The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land"

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

The rewriting of history, the rumblings about reparations are reverberating throughout the world.Mark David Hall's book, "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land" is a must read for anyone who wants an accurate picture of the past and a positive vision for the future. Mr. Hall's book shows how Christianity has advanced freedom & equality for ALL Americans.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here:SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Every year, thousands of people go to their very first concert. Our boosted signal at large events means they can always call a taxi to get home. Mom? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was grand. Do you think you could pick me up? Every connection counts, which is why Ireland can count on our network. Vodafone. Together we can. find the rate that's right for you. And with an online portal to track every stage of your application, it all comes together for a mortgage experience that's altogether more human. PTSP.

Apply online today. Lending criteria, terms and conditions apply. Over 18s only. Security and insurance is required. Permanent TSB PLc trading as ptsb is regulated by the central bank of ireland welcome back our guest is mark david hall i have a filmmaker that we talk to frequently mark hall this is mark david hall his book is Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land,

How Christianity Has Advanced Freedom and Equality for All Americans. I'm really excited to talk to Mark today. He has an amazing background in academia. He is a distinguished professor of politics at George Fox University. He is a senior fellow at many different universities, Baylor, Princeton, and others. And he has an extensive background in history. And we're going to talk today about some of the questions and the things that have been labeled at Christianity over the last few years as they were trying to remove

the foundation of our society, quite frankly. So joining us now is Mark David Hall. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you so much for having me, David. Well, it's great to have you on, and it's great to see a book like this. I think this is a great resource, especially for homeschoolers. And, you know, it is written at an adult level. It's not written at a children's level. But I always think when we did homeschooling that you don't try to dumb things down. You hit them with stuff that's maybe above their grade level and challenge them. But it's great for adults.

And you point out that it is important for us to be able to defend what we believe. We need to be ready to give an answer to anybody who asks us about our faith, but we also need to be able to do the same thing about our history and our culture. And so we need to be armed with the facts. We need to understand how Christianity has given us the best aspects of our society that we have now. So let's begin with some of the things that have been thrown at Christianity. Let's start with the slavery aspect, or if you want to, we can start with the 1619 Project. I think it's pretty interesting that they pushed that out just before the 400th anniversary of Plymouth Rock.

But you can start with either one of those. You can start with the pilgrims, or you can start with slavery, whatever you like. Yeah, thank you. So in my last book, Did America Have a Christian Founding?, I made a pretty powerful argument, I think, that America's founders were influenced by Christian ideas. And in some respects, this book was to be a sequel, but between the last book and this one, the 1619 Project came out, and it just infuriated me. We have to recognize, of course, that some Americans have appealed to the Bible or the Christian tradition to defend slavery. But to say that all of American history is best characterized by slavery and racism and Jim Crow legislation, that's just horrible history, as many left of center historians have pointed out.

And so part of what I wanted to do is to respond to the 1619 Project, the series of essays in the New York Times, and all too many academics who've written serious academic books, but as well as popular books, arguing that fundamentally America is characterized by slavery to the extent to which Americans were Christians, they were appealing to their faith to defend slavery or other evil, sexism, poverty, and that sort of thing. And without denying that some Christians have done some of that i i tried to argue a pretty powerful thesis that in fact christianity has been a force for progress for liberty and equality for all from the puritans to the present day and of course you know when we start tearing down statues of anybody that we find something we don't like about them uh

you know that is uh we can do that with individuals we can do that with individuals. We can do that with society. But that is not the way to progress. What we do is we want to try to find the best in our history, the best in individuals, and to build on that rather than looking for anything that we can find that is wrong and then using that as an excuse to tear it down. But that really goes back, I think, to Marxism. You know, when we look at Pete, I call him Pete Boudigay because he's very proud of his sexual orientation. And I have a hard time at the beginning pronouncing his name, but his father was a Notre Dame professor who had spent his whole life looking at the, his life's work was looking

at Antonio Gramsci, who was the founder of the Italian party. And he saw the attack had to come at the cultural level. He said the middle class and Christians have been able to establish their society with cultural hegemony. And so their goal was to take that away. And so we see that being done deliberately in a calculated way. They're not genuinely, I think, offended by some of the things that they're complaining about. There are issues that need to be addressed, but it is fundamentally a revolutionary tactic, I believe. Don't you agree? No, I think so. That's exactly right. And one of the problematic things with the 1619 Project is not only was it published in arguably the nation's most elite newspaper, it's now being adopted as a curriculum in schools.

And so young people who know almost nothing about history are learning whatever history they know from this. Yeah, I think it's absolutely a tactic of the left. And unfortunately, the left controls the academy by and large. It controls a major media. And so it's critical that we get out with programs like yours, with books like mine, arguing for the truth. Yeah, and your book could be used as a textbook, as I said, especially for homeschoolers.

At the very beginning, you talk about the fact that Puritans were not tyrannical theocrats. Talk about that. Were they there simply to impose their religious beliefs on other people? Sure. Let me take a step back to the Protestant Reformation and make a quick little equation. The Protestants, of course, believed in the doctrine of sola scriptura, the scripture alone. They believed in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Every individual needs to be able to read the Bible for himself or even herself. And so what you see in Protestant countries is an absolute explosion

of literacy. By the time you get to Puritan New England, you have almost universal male literacy, female literacy is catching up church structures and civic structures are flattened so the puritans in new england are congregationalists right they're standing up and making arguments in their church about who should be the minister whether or not to be able to build a new meeting house in new england people are voting every six months and i do meet by by people, I mean males, male property owners, but really any male with any amount of ambition whatsoever could own property. So you have pretty close to very widespread suffrage.

