00:01:21.480At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
00:01:30.340In case you didn't notice, this is how you devolve from a Christian nation to transgender story time at the local library, gay pride parades, and widespread societal degeneracy in just a few generations.
00:01:42.480This is the apotheosis of atomized, democratized, and morally bankrupt man.
00:01:48.640Or as the author of the Book of Judges put it,
00:01:51.040every man did what was right in his own eyes.
00:01:53.740Since 1992, America has slid an even farther
00:02:11.700like the LGBTQ cult, Diwali, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and more.
00:02:17.440Sadly, this is a far cry from what our Christian forefathers thought about the relationship between religion and politics.
00:02:24.080As James Baird recently pointed out in his new book, King of Kings,
00:02:27.860the Reformers held that government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.
00:02:33.320Since a pious people is necessary for a good society, the promotion of such piety is paramount for civil magistrates.
00:02:39.800Even Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story argued in the 1860s that the First Amendment was never intended to separate religion from politics nor to create a secular nation in which religious pluralism advanced.
00:13:32.980He makes a lot of statements that are not arguments.
00:13:36.440And at the end of it, it's sort of like the Billy Madison.
00:13:40.080the response should be everything that you just said was completely incoherent it made no sense
00:13:47.900whatsoever and everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to no point at no point and
00:13:53.180the danger of it is that so you get a guy like kevin de young who's a reasonable you know very
00:13:57.980much he's trying to be a reasonable uh guy um i think and and and then he wades into this area
00:14:04.260of political theory and where Stephen Wolf is a genuine expert, for example. And he, he assumes
00:14:11.560in authority because of his role as a pastor that he genuinely doesn't have in this question.
00:14:18.880And so he's a lay person with respect to these questions. I'm a lay person as well. You're a
00:14:23.920lay person as well. That's not actually a bad thing, but it's, it's good to recognize what you
00:14:28.260are. I'm actually an Althusian scholar. Oh, I'm a lay person. Eric is. Yeah.
00:14:34.260basically omnicompetent. I didn't want to have to say it. What happens is you have pastors and
00:14:41.020theologians who are wading into a discussion and they're talking about things like the
00:14:44.600Westminster Confession and thinking that they can levy or leverage the Westminster Confession
00:14:49.820against a Christian political national, a Christian nationalist, when the Christian
00:14:54.440nationalist like Stephen Wolf is actually saying, what I'm promoting quite demonstrably is the
00:15:00.260political theory of all the people who wrote the Westminster confession. Yeah. And there's some
00:15:04.380variation because Kevin obviously is going to quote from the Americanized version, 1788, which
00:15:08.760takes out a bunch of, yeah. And even that Steven, I think talks about this, even the revision,
00:15:14.140it doesn't do everything people today think that it does. Well, and the other thing it doesn't do
00:15:19.700as Steven points out, it doesn't make a philosophical argument and it can be incorrect.
00:15:25.240If you can demonstrate with a valid argument from scripture or reason that some idea or other in the confession is incorrect, then anybody should agree, including the people who wrote the confession.
00:15:38.380They said this more or less that it's not inerrant.
