The NXR Podcast - THE FRIDAY SPECIAL - Drowning Baptists And The “Evolution” Of Christian Nationalism

00:00:00 Leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform.

00:00:03 I get it.

00:00:04 It's annoying.

00:00:05 Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.

00:00:07 When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that

00:00:12 our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.

00:00:16 You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries

00:00:20 aren't.

00:00:21 We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.

00:00:30 Okay, here we are. This is a 10-part series. I'm Pastor Joel Webin. This is part nine,

00:00:51 and Dr. Wolf has prepped me right before we started recording. We've got an idea,

00:00:56 roadmap of what the episode's about. I forget virtually everything that you said, but I remember

00:01:00 this. We're talking about persecuting Baptists. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, and why we should do that 1.00

00:01:05 all the time and bring it back. But we are going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the

00:01:09 early American history being a pan-Protestant movement. You know, the immediate objection is,

00:01:14 yeah, pan-Protestant, my butt. You guys were, you know, picking on the Baptists. What's up with that? 1.00

00:01:19 And if you go back to being a Christian nation, you're going to do it again. I'm Presbyterian, 0.87

00:01:23 so a little bit different when you say congregation you're talking about like a john owen

00:01:27 kind of like there's still paedo yeah yeah but but there's not a presbytery outside of the local

00:01:31 church yeah like john conden john yeah they were all baptist uh polity but but a uh paedo

00:01:36 covenantalism yeah yeah close enough yeah i could get behind that yeah i'm close yeah i've been close

00:01:45 for a while now yeah i think you know someday i'll convince you the presbyterian polity but uh

00:01:51 you know. Honestly, the most convincing thing of the Presbyterian polity is every time I go online

00:01:56 and read the thoughts of other Baptist ministers. I'm like, somebody needs to be in charge of these

00:02:01 guys. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it can be bad because there's that good old boy system and a certain

00:02:09 mentality that can prevent you from speaking clearly and truthfully about things. Right.

00:02:15 Because then you have the heavy hand of a Presbyterian. Well, I was going to say, you know, 0.53

00:02:19 And celebrities in a denomination can be very kind of informally

00:02:23 influential at a presbytery level.

00:02:25 At the time of this recording, like, honestly,

00:02:28 my Baptist polity in congregationalism is one of the things that saved me.

00:02:32 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:32 With a recent controversy, you know, like,

00:02:35 and really putting a strong arm on, like, you've got this, you know,

00:02:40 this guy and he needs to be brought up on charges or church disciplined.

00:02:43 And because I'm a Baptist, I was able to say, take a hike.

00:02:48 yeah i mean it shows that like that like we said before that that something can be good in structure

00:02:53 like it's good to have a the type of authority structure you have in a presbyterian model it

00:02:58 can be abused but it can be abused and it can actually be harmful yep that's we're not here

00:03:02 to talk about okay apologies well take us away in terms of early persecution and baptism we want

00:03:08 to be pan-protestant we actually think it'll work even though there are some examples that can be

00:03:11 cited to the contrary. Yeah, so the main point of this episode will be how you can be Christian

00:03:19 nationalist. You can be a good Christian nationalist and be a good American. Because

00:03:22 there is that question of, well, wait a second, isn't the American tradition opposed to

00:03:26 being a Christian nation? Didn't we found a secular republic or a secularist republic?

00:03:32 And don't we have a First Amendment and all that? And one of the things I want to say is actually

00:03:37 there is continuity from our Puritan past with the founding and beyond. So people think that

00:03:45 there was a major break, like the founders broke away in principle from their forefathers,

00:03:54 particularly from New England. And so I want to start the story in New England, in the 17th

00:04:01 century new england uh focusing on massachusetts bay colony and particularly boston um so that was

00:04:10 they were congregationalists for our purposes they're presbyterian back then they they of

00:04:15 course didn't they wrote against each other on polity but they were uh generally speaking uh

00:04:20 99 on the same side right um and uh so they they all they left and uh landed in what we call

00:04:30 Massachusetts Bay. And they came to what's often called an errand in the wilderness. Before the

00:04:35 Puritans, you had the pilgrims. So there is a difference between the pilgrims, Plymouth Rock

00:04:40 and Salem, but came to be kind of under the same colony. And so you have the, so anyway, I'm going

00:04:48 to focus on the Puritans. They found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They have their city of

00:04:53 Boston. And they wanted to make it in what they said, the congregationalist way. So that was the

00:04:59 intent. That was the people that came there initially, and most of the people that came

00:05:04 there subsequently over the subsequent decades were there because they wanted also to be a part

00:05:10 of this congregationalist way. They did believe that the civil magistrate could suppress religion,

00:05:18 they did believe, or suppress false religion, that they could prevent the building of new churches

00:05:24 with contrary denominations like Baptists,

00:05:26 and we'll get into that.

00:05:27 But anyway, one of the first problems they had

00:05:33 was by a guy named Roger Williams. 0.90

00:05:35 Now, to this day, a lot of Baptists and others

00:05:38 and religious liberty people will look to,

00:05:41 oh, what happened to Roger Williams?

00:05:42 Look what happened to Roger Williams.

00:05:44 But they really haven't read the primary source documents on this.

00:05:49 Roger Williams was actually kind of a nut.

