Ep 61 ｜ Thanksgiving Is Not Racist & Neither Were the Pilgrims ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Words per Minute
168.23431
Summary
Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower compact, the agreement between the pilgrims and the Indians that led them on their first journey to America in 1620. To commemorate the anniversary, historian Leo Martin and historian David Barton talk about the meaning of the 1620 Covenant, and historian Tim Ballard talks about the vital and unfinished business of this covenant.
Transcript
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Late this past summer, you may have heard about something the New York Times got a lot of media attention, called the 1619 Project.
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It was their way to celebrate the pilgrims while ripping them apart.
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It's a very well-funded, far-left effort to reframe and rewrite American history.
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Specifically, it argues that America's true founding took place in 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia.
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I don't think it's a coincidence that the 1619 Project was unleashed just a few short months before a very significant anniversary in 2020.
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Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the covenant that the pilgrims made when they signed the Mayflower Compact in Plymouth, Mass.
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We're going to be talking a lot about that covenant in the next year.
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Anticipating that anniversary, I recently went to Plymouth, where I had three separate conversations that I want to stitch together here for you.
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The first is from a gentleman called Leo Martin.
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He is dedicated to preserving Plymouth's history.
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He walks visitors through a very distinctive and definitive story of the pilgrims.
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Later, I talk with historian David Barton on the meaning of the 1620 covenant.
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Tim Ballard from the Nazarene Fund on the vital and unfinished business of this covenant.
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There is an unprecedented effort to discredit and change our history to fit a new left-wing progressive agenda.
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And there is definitely no room for the antiquated covenant with God in the left's new version of American history.
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Join me in finding out exactly what this covenant is and why it matters for America and for the rest of the world now more than ever.
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Leo, you live an interesting, difficult life, I think.
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The pilgrims and the Indians signed a peace treaty where this house is located.
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And the front yard, there was a little dinner or something.
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And that's the significance of our Thanksgiving.
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So, and I want to get into it because you're this fantastic historian for this area.
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But this is the divide of America on steroids, Plymouth.
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There are those who know what this is and revere it and are really working tirelessly alone to preserve and to put it up in front of people.
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And there is a great movement to do the exact opposite.
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I mean, I think if it wasn't for you and some of the other people in the community that these might be condos.
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But fortunately, we do have people here who love the history of our country.
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Let's say you're in high school and all you've learned is pilgrims stink on ice.
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The pilgrims are really people who are a product of the Reformation.
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And they were, for the first time, reading the Bible.
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And as they read the Bible, they brought on a biblical worldview.
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And that's what they brought to our country, a biblical worldview.
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So, the Bible, so people know, was not read because most people were ignorant, couldn't read.
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And the churches over in England and in Europe, they were all controlled by the government.
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So, they were really, the government was dictating.
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The head of the Anglican church, which the pilgrims had come from, was the king or queen.
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And so, it's a political organ, and I can't imagine going to a church like that, but that's where they came from.
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He's translating the Bible in English in the common tongue.
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I'm not sure when that comes out, but it's around the time of the pilgrims.
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And the difference between the Geneva Bible and why did that play such a role here?
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Well, it played such a role here because, again, they were reading the Bible for the first time.
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What's the unique idea behind the Geneva Bible?
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It was relatively easy to read because it listed chapter and verse.
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It was inexpensive, and one-third of the Geneva Bible was footnotes.
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Now, imagine, from this time on, before, you have to have someone intercede between you and God, king, bishop, priest.
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Now, you can read the Bible, and you can talk to God yourself.
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They would have taught that only the priests or the bishops or the kings could hear from God.
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Once somebody starts telling you you're God's representative on earth, eventually you're going to think you're God on earth.
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As we will tell later with David Barton, it's really pretty much certain death for them to come here.
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And where are they heading on the speed well at first?
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They're heading on the speed well from Holland back to England to meet the Mayflower and come over.
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Keep in mind the pilgrims owned the speed well.
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And didn't the mast of the speed well break and have to limp back?
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So, well, what actually happened with the speed well is the captain didn't want to come.
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So that it would shake the timbers and cause the boat to leak.
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Eventually, the speed well was repaired and it was used for about seven more years.
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But the captain wanted to bail out on the trip.
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And when you see, because they just built a new Mayflower here.
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But it was with 102 passengers, about 30 crew members, and two dogs.
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And so they come over here and they land just across the street, Plymouth Rock.
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Well, what actually happened is the Mayflower stayed offshore about a mile or so, and they
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came in on a boat called the Charlotte, a 30-foot boat with a mast and a rudder.
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They came into Plymouth and they stepped on Plymouth Rock off of the Charlotte.
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But this was not the first land that their feet touched.
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Well, they landed on the tip of Cape Cod in Provincetown.
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If you've ever been to Provincetown, you might notice it's a bit sandy.
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Yeah, not a really great place to build a plantation.
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So what they did is they put the Charlotte together that they carried on the Mayflower
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and they explored Cape Cod for a place to stay.
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When they found this place, our river, right out here, they stayed here because the river
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The first is water power, the second is fertilizer, that river fills with fish, and it is spring
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Herring live in the ocean, but when they spawn, they spawn up in our pond.
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So every spring they migrate by the mill, the pilgrims take them out of the river, put
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them in the ground, fertilize, and grow the corn.
