The Eric Metaxas Show - #157 - James Lindsay

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Eric talks with James Lindsay about the Christian foundations of Western civilization, the American founding, faith and reason, the Scottish and French Enlightenments, religious liberty, Christian nationalism, Catholic integralism, theocracy, common sense, Marxism, and why America became the clearest expression of the West.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/- - -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ericmetaxas#EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to the program. I call it the Eric Metaxus show. I don't know what you call it, but it's my show. I get to name it. I'm Eric Mataxis. And I got to tell you, the show is not about me. I get to interview wonderful people most of the time. Today, I get to interview the wonderful James Lindsay. James Lindsay, welcome back. Hey, Eric, it's always great to see you. Just saw you the other day, actually, and here we are again. It's hard to believe we were together. It doesn't seem like the other day. You're talking about London? Yeah, two weeks ago in the inferno called London, England. It was bizarre. It was bizarre. Everywhere I go seems to be an inferno.

I'm in Connecticut now, and the weather has cooled down to the point where I forgot it could be cool. But when we were in London, just like when I was in Washington, D.C. for the 250th, it's so hot that you can't go out. It's just awful. But most of the time we were indoors, they don't do great in terms of the AC in England. We don't want to talk about that very much. But yes, you and I were at Ark, which is the, what is it, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship? Yeah, it's not an all kind of creepy name. But yeah, we were at Ark together.

It's honestly always a good meeting. You know, a lot of very interesting people are there from all over the world, literally all over the world, coming together to talk about the problems of Western civilization and potential solutions. in a pretty open-ended way. It bills itself as a competitor to the W.E.F, the World Economic Forum, that's trying to ground itself in a different set of presuppositions

and worldview. And it seems to be a very, you know, three deep now. It seems to always be a very productive meeting. But this time may be, you know, poorly chosen in the middle of June. Well, nobody would dream that June would bring, you know,

94 degree temperatures to London. You would think that June would just be, you know, strawberry weather. It would be very cool and beautiful. But no, it was brutal. But it was excellent. There were a lot of great speakers. I can't even remember what I did.

I did an event. I was interviewed on the main stage. And I hope I said some good things. But I was, I also had a conversation. Justin Breyerle, who's a Christian broadcaster, had an hour-long conversation. he interviewed, well, it was a conversation between me and Ross Delfutt about Trump and Christian faith. And obviously or predictably I came out on the side of Trump good for Christian faith or Trump views consonant with Christian faith.

Ross Douthit took the opposing view. But it was an amicable conversation. Nobody was cut. And I was so glad for that opportunity. I don't know when Justin Barley is going to release the conversation, but I thought it was profitable, generally speaking. Yeah, he does a good show. So I also did a panel at one of the Ark dinners with Ross Dothat.

And it was about also Oz Guinness was on the panel and Ayan Hershey. And the panel was about does the West need to renew its spiritual foundations in order to kind of rescue itself? Actually, the technical word they used was, does it need to relay? as in put them back down, not like convey them. I was very confused by the verbiage there. That is the weirdest to relay, relay. This is some British nonsense. I don't know.

British people use the English language completely wrong. But yeah, do we make a lay their, lay our foundations again is what they meant by it. And that's the question. Do we need to go back into the foundations? Establish would have been good. Yeah, but it's so the question was, do we basically need kind of a Judeo-Christian reawakening? or revival to save the West from its current spirituality. Yes, of course.

Right, right. It would be multiple choices should be yes and then duh. Of course, I got a sign to take the defense of the Enlightenment, which is a word that I don't even like for this panel. So when somebody says Enlightenment, I'm already confused what do we mean by Enlightenment? Because the French Enlightenment, not good, Scottish Enlightenment good. What do they? Well, I ask Grock about this because I'm a, I agree. agree with you, right? The German Enlightenment, really weird, French Enlightenment, really bad.

Scottish Enlightenment, really good, Foundation of America stuff. And so I don't know what it means precisely, but I ask GROC, because, you know, GROC obviously is the default answer to all questions. And it said, when we say, the Enlightenment, in quotes, with the before Enlightenment, we tend to mean the French one. So I understand now why people are so mad about the Enlightenment. Right. The French one was a disaster. But the Scottish one was not a disaster. The English one was not a disaster. And the way the Americans made use of that was not a disaster. And of course, the Americans, as I've been talking about quite controversially on X this past week, re-Hebrewized, in a sense, both in a real way, the Christian foundation of Western civilization, but also the

civilizational project of building a republic. You know, they looked to Moses as one of their chief, you know, inspirations. They quote Leviticus and Deuteronomy left and right and center. I assume, I can't remember if you've read my book yet or if we've sent you a copy. I have it, yeah. Because that's what I, I mean, I try not to make the book about that, but it's there. It's inevitable. It's undeniable.