00:25:23.400I'm going to go make a couple of things up about nationalism generally, all of which
00:25:27.240Stephen addressed in the book, the history of nationalism in brief, in a way that would
00:25:32.200help you to understand how he is and is not using the terminology. Right. But it's just, I mean,
00:25:37.600people, even in this very article, I think Kevin doesn't do a good job of distinguishing between
00:25:43.700things like a nation and a country, which are different things. A country is a geopolitical
00:25:50.240entity. Uh, it's a state, uh, a nation is a people. Those are different things. Like you
00:25:57.200can have somebody who lives in in italy who's actually french in terms of their ethnicity
00:26:02.840because of the changing in borders and things like that in leading up to world war ii one of
00:26:07.940the issues was that many germans who were germans nationally in terms of their ethnicity in history
00:26:13.640found themselves in the borders of other countries of geopolitical entities yeah that led to huge
00:26:18.860issues so we're not making fine distinctions and the problem is that people who read this who are
00:26:23.480not conversing in the material at all they will be like oh that was really helpful and persuasive
00:26:28.820well i think steven actually talks about this it's actually a lot of how doug writes
00:26:33.180where it's rhetorically effective right but it's intentionally imprecise yeah and part of it is
00:26:40.420that fuels engagement correct there's a gap so this gets people talking but i also the thing
00:26:46.580that i would caution against joe soberan actually mentioned this years ago with the use of the term
00:26:50.780like anti-semite yeah he said it's actually a really effective way to bludgeon people because
00:26:55.380you're imprecise yeah right because the terms are never defined it actually lets you use that
00:27:00.380political tool however you want yeah and it causes people to live in sort of an existential dread of
00:27:05.920ever being called like a racist what it gives you is the absolute power of the arbiter right since
00:27:10.840you haven't defined your terms you're the one in a case-by-case basis can what you're really doing
00:27:15.480is you're doing friend enemy politics yeah and you're using the vague the vagary the the lack
00:27:20.780of precision as a a cloak to shield what you're really doing which really isn't separating people
00:27:27.840on the basis of truth or goodness or beauty no you're separating them on the basis of friend
00:27:31.660and enemy and interacting with them using this cudgel weaponized and that really get gets to
00:27:37.500his fourth kind of concern he's very concerned um which is it says increasingly the loudest
00:27:43.860voices arguing for christian nationalism are marked by juvenile insults steeped in online
00:27:49.160jargon from the dissident right what's more some of these proponents traffic openly in racist
00:27:53.840ideology anti-semitism and neo-nazi sympathies the most strident christian nationalism proponents
00:28:00.420on social media are often a potent combination of ophrey and demagoguery um he'll actually get
00:28:07.560into this later in addressing Stephen, he was, he was upset with Stephen that he called PCA pastors
00:28:13.980fat. Are they fat though? And Stephen was like, well, I thought you would care about the health
00:28:19.080of ministers. I mean, I'm just trying to help you out, but this is the problem is that a lot of the
00:28:24.060time what's happening is that these loudest voices are being dismissed because their arguments on the
00:28:32.040level of definition are being called juvenile demagogue demagoguery and ophry because they
00:28:37.800are resistant to the post-war consensus and post-war order well they break the laws of
00:28:42.580liberalism so by definition in that framework they are juvenile nobody's actually dealing with
00:28:49.280the arguments of these people well and that that would be my point so this is just a it's an ad
00:28:54.120hominem attack really and we've seen this you know you can call them dank anons you can say that
00:28:59.900they're, you know, crackling with envy, but, but what hasn't, you can call them anti-Semites,
00:29:04.620racists, Nazis. But the one thing that Kevin didn't do with this concern is make a valid
00:29:09.680argument. No, he didn't. And if you, you say, okay, Stephen Wolf wrote a 500 page book,
00:29:14.680more or less. It's long. A 500 page book in the vein and in the style of a work of classic
00:29:21.660reformed political theory and philosophy. Right. All right. It is dense and weighty. It has many
00:29:28.020premises that can be brought into dispute and argued about. And instead of doing that,
00:29:37.820what do we get? Well, the same thing that happens, like, you know, Andrew Torba came out with that
00:29:42.300Christian nationalism website. He made it in like a week, probably of like nicotine-fueled frenzy.
00:29:47.760He made like a one million word whole website. He listed the King's Hall in there, or New
00:29:53.020Christian Press. So thank you to Andrew for putting us there. And I reposted it and said
00:29:58.760something like, one of the things I appreciate about Christian nationalism as a movement
00:30:03.120is that it's actually falsifiable. It has enough specificity and edges to what it is and is not
00:30:10.180arguing for that you can draw it out and you can debate with it. But look at the response to Torbo's
00:30:15.780website, probably 99.9993% of negative responses to it were just some form of four. They were some
00:30:24.820form of Andrew Torbo's an anti-Semite. This person's a white, this or that. This person hates
00:30:30.100this person. They are evil and wicked because of this, that, or the other thing. And instead of
00:30:34.420actually dealing with any of the arguments, they just dismiss them on the basis of a very,
00:30:39.400very flimsy ad hominem. That's a problem for somebody who's claiming to be intellectually
00:30:44.300serious about the debate i think part of the problem is like if you go back and you say what
00:30:48.800world is kevin de young operating in well so he's a pca pastor i believe in charlotte uh north
00:30:56.260carolina and the interesting thing about it is that it's the pca right but it's like many churches
00:31:02.140in america it is boomer world uh so that means that it's like a lot of neoconservatism yeah it's
00:31:08.980a lot of playing to the sentiments of, you know, hysterical women. Yeah. And so this is the best0.96
00:31:17.440way to steer that kind of group of people is just to start throwing around words like not neo-Nazi.
