The Eric Metaxas Show - #173 - James Lindsay

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, James Lindsay joins Eric to discuss John Adams’s forgotten 1765 essay A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law and why its warnings about tyranny remain relevant today. They examine post-liberalism, Catholic integralism, Christian nationalism, the “woke right,” Patrick Deneen’s proposed regime change, and whether political movements on the right are abandoning the constitutional principles of liberty, responsibility, religious freedom, and self-government.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/0:00 James Lindsay Joins2:16 The Forgotten John Adams Essay5:03 Why Every American Should Read It8:42 John Adams’s Warning About Tyranny14:40 Liberty, Religion, And The American Founding20:45 Patrick Deneen And Regime Change24:14 What Is Post-Liberalism?32:06 Where Should Liberty Be Limited?38:20 The Woke Right And Christian Nationalism- - -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 the folks, welcome to the program. I am very excited right now because our friend James Lindsay told me he could give us the whole hour. And I actually enjoy talking to James Lindsay. James, welcome back. Yeah, it's always great to see you, Eric. I said this to Suzanne, who's my current wife of 30 years, I said to her yesterday. I don't know if we were on a plane. I've lost track.

I've been traveling so much. I was in England. I was in Oxford, England. We flew to Dallas. I spoke in Dallas yesterday. I think I said this to her on the way home from Dallas to New York yesterday. But I said,

James Lindsay is one of the tiny handful of people whom I find deeply encouraging, just your person. I mean, of course it has a lot to do with what you say, but it's also how you say it because I think those things matter. You're encouraging. So I just want to say,

up front, thank you, because we need to encourage each other. I think that's really at the heart of the larger project to encourage each other that, yeah, there is such a thing as truth. And yeah, we need to fight for truth. And yeah, it's a fight. But so let me start by saying thank you. Yeah, well, I mean, I really appreciate that because I really do try to, you know, understand what I'm talking about and articulate the things that I say in a way that people can understand. And it's tough. It's tough and to stay positive in light of all of the crazy stuff we're all dealing with. It's also tough. So I appreciate that, you know, I'm helping you and others with that. Well, it's, yeah, it's not, it's not unimportant. And I think, do you know who insurrection Barbie is? Have we talked

about this? I know who the character is. I don't know her personally. But we don't know how to reach the person because she's writing a lot of great stuff along the lines of what you and I will be discussing today and what you're always talking about. I don't know. I don't know who that person actually is. Somebody said that she'd come out with a book or is coming out with a book. I don't know. Anyway, we can follow about that another time.

Now, I noticed, and we can talk about anything, but I noticed because I follow you on X, you seem obviously to have begun to read a terrific book. I probably haven't mentioned it on this program, but it's called Revolution, the birth of the Greatest Nation of the History of the World by Eric Metaxus. You've obviously started reading that book because on X, you're making references to things that I know he had to get that from my book. And one of the things you reference has to do with, it was one of my favorite things in writing this book is discovering an essay.

I write a long chapter about this. I think it's chapter four. John Adams at age 30 in 1766. writes a magnificent essay called a dissertation on the canon and feudal law. And when I read it, as I'm doing my research sometime over a year ago, I was just astonished at the whole thing. And I thought, how come the whole world doesn't know about this essay? This seems to me, you know, as important as just about anything. And nobody knows about it.

So I thought the least I can do is write about it in my book. So I'm really thrilled that you of all people are reading the book and that you've obviously bumped into that chapter. Yeah, well, when you first said a moment ago that you figured out from my posts on X and I might be reading your book, I thought you're going to reference. I was like thinking, did I say I have carpal tunnel from holding up the tome that is this book while I read it? My wrists have become strong, like manly strong holding the book in my hands because it is a meaty and worthy volume. I've made it about a quarter of the way through. So I'm still kind of, I'm about to read about the towns and decks, just to kind of put you where I am.

But the reason I'm going so slowly through the book is because I'm doing what a researcher is supposed to do, which I normally don't bother doing on the first read through a book. And when you reference something, I go find it and read it. Not every book that you talk about, but these original essays. So I read Jonathan Mayhew's his 1750 sermon all the way through. there was the one about Romans 13 and whether or not we should have non-resistance and submission to the higher powers. And I read this entire sermon. I think it's probably the best explanation of Romans 13 in print, at least from an American perspective. Again, not enough people know it.