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By the way, Glenn, they did go upstream for six weeks this spring.
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And we had a little over 230,000 fish go up the river.
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For six weeks, you can't see the bottom of the river.
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So when they come here, first, don't they hit someplace where they hit it on Saturday?
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And they know they're not going to stay there, but because it's the Sabbath the next day,
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Well, keep in mind, they came in on the Charlotte coming through Plymouth Harbor.
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They rode the boat up into an island called Clark's Island.
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The next day was Sunday, so they had their first church service on Clark's Island on that
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If you go down the Cape nowadays, there's almost a pulpit rock in every town because there
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were no buildings back then, so all the sermons were delivered from a rock, and they became
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Now, pulpit rock out on Clark's Island is 30 times the size of Plymouth Rock.
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Plymouth Rock, I will tell you, it's not a pebble, but it's a little...
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I mean, I grew up on the West Coast where you have rocks on your beaches, and when you come
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to it, you're like, hmm, you know, it's not, it's a little, it's like going to, and I live
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You know, you get there and you're like, huh, that's it, and there's a Popeye's across the
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So it's a little different than what you think.
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When I bring people down there on my tours, I tell them most people come to Plymouth,
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So, but, and people don't even know about, I mean, in this area, they don't even know
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There used to be, I think there was, didn't they used to have a ceremony every year that,
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I think you were just, weren't you disinvited from that at one point?
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Oh, well, on occasion, yeah, but also keep in mind, Puppet Rock's difficult to get to.
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If you go out there on the island and the tide goes out, you stay on the island, you can't
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But it, it's a great, great place, a great location, and I believe we'll be doing hopefully
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So, the pilgrims come here, they come right, right there off the boat.
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They, for a while, they live on the Mayflower in the winter.
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So by the spring, we have 51 remaining pilgrims.
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Well, most of the young and able-bodied survived.
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We have a little statue down here on the waterfront called the Pilgrim Mother.
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Again, when the pilgrims came here, they had those two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower.
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20 of the original passengers had to stay behind and they left late.
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When they landed on the tip of Cape Cod, they had run out of food.
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The men looked around the Cape, found a stash of corn buried in the ground by the Indians and they took it.
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Had they not taken the corn, they never would have survived.
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Because you see, by the end of that first winter,
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they were doling out a quarter pound of cornbread per person per day to survive on.
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So as you can well imagine, the mothers took their bread and fed their children.
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They covered their children with their own bodies to keep them warm.
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Of those 18 married women, 14 died the first winter.
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Sacrificing themselves for the next generation, knowing if they did not survive, we would not survive.
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And written on the back of that statue, it says they brought their families in a sturdy virtue
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and a living faith in God without which nations perish.
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Because I am convinced, Leo, we've known each other for a long time.
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And I have been looking, because of my job, I have been looking for ways to teach.
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I've been looking for ways to restore some of the lost things.
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And I've been looking for, for the last 20 years, I mean, 20 years ago,
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I was studying with scholars all around the world, having phone conferences with them,
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And we've gotten to a point now to where it's only God.
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There's nothing anymore, I think, that man can do by himself to save us.
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And as I learn history, I realize we have a choice.
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Plymouth, you know, there's a reason why they've dismantled all the history of Plymouth
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and not dismantled the ugliness of Jamestown, because Plymouth has the answer.
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Well, Glenn, you and I can make a promise to one another.
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If you want to make a promise, make a covenant promise unto God.
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And when the pilgrims formed their church in Scrooby, they made a covenant one to another
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Now, Glenn, you didn't have to belong to their church.
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And when I tell people that, they say, well, weren't they legalistic?
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And a covenant promise unto God is a completely different thing than me telling you,
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So that covenant promise is what grew the plantations through John Robinson, the pastor.
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We made a covenant promise under God to honor one another in a body politic where we all
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take responsibility for our people, for ourselves, not the king, not the leader.
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William Bradford, the governor, is the same as me, the poor guy, when it comes to the law.
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If he breaks the same law I do, we both reach the same punishment.
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This is the first kernel of corn planted in the world with that concept.
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Plymouth started that kernel, started civil government based on a covenant promise.
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There's a difference between religion and God people.
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You know, one of my favorite quotes from Gandhi.
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I just don't necessarily like all of his followers.
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The secret was their faith in God and putting God first.
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The 400th coming up and I'm having some anxiety.
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My wife and I run a museum and we're planning for the 400th and we're helping plan a parade.
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And as soon as I put my eyes back on God, then we've got something.
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Now, we talk a lot about the first Thanksgiving.
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One side of the river is where Habermark's village was, the Indian village.
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On the other side of the river is where the plantation was.
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Now, the pilgrims went from socialism to capitalism.
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And after starving to death, they never had a starving day after that, except they had a drought.
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On a Wednesday morning in July, 90 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, Governor Bradford turned to his people and he said,
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I want to get on our knees and I want to ask God what we've done wrong.
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Four o'clock, a little cloud right above the plantation.
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And I do not mean the kind of rain we're used to here in Plymouth, the nor'easter where everything gets knocked over.
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But a soft, gentle rain fell on Plymouth Plantation for two weeks.
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Somebody went up to Governor Bradford and said, Governor, what did you talk to God about?
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We thought all the success we were having was us.