00:05:50 He was not what you think he was. The reasons why he was eventually banished from Boston,

00:06:02 or I mean from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was because one, he refused the oath. There was an

00:06:11 oath. They were afraid that there was a bunch of bishops and Jesuits that showed up, and so they

00:06:15 required an oath to um and and he refused and thought that it was a violation of the third

00:06:21 commandment to have a required oath to to live in in massachusetts that's one reason they thought

00:06:27 he was he was subversive so again it was about politics the other was that he thought that the

00:06:32 charter that allowed them to be there to found the colony in the first place was invalid because he

00:06:38 thought it was immoral so the very basis for the colony the basis for the the king claim to the

00:06:44 place. And then with the magistrates there, the foundation of it was actually, he thought was

00:06:50 immoral. So again, subversive. And really the main reason was not, the reasons for banishing

00:06:59 was not actually religious liberty. He did later on have this, he published

00:07:04 tracks against the suppression of false religion. And John Cotton responded to him.

00:07:13 uh he eventually by the time before he was kicked out uh he was kicked out by his own church in

00:07:20 Salem and he became uh like a family church basically the only members was him his wife

00:07:26 and I guess maybe his kids so he was by his own church kicked out for basically being a nut um so

00:07:32 he really was even though uh you could see he was an early advocate of a type of maximal religious

00:07:38 liberty in a way, though it wasn't actually as Maxwell as you'll think, he was not kicked out

00:07:42 for religious liberty. It was mainly because he was subversive of, he was subversive to the system

00:07:50 in place. So that's the first thing to keep in mind when we, when he did that, that's just on

00:07:54 Roger Williams. And he's really not what people think he actually was. And the common theme

00:08:06 throughout all these different, you know, quote, persecutions in New England was they thought

00:08:12 these people were subversive. They thought they would destroy the civil discipline and the

00:08:18 spiritual discipline of the place that they were in. They said that we came here to organize

00:08:25 ourselves, church and state, in the Congregationalist way for this purpose. And if you come here

00:08:31 and join us in that purpose, then you can stay here. You can join the church, and if you don't

00:08:38 subvert it, you can be here all day long. But the moment you begin to undermine that thing that we

00:08:43 all came here to do, well, you're out. The same thing with the antinomians. You have Anne Hutchinson. 0.99

00:08:50 One of the fears of antinomianism was not just the theology. It was that antinomianism would

00:08:55 undermine both the church discipline and the civil discipline. Like if you start rejecting

00:09:00 the use of the law in terms of your, as in sanctification and use of the law in your

00:09:07 spiritual life, and just dwell on your justification and don't actually examine

00:09:11 yourself with regard to your good works, then that will undermine the entire system we have set up

00:09:16 here. And so Antinomians, there's a long story about that. But the fear was not only theological, 1.00

00:09:27 but it was political. It was a fear that you're undermining the project we set out to do.

00:09:33 And so Anne Hutchinson was eventually banished, as was another guy named Wheelwright. Anne Hutchinson

00:09:39 in her family tragically was killed by indians later on um but uh so that that was that so

00:09:44 it was not simply like hey here's a bunch of heretics who are here and there and saying

00:09:51 these things let's round them up and let's whip them and beat them and punish them it wasn't like

00:09:55 that at all um it was actually a a there was a civil political concern wrapped up with these 0.96

00:10:03 people uh and that justified to them to act against them um and uh and so that's that's the

00:10:11 antinomians uh the the third one was the baptists um oh actually i i could talk about the quakers

00:10:19 i'll just say the quakers were nuts yeah you always hear like oh they executed uh what's her 0.69

00:10:23 name um mary something i forget her name they executed her and that they were they were absolutely 0.98

00:10:28 nuts like today we think of the quaker as like that nice liberal like or not even nice but some 0.98

00:10:33 short-haired liberal woman and goes to a Quaker church. She doesn't believe anything. It's a 1.00

00:10:37 social club and a political activist committee. They're harmless type people apart from their bad

00:10:42 politics. But back then, they would get off the ship. They start rambling and yelling at you.

00:10:47 And there was one instance that Samuel Sowell records in his diary or his journal that a woman

00:10:54 shows up to church in blackface wearing a bag and just starts shouting at the minister.

00:11:00 so the quakers were actually very creative their theology was not only not their theology was bad 0.95

00:11:05 but their public behavior was notoriously horrible and so they'd be they'd banished then to come back 0.92

00:11:12 they'd be banished they'd come back and eventually after like the fourth or fifth time of this

00:11:15 happening they said that's enough um and they executed a couple of them but again it was a

00:11:21 matter of public disturbance civil disputes they disregarded civil magistracy you know chris the

00:11:28 do you have a christian state and christian uh so again it was it was largely because of subversion

00:11:35 to the project they had chosen to undertake and then the baptist was the same way um

00:11:42 they would affirm that there that these baptists were fellow believers so there's a very important

00:11:47 principle to understand about new england puritans is they didn't the the like john cotton and the

00:11:53 other guys in New England, they were not saying that we are the only true Christians. They would

00:12:00 affirm that the ministers in the Church of England were true ministers, that they administered true

00:12:05 sacraments and the Word. They would affirm this about the Baptists. They would even affirm this

00:12:11 about antinomians as well, that they were Christians, just an error. The same, that's how 0.99

00:12:15 they considered Baptists to be Christians, but an error. And they even allowed, Cotton says that 1.00

00:12:23 within their churches, they allowed antinomians and Baptists to be full members of their churches,

00:12:28 and there were actually members of their churches, but they were just told, you know, you can't talk

00:12:32 about the Baptist thing. You can't do the antinomian thing. That stuff's bad, but you can

00:12:36 still, as Christians, have every right to the word and the table and the sacraments as all the rest

00:12:43 of us. That's how I treat Arminians. Yeah, okay. Right, but that recognized, that's an early,

00:12:50 that's a really important early sign uh of protestants and this this is even like you

00:12:57 read this in all enthusiasts and older writers where there are differences that you consider

00:13:03 important but you can still recognize that yes i consider you an heir but also a brother in christ

00:13:10 they would not extend that to like roman catholics and some like uh notorious bishops and and um and

00:13:17 the Church of England, but your everyday sort of Church of England minister, they wouldn't say

00:13:22 you're false, like you're not a gospel minister. In fact, one of the disputes over with Roger

00:13:27 Williams that I didn't mention was Roger Williams would say that if someone goes to England,

00:13:33 let's say he's a merchant, and he attends a Church of England Anglican service,

00:13:40 then he needs to come back and repent, because that's a false church, according to Roger Williams.