00:31:22.640Yeah. Stephen was very clear in his response. He's like, I've actually been an opponent of the whole
00:31:29.320revive German history, you know, World War Two history revisionism even. And maybe even I would
00:31:37.540say like i'd love to hear more what steven has to say there because maybe i would disagree on some
00:31:43.360of those points i think getting our history right is really important but i understand he's thinking
00:31:47.240through this and he hasn't been one of the guys who's been saying like you know hitler was a good
00:31:52.780guy or any of that and so i think he's rightly frustrated he's like well wait a minute i wrote
00:31:57.720a whole book i didn't talk about any of those things because they're not actually central to
00:32:01.500his argument they're not they can be those points can be relevant and historically interesting and
00:32:05.780even have a lot to do with american culture today and i think they all do but for steven he's saying
00:32:11.580that's not my area this is my area i have a more modest and narrow focus on the argument i'm trying
00:32:17.440to put forth which is that christian nationalism as he very carefully defines it in the book
00:32:22.000is a good and proper uh political theory that christians should rally to achieve yeah that
00:32:29.380that's his narrow point in the book and that this idea is consistent with the history of reformed
00:32:33.780political thought, very much consistent. And on, on that point, um, which Kevin just, just genuinely
00:32:39.740doesn't really interact with. I think Steven is overwhelmingly successful in making his case.
00:32:45.880Yeah. So that's why it's frustrating to a guy like Steven to, to, to us to say,
00:32:50.700you're going to turn it into this thing where it's like via epithet and unfounded, um, just
00:32:57.620statement. Well, and this is going to dismiss the whole thing. This is the thing you've got
00:33:01.900understand so you know encourage people this founder's book king of kings james baird makes
00:33:07.660a lot of these same arguments uh as you said in the cold open that you know a christian magistrate
00:33:12.820a government has the duty to promote the one true religion which is christianity um but here's the
00:33:18.340point those arguments come from before way before world war ii correct right and i think that's
00:33:26.340what's brilliant about steven's point is now it's like calvin and and and the reformers are making
00:33:31.680these arguments you can make them without ever referencing you know nazis or world war ii or
00:33:37.900anything that would be associated with the post-war consensus but again kevin is not interacting with
00:33:43.140those arguments yeah and and to the world war ii point like what the world wars did in my view is
00:33:49.180they they brought an end to christendom they brought an end to like the death throes of
00:33:54.380Christendom. And they replaced a world where Christianity, Christian nations, Christian faith
00:34:00.160was set against the forces of Satan in history to where actually the two dominant views became two
00:34:06.520different camps of Satan. So you had basically the American, the Western replacement of Christian
00:34:15.400ideology with a broad multicultural globalist post-war consensus style secularism. And that
00:34:23.660became the team over here that's one team and then on the other side you had communism and and what
00:34:28.600i think happened is that christianity lost and then two different forms of communism
00:34:34.080were the remaining two parties and that not that there's you know christians aren't still here and
00:34:40.460in many ways we're not still alive and fighting but in terms of institutional power are you talking
00:34:45.420about sort of like the soviet bloc yes that sort of like hard authoritarianism but then in america
00:34:50.880we get like Gramsian Marxism. Gramsian Marxism. We get a mat, like all of the social movements
00:34:56.760that came out of it, not just, I'm not even just talking about the last 20 years, but especially
00:35:01.180since the 1960s. Yeah. And, and even the 1960s were genuinely, this is why world war two matters
00:35:07.940so much because the political order in America that arose through the world wars and then gained
00:35:14.340dominance after the world wars. And I'm talking about in the late forties, fifties, and then into
00:35:20.620the 60s that is the vehicle through which we got the domination of secular liberalism marxism and
00:35:27.780gramsian marxism in america that from the 60s onward gained institutional power and then via
00:35:35.560that institutional power took over the popular american sentiment yeah by shaping the american
00:35:42.520mind according to its premises and presuppositions well and i think here's one of the the problems
00:35:48.380Like everybody views, or I would say the majority of people view it today like change will come from the ground up or that change came from the ground up.
00:35:58.020The more that I've researched the 60s, for example, the more I realized, I think the narrative is actually that we were betrayed by our elites.
00:36:07.520People, especially the normies, the average citizen will always follow an elite who creates laws, runs institutions, and they're mostly going to believe the propaganda.
