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

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00:00:30.000 Okay, here we are. This is a 10-part series. I'm Pastor Joel Webin. This is part nine,

00:00:51.120 and Dr. Wolf has prepped me right before we started recording. We've got an idea,

00:00:56.300 roadmap of what the episode's about. I forget virtually everything that you said, but I remember

00:01:00.640 this. We're talking about persecuting Baptists. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, and why we should do that 1.00

00:01:05.260 all the time and bring it back. But we are going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the

00:01:09.340 early American history being a pan-Protestant movement. You know, the immediate objection is,

00:01:14.280 yeah, pan-Protestant, my butt. You guys were, you know, picking on the Baptists. What's up with that? 1.00

00:01:19.960 And if you go back to being a Christian nation, you're going to do it again. I'm Presbyterian, 0.87

00:01:23.240 so a little bit different when you say congregation you're talking about like a john owen

00:01:27.580 kind of like there's still paedo yeah yeah but but there's not a presbytery outside of the local

00:01:31.100 church yeah like john conden john yeah they were all baptist uh polity but but a uh paedo

00:01:36.940 covenantalism yeah yeah close enough yeah i could get behind that yeah i'm close yeah i've been close

00:01:45.700 for a while now yeah i think you know someday i'll convince you the presbyterian polity but uh

00:01:51.100 you know. Honestly, the most convincing thing of the Presbyterian polity is every time I go online

00:01:56.720 and read the thoughts of other Baptist ministers. I'm like, somebody needs to be in charge of these

00:02:01.320 guys. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it can be bad because there's that good old boy system and a certain

00:02:09.460 mentality that can prevent you from speaking clearly and truthfully about things. Right.

00:02:15.040 Because then you have the heavy hand of a Presbyterian. Well, I was going to say, you know, 0.53

00:02:19.880 And celebrities in a denomination can be very kind of informally

00:02:23.880 influential at a presbytery level.

00:02:25.660 At the time of this recording, like, honestly,

00:02:28.240 my Baptist polity in congregationalism is one of the things that saved me.

00:02:32.140 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:32.980 With a recent controversy, you know, like,

00:02:35.480 and really putting a strong arm on, like, you've got this, you know,

00:02:40.060 this guy and he needs to be brought up on charges or church disciplined.

00:02:43.800 And because I'm a Baptist, I was able to say, take a hike.

00:02:48.060 yeah i mean it shows that like that like we said before that that something can be good in structure

00:02:53.600 like it's good to have a the type of authority structure you have in a presbyterian model it

00:02:58.020 can be abused but it can be abused and it can actually be harmful yep that's we're not here

00:03:02.260 to talk about okay apologies well take us away in terms of early persecution and baptism we want

00:03:08.200 to be pan-protestant we actually think it'll work even though there are some examples that can be

00:03:11.800 cited to the contrary. Yeah, so the main point of this episode will be how you can be Christian

00:03:19.000 nationalist. You can be a good Christian nationalist and be a good American. Because

00:03:22.980 there is that question of, well, wait a second, isn't the American tradition opposed to

00:03:26.920 being a Christian nation? Didn't we found a secular republic or a secularist republic?

00:03:32.840 And don't we have a First Amendment and all that? And one of the things I want to say is actually

00:03:37.940 there is continuity from our Puritan past with the founding and beyond. So people think that

00:03:45.680 there was a major break, like the founders broke away in principle from their forefathers,

00:03:54.440 particularly from New England. And so I want to start the story in New England, in the 17th

00:04:01.620 century new england uh focusing on massachusetts bay colony and particularly boston um so that was

00:04:10.780 they were congregationalists for our purposes they're presbyterian back then they they of

00:04:15.360 course didn't they wrote against each other on polity but they were uh generally speaking uh

00:04:20.300 99 on the same side right um and uh so they they all they left and uh landed in what we call

00:04:30.220 Massachusetts Bay. And they came to what's often called an errand in the wilderness. Before the

00:04:35.740 Puritans, you had the pilgrims. So there is a difference between the pilgrims, Plymouth Rock

00:04:40.580 and Salem, but came to be kind of under the same colony. And so you have the, so anyway, I'm going

00:04:48.080 to focus on the Puritans. They found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They have their city of

00:04:53.500 Boston. And they wanted to make it in what they said, the congregationalist way. So that was the

00:04:59.600 intent. That was the people that came there initially, and most of the people that came

00:05:04.060 there subsequently over the subsequent decades were there because they wanted also to be a part

00:05:10.460 of this congregationalist way. They did believe that the civil magistrate could suppress religion,

00:05:18.320 they did believe, or suppress false religion, that they could prevent the building of new churches

00:05:24.460 with contrary denominations like Baptists,

00:05:26.960 and we'll get into that.

00:05:27.700 But anyway, one of the first problems they had

00:05:33.120 was by a guy named Roger Williams. 0.90

00:05:35.200 Now, to this day, a lot of Baptists and others

00:05:38.680 and religious liberty people will look to,

00:05:41.440 oh, what happened to Roger Williams?

00:05:42.880 Look what happened to Roger Williams.

00:05:44.520 But they really haven't read the primary source documents on this.

00:05:49.260 Roger Williams was actually kind of a nut.

00:05:50.960 He was not what you think he was. The reasons why he was eventually banished from Boston,

00:06:02.180 or I mean from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was because one, he refused the oath. There was an

00:06:11.380 oath. They were afraid that there was a bunch of bishops and Jesuits that showed up, and so they

00:06:15.740 required an oath to um and and he refused and thought that it was a violation of the third

00:06:21.880 commandment to have a required oath to to live in in massachusetts that's one reason they thought

00:06:27.460 he was he was subversive so again it was about politics the other was that he thought that the

00:06:32.380 charter that allowed them to be there to found the colony in the first place was invalid because he

00:06:38.620 thought it was immoral so the very basis for the colony the basis for the the king claim to the

00:06:44.760 place. And then with the magistrates there, the foundation of it was actually, he thought was

00:06:50.600 immoral. So again, subversive. And really the main reason was not, the reasons for banishing

00:06:59.760 was not actually religious liberty. He did later on have this, he published

00:07:04.700 tracks against the suppression of false religion. And John Cotton responded to him.