00:13:46 And what John Cotton says,

00:13:47 people don't realize,

00:13:48 it's John Cotton the Puritan.

00:13:49 What he says is actually,

00:13:51 Roger, you're wrong.

00:13:52 We still affirm that there's true gospel ministry

00:13:56 occurring in the Church of England.

00:13:58 We just think there are these errors

00:13:59 that by conscience we can't participate in,

00:14:01 so we came out of here. 0.90

00:14:04 So Roger Williams was the sectarian.

00:14:06 He was a sectarian to a pretty extreme degree,

00:14:10 where the Puritans were not.

00:14:13 And so you could do that,

00:14:14 come back and still be a full member of a New England church. So anyway, extension of brotherhood

00:14:20 of true believers. Now, with the Baptists, it wasn't simply that they were Baptists that they

00:14:25 were persecuted. It was that the Baptists wanted to erect their own churches, and in doing so,

00:14:34 they were considered subversive of the project, because Baptists would not recognize anyone else's

00:14:41 baptism. They wouldn't recognize the baptism of the civil magistrate. They wouldn't recognize

00:14:46 the baptism of the church ministers around them. That's still the difficulty that we

00:14:51 experience today is that it's not a two-way street. It's a one-way stream just by nature

00:14:55 of the position. Now, I've found some workarounds in our local church, but just the nature of the

00:15:04 position, it's far easier for a Presbyterian or any Paedo-Baptist to accommodate a Credo-Baptist 0.99

00:15:11 than it is for a credo-baptist to accommodate the paedo-baptists. Now, I, you know, I have most of 0.97

00:15:16 my friends at this point are paedo-baptists, and so even locally, I have paedo-baptist friends, 0.96

00:15:20 and so with families that are of the paedo-persuasion, I, you know, I send them down the 0.92

00:15:25 road, and they have their babies baptized, and I close my eyes, and, you know, and welcome them

00:15:32 back, so. Yeah, yeah, and that's precisely, that was precisely the problem back then, is the

00:15:40 the Baptist would very openly say that basically you're not a true church, you're not full of true

00:15:48 Christians. And in the words of Cotton Mather, he said that they would de-church or unchurch

00:15:56 the churches around them, including the ministers, the magistrates. And so if you consider it's a

00:16:01 small population, they came here for congregationalism, and now you have people

00:16:08 coming there who are not welcomed or invited, who are now creating essentially established

00:16:14 institutions considered subversive to that. Not just that they have their own churches,

00:16:20 but those churches are denying the whole fabric of everything else. They're not just doing their

00:16:29 own thing. They're doing their own thing while publicly decrying and denouncing everyone else

00:16:33 is false. Yeah. And, and, and to the, to the, to the Puritan, to the, um, Congregationalist

00:16:40 perspective, like I said, they were willing to receive Baptists as church members in their

00:16:46 churches that could not be reciprocated. So all the things could be reciprocated, um, and, and

00:16:53 these things accommodated. Like, I think that Cotton, I forget if it was John Cotton or Cotton

00:16:57 Mather, said that they would even allow like Baptists to dismiss themselves when there was

00:17:04 an infant baptism. I could be wrong about that, but I recall something about, okay, this violates

00:17:08 your conscience, we'll accommodate you. So if this bothers you, you can depart when we baptize

00:17:14 the infant. And so there was accommodation, but then once you create the church and it's

00:17:19 established and now you have Baptists flourishing that then would, could be subversive of the 0.86

00:17:24 brought. So that was then suppressed. And the magistrate said, no, you cannot have a church.

00:17:29 And that went on for many decades. There was like whippings and things like that that went on and

00:17:34 to try to prevent that. Years later, you have Cotton Mather, who's the son of Increase Mather.

00:17:42 Cotton Mather's writing about the early 1700s. And he actually did not like persecution of heretics

00:17:48 or of the Baptist. He didn't consider Baptist heretics, but he did not like persecution,

00:17:52 as he called it, of these people. But he did say that the reasoning behind for the Baptist

00:17:58 was that there's a reason behind it, and it wasn't simply because they were Baptists.

00:18:03 But anyway, the point being is, I think the fundamental principle is that people were

00:18:07 acknowledging each other's mutual faith, but they had a political concern that is not simply

00:18:15 political, it's also related to everything else, but that's why they suppressed these people,

00:18:19 including the Baptist. You go to the 1690s, and now after you have the English Bill of Rights,

00:18:27 now it's religious liberty is the official law of the land from the king on down. And so the

00:18:31 charter of Massachusetts was revoked, and basically what was put in its place was the

00:18:37 religious liberty doctrine. So from there on, there was no formal persecution apart from all

00:18:46 these people. Now, so moving on in the narrative, in the 17-teens, you have Cotton Mather still

00:18:56 there, and Increase Mather, his father, is still there. Increase was part of the persecutions of

00:19:03 the Baptists in the 1670s and 80s. But now you have Cotton Mather, a Congregationalist minister,

00:19:10 giving the ordination sermon for a Baptist of the First Baptist Church of Boston.

00:19:16 So you see a change.

00:19:18 So you went from Yower Brothers,

00:19:20 but you can't have your own church

00:19:21 to I'm going to give this sermon

00:19:24 where you're ordained for this church

00:19:27 called First Baptist Church of Boston.

00:19:31 And so you see a change.