Let's leave it at that. And so what you see in Puritan New England are some of the freest, most Republican, smaller Republican institutions the world had ever seen. The Puritans are looking to the Bible to reform the civil and criminal laws. In England, you could be punished by death for hundreds of crimes, including stealing just a few shillings. The Puritans got rid of almost all those death penalty offenses. And looking at the Bible, they said the proper penalty for theft is restitution, not death. If I steal your cow, I have to give you your cow back plus one of my cows, a far more humane criminal system than you have in England. And I could keep going on and on

about how these pilgrims and Puritans really created some of the most progressive, in the best sense of the word, societies that the world had ever seen. And, you know, that kind of reminds me, we always hear the eye for the eye and a tooth for a tooth, and it sounds like a very harsh standard. And yet in reality, it was a pullback from what was the already established, as you talk about so many crimes that could be meted out with a death penalty. It was actually pulling it back. It was actually to say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It was to pull back the severity of those penalties. And as you also said, it was focused on restitution. We don't have restitution in our system today. That's one of the big flaws in our justice system. But they went back to the

Bible and to Mosaic law and said, we need to have restitution for that. So it was not a tyranny in that regard. They did want to have religious freedom because they were under attack in their own country. But I think it's very important what you said about literacy. And we look at the rate of literacy today. It was so high. It was up in the high 90s at the time of the American Revolution, wasn't it? I think in New England, you have pretty well universal male literacy by the time of the revolution.

In the American South, you didn't. The aristocrats, of course, could not only read, but probably read Latin and Greek, and they're very well educated. So Jefferson and Madison are great examples of this. But unfortunately, your white yeoman farmer and that sort of thing say nothing of enslaved Americans. We're not reading. But yeah, and of course, New England's intellectual center of America until well into the 19th century, right? Harvard and Yale and Brown and Princeton. Yeah, a disproportionate impact for sure. And they started out as seminaries.

And you had pretty much everybody passing around Thomas Paine's Common Sense in the same way that everybody would see, I don't know, The Wizard of Oz today. They were reading things like that. That was their cultural touchstone, that and the Bible. And so you see, even in the late 1800s, you see Abraham Lincoln quoting the Bible because that's how he connected with people. Just like today, we would make movie references. He knew that everybody knew the Bible. That's why they had to learn how to read, as you point out. No, that's right. Let me plug my friend Daniel Dreisbach. He has a great book,

Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. And what he shows is that by far and away, the founders were reading their Bible, they knew their Bible inside and out, and they were routinely paraphrasing biblical passages without putting in the little citations. So, for instance, George Washington paraphrases Micah 4.4 more than 40 times, and yet he never puts in the citation micah 4 4 because everyone would have recognized it and so yeah the bible by far and away was the most um influential uh book in in late in the late 18th century in the founding era by far and away and i think that's what we mean when we say america was a christian country it was so thoroughly interspersed as a cultural touchstone that even people who are not necessarily

believing Christians would refer to it in terms of talking to other people, right? No, that's absolutely right. In my last book, I actually spell out in some detailed ways in which I think the founders were influenced by the Bible and Christian theology. One of the most obvious ones, and one of the key differences between the Americans and what went on over in France, is they were absolutely committed that all humans were sinful, all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Even Christians continued to struggle with the old man within, and so they designed a constitutional order characterized by federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances. Enlightenment political

thought was going the exact opposite direction. we want a strong centralized government run by the intellectual elites and that did not work out well over in france yeah they believed in the perfection of man the perfect ability of man and that they had already achieved it because they were the elites so let's talk a little bit about the american revolution because that's another thing that we even see from christians many times you got a chapter on the war for American independence, and a lot of people saying, well, I think you've got to, and of course, we've heard this in the last couple of years as the vaccine passports and mandates were rolling out. We've heard people say, well, if the government tells you you've got to put a pinwheel on your head, you better put a pinwheel on your head. I never interpreted Romans or 1 Peter 3 in that regard.

Talk a little bit about the war for American independence and whether or not it was justified from a Christian standpoint and how Christianity fed into that. Every year, thousands of people go to their very first concert. Our boosted signal at large events means they can always call a taxi to get home. Mom? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was grand. Do you think you could pick me up? Every connection counts. Which is why Ireland can count on our network.

Vodafone. Together we can. Subject to coverage availability. Limitations and terms apply. See vodafone. Together we can. That's right. With Merrick, every dog wins. Merrick's made with real ingredients like real deboned meat and real fruits or veggies. It's real good and real healthy. Because at Merrick, real is our recipe. Visit MerrickPetCare.com. Sure, that was a fun chapter, right? And I'll state up front that most Christian scholars who have addressed this point, with the exception of me and Eric Patterson, have said, oh my goodness, a war flies in the face

of Romans 13, or if resisting tyrants is biblically permissible, it was unjust. And I say, no, that's not the case at all. So for about 1300 years, the church did say, if you are living under a tyrant, and that tyrant tells you to disobey God, you refuse to obey him, if you are living under a tyrant, and that tyrant tells you to disobey God, you refuse to obey him, but you take the consequences. You don't get to resist. You don't get to overthrow him. The Protestants went in a very different direction. John Calvin, it's very clear, inferior magistrates may overthrow a ruler who becomes a tyrant, but John Knox goes beyond him, even as Calvin was saying no the people themselves may do that and so the the distinction here is between a ruler and a tyrant if a ruler becomes