00:07:13.080 uh he eventually by the time before he was kicked out uh he was kicked out by his own church in

00:07:20.500 Salem and he became uh like a family church basically the only members was him his wife

00:07:26.480 and I guess maybe his kids so he was by his own church kicked out for basically being a nut um so

00:07:32.740 he really was even though uh you could see he was an early advocate of a type of maximal religious

00:07:38.680 liberty in a way, though it wasn't actually as Maxwell as you'll think, he was not kicked out

00:07:42.960 for religious liberty. It was mainly because he was subversive of, he was subversive to the system

00:07:50.420 in place. So that's the first thing to keep in mind when we, when he did that, that's just on

00:07:54.780 Roger Williams. And he's really not what people think he actually was. And the common theme

00:08:06.640 throughout all these different, you know, quote, persecutions in New England was they thought

00:08:12.860 these people were subversive. They thought they would destroy the civil discipline and the

00:08:18.840 spiritual discipline of the place that they were in. They said that we came here to organize

00:08:25.900 ourselves, church and state, in the Congregationalist way for this purpose. And if you come here

00:08:31.620 and join us in that purpose, then you can stay here. You can join the church, and if you don't

00:08:38.140 subvert it, you can be here all day long. But the moment you begin to undermine that thing that we

00:08:43.520 all came here to do, well, you're out. The same thing with the antinomians. You have Anne Hutchinson. 0.99

00:08:50.120 One of the fears of antinomianism was not just the theology. It was that antinomianism would

00:08:55.060 undermine both the church discipline and the civil discipline. Like if you start rejecting

00:09:00.460 the use of the law in terms of your, as in sanctification and use of the law in your

00:09:07.320 spiritual life, and just dwell on your justification and don't actually examine

00:09:11.640 yourself with regard to your good works, then that will undermine the entire system we have set up

00:09:16.960 here. And so Antinomians, there's a long story about that. But the fear was not only theological, 1.00

00:09:27.640 but it was political. It was a fear that you're undermining the project we set out to do.

00:09:33.600 And so Anne Hutchinson was eventually banished, as was another guy named Wheelwright. Anne Hutchinson

00:09:39.620 in her family tragically was killed by indians later on um but uh so that that was that so

00:09:44.900 it was not simply like hey here's a bunch of heretics who are here and there and saying

00:09:51.860 these things let's round them up and let's whip them and beat them and punish them it wasn't like

00:09:55.600 that at all um it was actually a a there was a civil political concern wrapped up with these 0.96

00:10:03.820 people uh and that justified to them to act against them um and uh and so that's that's the

00:10:11.860 antinomians uh the the third one was the baptists um oh actually i i could talk about the quakers

00:10:19.020 i'll just say the quakers were nuts yeah you always hear like oh they executed uh what's her 0.69

00:10:23.820 name um mary something i forget her name they executed her and that they were they were absolutely 0.98

00:10:28.860 nuts like today we think of the quaker as like that nice liberal like or not even nice but some 0.98

00:10:33.740 short-haired liberal woman and goes to a Quaker church. She doesn't believe anything. It's a 1.00

00:10:37.860 social club and a political activist committee. They're harmless type people apart from their bad

00:10:42.580 politics. But back then, they would get off the ship. They start rambling and yelling at you.

00:10:47.480 And there was one instance that Samuel Sowell records in his diary or his journal that a woman

00:10:54.960 shows up to church in blackface wearing a bag and just starts shouting at the minister.

00:11:00.280 so the quakers were actually very creative their theology was not only not their theology was bad 0.95

00:11:05.680 but their public behavior was notoriously horrible and so they'd be they'd banished then to come back 0.92

00:11:12.100 they'd be banished they'd come back and eventually after like the fourth or fifth time of this

00:11:15.880 happening they said that's enough um and they executed a couple of them but again it was a

00:11:21.780 matter of public disturbance civil disputes they disregarded civil magistracy you know chris the

00:11:28.420 do you have a christian state and christian uh so again it was it was largely because of subversion

00:11:35.180 to the project they had chosen to undertake and then the baptist was the same way um

00:11:42.080 they would affirm that there that these baptists were fellow believers so there's a very important

00:11:47.420 principle to understand about new england puritans is they didn't the the like john cotton and the

00:11:53.960 other guys in New England, they were not saying that we are the only true Christians. They would

00:12:00.020 affirm that the ministers in the Church of England were true ministers, that they administered true

00:12:05.760 sacraments and the Word. They would affirm this about the Baptists. They would even affirm this

00:12:11.220 about antinomians as well, that they were Christians, just an error. The same, that's how 0.99

00:12:15.540 they considered Baptists to be Christians, but an error. And they even allowed, Cotton says that 1.00

00:12:23.320 within their churches, they allowed antinomians and Baptists to be full members of their churches,

00:12:28.260 and there were actually members of their churches, but they were just told, you know, you can't talk

00:12:32.920 about the Baptist thing. You can't do the antinomian thing. That stuff's bad, but you can

00:12:36.480 still, as Christians, have every right to the word and the table and the sacraments as all the rest

00:12:43.700 of us. That's how I treat Arminians. Yeah, okay. Right, but that recognized, that's an early,

00:12:50.980 that's a really important early sign uh of protestants and this this is even like you

00:12:57.800 read this in all enthusiasts and older writers where there are differences that you consider

00:13:03.800 important but you can still recognize that yes i consider you an heir but also a brother in christ

00:13:10.820 they would not extend that to like roman catholics and some like uh notorious bishops and and um and

00:13:17.660 the Church of England, but your everyday sort of Church of England minister, they wouldn't say

00:13:22.420 you're false, like you're not a gospel minister. In fact, one of the disputes over with Roger

00:13:27.780 Williams that I didn't mention was Roger Williams would say that if someone goes to England,

00:13:33.100 let's say he's a merchant, and he attends a Church of England Anglican service,

00:13:40.400 then he needs to come back and repent, because that's a false church, according to Roger Williams.

