The NXR Podcast - American Glory - Did America Have a Christian Founding？

00:00:00.000 Today at American Glory, we're answering a vital question. Was America founded as a Christian

00:00:05.100 nation? And how does national inception form national revival? In my weekly audit, we're

00:00:10.560 going to be discussing one of Charlie Kirk's best takes and why Christian monarchy is the

00:00:14.700 only form of government supported by scripture. All that and more coming up right now.

00:00:30.000 Welcome to American Glory. This is season two on American Christianity. I'm your host, 0.63

00:00:38.220 Dale Partridge. This is the first episode in this season, and it's titled

00:00:41.480 Colonial America Was More Christian Than You've Ever Been Told. Now, if you didn't know,

00:00:47.400 American Glory is both a podcast and a video show, and if you want to listen,

00:00:50.960 you can listen on the NXR podcast feed or from my personal podcast feed. Just search

00:00:54.660 Dale Partridge's podcast on Google, and you're going to find me on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

00:00:59.160 or anywhere else that you can listen to different podcasts. Now, if you want to watch the video,

00:01:02.700 which I recommend because it comes with all these helpful slides, and again, it's like a documentary

00:01:06.980 style that we're trying to add on to this season, you can watch it on my YouTube channel at Dale

00:01:12.080 Partridge TV. Now, this season, I'll be covering eight new topics around American Christianity.

00:01:19.000 Now, in addition to today's episode, I'll be discussing, and I'm going to list these out,

00:01:23.060 the curse of Ham and the historic Christian view of race in America. The next episode will be race 0.70

00:01:29.960 and slavery in Christian America, what they got right and wrong. Dispensationalism, the satanic 0.97

00:01:36.920 lie that ruined American Christianity. The next episode will be how Christian Zionism strangled 1.00

00:01:44.160 the American spirit. Then I'm going to move into the feminization of the church and how patriarchy 0.98

00:01:51.040 is our only hope. And then I'm going to be talking about two powerful episodes. One will be

00:01:57.040 you've been lied to, Jesus isn't coming back soon, and that's a good thing. And the last episode of

00:02:03.940 the season will be the case or the Christian case for ethno-nationalism and why you're not allowed

00:02:09.780 to believe it. So if you're new to Christianity, whether you're Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox

00:02:15.000 and maybe you've never been deeply discipled in the foundations of biblical theology,

00:02:20.640 Maybe you struggle to see how theology ought to shape culture and law and politics.

00:02:25.960 If that's the case, my hope is that this season will establish that for you.

00:02:30.740 And I want to introduce you to the robust, confident, civilizational, building Christianity

00:02:36.040 that wants to find the American people. 0.94

00:02:38.500 I also want to introduce you to the theological errors and the Christian cowardice that recently 0.99

00:02:45.780 has replaced it. 0.99

00:02:46.620 So this season is about tracing how our rich Christian inheritance was gradually surrendered,

00:02:53.780 not through some like radical rebellion, but through small compromises over long periods of

00:02:59.880 time through these theological retreats. And what I would say is the abandonment of hard truths our

00:03:05.920 forefathers once held without hesitation. Now, the point I'm trying to make ultimately is that the

00:03:13.600 decline of America was a combination of both politics and the pulpit. And so my goal is not

00:03:21.760 to simply look backward at some sort of spiritual nostalgia. It's to recover the theological

00:03:28.720 convictions that were lost. And we're living in an age of what I call like an age of retrieval

00:03:35.080 or recovery. And that's much of what the show is about. I'm trying to help Americans reclaim

00:03:40.560 forgotten truths, recover biblical convictions, rebuild what previous generations allowed to

00:03:47.320 erode. And while I always advocate for both a top-down political and bottom-up local church

00:03:54.460 approach to Christian nationalism, I do believe politics are downstream from religion. So laws, 0.56

00:04:00.860 customs, institutions, cultures, they're reflections of what people worship. Every person

00:04:08.580 and nation worships. It's not whether, it's which thing we will worship. And that is why

00:04:15.940 Christless conservatism will never save America. Yes, elections matter. Yes, policies matter. Yes,

00:04:22.940 laws matter. You can make a nation externally moral without mass spiritual revival, but without

00:04:28.500 Christ, the nation will still function as kind of an organized rebellion against God, preserving,

00:04:35.000 again this external order in one place while planting seeds of judgment in another and so

00:04:41.340 if america is going to be glorious and that is the mission of this show it needs to be operating

00:04:46.500 according to god's will and christianity must reign as the national religion as it once did

00:04:52.840 and that is the hope for this episode so let's begin 0.81

00:04:55.500 imagine 10 000 muslims leave their homeland cross an ocean settle a new land establish

00:05:05.120 communities write laws build schools elect leaders and create a government every one of

00:05:10.420 them is muslim their leaders and everybody there is muslim their judges are muslim their teachers

00:05:16.460 are muslim their families are muslim for the next hundred years nearly every immigrant who joins

00:05:21.420 them is also Muslim. Now imagine someone comes along 200 years later and says, well, you know

00:05:27.340 what? This country wasn't really conceived as a Muslim nation because their founding documents

00:05:32.400 never explicitly declared Islam to be the national religion. You'd laugh at that argument. Well, why?