a tyrant he may be overthrown and so in 1764 1765 when Parliament started acting in a clearly unconstitutional manner by trying to tax the American colonists to raise revenue, the American colonists didn't just pick up their guns. They didn't start shooting redcoats, but they resisted in other ways. They petitioned, they boycotted, they protested, and they did that for over 10 years. But as Parliament and the King continued to do what were taken as tyrannical acts, as unconstitutional acts, threatening basic liberties religious liberty trial by jury eventually in 1775 when the redcoats came to seize american ammunition we resisted actively and the war for american independence had begun i think you can make a very good case that

the cause was just that we did everything war should always be the last resort and so of course no one's going to pick up guns and start shooting U.S Army officers because of these vaccine mandates but we may properly resist in other ways right we can petition we can remonstrate we can elect different officials and it but if the government for the next 10 years continues to act in a tyrannical fashion you know maybe things would change but it does take that long train of abuses, as the Declaration describes. I think you can make an excellent argument that the war for American independence was both biblical and just. Yeah, and of course, you have other things, too, like the Magna Carta. You're talking about it being unconstitutional. There were limits. The king was not an absolute ruler, according to the

Magna Carta, and there were limits on what he could do, and they overrode those. And so that was a big part of it as well. But as you point out, you know, the difference between a tyrant and a ruler, a ruler is there for your own good. A ruler is somebody who is aligned with biblical principles, also with things like the Magna Carta, things like the Constitution. And of course, in our our time we have the constitution is the king you know lex rex was one of the things that they said that they wanted to set up a system where the law was above individuals and where you would not trust a man but you'd bind them down with the chains of the constitution right uh so that's the that's exactly right and parliament even said this in the declaratory act 1766 effect, I'm paraphrasing, but Parliament says we have the

right to do whatever we want, which to patriot ears, that's almost by definition tyranny. No, you don't have the right to do whatever you want. You're limited by law. No taxation without representation is a constitutional principle. Americans aren't represented in Parliament, so Parliament cannot tax Americans at all, period. And it doesn't matter if the taxes are heavy or light. There's a constitutional principle at stake. In the same way, if the government of Canada tomorrow tried to tax each American $1 a year, we should all refuse to pay, right? Because the Parliament of Canada has absolutely no authority to tax us. And it just simply doesn't matter that the amount is small.

Yeah, absolutely right. They understood the importance of principle. Let's talk a little bit about slavery because this is something that is really been the center of a lot of our problems in the last few years, going back to the 1619 project. As I said, they wanted to get that thing out just before we celebrated the 400th anniversary of, you know, people who came together there at, um, uh, with the Mayflower and they came up with a compact, which is a voluntarily, uh, you know, voluntary, uh, uh, uh,

document to govern themselves. A lot of precedents were set with that. They wanted to flush that out and then they wanted to change this to a slavery narrative. Uh, what, What do you want to say, first of all, about the 1619 Project and whether or not that is a valid interpretation of history? As you point out, many historians have pointed out it's really a very poor history. Indeed, how is it poor? You know, my friend Bill McCloy, the great historian, has said that the 1619 Project was a missed opportunity.

It's definitely reasonable to remember that Americans owned slaves, that African-Americans were abused at the hands of slave owners and others. And yet the 1619 Project errs by just trying to redefine all of American history as being interpreted through the lens of slavery and racism. And so, we need a much more balanced approach. We must recognize the evils of slavery and that Christians were complicit in it, but we also need to recognize that many, many Christians were coming to oppose slavery. We should also recognize, and I know you know this, but just to emphasize it, slavery is something that has existed throughout human history throughout the entire world existed throughout the world in the 17th and 18th centuries and so that was really not unusual that americans had slaves what was unusual by the time you get to the founding era is you had significant numbers of civic officials recognizing this is an evil institution and we must do

something about it so frank Franklin, John Jay. Every year, thousands of people go to their very first concert. Our boosted signal at large events means they can always call a taxi to get home. Mom? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was grand. Do you think you could pick me up? Every connection counts, which is why Ireland can count on our network. Vodafone. Together we can.

Subject to coverage availability. Limitations and terms apply. See Vodafone.ie forward slash terms. John Dickinson, James Wilson, they freed their slaves. Voluntarily freed their slaves. Eight states put slavery on the road to extinction or abolished it immediately between 1776 and 1804. The Confederation Congress and the First Federal Congress banned the expansion of slavery into the Northwest Territory, the area that became Ohio and Michigan and Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin.

And so they recognized no one had a good thing to say about slavery in the founding era. Everyone wanted it to end. Everyone was assured. They were certain it was going to end for a variety of reasons that we can talk about in a minute if you want. So no one's defending slavery as a positive good. Unfortunately, as we know, I'll just mention briefly, Eli Whitney invents a cotton gin and it creates a whole new dynamic in the South that allows slavery to become entrenched in the South. And so by the 1820s, you're having Southerners defending slavery as a positive good. But that's the 1820s and that's specifically Southerners. It is not the American founders. Almost every founder was highly critical of slavery and many were taking concrete steps to

end it. Yeah, I agree. You talked, you talked about how every civilization has had it. You know, Thomas Sowell has made the same argument. And he says, you know, where do we get the term slave from? From Slavic people, who are the ones who are most frequently enslaved. And so every civilization has had it. But he and others will make the case that this is the first civilization that got rid of it. And I think that's the key thing. But I think, you know, there's a couple of issues.

I think the real reason that they don't want people, that they want people to focus on 1619. Of course, they want to tear down our institutions, our culture, our society. But they also don't want people to see that we're being pushed into a form of modern slavery with all the surveillance state and the rest of this stuff. It'd be very nice if they get us fighting with each other and if they get us focused on past wrongs so we don't see the future wrongs that they are the chains that they're laying out for us with their technology. That's just the way I see it. But talk a little bit about the other factors and slavery. Of course, when we talk about the fact that Christians were the ones to pull it back, I think of William Wilberforce, for example. I mean, this is a guy who took on the major economic powers of his time.