00:19:33 And that event, I think,

00:19:36 is really significant in our history,

00:19:38 even though very few people know about it.

00:19:40 It shows that brothers in a civil life

00:19:44 can say, look, we have our disagreements, but we can actually get along. This project of

00:19:50 Christian civilization can operate with us despite our differences and no need to throw out,

00:20:00 to attack each other physically and through law. So the idea of religious liberty then in the

00:20:07 American context was not simply reading John Locke or reading Enlightenment philosophers about

00:20:13 about religious liberty and freedom of conscience, nor was it even about simply

00:20:21 preventing the wars of religion. That is part of it, certainly. But it's also a more positive

00:20:29 development, I would argue, between brothers saying, hey, we can do this together. This can

00:20:35 be something we can do as Protestant brothers. So religious liberty, in the mind of the founders,

00:20:41 you're saying was not for the purpose of like, um, the church of Satan.

00:20:47 No, no, absolutely not.

00:20:49 No.

00:20:49 Yeah.

00:20:50 I thought that's what it was all about.

00:20:51 Yeah.

00:20:51 It's so bizarre that like when you, when you see like, yeah, these people think that it's

00:20:57 this abstract enlightenment notion that came from nowhere, from just the brains of someone

00:21:03 sitting in a, in his, on his desk in a, an office somewhere.

00:21:07 but it was really um largely a product of just experience it was protestantism

00:21:14 in you know affirming that we could be we could be mutual brothers despite our differences and

00:21:22 then the experience with each other of saying this could work as a civil as as a sort of pan

00:21:28 protestant project right together so that was all that was early early 18th century

00:21:33 and then you get into like the founding period and by then every colony was had adopted religious

00:21:45 liberty there still were establishments you got like a kind of church of england dominant in

00:21:50 virginia you got congregationalism in massachusetts and in connecticut then you have some religious

00:21:57 like religious liberty places like rhode island like a non-establishment like rhode island and

00:22:02 pennsylvania um so it's kind of a mixed diversity but broadly speaking they're all inheritors of

00:22:09 that experience of protestantism so even with an established church in massachusetts you still

00:22:13 had baptists and presbyterians and and uh i don't know how many anglicans were there but

00:22:18 um so yeah um and this is how we have to then come to understand like the first amendment right

00:22:24 uh well what's the first thing like mutual denominations of our common lord or how does

00:22:31 the phrase go you meaning like the oh you're talking about the revision of the westminster

00:22:36 standards yeah yeah yeah so that comes about do you remember the wording i think it says that

00:22:42 the uh you know i think you quoted it yeah like of our common lord yeah i know the of our common

00:22:47 lord i can't just i can't quite remember verbatim the preceding part it's like multiple denominations

00:22:53 or expressions of our of worship of our common lord or something like that yeah and that that

00:22:58 I would say is, I think that the American revision, it actually is not as much of a

00:23:05 substantive change as people think it is. I think there are some changes that are probably

00:23:11 changes in substance, but it's also bringing them in, bringing Presbyterianism into the American

00:23:17 context. And it's in a way updating, even though I don't affirm that confession, I affirm the other

00:23:23 one, but I would say it's in a way updating the confession for the American context in light of

00:23:30 the development of religious liberty. But it still permits, and most people to that day,

00:23:36 in that day, believe you can still suppress atheism. You can still grow some piety. It does

00:23:42 not like permit Church of Satan. It's not going to permit the, like, it doesn't in itself say you

00:23:51 can't um like suppress islam or like non-christian religion or something like that it's just it's

00:23:59 it's talking about how we as a uh churches of our common lord um are not to attack each other on the

00:24:07 basis of that it's not speaking about false religions or atheism is speaking about um let's

00:24:12 not be jerks to different christian denominations yeah and i would say like even back then i i they

00:24:18 would probably many of them would exclude church of you know church of rome or rome catholicism 0.93

00:24:22 yeah they would have from under common common i think some like uh people like john witherspoon

00:24:27 yeah i think he would exclude it as well but there was a um that it was kind of a there were

00:24:33 a lot of anti-roman anti-roman is romanist or anti-catholicism um sentiment at that time

00:24:40 but still yeah no i mean it was it was actually very common john jay was very anti-roman catholic

00:24:46 um and uh throughout american history and into the 19th century there was a fear that roman

00:24:52 catholics could not be fully loyal to um any country that they were in because they have a

00:24:59 dual loyalty they are loyal i don't even do loyalty their supreme loyalty is to the uh the

00:25:06 pope right who has civil authority in a sense in their minds over all civil parties so they can

00:25:11 And not only does he have civil authority and civil conflation of spheres and different

00:25:17 jurisdictions with church and state, which is not a theocracy, but an ecclesiocracy for

00:25:24 all intents and purposes, but also a dual loyalty or supreme loyalty to whatever nation

00:25:32 by proxy that the Pope happens to be in.

00:25:35 it's like, cause it's not like, he's not, he's your Pope, but like right now, you know, it's

00:25:42 like, like he's in Rome, you know, like he's, he's in Italy, you know, or, and, and then he also

00:25:46 is from a different, you know, right now, like, what is it? Argentina that Pope Francis is from.