And then this essay by John Adams. And I've actually read both of these now into my own microphone here as future forthcoming episodes of my own podcast so that people can hear the things in their entirety because I know people don't tend to read. But I read this John Adams essay. I sat down your book and I read the John Adams essay and like you, I was blown away by this essay. I was just absolutely flabbergasted by how pertinent and good and sharp and insightful and clever and scurting that line of treason without crossing it that it proves to be how foundational to America that it is. I've read it actually this once out loud to the microphone, but I've read this now three times this essay, and I have not gone back to your book because I found the essay so

captivating. And yeah, I think everybody in America needs to hear the story of this essay, needs to hear this essay, or needs to read this essay. I encourage people to make book clubs to read not just your book, which I do recommend, but also this essay and these other, you know, the sermon and other sources. Think about it, James. Think about it. And listen, you're giving me great joy because honestly, you know, when I do what I do, you always wonder, will anybody care? The fact that you, James Lindsay, have looked up the essay as a result of my writing a chapter on the essay. You know, I was so amazed when I read this. And this happens to me every time I write a book, and I don't know if it's just God's

particular calling on my life, that every time I write a book, I discover something and I am astonished that I've never seen it before. I'm astonished it exists. And then I look around and I think, how has no one ever? talked about this. However, I just can't get over the fact that I've never heard of this essay. I mean, even if you read David McCullough's biography of John Adams, he barely mentions this. He gives it like a page, kind of a, it struck me when I was reading it. I said, this is, this is really important. But if it's so important, how come I haven't heard of it before?

And ultimately I just decided I've got to write a long chapter about the essay because it is so important, hoping, of course, that somebody like you would see this and would look into it deeper. But it's part of why I keep saying in almost every speech I give on the revolution that John Adams should be a thousand times more famous than Thomas Jefferson or at least 100 times or 10 times more famous than Thomas Jefferson. because this in 1765, for him to write this is just, you know, it's noteworthy. And we've been 260 years not talking about it. So it's about time. I think it should be actually required curriculum in high school government classes. I'm kind of upset that I was at no point, whether in my American history courses or in my required government courses in high school and college to ever have read this essay.

I think it's that foundational. Now listen, there's always reasons for this, right? Like whenever I discover something that nobody knows about, I think why does nobody know about it? And there are reasons for it. And I think I say it in my chapter. I say, number one, Adams published it under the preposterous pseudonym of Humphrey Plow Jogger. So that's number one. Number two, he published it in four different pieces in the Boston Gazette.

under the preposterous pseudonym Humphrey Plow Jogger. So, you know, you'd read a quarter of it, and then, you know, eight weeks would pass, and then he published another piece of it, another piece. So it was never put out there as here's this great essay by John Adams. So it falls to us a thousand years later to talk about it. Well, the funny thing is that it answers the exact challenges that we're dealing with, whether it's the World Economic Forum and all this ridiculous, sustainable, and inclusion dynamic that we've all had forced upon us,

that we're all sick of, whether it's communism, actually. And even, you know, a lot of the stuff that the woke right, this kind of neo-integralist project, this Catholic, you know, social program with the common good economy and all of this that they're trying to bring to bear, it's all actually answered in 1765 with tremendous force by John Adams commenting on the idea that the canon law, meaning the church, the ecclesial law, and the feudal law are two tyrannical systems. and when they fuse, in other words, integralism, when they fuse, you have a big tyrannical problem on your hands. And he's as answered to this as like what we need, actually, is the ability to have freedom to pursue knowledge in particular. And most importantly, as you cite in your book, the knowledge to understand what your leaders are up to. You should be allowed to know if your authorities are corrupt, if they're violating the Constitution, if they're depriving you of your natural rights. So you need to know these rights. You need to know your rights under the Constitution and as human beings as man made in the image of God.