He took on the military-industrial complex, if you will, and beat their plows and their swords into plowshares. And so we had leaders like William Wilberforce, as well as other people in the United States. Who did we have in the United States that was similar to William Wilberforce that comes to mind as a leader? First of all, let me highlight what you said about Wilberforce. I think he's a great example for those of us who are profoundly concerned about the sin of abortion. He just spent his whole lifetime fighting this evil, and he didn't live to see it ended completely in the same way many of us have spent years and years fighting abortion. And praise the Lord, Roe versus Wade was overturned last summer, but we still have a lot of work to do, and we can't just give up. We can't say it's too hard

or whatever. So, in America, as I've already suggested, you have a lot of Americans in the founding era fighting slavery. I have a chapter on the American abolitionists, though, and we usually think about these folks as these 19th century Christians who sacrifice a great deal to oppose the institution of slavery, both its expansion into new states, but also advocating for the end of slavery. And I highlight the work of some really fascinating people, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Vinnie, one of my favorite is Sojourner Truth. I'm sure many of your listeners recognize the title of my book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land. It is, of course, inscribed on the Liberty Bell, but I think an even better story is Sojourner Truth,

the African-American evangelist and abolitionist who used to go to revival meetings, string up a banner reading, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land. And what did she do first? She Evangelists and abolitionists would used to go to revival meetings, string up a banner reading, proclaim liberty throughout all the land. And what did she do first? She preached the gospel of Jesus Christ. She tried to convert people to the Christian religion. And then she preached to these people about the sins of God's people in America that is slavery.

And so here's a woman brilliantly advocating for both the Christian gospel and opposing slavery at the same time, making explicitly biblical arguments in the public's court to do so. And so I think these abolitionists really should be inspirational to those of us today that call ourselves followers of Christ. I agree. I've said many times that when we look at how divided and fractionalized and tribal America has become and how politicians are trying to push us into that kind of tribalism, I've said that I think the only way out is to do the types of things that you pointed out or that she did in terms of preaching the gospel, talking about how we all have the same relationship to Christ, bringing us together in that kind of brotherhood, sisterhood, if you will.

And that is the thing that is going to keep us from having a civil war. If we understand that in God's eyes, there is no male, female, black, white, slave, free, any of these, we're all together. But then that doesn't mean that we justify and leave the systems that are harming people in place, just like we don't do that in our own personal life. You know, we turn from the things that are wrong in our life, but that there is a unifying there, and that when we look at things like reparations, the Christian story of what Christ has done, that is our reparation.

You know, he's paid for what we've done wrong, and he's paid for the wrongs that have done to us. We could heal this country if we focus on the gospel as she did, I think. You know, I think that's my number one prayer, is that this country would see revival, that men and women, boys and girls would turn to Jesus Christ, submit their lives to him, and I think that would do wonders. So the American founders were in complete agreement that if Republican government is to work, small or Republican, you must have a moral people. And if you're going to have a moral people, you must have a Christian people. And so, yeah, we can, you know, advocate for laws and structural changes and this sort of thing. But ultimately, probably our number one job as Christians is to spread the gospel and pray for revival. I agree. And when we look at the writings of the people who were alive at that time and

struggling with this, they realized that it was a moral wrong. But what do we do about it? And many of them would struggle with it in a kind of paternalism, wouldn't they? They would say, well, I know it's wrong, but I just can't turn the black people loose here because how would they live? They would be attacked or whatever. So you see certain things like the creation of Liberia and trying to repatriate freed slaves back to Africa and things like that. But I think fundamentally when we look at the paternalism, uh, it was, whether it was conscious or unconscious,

I think they were trying to defend a practice, uh, that made a lot of economic sense to them. You know, it's more of a love of money than it was a love of humanity. What do you think about that in terms of things like Liberia and other efforts? Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. So, you know, someone like Thomas Jefferson is maybe instructive here. You know, in his notes on the state of Virginia, he says, I tremble for my country when I know that God is just. And he's referring to the participation in the practice of slavery.

But then he goes on to say, but what are we to do? I'm paraphrasing. If we were to let the slaves go, they would rise up and kill us because they're really mad at us. And I think he has just got us to think that he of course is um probably thinking of the of the haitian slave rebellion where in fact you did have slaves rise up and kill most of the white population maybe all the white population so jefferson throughout his life he always said what we need to do is free the slaves and send them back to africa the american colonization society which purported to do that that was their goal was surprisingly popular even in the american south you had a lot of send them back to Africa. The American Colonization Society, which purported to do that,

that was their goal, was surprisingly popular, even in the American South. You had a lot of Southern statesmen who joined that, who supported it, but it was never a realistic possibility. Something like 10,000 slaves were freed and shipped back to Africa. During that time, the slave population increased by maybe 800,000. And so it just never was a viable alternative. And we must remember, I think, that we did end slavery peacefully in the Mid-Atlantic states and the northern states. Slavery was ended peacefully in Brazil. It would have been a heavy lift, but it could have been done in America. We did not have to fight a bloody civil war to end slavery. And I think what is required then is we have men and women involved in politics, motivated by the Christian faith,

attempting to bring about a solution to these grave evils, be it slavery, be it Jim Crow legislation, or be it abortion today. That's why we must be politically active as much as we might get tired of contemporary politics. And believe me, I get tired of it. I'm a political scientist is kind of what I do. Me too. And that's what I do for a living as well. But, you know, we look at the situation, you talk about ending it peacefully. We saw it ended peacefully in the Caribbean because of the work of people like William Wilberforce. And what the British government did was they compensated the plantation owners. And of course, Lala Harris says that her father is very proud of the fact that they had owned slaves there.