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And there was a visitor there when that took place.
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That visitor's name, Habermock, the Indian chief.
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Habermock went up to the governor and he said, Governor, I like your God.
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And that is when he built his village next to the plantation so he could be closer to his Christian friends and his Christian God.
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And the pilgrims were driven by their family and raising their family to God and raising them and really just concerning.
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They had small vision, if you will, instead of the big vision of, hey, let's go over and build a country.
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They said, let's just, I just want to go and worship God with my family.
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Too many people right now, I think, are looking for God to save us or a man to save us or a politician to save us.
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And they think that if we just start to ask God, but that's not what Bradford did.
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And when they do that, and the point is good that it's in the family, the difference between us and Jameson, we came as families.
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Now, imagine you're going to come over here on that ride, on that boat.
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But the men in that group were making that decision to come here.
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Because the men had a covenant relationship with God that they would pass that down to the next generation.
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That was their hope to come here, that they would get that same thing, that their parents, godly parents, were taking care of them in the best way they could.
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Tell me about the struggle to even do the parade.
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Tell me what it's like having a museum that will talk about God.
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Not because I do what I do, because I dress weird.
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A lot of people of faith come visit us on TripAdvisor.
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But our job is to show people what a wonderful place Plymouth is.
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That our country was founded on biblical principles here in Plymouth.
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There are some people who are in some sort of positions of authority that think we ought not be doing what we do.
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Because if we didn't have pushback, we wouldn't be in the game.
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So, David, on this street, this is lot number one.
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And, you know, we know what this house sold for 10 years ago.
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And it's a crazy house because it's so inexpensive.
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And yet the first Thanksgiving happened on the front yard.
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And where we're sitting is where they signed the first ever peace treaty between Native Americans and Anklos.
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The longest lasting peace treaty in American history.
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And the peace treaty that the Pilgrims didn't break.
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And that was the chief who has this beautiful statue up at the house.
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It was broken because Massasoit's grandson, his name was Metacom.
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He declared war against all whites, all Englishmen, all settlers, and all colonies.
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He objected to Christian missionaries because he said they're changing our culture.
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At least he made that declaration at the end of his life.
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He asked William Bradford, I want to go to the White Men's Heaven.
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And they were for 54 years around Christians with the Pilgrims.
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There were 3,600 Christian Indians here in Massachusetts at the time.
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So they're in trouble because the Christian Indians were saying, you know, you really need
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And this thing about torturing your enemies before you kill them and what they would...
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I've got the accounts out of the books, but they would disembowel them, make you hold
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That's the culture of the Indians was you really butcher your enemies.
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And by the way, when Columbus landed here, as much as we like to blame Columbus for stuff,
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when Columbus landed in America, academics tell us that between 20 and 40 percent of Native
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Americans were slaves to other Native Americans.
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So the culture, the Indian culture was one of slavery, one of torture.
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The Christian missionary said, you don't need to gut people before you do this.
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And so they launched surprise attacks against all the whites they could find.
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They even burned down Roger Williams' home in Rhode Island.
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And he had been an advocate for Native Americans.
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He bought all of his land from Native Americans here in Plymouth.
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But the Plymouth governor said, there's not a square foot of land we own, but what we didn't
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They had great relations until Metacom says, you guys are messing with our culture.
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And that resulted in King Philip's war, which is the highest casualty rate of any war in
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Highest percentage of Indians killed, highest percentage of settlers killed by percentage
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of any war at that point in time, of any war we've ever had.
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And it ended when other Indians killed Metacom.
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Because when Metacom went after the pilgrims, he also went after all the converted Indians
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because he didn't like the Christian culture changing their culture.
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So he fought Indians just like he fought the pilgrims.
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You know, that would be, I mean, in that story, the way you've just told it, that's probably
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spun as the white man was bad because he was taking the culture, even though it was slavery
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I cannot tell you how significant the pilgrims are to so many things we believe today that
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Because you have slavery get started in the Jamestown colony.
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One of the indentured servants there, a guy named Anthony Johnson.
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And I don't think most folks know what an indentured servant is today.
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It's basically I need a job or I need to move over here to America from England.
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And I go to a wealthy store owner or somebody who needs an employee and say, OK, well, it's
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going to cost me this amount of money, so I'm going to take that out of your salary.
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If you'll fund me to go to the new world, I'll give you seven years of work.
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And so that's an indentured, that's not a slave.
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So a black guy named Anthony Johnson came here as an indentured servant, became prosperous,
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And one of the indentured servants that came was a black guy.
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And Anthony Johnson said, this guy is so worthless, so lazy, I'll never get my money back ever for him.
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So he went to court in Virginia and said, I want to own this guy for the rest of his life,
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It'll take me his whole life to get my money back from him, and I want to own this guy.
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And so that's the first occasion of slavery in America.
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Lifelong bondage and slavery was a black man owning another black man in court in Virginia.
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When the slave ships came to the pilgrims, pilgrims and Puritans both.
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Massachusetts made up two colonies, the Pilgrim Colony 1620 and the Puritan Colony in 1630.
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When the slave ships arrived here, they said, oh, no, no, no, no.
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What they did was they imprisoned the slave owners and they freed all the slaves.
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And so Massachusetts has always been the first birthplace of abolition in America.