And when you know those things, if you are intelligent, as he phrases it and well read enough, what happens is that tyranny loses its force and people become mad at that tyranny. And eventually, maybe they'll have not a, but the revolution that tries to throw that tyranny off. And thus we have the foundation to answer the precise questions that we are wrestling with. here in the 21st century in 2020 through 26, particularly for people, of do we have an obligation to bow to a sustainable and inclusive, you know, bureaucratic state? Do we have an obligation to transform our world for socialist and communist programs like Mandami and the DSA want? And do we have an obligation to throw out our system like Patrick Deneen would write to have a regime change in favor of some new

integralist program that infuses religious social teaching directly into the state law to orient, not just for the common good, but also demands highest spiritual ends. And John Adams is like, no, absolutely not. We made America to not do that. Actually, he says this 11 years before we made America. That's one of the reasons that I'm so amazed by it. That's right. This is 17, ladies and gentleman, 1765, folks, 65. He is 30 years old. There is nobody, absolutely nobody thinking about independence from Great Britain in 1765. Nobody. But there's something going on and I, I don't know that I stated explicitly in my chapter, but it seems like John Adams is somehow intuitively

postulating some kind of messianic age, some utopian in the positive sense, future, where we could have liberty, where we could have self-government. He seems to be groping his way forward in this

essay and seems to be suggesting that we've come to a moment in history or we're coming to a moment in history where this is possible. But it is 11 years before the Declaration of Independence. So it is to me, I say it's prophetic. In fact, the title of the chapter is Adam's John Adams waxes prophetic.

Because you think how is it possible in 1765 at age 30 when the Stamp Act is suddenly a thing, a new thing, he comes out with this long essay called a dissertation on the canon. and feudal law. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing. And I think, you know, he was obviously super brilliant, but his friend Jeremiah Gridley, who was a little older than he was, who was a lawyer, I think encouraged him to put these thoughts down into the essay. And of course, he did. Yeah, that seems to be the case. And it's funny, because, you know, it wasn't a response to this tyrannical stamp act that was, you know, the second of the big, well, third, I guess, of the big acts that the British crown had foisted on America, the rits of assistance,

being the first, and then you have the Sugar Act, and then they come out with this Stamp Act, and this is all to try to get America to pay for the French Indian War, and the colonists are not having this, but he barely mentions, and he obliquely talks about in the third part of the essay stuff relevant to the Stamp Act, but he barely mentions the Stamp Act at all until kind of the last paragraph where he's like, eh, if I have more time and I feel like it, I'll get around to writing about the Stamp Act, actually, for real, but, P.S. This is what this has actually all been about. And then the stamp act was, you know, dead on arrival. So he never got around to writing that piece on the stamp act because it turned out to be unnecessary. I bet you

it would have been fascinating because as history proved, Britain wasn't backing down. And it really was necessary given that he wrote, you know, 15, 18 pages or whatever of deeply principled argument only to give one paragraph to basically say, by the way, I'm talking about the stamp act at the very end. And it's just a fantastic essay. And like I said, it answers all of the threats and challenges that Americans are facing today. And I agree with Adam's big point, which is if we understood where we came from, why we came from there, what our rights are under the Constitution and under God, and we were to actually understand those things that we would reject these tyrannies and establish a much better system for ourselves that prevents them.

Well, I mean, let's lay this out because I have to say again, for me, I had to think this through all by myself. It's not like there's literature on this essay. And so it really was fascinating to me to discover this thing like in the raw, basically, and to try to make sense of where did this come from. I mean, one of the things I discovered, and I'm sure you saw that, is that the first part of the essay, he actually never published. but it was preserved. So I quote it. It's a kind of a prologue to the essay that did not appear in the Boston Gazette.

But he is ruminating on what liberty is. And his definition of liberty, I thought, this is extraordinary because this is a biblical definition of liberty. It's not a modern definition of liberty. And he is, I mean, we have to say this. that in many ways, the Boston Puritans of that era were very anti-Catholic. And I think that we have to frame that.