But they compensated the slave owners, and someone calculated that they spent less money than the U.S. government spent on ammunition in order to do that. Sometimes we have to calculate the costs, and we have to look at every option before we look at the use of force, I think. Let's talk a little bit about education, because you talk about debates over religious liberty and about church and state relations, and you made some interesting comments about education and about the purposes of education to begin with, Protestant versus Catholic. Sure. One of the things I do in my last book is I think I show definitively that in no way,

shape, or form did the American founders want the strict separation of church and state. And so this leads to the question, where did this idea come from in America? And what I show, and I'm borrowing from Philip Hamburger here in his wonderful book, Separation of Church and State, that really this came about, this idea that we should have a separation of church and state because of the profound anti-Catholicism that you saw among American Protestants in the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. And basically, what had happened by that time is we had public schools. The public schools were, in effect, Protestant schools. You would have the King James Version of the Bible read. You have Protestant prayers that were said. Catholics believed they should have Catholic schools. And so they went to the governing authorities and said, look,

we're paying taxes. Give us a share of tax dollars so we can have our own schools. And in response, the civic officials who were mostly Protestants said, no, no, no, we can have our own schools and in response the um Civic officials who are mostly Protestants and no no no we can't do that we aren't going to fund sectarian schools and by sectarian they mean Roman Catholic schools send your kids to the public schools they're non-sectarian but of course they were very sectarian from the Catholic perspective and you see this played out in the great state of Oregon my home state state, where Oregon banned all private schools. And lo and behold, all private schools with one exception were Roman Catholic schools. And as late as 1948, you have an organization founded, Protestants and Others United for Separation of Church and State,

today known as Americans United, a profoundly anti-Catholic organization. And so what is going on here is these Protestants arguing for the separation of church and state, but basically they just mean we don't want to fund Catholic stuff. We're perfectly happy to have prayer in school and this sort of thing. And so the Supreme Court really pulled a fast one on everyone when in 1962, 1963, they said, surprise, separation of church and state means more than not funding Catholic schools. It means no teacher-led prayer in public schools.

It means no Bible reading in public schools. And so now all of a sudden Protestants are like, what? This is not what we signed up for. And you begin to have a movement of Protestants and Catholics coming together to oppose a progressive left that wants to have a naked public square, that wants to drive religion out of the public square. Yeah, I agree. And many times we will do that. We will set up a precedent and realizing this precedent is going to be used for something that we like. And so, as you point out, they set up these Protestant schools. But then what happened was those schools got taken

over and turned into seminaries for secular humanism. That's essentially what happened. You just had a different religion being preached to that. That was something that was anticipated by RL Dabney back in the end of the civil war, he said, there's no way that you can get around, uh, the, uh, you know, government should not be involved in education because education is not fundamentally about simply reading and writing or how to do some kind of a technical thing. Education is really about morality and that type of thing. So it is fundamentally religious.

And so you're always going to have some kind of a conflict in terms of this religious instruction. That seems to be where we are today, I think. What do you think? Every year, thousands of people go to their very first concert Our boosted signal at large events means they can always call a taxi to get home Mom! Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was grand Do you think you could pick me up?

Every connection counts which is why Ireland can count on our network Vodafone, together we can Subject to coverage availability Limitations and terms apply See vodafone. Together we can. Subject to coverage availability. Limitations and terms apply. See Vodafone.ie forward slash terms. I think that's exactly right. We have to recognize there's no such thing as neutrality, that all schools are teaching some sort of ideology, maybe more overt, maybe less overt. I think one of the problems, some of us, I used to live in a fairly rural community in Oklahoma, and so we knew most of the teachers in the public schools, and they were good people. And so I don't think we should

assume that most school teachers are bad people, but then they're given standards that they have to live up to and CRT curricula, and they aren't permitted to mention God except for in an academic way. And so an ideology is being inculcated on our children. Now, sometimes teachers are wacky progressives, right? Probably in Chicago and New York City, you have a lot of those. But I think a lot of teachers are well-meaning people, and yet still, public schools are not neutral, which is why I love what we're seeing in some states like Arizona and elsewhere, where we're having true school choice. So I don't like I'm a Protestant, but I don't think it was appropriate to only have Protestant schools funded by the state. I love the idea where a Catholic family could choose to send their kids to a Catholic school, Protestant to a Protestant school, a Jew to a Jewish school, an atheist to an atheist school.

And, of course, then you can mix and match all you want, but it should be the parent's choice and not the choice of the state or local governments. I agree. I just feel from a practical standpoint, as long as the government's got a financial purse string, they're going to be pulling the strings to tell you what to do. You know, the opinion that we've got to break that. And, you know, we have in Tennessee, and it's also been done in another state recently, bills to basically wean us off of the government purse. You know, we're not going to take any federal money on education because we take their money. They're going to tell us what the curriculum needs to be. They're going to define what the

standards are. We'll have to teach to those standards. The tests will be defined to that and so forth. There's so many different ways that they control us if they've got the money. So it is a, and I think some of these bills are set up to be a gradual process that will gradually wean ourselves off of this over many years. But I imagine a push will come to shove quite a bit earlier than that. I don't know. It is a fundamental thing. And of course, education is where they have pushed all this stuff, isn't it, Mark? You know, they, whether you look at the 1619 Project or you look at what is

happening with the LGBT movement or the critical race theory, all these different things, that is where they are pushing out all these ideas. It is of fundamental importance how we educate and who educates our children, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. So I was involved recently with the Florida Civics Initiative, and they're doing great work down there. They came up with an endorsement for teachers. They helped put together a series of lectures, basically a class that they could take. And believe me, we talked about the points of