00:05:39.780 Because when a people share a common faith and culture and moral vision, they don't need to

00:05:44.800 constantly announce it. It's woven into everything they build. Their identity is assumed because

00:05:51.480 it's universal among them. The same principle applies to America's founding. 98% of the signers

00:05:58.840 of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution professed Christ. They lived within

00:06:04.400 a Christian civilization and operated from a Christian assumption. At the founding, 99% of

00:06:10.880 population was christian the nation's laws customs moral standards institutions and public life were

00:06:16.800 shaped explicitly by christianity naturalization was limited to free white men of good character

00:06:24.000 which was a synonym for really white christians and these came from almost exclusively other

00:06:30.160 christian nations of the british isles and europe the founders did not need to write america is a

00:06:36.560 a Christian nation. For the same reason, a group of 10,000 Muslims would not need to write this is

00:06:42.480 a Muslim nation. It was already understood. It was a fact. So today, many Americans have been told

00:06:50.400 that Christianity was merely a private belief held by some founders and had little to do with

00:06:55.860 the nation's identity. But that claim becomes harder and harder to maintain when you examine

00:07:02.220 the historical record. And that's exactly what we're going to do today.

00:07:07.100 Now, to understand America's identity, you have to go back to the beginning. America was not

00:07:12.760 founded by a religiously neutral people. It was discovered, it was explored, settled, and built

00:07:18.940 by Christians. In fact, as we discussed in season one, episode two, America is the only continent

00:07:24.780 named after a Christian Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, whose voyages helped reveal the scope

00:07:30.500 of the New World at the close of the 15th century. But then came the settlers. In the early 1600s,

00:07:36.100 Protestant Christian families began crossing the Atlantic Ocean from England. And they were not 1.00

00:07:41.900 searching for diversity. They weren't searching for multiculturalism or secular, you know, some

00:07:47.280 sort of secular experiment. They came seeking freedom to worship Christ according to their

00:07:52.000 convictions and to build communities ordered by the Bible. They were leaving a nation whose 0.74

00:07:57.180 established church and political authorities often imposed forms of Christian worship and

00:08:01.620 religious conformity that many of them found burdensome. Now the Christian colonization of

00:08:06.900 America began with Jamestown in 1607 and continued with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620,

00:08:13.200 which established the Plymouth Colony in New England. And before these pilgrims ever stepped

00:08:18.800 off the ship, they wrote a covenant. We know it as the Mayflower Compact, the first governing

00:08:25.040 document drafted by the settlers themselves and it declared that they had undertaken their voyage

00:08:30.480 quote for the glory of god and the advancement of the christian faith end quote just think about

00:08:36.620 that for a second the first governing political document produced by the first americans did not

00:08:44.420 appeal to religious pluralism individual autonomy religious neutrality no it explicitly stated

00:08:50.480 that its central purpose was the advancement of Christianity. Now, this shouldn't surprise us.

00:08:57.260 The American colonies didn't emerge out of thin air. They were an extension of England,

00:09:02.500 which was a nation that was openly and officially Christian. The colonists brought with them 0.93

00:09:07.900 English law, English customs, English institutions, English culture, and of course,

00:09:13.420 the English religion, which was Christianity. It's why the region that they planted and settled 0.75

00:09:20.120 was known as New England. It was Christian England transplanted across the Atlantic. 0.64

00:09:27.300 So from the names of the colonies, to the language of their charters, to the laws that they enacted

00:09:33.680 to the churches and schools that they established, Christianity was not a footnote in early America.

00:09:39.920 It was the cultural, moral, legal, religious framework from which the colonies emerged.

00:09:47.100 The question is not whether Christianity shaped early America.

00:09:50.840 The question is how anyone could study the historical record and conclude otherwise.

00:09:56.540 Okay, they do this because if you can change inception, you can change identity.

00:10:01.700 And if you can change identity, you can change allegiance.

00:10:04.800 And if you can change allegiance, you can redirect the future of an entire people.

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00:11:30.820 to your family. In other words, if America was not conceived as a Christian nation, 0.52

00:11:39.140 then it can be reimagined and remade into a secular nation or a liberal nation or a Muslim 0.63

00:11:45.920 nation or Hindu nation or anything else this age demands. But if America was founded

00:11:50.760 on Christian principles, then we need to embrace that. And it's so funny when people say that it's

00:11:59.000 not. If it's not, then someone needs to explain what exactly was happening between 1620 and 1776.

00:12:05.420 Because when you step into the colonial America, you do not find a society attempting to separate

00:12:11.460 itself from Christianity. You find the exact opposite. For more than 150 years before 0.93

00:12:18.220 independence was declared, the colonies operated with the assumption that public life

00:12:23.460 was expected to be Christian. Just let me give you some examples. Consider voting.

00:12:29.000 Today, voting is viewed as this universal civic right. In many of the colonies, most of the

00:12:34.580 colonies, it was viewed as an extension of church membership. So in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,

00:12:39.820 beginning in 1631, only men who were members in good standing of a Christian church could become

00:12:45.380 what they called free men, which was just the status or the name required to vote and participate

00:12:49.840 in government then. Now, similar standards existed in the Connecticut colony and New Haven colonies

00:12:55.200 throughout most of New England. The reasoning was simple. If a man could not be trusted to

00:13:00.920 govern himself under Christ at the local church, why should he be trusted to help govern a

00:13:06.140 commonwealth? Now, just let's look about another territory. Let's look at public office.