We have to say that it's not anti-Catholic in the way that it would be anti-Catholic today. This was responding to a Catholic church that at the time really was oppressive. I mean, I think that most Catholics today have taken. on very American, very Protestant ideas that inform their Catholic faith. But this is the 1760s. And obviously, John Adams and others saw the canon law of the church in Europe and then the feudal law as twin oppressors as working hand in hand. And of course, that's how the French revolutionaries saw it as well. But I mean, that's the idea that he's able to articulate this. I just find absolutely fascinating. Yeah, you know, he would have had in not living memory probably,

but certainly in memory, things like the killing times, which was this crackdown at the Anglican church, which they considered to basically be like just a mirror image of the Catholic church, but the one that was specifically infused to the British crown. But the killing times were the 1680s. And so, you know, 80 years before he's writing this essay, there was this crackdown on Presbyterianism, which, of course, is really relevant to Puritans. And this ends up, you know, it was a bad time. The church state monstrosity in Britain at the time, this would be under the Stuart Kings, which he condemns pretty clearly in the essay. They would, if you were found to be a Presbyterian and you wouldn't recant and deny it, you were basically an outlaw. You had no

protections under the Constitution. And frankly, since it was called the killing times, you could be killed. And this was happening in Scotland. It was happening in London. It was happening across Great Britain. And a lot of these guys, these Presbyterians, fled first to places like the Netherlands and to Denmark. And then they eventually come across to Plymouth in the late 1680s. So these are some of the forefathers that he's going to have directly in mind when he's writing this, that the church state thing, when it gets kind of worked up on its own power. And then you end up with either, you know, a bad archbishop or a bad pope or a bad king or any of this kind of stuff, a tyrant who in Mayhew's view, you know, has stepped out of his just role as an ordinate of God to, you know, lead the civil circumstance. When you have that, you have a bad situation. And he's like, this is what he says at the beginning of the essay, this is what peopled America. Not so much religion as is commonly believed, but a love of religious liberty and a hatred, a deep abiding fear and hatred of these tyrannies from which they were fleeing. When we look at the headlines coming out of Iran and Israel right now, the fog of war is real. It's hard to know whom to trust. That same feeling of confusion often hits home when you're trying to navigate Medicare.

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It's free, it's quick, and it's the kind of honest guidance we need more of today. Call chapter and get the peace of mind you need. James, I just want to interrupt to say again how gratified I am that you're reading my book because I knew that if I put this stuff out there, if the right people stumbled on it, it really is it's again a crazy thing for me to discover something that nobody seems to know about or talk about it's so seminal what he's saying and it's a little crazy that nobody's been talking about it and then suddenly here we are 260 years later seeing it as an answer to what we're dealing with right now there's nothing new under the sun i mean you know catholic integralism

the woke right, as you've termed it, they're at odds. I mean, if you don't mind, John Zmirak has talked about this on the program, but who is Patrick Deneen, for example, and what is his vision of what we're talking about? So Patrick Deneen is a kind of political philosopher. He was at Georgetown. Now he's at Notre Dame. He's a Catholic. He is by degrees an integralist. He's written two very well-read books, the vice president, is a fan of these books and has sat with Deneen and promoted the books and said that he agrees with their thesis. The first is called why liberalism failed. It was 2018. And the second is 2023. And it's called regime change. And he says that it's calling for something far more radical than a kind of political coup where we change out the people.

But rather that we need a new constitution for the United States that has what he calls a blended constitution, which is going to be part aristocracy, part limited monarchy and part democracy. So we're going to have a completely new system, and it is based off of the obligation for the state to order people's affairs, people's temporal affairs, toward something called the common good. It is for the state to take control of the economy, so that the economy becomes a tool of promoting the common good, according to Catholic social teaching.

And how integralist he is is a bit of an open question. question, but the Integralist program takes that one step further and says that the state has the obligation to order man's temporal affairs, his practical, economic, political affairs, such that he's not just creating the common good in society, but also that he's completing his highest spiritual ends. In other words, from the Catholic perspective, to be in right alignment with the Catholic Church to go to heaven, you can have a different model. And so Patrick Danine fundamentally believes that liberalism, that this stuff, that the liberty that John Adams is talking about in this essay is the disease. It is the fly in the ointment that has caused it to smell foul all the way down

to the very day that we live in, and that until we have an entirely new political and economic system in the United States, it's controlled with a view to what they call the common good that is administered by men of prudence, as they phrase it, that we basically have no hope that this kind of woke thing is going to consume us and we don't have the possibility of resisting it because the woke thing consuming us is the logical endpoint of the system that John Adams and others were installing. And like I said, friend to the vice president, the vice president has sat and there are many videos of him describing himself as opposed liberal, sitting with Patrick Deneen endorsing the book, regime change in particular, which I find concerning enough.