00:13:46.280 And what John Cotton says,

00:13:47.660 people don't realize,

00:13:48.280 it's John Cotton the Puritan.

00:13:49.700 What he says is actually,

00:13:51.340 Roger, you're wrong.

00:13:52.940 We still affirm that there's true gospel ministry

00:13:56.600 occurring in the Church of England.

00:13:58.320 We just think there are these errors

00:13:59.620 that by conscience we can't participate in,

00:14:01.840 so we came out of here. 0.90

00:14:04.640 So Roger Williams was the sectarian.

00:14:06.980 He was a sectarian to a pretty extreme degree,

00:14:10.340 where the Puritans were not.

00:14:13.120 And so you could do that,

00:14:14.540 come back and still be a full member of a New England church. So anyway, extension of brotherhood

00:14:20.320 of true believers. Now, with the Baptists, it wasn't simply that they were Baptists that they

00:14:25.820 were persecuted. It was that the Baptists wanted to erect their own churches, and in doing so,

00:14:34.940 they were considered subversive of the project, because Baptists would not recognize anyone else's

00:14:41.800 baptism. They wouldn't recognize the baptism of the civil magistrate. They wouldn't recognize

00:14:46.480 the baptism of the church ministers around them. That's still the difficulty that we

00:14:51.440 experience today is that it's not a two-way street. It's a one-way stream just by nature

00:14:55.280 of the position. Now, I've found some workarounds in our local church, but just the nature of the

00:15:04.720 position, it's far easier for a Presbyterian or any Paedo-Baptist to accommodate a Credo-Baptist 0.99

00:15:11.400 than it is for a credo-baptist to accommodate the paedo-baptists. Now, I, you know, I have most of 0.97

00:15:16.680 my friends at this point are paedo-baptists, and so even locally, I have paedo-baptist friends, 0.96

00:15:20.580 and so with families that are of the paedo-persuasion, I, you know, I send them down the 0.92

00:15:25.740 road, and they have their babies baptized, and I close my eyes, and, you know, and welcome them

00:15:32.920 back, so. Yeah, yeah, and that's precisely, that was precisely the problem back then, is the

00:15:40.600 the Baptist would very openly say that basically you're not a true church, you're not full of true

00:15:48.940 Christians. And in the words of Cotton Mather, he said that they would de-church or unchurch

00:15:56.820 the churches around them, including the ministers, the magistrates. And so if you consider it's a

00:16:01.900 small population, they came here for congregationalism, and now you have people

00:16:08.980 coming there who are not welcomed or invited, who are now creating essentially established

00:16:14.240 institutions considered subversive to that. Not just that they have their own churches,

00:16:20.580 but those churches are denying the whole fabric of everything else. They're not just doing their

00:16:29.240 own thing. They're doing their own thing while publicly decrying and denouncing everyone else

00:16:33.020 is false. Yeah. And, and, and to the, to the, to the Puritan, to the, um, Congregationalist

00:16:40.200 perspective, like I said, they were willing to receive Baptists as church members in their

00:16:46.520 churches that could not be reciprocated. So all the things could be reciprocated, um, and, and

00:16:53.140 these things accommodated. Like, I think that Cotton, I forget if it was John Cotton or Cotton

00:16:57.420 Mather, said that they would even allow like Baptists to dismiss themselves when there was

00:17:04.020 an infant baptism. I could be wrong about that, but I recall something about, okay, this violates

00:17:08.600 your conscience, we'll accommodate you. So if this bothers you, you can depart when we baptize

00:17:14.140 the infant. And so there was accommodation, but then once you create the church and it's

00:17:19.920 established and now you have Baptists flourishing that then would, could be subversive of the 0.86

00:17:24.360 brought. So that was then suppressed. And the magistrate said, no, you cannot have a church.

00:17:29.840 And that went on for many decades. There was like whippings and things like that that went on and

00:17:34.860 to try to prevent that. Years later, you have Cotton Mather, who's the son of Increase Mather.

00:17:42.560 Cotton Mather's writing about the early 1700s. And he actually did not like persecution of heretics

00:17:48.660 or of the Baptist. He didn't consider Baptist heretics, but he did not like persecution,

00:17:52.980 as he called it, of these people. But he did say that the reasoning behind for the Baptist

00:17:58.200 was that there's a reason behind it, and it wasn't simply because they were Baptists.

00:18:03.400 But anyway, the point being is, I think the fundamental principle is that people were

00:18:07.300 acknowledging each other's mutual faith, but they had a political concern that is not simply

00:18:15.420 political, it's also related to everything else, but that's why they suppressed these people,

00:18:19.760 including the Baptist. You go to the 1690s, and now after you have the English Bill of Rights,

00:18:27.020 now it's religious liberty is the official law of the land from the king on down. And so the

00:18:31.940 charter of Massachusetts was revoked, and basically what was put in its place was the

00:18:37.920 religious liberty doctrine. So from there on, there was no formal persecution apart from all

00:18:46.420 these people. Now, so moving on in the narrative, in the 17-teens, you have Cotton Mather still

00:18:56.240 there, and Increase Mather, his father, is still there. Increase was part of the persecutions of

00:19:03.120 the Baptists in the 1670s and 80s. But now you have Cotton Mather, a Congregationalist minister,

00:19:10.900 giving the ordination sermon for a Baptist of the First Baptist Church of Boston.