Absolutely undeniable, inescapable. That is clear. And the clearest example of that, which I keep saying, is that the, least religious of the founders, Franklin and Jefferson when asked to create a seal for the new country, their image of a seal. Franklin comes up with Moses overseeing the parting of the Red Sea and Pharaoh drowning. Jefferson comes up with the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness following the pillar of cloud, pillar of fire and the cloud. This is as explicit and biblical as ever could be from the least religious of all these religious founders. It's so obvious, but we've lived in a world,

James where people pretend like none of this is true. That's just a bunch of, you know, like this, all these wonderful ideas of the American Revolution and the idea that were created equal. We're not even created. We just bubbled up into equalness or something like that. That nonsense, French Enlightenment nonsense, has just run the field in our lifetime. And it is time we call it the nonsense that it is and that we go back to the truths of our founding. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the argument, even as the so-called defender of the so-called

enlightenment on that panel, that was sort of the argument that I made, that the Scottish Enlightenment actually left a lot of room for that faith-based foundation, as I've called it in the past, the handshake between reason and faith. So the Enlightenment is like the reawakening of the reason, so to speak, and as appeal to us being reasonable creatures. I don't think we are actually reasonable creatures. I think we are creatures with the capability of being reasonable, which is a very different thing because we actually have to try to be reasonable in order to be reasonable. We're not reasonable by default, but that you have to have reason, which can get like the French Enlightenment's like, oh, we're going to make everything based on 10 and order the whole world

scientifically. And the next thing, you know, we're chopping everybody's heads off because they think this is stupid because it is. And this doesn't work, right? Reason can get very haughty, very proud. It has no humility. It has no grounding. It has no foundation unless it remembers, basically, you know, as I like to say, I said the ethos of America is effectively the Keepa. I have a good one, by the way. Oh, that's the greatest thing ever. You've often heard me talk about the golden triangle of freedom, that intersection of faith, virtue, and liberty.

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And so they love it. They love Trump. I don't know, maybe not now. But up until then, they really loved Trump. And they're very excited about it. But the idea of the Kipa is that you have something physically on your head to remind you that you are below God, that you're below heaven, that you're part of the common folk here on earth. And that's where, you know, everybody being created equal with equal dignity, equal claim on fundamental justice. This idea permeates throughout the entire kind of American experiment, but it's also everybody is in the Scottish Enlightenment sense, everybody has sense-making apparatuses and a brain to process it.

We can be reasonable. So we call that common sense with a capital C and a capital S. Thomas Reed is the main philosopher of this. Everybody says John Locke, they know about Hume, David Hume, but Thomas Reed is really the guy that lays out these common sense foundations that inspired our founders. And what they understood was there has to be this room for the human, humility that faith brings and for the the gratitude that comes with being oriented toward faith,

you know, to God goes all the glory kind of mentality. And this is all, you know, symbolized not just by the Kippa for the Jews, but also in the entire organizational foundational principles of the United States and the idea that, you know, we wrote in our Declaration of Independence. Well, and of course, the French did not get that. And everything ends up being a bloodbath. They get a dictator emperor in place of the king, bad trade, and all that bleeding and beheading for what?

Nothing. So it's, I mean, I keep saying, that's why my book's titled Revolution, not the American revolution. I say it's the only revolution that succeeded. It's the only revolution that did what it said it was going to do. And it's because they had the wisdom to say, we must be under God. We can't just be on our own. We can't just kill the authority.

and then we're going to be fine. They had a biblical view of, you know, the sinfulness of humanity that we need to have checks and balances and on and on and on and on. Kind of amazing that some people still don't get that. But I have to say when, again, when we talk about faith and reason, even that troubles me because I think we're defining faith as being extra rational at least, right? maybe, but it seems to me that genuine faith is rational. It's not exclusively rational. It's not merely rational, but it is rational. And so somehow people on that side of things, people who are

say that I'm pro-reason or I'm all about being rational or logical, they seem to define faith as inherently outside of that. And I think there are elements, I mean, when we're talking about revelation, yes, we're talking, but even revelation needs to be processed rationally.

Otherwise, it's useless. And so I think that we get into this false choice between reason and faith. And I think that's, that's just wrong. Right. This is about the Bible that says we're supposed to be irrational or

extra rational. And I think what I keep saying, or what I say in my Revolution book, there's a chapter on an essay written by John Adams where he makes clear what we all ought to know is that the Reformation and the Puritans, they were all about reason. They were all about learning, reading for yourself, teaching, understanding. They weren't just like, they were the opposite of what they saw as, you know, the Catholic Church or the established. church in England, which is, we're the bishops and where the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we're the, we all have to understand this for ourselves, which is why in 1636, six years after they get here, they established Harvard College. And that was that, that, these were reformation

views, not enlightenment views. Like the enlightenment to me is right. Right. Right. But it, the idea that they have the, the, the corner, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the market cornered on reason is just a complete misunderstanding. of at least Protestant thinking. No, I think that's right. And I mean, a lot of people forget, historically speaking, like, why were these people coming to Massachusetts to begin with? Well, it's because effectively that the Church of England and Catholics and other parts of Europe were like hunting down different brands of Calvinists and killing them largely. This is a very significant part of the story.

The killing times in the 1680s, it's a little later than you're talking about there even in London on the exact streets that we were on together a couple of weeks ago, you know, they were hunting Presbyterians and they end up fleeing to Massachusetts. And before that, earlier than that, Plymouth is largely the consequence of another one of these kind of witch hunts where these, you know, what we come to call the pilgrims fled to the Netherlands and then eventually came across the Atlantic to just get away from all this. And what do they do? They set up Massachusetts Bay Colony. You've got John Winthrop riding city on a hill. So calling basically, which is sort of funny to think about it, but he's basically calling what will become Boston, like a new Jerusalem. And he's calling down saying that we're going

to live according to a covenant so that the God of Israel will live among us. And we'll know that he's here because a small number of us will be able to feed a large number of enemies and all these kind of biblical things that, you know, are all throughout the Old Testament. And this is kind of what they're calling to. But when we say that, you know, this handshake between faith and reason, you're absolutely right. This faith side is absolutely reasonable. And biblically, it's reasonable. If you look, look at Hebrews 11, where obviously there's the most famous definition of faith given in the Bible. You know, there's very long exposition, but it's defined as a form of trust in that which hasn't been, that is not seen, but which comes within a promise. And if you look back upon in numbers,

numbers, I think it's early in numbers, numbers five, something like this, don't quote me on that. You're the Bible guy, not me. You have this idea that, you know, God's frustrated with the Israelites at the end of their journey through all of the desert because they're grumbling. And he's like, basically, I've given you all these miracles. Do you not believe that I'm going to deliver the next one? But what that means is it's like, I've done this and this and this and this and this. You're doing your part. I'm doing my part every time. You can trust me to do my part the next time. And this is the same, this is what reasonable faith actually looks like. It's not a, it is a leap in that you don't know for certain that this is going to happen, but you have it on, as we say, good faith that's been demonstrated over

time that, you know, the agreements that have been made, the covenant that has been been forged will be kept because so far I've been faithful, so far you've been faithful. So in the next step, we can trust to be faithful. God reveals his character and expects us over time to say we can trust him. That's right. But that's not irrational. It's not irrational at all. It's a leap into the light. That's at least how I see it. It's a much more prosaic way to look at it. But imagine you decided for whatever reason, Eric, that you wanted to go do Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And this guy, he gets black belt on and he can choke your brains out and he can break your arm and he can twist your leg off. And I saw a guy get his kneecap dislocated in jiu-tacu class one time.

Horrifying sight. So you have this guy, right? And you have to be able to build trust that, first of all, the stuff he's teaching you is not nonsense. And second of all, that he can handle you in a sense with teaching level kid gloves so that you can trust him to demonstrate and teach you these techniques. And when you first meet the guy, you don't know, he could be a total psychopath that just is in that position to hurt people. He could be like the stereotype from all the comedy movies. It just wants to kick kids in the face or whatever. But what you do is over time, you start to see how he's worked with other students. You ask, you build up this reasonable expectation that you're going to be handled correctly. You're going to be taught faithfully. And this is the essence of this

combination of reason and faith that I'm talking about that the Americans understood when they were founding the country, which is why I say that the foundations of the things we call the West today are Judeo-Christian and American, because we didn't really unlock Western civilization until the American pioneers came along and figured out how to put all these pieces together. Okay, you wrote about this on X, uh, either yesterday, the day before, and I'm glad you reminded me of this, that if somebody wants a definition of what is the West, the short answer is America. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly the case in our era now, but I think that's been the case since the late 18th century or maybe the early 19th century, that the American, even though I hadn't spread, America was very isolationist at the time. It's like there were all these pieces, whether it's pieces, even of the French Enlightenment, that, you know, our founders were working with Montescu, Lafayette, some of these other guys, Voltaire, they were taking seriously. There were a lot of different pieces. And they were like, well,

yes, this, but not that. And they were figuring out how to take these different pieces of kind of this, you know, unfolding of a new era in human thought that was taking place in Europe, including the Reformation, including the bloodbaths that followed, including the trials and tribulations against the Catholic Church. And they said, well, how do we put all these pieces together? And number one, let's look backwards. Let's read, let's learn Hebrew. Let's study Hebrew. This is one of the things that Harvard was doing. Like, let's teach everybody. to Hebrew and find out what the Bible actually says in the Old Testament, then we can figure out how we're supposed to organize a society because that's the best guide we have. And they figured out basically how to take all these disparate pieces that, in my opinion, that Europe had been struggling with, so-called Western civilization or Judeo-Christian civilization, have been struggling with, and how to fit it together in a way that's successful. Of course, they inherited as another answer to the West, is it's basically the Westphalian model, nation, states, sovereignty, of nations, non-interference, and that kind of thing is a part of the equation.

But until the Americans came along and basically, like, tinkered with all these pieces and realized that essential core, it didn't work. And they reinvigorated the essential core. Just to take a quick detour, can you speak for 40 seconds on the piece of Westphalia? Because, you know, I have these things in my head, 1648, the piece of Westphalia, nation states. what happened at that time because you're just referencing it? This is off the back, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not the historian, this is off the back of the 30 years war, if I'm not mistaken.

So this is one of the bloodiest craziest religious wars in Europe. And basically at the end of, I guess, about 30 years, people were like, enough. We've got to figure out something different. And so they sat down, there's a treaty involved. They sit down. They figure out this new model where, look, different states, are going to do different things, and within their own borders,

they're sovereign over themselves, and we're going to more or less leave each other alone. We're going to not interfere and get all involved inside. And so you shift to this nation-state model, which of course is in some sense based off of the old city-state model of Athens, and you start to reorganize the way that the European mind starts to think of who they are. And a lot of this was based off of the fact that, you know,

this part is Catholic, that part is Protestant. If we try to mix them together, they tend to kill each other. And what are we going to do about that? And so the piece of Westphalia follows this decision to start, well, why don't we just like kind of break some people apart and let them handle their own affairs according to the way that they think is best? And in a sense, kind of do these experiments to see, you know, okay, so the polls end up doing this and they rise or fall and, you know, whoever Germans do this and they rise or fall, eventually they create a Holocaust. Great job guys. Slow, you know, clap for that. not so good um but let's separate this apart and then like i said the americans have this in their

head they understand this as they're founding the new nation uh that becomes the united states eventually and they understand that this idea of sovereignty is so core that they're very upset with the way that they're being treated as a colony of the british crown and they want to establish something fundamentally different to where no you know we can do our own experiment and our experiment is going to be that we have religious liberty, that we don't actually go around killing people over their faith. And the state is certainly not going to endorse that. In fact, the state is going to prohibit that. The state is going to get in the way if a Catholic gets mad and decides that all the Presbyterians need to be killed. We're going to say, no, people are going to, you know,

Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion and nothing to prohibit the free exercise thereof. And we're going to try this experiment. We're going to do something different. We're going to organize ourselves in a way that extends and amplifies that piece in a way that even Europe never quite figured out. But again, I'm not the historian on this. This is a chapter of history that I'm still a bit murky on myself. But this is the general picture, the rough hewn edges of a story that I roughly know from this. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm fascinated just in my own research on the revolution.

the idea that what I have said a couple of times is that they were forced, the 13 colonies were forced with a little help from the secularist French Enlightenment to kind of critically look at what does the Bible really say? And they were forced to kind of squeeze it and out pop this idea of liberty. I think that it's at the heart of the Bible, but it took close to 18 centuries for people to it and to understand, no, this is central. If you want to understand what is central to the Bible is we do not convert by the sword, theocracy is bad. Theocracy is not consonant with biblical values. There has to be some measure of freedom. So they reject the theocratic models of the Massachusetts

Bay colony and on and on and on. That to me is fascinating, that it took the 13 colonies, you know, forced to be together in a room to kind of see this and that to kind of to say that we're going to agree on that we have this thing in common and at the heart of it, it is fundamentally Christian and at the heart of this is this thing called liberty, religious liberty. Like you're saying, that hadn't happened before. You know, Martin Luther didn't believe in religious liberty. No, not at all. He ends up throwing a guy in the well for disagreeing with him about baptism. Wait a minute. What's, what's? Yeah, France Earps. Is that the guy's name, something like this? What do you mean literally? Literally. The guy came and, you know, he says kind of, hey,

Martin Luther, your whole brand is like, that's not in the book. And this thing about infant baptism is not in the book, but you do the infant baptism. So Luther responded positively to that by throwing a guy in a well to die. Not big. I'm embarrassed because I write books on people like Martin Luther, and somehow I missed that. Then he decides all the Jews are going to become Protestants because, you know, Protestantism is kind of opened up, you know, back, going back to the scripture itself. And then they don't. That was early on. And he was very very, very kind and gracious to the Jews and was really of how the church had treated them. Oh, no, absolutely.

And then at the end, I say in my book that he was just a he was cranky and nasty to everybody who disagree with it. It's likely to be true. But the Nazis, of course, cherry picked what he said about the Jews as though it was his main teaching. Right, right. And to this day, I hear that, which is frustrating. Yeah. So this idea, this idea of liberty being central to the Judeo-Christian ethos, I think, which, of course, America is the one that consecrates and activates this, I think is absolutely key. Like the Jewish religion, they have 613 commandments, the mitzvot, and you're supposed to follow these things. And that's what you have to do to be a properly good Jew. But it doesn't matter if you follow them. You're still a Jew if you're a Jew if you're a Jew. And so it's ultimately righteousness is your personal set of decisions. And the deal is if you're doing your end, it's a covenant, if you're doing your end, you're going to probably receive blessings.

If you looked at it in a dry secularist way, you even take God out of the equation, it's like, this is the right way to live, and therefore living right makes good outcomes. But if you add God into the equation, it multiplies the power of that. But then on then the Christian, it's, the covenant is different. We don't have 600, or Christians don't have 613 mitzvah that if I have to follow. They have, do you accept Jesus as your savior or not? That's the covenant, period. But it's still an individual decision. And to understand what that means and what that entails for your life is also an individual decision that you make. And you can voluntarily submit to the authority of a pastor or a priest or whatever, but that's a voluntary decision on the individual's part.

And this crazy Judeo-Christian idea somehow got lost. This is the, whether you call it integralist or like these more radical Christian nationalists explicitly say this here in America, is the integralist idea that came up from Leo the 13th in the late 19th century, Catholic Pope, of course, was, well, man has temporal ends in the world, but man also has spiritual ends with God and in heaven. And because his spiritual ends are more important in the grand scheme of things than his temporal ends, we have to order the world, including through the state, such that his spiritual ends are satisfied. So this justifies kind of another theocratic model. And you see this trying to creep back into the story today. And this is the thing the American founders specifically were trying to reject. Again, like you said, theocratic model of the Massachusetts Bay Colony being a specific example.

And the idea was not that it's the state's business to try to order the spiritual affairs of anybody. And this is so important for people to understand. this is the foundation of what the Americans were trying to achieve with what they did. And I think it's just a crucially important part of how important liberty is, liberty of conscience, liberty of belief, liberty of speech so that you can go proclaim the gospel if you want to, liberty to hear the gospel if you want to show up and listen to a guy, you know, yelling about it either in a sane way or an insane way. That's your freedom, your liberty, because the state has no business ordering the the affairs of men in the spiritual realm. It's the exact refutation of that late 19th century Catholic model that comes along integralism that says, no, no, no, we have an obligation. We, the priests have an obligation. We, the church has an obligation to reorder the state so that the state arranges affairs to intervene on the higher needs of man's spiritual ends, which are the most important thing from, you know, it's a reasonable perspective to absorb, but it doesn't

actually work. This is actually, in my opinion, antithetical to the Judeo-Christian ethos, and this is what it makes America both so magical and so successful. Well, it's interesting because I think that I said this on the Jeremy Boring podcast the other day. You see these folks, again, it's a strange group of Catholics, the Catholic Integralists, and a strange group of the Protestants who are, you know, Protestant indigalists, maybe they proudly call themselves Christian nationalists in the,

the strange sense of that. And they don't seem to like America. They don't see America as being, as I do, as being God's idea of how we should govern ourselves, how we should order government, how we can create a country where people are genuinely free. They don't like, that. They prefer monarchy. I think maybe they'd rather go back to the Habsburgs or go back to

something previous, and they would like to take us all there. They'd like to undo, you know, 1776 and 1787. It's very strange to me that these people have arisen at this time, and their thinking is tribalist. I mean, this kind of thinking leads to demonizing the other, which is what a lot of, you know, secular liberals think Christians are all about demonizing the other. No, no, no. actual Christians are about loving our enemies and about loving the other. But these folks actually are about demonizing the other. It's a strange retrograde movement, let's put it that way, in history. Yeah, I think it misses, again, the ethic of America.

While you have liberty on the one hand, you also have this humility, which we could say, or I said earlier, is symbolized by the Kippa that the Jews wear. It's this idea that, look, maybe it's true that, you know, we should all be ordered or all ordering our lives to our ultimate spiritual ends in alignment with God and God's plan for the world or whatever it happens to be. Of course, you know, God's path in Arabic is pronounced Sharia. So maybe we're supposed to be ordering ourselves to the divine path laid out before us, the Sharia laid out before us, depending on how you see this thing. But the problem is that it's actually, if God is intervening to do that, he's doing it with individuals. And he's not, we have no business trusting some guy to order those affairs for us. Like, I know Catholics will get upset about it. But the truth of the matter is just like President Trump is some guy, the Pope is some guy.

They're just some guy, right? And I understand the authority and I understand the tradition and I understand the whole thing. But at the end of the day, the American attitude is, look, that guy that claims to be a spiritual authority that wants to order people's spiritual ends is some guy. Therefore, the only way that we can be okay with the idea of that guy ordering spiritual ends for people is if the people themselves consent to that. But when it becomes a matter of the state, it automatically becomes a matter of a tyrant ordering your spiritual ends, which means it's at the end of the day. It's not God-orienting your spiritual lens. It's some guy. And some guy might have, you know, he's fallen too.

He's limited to. He might be corrupt. He might have, you know, he might have made a deal with the Russians or with the Chinese for all we know. He's just some guy. He's just as temptable as anybody but Jesus. I was going to say the point. That's the point, right, is that, you know, and this is what George Whitfield brings

in the great awakening of the mid-18th century. by preaching the gospel and by preaching that we all need to be born again and look directly to God of a direct relationship with Jesus, he is also communicating this egalitarian idea that we are all under God's judgment, including the king, including the magistrates, including the bishops. So they were all equal in God's sight. And of course, you get that line in the Declaration of Independence. We are, you know, created, created equal. where does that idea come from that we're created equal?

Well, it's a biblical idea. But if we're all created equal, it means that the king and everyone, all of us are under God and have to look to God. So you can't have that over reverence in a sense for figures such as the king or whatever. You always have to reverence God far greater, far more than you do these figures.

And, you know, that to me, is the true teaching of the Bible, basically. That's what it actually says, and it takes time to kind of get there. And that it does create what we call the United States of America, is that these ideas are, you know, we look to, we know that our presidents and our chief justices, these are just men and women.

These are, these are, these are, these are human beings as we are human beings. And so we reference the office. But we know that the man can be tempted just as I can be tempted. That's why one of the most important theological books ever written in the history of man that's got this whole idea written down on it is a children's book called Everybody Poops. I'm so happy to be unaware of that book because I hate that title. But I get the idea. I get the idea. It's a very cute book actually.

Fundamentally biblical idea that we are all equal in God's eyes. And that's why when people talk about, you know, the French Enlightenment, I think, well, where do you get the idea that we're all equal from the French Enlightenment? Apart from the Bible, where do you get the idea that we're equal? Like, I think it's people who just believe in the idea of evolution, that we're just evolving towards something more wonderful and that eventually it just pops out of history that we, you know, we're all equal. We believe in equality.

Like, where do you get that idea? That's a biblical idea. Apart from the Bible, it doesn't exist. So to pretend that our founding is based in the French Enlightenment or something, as many still seem to try to do, is fascinating to me. It's just strange. Now, the French Enlightenment, I mean, the direct, I mean, it's both historical and kind of obvious when you think about it, at least in retrospect, that the conclusion is, in fact, not that we're equal, at least not now. Maybe we get there, like you said, through some kind of, you know, I actually say that these programs, communism, so on, are a spiritual eugenics program. They're selecting for people who are obedient to the belief system. So it's not physical necessarily eugenics.

You're not like trying to get the tallest guy so you can create a nine foot tall, 10 foot tall human being, but rather what you're doing is you're selecting for people that will believe this crap. And so it's a spiritual eugenics program. And what you get, though, is you get this idea that the most rational among us who are always scholars who appoint themselves and that are willing to be like brutal warlords, create a vanguard of the enlightened, the, you know, the self-appointed elect that are now going to drag everybody into this rational program that's going to result in the total equality of all men on the far side of whatever their program is because we obviously are too stupid to order our own affairs. and whether it doesn't matter where you look, this is the same model.

The French Revolution obviously had that, and it ended up, you know, consuming itself. The Bolsheviks, this was Lenin's great idea. His great idea was, oh, my God, the workers are never, they're too stupid. They're never going to do it. So what we're going to do is all the most intelligent Marxist thinkers are going to become the vanguard to drag these people into the blender. And socialism will come out the other side and eventually it'll work. Well, of communism. You know, we'll just do another five-year plan after another five-year plan after another five-year plan until it works.

And, you know, maybe we lose a million here, 10 million there along the way, but they weren't spiritually pure enough. So we had to get, you know, we had to cut, cut them loose anyway, no big deal. And you always get this. It's this psychotic, anti-rational view of the world posing as rationalism where basically a bunch, frankly, just to be kind of blunt about it, a bunch of bloodthirsty nerds decide that they're the only people who understand human nature correctly and they're going to force everybody to play according to. game. And this is the logic of this so-called French Enlightenment, which then the, you know, the Germans look at the French Enlightenment, whether you look at Kant, he's a major figure in the German Enlightenment. You look at Hegel. These guys had like, like, Kant famously was very in a sense Calvinistic in one way, which is that he had no decorations anywhere at all. You followed like the most

rigid schedule in the possible. I don't know if you know these stories about Emmanuel Kant. He's a weirdo. So he had nothing in his study except one decoration, which was a portrait of Rousseau. And then he takes his walk every day at like 3 p.m. The locals could set their watch by the time that Emmanuel Kant would walk by their door because he was so meticulously at the same time. He missed his walk one time. And it was because he was reading something in Rousseau that just blew his mind. So the Germans import this whole French Enlightenment.

And they're like, ah, V can make a BMW factory out of this and make it to every human. You know, they basically tried to turn it into a giant social engineering project attached to neoplatonic ideal. that didn't work. It just created things like communists and Nazis. Well, you know, it's so funny. I was looking in my own book, I keep in my speeches or sermons when I'm talking about my book Revolution, I keep mentioning how on August 1st, John, sorry, Samuel Adams gave a speech where he says, we have restored the sovereign. to whom alone men ought to be obedient. So he's making the clear point as a member of Congress to Congress, that what we've done here is we've broken away from King George III, but we have restored the true sovereign who is God.

And he goes on to say, truth loves an appeal to the common sense of mankind. He who made all men have made the truths necessary to human happiness obvious to all. I find this fascinating. And then he says, our forefathers threw off the yoke of popery in religion. And we have the honor of leveling the popery of politics. So he's talking about these ideas in a speech to Congress the day before they sign the declaration.