So this isn't, you know, some idle guy floating out there at Notre Dame writing crazy stuff. This is a guy who has his lips whispering into the ears of close to the highest power of the land as well. So it's a significant concern. And obviously there's a broad movement, the post-liberal or more specifically woke right movement, that has taken up many of these ideas. And in essence, has given up on the vision of people like Adams and Jefferson, Madison, and the rest of them. I'm surprised that the vice president Vance would be promoting these kinds of ideas. How is post-liberalism? Are there more benign versions of post-liberalism?

Yeah, of course. So post-liberalism, I'm going to do this in the greatest generality and then specify to the one that we're actually talking about. But post-liberalism and the greatest generality is this claim. that we have reached the zenith of the liberal experiment, and therefore we have to try to move forward from that experiment while retaining the benefits that that experiment brought us. So it's not necessarily that, you know, we need to go back and completely erase it. It's that we need to move forward.

This is generally postmodernism as we're going to retain what we learn from modernism but move to a new era, where truth is actually local and irrelevant and so on. So it's this idea that we need to now move on from the liberal experiment. It had its time, depending on who you ask, it probably ended its time or ripened fully somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, although some people would argue much more recently. And it's time to move on to something new, but not by completely jettisoning that which came before. So there are a lot of post-liberal models, and this is going to be controversial, but it's true. Marxism is a post-liberal project. His critiques of capitalism, his critiques of the liberal political economy, saying that those need to give way by bloody revolution to a socialist system that reorganizes the already socialized means of production to be in the hands of the people incorporated through the socialist state is a post-liberal model. The liberalism has failed. It created this capitalist monstrosity. Everybody's

immiscerated by the working conditions. So we're going to now go beyond that. And as Mark says explicitly, we're going to retain the benefits of the, we're going to do so consciously retaining the benefits of the previous eras of production. So that's a very extreme post-liberalism. There are more benign ones. In the 1880s, you have Pope Leo the 13th coming along with Rarum Novarum, which again, you'll hear the vice president citing quite a lot, and also the Secretary of State. And this is the Integralist Project. This is, look, liberalism hasn't worked. Communism isn't the answer, but we need to do something. We need to have more social justice. We need to have Catholic social teaching bearing upon society, and the only way to do that is to reintegrate, hence toward integralism. We need to reintegrate the state into the church so that society is organized toward a vision of the common good and toward a higher spiritual end, which is getting into heaven on the Catholic pretences. But this is the same thing as Marxism, by the way, except in terms of the religion. Catholicism is not as wicked as Marxism by any stretch of, of anybody's imagination, but Marx believed that man's highest spiritual end was to realize his social

nature and achieve communism as an eschatological goal. And therefore, all of society has to be organized to the common good of redistribution under socialism in order to socialize people into the point of realizing their communist nature and entering into communism. So it's ultimately the state deciding there's a higher spiritual end of man and it has to take control of society both to have the common good and to have the ultimate, you know, eschatological or satirological end achieved, depending on, I mean, there's no real satirology in communism except to become an activist on behalf of the communist program. So, yes, there are different versions of post-liberalism and even of integralism, some more benign and some less benign. You could argue that the Sustainable Inclusion ESG or DEI regime is just another one with a new set of values, a new kind of George Soros-flavored open society, global EU program, Our Democracy, TM, that is just another set of religious values that the state is then ordering people's affairs to achieve. So how evil, how dangerous, how benign are all of these, they can go all over the place.

You could actually just have a very light touch. John Adams himself organizes the state constitution of Massachusetts 15 years after this admirable essay and explicitly includes a state establishment. There is a church and everybody will pay a tax tithe to support the state church. Eventually this proves really unpleasant to people. So they kind of amend the law to make it so that people can tithe to their own church if they regularly. attend and then you can kind of like report that to the tax authorities and get around the tithe to the state church, which is congregationalist. And this turned out to be a huge mess and a huge problem so that by 1811 or so, they're like, eh, this isn't working. And then by 1833, which is the last

in the country, they disestablishmentarian move and get rid of the state church. So John Adams himself, I forgot what they called it, a moderate and mild establishment or something like this. but he himself organized the government of Massachusetts in antipathy to the essay that he wrote in order to make the compromises necessary with the rather rabid Calvinists of the Congregationalist movement in Massachusetts. But I mean, I guess you could argue that the tax-exempt status of churches is a vestige of that, is it not? Yeah, probably, actually.

That may be right. Certainly, though, what happened was that you were paying. a tax tithe, everybody had to pay it. So Adams, true to his religious liberty bones, carefully worded the second article of his constitution to say that you had to have worship in the supreme being and creator of the universe. He did not specify that it has to be the Christian God like the Congregationalists wanted it to be, or Jesus Christ, although that in the third article comes up. So he had this very clever wording that would include Jews. It would include deists. It would include other Protestants. It would include Catholics and Anglicans. It would also include

certainly Muslims and maybe Hindus, but it would not include atheists, for example, who were penalized under Massachusetts law until 1961, as a matter of fact. And so that held over for a long time. But what happened was he was trying to carve out as much religious liberty as possible, trying to make a compromise with the with the congregationalist majority of the state of Massachusetts who weren't going to have it any other way. And he came up with a very mild system of effectively canon and non-feudal law. It was not a feudal system. It was a Republican system, a canon and Republican system that had some cutesy name like a mild and moderate establishmentarianism or something like this. So yeah, you could do this in a gentle way. And then you could do it in like full-blown

Stalin or full-blown Mao. Right. Because those are the actually or, you know, full-blown inquisition under the Catholic Church previous to this or killing times in Britain under the Anglican Church and the crown. So, yes, there are a wide variety of ways that this could be implemented. But like I said, this mild version that was implemented very strategically by John Adams himself in Massachusetts fell apart 53 years after it was implemented. It simply didn't work 53 years later. And in fact, there was a lot of trouble in between, especially from 1810 to 1830. And John Adams, of course, dies in 1826, but in his last letters that he's writing to Thomas Jefferson, oh, I shouldn't say it.

The last few years, he's writing letters to Thomas Jefferson, actually saying this didn't work. This was a mistake. I did not honor the principle of perfect religious liberty the way that I should have. And this isn't working here in Massachusetts. Well, I think ultimately the question is, what are the limits of any liberty? We know that we have free speech, but I can't yell fire in a crowded theater. We know that, logically speaking, every one of these liberties has its limits. And I think that's the question is, where are those limits?

What exactly do we mean by religious liberty? I can't think that, you know, J.D. Vance is, you know, completely lost. that there, in other words, there are, I'm just imagining that they're trying to figure things out and that they can be pulled too far. I'm just, I guess I'm wondering where this, we're going to have to talk more about this because it's something that I don't really understand enough, obviously. Yeah, it's certainly concerning a lot of people. But I will say that there are answers given, even in Jonathan Mayhew's who, Jonathan Mayhew's not exactly like, you know, go do whatever you want religiously. He's like a pretty hardcore, uh, congregationalist, uh, Protestant. Actually, however, he is Unitarian, which is bizarre to me. That's right.

As much as much as much as became unitarian. Well, at the end of his life, let's, let's, let's put that aside. Yeah. He got an argument with his son over that. John Quincy Adams was very upset with that, but put that aside. Let's just stick to the, that's right. That's right. That's right. The concept on the table here. Yeah. So the limit, though, is responsibility and that admirable sermon that he that the Mayhew gives in 1750 he's very clear that there's a point where we're loyal to the authorities and that point can be determined when they are producing civilly beneficial outcomes and he actually is specific even for a congregationalist in 1750 he's specific that Paul has to be writing in Romans to people who have pagan rulers so he's not saying disobey your

ruler because they don't have your faith he's saying are they producing outcomes comes in line with what a godly organization would do. Are they working for the common, not the common good, but the common positive outcome, the positive development of society? Are they punishing actual evil by any reasonable definition? Are they rewarding actual good by any reasonable definition? In other words, judge them by their fruits. And the answer becomes then to how do we find the limits of liberty?