00:37:39.940At a higher Christian institution of learning.
00:37:42.540Now, the problem is that if it's true that especially the institutions of higher learning have been corrupted by essentially Marxist egalitarianism in this post-war consensus order, scholars are often very concerned with remaining respectable within the mainstream of thought at their time.
00:42:13.460What they're doing right there is assuming the liberal frame and operating from it.
00:42:19.940And they're saying that you're an unwise, oafish demagogue just for saying it.
00:42:24.560If you look at what Kevin does with point number four, this is fundamentally a tenant that Herbert Marcuse taught, kind of one of the fathers of the sexual revolution from the Frankfurt School in Germany in critical race theory, as we know at Frankfurt School, all that stuff.
00:42:40.360But he called it repressive tolerance, and that's fundamentally what this is.
00:42:43.820To your point is, no, there's a certain set of Christian moral principles that we exclude from the beginning.
00:47:27.600But people will say Brian's a racist because, oh, well, in an episode of the King's Hall, he made generalizations about black culture in America on the basis of demonstrable facts.
00:47:41.540And particularly for something like anti-Semitism, this word has basically come to mean anyone who would criticize anything the Jews or Israel has ever done and would call that wrong in any way.
00:47:53.720utterly unusable word today yeah i mean it basically has come to mean nothing no like
00:48:01.560except except i would say it's it's a political tool same with nazism here the fact is there
00:48:08.760there are like i i don't know of anybody who's trying to revive the nazi party no um they're
00:48:15.220not actually trying to do that so then you get the new term which is neo-nazi they're they're
00:48:20.060like a nazi you're a neo of the nazis you're a new one do you remember some of the things bill
00:48:25.840buckley would say about pat buchanan oh yeah he's not an anti-semite but some of the things he've
00:48:31.240said are very anti-semitally anti-semitic and you know it's take the the nazi one even um i've
00:48:38.140noticed this again when you rule out that you can't even discuss certain ideas without bad word
00:48:43.420as you know your bad word and it's you've broken the rules and you're unwise so like even people
00:48:47.720i've seen this happen someone will say you know it's really interesting if you look at what was
00:48:52.120happening in 1930s post-world war one germany and with the versailles treaty and all these things
00:48:57.380that happened and some of the genuine political concerns of the german peoples and then you have
00:49:02.620this leader adolf hitler and he comes in and he has these certain policies and like let's discuss
00:49:07.120the effectiveness or ineffectiveness the justice or injustice of those policies and someone goes
00:49:12.740nazi and you're like no no hang on this is a valid historical question i'm interested like
00:49:18.160what do you think about this thing and they're like you anti-semite you're like what i'm just
00:49:22.800i'm trying to literally have a discussion with you about history and political theory
00:49:27.580for the sake of like knowing what to do today what is a good and bad idea and we've ruled these
00:49:33.860discussions out all together on the basis of epithets that have been transparently weaponized
00:49:41.420by the left to destroy christians well so look at this like number under number one he said a
00:49:47.740disdain for jewish people okay and then he says a belief that a secret cabal of jews are responsible
00:49:54.620for a litany of evils in our world so if you yeah let's let's talk about these if you uh i would
00:50:00.760kind of be with him on the like i i think it's sinful to just hate outright hate a people group
00:50:06.020or like a whole general people group right or like let's especially he does the same thing for
00:50:12.120non-whites like if you're just like i for no reason i just hate i hate whities so you know
00:50:17.320like the basically the way that a lot of black people in america today think about whites and
00:50:21.660have been trained to think about i think it's sinful it's sinful and it would be sinful the
00:50:25.500other direction and the way that you would know it's happening like i could i think it'd be pretty
00:50:29.780obvious to distinguish like i want to be able to talk about a people group and their sins and also
00:50:35.200their proclivities my own of any people group you know i can do that but if i move into anytime i
00:50:43.420see anybody who is merely ethnically or racially in that group and i make a whole host of attitudes
00:50:50.680and assumptions towards them and i have a personal hatred in my heart and disdain for them i'm sinning
00:50:54.900well think about that action yeah so there i'm with him that there can be a sinful hatred um i
00:51:01.660went to seminary with a guy who converted out of judaism his name was ari and he can he converted
00:51:07.940out of judaism and he was a christian yeah and he was very critical of you know talmudic judaism
00:51:13.020and um especially like kosher stuff he was like totally totally fake because he's familiar with
00:51:17.760like what is actually going on and so like if i if i saw him and he said hey do you want a cup
00:51:22.600of coffee and i said give me that cup and i threw it in his face i was like you're jewish i hate you
00:51:27.420okay yeah there is a category for sinful hatred now but the problem is he puts that together with
00:51:35.560a belief that a secret cabal of jews are responsible for a litany of evils in the world
00:51:39.860so he's saying that you would be anti-semitic if you said something like you know the jews
00:51:45.600run pornography or like in the 20th century which is a fact yeah the smut industry in the 20th
00:51:50.960century was very disproportionately led promoted and normalized by elite jews yeah which is just a
00:51:58.480it's just a statement of historical fact you've seen the video i've shared it but it's a jewish
00:52:02.480woman in the name of tikkun olam they're like post mill vision and she says here's all the
00:52:07.980things that jews have done we brought abortion to america we helped with civil rights every
00:52:12.340leftist cause in america we did that you know what i feel in my heart when you when you describe all
00:52:16.060that? Disdain. Disdain. Okay. So here, here's the distinction. And this is why he's getting it
00:52:21.020wrong right off the bat here. He is ruling out as sinful something that the scriptures actually
00:52:25.700require of us. You should hate evil things. So it's not just ruling out something that could
00:52:29.920possibly be true. It's ruling out something God requires of his people. Put it in this context.
00:52:36.040I just have a deep disdain in my heart for the white liberal American culture that destroys
00:52:42.940itself via apostasy and the buying of all of these ideologies that are absolutely civilization
00:52:48.960destroying. When I think of like the college educated feminist liberal white woman, I have a
00:52:56.080disdain in my heart for that group. Now, do I look at any white woman and assume that she's in that1.00
00:53:01.200group? Of course not. Now, would I have a statistical probability where I can make some0.99
00:53:05.780assessment of the likelihood? Sure. And then I could do my investigation. We're actually required
00:53:10.240in scripture to disdain disdainful things yeah i would it's kind of like the gag reflex we talked
00:53:16.340about before but when you see a woman at a rally and she's got a poster that says i'm on my 13th
00:53:23.080abortion i'm looking forward to number 14 that is evil and you should hate evil yeah let's talk
00:53:29.420about he says um a disdain for non-whites and a belief in the mental superior mental and spiritual
00:53:34.380inferiority but he does the same thing with number two yeah again like first of all like
00:53:39.920you can get into all the iq stuff yeah our our haitians you can compare the average iq of
00:53:47.680haitians against asians against europeans against englishmen against white americans like we can do
00:53:53.860this and just because a conclusion is politically incorrect doesn't mean that it's sinful to to
00:54:00.580actually just say well that's that's true so if you said or another one spiritual inferiority of
00:54:06.900blacks, the average black Christian in America, like, and I'm saying in terms of professed faith,
00:54:14.260not like whether they're regenerate or not in the black Christian church, I believe it's something
00:54:19.580like 70% of professed black Christians are pro-abortion. Now, when you go into white
00:54:26.180evangelicals, that number drops radically. It is much smaller. And so whenever people say,
00:54:33.400do you believe that x is like that this people group is superior to that people group i ask the
00:54:38.460question that blows people's minds i say with respect to what because they're acting like
00:54:44.720they're asking a question that is totally sinful even ask and think about but again god gave you
00:54:49.440a brain he made a world where there is coherence and truth and falsity so i can say with respect
00:54:55.820to what so are asians superior to let's say um you know bavarians when it comes to iq let's just
00:55:05.440narrow it down are japanese asians superior when it comes to iq to bavarians i actually don't know
00:55:13.180but you could figure that out and and you would be able to say yes bavarians or jeff it's probably
00:55:17.880japanese i i don't actually know you'd be like this one's superior is that a sin to say out loud
01:06:54.340His last line here, he says, it seems to me then that nations can be called to account before God without insisting the government of those nations make declaratory statements about Christian doctrine or suppress non-Christian forms of religious expression.
01:07:07.600To which I would just say, see the entire reform tradition before 1960.
01:07:12.500Also, just here's the support for that argument.
01:14:59.160So actually, what I want to be promoting is godly civil magistrates, ministers, godly magistrates who enact godly laws.
01:15:09.020So one of the things that strikes me as interesting is you think about I was listening under Obama to one of his State of the Union addresses.
01:16:38.680What you just described is imposing your religion.