00:25:51 So it's like, you got a guy who probably you would expect, you would even hope has some,

00:25:56 some sense of fondness for Argentina, but is located in Italy and, and yet has some kind of

00:26:04 authority that's binding over someone in china it's like it's it's not a great system

00:26:11 yeah i know and and this wasn't pure this wasn't irrational uh i mean like we tend to think of

00:26:18 roman catholics we we consider roman catholics today in light of vatican ii and and uh when

00:26:25 when suddenly the roman church discovered religious liberty i think it's hilarious when

00:26:30 these guys like quoting um like the various papal statements regarding religious liberty is it's

00:26:35 like you guys were literally the worst um like people the calvinists were uh persecutors but

00:26:41 if you read like the jesuits like suarez and bellarmine uh and uh and and some of the others 0.86

00:26:47 they they said no like you cannot tolerate that the heretic and by heretic they meant anyone who 0.90

00:26:53 does not submit to the roman church right and they were actually absolutely brutal and so like 0.79

00:26:59 even all enthusiasts in like 1604 or 1603 is saying like you jesuits are nuts and that we

00:27:07 we protestants can actually extend toleration to people um even even to heretics if if you if uh

00:27:15 like we i mean yeah even heretics if it if we need to um and uh so yeah it was roman catholic church

00:27:22 that was absolute but in the 19th century the the fear was that again that the papal power meant

00:27:27 that they don't, they can't actually have true loyalty. And also that they thought that if you're

00:27:32 under a papal, if you're from a Roman Catholic country that is in a way submitted to the Pope,

00:27:40 you don't have the political principles of freedom that make it so that you can properly

00:27:45 assimilate. So if you're a German Catholic or an Irish Catholic, it wasn't because you were Irish

00:27:51 or because you were German in itself, because there were German Protestants who actually

00:27:54 assimilated and irish protestants who assimilated very well um before that wave of catholic

00:27:59 immigration but it was the fear that you've been subjected to tyranny your entire life

00:28:04 and now you come here and you're not just going to suddenly adopt these anglo-protestant

00:28:09 understand understandings of liberty um and uh and you're going to actually influence the country for

00:28:16 for tyranny so anyway that was 19th century um but over time even the catholics you know everything

00:28:22 kind of became Americanized, and some of that could be negative, but I think a lot of it was

00:28:27 positive. And, you know, like we were saying, you know, the Westminster and its Americanized

00:28:33 revision, you know, taking some of what's innate and historical and traditional to America and

00:28:41 fitting that within a Presbyterian scheme. But even, you know, from a little bit of my reading

00:28:45 and conversations, it sounds like that even with Catholicism, as rigid as it is, that Catholicism

00:28:52 in America was also Americanized, that over time, even the priests, you know, like there's a

00:28:58 different flavor of sorts of Catholicism here in America. And that's probably true of every

00:29:02 country. Like when you think of Catholicism in Mexico, which I've witnessed on various occasions

00:29:09 and trips, um, it's, it's far more superstitious, you know, uh, whereas American Catholicism is

00:29:15 only a little stitious. Yeah. Well, and even the, uh, you could say the, the native born type

00:29:22 Roman Catholics, uh, they like the, the, the famous, like the, the carols, um, uh, were from

00:29:31 Maryland. So there are a lot of Roman Catholics in Maryland. They were, there were delegates to

00:29:36 the various founding events in the founding era. And they actually were part of the school of

00:29:46 thought that rejected papal supremacy over civil matters. So when I say Roman Catholicism,

00:29:52 there has been a stream within kind of native-born Roman Catholic Americans who, in a way,

00:30:01 they wouldn't call it this, but essentially Protestantized their view of church and state.

00:30:05 so actually the pope because one of the issues all the way back like 1640s and 50s when they

00:30:10 were trying to establish in maryland was that the king of england required an oath that you

00:30:15 you'll give supreme loyalty to me the king and the the pope said no if you sign that i excommunicate

00:30:24 you wow and so there was all of this um drama and and there was there were attempts to try to

00:30:31 how can I do both? How can I sign it? Can you revise it a little bit? Because then I can sign

00:30:37 it. And the king was like, no, not doing that. But they were of the opinion, even though they

00:30:44 would get excommunicated, but in privately, they were of the opinion that actually the Pope does

00:30:48 not have the power to do that. So there were those who believe that. But the fear was that

00:30:53 the immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Poland and elsewhere, and later Italy, that

00:30:58 uh those people would not have that that they would affirm papal supremacy that was one of

00:31:04 the fears i did the same thing you know with the antioch declaration i told my church members if

00:31:08 they signed it they'd be excuse jk that's not that it's you know obviously that's not the point

00:31:15 of our conversation but i understand the sentiment and some and some of the points i agreed with but

00:31:21 then other points i'm just like guys it's like i feel like statements and declarations and

00:31:25 especially theological statements,

00:31:28 I don't know.

00:31:28 I'm of the persuasion

00:31:29 that they should be timeless,

00:31:31 you know,

00:31:31 and not just a product

00:31:33 of a personal particular.

00:31:35 Also not contain, 0.95

00:31:36 like, dumb things in it. 0.87

00:31:39 That's generally my rule, too. 0.99

00:31:40 If it's dumb, 0.98

00:31:41 then, like, let's not. 0.97

00:31:42 The Aristotle line 0.99

00:31:43 was pretty dumb. 0.99

00:31:45 I think even the Enlightenment line 1.00

00:31:46 was dumb. 0.99

00:31:46 Yeah. 1.00

00:31:47 Because I think the.

00:31:48 Remind me of that line.

00:31:49 I think I know what you're talking about.

00:31:50 Where it says, like,

00:31:51 we, you know,

00:31:52 it can't just,

00:31:53 it's not just the post-war consensus.