00:13:12.880 Political leadership was not religiously neutral. Pennsylvania's Charter of Privileges declared that

00:13:18.320 those qualified to serve in government must, quote, profess faith in Jesus Christ as the

00:13:25.320 savior of the world, end quote. South Carolina required public officials to profess the Christian

00:13:31.080 religion and swear their oaths on Bibles or the Holy Scriptures. The Delaware Constitution required

00:13:36.300 officeholders to swear, quote, I do profess faith in God the Father and in Jesus Christ, his only

00:13:42.400 Son. And in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed forevermore. And I do acknowledge the Holy

00:13:48.120 Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration, end quote.

00:13:53.460 In Massachusetts, the governor and the high officials of the area had to declare that they

00:13:58.300 were of the Christian religion. Several other colonies and states, New Jersey and Georgia and

00:14:03.420 North Carolina, South Carolina, et cetera, they restricted public office strictly to Protestants.

00:14:08.420 The question was not whether Christianity should influence government. The question was more how

00:14:14.980 Christian convictions would be applied in civil law. Now consider blasphemy. Modern Americans

00:14:22.000 often assume that religion belongs only in the private sphere, but colonial Americans would have

00:14:28.360 found that idea to be incomprehensible. Public attacks upon God, Christ or scripture,

00:14:33.820 were treated as offenses against the nation's moral order itself. Several colonies imposed

00:14:40.360 severe penalties for blasphemy, including fines, imprisonment, and in some cases,

00:14:44.740 even capital punishment. Massachusetts colonies stated, quote, a cursing of God by atheism or the

00:14:51.140 like was punishable by death, end quote. The Maryland Tolerance Act in 1649 made it a capital

00:14:58.060 punishment to deny that Jesus Christ is the Son of God or to blaspheme God. The same was true of 0.97

00:15:04.640 the Lord's Day. Throughout the colonies, Sunday was protected as a law. Businesses were closed.

00:15:09.880 Commerce was seized. Public recreation was even restricted. Church attendance was expected.

00:15:16.320 In Virginia's earliest years, Sabbath observance was enforced with extreme severity. Their law 0.69

00:15:23.300 stated, quote, every man and woman shall repair in the morning to the divine service and sermons

00:15:29.420 preached upon the Sabbath day and in the afternoon, the divine service and catechizing upon pain for

00:15:36.080 the first fault to lose their provision and the allowance for the whole week following for the

00:15:42.720 second to lose their set allowance and also be whipped and for the third to suffer death, end

00:15:49.260 quote. So across the colonies, the Lord's Day was not treated as some sort of personal preference,

00:15:54.380 but as a public obligation because the colonies believed that honoring God was essential to the

00:16:01.720 health of the greater commonwealth. Now, even in education, it was explicitly Christian. The

00:16:07.820 famous Massachusetts law in 1647, often called the old Deluder Satan Act, required communities

00:16:13.240 to establish schools so that children could learn to read. But why? So that they could learn the

00:16:18.640 Bible and read for themselves and not be left vulnerable or ignorant to deception. So the

00:16:24.500 primary educational concern of the colonies was not some sort of workforce development or economic

00:16:30.000 advancement. It was biblical literacy. And beneath all of this stood an even deeper evidence of our

00:16:37.180 Christian foundation. The legal system of every colony drew heavily from scripture. The Ten

00:16:42.240 Commandments informed obviously more infrastructure and legislation, but biblical principles shaped

00:16:47.360 criminal law, civil authorities were constantly citing scripture as a source of legal and moral

00:16:52.060 authority. Their charters literally ended sentences by saying, quote, according to the

00:16:57.000 rule of the word of God, end quote. And when Connecticut, for example, listed its capital

00:17:02.260 laws, it didn't just like prohibit murder or blasphemy or idolatry or kidnapping or adultery.

00:17:09.240 It actually cited chapter and verse, Deuteronomy and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers. This was

00:17:15.940 extremely common. The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 opens up by saying, quote,

00:17:21.740 for as much as in a well-governed and Christian commonwealth matters concerning religion and the

00:17:27.820 honor of God in this first place to be taken into serious consideration, end quote. In other words,

00:17:34.300 scripture was not treated as this private inspiration or this privatized faith. It was

00:17:44.240 treated as a public legal authority. And yes, the colonies differed in practice and in emphasis,

00:17:50.480 but they shared a common conviction that the Bible was not some sort of irrelevant thing

00:17:55.660 to public life. Now, you just have to think about this. Consider how far we have fallen,

00:18:01.560 how far we have drifted from this time. We went from literally creating schools specifically for

00:18:08.320 the Bible to outlawing the Bible from schools. I mean, it's absolutely insane. You need to

00:18:15.480 remember that this is like, this is how far we've gone. And it's important because when you're

00:18:22.260 fighting against our enemies, you are not extreme. Okay. In fact, you are moderate compared to your

00:18:28.540 forefathers. This is not an extreme position. They are actually extreme. You are simply just,

00:18:35.900 I'm a normal guy from the founding of this nation. And if you fight for that, they will literally

00:18:40.420 want to kill you for it. Now I get it. Christian law does not prove that every citizen was a

00:18:47.360 sincere believer. It doesn't prove that the colonies were perfectly righteous or free from 0.91

00:18:52.100 some sort of hypocrisy. They certainly had sin, but it does demonstrate something that is

00:18:58.120 increasingly difficult to deny. From voting to public office, from education to marriage,

00:19:04.340 from Sabbath observance to criminal law, the American colonies were operating within an