01:16:41.300A lot of this actually comes back to the Warren court.
01:16:43.380Now, Stephen mentioned the Warren court decisions a lot in his episode,
01:16:47.700but I'm not going to belabor it a lot.
01:16:49.020But the Warren court is this court under Chief Earl Warren, I think is his name.
01:16:55.340He was appointed by Eisenhower, who later called it one of his worst decisions.
01:17:00.580So he's like a conservative chief justice.
01:17:03.640It was like 53 to 1969 that he was the chief justice.
01:17:07.360They made a series of decisions around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which what is the first word, Eric, of the First Amendment Establishment Clause?
01:20:00.240So the Warren Court, this post-war 1950s, 1960s court, establishes a completely new constitutional order when it comes to the First Amendment Establishment Clause on America, and they not just – they don't just tinker with.
01:20:16.640They fundamentally change the original intent of the Constitution with respect to that point.
01:20:22.060They end up making it do the opposite of what it was supposed to do in a way
01:20:25.160because they establish on a federal level the religion of secular humanism.
01:20:33.880I recently got these new resistance candles.
01:20:37.880And let me tell you, these are not your grandmother's potpourri.
01:21:13.080Because it just goes to show that we Christians are giving our money away to people who don't share our values like Jeff Bezos in Amazon.
01:21:19.820Look, I agree, but it's hard for Christian businesses to be found by Bible-believing Christians online.
01:21:25.120Well, I think I just found the solution.
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01:36:10.920Oh, you're for that hypothetical imaginary land that is never going to happen, but you
01:36:15.540won't take any political action today.
01:36:17.220You're on the 27th line of the seeing chart with the little numbers and letters and stuff.
01:36:22.560we're trying to say what if america could read the big e on the first line
01:36:26.920what what if we could read the many teated blue indian lizard goddess what's funny too is like
01:36:32.580just putting this in perspective do you remember after charlie kirk how there were churches who
01:36:37.420like just kept expositional preaching and they were like we're not going to talk about this
01:36:42.340it's too controversial yeah yeah i heard from people who actually go to the series of there's
01:36:47.880a couple of them, Kevin DeYoung churches in that area. And they were like, yeah, it was not
01:36:52.540mentioned. Um, so it's kind of goes back to that same thing. Like you're just trying to stay out
01:36:58.020of the heat because it doesn't cost you anything to talk about Westminster confession. It would
01:37:02.000cost you something to say, I don't know. We should, the U S government should say that Jesus
01:37:08.020Christ is Lord. The U S government should make Christian laws. Even if you didn't like, even
01:37:14.640if kevin de young got to say like a bunch of the first table of the law stuff blah blah blah blah
01:37:19.120blah but i'm just saying like what if we just throw off the liberal frame and this libertarianism
01:37:22.640altogether and just at least start with like something that costs you the second you start
01:37:27.800to say almost anything it's wildly costly today to be a public figure whose name is on the internet
01:37:34.340saying these things ask me how i know ask me but it doesn't cost you anything do you think anybody
01:37:39.880would have ever made a death threat to me from saying like now i agree with the 1788 revision
01:37:45.360against because i do not believe that the civil government has the authority to call a synod
01:37:51.860and your neighbor is like bro could you quiet down i'm trying to watch my tranny kids cartoons
01:37:58.680you know what i'm saying that's gross uh it's going to gross question five
01:38:05.600uh was the first amendment a mistake he says if i only had one question to ask a proponent
01:38:11.120of christian nationalism this would be my first what do you believe about the first amendment
01:38:15.220we talked a lot about it yeah so we've kind of talked about this um he seems to be supporting
01:38:21.120the quote-unquote principle of religious freedom enshrined right it's enshrined nobody thought that
01:38:28.620until like 1960 but apparently it was enshrined it was enshrined eric he said he and then he goes
01:38:34.120on to say i'm talking about the original intent okay if you skip scroll down my interests
01:38:42.000uh yeah and then he engages with doug wilson you can just like scroll through this it's
01:38:48.300basically nothing it's a big nothing burger keep going american constitution okay that last
01:38:55.500paragraph religious freedom was the evolution of a protestant idea that at the time of the
01:39:01.000founding was not limited to the protestants and this is to say nothing of the presence today of
01:39:06.140millions of mormons oneness pentecostals and jehovah's witnesses all of whom are not christians
01:39:11.220by any historic standard if christian nationalists believe the first amendment only protects orthodox
01:39:16.120protestants and maybe begrudgingly catholics and jews definitely not jews catholics okay i do not
01:39:23.760believe some of what he just said then surely these newer heretical groups should be suppressed
01:39:32.100i suggest however as an american and as a christian that the better way oh thank goodness
01:39:38.800for the better way kevin holy art thou my friend the better way has come we never had a better way
01:39:46.900until kevin de young the better way is here to pray to preach and to proselytize for the
01:39:55.920conversion of these religious groups while also defending their right to exercise their false
01:40:01.000religion during this temporal where does god in his word like what would give you the idea oh my
01:40:07.000god that god would have in a society largely constructed of christians for the christians
01:40:15.020to establish a right to exercise a false religion,
01:40:18.760particularly when it comes to its public expression.
01:40:21.700What biblical principle would you build that on?
01:40:25.220And how would you overcome, I don't know, the Old Testament?
01:40:30.300I've read the whole thing more than once.
01:40:33.880So basically what he's arguing for is religious pluralism.
01:40:39.520Yeah, and he's saying it's like a product.
01:40:41.140Okay, now there's, again, like a lot of this,
01:40:43.060there's there are some core truths that are mixed in with a bunch of horse manure and yeah the
01:40:49.520freedom of religion as it was written into the first amendment is a very protestant thing
01:40:57.100of course because if you look at catholic christendom roman catholic christendom it
01:41:01.080wasn't really a question they were roman catholic nations so the protestants did have a concern
01:41:06.440they're like hey we don't want to have a big street fight to decide whether the presbyterians
01:41:11.820The Anglicans are in charge of the federal government, but they wanted to be able to gather in to voluntarily, by the way, and freely gather into states, cities, communities, institutions and be Anglican Presbyterian and write those rules and everything they did and not have them legally cordoned off from all civic and public life.
01:41:32.240yeah that's true um but the idea that like it's a it is an absolute protestant value that we would
01:41:40.200defend the public exercise of false religion and then people do this really dumb thing to try to
01:41:46.280prove this why didn't paul tell so and so you know you know why didn't he tell any of the roman
01:41:54.480governors or why didn't he tell you know nero or any of the emperors to like you know establish
01:41:59.640Christianity. You're telling me that Paul was so dumb that he thought, you know what, now's the
01:42:06.440time in history. There are 1,600 Christians in Corinth. There are 1.2 million people total.
01:42:14.880It's time to try to establish Christianity. We're not talking about that. We're talking about after
01:42:20.000the 11 of the gospels gone through the nations, you have whole nations that have converted
01:42:23.360that are attempting to establish Christian orders on a civic realm and obey the instructions of God
01:42:27.880of the magistrate in Romans 13 and first Peter and these sorts of things and say, what would a
01:42:31.980just Christian society look like with respect to its criminal civil law and customs and all these
01:42:35.840things. And I would submit to you that in that time in history, it would be appropriate to say
01:42:41.140no Mormon temples, no Hindu. I'm not going to say it again. No, no, uh, what, what it, no minarets
01:42:51.300and no, whatever the heck they call them. What's the menorahs, you know, Doug said no minarets,
01:51:59.320and actually govern justly, not perfectly until the eschaton, not perfectly until the resurrection.
01:52:06.420Of course not. But can they do it better than some other time? Can they learn to do it better?
01:52:12.720Can we promote that? Can we pursue that? Of course we can. That's what Kevin's trying to do too.
01:52:17.460He's just trying to do it through the establishment of one national religion,
01:52:21.360and that is satanic secular liberalism. Yeah. It's also interesting if Kevin would go back
01:52:27.680can read like the french revolution oh the ideologies that came out of that love the french
01:52:33.100revolution you haven't heard oh kevin oh you love it trust me but that that's basically like he's
01:52:41.000he's advocating for post-revolution thought this is why uh in europe even guys like franco they
01:52:49.560were like this whole democracy project it's for communists this is how communists subvert and
01:52:55.120overtake a country yeah that's what they're doing and the only way to stop it was guys like franco
01:53:00.020in spain who basically said absolutely not the communists are not in charge yeah we're gonna
01:53:05.960fight you know to the hilt against that yeah and we're gonna establish and in their country it was
01:53:12.420roman catholic but we're we're going to establish a christian order yeah and and thank you very much
01:53:19.940no we don't want mosques in our country no absolutely not i'm not i'm not interested in it
01:53:24.580And I don't think God is interested in it.