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This is where all your major abolitionists came from, whether it's John Quincy Adams,
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whether it's Charles Sumner, whether it was Frederick Douglass,
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who spoke for the Massachusetts Abolition Society.
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This is the birthplace of freedom and anti-slavery is Massachusetts.
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And the pilgrims had lots of Bible verses to point to on why this was wrong.
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So the pilgrims give us this equality position, if you will.
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And it's up in this New England area that you have your first blacks elected to office way back in 1768.
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As a matter of fact, black congressmen from Massachusetts in the Civil War said there's never been a time in Massachusetts when blacks could not vote.
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You know, we know so much about the South and the oppression of the South.
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We hear little about what happened in this land of the pilgrims.
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Two houses up from this house, up this little street, is the, what was it called, the common house?
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And socialism can be okay, I mean, morally speaking, if it's voluntary.
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If you and I want to say, hey, let's just share what we've got, okay, we can do that.
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We can argue that the early Christian church did that in Acts 2, but it was not government coercion.
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When the government starts putting power to it.
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Yeah, once somebody puts a gun to your head and says, you will participate.
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And so what happened was, as a congregation, they came over and they said, we just want to take care of each other.
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You got 55 people out of the same congregation, 102 pilgrims.
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But the problem was it took them about two years to find human nature is, because if you look at the picture of the pilgrims hanging in the rotunda at the Capitol, you can go online and see it really easy.
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And you only see six or seven able-bodied guys, maybe in their 30s, maybe in their 20s.
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And so when sickness hit the pilgrims, because they're sitting out in that harbor inside a ship for months while they're trying to build houses here in December, January, February, and all before the women die.
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What happens is you get six or seven guys doing the work for 102.
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And no matter how much work they do, everything they do is shared with everybody else.
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So they noticed Governor Bradford said, essentially, guys started calling in sick.
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Because he's still going to get his share, whether he works or not.
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And so they learned from human nature that they needed to break that up.
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And so in taking the principle from 1 Timothy 5, 8, that if you don't provide for your own household, you're worse than an infidel.
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They said, oh, we're providing for everybody else.
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And so they broke it up and they gave land to everyone because they bought the land from the Indians at the price set by the Indians.
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And they said, you've got your own land, make it work, make it produce.
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I'm not a good farmer, but I am a good barrel maker.
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And I'll trade you one of my barrels for three bushels of wheat or whatever.
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And so this free enterprise system starts going where whatever I'm good at, I can trade with others to get stuff.
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And so by 1627, they actually built a trading post here.
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And that is the first free market system thing that happened in the New World.
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Because Jamestown Colony was completely socialistic, run by the government.
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They had a voluntary socialism here, but they broke that up pretty quick after only two years.
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And then by the time you get to 1627, they've actually, they're engaged in business.
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And they're trading with Indians, and they're trading with other ships that come to the shore and the beach.
00:34:44.720
And so they've got a business going, and they become prosperous.
00:34:47.860
And after those first two years, when they abandoned socialism, they never again had economic wound in Plymouth.
00:34:56.460
What's the difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans?
00:35:00.760
They both theologically believed the same thing.
00:35:05.040
They're children of the Reformation, and they were all part of the Church of England.
00:35:09.580
But what happened was the Pilgrims said, you know, that church is so corrupt, we can never reform it.
00:35:19.100
And this is why Europe and England are so atheists now.
00:35:26.680
And I cannot imagine paying my tithe or going to a church that was a government church.
00:35:33.460
Well, here's the deal with them is they were reading the Bible.
00:35:37.160
And if you read the Bible from the Christian viewpoint, Christ is head of the Christian church.
00:35:42.040
The pastor of the Pilgrims, John Greenwood, he told Queen Elizabeth, he said, Jesus Christ is head of the church.
00:35:52.700
She killed him for saying that Christ was head of the church.
00:35:55.600
So here you have the Pilgrims who have just lost their pastor because they believe what the Bible says, that Jesus is head of the church.
00:36:01.180
And Elizabeth said, no, no, no, I'm head of the church.
00:36:04.540
Whoever the king or queen is is head of the church, which is why they have a state-established church.
00:36:08.860
So that's where – and after she killed the leader, the pilgrim, the pastors, she then passed a law that says if anyone criticizes Her Majesty's ecclesiastical supremacy – in other words, if you say that I'm not the top theologian, whatever, and that I'm not the head, she said you'll be committed to prison without bail.
00:36:31.400
You will never get out of prison again for the rest of your life.
00:36:33.800
If you say I'm not the head of the church – and that's when the pilgrim said, let's go to Holland.
00:36:40.900
And so what they did was they didn't try to stay and reform the church.
00:36:43.660
The Puritans said, no, no, no, we can get control of the church.
00:36:56.340
Because the Puritans decided to come when after – they were making the same points.
00:37:00.400
But what happened at that time was the king said, I'm tired of you guys criticizing me.
00:37:05.240
So he took 10,000, cut off tongues, chopped off ears, slit noses, say, anything else you want to say?
00:37:20.460
And that's when the others said, no, let's get out of here.
00:37:33.860
And the Salem witch trials are a lot of fun because of how they got started.
00:37:41.720
Historically speaking, they're a lot of fun because every history book I have ever seen will cover the witch trials in Salem.