00:19:16.420 So you see a change.

00:19:18.780 So you went from Yower Brothers,

00:19:20.220 but you can't have your own church

00:19:21.360 to I'm going to give this sermon

00:19:24.300 where you're ordained for this church

00:19:27.660 called First Baptist Church of Boston.

00:19:31.100 And so you see a change.

00:19:33.300 And that event, I think,

00:19:36.780 is really significant in our history,

00:19:38.280 even though very few people know about it.

00:19:40.340 It shows that brothers in a civil life

00:19:44.360 can say, look, we have our disagreements, but we can actually get along. This project of

00:19:50.780 Christian civilization can operate with us despite our differences and no need to throw out,

00:20:00.440 to attack each other physically and through law. So the idea of religious liberty then in the

00:20:07.160 American context was not simply reading John Locke or reading Enlightenment philosophers about

00:20:13.660 about religious liberty and freedom of conscience, nor was it even about simply

00:20:21.420 preventing the wars of religion. That is part of it, certainly. But it's also a more positive

00:20:29.160 development, I would argue, between brothers saying, hey, we can do this together. This can

00:20:35.480 be something we can do as Protestant brothers. So religious liberty, in the mind of the founders,

00:20:41.200 you're saying was not for the purpose of like, um, the church of Satan.

00:20:47.060 No, no, absolutely not.

00:20:49.100 No.

00:20:49.740 Yeah.

00:20:50.140 I thought that's what it was all about.

00:20:51.700 Yeah.

00:20:51.960 It's so bizarre that like when you, when you see like, yeah, these people think that it's

00:20:57.880 this abstract enlightenment notion that came from nowhere, from just the brains of someone

00:21:03.940 sitting in a, in his, on his desk in a, an office somewhere.

00:21:07.340 but it was really um largely a product of just experience it was protestantism

00:21:14.900 in you know affirming that we could be we could be mutual brothers despite our differences and

00:21:22.000 then the experience with each other of saying this could work as a civil as as a sort of pan

00:21:28.660 protestant project right together so that was all that was early early 18th century

00:21:33.920 and then you get into like the founding period and by then every colony was had adopted religious

00:21:45.080 liberty there still were establishments you got like a kind of church of england dominant in

00:21:50.340 virginia you got congregationalism in massachusetts and in connecticut then you have some religious

00:21:57.320 like religious liberty places like rhode island like a non-establishment like rhode island and

00:22:02.580 pennsylvania um so it's kind of a mixed diversity but broadly speaking they're all inheritors of

00:22:09.080 that experience of protestantism so even with an established church in massachusetts you still

00:22:13.860 had baptists and presbyterians and and uh i don't know how many anglicans were there but

00:22:18.360 um so yeah um and this is how we have to then come to understand like the first amendment right

00:22:24.500 uh well what's the first thing like mutual denominations of our common lord or how does

00:22:31.180 the phrase go you meaning like the oh you're talking about the revision of the westminster

00:22:36.480 standards yeah yeah yeah so that comes about do you remember the wording i think it says that

00:22:42.400 the uh you know i think you quoted it yeah like of our common lord yeah i know the of our common

00:22:47.120 lord i can't just i can't quite remember verbatim the preceding part it's like multiple denominations

00:22:53.340 or expressions of our of worship of our common lord or something like that yeah and that that

00:22:58.820 I would say is, I think that the American revision, it actually is not as much of a

00:23:05.100 substantive change as people think it is. I think there are some changes that are probably

00:23:11.740 changes in substance, but it's also bringing them in, bringing Presbyterianism into the American

00:23:17.380 context. And it's in a way updating, even though I don't affirm that confession, I affirm the other

00:23:23.720 one, but I would say it's in a way updating the confession for the American context in light of

00:23:30.320 the development of religious liberty. But it still permits, and most people to that day,

00:23:36.760 in that day, believe you can still suppress atheism. You can still grow some piety. It does

00:23:42.680 not like permit Church of Satan. It's not going to permit the, like, it doesn't in itself say you

00:23:51.620 can't um like suppress islam or like non-christian religion or something like that it's just it's

00:23:59.600 it's talking about how we as a uh churches of our common lord um are not to attack each other on the

00:24:07.200 basis of that it's not speaking about false religions or atheism is speaking about um let's

00:24:12.760 not be jerks to different christian denominations yeah and i would say like even back then i i they

00:24:18.080 would probably many of them would exclude church of you know church of rome or rome catholicism 0.93

00:24:22.820 yeah they would have from under common common i think some like uh people like john witherspoon

00:24:27.960 yeah i think he would exclude it as well but there was a um that it was kind of a there were

00:24:33.560 a lot of anti-roman anti-roman is romanist or anti-catholicism um sentiment at that time

00:24:40.960 but still yeah no i mean it was it was actually very common john jay was very anti-roman catholic

00:24:46.860 um and uh throughout american history and into the 19th century there was a fear that roman

00:24:52.400 catholics could not be fully loyal to um any country that they were in because they have a

00:24:59.060 dual loyalty they are loyal i don't even do loyalty their supreme loyalty is to the uh the

00:25:06.060 pope right who has civil authority in a sense in their minds over all civil parties so they can

00:25:11.460 And not only does he have civil authority and civil conflation of spheres and different

00:25:17.660 jurisdictions with church and state, which is not a theocracy, but an ecclesiocracy for

00:25:24.480 all intents and purposes, but also a dual loyalty or supreme loyalty to whatever nation

00:25:32.760 by proxy that the Pope happens to be in.