00:19:09.040 unmistakably Christian framework. Christianity was not some sort of decorative feature attached

00:19:15.480 to the edge of American society. It was the atmosphere the nations breathed and the foundation

00:19:21.280 upon which they built their civilization. See, but the evidence of our Christian identity goes even 0.73

00:19:27.140 further, okay? In the Declaration of Independence, it declares, quote, we hold these truths to be

00:19:33.000 self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator

00:19:38.380 with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,

00:19:48.240 that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers

00:19:54.260 from the consent of the governed, end quote. Now, I just want you to notice something. Notice the

00:20:00.800 foundation of the argument. Human rights do not originate with the state or with the people or

00:20:06.140 with nature itself, but with the creator who endows mankind with the dignity of rights given

00:20:11.220 to us by God. In other words, government exists not to invent rights, but to protect those rights

00:20:17.520 God has already given to us. And this is not like the language of secular humanism or

00:20:24.600 enlightenment deists. This is the language of men who understood Christian doctrine,

00:20:29.140 that man is created by God, in the image of God, possessing inherent worth because of that

00:20:36.040 imago Dei, and is accountable to a higher law above any earthly rulers. Now, every time this

00:20:43.820 discussion occurs, you get some retarded historian that says, oh sure, the colonies may have been 0.93

00:20:52.540 Christian, but the United States was founded by Enlightenment people who wanted a separation of 0.90

00:20:58.000 church and state. Okay, their argument usually centers on the First Amendment, approved by

00:21:05.760 Congress 1789, which we know states, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment

00:21:11.700 of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, end quote. Now, many modern Americans

00:21:18.280 read those words through, again, a 21st century lens and assume they were creating some sort of

00:21:24.800 a secular nation with a strict wall between Christianity and government. But that interpretation

00:21:30.160 ignores all of the historical context. The founders had just separated themselves from

00:21:36.260 a system in which the church and state were institutionally fused together. They had been

00:21:42.080 seeing the problems that arose when kings governed churches and when churches executed capital

00:21:48.960 punishment. They didn't want a national church controlled by the federal government, nor did

00:21:53.980 they want ecclesiastical authorities wielding the sword of the state? They understood that God had

00:22:01.000 established three distinct spheres of authority. He had the family, the church, and the state.

00:22:07.580 And each one of those had its own responsibilities and limitations, and each to be under the

00:22:11.960 authority of Christ. The First Amendment was designed to prevent the federal government

00:22:16.840 from establishing a national denomination like the Church of England. It was not designed to

00:22:22.440 remove Christianity from public life or politics or law or government. In fact, the objective was

00:22:27.740 to keep the state out of the church, not so much the church out of the state. When James Madison

00:22:34.380 wrote, quote, the religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every

00:22:41.520 man. End quote. He was not advocating for a modern concept of religious freedom or religious

00:22:47.860 pluralism in which all religions were viewed as equally true and equally beneficial to society.

00:22:54.360 To think that the same generation that would kill citizens for blasphemy would legally support the

00:23:00.480 buildings or the building of mosques and Hindu temples across our nation is an absurd idea.

00:23:08.320 The founding generation of America understood that the first and second commandment in the

00:23:13.320 Ten Commandments condemned false worship. They understood that Christ is not for the freedom

00:23:18.940 of religion in the way that we think about it today. So what was the purpose of this legal

00:23:25.660 ethic? See, their concern was not freedom from Christianity, but freedom from ecclesiastical 0.87

00:23:32.860 coercion and denominational persecution. Again, you have to remember that they witnessed centuries

00:23:38.740 of conflict between Rome and the Church of England and various Protestant groups. So they

00:23:43.940 sought a nation where Christians could worship according to conscience without state-imposed

00:23:48.920 denominational control. In other words, religious liberty was among Christian communions. Okay,

00:23:56.820 you could be Baptist or Congregationalist or Presbyterian or Anglican or Lutheran or even

00:24:01.000 Catholic. It was not an endorsement of religious pluralism. And we know this because the state,

00:24:08.540 which the vast majority of the power in a republic was with the states. The states continued to

00:24:16.520 maintain explicitly Christian establishments. They had religious tests. They had public

00:24:23.000 Christian standards and confessions and Christian laws long after the First Amendment was adopted.

00:24:29.480 In fact, one of the clearest pieces of evidence comes from the very moments after the First

00:24:35.940 amendment was adopted. On October 25th, 1789, Congress approved the language that would become

00:24:42.820 the first amendment. Now, the very next day, Elias Boudinot, a founding father, he was a former

00:24:49.520 president of the Continental Congress. He actually became later the president of the American Bible

00:24:55.360 Society, and he proposed that Congress request George Washington to proclaim a national day

00:25:02.300 of prayer and thanksgiving. And what happened? The House agreed, the Senate agreed, and President

00:25:09.800 Washington complied. On October 3rd, 1789, George Washington, again, he's our national patriarch,

00:25:17.180 issued a national proclamation calling upon the American people to observe November 26th as a day

00:25:24.180 of public thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God. Now, some people say, but Dale, it's a general

00:25:32.500 call to prayer, right? It could apply to any religion. Okay. 99% of the nation's population

00:25:40.300 was Christian. It's probably, honestly, it was 100%, but maybe 99.98%, okay, was Christian.

00:25:46.440 Do you think George Washington was calling the nation to some agnostic God? Okay, no.