00:37:57.920
But the trick is, at the same time the witch trials are going in Salem, they're also going in Europe.
00:38:05.220
Now, why don't we talk about the 27 in America and not the 500,000 in Europe?
00:38:09.060
Because what America was doing is the same thing everybody else in the world was doing.
00:38:15.740
The witch trials came to an end after 18 months instead of after decades like they went in Europe.
00:38:19.960
Because three Christian leaders, the Reverend John Wise, the Reverend Increase Mather, and Bratton, these three guys went to Governor Phipps and said,
00:38:30.980
Phipps, we study the Bible here, and here's what the Bible says about due process rights.
00:38:35.840
You're supposed to be able to confront your accuser, John 8.
00:38:38.100
You're supposed to be able to call witnesses in your half, Proverbs 18.
00:38:41.700
Went through all the verses and said, you're following the English customs.
00:38:45.240
You're not allowing people to confront their witnesses.
00:38:51.320
And Phipps, Governor Phipps, to his credit, said, you are right.
00:38:54.400
He called in Judge Sewell and said, we've got to stop the trials.
00:38:59.100
Judge Sewell stood up in church and said, I confess my sin.
00:39:03.040
I've shed innocent blood because I didn't read the scriptures.
00:39:10.160
The governor then calls for a statewide day of humiliation fasting to seek to avert God's judgment because they shed innocent blood.
00:39:19.240
The state then exonerates all of them and pays restitution for all of those that were.
00:39:27.880
I challenge you to find any textbook in America that talks about the witch trials, that talks about how they got stopped,
00:39:33.280
what the rest of the world was doing, or how due process rights came out of that.
00:39:56.380
But it's bizarre because you have it right here.
00:40:05.300
And the role of the covenant is critical, critical.
00:40:34.660
And I'm glad it's in the hands of the couple who bought it because they've dedicated it to Christ.
00:40:39.220
Um, but no one knows that they are, they're walking around all these things and it's just invisible.
00:40:48.900
And in thinking about it, you know, this year with Thanksgiving in the 400th year, we were in Gettysburg yesterday.
00:41:02.880
Um, and it has the pilgrim on the front, the Mayflower on the back, didn't know it.
00:41:09.200
The, the columns over Plymouth Rock where we just were right across the street.
00:41:29.680
I, you wouldn't even know it was the 400th anniversary of the pilgrims.
00:41:35.540
And if you ask, if you ask kids today in school, name three good things that we can track to the pilgrims.
00:41:47.120
I mean, we just, we have no clue that the education system we have of, of every kid being educated goes back to the pilgrims.
00:41:53.920
You know, the pilgrims, as they came out of Europe being persecuted, they said the only reason that the people have let the queen get away with what she's doing is because they can't read and they can't read the Bible.
00:42:06.520
She keeps saying the Bible says and they can't read and they don't know that she's lying to them.
00:42:12.700
George Whitefield stopped trying to preach to the people in the church.
00:42:18.020
And he started preaching to the poor and there's a great story of him going out, out into the coal mine areas of England and it's raining and horrible and everybody's muddy and it's, it's, you know, it's every Monty Python movie you've ever seen of what it was like.
00:42:36.080
And Whitefield starts talking about Christ and the birth of Christ and Mary and Joseph and the wise men.
00:42:45.680
And one guy in the back says to probably his son or grandson, I remember my grandmother telling a story like this.
00:43:02.480
And people couldn't read and it's a whole lot easier to be a monarch and a tyrant if people can't read because you can tell them what it is.
00:43:09.700
And again, the churches were established to serve the taxpayers.
00:43:14.260
You didn't, you didn't get a seat in the church unless you paid for it.
00:43:30.760
Play the organ louder so I don't hear the train.
00:43:36.340
Sing louder so we don't hear the people who are starving in the streets right outside the window.
00:43:41.880
And so the pilgrims said, look, everybody's got to be able to read.
00:43:49.200
Private property, land ownership goes to the pilgrims.
00:43:51.500
Because the king said, it's my land in America.
00:44:02.520
I mean, we can just, the free market system, what we call free market economics.
00:44:06.960
Pilgrims had that 150 years before Adam Smith wrote about it.
00:44:10.380
So there are so many things we tracked to the pilgrims.
00:44:16.860
The story of a guy who lived his life of really no consequence that came on the Mayflower.
00:44:28.280
He was one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower.
00:44:42.360
At the time, the founding fathers signed the Constitution 150 years later.
00:44:48.720
So you're talking a brutal life back 150 years before the founding fathers.
00:45:04.160
I believe very providentially God gave them really rough storms because they're trying to sell to Virginia.
00:45:11.600
Do they know about the plague that happened here with the Indians?
00:45:16.120
So there was a, quickly, there was a plague that happened here.
00:45:29.240
So they're trying to go to Virginia because that's where their charter says they can go to northern parts of Virginia.
00:45:34.080
And the further south they try to turn, the more the wind blows them north.
00:45:37.880
And it's like God's starting to say, no, no, I don't want you in Virginia.
00:45:43.380
And so they finally get here after 66 days at sea.
00:45:48.200
The weather, the further south they turned that ship, the rougher it got, the weather actually broke the main beam of the ship.
00:45:55.460
And so that's what holds your ship together and they try to tie it back together and pilgrims use some innovative things to save them.