American history that are uncomfortable, slavery and Jim Crow legislation and not permitting women to vote. Of course, you're going to talk about that stuff, but you can do that without doing the critical race theory thing. And then you also want to get kids reading the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and engaging these fundamental documents. Because ultimately, I contend America is a creedal nation. The creeds are contained in those documents. And so we need to engage them and we need to engage them in a critical way. And we can have an argument. Was Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite for penning these wonderful words of the Declaration of Independence and continuing to hold slaves?

But let's also be aware that Ben Franklin owned slaves, freed them. Roger Sherman never owned a slave. Robert Livingston owned some slaves and freed them. John Sherman never owned a slave. Robert Livingston owned some slaves and freed them. John Adams never owned—so it's a mixed bag, and we should expose students to that and let them discuss it and think about it in a critical way, and hopefully they'll come away with a greater appreciation for the greatness that is the United States of America. I agree, and that's the importance of your book. Again, the book is Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land. You point out why Christianity has been a force for good in the United States, but you also talk to adults and you say,

here's why you need to not be afraid to talk about this. Why are we afraid to talk about this today? You know, I think the left and the academy and major media has just done a good job, a very good job of painting the American founders as a bunch of hypocrites. And who wants to stand up for a hypocrite, especially a slave-owning hypocrite, right? And so, especially if we don't know much about this era, if we don't know much about these people, we know, we might just kind of be embarrassed of it, and we don't feel equipped to engage in a serious debate. And that's why I would encourage all of your viewers to read a book like Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land. Read a book like Bill

McClay's Promise of Hope, Daniel Grisbach's Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. All these books are accessible. They're very accessible. I don't even think you need a college degree to appreciate them. And that prepares us to engage our neighbors in a winsome way, right? It's not about winning a battle, but say, hey, wait, let's think about this. Did you know that many founders didn't own slaves? Many who did freed their slaves. Even those who owned slaves took significant steps to prevent the expansion of slavery. And then hopefully we can shake up our neighbors that have such a bad view of the American founders. And if enough of us do that, perhaps we can affect a change.

And if you know history, and that's a key thing too, that's why your book is so important, you realize that these people have created a straw man, literally created a scarecrow and said, this is what Jefferson was, or this is what Washington was or whatever. And then they beat up on that thing. And if you know what the truth is about these individuals, yes, they were like any of us.

They had their contradictions. They had their faults as well as their virtues. So if you know the real history of the person, if you've read their writings and you get a glimpse into their mind and where they are, and if you understand the time, that's also another important thing, is how they were influenced by their time. And many of these people, even though they engaged in things that we would condemn today, they were pushing in the direction that we'd celebrate today. I think that's one of the key things there.

But it always is about ignorance, fear, shame, and guilt, isn't it? That's the key to this,'s right and there's a real arrogance in it right I think many of our neighbors think we've somehow arrived at moral perfection in the 21st century and to point out as you do look at the American founders were flawed humans but guess what so are we today yeah one of the things I enjoy doing with my students is I push them to say, look, imagine 200 years from now, our people then will look back on us. What kinds of things are we doing that they might say, how could they possibly do that? Because almost certainly we're doing things that are bad for the environment or dangerous or harmful that we don't recognize or we don't really think about. And the call there is just for

humility. We aren't there is just for humility. We aren't greater than the American founders. We're all humans. We're all flawed. And in fact, I think you can make an argument that the contributions of the founders were in fact greater than the contributions of almost any other group of humans that we've seen throughout human history. This constitutional order that they have set up has done a lot of good. And we've made so much progress, even on something like race relations, right? We've abolished slavery. We abolished Jim Crow legislation. We've made virtually every form of formal discrimination on the basis of race illegal.

Now, we know there's still racism out there, and we should be the first, and we have the best reasons for combating that latent racism. But to pretend there hasn't been huge progress on those matters is just ridiculous. And of course, if everything is racist, then nothing is racist, right? If they're going to cry, if everybody that they don't like, they point at them and scream racist, then pretty soon you are giving a free pass to the people who really are racist and to real racism. I think when we go back and we look at how they've intimidated people, but they've kind of dumbed down our educational system by not letting us, you know, well, by not talking about history, by selecting what they want to talk about, by giving us a false

history. But they've also done, as you pointed out, in terms of this whole idea of separation of church and state, they kind of imposed a silence on us as baby boomers. We were trained not to talk about religion. We were trained not to talk about politics. And then they pushed their idea of religion and politics on us. So what would you say to the baby boomers or to different generations as to how they need to respond to this type of thing? Well, the first thing I would do with respect to the separation of church and state

is say, read the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Now, that has been applied to the states through the 14th Amendment. So, let's just say all governments shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. What does that mean? It means what it says. Nine of the 13 colonies, nine of the 13 states had established churches. One flavor of Christianity that's favored above all others. Everyone's taxed to support the favored church. Sometimes the state's involved in running the church and saying how it's going to govern itself.