I got this from another book about the revolution that I'm also looking into. I haven't read it as far as I've read yours, but it's Tim Sandifers' book Proclaiming Liberty, and he's got it published under the Cato imprint. And so he has this really intriguing argument that liberty and responsibility are fundamentally connected to one another in a profound way, which is that you can only have responsibility if you have liberty. If you're compelled to act, you were forced to do it. You're not really responsible. So personal responsibility and self-government become actually the limits on our liberties rather than falling into license.

And every single founding father would have understood and believed this strongly that it is, you know, maybe you do have the capability to go out and act the fool in public. But it is not behoove. I mean, this is something John Adams in your book you're dealing with where the mobs of the Sons of Liberty are going and tearing down houses, you know, because they're mad at the governors over the stamp. facts, right? And John Adams kind of poohs this. He doesn't really come out and strike hard at everybody poohs this. But what he's basically saying is ultimately that there's a responsibility that we have, that just because you can doesn't mean that you should. And so you must therefore be held responsible to your actions. And if you're damaging the public, you know, whether it's disturbing the peace, whether it's incitement or something of that kind or actually engaging in riotous

behavior or criminal activity, then you're not. you need to be held to account, but otherwise you should be responsible. So the limits of liberty are defined by responsibility. And then some of those limits are then encoded in law, which is, you know, the idea of rule of law. This is how they started to solve these problems of what do you do with the totally free people as well. You've got to draw some lines and you behoove them, you beseech them to be, as Adams put it later, a moral and religious people who don't go out and act like wild animals, who don't think that they can transform their fundamental nature by putting on a dress or whatever else, but rather that you call them to behave within

the limits of their responsibility, which they will be called to. Of course, this is where the Christian part of the Judeo-Christian Foundation of the United States is so important, is that your average Christian American, which was most of them, believed that if they didn't have to answer to the authorities, they were going to have to answer to the authority with a capital A, eventually. So, you know, you better be good for goodness sake. And I'm not actually talking about Santa Claus here as the authority. I'm talking about God. You're going to face that. So this is an important ingredient in why people like Adams believed, part of why Adams believed that the morality and religion are so intertwined. But certainly, certainly the Puricans would have believed

if you misbehave, you will be held responsible, even if you do it in secret, even if you do it behind an anonymous account, even if, you know, the other side was really bad or whatever else. So responsibility is actually the answer. And I like how, like I said, Tim Sandifer, who's written a similar book to yours at roughly the same time has laid out that responsibility is the consequence of liberty and nothing else. So therefore, if you have liberty, you must be responsible because you are actually responsible. for your freely chosen actions. Well, so what are the, whether it's Catholic integralists or some of these post-liberals,

you're talking about, are they trying to take away some of our liberties? Is that really the issue that they're saying that the liberty doesn't work? The liberty leads to license and the government needs to be more robust in enforcing a kind of moral vision, both morally and economically. So, you know, again, I turn to the vice president's own words. He's spoken extensively about how the free market has basically sold out things like the Rust Belt and has not worked for American workers. Again, the Secretary of State has said similar things. And so we have to think about, you know, what kind of limitations we want to put, whether it's on big tech companies in terms of their ability to contour speech, whether which some of is a robust and real debate, or whether it's on. on mega multinational corporations to be able to offshore manufacturing or other things. So in the economic domain explicitly, but also in the moral domain, where Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that what harm is it to him, whether his neighbor believes in one god, zero gods, or 20 gods, it does no damage to him whatsoever. The answer here, which John Adams probably would have agreed with to a degree, is it actually does possibly do harm.

if you have a society filled with people who believe stuff that is deleterious of a common belief set that grounds morality. Now, the question is what and where. So they explicitly want to ban things. And, you know, this isn't a terribly difficult, this is the discussion about liberty, right? They want to ban things like pornography. And people are going to have a lot of opinions about that, whether that's good, whether that's bad, whether it's appropriate. But isn't that a good example, okay, that's a good example, though, because I think that a lot of people, people would say we've had bans on pornography. The only question is to what extent.