00:25:54.180 he was speaking of God, the father of Jesus Christ. The writings of Washington are filled

00:26:01.280 with devotion to Christ. In a speech to the Indian chiefs of Delaware on May 12th, 1779,

00:26:10.600 Washington said, quote, you do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life. And above all,

00:26:17.860 the religion of Jesus Christ, these will make you a greater and happier people than you are.

00:26:23.780 end quote. You got to remember, Washington was a member of the Anglican church his entire life.

00:26:31.860 So you just have to think about the timing here, okay? The same Congress that approved the First

00:26:38.860 Amendment around the separation of church and state immediately turned around and asked the

00:26:44.120 president to call the entire nation to pray and have thanksgiving to God. That alone should cause

00:26:51.600 us to question the modern narrative. Washington's proclamation is incredible. I'm going to read it

00:26:58.200 for you, at least a portion of it for you. It says, whereas it is the duty of all nations to

00:27:04.280 acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for all his benefits

00:27:10.160 and humbly to implore his protection and favor. And whereas both houses of Congress have by their

00:27:17.500 joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public

00:27:22.680 thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many

00:27:27.920 signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to

00:27:34.000 establish a form of government for their safety and happiness, to be devoted by the people of

00:27:40.360 these states to the service of that great and glorious being who is the beneficent author

00:27:46.560 of all good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering under him

00:27:54.880 our sincere and humble thanks for this kind care and protection of the people of this country

00:28:02.140 previous to the becoming a nation. That we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers

00:28:09.060 and supplications to the great Lord and ruler of nations and beseech him to pardon our national

00:28:15.980 and other transgressions to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our

00:28:22.680 several and relative duties properly and punctually to render our national government a blessing to

00:28:29.740 all people, end quote. If that's not Christian nationalism, I just don't know what is. Okay, 0.82

00:28:37.320 he went even further urging at the end of this, the parts that I didn't read, urging Americans to

00:28:42.540 pray that in the United States, that God would, quote, promote the knowledge and practice of true

00:28:48.780 religion and virtue, end quote. So you got to notice the language, right? Not religious in the

00:28:56.160 abstract, not private spirituality, not secular morality, okay? But the promotion of true religion

00:29:04.280 and virtue among the American people. Now, unfortunately, the word religion has been

00:29:10.320 largely hijacked in modern times. So today, many people assume it refers, you know, oh,

00:29:16.660 religion, like as a general equality of all faiths. But that was not how the founders used

00:29:22.280 the term. In 18th century America, the word religion was synonymous with Christianity,

00:29:28.220 and it's a massive, massive mistake. If they would have just put Christianity in place of religion,

00:29:34.260 so much would be more clear on our identity as a Christian nation. Now, as a result, a lot of 0.96

00:29:41.800 people, they wrongly interpret statements like these as evidence that the founders just viewed

00:29:45.880 all religions as equally true or equally foundational to the Republic. They did not,

00:29:51.480 okay? When Washington and his contemporaries spoke of promoting religion, they were speaking

00:29:57.140 of the Christian religion. We know this for a fact by cross-referencing so many quotes,

00:30:01.840 but I'm just going to give you one for an example. In his general orders, Washington said

00:30:06.820 on May 2nd, 1778, he uses the term religion and Christian in the same quote. I'm going to read it.

00:30:13.340 He says, quote, while we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers,

00:30:19.780 we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion, to the distinguished

00:30:26.520 character of patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character

00:30:33.140 of Christian, end quote. In Washington's proclamation in 1779, he also said American

00:30:40.260 citizens ought to pray to God that God would, quote, bless America with good government,

00:30:47.360 peace, and concord to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion, end quote.

00:30:52.800 Okay, again, he viewed public virtue, Christianity, national prosperity as inseparable realities,

00:31:01.980 which are, again, the fundamentals of Christian nationalism.

00:31:07.660 In other words, when people try to tarnish you for being a Christian nationalist, you

00:31:14.800 are no different than the founders of your own country.

00:31:19.180 The people who do this are trying to rewrite its history to support their evil and steal your 0.71

00:31:25.660 nation. You cannot cower to these people. You have to push back. You have to endure. You have

00:31:32.300 to continue to understand history because when you understand inception, you understand identity.

00:31:37.280 When you understand identity, you understand allegiance. Yes, the founders did reject

00:31:44.620 a federally established church. We know that. But rejecting an established church is not the

00:31:51.160 same thing as rejecting a Christian nation. So the America of 1789 was not attempting to become

00:32:01.000 less Christian than the colonies that just preceded it. It was attempting to preserve

00:32:07.280 Christian civilization without recreating the abuse of the European state church system that

00:32:13.400 they had just left behind. In the year 1800, approximately 98% of the United States population

00:32:22.020 was Protestant. The remaining 2% was basically Roman Catholic. Now, most of the Catholics,

00:32:30.020 they lived in Maryland, which is Maryland. And if you just look at those numbers, if that was

00:32:36.700 the fruit of the nation, what does it tell you about its root? Again, to argue that such a people

00:32:42.160 founded by Christians, governed by Christians, and overwhelmingly populated by Christians,

00:32:49.000 somehow established a religiously neutral nation, requires a level of historical revisionism

00:32:55.060 that borders on insanity. Now, this claim that Christianity played only a minor role

00:33:02.100 in America's founding becomes even more difficult to argue or to sustain when we examine the

00:33:12.020 research of political scientist Donald Lutz in 1980. Now, this guy surveyed thousands of

00:33:19.400 political writings published between 1760 and 1805. I'm talking pamphlets, newspapers, essays,

00:33:27.840 political tracts, sermons, all of it. And he found that the Bible was the single most cited source

00:33:34.860 in the founding era. And he's accounting for basically his results that approximately one

00:33:41.740 third of all citations in written literature came from scripture. It was cited more than

00:33:47.720 any other European thinker and often more than any other enlightenment school of thought.

00:33:54.920 They were thoroughly biblical. Now, interestingly, when I was looking into the research,

00:34:01.100 the biblical book that was cited most frequently was Deuteronomy. And it was obviously because

00:34:06.380 they were constantly referencing Christian law. And according to Lutz and all of his findings,

00:34:10.780 Deuteronomy was referenced nearly twice as often as the writings of any philosopher or politician.

00:34:15.320 The apostle Paul was cited about as often as Montesquieu and Blackstone, which are two of

00:34:20.080 the most influential secular politicians and have their political theories at that time.

00:34:25.040 And so whatever else must be said about the founding generation, the historical record

00:34:33.560 shows that when Americans discussed politics or law or liberty or government or nation,

00:34:41.540 they turned to the Bible more than any other source. Now, why is this important? Because the

00:34:51.000 claim that America was founded primarily by Enlightenment rationalists and deists

00:34:55.480 simply doesn't square up with the historical record. And the dominant political vision of

00:35:01.380 the Enlightenment was not a constitutional republic that was built on checks and balances

00:35:06.660 and divided powers. It was an aristocracy of elites that are running the nation. Okay. The

00:35:12.900 American system emerged from a completely different understanding of man and government.

00:35:19.440 they had witnessed the abuses of concentrated power in both the English monarchy and the Roman

00:35:25.260 church. So this massive nation of Protestants, essentially it taught them that man has fallen,

00:35:33.560 prone to corruption, incapable of being trusted with unlimited power and authority. And so this 0.94

00:35:40.100 biblical view of human nature shaped their political philosophy. They didn't assume men

00:35:44.860 would use power virtuously, they assumed that they would abuse it unless it was restrained

00:35:50.680 by checks and balances. James Wilson, a signer of the Constitution, grounded the necessity of

00:35:57.180 government in the doctrine of the fall itself, writing, quote, government is indeed highly

00:36:03.120 necessary, but it is highly necessary to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society without

00:36:11.760 the aids of government would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of paradise, end

00:36:18.440 quote. John Adams, he expressed the same principle when he famously declared, quote, our constitution

00:36:24.740 was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any

00:36:32.680 other, end quote. George Washington explained the need for constitutional restraints by appealing

00:36:38.740 to the sinful tendencies of man. It says, quote, a just estimate of that love of power and proneness

00:36:46.160 to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us the truth

00:36:52.440 of this position. Talking about checks and balances. He goes on to say, the necessity

00:36:57.540 of reciprocal checks in the existence of political power by dividing and distributing

00:37:03.340 into different depositaries, end quote. Okay, these are not the words of men building a nation

00:37:10.660 on enlightenment humanism. Okay, they are the words of men who believed what Christianity teaches,

00:37:17.260 that man has fallen, that unlimited power corrupts, and that civil government must be

00:37:23.420 structured according to scripture. But that system was never designed for a nation that

00:37:30.560 ceased to be overwhelmingly Christian. And that checks with reality. America functioned fairly

00:37:37.360 well until we decided to import millions of non-European pagans. And what did they do? 0.94

00:37:44.560 What did these people do? They took the freedoms that had protected the robust Christianity

00:37:50.020 that we had and weaponized it and reinterpreted it to be openly hostile to the Christian faith 0.92

00:37:58.120 that built the very nation they're coming to. In other words, what had been a framework

00:38:04.820 for a Christian people became a tool used against Christian identity, against Christian law, 0.52

00:38:12.060 against Christian culture. And now we have a national mess. But in that mess, we can say 0.72

00:38:20.580 without a doubt, America's inception, founding, and the vast majority of its history was explicitly 0.61

00:38:27.200 Christian. Don't let anyone tell you, hey, you know what? It's too late. This thing's too far

00:38:33.120 gone. You can't turn it around. No, it's never too late for the reformation or revolution when

00:38:42.580 a nation is strayed from its identity. Imagine if like Luther or Calvin just said, you know,

00:38:48.160 hey, it's too late. Like, it's too late. No. Having the courage to go, no, it's not too late.

00:38:57.760 We're going to return and restore to our identity as a Christian nation. We need that. I believe

00:39:04.180 that the next 10 years are going to be filled with intense political, moral, and religious upheaval.

00:39:12.340 And so now is the time to boldly voice your convictions, generate greater what I would call ideological agitation and polarity.

00:39:26.160 And that's because we want to cause the necessary disruption to inaugurate real change.

00:39:33.960 I think it was Abigail Adams, who, in the midst of waiting for the Revolutionary War,

00:39:44.080 she said some quote, I wish I had it before me, but it was like, if we're either going to start

00:39:49.380 or not, but the middle way is no way. And I feel like we have that right now. We are in a

00:39:55.980 ideological, religious, nationalistic Cold War. We are living among people that hate us and would

00:40:04.720 kill us if it was legal to do so. And so we need to be praying right now for genuine nationalistic

00:40:13.040 revival with a robust Christian foundation. And that is why this episode is so important.