00:25:35.820 it's like, cause it's not like, he's not, he's your Pope, but like right now, you know, it's

00:25:42.500 like, like he's in Rome, you know, like he's, he's in Italy, you know, or, and, and then he also

00:25:46.940 is from a different, you know, right now, like, what is it? Argentina that Pope Francis is from.

00:25:51.620 So it's like, you got a guy who probably you would expect, you would even hope has some,

00:25:56.220 some sense of fondness for Argentina, but is located in Italy and, and yet has some kind of

00:26:04.920 authority that's binding over someone in china it's like it's it's not a great system

00:26:11.640 yeah i know and and this wasn't pure this wasn't irrational uh i mean like we tend to think of

00:26:18.200 roman catholics we we consider roman catholics today in light of vatican ii and and uh when

00:26:25.320 when suddenly the roman church discovered religious liberty i think it's hilarious when

00:26:30.040 these guys like quoting um like the various papal statements regarding religious liberty is it's

00:26:35.800 like you guys were literally the worst um like people the calvinists were uh persecutors but

00:26:41.220 if you read like the jesuits like suarez and bellarmine uh and uh and and some of the others 0.86

00:26:47.580 they they said no like you cannot tolerate that the heretic and by heretic they meant anyone who 0.90

00:26:53.900 does not submit to the roman church right and they were actually absolutely brutal and so like 0.79

00:26:59.760 even all enthusiasts in like 1604 or 1603 is saying like you jesuits are nuts and that we

00:27:07.380 we protestants can actually extend toleration to people um even even to heretics if if you if uh

00:27:15.320 like we i mean yeah even heretics if it if we need to um and uh so yeah it was roman catholic church

00:27:22.380 that was absolute but in the 19th century the the fear was that again that the papal power meant

00:27:27.580 that they don't, they can't actually have true loyalty. And also that they thought that if you're

00:27:32.720 under a papal, if you're from a Roman Catholic country that is in a way submitted to the Pope,

00:27:40.340 you don't have the political principles of freedom that make it so that you can properly

00:27:45.600 assimilate. So if you're a German Catholic or an Irish Catholic, it wasn't because you were Irish

00:27:51.080 or because you were German in itself, because there were German Protestants who actually

00:27:54.720 assimilated and irish protestants who assimilated very well um before that wave of catholic

00:27:59.120 immigration but it was the fear that you've been subjected to tyranny your entire life

00:28:04.420 and now you come here and you're not just going to suddenly adopt these anglo-protestant

00:28:09.700 understand understandings of liberty um and uh and you're going to actually influence the country for

00:28:16.400 for tyranny so anyway that was 19th century um but over time even the catholics you know everything

00:28:22.600 kind of became Americanized, and some of that could be negative, but I think a lot of it was

00:28:27.980 positive. And, you know, like we were saying, you know, the Westminster and its Americanized

00:28:33.480 revision, you know, taking some of what's innate and historical and traditional to America and

00:28:41.540 fitting that within a Presbyterian scheme. But even, you know, from a little bit of my reading

00:28:45.840 and conversations, it sounds like that even with Catholicism, as rigid as it is, that Catholicism

00:28:52.960 in America was also Americanized, that over time, even the priests, you know, like there's a

00:28:58.320 different flavor of sorts of Catholicism here in America. And that's probably true of every

00:29:02.980 country. Like when you think of Catholicism in Mexico, which I've witnessed on various occasions

00:29:09.080 and trips, um, it's, it's far more superstitious, you know, uh, whereas American Catholicism is

00:29:15.640 only a little stitious. Yeah. Well, and even the, uh, you could say the, the native born type

00:29:22.600 Roman Catholics, uh, they like the, the, the famous, like the, the carols, um, uh, were from

00:29:31.240 Maryland. So there are a lot of Roman Catholics in Maryland. They were, there were delegates to

00:29:36.000 the various founding events in the founding era. And they actually were part of the school of

00:29:46.320 thought that rejected papal supremacy over civil matters. So when I say Roman Catholicism,

00:29:52.240 there has been a stream within kind of native-born Roman Catholic Americans who, in a way,

00:30:01.580 they wouldn't call it this, but essentially Protestantized their view of church and state.

00:30:05.260 so actually the pope because one of the issues all the way back like 1640s and 50s when they

00:30:10.040 were trying to establish in maryland was that the king of england required an oath that you

00:30:15.460 you'll give supreme loyalty to me the king and the the pope said no if you sign that i excommunicate

00:30:24.240 you wow and so there was all of this um drama and and there was there were attempts to try to

00:30:31.380 how can I do both? How can I sign it? Can you revise it a little bit? Because then I can sign

00:30:37.100 it. And the king was like, no, not doing that. But they were of the opinion, even though they

00:30:44.220 would get excommunicated, but in privately, they were of the opinion that actually the Pope does

00:30:48.620 not have the power to do that. So there were those who believe that. But the fear was that

00:30:53.320 the immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Poland and elsewhere, and later Italy, that

00:30:58.860 uh those people would not have that that they would affirm papal supremacy that was one of

00:31:04.400 the fears i did the same thing you know with the antioch declaration i told my church members if

00:31:08.700 they signed it they'd be excuse jk that's not that it's you know obviously that's not the point

00:31:15.500 of our conversation but i understand the sentiment and some and some of the points i agreed with but

00:31:21.020 then other points i'm just like guys it's like i feel like statements and declarations and

00:31:25.680 especially theological statements,

00:31:28.420 I don't know.

00:31:28.800 I'm of the persuasion

00:31:29.500 that they should be timeless,

00:31:31.080 you know,

00:31:31.360 and not just a product

00:31:33.380 of a personal particular.

00:31:35.780 Also not contain, 0.95

00:31:36.900 like, dumb things in it. 0.87

00:31:39.460 That's generally my rule, too. 0.99

00:31:40.880 If it's dumb, 0.98

00:31:41.600 then, like, let's not. 0.97

00:31:42.560 The Aristotle line 0.99

00:31:43.600 was pretty dumb. 0.99

00:31:45.040 I think even the Enlightenment line 1.00

00:31:46.120 was dumb. 0.99

00:31:46.880 Yeah. 1.00

00:31:47.680 Because I think the.

00:31:48.720 Remind me of that line.

00:31:49.320 I think I know what you're talking about.

00:31:50.760 Where it says, like,

00:31:51.660 we, you know,

00:31:52.780 it can't just,

00:31:53.260 it's not just the post-war consensus.

00:31:54.520 Yeah, it's also,

00:31:55.360 it's tracked right because because if it was just stated in in the uh negative of um all the ills

00:32:02.800 of the world can't just be traced back to the 1940s sure right but but but it actually made a

00:32:10.260 positive um assertion of like uh it almost almost to say uh instead we believe that they can all be

00:32:17.220 tracked back to this other event i would say that like that actually for most the collaborators that

00:32:22.700 their their theology and and worldview is rooted in enlightenment thinking and that mine's not

00:32:29.820 like mine's rooted in like early modern aristotelianism or you know whatever whatever

00:32:34.540 you want to call it but there's absolutely is like rejection of natural theology is that's

00:32:39.660 david hume and emmanuel kant um the uh the idea of limited government that's very much of a western

00:32:46.860 Enlightenment development through John Locke and others that, let's see, the rejection of

00:32:58.660 natural truth or being able to acquire natural truth through your reasoning powers,

00:33:04.640 the idea that you can't actually kind of know the good apart from revelation and that ultimately

00:33:10.460 you are just a kind of a sort of bundle of sentiments and emotions that don't have a

00:33:15.600 clear ordering principle that you can't know apart from something above you in scriptural,

00:33:20.240 like for them, scriptural revelation, that's just like Thomas Hobbes. That's the Leviathan. That's

00:33:25.440 the anthropology of Thomas Hobbes. So you could just go down, like keep going down the line on

00:33:33.160 that. So I think like their system of thought is deeply enlightenment driven and deeply like

00:33:40.480 in very nominalist uh like or you know william of ockham sort of um ways so also economic system

00:33:49.940 like adam smith like their key guy for laissez-faire capitalism is is adam smith who was a scottish

00:33:55.920 enlightenment figure so if like that's not to say that they acquired all of their thinking from the

00:34:01.900 enlightenment um but if all of that enlightenment is reflected in today like well then they represent

00:34:07.740 that version of it just it just appears to be christian right so right to me one of the uh the

00:34:13.920 lines that i i i thought was was silly was um just the notion that uh and i think this is kind

00:34:22.040 of an enlightenment thing also like a like a a weird application of egalitarianism that like

00:34:29.080 everything is steamrolled and and everything is equal uh but you know in the positive sense but

00:34:34.480 also in the negative sense. So the idea that we, I can't remember if they stated it as an

00:34:39.280 affirmation or a denial, but we'll go with the denial. It's something along the lines of we

00:34:44.820 deny that Talmudic Judaism is more of a negative impact than any other major world religion that's

00:34:53.920 false. But what was key there was you might have an argument if you were talking about in the

00:35:01.540 eternal sense, like all falsehoods and heresies and blasphemies, you know, apart from repentance

00:35:08.160 and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ are equal in the eternal sense of their ability to separate

00:35:12.280 you from a holy God. They'll all send you to hell at a soul level, a spiritual level,

00:35:18.000 eternal level, but at earthly and temporal level, which is actually what they said in the statement

00:35:26.120 was that it said in terms of their negative effects towards Christians. So they're talking

00:35:32.280 about temporal harms and effects in this earthly life for Christians. And I'm thinking,

00:35:41.180 like, put Judaism aside, like, like the implication of that is that like all false religions 1.00

00:35:46.720 in all places and in all times, temporally, and their negative effects, particularly as it affects

00:35:53.620 christians have been equal and i'm like i don't even know how you would begin to demonstrate that

00:35:58.100 like how how would you like i feel bad for john travolta and tom cruise but how would how would

00:36:03.780 you argue that scientology yeah has been um as harmful over the last 80 years that that is an

00:36:10.100 equal harm to uh 1300 years of islam like i don't even know how i would begin to make that point so

00:36:19.140 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

00:36:27.780 it was like overall um poorly done and in poor taste and especially in the context in which it

00:36:34.920 was done the time frame was done so yeah if there had been you know like genuine you know resolution

00:36:40.620 some time that passed um and maybe and and the biggest thing honestly is when you do statements

00:36:47.060 like that one it should be very few and far far between if ever um but in rare occasions if

00:36:53.020 something like that might actually be necessary it becomes to me like all the more imperative

00:36:57.800 um not just sheer number but um but but who who's among that number in terms of collaborators and

00:37:05.900 involvement like like i think it actually would have been um now i i don't know if we would have

00:37:10.700 said yes but like let's say that like things were resolved and and there was you know a generous and

00:37:16.200 you know hospitable welcome uh given to you me andrew isker brian survey you know organ guys

00:37:23.340 and to like come in also um i don't know if we would have but but i'm just saying but like

00:37:29.080 um if they're you know if it's like hey guys what like what do you think

00:37:33.320 like even a even a recognition like we recognize that you guys um are are not unhinged and uh and

00:37:42.220 you guys are not harboring you know sinful malice and hatred you know uh we don't like the you know

00:37:47.900 we disagree with some of your doctrine we don't always like the way that you word things you could

00:37:51.340 even say like we think at times if you know you're not careful enough and it leaves the door open

00:37:55.180 even though you're not that guy it may leave the door open for somebody who is that guy

00:37:58.780 but still by virtue of inviting uh the other side of the aisle guys like us to the table

00:38:04.300 um that actually might have got a lot of support instead it got you know fake signatures of

00:38:09.820 aristotle was one of them like you know yeah and which is a shame like it could have been it could

00:38:15.260 have been a document at least the attempt i don't know if it could have succeeded but at least like

00:38:20.460 the attempt to have a consensus document between especially in a time in which like you and i

00:38:28.380 you and i don't want disunity right with these guys no i didn't write the book

00:38:33.100 ever even once thinking of James White or Joe Boot

00:38:37.800 or any of these people.