01:53:26.580And it's not in any way contradictory to the clear principles of scripture.
01:53:32.100What it's contradictory to is a muddled reading of scripture where you constantly collapse and conflate individual responsibilities with ecclesiastical authority, with civic authority, with all these different things.
01:53:44.080But if we just think clearly and read the scriptures, I don't think a lot of the, again, we're not trying to get down to the 27th line on the eye chart, what with the tiny letters and stuff.
01:53:52.460we're trying to do like the first one two three or four lines the big letters you know like
01:53:59.560christianity or not yeah i want to ask you just summarizing all of this why do you think so many
01:54:07.660christians and there were a lot of reform guys why do you think so many people were quick to
01:54:13.020read this article and say something like what a truly helpful helpful article from kevin de young
01:54:19.420i have just been so helped because i read this and i'm like this is slop oh yeah this is not
01:54:27.000helpful no this is not good this was actively harmful this article and one of the reasons
01:54:33.380it's so actively harmful is because it has a veneer of legitimacy yeah it has a veneer of
01:54:38.300scholarly legitimacy because it's kevin de jong i mean he's senior pastor christ covenant church
01:54:42.660pca in matthews north carolina he's the associate professor of systematic theology at rts he you
01:54:48.260know he's referencing the Westminster confession he quoted Dabney how many quotes from Kuyper
01:54:53.540he talked about Bavink I mean he talked about the 1788 American revision surely people will
01:55:00.460listen to reason now that an adult has entered the room that's really what people were saying
01:55:04.980but when you analyze the arguments when you give them the slightest feather poke turns out they
01:55:13.500were just wind. There wasn't much substance to them. There was a lot of confusion about basic
01:55:18.560categories. There was a lot of obfuscation and refusal to deal with the strongest arguments of
01:55:22.920the position. Um, there was active points where the logical, almost inescapable conclusion of
01:55:29.760what Kevin is promoting in this argument ends up being something that in my view is obviously evil,
01:55:35.740not even like, Oh, which is real, real debate. Like when he's talking about how we can't make
01:55:41.340like any judgment we should rule out from the beginning any judgment about cultures or we
01:55:45.820should dismiss as anti-semites these people yeah yeah or we should you know all or the idea that
01:55:50.140the government is basically so it's incompetent to do anything what you're saying is that god
01:55:54.560created an institution a role yeah that is worthless yeah basically it's totally muddled
01:56:01.460and at the same time in an incoherent and self-contradictory way it is able to adjudicate
01:56:05.900this complex political philosophy of Locke and apply that to society. Oh, and that actually
01:56:11.400turns out to be like the apotheosis of Protestant political theology is like Lockean individualism.
01:56:17.640And I just go, really? That's the best that a reformed Christian and a son of the Westminster
01:56:22.640divines can do? I think that's absurd. I think that's actually, I think it's actually kind of
01:56:27.600sad that, that Kevin DeYoung, who is far more studied and degreed than me would write this.
01:56:33.720yeah and i'm just a i'm just a guy in utah reading this and going how did he not see
01:56:40.580these objections don't you think part of it too is for all the guys who were falling over
01:56:45.100themselves trying to congratulate kevin for this article i think part of it is a lot of guys just
01:56:52.740want to seen they want to be seen as respectable at this table and i love the line from calvin
01:56:58.420robinson he said a lot of you are trying to get seats at tables you were sent to overturn
01:57:02.240yeah like this is the kind of christian establishment that makes so many americans
01:57:07.760not trust their pastor it functions as a political wing for the liberal revolution in america yes i'm
01:57:15.600sorry the religious wing it functions as the religious wing for the revolution of secular
01:57:21.520liberalism in america which what we talked about in the post-war consensus episode where it's like
01:57:25.940the post-war consensus invents a novel Christian theological apparatus that is thinly Christian,
01:57:33.640but it's really just the repackaging of all sorts of other things like Lockean individualism and
01:57:38.860libertarianism and a bunch of other stuff and then saying, and religious pluralism and Marxism,
01:57:43.960and then saying, this is what Christians have always believed. Westminster Confession,
01:57:48.660Bavink, Kuyper, da-da-da-da. Look, I'm so scholarly. And you just go, you're so scholarly
01:57:54.780that Calvin would have laughed you out of the room
01:57:56.700if you presented this argument to him.