Isn't that it? What are we defining as pornography? What are the limits of that? What are the limits of our freedom to consume things that that harm us? You know, that's, we've had this debate on drugs, you know, people like William F. Buckley and others have said that we know, we can decriminalize drugs that people have the freedom, whatever. We recognize, most of the Most of us would have called this social conservatism, right? Isn't this just social conservatism under another name? And wouldn't somebody like me say, basically, I think that some social conservatism is a good thing for the state to draw these lines. It is politically enforced social conservatism.

But, I mean, some of them are more extensive. Some of them believe that, you know, if you want to basically have the full range of abilities to participate in society, politically or even economically that you have to be a professing Christian of some denomination or another. Maybe the church attendance can be compelled, again, if you want full enfranchisement or whatever. So perhaps non-Christians can't vote or something to that effect. But is this at all realistic? It seems preposterous to me that in an age such as we're living in, that anything like that could ever fly. I mean, maybe 100 years ago. Yes, but not the way that you're not the way that they're proposing. What they're proposing is a great way to get

Democrats to experience a psychological state called reactants, which is the fear and compulsion to action that people feel when they are losing their rights. And they will get violent over it. So this is in their program, this religious right, woke right, or whatever program, is a great way to get Democrats elected. That's what it boils down to. But yes, this is completely practical. The sustainability, DEI, ESG, crap, every corporation has not only embraced, but forced all of its employees to go along with is the same program exactly with a different moral vision. It's not the church of, you know, Jesus Christ or the church of the one holy, Catholic, apostolic, or whatever. It is the church of Klaus Schwab's sustainable and inclusive movement

for a new capitalism that includes all the people. Well, right. So we see how it's wrong on the left. The question is, on the right, what, what, I mean, who is realistically talking about imposing some kind of a Christian moral vision and what are the specifics? This is what's never clear to me. I mean, Stephen Wolfe has written an entire book about it, published by Doug Wilson's Canon Press, called the case for Christian nationalism. That actually has pretty extreme recommendations under a highest office above the president and everything called the Christian Prince and that the civil religious magistrates would have the power. to punish blasphemy, non-belief, even practice, open practice of other religions, including Judaism. I thought we moved past this like when Rhode Island was populated, like in the 17th century.

I'm just fascinated. It's making a comeback. I just read an article, a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal where, again, Pastor Doug Wilson has argued for, in fact, this kind of thing, saying that, you know, while saying explicitly things is that like, you know, there are certain kinds of behaviors such as, you know, we see in maybe the queer theory movement or that radicalism that nobody would really disagree with having strict state moral codes to oppose them. Maybe people would fear a Christian nationalism, he says. And he's writing a letter to the editor in response to somebody who is rejecting a broadly Christian nationalism or theonomic, I should say Christian nationalism where God's law is applied intentionally by the state. he's saying that look, I can't think of anybody who would disagree with a lot of these limits.

So he's actually advocating for this kind of thing, but in a softer manner than Stephen Wolfe, whom he published. He is the publisher of Stephen Wolfe's much more radical book. Of course, we understand how, you know, you move the Overton window with the extreme thing, and then you say the moderate thing to sound like a reasonable person after the extreme thing's on the table. But there are people seriously. and not inconsequential people pushing these ideas from the right. And like I said, their primary effect is going to be either to get Democrats elected or to get them elected in some places while these right-wing guys hold sway in other places by increasing necessity and to break apart people, communities, and maybe even states within the United States from one another. In other words, to balkanize the United States and fracture its fundamental structure. Now, whether that's their intention or not, is an open question or in which cases. But certainly there are people making the case,

and that will be a very likely outcome. Well, there's a lot more to talk about here. Lucky for the audience, we're out of time, because this is a lot. But I am really grateful. We've got to have this, we've got to continue this conversation once I've done some reading.

So James Lindsay, as ever, thank you so much to be continued. Yeah, and let me just say fast, audience read eric's book and go look up these primary sources and read them to is edifying beyond belief thank you