00:38:39.560 Did you even know who they were at the time?

00:38:41.080 I don't think I knew who Joe Boot, I knew James White.

00:38:43.020 I didn't know Joe Boot.

00:38:44.700 I knew Sam Lynn, I knew he wouldn't like the book.

00:38:47.640 He didn't like me from a long time ago.

00:38:49.500 But yeah, none of us wanted to have disunity

00:38:54.340 and certainly not to have a type of public brother war.

00:38:59.340 Things that could have handled privately

00:39:02.940 should have been handled there it's a white supremacist slur though brother war yeah yeah

00:39:07.900 is that officially now and they did that i heard that argument to be fair i i did uh nathan looked

00:39:13.620 it up and um he's like oh snap he was like it's actually a little bit true the no more brother

00:39:18.560 wars was like something that white supremacists uh used to like not funny funny that that's

00:39:22.980 actually just kind of funny now because none of us knew that like i didn't know that no one knew it

00:39:27.580 and the thing is we didn't even come up with it so like i you know i i think i i retweeted some

00:39:31.780 things of other guys saying it, but as far, unless my memory fails me, I think I'm pretty

00:39:39.700 sure it was Ogden and particularly, I think Eric Kahn, I doubt he knew. Then again, the fact that

00:39:47.540 it's Eric Kahn, I could see him knowing and not being a white supremacist, but doing it just to

00:39:54.640 rile people up, you know, like a call for peace that he knows that those on the other side of

00:39:59.380 that I will be offended by.

00:40:00.660 I could, like, that seems like an Eric Conn thing to do.

00:40:03.560 I've learned so many white supremacist slogans

00:40:05.800 because I've been accused of them.

00:40:07.760 Yeah.

00:40:08.360 Yeah, like when the book came out,

00:40:09.620 they're like, what is it, like 13 words or nine words?

00:40:12.120 I don't even know what it is.

00:40:12.880 The 11 words?

00:40:13.540 11 words.

00:40:14.000 I don't even know what it is now.

00:40:15.440 And it's like, oh, yeah, that's in,

00:40:16.900 like, they, like, literally counter the words

00:40:18.960 of a statement of my book.

00:40:21.040 Like, and they said, it's 11 words

00:40:24.020 and it has a certain ring to it.

00:40:26.620 That's what Wolf's alluding to.

00:40:27.760 and i had no idea even what that was i don't know that either other things too like i thought the

00:40:32.520 11 words was in reference to your uh lone bulwark oh i thought that was i don't even no no no that

00:40:38.000 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

00:40:43.260 that like neo-nazis used oh i didn't see that somehow they thought that like a sentence in

00:40:48.080 the introduction is in reference to that and i didn't even know what that was and i have not

00:40:52.420 even heard about this certain words that i used i used the word like instauration which is an old

00:40:56.600 word for like restoration or recovery or you know and they're like oh that's a far right word and i

00:41:01.920 was like dude like i'm learning stuff by you accusing me of all these things it's really

00:41:06.960 funny it's like it seems like you guys know more about white supremacy yeah i know what this stuff

00:41:11.140 is um but anyway uh how do how do we oh we got on that because we were talking about deck i i

00:41:17.660 brought it up it was my fault no it's fine spice things up about declarations history and stuff

00:41:21.940 Yeah, so we were talking about declarations, and I was thinking of confessions and things like that,

00:41:28.900 and I think there was something before I derailed us.

00:41:30.840 Well, let's go. We got a few minutes left.

00:41:32.860 Yeah, go ahead. 0.56

00:41:33.280 Let's go to the First Amendment, just so we can cover that.

00:41:35.580 Yeah, there you go. That's a statement. That's a declaration.

00:41:38.740 Yeah, right.

00:41:39.460 First Amendment. Here we go.

00:41:40.760 The First Amendment, first word of the First Amendment.

00:41:42.900 Yeah.

00:41:43.640 It's actually hilarious when I watch these guys, they'll attack me and say,

00:41:47.100 First Amendment, and they'll read it out loud, and then they'll be like,

00:41:51.040 that means that there could be no religion uh in in anywhere in the united states right and it's

00:41:57.240 as if they didn't even read the first word the first word is congress what the you know what

00:42:03.860 the first amendment is not recognizing a universal principle for all levels of government it is a

00:42:12.540 prudential statement saying that it's it would be it's would be ill-suited to put to have a national

00:42:20.460 church at the national level. Because you have congregationalism in Massachusetts, you have

00:42:27.260 religious liberty traditions in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, and all that stuff were different.

00:42:34.160 So the irrational fear, I would say, of the Anti-Federalists, I think it was an irrational

00:42:38.540 fear, was that someone would come to power, and then the Presbyterians would make it a

00:42:42.300 confessional state, something like that. That's what they were afraid of. Or actually, probably

00:42:45.600 more likely the Anglicans would have a sort of like bishop, episcopal thing that they

00:42:51.480 established.

00:42:52.220 So that was the fear.

00:42:53.120 Irrational, but nevertheless, that's what it was there to prevent.

00:42:56.160 It was not there to prevent the states themselves from having some relationship to religion,

00:43:01.960 including having their own state churches.

00:43:06.280 And there were several state churches at the time.

00:43:07.940 Which may or may not be a good idea, but it would have been permissible.