And the American founders said, we are not going to have this at the national level. We are not going to have a church of the United States of America. But that doesn't mean that presidents can't issue calls for prayer and fasting or Thanksgiving Day proclamations. It doesn't mean that Congress can't appropriate money for religious schools in the territories. It doesn't mean that there can't be legislative and military chaplains. And we can see this by looking at their actions. Even as they pass the First Amendment, they're doing all these things so today i would say through the 14th amendment tennessee oregon virginia cannot have official state churches that's what the first amendment prohibits but that leaves a lot of freedom to

do other things it certainly doesn't require tearing down world war world war one era crosses it certainly doesn't mean that tax dollars can't flow to religious schools on the same terms they flow to other schools. There's a whole lot that's permitted under the Establishment Clause. And what we need to do is make policy arguments at this point. Does school choice make sense? What are the benefits of it? What are the weaknesses of it? I happen to be a huge advocate of it, but I'm happy to hear the counter arguments. But don't pretend there's a wall of separation between church and state that keeps religious schools from receiving tax dollars, because there isn't. And fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court today recognizes that.

And of course, like so many things they've turned upside down, inside out, Jefferson's wall of separation was a wall around the government, not around the churches when he was writing that letter, right? But it is a fundamental difference between establishment and between exercise, right? That's the reality. I think we need to focus on that. And when we look at the establishment, going all the way up into the 1840s, you still had a Massachusetts. They still had an official state church. They were worried, as you pointed out, about not having an established federal church that was going to be over everybody. All the original states and colonies and then states had initially had their own separate churches based on the majority that was there.

Some of them would be congregational, some would be Baptist, some would be Catholic. And so they didn't want to have one choice made for everybody at the federal level. But technically, although I think it's a very bad idea, because whenever you mix politics with religion, you get politics, you could have a state-established church. But they – because it did continue to go on after the Bill of Rights. But it's all really about the exercise. And that's really what they put the kibosh on with the Supreme Court decision and all of this talk about separation of church and state, isn't it? It's about the exercise. Yeah, one of the things I argue in my last book is that the main opponents of established churches were indisputably orthodox, pious

Christians who argued just like you argue, when the government runs a church, that always is bad for the church. We need to get the government out a church, that always is bad for the church. We need to get the government out of this business, and then the church will flourish. And this is exactly what happened in the early 19th century as the last state got out of the business of having an established church. We saw the Second Great Awakening. We saw great revivals, and the church was tremendously healthy. Yeah, I think the First Amendment, the religion

clause is, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. It's fundamentally about protecting religious liberty, both of individuals, but also groups. So, churches, obviously, synagogues, mosques by extension, but also religious entities like Catholic Charities or Covenant College. These are clearly protected by the First Amendment, and rightly so. I think it's key that we understand that there is something that is special, that we should be grateful and that we've been blessed here in America more than many, many other nations, and we should be looking at what that is and try to reclaim that.

That's why I like your book, Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, because as I said many times, it's not enough just to come back and say, no, we don't want that. We need to have a positive vision of what we do want. We need to have a positive vision of what works, what we want to be, the foundation of our society. And it's books like yours that really give us that. Talk to people about the right way to not be silenced. How do we bring our faith into the public square, just as individuals? How do we do that? Because there's going to be a lot

of shame, guilt, intimidation. People are afraid to do that. Talk to people about giving their positive version of the Christian faith and of history to other people as they learn it? Sure. I'm not sure I have the final word on it, but here's at least a few thoughts that come immediately to my mind. First of all, we should be characterized by love of neighbor, and so we should make it crystal clear we love everyone, including people who disagree with us, and we want the best for them. I think it's all we should be characterized by humility so we should recognize that we don't have everything all figured out and yet we should be bold and we should be um encouraged that we if we're faithful in the public square if we go into

the public square and make our arguments that um i'm not saying we we will eventually become successful but you can certainly show lots of examples. William Wilberforce being one of the greatest examples of this, someone who just poured his life into the opposition of the international slave trade and then slavery within British colonies. And he died before he saw the final fruits of his effort, but eventually he succeeded. The American abolitionists, I'm sure it seemed like they would never win,

and yet they were continuing, they were faithful, they were opposing slavery, explaining why it is an unjust and unbiblical institution. And unfortunately, we ended slavery through a bloody civil war, but as I suggested before, I don't think that had to be the case within our lifetimes. Opp abortion fighting an uphill battle but consistently faithfully making arguments i think sometimes some pro-lifers made them in very inefficient ways back in the late 80s early 90s when people are protesting and blocking abortion clinic doors i understand the sentiment but i'm not sure that was very effective and yet you have plenty of people like robbie george and ryan anderson and others who've been out in the public square making arguments against abortion but in a very winsome way reaching out to people building

alliances across the aisle and so i think that's our responsibility today i think all of us in america must be politically active it is i mean we have to run for office but we should be informed we should vote maybe write the occasional letter to the editor, maybe support Christians who are more active and engaged in the public square. I particularly single out those religious liberty advocacy groups that are fighting in our nation's courtrooms every day for religious liberty, and not just for Christians, for Muslims and Jews and Sikhs. I think it's a Christian principle that every individual should be able to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and act upon those religious convictions wherever possible, and we should be able to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and act upon those religious convictions wherever possible.

And we should be among the first and foremost in fighting for those rights. Yeah, we don't want to have people who are converted at the point of a sword. You know, we want we want it to be genuine conversion that comes from the inside. If it's going to be that type of situation we see in the GOP. And of course, we heard after the last election, a lot of people in the GOP very upset when we had Roe v. Wade overturned. We had candidates who were running for office who went back and scrubbed their website and toned it down. And then we had after the election, we had comments that, well, the problem was that these

pro-life people are just too extreme and too radical in their defense of life. What do we do to shore up the GOP on this? Is it a letter-writing campaign? What do we do, or do we just bypass these politicians and start trying to educate people? I agree with what you said about the physical interventions in terms of trying to block clinics and things like that. But, you know, there's other things. I think of the excellent animated film, I don't know if you've seen it or not, The Procedure that was narrated by Kevin Sorbo.