00:46:01.480
But 66 days and they're below deck most of the time and you're retching and throwing up your guts plus all the exequent and everything else.
00:46:08.700
And you've got 30 crew members and they spent time below deck because it's just too rough up on top.
00:46:13.780
So every once in a while you try to go up and see what the sunlight looks like.
00:46:16.580
And this kid, John Howland, went up on deck and got swept overboard by a wave.
00:46:24.100
Number two, even if they had known he got swept overboard, they could not have stopped the ship.
00:46:28.860
Number three, if you could have stopped the ship and sailed it back to him and take an hour, he's dead by then.
00:46:33.620
As it turned out, there was a rope trailing along in the water.
00:46:36.560
And he managed to grab that rope, got back up on top side, saved his life.
00:46:44.540
He didn't do anything significant when he got here.
00:46:53.840
As a result, one million Americans now track themselves to John Howland.
00:47:02.080
And whether that be A-listers in movies like Humphrey Bogart or whether you want to say the Baldwin brothers in Hollywood or whether you want to take three presidents or whether you want to take star athletes, Joseph Smith, founder of LDS, all these guys go back to John Howland.
00:47:17.380
If that guy had died at sea like he should have, think how different America would be today with one life different.
00:47:25.040
And, you know, I kind of liken that to abortion or anything else.
00:47:28.200
The one life, maybe that was the one life that was going to do something significant.
00:47:33.980
We were talking earlier today about thinking small.
00:47:42.840
They weren't over here thinking, we're going to build a nation.
00:47:49.360
And they worried about and paid attention to what they were doing in their life.
00:47:54.520
They wanted to raise their kids in a godly fashion, which they could not do in Secular Hall and they could not do in England.
00:48:04.740
We want those families to build a community that will be strong.
00:48:08.560
And so the strong families built a strong church, which built a strong civil government, which built a community.
00:48:14.140
Out of this community, it shaped the entire United States.
00:48:20.420
And Jamestown, which was also a Christian community, but the governmental Christian community, right?
00:48:27.880
They were the ones that were coming in and we got slavery from Jamestown.
00:48:38.180
We got government tyranny, hard-fisted rulers not serving the people.
00:48:45.860
And when they went to Jamestown, they were thinking colonies, we're going to colonize this land.
00:48:51.000
We're going to bring back the riches of the gold and everything else.
00:48:59.780
So we have to decide, are we Jamestown or are we Plymouth?
00:49:06.740
So, Tim, you just got back from Leiden, Holland.
00:49:21.180
And no sickness, nobody died on the flight, or a little easier.
00:49:27.820
But you went over to find out why they came here.
00:49:32.940
I heard, you know, I read these reports, even from William Bradford and others.
00:49:46.580
They were quite prominent in the town, and going there and feeling it and seeing it, I
00:49:56.800
I tracked down a couple of the historians in the town.
00:49:59.100
There's a tiny little American Pilgrim Museum, believe it or not.
00:50:03.380
It's a tiny little house from, you know, from, you know, the Pilgrim time period.
00:50:21.620
And we sat down, and I asked him, why did they leave this town?
00:50:29.380
Others struggled, but it was like anywhere else.
00:50:31.920
And he had answers that weren't incorrect, but they weren't satisfying to me at all.
00:50:37.080
He said, you know, there was a potential recession they were heading into, an embargo on some of
00:50:48.300
So they left Leiden, where they had a thriving church, 500 members?
00:50:54.100
Okay, so they leave, they're good, because there might be a recession, and there might
00:50:59.900
be some things, and so they decide to take a trip to where they think they're going is
00:51:11.460
Yeah, or maybe a war with Spain, or pretty much a definite war with the Native Americans.
00:51:17.380
Like, you know, a recession versus living in the mud and dying.
00:51:21.060
So I'm just going, I said to them, I don't, I'm not buying it.
00:51:23.900
There has to be something more to why they did this.
00:51:30.760
You know, they brought these questions to the Lord.
00:51:32.520
You got to be careful, as you know, we talked about this, when you bring a question to the
00:51:35.880
You know, they said, okay, we're always trying to improve, and so there are these issues.
00:51:40.980
And there are other places, by the way, if they didn't like it, they could have gone.
00:51:44.660
Other Dutch provinces that were available and open, that they were being offered.
00:51:48.640
So there's other options, and they came out of that psalm assembly, and they said, it's
00:51:55.760
As I understand this, and I could be wrong, don't they, don't half of them leave in the
00:52:00.720
speed well at first, and then the speed well, the mast is broken, and they have to come
00:52:06.360
And it's then that their preacher, who had not gone with the rest of them, called them all
00:52:12.460
together and said, hey, I've been hearing from God, and I got to talk to you.
00:52:15.600
I think we shouldn't be going where we were going to go.
00:52:20.240
And that's when a few of them left and said, I'm out.
00:52:33.020
The solemn assembly happened in Holland before they left, and John Robinson, their pastor,
00:52:36.960
he sent them from Holland and sent them on their way.
00:52:40.020
But when the speed well came back, I don't think there were, there was plenty of people
00:52:47.500
And the number, those who stayed, they're the ones, I think, who more than anyone else
00:52:52.300
truly were converted to the idea that God is sending us here.