00:43:11.460 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.

00:43:30.980 so if you choose you can elect you can through like your own volition choose and i think in

00:43:37.880 most states was like this you can if you're baptist your money your tie your money from

00:43:41.980 the tax goes to that church or that denomination or something like that and the idea behind it was

00:43:47.060 that hey hey you have these sparsely populated places they don't have a lot of money and they're

00:43:51.340 probably not going to dish out a bunch of money to build a church and to have fun to minister

00:43:55.440 Nevertheless, they need church.

00:43:57.320 They need ministers.

00:43:58.200 And so if you have this tax, this funds ministry so that everyone can have ministry.

00:44:03.940 That was the idea behind it.

00:44:05.820 It wasn't necessarily to replace your tithe or anything like that.

00:44:08.900 It was a way to fund ministry in the state because they consider religion not only good

00:44:13.760 in itself as worship of God, but also good for the health of society.

00:44:17.800 So that was the idea.

00:44:19.000 And those lasted many years.

00:44:20.640 The last one was disestablished in early 1830s.

00:44:24.480 but it did not establish a secularist principle that then went all the way down in the states.

00:44:32.900 The states had the power to establish a church up until the 1950s and 60s, until they used the

00:44:40.420 14th Amendment to then apply the First Amendment to the states. So that's how they get around the

00:44:46.540 Congress word in the front, is they use the 14th Amendment to say, well, actually, all those rights

00:44:52.500 now apply to the states, all the way down to the point where a football team cannot have a prayer

00:44:56.400 before a football game on Friday night. But yeah, that was a bad application of law. But for most

00:45:04.440 of our history, in principle, the states could have done a church establishment. They had blasphemy 0.85

00:45:11.680 laws, Sunday laws, blue laws were very common throughout the country. And so the idea that 0.88

00:45:18.740 religion is separated from the state is absolutely false in the American tradition.

00:45:24.680 And so in terms of Christian nationalism, I don't want to return to Geneva. I know you don't want 0.93

00:45:29.880 to return to Geneva. No one I know actually wants to return to Geneva. They are more pro-establishment

00:45:36.700 than I am, but my vision is that a 19th century type of Protestantism with all its messiness,

00:45:42.580 where we all say we are a Christian people, but we're a Christian Protestant people,

00:45:47.440 And so we're going to arrange ourselves in light of that.

00:45:50.440 That's my vision.

00:45:52.100 That'll look different in England. 1.00

00:45:53.720 The Christian nationals would look different in England. 1.00

00:45:55.300 It would look different in Hungary and Italy 1.00

00:45:56.600 and all these other places

00:45:57.900 with their own traditions and institutions.

00:46:01.420 But we have federalism,

00:46:03.000 which means that Idaho could have an established church

00:46:05.760 and, you know, so can Texas and North Carolina.

00:46:09.880 So anyway, that's the idea behind it.

00:46:13.060 That's great.

00:46:13.400 And so there's no,

00:46:15.440 is absolutely there's no reason to say that to be a good christian nationalist you cannot be a good

00:46:21.880 american i would say to be a good american you need to be a christian nationalist um because

00:46:27.820 for most of our history we thought of ourselves as a christian people even though it wasn't

00:46:32.040 established explicitly in the constitution which i consider a mistake but among the people

00:46:37.840 themselves it was we are christian people and this was always like even in like the early 20th

00:46:44.940 century progressives, the progressive social gospel guys, this is how their argument for

00:46:51.440 social policy went. They said, if we are a Christian people, then we should have these

00:46:57.360 social policies, X, Y, Z. And they'd affirm, we are a Christian people, right? So ergo, 0.63

00:47:03.220 we should have. So that was their reasoning. And so their premise was, we are a Christian

00:47:07.680 people, let's act like it. So even the left, you could call them the left, on that side said,

00:47:13.380 were christian people and it really wasn't until the last few decades when that was seemingly

00:47:19.980 forgotten i mean prayer was taken out of schools um really there was a strict separation of church

00:47:25.760 and state the uh the the wall of separation nonsense that came in there um i know we're

00:47:31.580 out of time but last thing among the founders madison and jefferson were not they were in the

00:47:38.140 minority when it came to church-state relations. If you read the Supreme Court documents in the last

00:47:45.400 80 years, they only cite Jefferson and Madison, but they were the minority position.

00:47:51.960 John Adams, George Mason, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, all those guys

00:47:58.700 believed that a type of soft establishment for the states was not only okay, but it was prudent.

00:48:07.080 It was right. But in the end, over the course of history, really only from the last few decades,

00:48:14.380 Madison and Jefferson have become the giants through which to interpret the First Amendment.

00:48:19.000 But that's totally false. If you're going to interpret the First Amendment, it's better to

00:48:23.160 look at John Adams, Roger Sherman, George Mason, George Washington, those guys, who all again,

00:48:28.260 all affirmed that it seems right to tax people so they can fund ministry in the church, in the

00:48:34.240 state. So anyway, that's what I'll leave it at. Yeah. Okay. So this was episode nine. We have

00:48:40.880 our final episode to go. So if you're a part of this series, stay tuned. We'd love for you to

00:48:45.520 be able to finish off with us. And our last episode, we're going to try to make it more

00:48:49.760 practical, look at takeaways, applications, basically trying to answer the question in

00:48:54.920 practical ways. Where do we go from here? So Christian nationalism, you know, for those of

00:48:59.420 you who think we're crazy then you know maybe tune out but for those of you who like hey you 0.79

00:49:04.300 might be on to something okay but how do we do it it actually might be the spiciest uh you know 0.81

00:49:09.880 it could be episode every just have to i guess we'll find out we'll find out so thanks for 0.99

00:49:13.500 tuning in and we'll see you in the next and final episode

The NXR Podcast - August 30, 2025

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

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