And it was based on a story of a guy who was an ultrasound doctor. And he was called into a procedure. He didn't know that it was an abortion. And he describes an horrific, you know, he described what he saw and they animate it. What a powerful piece that is. We don't need to defend life. We just need to show what it is and let the truth out. Don't we?

Yes. I think there's, there's a lot of wisdom in that sort of thing. I think with these 3D sonograms that we can do nowadays with children. You know, so yeah, making the message again in a winsome way. We aren't judging people who have had abortions or might be having abortion. Just look, consider this. What do you think human life is? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it from a scientific perspective.

Let's talk about brainwaves and heartbeats and DNA and this sort of thing. And let's look at what we can see within a mother's womb. I think as well, we have to recognize politics is the art of the possible. I mean, I think one of the problems, I'm about as pro-life as you can get. I would say all abortion should be banned, period, except when it's absolutely necessary to save the life of the mother. And I know some Christians argue that that's not even really a real problem. But the reality is, I think, you know, we might need to compromise, and we might need to at least start off by trying to get a 15-week ban, no abortions after the 15th

week. And let's make arguments, let's get something on the table, and then perhaps work to push that back to six weeks, right? Politics is the art of the possible. I think one of the problems in 2022 is some of these abortion bans just seem too draconian that, of course, the extreme pro-lifers like myself are going to vote for them. You got a lot of people in the middle who are uncomfortable. And then we always know the extreme pro-choicers will vote against them. So again, politics is the art of the possible, and we should be wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, right? We have to be prudential in the public square. Yeah, when we look at William Wilberforce, again, he did it, it took his entire life, and he began by putting restrictions on the transportation of slaves, then ending the transportation of slavery,

then going after ending the perpetuation of slavery, keeping people in slavery. So it was a process. Uh, we know that that is a very important thing. I play all the time a quote from Anthony Fauci back in October, 2019, before all this stuff happened. And, uh, he was asked by some people at the Milken Institute, how do you, um, how do you get everybody to take an untested vaccine, do it around the world and get them to take it right away? And he goes, well, you do it from the inside,

you do it with disruption, and you do it iteratively. And I think that's a key thing is the iterative process. But I think it's also important that, you know, that was always a part of what William Wilberforce was doing. He never sacrificed the humanity of the slaves, right? And that's really where the fundamental argument is. And so I think, you know, when you look at it, as you pointed out, you know, some of the more educational things, you know, coming alongside people and showing them the reality

that they've been lied to about when life begins and what really the condition of the baby. I said from a long time ago when my wife was involved with the pro-life group, I said they need to pool all their money and advancing technology to get what we now have with 3D ultrasound and to get more of it and to continue to improve that. I think that would be the key thing. If we could get a great picture of that, I think we would end abortion overnight

if people could really see the truth. I think it's a massive deception that is happening there. Um, before we run out of time, uh, just tell us a little bit about your hope for what is happening in the future. You say it seems like dark days ahead, but we are not without hope as Christians. And what, what do you see as the, uh, in the road ahead? You see a lot of persecution. Uh, there certainly is going to be confrontation

from where we are right now if we're going to reclaim some of the light that we've lost. Yeah, so I tend to be an optimist, and I think there's a lot of good things going on right now. I see a lot of recognition among Christians that we do need to be involved in politics, we need to be involved in the public square, and we need to do so in a winsome way. I think in the 80s, maybe it was real easy to become arrogant and say, okay, we're going to take over America and run it as God would have us run it. And that didn't work out all that well, right? And so now perhaps figure out ways in which we can work with each other to, you know, win offices, to be sure, but then to reach out across the aisle and try to do things that bring about real and meaningful results. I see a lot of great work being done at the more educational work at some of

the more conservative Christian schools, places like George Fox and Regent and Hillsdale and Arizona Christian and whatnot. And these are, they're bursting at the seams, right? It's getting really hard to get in some of those schools because parents are recognizing, I don't want to send my kid, certainly not to a public university or even to many private universities. You see this burgeoning homeschool networks and classical Christian schools and that sort of thing. And so I think over time, these things will pay dividends.

We have an excellent U.S. Supreme Court nowadays. It's very protective of religious liberty, very unsympathetic to claims that religion must be scrubbed from the public square, protective of freedom of speech. And so, I think there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic. We always have to be vigilant. And as you and I agreed earlier, I think our number one prayer has to be for revival. Just having Republicans win elections will not bring about salvation, right? We need revival. We all need to be praying for that end. That's right. What if we save the country and lose our own souls, right? That's not what we want to have. And I think it has been a real wake-up time that we've seen in the last couple of years. I think the Zoom classes that we had during lockdown were kind of like

ultrasound for the classroom. Parents could see what was going on inside and they didn't like it. And so they started looking at alternatives and it really galvanized them. The book is proclaim liberty throughout all the land by Mark David Hall. I would highly recommend this. It is a great for you to read. And again, uh, for those of you who have older homeschoolers, it's a great foundation for them and answers a lot of questions, uh, even if you got younger homeschoolers, read it yourself great foundation for them. Answers a lot of questions. Even if you got younger homeschoolers,

read it yourself and you can put it in terms that your young child can understand. The book again is Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mr. Hall. Appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, David. It's been a real pleasure.

Great resource. the common man they created common core to dumb down our children they created common past to track and control us their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary, but each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.

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