00:40:23.620 I want us to make sure that we really know that something has been stolen from us.

00:40:28.460 Something has been taken.

00:40:30.480 We have drifted.

00:40:32.220 Who we were at the inception and our identity has been perverted. 0.94

00:40:37.500 And it's going to require Christian patriots to restore and fight for that identity, whether 0.70

00:40:44.400 it's through balkanization, whether it's through something else.

00:40:47.380 But this is a vital episode for us to understand and be confident in who we are as Americans.

00:40:54.560 So let's move on to the weekly audit.

00:41:02.700 In this first clip, I want to look at one of my favorite clips from Charlie Kirk.

00:41:07.460 And it's basically just going to inform or reiterate everything that I just talked about.

00:41:14.060 But I love Charlie Kirk's absolute ability to retain knowledge on the fly. I really do believe that he was a savant on political theory. Just to have a question like this come out and the ability to recall the information with such accuracy is incredible. So let's go ahead and watch.

00:41:35.520 Our country was found on common law because the declaration only refers to God four times,

00:41:41.180 and the constitution doesn't refer to God at all, and it only articulates the structure of government.

00:41:46.340 So first of all, remember that we were a collection of states and colonies,

00:41:49.440 and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.

00:41:52.140 Nine out of 13 of the original states required you to be a Bible-believing Christian to serve in government

00:41:56.180 at the time of the founding.

00:41:57.040 All 13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.

00:41:59.560 Nine out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic,

00:42:03.100 which still required a declaration of faith.

00:42:04.980 Almost every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had, I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions.

00:42:13.100 You remember, we're a collection of states before that. 0.69

00:42:15.060 Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing, church-attending Christians.

00:42:20.300 So a common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.

00:42:23.680 A common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.

00:42:25.740 So let's go to three principles of common law.

00:42:27.360 Presumption of menace, due process, and jury of your peers.

00:42:29.740 All three are biblical principles.

00:42:30.840 wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or

00:42:36.000 poor, which is Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you

00:42:41.060 should love your neighbors yourself. But before that is that in the administration of justice,

00:42:44.720 you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice. We get that in the

00:42:48.780 West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal, neither slave nor Greek nor

00:42:52.380 Jew. You're all one in Jesus Christ, which is the idea of human equality. These are all biblical

00:42:56.000 ideas. They're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time. But more

00:42:59.780 importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of

00:43:03.700 Independence. Well, that's a big deal. Okay. Laws of nature and nature's God. The last paragraph 0.73

00:43:07.720 of the Declaration reads as a prayer. It says, we appeal to the supreme judge of the universe,

00:43:12.800 who's the judge of the universe, Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge

00:43:16.900 the earth on his throne. So in the Declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer

00:43:22.740 very specifically. Thirdly, as I said on stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted

00:43:27.740 book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together

00:43:31.900 the constitution, more than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone, the book of

00:43:36.480 Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions. It was Moses' farewell address

00:43:40.520 as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys. Here's how you should set up your

00:43:45.480 form of government. But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the

00:43:49.660 founders said. John Adams famously said the constitution was only written for a moral

00:43:53.720 religious people. It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other. The body politic of 0.92

00:43:57.960 America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was

00:44:02.140 built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord. One of the reasons we're living through a 0.51

00:44:06.640 constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form 0.96

00:44:11.160 of government and they're incompatible. So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian 0.99

00:44:15.220 population. What an incredible ability to recall such, I mean, I had to do a bunch of research for 1.00

00:44:22.060 this episode. He had it just right off the top of his head. Now, the next clip is from my friend

00:44:26.820 John Wellnick, and it's on the topic of Christian monarchy. I think it's a really great conversation.

00:44:33.320 Let's take a look. God's best form of government is theocracy. It was Moses, it was God. Moses was

00:44:38.980 the religious leader, and he also led the nation. That's definitionally theocracy. But now we have,

00:44:43.640 you know, end of judges. People are begging for a king. We just want a king. So God's like,

00:44:48.380 fine, you want a king to bat, I will give you a king. So we're no longer theocratic now, we're now

00:44:52.300 monarchical. Post-Lapsarian, pre-Second Coming, that's our best bet, is a monarchy. A monarch

00:44:59.500 who is submitted and obedient to the Lord. So you have that, now you have the French Revolution,

00:45:04.280 you have Regicide, you have the people rising up and killing their king. What's so funny about that

00:45:09.040 is the very first thing they do, a handful of years later, is they install another monarch.

00:45:14.260 To me, that shows that people were made to be ruled.

00:45:17.560 And that's when it sounds tyrannical, but I don't think it is.

00:45:20.120 Because we are in hierarchy with God above us, right?

00:45:23.840 Everything in nature works, in man's nature, works in a hierarchy.

00:45:27.460 There's God in the family.

00:45:28.460 There's the husband.

00:45:29.500 There's the wife. 0.67

00:45:30.340 There's the kids.

00:45:30.900 It's hierarchical.

00:45:32.080 We are made to be, at our very core level, submissive to a higher authority, a higher power.

00:45:37.160 Yeah, you have father and mother.

00:45:38.800 You have elder, deacon, pastor.

00:45:40.680 these are very clear oversight mechanisms for the two things that god created right you're saying

00:45:47.500 that naturally because we're like that it also works that way politically best it's in our nature

00:45:54.040 gods yeah so i don't believe america can return to the constitutional arrangements of the founding

00:46:05.680 era. Those arrangements were crafted for a different people. Now, sure, yeah, maybe with

00:46:11.340 100 million deportations, a massive revival in the church. But if you ask me, how are we going

00:46:19.700 to get out of this national mess? I think the only form of government that possesses both the

00:46:26.100 biblical legitimacy and the concentrated authority to enact these kind of sweeping structural

00:46:32.640 changes that are necessary to restore America's Christian identity is a constitutional monarchy. 0.70

00:46:39.940 And because that's basically impossible in our current situation, I believe that we need to form 0.85

00:46:47.180 some degree of balkanization in the United States. We need an honest recognition that a single

00:46:53.480 sprawling republic that we have right now can no longer hold together a people who do not share

00:46:58.380 the same general ancestry, the Christian faith, the culture, vision of what it means to have a

00:47:03.720 good life. And if we could balkanize, I would love to see a constitutional monarchy. I'd love to see

00:47:12.260 a 90% ethnostate. I'd love to see a new constitution that eliminates a lot of the 1.00

00:47:19.480 stuff from the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th amendments. Now, I would not throw out, if I'm just thinking

00:47:27.180 out loud here. I would not throw out the founder's commitment to ordered liberty and the wisdom

00:47:31.720 of some of the system's checks and balances, but I would frame all of our governing documents in

00:47:39.960 far more explicitly Christian language. I would also require that any monarch appointed over a

00:47:47.780 people share their ethnicity, that's important, and be able to demonstrate a credible evidence

00:47:54.420 of regeneration. I don't know what that would look like. And I would probably call for a clear

00:48:00.000 right of resistance clause against any monarch who openly abandons the Christian faith.

00:48:05.400 But again, our mission right now is polarity, okay? We must awaken Americans to the hard reality

00:48:12.960 that long-term peace is impossible under the current demographics, whether you think about

00:48:17.720 them spiritually, ethnically, whatever. Okay. We must show our fellow patriots, our fellow

00:48:24.300 Americans that deportations, balkanization, they're not actually radical ideas. They're

00:48:31.000 actually moderate ideas. They're realistic solutions because the radical idea would be

00:48:37.920 civil war. And so it is a moderate thing to deport, mass deport. It is a moderate thing

00:48:45.020 to balkanize instead of having the bloodshed of civil war. So when people call you extreme for

00:48:49.700 your position, say, no, no. Having ICE put 100 billion people, that's not extreme. What's going

00:48:56.760 to happen if we don't do that is extreme. We start killing people in the streets because

00:49:02.500 the tensions rise so much. No, this is the government's duty is to create a moderate

00:49:08.440 solution that eliminates the possibility of bloodshed, which would be mass deportations

00:49:12.960 in some form of balkanization.

00:49:15.560 All right, that's a wrap for this episode.

00:49:18.200 I wanna keep talking, but I gotta stop.

00:49:20.760 And next week, I'm going to be talking

00:49:23.460 about a massively controversial topic

00:49:26.340 titled The Curse of Ham

00:49:29.360 and the Historic Christian View of Race in America.

00:49:33.720 Now, if you don't already know anything about that topic,

00:49:37.320 I'm gonna come at it from a biblical perspective

00:49:39.240 and I'm going to offer scripture from Genesis chapter nine. And we're going to look at that

00:49:45.020 together. I'm going to try to not make it like a sermon, but it's probably going to feel preachy

00:49:48.500 because you know what? I'm a preacher. But it's going to be a great conversation that is going

00:49:53.340 to be applied specifically to the American context. So I'd love to have you on that episode.

00:49:58.340 Now, if you don't follow me already on X, Instagram, and YouTube, I'm posting new content

00:50:03.100 there basically six days a week. So would love to have you follow me on those platforms. My

00:50:09.040 featured book for this episode is my book, Reform vs. Rome, Why Classical Protestantism

00:50:14.600 is the Restoration of the One Holy Catholic Church. Now, whether you're, again, considering

00:50:19.140 a shift from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism or from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism or

00:50:24.920 Anglicanism or whatever it may be, this book was my attempt to honestly compare the two and showing

00:50:30.760 why I am a Reformed Catholic and not a Roman Catholic. It's available at relearn.org. You can

00:50:37.100 listen to the audio in the ReLearn app, or you can pick up a copy on Amazon. My name is Dale

00:50:42.660 Partridge. Thank you for watching or listening to American Glory. I'll see you next week.

00:50:47.080 America will either have Christ

00:51:04.860 or it will have chaos

00:51:06.400 For years, conservatives believed

00:51:09.460 that Trump could reverse America's decline

00:51:11.800 But after Trump

00:51:13.400 the right is now fractured

00:51:15.160 exhausted, and losing ground. Endless infighting and electoral losses have exposed a deeper problem

00:51:23.140 that politics alone cannot solve. A nation that rejects Christ cannot be restored by mere

00:51:31.260 personalities, grandstanding, or Christless conservatism. So NXR Studio's first annual

00:51:38.600 conference, America After Trump, brings together pastors, politicians, commentators, and Christians

00:51:46.600 that are committed to strength, cooperation, and a durable future for the American right.

00:51:53.440 Complaining is not a strategy, and despair cannot be an option. Christ is King. Let's live like it.

00:52:08.600 Amen.

The NXR Podcast - July 07, 2026

American Glory - Did America Have a Christian Founding？

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