00:52:57.400
And the point that really stumped the historian when I asked him this, I said, fine, let's
00:53:04.660
America's recession proof because there's nothing there.
00:53:07.520
There's zero infrastructure and people that want to kill us.
00:53:11.900
But the part that stumped him is when I said, okay, fine, let's just say that's the reason.
00:53:18.880
What about when they get there and they're dying and half of them are dead or dying and
00:53:24.840
the Mayflower is still parked in the harbor and the captain says, hey, guys, this ain't
00:53:32.620
Come back because if I leave, I may never come back.
00:53:42.740
And I'm thinking, okay, now you really can compare America versus how life was in Holland.
00:53:51.500
Some of them left their children, their babies even, back in Holland.
00:53:56.660
If I could leave a few of my teenagers in Holland.
00:54:05.760
She fell off in the Provincetown Harbor and drowned.
00:54:10.120
So, I mean, you're talking about just brutal things going on.
00:54:16.100
And guess how many people of the remaining survivors jumped on that Mayflower and said, I'm going
00:54:27.760
And if someone's going to tell me that there was some other influence other than God and
00:54:32.760
their faith and their knowledge that this is where they needed to be, I'm not buying it.
00:54:45.200
I mean, I know God people who have done crazy stuff and know that it's crazy.
00:54:53.120
They'll say, yeah, I have no reason to do this.
00:54:56.540
I just, I just, I feel God has told me to do this.
00:55:00.160
And you're like, dude, you're going to destroy your life.
00:55:17.800
But if you are driven by God, you feel that God is pointing you in that direction.
00:55:29.360
It's always like, oh crap, I don't want to do that.
00:55:34.340
Why is it so hard for people to believe that's why they did it?
00:55:39.380
Because there is an absolute adversarial attack on the true story.
00:55:48.240
Because the true story has the solution to all of our problems today.
00:55:57.540
They knew what they needed to do biblically to bring those blessings down.
00:56:05.800
The Puritans did the same when they came 10 years later.
00:56:10.240
Build one nation under God and we will be a land flowing with milk and honey and blessings
00:56:24.380
But if we can hide that history by any means possible, then we will lose the solution.
00:56:29.820
And so I truly believe it's an adversarial attack from the dark side and influencing as
00:56:34.900
many people as possible to destroy this history.
00:56:40.200
And when they're coming over, they read their scriptures.
00:56:58.360
If we don't live by how we're supposed to live.
00:57:06.120
Once again, he's the Puritan leader that brings the Massachusetts Bay Colony and says the same
00:57:12.620
It says this is the ancient Israelite covenant.
00:57:19.720
And it's not, let me get technical, theological here for a second.
00:57:30.860
It, it, it, it's not that they thought they were the Israelites.
00:57:36.700
This was the same journey, a continuation of God's people, but that didn't make them the
00:57:44.600
Israelites, but they saw this as their journey across the Red Sea.
00:57:52.920
It was an extension of, of the story of Israel.
00:58:17.340
And this one, I'm so excited because I've heard of, I'd never heard about it growing up.
00:58:22.160
Uh, and I started hearing about it from, from Leo about, oh, 10 years ago, maybe eight years
00:58:32.160
You have been up there several times and it is the secret of America.
00:58:46.100
The monument, first of all, say it's probably the most sacred place.
00:58:49.480
Maybe one of the most sacred places, uh, in America, uh, the spirit you will feel there.
00:58:54.840
I promise you, I know what you're going to feel there when you get there.
00:58:58.200
It is a monument to God and covenant and faith.
00:59:01.560
It explains the entire, and you have to have Leo Martin give you the tour, by the way, to
00:59:09.180
It's, it's, it's who the pilgrims were, morality, law, education.
00:59:13.520
And, and most importantly, the central figure is the figure of faith pointing to heaven with
00:59:21.220
the Bible in hand, that ancient covenant in hand, which is the law that will bring the
00:59:28.100
blessings and the entire, the entirety of the monument is, uh, is that, is that very secret
00:59:36.380
that I'm talking about, the secret that will bring us salvation today.
00:59:41.220
One of the most fascinating things that Leo Martin taught me, um, was that in 1861, as
00:59:46.560
the civil war is getting underway, Abraham Lincoln wrote a $10 check to help that $10 was no
00:59:54.240
And in that time out of his own pocket, he knew that monument was being built.
00:59:58.000
He wanted to participate in it because he understood that he was fighting for those pilgrim
01:00:04.280
ideals against Southern ideals born out of Jamestown goals, socialism, slavery versus
01:00:12.460
And that was one of the things that in the 1860s we were arguing about, 1850s.
01:00:18.700
We, we, we wanted to know, was America's founding town Plymouth or was it Jamestown?
01:00:26.240
And, um, wasn't William Bradford's original works lost to us?
01:00:40.820
This becomes the kind of seminal, the preeminent kind of, uh, document that tells the story of
01:00:47.800
He was a diarist and he explained it all beautiful manuscript.
01:00:52.440
They believed it was kept in the, in the South, in the old South church tower in Boston, uh,
01:00:57.460
after Bradford had passed on, no one made a copy of it.
01:01:00.100
No one published it and it was believed that when the British came during the American war
01:01:04.640
for independence, that they seized it, took it back to London saying, this is our history.
01:01:09.520
And it was lost and no one knew what Bradford had written, uh, in that book.