00:31:54 Yeah, it's also,

00:31:55 it's tracked right because because if it was just stated in in the uh negative of um all the ills

00:32:02 of the world can't just be traced back to the 1940s sure right but but but it actually made a

00:32:10 positive um assertion of like uh it almost almost to say uh instead we believe that they can all be

00:32:17 tracked back to this other event i would say that like that actually for most the collaborators that

00:32:22 their their theology and and worldview is rooted in enlightenment thinking and that mine's not

00:32:29 like mine's rooted in like early modern aristotelianism or you know whatever whatever

00:32:34 you want to call it but there's absolutely is like rejection of natural theology is that's

00:32:39 david hume and emmanuel kant um the uh the idea of limited government that's very much of a western

00:32:46 Enlightenment development through John Locke and others that, let's see, the rejection of

00:32:58 natural truth or being able to acquire natural truth through your reasoning powers,

00:33:04 the idea that you can't actually kind of know the good apart from revelation and that ultimately

00:33:10 you are just a kind of a sort of bundle of sentiments and emotions that don't have a

00:33:15 clear ordering principle that you can't know apart from something above you in scriptural,

00:33:20 like for them, scriptural revelation, that's just like Thomas Hobbes. That's the Leviathan. That's

00:33:25 the anthropology of Thomas Hobbes. So you could just go down, like keep going down the line on

00:33:33 that. So I think like their system of thought is deeply enlightenment driven and deeply like

00:33:40 in very nominalist uh like or you know william of ockham sort of um ways so also economic system

00:33:49 like adam smith like their key guy for laissez-faire capitalism is is adam smith who was a scottish

00:33:55 enlightenment figure so if like that's not to say that they acquired all of their thinking from the

00:34:01 enlightenment um but if all of that enlightenment is reflected in today like well then they represent

00:34:07 that version of it just it just appears to be christian right so right to me one of the uh the

00:34:13 lines that i i i thought was was silly was um just the notion that uh and i think this is kind

00:34:22 of an enlightenment thing also like a like a a weird application of egalitarianism that like

00:34:29 everything is steamrolled and and everything is equal uh but you know in the positive sense but

00:34:34 also in the negative sense. So the idea that we, I can't remember if they stated it as an

00:34:39 affirmation or a denial, but we'll go with the denial. It's something along the lines of we

00:34:44 deny that Talmudic Judaism is more of a negative impact than any other major world religion that's

00:34:53 false. But what was key there was you might have an argument if you were talking about in the

00:35:01 eternal sense, like all falsehoods and heresies and blasphemies, you know, apart from repentance

00:35:08 and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ are equal in the eternal sense of their ability to separate

00:35:12 you from a holy God. They'll all send you to hell at a soul level, a spiritual level,

00:35:18 eternal level, but at earthly and temporal level, which is actually what they said in the statement

00:35:26 was that it said in terms of their negative effects towards Christians. So they're talking

00:35:32 about temporal harms and effects in this earthly life for Christians. And I'm thinking,

00:35:41 like, put Judaism aside, like, like the implication of that is that like all false religions 1.00

00:35:46 in all places and in all times, temporally, and their negative effects, particularly as it affects

00:35:53 christians have been equal and i'm like i don't even know how you would begin to demonstrate that

00:35:58 like how how would you like i feel bad for john travolta and tom cruise but how would how would

00:36:03 you argue that scientology yeah has been um as harmful over the last 80 years that that is an

00:36:10 equal harm to uh 1300 years of islam like i don't even know how i would begin to make that point so

00:36:19 anyways yeah yeah i yeah it was it was silly i i i i i didn't even know what to say i i just thought

00:36:27 it was like overall um poorly done and in poor taste and especially in the context in which it

00:36:34 was done the time frame was done so yeah if there had been you know like genuine you know resolution

00:36:40 some time that passed um and maybe and and the biggest thing honestly is when you do statements

00:36:47 like that one it should be very few and far far between if ever um but in rare occasions if

00:36:53 something like that might actually be necessary it becomes to me like all the more imperative

00:36:57 um not just sheer number but um but but who who's among that number in terms of collaborators and

00:37:05 involvement like like i think it actually would have been um now i i don't know if we would have

00:37:10 said yes but like let's say that like things were resolved and and there was you know a generous and

00:37:16 you know hospitable welcome uh given to you me andrew isker brian survey you know organ guys

00:37:23 and to like come in also um i don't know if we would have but but i'm just saying but like

00:37:29 um if they're you know if it's like hey guys what like what do you think

00:37:33 like even a even a recognition like we recognize that you guys um are are not unhinged and uh and

00:37:42 you guys are not harboring you know sinful malice and hatred you know uh we don't like the you know

00:37:47 we disagree with some of your doctrine we don't always like the way that you word things you could

00:37:51 even say like we think at times if you know you're not careful enough and it leaves the door open

00:37:55 even though you're not that guy it may leave the door open for somebody who is that guy

00:37:58 but still by virtue of inviting uh the other side of the aisle guys like us to the table

00:38:04 um that actually might have got a lot of support instead it got you know fake signatures of

00:38:09 aristotle was one of them like you know yeah and which is a shame like it could have been it could

00:38:15 have been a document at least the attempt i don't know if it could have succeeded but at least like

00:38:20 the attempt to have a consensus document between especially in a time in which like you and i

00:38:28 you and i don't want disunity right with these guys no i didn't write the book

00:38:33 ever even once thinking of James White or Joe Boot

00:38:37 or any of these people.

00:38:39 Did you even know who they were at the time?

00:38:41 I don't think I knew who Joe Boot, I knew James White.

00:38:43 I didn't know Joe Boot.

00:38:44 I knew Sam Lynn, I knew he wouldn't like the book.

00:38:47 He didn't like me from a long time ago.

00:38:49 But yeah, none of us wanted to have disunity

00:38:54 and certainly not to have a type of public brother war.