He's making clear this is what we have been doing and that it's something that's understandable to all. It's not part of some priestly elite understands it, but you can't understand it. it's sacred information only for the elites. And that to me is at the heart of what we did in declaring independence. It's at the heart of America. It's at the heart of the West, but it takes time for us to get there. And he even says, just as the reformers had opened the Bible to all and maintained the capacity

of every man to judge for himself in religion, a Congress made it possible for Americans to judge for themselves in material and temporal. matters. He says, this day, I trust the reign of political Protestantism will commence. I mean, you know, I don't think he's meaning really to be just nakedly anti-Catholic, but he's making a point about what they're doing here. And we don't seem to talk about this very much. Yeah, I mean, you could call it the low church model if you want, which is that every man has access to both general revelation and in special revelation and can study those things. for himself and come to these conclusions.

Of course, the Scottish Enlightenment figures called that common sense. And this was going to be the idea. So now we're not just going to, again, we're going to dispose of these kings. It's like almost looking at the difference between Torah and Tanakh and looking at the period of the, you know, the Israelite kings and saying like, God was like, don't do that, right?

And then, okay, fine, try it. See how it goes. And that's like the history of Europe. They tried it. See how it goes. Whoops, bloodbaths, you know. So we're going to do something completely different. We're going to, you know, basically it's, it's restoring the sovereign, as he said, but it's also therefore putting that cap on the head of every citizen. It's like, remember, as it says in, you know, the book of James, you know, what are you? You're but a miss seen for a while and then then dispersing. Like, we're each like a very small in kind of human affairs sense, inconsequential thing. So like don't get so uppity that you think you get to order everything. So,

just like the Reformation opens this low church model where anybody can go. And one of the first things that you did, you know, so what's the Reformation? We can print the Bible and vernacular languages. People can read it in German. People can read it in English. People can read it in French. For the first time, it's all very exciting. You're not getting your head cut off for printing Bibles and languages people can read.

So what do they decide to do? Let's learn Hebrew. Let's study the Old Testament in Hebrew so we can understand the way it was actually written. You have this same mentality. It's like, let's actually understand this. Let's cut out the BS. Let's get back to, you know, let's get back to these basics.

And now you get this low church. Everybody can study to tremendous deep levels if they so choose or they can stay on the surface if they so choose. But let's get back to this kind of thing. And our politics is like low church. We don't have Versailles. We don't have Buckingham. We have the White House guys. And there's a UFC, you know, fight ring in the front lawn.

that's i you have to forgive me because i i turned to the page of my book's page 341 in my book i say that samuel adam sometime that summer i think it was uh in in may or june wrote to a friend he wrote uh i've long been convinced that our enemies have made it an object to eradicate from the minds of the people in general a sense of true religion and virtue in hopes thereby the more easily to carry their point of enslaving them which of course is what's been happening in the decades in our lifetime. He says, indeed, my friend, this is a subject so important in my mind that I know not how to leave it. Revelation assures us that righteousness exalted a nation. Communities are dealt with in their world by the wise and just rule of the universe. He rewards or punishes them according to their

general character. The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness and the public liberty will not long save the total extinction of morals. I just find it amazing because we've seen this, the Marxists and various other. figures in our own lifetimes have mocked virtue. And you really do feel like behind it, what are they trying to do by mocking virtue or by mocking the ability of your average American to think for himself? They're really preparing us for slavery. And I just think that that's the way it works and that that's true. And you know who the slave masters will be, them, right?

They'll be the slave masters. This is, I actually said something about this on accident of conversation I was having with somebody yesterday. and I continue it a little bit today, this is actually where the fundamentally Gnostic character of these movements like Marxism comes into being, which is if you believe, like the founders did, that the foundations of virtue, of the foundations of truth,

the foundations of goodness are accessible to all, whether it's through reading the Bible, whether it's through experience, whether it's through engaging with the world, if you believe it's accessible to all, then that's like, if that's your foundation for goodness, And then you're a Marxist and you're like a Gnostic about that.

What you believe is that those foundations are the big lie. They're the big lie that everybody has to see through. So you're going to invert everything. You're going to the things that are actually the foundations of virtue, goodness, truth, you're going to turn them upside down and you're going to do everything you can to sully and destroy people's belief in those things. And what are you going to replace it with? You're going to replace it with your own vision, which is you believe you see through the trick, right? The whole Gnostic thing is a cosmic conspiracy theory.

We're out of time. James Lindsay, my friend, wonderful to speak with you. Thank you for all you do. God bless you. Yeah, you too, Eric. I just decided I want to write a book on the American Revolution. Because this is extremely important. Unless Americans know our story, we cannot possibly continue to keep the Republic.

You know,