie's dear, dear friend, and I haven't seen him for too long now, Bill Federer, author and speaker.
00:01:27.000You can find him at AmericanMinute.com.
00:01:30.000And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, executive director of Providence Forum.
00:01:34.000You can find him at providenceforum.org.
00:01:37.000Gentlemen, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:01.000In Charlie's honor, I am all about evangelizing the love of this holiday and the uniqueness to the American spirit it represents.
00:03:09.000Tell us what makes Thanksgiving unique and so special.
00:03:14.000Well, that America is an experiment of people ruling ourselves.
00:03:21.000So, one of the things I did was go back and research every single century of recorded human history to try to find out what the most common form of government is.
00:03:30.000And it's gangs and a gang leader with enough weapons we call a king or a pharaoh or a Caesar, Kaiser, Sultan Tsar.
00:03:36.000And these kingdoms keep getting bigger because with the latest military advancement, kings can kill more people.
00:03:43.000So, finally, the king of England had the biggest empire on planet Earth.
00:03:46.000The sun never set on the British Empire.
00:03:58.000Well, they were the ones that had the Mayflower Compact, this idea of people ruling themselves.
00:04:03.000So at the time the pilgrims were founding America, you had Chinese emperors, Japanese emperors, Korean emperors, Indian Maharaja.
00:04:11.000Raja means king, Maha means great, Russian czars, Mongolian Khans, African chieftains, kings of Spain, France, and the whole world's basically kings.
00:04:19.000And here you have these little Christians starting their own community.
00:04:23.000So one overlooked thing is they got their idea from ancient Israel that first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king.
00:04:31.000So around 1400 BC, you have the Israelites, millions of them come out of Egypt.
00:06:31.000And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, you know, you run the Providence Forum, and your whole mission is to bring back Judeo-Christian values to the United States, make much of them.
00:06:44.000You know, you say an article here on your website, America's First Thanksgiving.
00:06:49.000You're talking about this First Thanksgiving that Bill just alluded to.
00:06:53.000And you say that it's an annual reminder of our nation's Christians and roots and our godly heritage.
00:06:59.000I do believe this nation is providentially founded.
00:07:02.000When you look to the First Thanksgiving, you look to the story that's uniquely American.
00:07:06.000What stands out to you that you want to call attention to for the 2025, our modern Americans?
00:07:14.000Well, how much suffering the pilgrims endured just for the sake of the goal to be able to worship Jesus Christ and the purity of the conscience and be left alone.
00:07:25.000When they started in England, it was a small little church.
00:07:29.000The pilgrims were basically one particular congregation that managed to, when they began in a place in the Midlands in England, about 150 miles north of London, it was all secret.
00:07:52.000And then eventually, about 10 years later, they were able to come to the new world.
00:07:57.000But through it all, they were suffering.
00:07:58.000And in fact, in the book called A Plymouth Plantation, which their main leader, Governor William Bradford, wrote, he said at the very beginning, it is well known unto the godly how ever since the first breaking out of the light of the gospel in our honorable nation of England, Satan hath raised, maintained, and continued wars and oppositions against the saints.
00:08:21.000And so they suffered one hindrance and persecution after another, but they went forward with their goal.
00:08:30.000And when they finally got to the new world and they wrote the Mayflower Compact that Bill Federer was talking about, which was the first beginning of what would become the American constitutional process.
00:08:42.000You know, 150 years later, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution would flow out of the same ideas of self-rule under God that were written down there right in the cabin of the Mayflower.
00:08:58.000But they said we came, you know, for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.
00:09:04.000And so when they finally were here, despite one hindrance and one setback after another, including the fact that half their number died that first winter, when the harvest came in 1621, they set aside time to give thanks to God in all circumstances.
00:09:24.000And later on, when they would celebrate Thanksgiving, because they had gone through this period of starvation where the daily ration for each person would only be about five kernels of corn, they would sometimes take their Thanksgiving plate.
00:09:40.000This is at later times of prosperity, and they would put five little kernels of corn on the plate to remind them of what they had endured during that time of starvation, where again, half their number died, but they gave thanks that he allowed them to flourish.
00:09:58.000So Thanksgiving is such a great reminder of our Christian roots.
00:10:02.000And a lot of people want to say, well, you know, okay, we can understand the settlers like the Pilgrims and the Puritans, they were Christians, but by the time you get to the Founding Fathers, they weren't.
00:10:10.000They were, you know, basically unbelievers.
00:10:14.000And anybody who takes Bill Federer's book, America's God and Country, and you look at these quotes from the Founding Fathers as well as the settlers, including, you know, George Washington and, you know, all the founding fathers, James Madison, you see the Christian faith played a very important thing.
00:10:33.000Dr. Newcomb, we have a great clip from Charlie basically asserting the Christian roots of our founding.
00:10:44.000A new Hillsdale College miniseries on colonial America offers a fresh way to think about Thanksgiving.
00:10:51.000Beyond the food and the political debates, it reminds us what we should be truly thankful for, our freedom, our prosperity, and our faith.
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00:12:01.000We were talking before the break about the founders and the myth the founders were all proto-modern atheists and such.
00:12:10.000And so I was looking at some of the early Thanksgiving stuff.
00:12:14.000So George Washington was proclaiming days of Thanksgiving in the middle of the Revolutionary War, notably after the Battle at Saratoga, which was the victory that really opened the way for America to actually win that conflict.
00:12:28.000Multiple, and then we had proclamations of Thanksgiving by the Continental Congress or the Confederation Congress during that fun period where we didn't have the Constitution yet.
00:12:38.000And then this one really stood out to me as remarkable.
00:12:41.000Basically, the day after the House of Representatives voted to advance the First Amendment, the Freedom of Religion Amendment, the one that people used to argue there's a wall of separation between church and state in our government.
00:12:52.000You know, they declared us a non-religious country.
00:12:54.000The day after they do this, Congressman Elias Boudino, Boudinot, I have no idea how they're going to pronounce that from New Jersey.
00:13:03.000He had this House and Senate jointly call for President Washington to declare a day of Thanksgiving for, quote, the many signal favors of Almighty God in his favor for our country.
00:13:17.000Yeah, Bill, you know, this is a debate that goes back and forth.
00:13:22.000And Charlie, I think, had the ultimate slapdown video.
00:13:26.000I think we're just going to have to play it when we get it.
00:14:47.000But then they all had to work together against the king of England.
00:14:50.000After the revolution, their attitude changed to: we may not always agree on religion, but you are willing to fight and die for my freedom.
00:14:58.000I need to let you practice your faith.
00:15:02.000And so religion began to expand, but on a state-by-state basis.
00:15:06.000So in 1776, 98% of the country was Protestant, 3 million people, only 1% Catholic, like 30,000 Catholics in a country, 3 million.
00:15:15.000They were only allowed in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.
00:15:17.000And then 1 tenth of a percent Jewish, only seven synagogues in the whole country.
00:15:21.000And then I read through every state constitution.
00:15:23.000And so nine of the original 13, you had to be a Protestant.
00:15:26.000Three, you had to be a plain Christian.
00:15:28.000And then there's an Irish potato family.
00:15:30.000Millions of Irish Catholics come to America and they go from 1% to 20% in a decade.
00:15:34.000And then states began to expand from requiring you to be Protestant to just Christian.
00:15:38.000Then there's a persecution of Jews in Bavaria.
00:15:40.000They come across and go from a tenth of a percent to 1%.
00:15:43.000In 1851, Maryland changed its state constitution to say you could hold office if you were a Christian or a Jew.
00:15:50.000And then after the Civil War, many states rewrote their constitutions to say all you had to do was believe in God.
00:15:55.000But again, the First Amendment was simply to prevent the federal government from picking one Christian denomination and making it the national one, which again was what every country in Europe had done.
00:16:22.000We did an interview actually on that topic beforehand.
00:16:26.000And then right after he recorded that, he texted it to me and he said, how did I do it?
00:16:32.000Well, I think he did well because that clip was seen by tens of millions of people.
00:16:38.000It really was an absolute masterclass.
00:16:41.000Dr. Jerry Newcomb, when we play it for you, we'll get your review on how Charlie did.
00:16:46.000But it's one of those clips that keeps coming back around again and again and again, especially after we lost Charlie, because I think it just was the exact type of moral clarity that the world so desperately needs.
00:16:59.000And Charlie had a way of being patient, but forceful and firm and morally clear.
00:17:06.000And I think it was a really powerful moment.
00:17:11.000And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, we'll get your grade.
00:17:14.000A through F. You're going to have to grade Charlie's take there.
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00:18:16.000President Trump is fighting for America's future.
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00:18:39.000Remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.
00:18:44.00013 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.
00:18:46.0009 out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith.
00:18:52.000Every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had, I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions.
00:19:01.000Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
00:19:08.000So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.
00:19:11.000A common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.
00:19:13.000So let's go to three principles of common law, due process, and jury of your peers, wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
00:19:29.000But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice.
00:19:35.000We get that in the West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal.
00:19:38.000Neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is where the idea of human equality.
00:20:02.000Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne.
00:20:08.000So in the Declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically.
00:20:13.000Thirdly, as I said on the stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together Constitution, more than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone.
00:20:26.000So the book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions, it was Moses' farewell address as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys.
00:20:35.000Here's how you should set up your form of government.
00:20:37.000But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said.
00:20:41.000John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral, religious people.
00:20:46.000It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other.
00:20:48.000The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord.
00:20:56.000One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible.
00:21:04.000So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.
00:21:21.000We have this foundation of the nation that is based on biblical principles.
00:21:27.000And that quote that he alluded to from John Adams, our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
00:21:34.000It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
00:21:37.000When George Washington was leaving the office, he gave us the farewell address.
00:21:41.000And he said there, of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.
00:21:51.000Well, modern Americans today are saying religion and morality have no place in the public arena.
00:22:22.000In a different context, John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things.
00:22:28.000This is why the history is so important.
00:22:30.000This is why at providenceforum.org, for example, we do so much to try and create these videos and programs like you do too at Turning Point with Bill Federer in order to educate people about our Christian roots.
00:22:45.000And, you know, the fact of the matter is, human beings are sinful.
00:22:51.000And that is a very important doctrine that the founding fathers fully understood.
00:22:57.000You read the Constitution and you see the separation of power.
00:23:01.000They did not want to give too much power to too many people.
00:23:05.000You read the Declaration of Independence and you see the consent of the governed.
00:23:10.000And this is because we have our rights from God.
00:23:14.000So the fact that human beings are made in the image of God, that's enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
00:23:20.000And the fact that human beings are fallen and sinful, that's enshrined in the Constitution.
00:23:25.000And these have governed us very, very well.
00:23:28.000When you look at countries like the communist countries, for example, in the 20th century and 21st century, even you see how they begin with this atheistic foundation.
00:23:57.000In fact, the year after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he helped found as a layman the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
00:24:08.000And he even wrote up the agreement for the subscription for this.
00:24:12.000And they called an evangelical minister, the Reverend Charles Clay, for this church.
00:24:17.000And they said, we're desirous of gospel knowledge.
00:24:20.000But even Jefferson, later, when he has some doubts and so forth about some of the doctrines, he still said that, you know, our rights come from God.
00:24:29.000And if we ever forget that, I tremble for my country because how can we maintain our freedoms if we ever lose sight of God?
00:24:39.000And the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, many nations have been soaked in blood because they began with the premise that there is no God.
00:24:50.000There's no higher authority than the state.
00:25:04.000And we have to be on guard about that.
00:25:06.000And speaking of that, I think it's worth remembering that, you know, we've talked about the first Thanksgiving.
00:25:11.000We talked about the founding era Thanksgivings, but the annual, you know, Thanksgiving as we observe it was born in the middle of the American Civil War, proclaimed by Lincoln 1863.
00:26:12.000People forget that they were surrounding Vienna, Austria twice, and they had pirates capturing and they had whole Catholic orders in Europe called the Trinitarians and they would ransom back people for Muslim slavery.
00:26:24.000And matter of fact, one of the pilgrim ships was captured by Muslim pirates.
00:26:28.000In 1625, William Bradford said they saved up 800 pounds of beaver skins, sent it back to England, but it was captured in the English Channel by a Turkish man of war, carried off to solemn Morocco, and the crew was made slaves.
00:26:42.000So even the pilgrims had to deal with that.
00:26:45.000One other thing before we get off the pilgrims is they tried communism, right?
00:27:20.000The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to plant corn.
00:27:24.000Well, before they would allege weakness and to have forced them would have been great oppression.
00:27:27.000So here the pilgrims tried everything owned in common and it didn't work.
00:27:33.000One other thing that's overlooked is there were twice as many Indians at the first Thanksgiving than pilgrims.
00:27:38.000There was like 90 Indians and only 52 pilgrims.
00:27:42.000And get this only four adult women cooking for 142 people because all the rest of them had died in the winter.
00:27:50.000And then one other quick thing is Squanto, who had been kidnapped by some unscrupulous people and taken and sold as a slave in Malaga, Spain.
00:27:59.000He was purchased by some friars, given his freedom.
00:28:02.000He hitchhikes his way back to England, works for the Newfoundland company that drop him off on the shores of America, only to find out that his entire tribe was wiped out in a plague.
00:28:12.000And William Bradford says three years earlier, a French ship was shipwrecked there.
00:28:16.000And evidently, one of the sailors that got ashore had an illness and wiped out the tribe.
00:28:20.000But had Squanto not been kidnapped, he most likely would have been killed as well.
00:28:24.000But here the pilgrims land and half of them die the first winter.
00:28:28.000But the next spring out of the woods walks this Indian Squanto.
00:28:32.000And you can just imagine the conversation.
00:28:39.000And so Squanto was their interpreter, showed them how to catch beaver and plant corn and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation, what William Bradford said.
00:28:48.000And one last thing, when Squanto was dying, he says that a couple years later, they were exploring and they got caught in the freezing rain and Squanto fell ill of Indian fever, bleeding much in the nose.
00:28:59.000And he begged Governor Bradford to pray for him that he might go to the Englishman's God in heaven.
00:29:10.000Anyway, so we looked at the Pilgrims because they had self-government, which inspired New England and then eventually turned into our Constitution.
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00:31:42.000And so, as Blake mentioned, you had days of fasting during the Revolutionary War and then days of Thanksgiving.
00:31:49.000You had threatened war with France, and John Adams has two days of fasting and prayer, and then days of Thanksgiving when the British burned the White House.
00:31:59.000James Madison had a day of fasting and prayer and then a day of Thanksgiving during a cholera epidemic in 1849 when 150,000 Americans died of cholera.
00:32:10.000You had Zachary Taylor had a day of fasting.
00:32:14.000And then Lincoln had two days of fasting and prayer during the Revolution.
00:32:18.000And then he made, as Blake mentioned, the day of Thanksgiving an annual event.
00:33:29.000And I love what you were talking about, those presidents that were between Washington and Lincoln and how they had days of fasting and days of prayer and days of thanksgiving.
00:33:39.000I mean, how amazing would that be if the president of the United States called on a day of fasting and prayer?
00:33:46.000I mean, that would just be a complete paradigm shift from our current moment.
00:33:50.000And I'm sure it would be incredibly controversial and all of that.
00:34:18.000But paramount importance to them was living freely and worshiping God according to the dictates of their own consciences, their own beliefs.
00:34:32.000That's what they were denied the freedom to do in England.
00:34:37.000But because of the biblical precedent set forth in scripture, they never doubted, because of their faith in God, that their experiment would work.
00:34:48.000They never doubted they would get to the new world.
00:34:50.000They never doubted that once they got there, they would thrive.
00:34:54.000During that first winter, remember they arrive in November.
00:34:58.000During that first winter, half of them, including William Bradford's own wife, died.
00:35:07.000They did meet the Indians, the Native Americans who were there, who did help them.
00:35:15.000You know, Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives.
00:35:26.000That happened, but Thanksgiving was a devout expression of gratitude, the pilgrims, to God For their survival and everything that was a part of it.
00:35:47.000Dr. Jerry Newcomb, well, the Pilgrims were a small group of Christian who were basically Christians that were outcasts in their own society.
00:35:57.000And all they wanted to do was worship Jesus and the purity of the conscience.
00:36:00.000And as Dr. D. James Kennedy once noted, America began as a church relocation project in the sense that the Pilgrims were the ones he's talking about.
00:36:10.000They went from this place north of London, about 150 miles, then they made it to Holland where they could at least be tolerated.
00:36:19.000And then eventually they made it to the New World.
00:36:21.000So in that sense, in the sense that the Pilgrims cast a long and positive shadow in what would become the United States of America, that's a fantastic observation.
00:36:31.000They began that whole process of self-rule under God that we've talked about with the Mayflower Compact.
00:36:37.000They had a form of socialism imposed on them by the people who made the loans so they could even have the voyage.
00:36:46.000And they got rid of that and instead gave free enterprise.
00:36:50.000And they flourished as they made God the center of their whole settlement.
00:36:57.000In a film I made about this, about the Pilgrims, and Charlie, by the way, commended one of the films I made, you know, in this whole series called the Foundation of American Liberty series.
00:37:07.000And Bill Federer is a major, major guest.
00:37:09.000Anyway, so I interviewed the direct descendant of the de facto pastor of the Pilgrims.
00:37:19.000And so I interviewed this descendant, and he said, Suppose one after things got real stable in Plymouth and they were starting to thrive and flourish, you know, under God.
00:37:33.000Suppose one of their children said, Do I have to go to church?
00:37:37.000He said, One of those parents could easily say to that child, What do you mean?