00:38:59 Things that could have handled privately

00:39:02 should have been handled there it's a white supremacist slur though brother war yeah yeah

00:39:07 is that officially now and they did that i heard that argument to be fair i i did uh nathan looked

00:39:13 it up and um he's like oh snap he was like it's actually a little bit true the no more brother

00:39:18 wars was like something that white supremacists uh used to like not funny funny that that's

00:39:22 actually just kind of funny now because none of us knew that like i didn't know that no one knew it

00:39:27 and the thing is we didn't even come up with it so like i you know i i think i i retweeted some

00:39:31 things of other guys saying it, but as far, unless my memory fails me, I think I'm pretty

00:39:39 sure it was Ogden and particularly, I think Eric Kahn, I doubt he knew. Then again, the fact that

00:39:47 it's Eric Kahn, I could see him knowing and not being a white supremacist, but doing it just to

00:39:54 rile people up, you know, like a call for peace that he knows that those on the other side of

00:39:59 that I will be offended by.

00:40:00 I could, like, that seems like an Eric Conn thing to do.

00:40:03 I've learned so many white supremacist slogans

00:40:05 because I've been accused of them.

00:40:07 Yeah.

00:40:08 Yeah, like when the book came out,

00:40:09 they're like, what is it, like 13 words or nine words?

00:40:12 I don't even know what it is.

00:40:12 The 11 words?

00:40:13 11 words.

00:40:14 I don't even know what it is now.

00:40:15 And it's like, oh, yeah, that's in,

00:40:16 like, they, like, literally counter the words

00:40:18 of a statement of my book.

00:40:21 Like, and they said, it's 11 words

00:40:24 and it has a certain ring to it.

00:40:26 That's what Wolf's alluding to.

00:40:27 and i had no idea even what that was i don't know that either other things too like i thought the

00:40:32 11 words was in reference to your uh lone bulwark oh i thought that was i don't even no no no that

00:40:38 well that's in i think it's a 13 word i don't even know like but i think it's a 13 word thing

00:40:43 that like neo-nazis used oh i didn't see that somehow they thought that like a sentence in

00:40:48 the introduction is in reference to that and i didn't even know what that was and i have not

00:40:52 even heard about this certain words that i used i used the word like instauration which is an old

00:40:56 word for like restoration or recovery or you know and they're like oh that's a far right word and i

00:41:01 was like dude like i'm learning stuff by you accusing me of all these things it's really

00:41:06 funny it's like it seems like you guys know more about white supremacy yeah i know what this stuff

00:41:11 is um but anyway uh how do how do we oh we got on that because we were talking about deck i i

00:41:17 brought it up it was my fault no it's fine spice things up about declarations history and stuff

00:41:21 Yeah, so we were talking about declarations, and I was thinking of confessions and things like that,

00:41:28 and I think there was something before I derailed us.

00:41:30 Well, let's go. We got a few minutes left.

00:41:32 Yeah, go ahead. 0.56

00:41:33 Let's go to the First Amendment, just so we can cover that.

00:41:35 Yeah, there you go. That's a statement. That's a declaration.

00:41:38 Yeah, right.

00:41:39 First Amendment. Here we go.

00:41:40 The First Amendment, first word of the First Amendment.

00:41:42 Yeah.

00:41:43 It's actually hilarious when I watch these guys, they'll attack me and say,

00:41:47 First Amendment, and they'll read it out loud, and then they'll be like,

00:41:51 that means that there could be no religion uh in in anywhere in the united states right and it's

00:41:57 as if they didn't even read the first word the first word is congress what the you know what

00:42:03 the first amendment is not recognizing a universal principle for all levels of government it is a

00:42:12 prudential statement saying that it's it would be it's would be ill-suited to put to have a national

00:42:20 church at the national level. Because you have congregationalism in Massachusetts, you have

00:42:27 religious liberty traditions in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, and all that stuff were different.

00:42:34 So the irrational fear, I would say, of the Anti-Federalists, I think it was an irrational

00:42:38 fear, was that someone would come to power, and then the Presbyterians would make it a

00:42:42 confessional state, something like that. That's what they were afraid of. Or actually, probably

00:42:45 more likely the Anglicans would have a sort of like bishop, episcopal thing that they

00:42:51 established.

00:42:52 So that was the fear.

00:42:53 Irrational, but nevertheless, that's what it was there to prevent.

00:42:56 It was not there to prevent the states themselves from having some relationship to religion,

00:43:01 including having their own state churches.

00:43:06 And there were several state churches at the time.

00:43:07 Which may or may not be a good idea, but it would have been permissible.

00:43:11 Yeah, and at that time, they were all very weak in the sense that the only thing was that you were taxed, and that tax money would go to the church that the state recognized, or as the established church, or you can direct it to your own congregation.

00:43:30 so if you choose you can elect you can through like your own volition choose and i think in

00:43:37 most states was like this you can if you're baptist your money your tie your money from

00:43:41 the tax goes to that church or that denomination or something like that and the idea behind it was

00:43:47 that hey hey you have these sparsely populated places they don't have a lot of money and they're

00:43:51 probably not going to dish out a bunch of money to build a church and to have fun to minister

00:43:55 Nevertheless, they need church.

00:43:57 They need ministers.

00:43:58 And so if you have this tax, this funds ministry so that everyone can have ministry.

00:44:03 That was the idea behind it.

00:44:05 It wasn't necessarily to replace your tithe or anything like that.

00:44:08 It was a way to fund ministry in the state because they consider religion not only good

00:44:13 in itself as worship of God, but also good for the health of society.

00:44:17 So that was the idea.

00:44:19 And those lasted many years.

00:44:20 The last one was disestablished in early 1830s.

00:44:24 but it did not establish a secularist principle that then went all the way down in the states.