01:01:15.200
Well, in 1950, in 1855, a researcher doing a history on Massachusetts comes across this
01:01:23.820
And it makes a reference to William Bradford, a direct quote.
01:01:27.680
And it says from manuscript Fulham, England library from manuscript.
01:01:32.680
And he says, could this be that lost manuscript?
01:01:35.240
So he sends the correspondents over across the Atlantic and find some friendly people back there.
01:01:43.140
Oh my gosh, I am holding William Bradford's manuscript right here.
01:01:50.700
They send the copy back to Boston, Little Brown Company publishes it in 1856.
01:01:56.680
And now the world is exposed to what that monument teaches, the covenant on the land
01:02:03.940
through the words of that preeminent governor, William Bradford.
01:02:07.900
And the book is published in 1856 and not a year too soon.
01:02:11.020
It was providential at the timing because four years later, we're diving into civil war.
01:02:15.620
And it's a war of ideas, Jamestown versus Plymouth.
01:02:19.280
And the people of the north got to read that book and understand this is what we're fighting
01:02:25.660
We're fighting to bring this covenant back through the liberation of slaves.
01:02:37.360
I have, I mean, sometimes the Lord just won't leave me alone.
01:02:43.920
Sometimes I think, you know, I'm like, hey, are you around?
01:02:51.100
And one of those times has been in the last year, year and a half on this project.
01:03:00.020
And everything just has kind of fallen into place.
01:03:05.780
All of my friends who happen to be working on seemingly unrelated projects are not unrelated.
01:03:14.260
And we're here in Plymouth because it is the 400th anniversary of the pilgrims and that covenant.
01:03:24.780
And it's that covenant, that small thinking, I will do this, Lord.
01:03:32.740
And you will bless my life and my family because I do these things.
01:03:43.760
And I have felt that we needed to do another restoring event.
01:03:48.260
And as I was thinking in the last few years of what is going to bring us together, you and I became friends.
01:04:03.720
And I don't even know if you believed it, that Tim, slavery, that's the one thing that we can, I take, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
01:04:20.280
But I know I could go to her and go, hey, what do you say we work against slavery?
01:04:25.060
And anyone who says no, you know, then we know exactly who you are.
01:04:32.900
And then Lincoln, I start doing stuff with the Lincoln Museum and Gettysburg.
01:04:38.060
And I'm like, wow, you know, he never finished that work.
01:04:51.040
And why don't you just lay out a little bit of the idea?
01:04:58.720
Well, it's time to take this hidden secret that was born here in Plymouth and bring it back.
01:05:04.900
The way Washington brought it back, the way Lincoln brought it back.
01:05:08.500
And that is that there is a covenant on this land.
01:05:13.240
And this event, restoring the covenant, will be that time.
01:05:27.800
And we will take you through the places where the covenant has been made.
01:05:34.960
Because it's been made that we know of at least three times.
01:05:42.260
We know that it was made in New York City with George Washington on his inauguration day.
01:05:49.680
And we know that it was the game changer of the Civil War with Abraham Lincoln.
01:05:56.440
I just read a quote yesterday of him in Gettysburg.
01:06:01.640
And he said something along the lines of, I've always known I was a man of God.
01:06:07.860
But until I went to Gettysburg, I did not know that I was a Christian.
01:06:20.240
And did you know that when he went to Gettysburg, and few people know this,
01:06:23.760
he sat, before he gave that speech, he sat in downtown Gettysburg with William Seward,
01:06:28.120
knee to knee, and he said, William, we need to reinstitute Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
01:06:38.880
So it's every year, not just whenever we decide, every year.
01:06:42.460
And if you read the proclamation, Glenn, of Thanksgiving, it is a call to the covenant.
01:06:50.840
It means we serve God and we repent of our sins.
01:06:55.160
That's what he says Thanksgiving is in that proclamation that's released in 1863.
01:06:59.600
I have, since I sobered up in the 90s and started thinking about things, I've never thought that it was a coincidence that in America we have three holidays in a row.
01:07:17.500
And most people look at him and it's like, ah, good, it's, you know, I'm just, it's, it's cookieville for the next, you know, six or eight weeks.
01:07:25.960
Um, and time off and time off and time with the family, but that's really not what it is.
01:07:32.840
These, I've always called them the trilogy of holiday of holidays.
01:07:36.540
The trilogy is Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.
01:07:39.840
And because we, we know this doesn't work, uh, without all three of them, because most people will concentrate on one holiday or another, and then they'll get to New Year's and they'll make a resolution and it won't work.
01:07:57.400
But that's because you haven't worked all three of them together.
01:08:01.580
You haven't taken Thanksgiving and really said, Lord, thank you and become humble enough to be able to see it's not you.
01:08:13.640
And in fact, you've stood in your own way so many times.
01:08:20.480
People are standing in the way of their own success because they think they're less than what they need to be, or they've made too many mistakes and they don't, they're not humble enough to look where the blessings really come from.
01:08:36.960
And when you're in that point, you're on your knees and here comes the baby Jesus who wipes everything clean.
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But if you're not thankful, humble, and understand why Christ was born, you can't start fresh.
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That's, I think that's why Thanksgiving is so important.
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And these three holidays launching into the 400th anniversary of this covenant is so important.
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