00:44:32 The states had the power to establish a church up until the 1950s and 60s, until they used the

00:44:40 14th Amendment to then apply the First Amendment to the states. So that's how they get around the

00:44:46 Congress word in the front, is they use the 14th Amendment to say, well, actually, all those rights

00:44:52 now apply to the states, all the way down to the point where a football team cannot have a prayer

00:44:56 before a football game on Friday night. But yeah, that was a bad application of law. But for most

00:45:04 of our history, in principle, the states could have done a church establishment. They had blasphemy 0.85

00:45:11 laws, Sunday laws, blue laws were very common throughout the country. And so the idea that 0.88

00:45:18 religion is separated from the state is absolutely false in the American tradition.

00:45:24 And so in terms of Christian nationalism, I don't want to return to Geneva. I know you don't want 0.93

00:45:29 to return to Geneva. No one I know actually wants to return to Geneva. They are more pro-establishment

00:45:36 than I am, but my vision is that a 19th century type of Protestantism with all its messiness,

00:45:42 where we all say we are a Christian people, but we're a Christian Protestant people,

00:45:47 And so we're going to arrange ourselves in light of that.

00:45:50 That's my vision.

00:45:52 That'll look different in England. 1.00

00:45:53 The Christian nationals would look different in England. 1.00

00:45:55 It would look different in Hungary and Italy 1.00

00:45:56 and all these other places

00:45:57 with their own traditions and institutions.

00:46:01 But we have federalism,

00:46:03 which means that Idaho could have an established church

00:46:05 and, you know, so can Texas and North Carolina.

00:46:09 So anyway, that's the idea behind it.

00:46:13 That's great.

00:46:13 And so there's no,

00:46:15 is absolutely there's no reason to say that to be a good christian nationalist you cannot be a good

00:46:21 american i would say to be a good american you need to be a christian nationalist um because

00:46:27 for most of our history we thought of ourselves as a christian people even though it wasn't

00:46:32 established explicitly in the constitution which i consider a mistake but among the people

00:46:37 themselves it was we are christian people and this was always like even in like the early 20th

00:46:44 century progressives, the progressive social gospel guys, this is how their argument for

00:46:51 social policy went. They said, if we are a Christian people, then we should have these

00:46:57 social policies, X, Y, Z. And they'd affirm, we are a Christian people, right? So ergo, 0.63

00:47:03 we should have. So that was their reasoning. And so their premise was, we are a Christian

00:47:07 people, let's act like it. So even the left, you could call them the left, on that side said,

00:47:13 were christian people and it really wasn't until the last few decades when that was seemingly

00:47:19 forgotten i mean prayer was taken out of schools um really there was a strict separation of church

00:47:25 and state the uh the the wall of separation nonsense that came in there um i know we're

00:47:31 out of time but last thing among the founders madison and jefferson were not they were in the

00:47:38 minority when it came to church-state relations. If you read the Supreme Court documents in the last

00:47:45 80 years, they only cite Jefferson and Madison, but they were the minority position.

00:47:51 John Adams, George Mason, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, all those guys

00:47:58 believed that a type of soft establishment for the states was not only okay, but it was prudent.

00:48:07 It was right. But in the end, over the course of history, really only from the last few decades,

00:48:14 Madison and Jefferson have become the giants through which to interpret the First Amendment.

00:48:19 But that's totally false. If you're going to interpret the First Amendment, it's better to

00:48:23 look at John Adams, Roger Sherman, George Mason, George Washington, those guys, who all again,

00:48:28 all affirmed that it seems right to tax people so they can fund ministry in the church, in the

00:48:34 state. So anyway, that's what I'll leave it at. Yeah. Okay. So this was episode nine. We have

00:48:40 our final episode to go. So if you're a part of this series, stay tuned. We'd love for you to

00:48:45 be able to finish off with us. And our last episode, we're going to try to make it more

00:48:49 practical, look at takeaways, applications, basically trying to answer the question in

00:48:54 practical ways. Where do we go from here? So Christian nationalism, you know, for those of

00:48:59 you who think we're crazy then you know maybe tune out but for those of you who like hey you 0.79

00:49:04 might be on to something okay but how do we do it it actually might be the spiciest uh you know 0.81

00:49:09 it could be episode every just have to i guess we'll find out we'll find out so thanks for 0.99

00:49:13 tuning in and we'll see you in the next and final episode

`witch hunt`	Both words, anywhere in the episode.
`"witch hunt"`	The exact phrase.
`witch OR hunt`	Either word.
`"alpha male" -"high value"`	The first phrase, but not the second.
`(feminist OR feminism) AND (marriage OR divorce)`	Parentheses group alternatives.
`"decline civilization"~5`	Both words within 5 words of each other.

`misogyn*`	Any word starting with "misogyn": misogyny, misogynist, misogynistic…
`feminizm~1`	Words one letter off: catches typos and transcription errors.

`person:"Andrew Tate"`	Episodes where they host, guest, or are mentioned.
`host:"Glenn Beck"`	Episodes they host.
`guest:"Jordan Peterson"`	Episodes they appear on as a guest.
`mentioned:"Andrew Tate" -host:"Andrew Tate"`	Talked about on other people's shows.
`show:"Bannon's War Room"`	Episodes from one show.

`topics:abortion`	Episodes tagged with a topic (see the Topics page).
`summary:"Andrew Tate"`	Words in the episode summary. Summaries are machine-written and can be wrong.

`"great replacement" AND episode_date:[NOW-1YEAR TO NOW]`	From the past 12 months.
`lockdown AND episode_date:[2020-01-01T00:00:00Z TO 2020-12-31T23:59:59Z]`	From one year. Dates need the full time, as shown.
`"high value" AND misogyny_count:[100 TO *]`	Episodes with 100 or more sentences flagged as misogynistic. Also: hate_speech_count, toxicity_count, word_count.

The NXR Podcast - August 30, 2025

THE FRIDAY SPECIAL - Drowning Baptists And The “Evolution” Of Christian Nationalism

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript