Within Reason - #58 Michael Knowles - Is America a Christian Nation?

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Michael Knowles is an American conservative Catholic political commentator and media host. He has worked for the Daily Wire since 2016. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Knowles, welcome to Within Reason. Alex, thank you for having me. We have unfinished business, I think. The last time I saw you will have been in this cigar bar in Nashville. We were out there filming for a Catholic Mass, a traditional Latin Mass organization, and I was something of the token or resident atheist. I say that, I mean, they treated me very well, and I had a very good time filming this project. But I think I might have been the only atheist in the room. And so the conversation at dinner was really interesting, in particular, when we briefly got

onto the subject of America as a Christian nation, I think we had about a few sentences each and then swiftly moved on to other things. So I was hoping we could sort of pick that back up again, but do so in the fine company of my podcast audience. I was hoping that the unfinished business would be the scotch and the cigars, but I suppose the conversation is fine enough. So, yes, that's a very important question because I know you've been talking. traveling around the states, but in recent months, this notion of Christian nationalism, this grand

debate over the religious origins of America, has become the hobby horse of the left. I think that the Democrats think this will be one of their best chances to really beat Trump in November. So it's come into prominence, and a lot of both sides are making lots of claims that seem dubious and only lightly related to historical reality. But it reminds one of the line of Ronald Reagan. You know, our opponents are not so much ignorant as they know so many things that aren't so. And in America, to quote a fellow British atheist, Christopher Hitchens, he observed that Americans just never read history ever. So unfortunately, the consequence of that is that if people don't know even our own founding history.

Having said that, that's the self-same Christopher Hitchens who would have not so much died, but probably won on the hill of arguing that America was in no way a Christian nation. Whether or not he was correct is another question, whether he would have won the argument, I think, is undeniable depending on who it was he was talking to. That's another thing that we had in common, our shared suspicion of Christopher Hitchens as a philosophical thinker, Although I think I'm a little more charitable towards him in terms of his overall influence over my thinking than you would be. But I think there are two ways of approaching this question. As you say, recently we have a conversation that takes a more political tone.

That is, this description of Christian nationalism as a sort of right-wing danger to the fabric of America in the way that a lot of right-wingers will see. left-wing radical wokeists as a danger to the fabric of America. And so the focus is, I suppose, maybe more on the nationalism part than the Christian part. But there's also just this historical question, which is the one that I'm more interested in, which is less about, let's say, that the danger of people who today believe in the existence of God and the risks that they might pose to American democracy, whatever that might mean. But whether the country that you're in is best described in a historical sense as a Christian, nation. And I've heard you say before that it is. And I've heard you use phrases like

the soul of America is Christian and saying things like this. And I suppose the first thing I wanted to clarify is, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but if you do say that America is a Christian nation, or perhaps ought to be a Christian nation, are you talking here legally, like in terms of the documents, the constitution, or are you just talking about the, say, the culture or something like that or the philosophy undergirding the legal element of this conversation. I don't always neatly separate these two things. I know that some American libertarians are fond of saying that, you know, politics is totally distinct from culture or something like that. I think that's all a little bit silly. I think what we're talking about here,

and we talk about the soul of a country, is a nation's constitution, capital C, and a nation's constitution, lowercase C, and that laws and customs and taboos and ends and goals are not so neatly separable. So another problem, I suppose, with Americans being a little dismissive of history is that we pick arbitrary dates to start looking at our own history. So typically Americans look at 1776 or else, you know, a little over a decade later at the constitutional convention, and they will say, this is the beginning of America. But it does cause one to ask, well, hold on, where did those people come from? How did they get there? And so America begins a little earlier than that, I would trace it to 1620 to the Mayflower. One could, I suppose,

trace it in different parts even earlier than that. But in any case, wherever you trace it to, the men who came there broadly were Christian. They certainly came from a Christian culture, and where Americans have long found their origin is in the Mayflower, among men who were extraordinarily zealous separatist Christians. In fact, I'm not an academic historian or even a trained apologist or theologian. I am a cigar salesman, and I've named my cigar company Mayflower after those very men. Some of my ancestors were on that boat, and they made it quite clear that they were in the United States on a religious project, the country that would become the United States, on a religious project. And then the Puritans who followed the pilgrims had slight

distinctions from them, theoretically, but were broadly the same. And so Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he declared that America would be a shining city on a hill in a famous speech called a model of Christian charity. And all the way up through the revolution, Americans considered themselves to be a Christian. The founding fathers were a little bit of a hodgepodge of Freemasons and deists, but there were a number of vaguely faithful-seeming Christians among them. And even the ones who were not particularly orthodox in their Christianity, at least recognize the importance of Christianity to the country. So you have a founding father, author of the Federalist Papers, and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court's, John Jay. He said that Christianity must be the religion of the United States. He thanked God that the country had the same religion, were descended from the same stock. He went so far as to say that Christians, non-Christians, should never hold public office. Now, there's no religious test for office in the Constitution, but there are religious parameters around the country. So if you go back to the philosophical founding document, the Declaration,

It begins and predicates the nation on the notion that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. So I'm not trying to convince you here that this is a papal bull or this is some particularly sectarian version of Christianity. But at the very least, the nation, I think we all would have to agree, is predicated on the notion that God exists and created us and gave us rights. and then in practice America developed far more clearly in a Christian manner so much so that in our national anthem in the little heard final verse

the final stanza Francis Scott Key writes Conquer we must when our cause it is just and this be our motto in God is our trust and it's inscribed on our money and it's in our pledge of allegiance so I think one can quibble over quite how orthodox or rigorous

the Christianity of America was, but it's simply an historical fact that it was Christian men who were motivated by Christian ideas, who created Christian institutions, who founded the country, whether it was consciously Christian or not. And quibble, we shall. I think it's probably worth beginning, and by the way, I'm talking here about the United States of America, and I understand that it's useful to look historically at what precedes a nation to understand what that nation becomes. But we have quite good insights into the writings, the private thoughts, even from their letters and things of the founders of the country that we now see today.

So I think one of the most underrated, let's say, even though he is quite highly rated of the founding fathers, is of course Thomas Payne, without whom the revolution may not have taken place. I mean, it's often said that Thomas Payne is the author of the revolution. and this is because he writes common sense, which is during a time when many people in the colonies were really just looking for better representation. The idea of actual revolution and independence was not as inevitable as a lot of people may think. Thomas Payne writes common sense and convinces a lot of people that actually maybe independence is the goal here. And I think to this day, common sense is still the greatest selling American pamphlet. Now, and it's still in print, of course. he's not just the author of the American Revolution though of course he's also the author of a text known as known as the age of reason which espouses sure a philosophical deism he says in no uncertain terms right at the beginning that he believes in one god but also describes organized religions including Christianity as as essentially conspiracies to conduct power and to hold monopolies over people and in fact this this leads him into a great deal of controversy he ends up

narrowly escaping execution, he gets exiled, he dies, and then when his bones are dug up to be brought back over to England, they end up getting lost, and we still don't know where his bones are today, and about six people attended his funeral. And yet this man is the author of the American Revolution. Now, why is it that at the end of his life, he's treated with such disregard and contempt? It might have something to do with the fact that his own personal religious beliefs were in no uncertain terms, not Christian. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that America is a legally secular nation. It doesn't mean that Thomas Payne is not an anomaly among the founding fathers. But in the way that we can say, okay, the founding document of America, maybe the

Declaration of Independence, not a legal document. I mean, the Declaration of Independence is not supposed to be legislation. It doesn't protect any rights. It doesn't establish any courts. It doesn't do anything other than act as a polemic, essentially, against not just monarchy, but the specific king. Well, just on that point, I mean, I'm quite interested in many of the things you've said, and I'm not surprised that a British atheist would choose a Brit, a very liberal Brit. He mentioned Thomas Payne. He was his favorite founding father.

But, you know, there was some legal force to the declaration, which is that the declaration told King George that they were separating. So I agree with you, it's a different sort of document than the Constitution, though Abraham Lankin later than in the 19th century elevates, again, the Declaration of Independence to the level of, I think, a more significant founding document. But it does have some legal bearing in as much as it kicked the whole thing off. Yeah, it's treasonous. I mean, there's a, I mean, literally treasonous in the sense that if I write a document right now that says something illegal, which. can happen in the United Kingdom. This would have sort of legal relevance, let's say. But the declaration is clearly supposed to be a mixture of, it's supposed to draw upon law and history and also

rhetoric. It's supposed to uplift and inspire a nation to revolution, which is sort of what it did and what it does. But when you get to the actual legal document, it takes a little bit more time and a few more people to throw together. Interestingly, by the way, one of Thomas Chavison's earliest drafts of the Declaration of Independence doesn't mention a creator. It does say that men and women are endowed by, that they are created equal, but it doesn't say that they're endowed by a creator. It's only sort of Congress in later editing that document that that gets added in. But look, I'll grant it to you. Fine. The Declaration of Independence has a creator. Still not Christian, by the way. And of course, if a Christian writes the creator, they're probably

talking about the Christian creator. But the whole point of America and the reason that the founders were so genius is because they recognized that not everybody living in the country and not everybody who goes on to rule the country are going to share their political opinions. And so they were very clear about what kind of political views and what kind of political tests somebody must pass and which ones must not be relevant. And we know that religious belief is not one of those, especially when we look at the constitution and find that the only times religion is mentioned is twice. firstly, in saying that no religious test, that there should be no religious test to any public

office in the United States, and secondly, in the later added Bill of Rights, protecting the free exercise of religion. And so, I suppose what I'm asking is, when we look at the actual legal texts here, I understand the idea that referring to a creator in the Declaration of Independence, maybe Congress had the Christian God in mind. Maybe they didn't. I mean, some of these founders were, as you say, I mean, you said it was a hodgepodge. As putting it lightly, Thomas Jefferson famously cuts out all references to the divinity of Christ from his Gospels. Like, where are we getting this specifically Christian idea at the founding of America from, and not just some kind of vague deism that may have even only been referenced in the first place in a rhetorical attempt to inspire people to revolution? Well, I totally grant that Thomas Jefferson had some problems. I'm not denying it. I mean, Thomas Jefferson was one of, if not the most.

liberal of the founding fathers. And then you mention Thomas Payne, who I wouldn't count really as a founding father, but he did write the pamphlet that kicked off a lot of revolutionary sentiment. The media would disagree with you, though. Yeah, listen, you lie me, is I don't know what you're doing to our founding fathers. But that man, I consider separate. But he's obviously, is extremely important, and he was quite radical. You know, if we're picking our favorite Brits who were in favor of America in one way or the other, I would have to side with the great Edmund Burke, who took a great deal of issue with Thomas Payne, but perhaps we can get to him a little bit later. When it comes to the declaration,

we don't need to wonder too much about what these guys thought about the creator, because we do have some of their writings. And John Adams, who served in the Continental Congress and then was the second president and was a political foe of Thomas Jefferson, said, and the man, by the way, was not particularly orthodox in his Christianity, but he said that we all agreed that the general principles for the revolution on which we could achieve national independence would be the general principles of Christianity. So he speaks about Christianity broadly. He's speaking on behalf of his fellows in the Continental Congress and the Founding Fathers. Even as you say, if Jefferson didn't, he was a little reluctant to include the word creator. He ultimately acquiesced

and it's a document not just of single authorship by Jefferson, but it's a statement by this incipient country. So you see that there. But you see it elsewhere also. You see it in the Federalist papers, again, not exactly reading like an encyclical or a papal bull, but the Federalist papers, specifically James Madison, do cite God directly by name. And then you have the Constitution. You mentioned the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which says that there will be the free exercise of religion. There will be no establishment of a church. This is quite misunderstood in modern day because some people take this to mean that either there can be no church established, anywhere in the United States, or they would go even further and say that the country would be secular,

you know, it would be absent from religion. And this would have been completely unheard of to the framers of the Constitution. In fact, the chief political reason for the refusal to establish a church at the national level is that there already were churches established at the state level. There were a number of them, and they persisted for decades after the ratification of the Constitution. So no one would have understood that to be unconstitutional or contrary to the spirit of the new nation. If so, the constitution never would have been ratified. Now, later on, again, bringing Lincoln back into it, in the middle of the 19th century, you get, or later in 19th century, you get the 14th Amendment, which then incorporates the Bill of Rights to the states and probably precludes any chance that we

would have of having state establishments ever again. But now we're fast forwarding over 150 years, at least at the beginning of the country, it was not understood as having a firm separation of church and state, no matter what Thomas Jefferson might have longed for in a private letter. Yes. Well, of course, that's often referred to. And I know we must be careful not to conflate the, I say, private interpretations of the founders of what the Constitution said and what the Constitution either actually literally says or what it should perhaps be understood to say.

I mean, the establishment clause doesn't just, it seems to me, preclude the ability to have an established church. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. It seems much more broad than this, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. It seems to be a protection, both of private religious belief and also, or I should say both a protection of private religious belief, but also a preclusion of the government to legislate in any way that respects an establishment of religion. not just establishing some state church. The key here, though, is that the Congress part, Congress shall make no law, because it's very easy to look back with the current mode of jurisprudence and constitutional law and impose that

on the Continental Congress, or I'm sorry, on the constitutional convention. But that was just not what the phrase meant at that time or for many decades afterward. you know, Congress could make no law doing those things because the states could do that and the states did that and the states had plenty of religious laws. We had blasphemy laws on the books in the United States until very, very recently and the churches did have established, or rather the states had established churches. So if we're talking about some protection of an individual right to believe whatever he wants, that's just not there. The Constitution was far more limited. And when we're talking about something like the First Amendment, what we're actually seeing here is a restriction on the right of the Congress to these sorts of declarations.

So how about this then? The United States, at least at its founding, was at the federal level, a secular nation. I wouldn't say secular, really. I mean, I would say it did not have an established church, and I would say it did not take a sectarian side in things. fathers and the framers were all pretty focused on that. But I just don't think it would have meant very much to anyone, especially considering that we're talking about a federal system here. So, you know, you can't just view the federal government absent the state governments or absent the rights of the people for that matter. One of the ironies here, as we're debating the supposedly

secular foundation of the country, is the best description I've ever seen of the American government, which came to the founding fathers either directly or implicitly through other thinkers is the description of perfect government by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologia, which says that there will be not merely a monarchy, but there will be a monarchical element, a strong executive, and then an aristocratic element, and then a democratic element, representation for the people. And so in the American system, as it was founded, we've decayed a little bit since then, I'm sorry to say, that's exactly what you have.

You have the Thumotic element in the executive, which could have been a hereditary king, or at least an elected king. Alexander Hamilton argued to some degree for that. He did. And then we have the aristocratic element, and then obviously there's a strong democratic element. But it confuses a lot of modern liberals, including Americans, because they say, you know, we're a democracy,

and democracy is at stake and, you know, whatever. Our buildings are temples of democracy. But obviously, there's quite a lot to the American system that is not democratic. And it's because they were trying to balance all these different types of regime, as well as balance different types of powers. the power of the national government, which confusingly we call the federal government, even though federal refers to all of these different layers and protections for the states,

and then obviously the state power and then the individual rights as well. Yeah. I mean, look, I suppose I do want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and his wall of separation, but look, I mean, suppose that we were trying on this hypothesis that America is explicitly a secular nation, and that's what the founders intended. You might ask, okay, could the language not have been a bit clearer, maybe. But I could ask the same question in the other direction, because really the question of whether America is a secular nation, I think, should best be framed as, is it a religious nation or not? If it's not, then what are we left with? And if the claim is that it's a Christian nation, I could ask similarly, what's with the complete and

utter lack of any reference to God, let alone Christ or Christianity, or anything of that sort in the Constitution. If the founders quite clearly in their private letters were saying to each other, yes, this is certainly Christian, which also I don't even think is true. I think that for every example you have of a founder talking about the Christian basis of America, you can find even sometimes the same founders saying the opposite. For example, famously, John Adams signs the Treaty of Tripoli, which says that the government of the United States is not in any way founded on the Christian religion. Now, you're probably going to want to say something like, now, I don't No, again, I don't want to put words on your mouth here, but look, this is the Treaty of Tripoli, right?

He's quite clearly just writing to some Muslims trying to, you know, calm the ties. Stop them from taking our sailors. Also negotiated by a Jeffersonian diplomat. Quite right, indeed, as well. And so, okay, sure. In fact, why don't I avoid putting words in your mouth? And tell me what you make of this Treaty of Tripoli, in which we have those words. I'll repeat them.

I will underline them and underline them again. the government of the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion. How do you explain that one? Well, I explain it exactly as you just have, which is it's the Treaty of Tripoli, okay? And these Muslim pirates were stealing our sailors, and we wanted it to come to an end. And it's not even as though John Adams negotiated this directly. In fact, tellingly, I think it was negotiated by an acolyte of Jefferson, a Jeffersonian diplomat. But all of that to say, I don't really dismiss your point.

You're right that there is some confusion among the founding fathers, They certainly didn't found the country as hierocratic or theocratic or anything like that, theocracy just being government by clerics. Certainly it isn't. Though I am skeptical of your suggestion that for every pro-Christian point that I could find in the Federalist papers or the Declaration or at least implicit in the Declaration or in the private correspondence of John Adams or Madison, for that matter, that you could find another point on the other side. I agree. You can find a lot of confusing messages and even contradictions there, but I think the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of Christianity in some form or another. So, yes, you're right. The president signs a prudential treaty to preserve some of our sailors, and he tries to assuage the Muslims because he knows the only way to get them to stop is to say, we're not really a Christian nation, don't worry. But, you know, again, I think that that little treaty with those random little Muslim pirates

taken against all of the other documents and the whole, you know, century and a half of American history that we've cited, it doesn't quite hold up. I think there are better arguments for secularism. I think that that little treaty, you know, signed and directed towards that random little British king is also not particularly relevant here, especially given that you just said Are you, hold on it. Christianity. You said you're telling me that the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Tripoli are on equal standing and significance to American history. You don't believe that. No, I don't believe that. What I do believe is that they're both equally relevant to the present conversation. Because you said a moment ago, it was quite funny how you said, I dispute this claim

that you say that every reference I have to Christianity in the letters of Thomas Jefferson, in the Federalist Papers, in the Declaration of Independence, and then stops yourself and or, I suppose, you know, implied by the Declaration of Independence, because you pick an example where Christianity is not mentioned at all. It doesn't get a mention. And what I want to say is that although the Christianity is implicit, I agree. The creator is mentioned. I'll give you that much. Well, yeah, it's not Ahura Mazda. You know, we're not talking about some demiurge or something. I mean, presumably these men are talking about some creator, at least vaguely resembling the Christian God. I'm going to imagine so too. However, I would say, I'd refer to what I said a moment ago, which is that the founding fathers were geniuses in this regard of knowing exactly how much of their own worldview to put into the words on the page. So although they may have been thinking of a Christian God, it may be that they think to themselves, well, let's write this in such a way that if you don't have the same view of God that I do, you can still identify with this document, especially given that the founding fathers had completely an utterly different views of God, even just amongst the company that ended up making up the constitutional convention. But the reason that I'm drawing a comparison here to the Treaty of Tripoli is because, of course, the Declaration of Independence is, I mean, they don't have the Treaty

of Tripoli, you know, in Washington, D.C., behind four inches of bulletproof glass. Yeah. But the point that you, that the way that you say, well, yeah, okay, so John Adams was writing that America isn't Christian, but he was just doing this essentially as a rhetorical tool to help serve the political end. That's maybe what I'm suggesting is happening in the Declaration of Independence. It's more relevant because, of course, it's the Declaration of Independence. But in the same way that when I was saying a moment ago, the Declaration of Independence is just this document that's supposed to inspire what is a predominantly Christian nation to revolution. He's going to say, yeah, endowed by their creator, even though really, you know, that maybe

isn't what he privately thinks. But he writes it because he's trying to achieve a political end. In the same way that John Adams does that with the Treaty of Tripoli, the difference is that in the Treaty of Tripoli, John Adams specifically references Christianity and in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson does not. I think you've just made my point, though, accidentally, which is we have to consider who the Treaty of Tripoli is designed to persuade a bunch of foreign Muslim pirates and who the Declaration is designed to persuade. It's addressed to King George, but it's obviously to persuade the American colonists. So why is it that the Continental Congress believed that they had to appeal to broadly religious, red Christian principles to persuade the Americans? It's because they were broadly religious and, in fact, Christian. And they write about this too. So if your argument is some of these founding fathers, you know, they might have pretended to be a bit more Christian than they actually were, I think you're probably right about that.

But I think that that also kind of proves my point, because when we talk about whether or not America is a Christian nation, I'm not even particularly concerned with the idle musings of Thomas Jefferson or even John Adams, who I prefer to Thomas Jefferson. I'm more concerned about that lowercase C constitution. What kind of a country is this really in practice beyond the declarations of a president or two or even some of the elected representatives who perhaps have different views than most people? And I think this really gets us to Alexei de Tocqueville, who observes that America has a chasm between the way that it talks in the way that it acts. You know, America talks in this very liberal, modern, and fashionable way, but they behave in

this really conservative, traditional, openly religious way. America has always been more religious than most of the West, and that's become especially true in recent years. And Tocqueville makes an interesting observation, too, which is that he says, America in the future will either follow secularism that exists. There's a little seed of secularism here. They will either follow that toward atheism, or they will follow the broad Christian culture toward the apotheosis of Christianity, which he said is Catholicism.

Now, I think I've managed to upset every single person who's listening at this point. But Alexei de Tocqueville is a very wise man, and probably he has a point here, that the contradictions and the dissension that you're observing in the founding era. I think you're overstating the secular impulses here, but in any case, there was a little bit of that. Those ideas are going to follow themselves to a logical conclusion. So, again, I'm not even arguing that America is a Christian nation, is now and ever shall be a Christian nation. I'm merely observing that America was founded as a Christian nation, going back in the early days of settlement, during the so-called founding era. it was still understood and understood itself to be Christian.

In the early century or two, century, century, century and a half of America, we understood ourselves to be Christian. And there has been a growing secularism and atheism that I think overstates the supposed secularism of the past. I understand that the small sea constitution of America, at least with regards to its citizenry, let's say, is historically, certainly Christian. And I agree with you that that's why this. This reference to the creator is put in the Declaration of Independence to persuade a majority religious.

They're at least going to believe in a creator. And when they hear the word creator, they're going to think of Christianity. And you're also right that it's become something of a truism that, I mean, people say this all the time about the UK and the US. They say, isn't it funny how the UK is officially a Christian country with an established church and yet in practice so secular? and America is legally a secular nation, but in practice so religious. But it seems like you're disputing even that, because you wouldn't describe the legal America as secular at all. Because in other words, I have no problem saying that, yes, Americans speak and act differently, as everybody does. And I would characterize that as in the founding documents affirming a secular nation.

And yet maybe in practice, acting incredibly religiously, you know, still allowing court houses or state houses to put the Ten Commandments outside, this kind of stuff, you know, eventually adopting the motto of in God we trust, which by the way, I mean, you mentioned that earlier, that only gets adopted what in like the mid-20th century or something like that? No, no, it's put into the, there's a common misconception. That motto is put into the, what's it called, the Pledge of Allegiance as a way to fight communism in the 20th century. But the motto itself long predates it. So we have the motto on our money, for instance. But the motto comes from the Star-Spangled Banner. It actually comes from the National Anthem, which is written in the middle of the 19th century by Francis Scott Key. I'm sorry, actually earlier than that, it comes from what it's referring to is the war of 1812. So the second battle with your country over there, which we won, by the way.

And so that final stanza says, this be our motto in God is our trust. That goes back to some of the earliest days of our country. It's not a song and an anthem about the Revolutionary War or even the French and Indian War, which predates it. But it is about the Second War of Independence. And so that idea had been longstanding there. And so to your point, yes, America is practically more religious than any other country in the West. But even as a matter of law, we have been, and I guess the example I would point to, and the answer you would have to provide for the supposed secular founding is how it is that we had for decades. after the ratification, the established churches at the state level in a number of the states,

and how it is that we've had until very recently in American history blasphemy laws. If this were a proper, secular, atheistic nation with no lawmaking that respects religion, how is it that blasphemy laws could endure for most of our nation's history? I think there are a few ways to answer that question. The first sisters suggest, I mean, I suppose the first sister suggests that you're completely right and that America is my favorite way to a nation and it's Tyler Christian. Fine. And I can see, I can see it being clipped, you know, if you want to swap load a clip with this conversation on your channel and it ends there just with me saying, well, I suppose you may just be completely right. Thanks for watching. See you in the next one. It's going to be a blurb on my next book. I suppose

you're completely like Alex O'Connor. Yeah, well, we are doing something of an exercise in taking people's quotes out of context in this episode, it seems. Who's doing it more remains to be seen. seen. The other answers might be, for example, that America is also ostensibly founded on notions of, I mean, look, the Declaration says that all men are created equal. And the man who writes those words owns hundreds of other people as private property in Virginia. Now, when somebody points, I can point to Thomas Jefferson being a slave owner and writing in the founding documents of America that America is a equality, I would not say, therefore, that America isn't really about that. They didn't really have that in mind when they were writing those documents. They didn't really think that people should be equal. I would say that they did mean that. It's just that in practice, they failed to live up to their own standards. And that's what made America such a great country, is that they wrote. I see that objection. I just think it's a little different than the

blasphemy laws or, say, the blue laws, you know, the Sabbath laws, which we actually still have in large parts of the United States, at least in large parts of New England. Because in the case of Thomas Jefferson, you're saying, here's a man who had an ideal, but it's a fallen world and he's a fallen man and he failed to live up to it. That's true. That describes all of us to some degree. But here, you're making a claim about the legal and political constitution of the country. And I'm pointing out that there are these laws throughout the country that have existed for most of our nation's history. There, it doesn't seem that it's just the matter of a few men failing to live up to their ideals. It raises this question,

hold on, how did these laws get on the books in the first place? How were there established churches for decades after the ratification? How were there still blue laws and Sabbath laws today? And why did no one challenge these laws as being un-American or contrary to the spirit of our country until relatively recently, until the 20th century? That seems to be the historical problem for the secularist side. Yeah, well, on that latter point, the fact that people sort of failed to pick up on this, I think that this is sort of what I'm driving at with the point about Thomas Jefferson is that when people, when a government actually does have either an essence or a strict legal system which runs contrary to something which you like and something which you enjoy. So in this case, it would be Christianity. I mean, you could think to yourself, well, maybe America is a Christian nation, but most of the people living, is not a Christian nation, but most of the people living in America were Christian. When there's like, you know, a law that seems to respect the establishment of religion, it's not exactly a priority for people. People are not going to make a big song and dance about this because they're Christian and they don't mind it. But that doesn't change whether or not it was actually a legitimate law or not, if you see what I'm saying. Now, yes. Now, you're getting a line of argument that I hear a lot of modern liberals argue about, not even just with regard to this question, but many political questions. And what you're saying is, look, the nation was established to be secular. That was what

they were after. But you see, the people, they just couldn't, they didn't quite understand it. They had these blind spots. It was maybe a little too advanced for them. So, you know, they all remained Christian and kept doing what they were doing. And, you know, actually the legislators, they didn't quite get it either. So they passed all these laws that established religious doctrines and practices at different levels of the government. And actually, even some of the states, they had churches and this and that. But it's because they didn't understand what the American revolution was really about until 200 some odd years later when Alex O'Connor, the great interpreter of the Founding Fathers, showed up that Limey from Great Britain, and he understood the true spirit

of the Constitution. And it's not just you, and it's not even people in Britain. There are many American liberals who make this argument. So you just don't understand, Michael. The Founding Fathers, the framers, the early American jurists, and basically everyone for 150 years, they didn't get the true meaning of the revolution until we liberals in 1962. discover that there's a right to use condoms or something somewhere in the Constitution. And then they have a number of court cases on this point. Okay, I get the argument. It just seems like a bit of a Gnostic cult rather than a real legal and historical argument.

Well, for a start, I don't think that the separation of church and the state is what the American Revolution was about. I think it may have been something that I think is established later on in the process of building a nation, just as many things are, and a lot of them are quite small or tangential. I think this is more significant than many of the things that go into the founding of America, but certainly much less significant than a great deal of other things. So, you know, the whole, oh, well, this is what it was all about and we haven't noticed yet. Well, I don't think this is what it was all about. But what I wanted to ask you... So hold on that point, just to clarify. So now you're not saying that America was founded with a separation of church and state,

as perhaps Thomas Jefferson would have liked, at the ratification of the Constitution. You're saying it's something that developed and happened later on. No, I mean to say that it happens, say, at the writing of the Constitution. So it's not like people are fighting the Revolutionary War in an attempt to establish the separation of church and state. This is something that happens later and happens in the way that, When you sit down to actually create a constitution for a new nation, you need to cover all bases, and this is going to be one of them. So it's not like this is what the revolution was about. The point that I thought you were making, I think, is the better point, which is that you do get something closer to a separation of church and state later on as the nation develops.

That really doesn't happen until the latter part of the 19th century, and then it really accelerates in the middle to the latter part of the 20th century. And I totally agree with the point that I'm now making on your behalf, you know, as being obviously part of the development of polities. And I think it's a terrible thing. And I wish that we could, you know, regain a little bit of sense. But I certainly agree with you that no American revolutionary was fighting for the separation of church and state. There wasn't a single one who was doing that. I just, I keep coming back to this point that as a practical matter, both in cultural practice and in law, after the ratification, there was so close a relationship between the church and state in large

parts of America that there was a state establishment for decades after. And what this all gets back to, I think, is an observation of another Brit, Cardinal Manning, which is that he mentioned this to Hiller Belloc, and Hiller Belloc writes it in one of his books, that all human conflict ultimately is theological. So you can have a separation of a state from Rome, you know, from the Pope or something. You can have a separation of the state from some kind of formal establishment, be it Episcopalian or Methodist or whatever. But you can never have a separation of a state from religion in that religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to render to God what he deserves. And states make laws and determine how we all live together. And so that's

going to touch on questions of anthropology and of morality. And so you always have to come back with some recourse to religion, whether you want it or not, whether Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Payne create their ideal utopia and the American people just go along with it. Even then, there will be some recourse to religion. Well, that's something that, of course, is a separate question and something that I do want to delve into, but I fear that if we did so, there's more ground to be trodden on this issue before doing so. So listeners will hear what you're saying, especially listeners of this podcast that all conflict is ultimately theological and be screaming at their podcast provider on their phone. But before talking about that, and maybe we won't even

have time to, I'm not sure, but you're right, it's not just Alex O'Connor, and it's not just the Britons who are saying this. It's also people like Thomas Jefferson. Let's finally do it. We've been skirting around the edges for too long now. Thomas Jefferson writes to the Danbury Baptists, that there is a wall of separation between church and state. Was he wrong? Did he have the wrong interpretation of what America was all about? Was he just writing rhetorically something that he didn't actually believe about the nation? He might have believed it, and he probably wanted it. It's just an historical fact that that is not what occurred. So, you know, Jefferson was certainly among the more liberal of the founding fathers. I mean, even as Jefferson would have

liked the Americans to side with the revolutionary French. And the more conservative voices in America did not want the United States to side with the revolutionary French. So they duked it out and they had a different view of the country, but only one side won out there. I mean, there was a side of American statesmen who wanted a closer alliance with Britain. There was a side of American statesmen who were still quite irritated at the Brits because, you know, they burn the White House and all sorts of things like that. But only one side wins out. So Jefferson, yes, I'm sure he had a more secular vision for the country. He just lost. He won on a lot of things. He doubled the size of the United States. He beat John Adams for re-election in 1800. But on that

matter, he did not succeed. His intellectual successors might have completed that project for him, or they might soon. But Jefferson just, his prediction or his stated desire were not fulfilled in his lifetime or for some time thereafter. God willing, we may see it in our lifetimes. So Jefferson was wrong, in other words. Well, he just was, he was proven wrong in the sense that he advocated for something that the rest of the American statesman did not give him. So he calls for a firm wall of separation, and he just didn't get it. You know, he didn't get it for a century and a half probably. Doesn't mean he was insincere. Right, of course.

He just, yeah, he just didn't. I mean, look, John, I'm sorry, Alexander Hamilton thought that the president of the United States should be addressed as his majesty. And he wanted that for George Washington, and it didn't happen. So it's not that he was insincere. You know, I think it might have been nice. Would have elevated the presidency a little bit, too, but he just didn't get it. It doesn't mean he was wrong. It just means that, you know, history developed differently than he would have had it. But Alexander Hamilton doesn't say, oh, this is why, because of this issue that we're facing here, this is precisely why we refer to our president as his majesty,

because that would be silly, that would just be incorrect, whereas Thomas A Jefferson does write to the Danbury Baptist, well, this is why there is this, fear not, there is this separation between church and state. It doesn't seem, in other words, like he's making a prediction or saying something that he wishes to be the case, but saying something he believes to be the case. already have been established into the nation of America? Yeah, I suppose I would ask him how to make sense of the establishments and the blasphemy laws and the blue laws and all the rest. He did a good job at wielding his influence to de-center religion.

He certainly did that. I mean, you even think at the University of Virginia, he enshrines at the top of the academic hierarchy ethics rather than theology, at a time when the early American universities, I was about to say great universities, but some of them have declined in recent years, I'm sorry to say. But at the time that they were seminaries, you know, Thomas Jefferson is just trying to replace this idea of religion and theology with something like ethics, which is a bit more secular and a bit more in keeping with everything you're talking about. So I'm not saying he was totally a failure at pushing for a more deistic or secular view in the country. I just mean ultimately on that particular line that is always quoted is that.

the evidence that America somehow is in a Christian country. I think it would have been bad had that happened, so I would have argued against Thomas Jefferson at the time, but it's just simply a fact it didn't happen. And the secularism that you've seen creep in, the banning of prayer in schools, public schools, the banning of teaching the Bible in schools, the pushing out, which has mostly been unsuccessful, actually,

the pushing out of Christian displays in the public square, which the Libs have been pushing for for 50 years. that all really begins in the 1950s and 60s. So in as much as Thomas Jefferson can be credited with saying that America has a firm separation of church and state, he got the timing off by a couple of centuries. And it's worth mentioning as well that people might want to object to me that I'm doing what I accuse you of doing, which is looking at a document that has no legal relevance and saying, see, here we have the evidence of secularism in the United States. What I'm specifically doing is saying that this is how one founding father interpreted the question. And of course, We can look at the documents and we can look at the history ourselves and interpret what happened, but I think it's at least worth considering how the men who were involved in creating the nation also interpreted the founding of that nation. But I certainly don't think that it establishes secularism. But there are all kinds of examples. But even the reason I don't make the objection that I'm sure many other people would make, and it's the one that you just articulated, is because I think it is relevant how the founding fathers viewed their actions. And, you know, I know that some people take this strict, I think, trite kind of legalistic view that, you know, if we don't find this, that, or the other thing in two or three documents, then it has no bearing on history. But to your point, no, it matters what Jefferson thought, matters the conversations that Adams and John Jay had, and it matters

how the Constitution was interpreted and implemented at the time of ratification. I mean, this is, to me, is the brilliance of Antonin Scalia's version of originalism. I'm not saying that originalism is a flawless judicial interpretive principle. I'm not suggesting, I'm not even endorsing one view of originalism over the other because there are a lot of different versions of it. But Scalia's version of originalism relied not on original intent, but on original public meaning, which I think is beautiful because putting all sorts of court questions out the window for a moment, it speaks to that lowercase C constitution, not how America was supposed to be, according to some piece of parchment, but just how it really is, how it really

was, what these things meant in the real world for history, which I think is more pertinent to the conversation than, you know, the way in which Thomas Jefferson interpreted the views of Montesquieu-Lock in his own mind. It seems to me that the founding fathers would change how they talk about God and his relationship to the nation of America, depending on the political aim that they had. That's something that I think is seeping out of everything we're saying here. I mean, you said before that you were skeptical that I could offer, you know, an example to the contrary every time you mentioned the founding fathers talking about Christianity. I don't know if that's true.

Maybe it's not, but it does seem to me that the goal at hand seems to allow these founding fathers to completely change what their view is on the nature and importance of God. This is this wonderful episode. It's in Richard Beeman's great account of the Constitutional Convention, Plain Honest Men, which, by the way, that title comes from Gouverna Morris, who you mentioned earlier, when asked or when reflecting upon the influence of the divine in the founding of the Constitution, the miracle at Philadelphia, said, I'm inclined to believe that this is just the work of plain, honest men. a potential further reputation of the idea that God had anything to do with the founding. But to that point, it's a really important point to bring up Governor Morris,

because to most listeners, not only in Britain, but in the United States, they will have no idea who Governor Morris is. And now I do. I like American history. You know, I'm a son of the American Revolution, believe it or not. But most people don't really remember him. And I think that's telling. And most people probably have heard of Thomas Payne,

because they learned about him in seventh grade history class. But people don't really read common sense anymore. Jefferson obviously is still a looming figure, of course. But the father of the country is George Washington, who is much more open to religion. For goodness sakes, even Benjamin Franklin, who was rather deistic in a lot of his views. And yet even Benjamin Franklin would make passing references to God and invoke God's blessing on the country. So the very fact that some of these guys have been. written out of history or sideline, especially someone like Governor Morris, it tells me that

no matter what they may have thought privately, the people are going to follow a narrative for how their country is going to develop. And that's going to sideline certain people. It's going to sideline certain ideas. Because even the people who love Thomas Jefferson, if you tell them that Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the Bible and he took out all the miracles, first of all, most of them are going to have no idea about that. And if they have even heard of it, they're just going to dismiss it. They're going to push it to the side, which doesn't tell us anything about Thomas Jefferson, but it does tell us something about the character of the country, which even today, where secularism has advanced so much, still views itself broadly as Christian.

If people don't know who Morris is, they'll at least have seen him, given that most of the statues of George Washington, including, I think, for example, the one outside of Federal Hall in New York City, are modeled on Gouverna Morris because he had such a similar bill. They were sort of a similar height, and after Washington died, they needed someone to fill in for the statue. So if you look at a statue of George Washington, you may actually be looking at the body of Morris with a Washingtonian head stuck on top of it. Sure, look, people remember certain people, they don't remember others. I mean, Morris is the man who writes the words, we the people of the United States of America, into the Constitution. This is an important figure in the founding of the country. And even if people

don't remember him, and maybe in some bizarre turn of history, this is because he had a slightly more secular inclination. As you say, I think that this is where you may be making my point, just as I may have made yours earlier, as you see it, that yeah, sure, people can remember certain things and forget other things, but let's look at what actually happened here. Let's look at what the founder's actually said. Let's look at how they actually interpreted these documents. And it seems to me that at least Morris thought that the Constitution was the work, not of any divine influence, but just of plain honest men. No, I suppose what I'm, the point I'm making when we're talking about the difference between the Barbary Pirates and the United States Treaty Tripoli versus the Declaration is just what the people wanted to hear, what they actually heard, and what they did with what they heard.

And so it seems clear to me that in the United States, they heard about the founding of a country that was broadly religious. I mean, even we're focusing on the most concentratedly deistic era of America. in history, which would be the 1770s, 1780, 1790s. And even there, you see so many references to the hand of providence, giving thanks to God. I mean, George Washington, Father of the country, first president, inaugurates the first Thanksgiving feast. Why is there a Thanksgiving holiday? Who are we giving thanks to? We're obviously giving thanks to God. And it's a direct reference back to the pilgrims. So then I think, okay, well, let's look back at the pilgrims. And we have the writings of Governor Bradford and Governor Winthrop. And they say, look, they knew they were pilgrims.

You know, they knew that their country was not in this land, ultimately, but that it was in the heavenly realms. And then let's fast forward even. So forget about the pilgrims and the early Puritans. You fast forward after the founding era to the re-founding of the country after the civil war. And you get to President Lincoln. President Lincoln's language is straight out of the King James Bible. President Lincoln is more overtly Christian in his rhetoric, probably than any of the founding fathers. And you might say, well, who cares about Lincoln? Lincoln came in the middle of the 19th century. We're here talking about the founding of the founding. But really, we're talking about the refounding of the country and upending of the constitutional order. And I hate to sound like a

liberal here because I love the founding era and I think still in the founding era, it's quite clear that the country is Christian. But the time doesn't stop in the 1770s. You know, it goes on. And so what's really amazing, as you fast forward to the civil war and you get the second, you know, father of the country, the slightly lesser but still of great importance, Abraham Lincoln, is the religious fervor increases. It doesn't decrease. It increases. And in part, that's because of the abolition movement, which was grounded largely on Christianity. I mean, you even hear it in the battle hymn of the republic. We've now got a religious hymn that is still sung in churches as the rallying cry of the nation. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. This is language that is far more

religious, even than in the founding era. So even if you look at the trajectory at that point, it seems that the country is becoming more religious, not more secular. There's so much to say. So much, of course. Interestingly, earlier, it seemed like you were suggesting that America begins as a Christian nation and slowly declines into secularism. Now it seems that you're suggesting something like it begins somewhat Christian and then grows a bit and sort of peaks in its Christianity. No, it's even... It's even more complicated than that. You're right that it's not a linear progression.

I think it begins quite clearly and explicitly Christian in the 1620s and 1630s. And then it declines a little bit during the Enlightenment era. In that little area where they founded the country. That little dip, you know, the Revolutionary War. Sure. Then it increases a little bit. And even by the second Revolutionary War, mentioning Francis Scott Key, you're seeing a little click up in religiosity, then by the, you know, events surrounding the civil war, bleeding

Kansas, the, you know, Fort Sumter, then actually fighting the breaks out, the Gettysburg address, the second inaugural are quite overtly and explicitly religious, the battle him of the Republic for goodness sakes. That religiosity then increases. Then you've got the end of the 19th century, and even at the end of the 19th century, American populism takes on a very, not only a religious, but a specifically Christian tone. I mean, you think of William Jennings, Brian, saying you will not crucify this country on a cross of gold. You've got a very religiously engaged populace

on top of what the leaders are saying. And then you head into the Cold War. I'm skipping over a little bit here, but you head into the Cold War where now Christianity becomes center place in American public life because we're fighting those godless communists and we're adding in, you know, in God we trust, or one nation under God, rather, into the Pledge of Allegiance.

And so that increases. And then you hit the 1950s and 60s, where the secular forces start to hit him against it. Then it kind of declines again. So basically what I'm saying is it's like a sign curve almost. And unfortunately, I think the trajectory we're on right now is toward a diminishing religiosity. But I wouldn't say it's a simple matter of going in one direction or the other, and which is good news for me, because I think it means that things could turn around and we might, We might get godly again. Well, an interesting history of the United States, but I think that my followers might crucify me if I didn't pick you up on a few things that you said before.

You sort of got to the civil war. You were talking about the influence of concepts like Providence in the founder's rhetoric, and I think that's true. I mean, you rightly described, I think, at the late 1700s as the most deistic era of American history, where the founders seemed to be more. inclined to refer to destiny or providence than they were to God. And the reason I brought up Richard Beeman and his account of the Constitutional Convention is because he records this wonderful episode which I'd never heard of before. Although I had heard of some of the quotes that came from it where after a disastrous and potentially drunken intervention from Luther Martin, Benjamin Franklin tries to get things back on track. And I think it's the first time he speaks at the convention

because he's so old and tired. And he finally gets up and says, how have we not yet you know looks to the father of light to illuminate our understanding here he says you know what like he mentions the fact that during the during the revolutionary war the continental congress had had daily prayer meetings

and he this is where you get this really famous quote that he turns to Washington and this is often attributed to Washington but as far as I can see it was Benjamin Franklin who said it where he said that the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see that God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow can't fall without his notice, then how can a nation grow without his guidance or whatever the exact words are?

But interestingly, Benjamin Franklin here, a man who usually refers to providence and destiny may have been a deist. Christopher Hitchens was firmly of the conviction that Benjamin Franklin was an atheist, and he said so with certainty. And yet in the handwritten notes for this speech that he delivers to the convention, he underlines the word God twice. And it's funny that it's only in this moment of desperation and political and need for political expediency that Benjamin Franklin changes his general rhetoric and now starts talking about God. Anyway, what Benjamin Franklin suggests is that they institute daily prayer. He says, why not at the opening of the proceedings of this convention, we have, we enlist the services of a local clergyman and we, get him to lead us in prayer. And as Beeman recounts, an awkward silence follows. None of them

want it. They all look at him sort of with confusion like he's lost his mind, who's this senile old man. I mean, it's seconded by one guy and everyone just sort of, I think Hamilton then gets up and tries to sort of quell the concerns as well, if we started doing it at this late stage, it would look like desperation. Another gets up and says, well, it's because we didn't have the funds, like, like silly explanation. But again, just just sort of trying to to quell Benjamin Franklin here. And then somebody gets up Edmund Randolph and suggests, okay, well, how about on the 4th of July we preach a sermon at the request of this convention? And then we institute daily prayer. And this motion also fails.

The interesting thing, in other words, is not that, I mean, you might point to the fact that Benjamin Franklin gets up and starts talking about God. At a time of need, he gets up and refers to God governing in the affairs of men and the founding of the American nation requiring the influence of God. But it's relevant, I think, that he only does this in a time of death. And the more interesting thing is what happens when he does, the convention look at him and go, no. Like if America is a fundamentally Christian nation, you know, motivated by the influence of God, then, and in fact, at the end of the day, Franklin writes in his notes, something like, you know, the convention thought, God or prayer, not necessary, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, you know, in sort of disbelief. Now, I wish I had the words in front of me because I don't know if he said prayer. I don't know if he said God, but if he did say something like, you know, the, the delegates at the convention thought God's not necessary. That would be in so many words exactly what I'm saying about that entire episode of the founding of America. I don't think he used the word God there. But that was certainly, you know, one interpretation of the events there. Why didn't they jump at the opportunity? Why didn't they say, you know what, Franklin? You're right. God does govern in the affairs of men and we should institute daily prayer. Why did they look at him like he'd lost his mind? Alex, I dare you to go to the U.S. Congress today. Even many of the supposed. at Holy Rollers over there.

And if you get them in a private meeting, there's no cameras, there's no anybody around you say, hey guys, how about you take a little time out of your day to pray to God? Something tells me a lot of them are going to laugh at you too.

I love the episode you've just recounted. I remember it, though you've added richness of detail to it. But my takeaway from it is not that these young politicians are disregarding God and religion. The most shocking part of it to me is that Franklin,

rather, up to a little bit of trouble in Paris and was known for being kind of a deist. And who knows, Hitchens said maybe he was an atheist, that when he gets into that foxhole and the fate of the country is on the line, old man Franklin says, let's all pray to God. And the question is, why was he so shocked that these young politicians didn't immediately leap at the opportunity? The answer, clearly to me, is that these guys in politics were, one, influenced by the ideas of their age, the Enlightenment ideas of their age, but also they're young-gun politicians, and that's how young politicians behave, and with age often comes wisdom, even to Benjamin Franklin, who was a little derelict in some aspects of his life. And he writes a very amusing autobiography, too, where he writes away his transgressions.

He says, oh, you know, I was going about, and occasionally a woman would fall in my path. You know, I did nothing to encourage this situation. But, oh, well, that's life, isn't it? And then he says, I decided that when I wanted to cultivate the virtue of humility, I would just emulate Socrates and Jesus, the irony, unclear, if he quite intended it. But even he says, we need to pray to God. You know, the episode is amusing, and I guess either side could use it to make their point. But I think the stronger point here is for the religious side, which is the old man

who was, you know, guided American affairs going back to the French and Indian War. I mean, the most famous political cartoon, probably in American history, that called for the nation to join together was etched by him, the join or die, little snake cartoon. He said, hey, let's go back to the faith of our fathers. And that, you know, no matter what the people at the convention thought privately or however many prayers they wanted to make that America continued to be a religious country and grew, frankly, in its religious fervor for the subsequent 70, 80 years, really more than that, I guess, but certainly reaching a fever pitch in the Civil War, seems to me that probably Old Man Franklin had some wisdom there, both at the very least

on the political matter of Americans would like us to pray, but perhaps even on the providential matter, because you'll remember when we talk about July 4th, this odd aspect of providence, which is that both Adams and Jefferson die on the same day, and they die on the 4th of July, and they die exactly 50 years after the declaration. Very strange circumstance that to your point, when there's not so many direct references to Christ or to God by name, or certainly not to any early church figures, there's just this talk of providence in the hand of providence. That's a great little wink of Providence, if you ask me. Yes, Providence winking on them with death.

Pain and old age and death surrounded by the slaves who were serving them, at least in the case of Jefferson. Not Adams, yeah, yeah, only Jefferson. Not Adams, of course. Adams was one of the early presidents who did not own slaves. Actually, I wanted to talk about that. I suppose, just to wrap this bit up, I mean, you're right. This can be taken both ways. I mean, I read this account, and I hear of Benjamin Franklin, the atheist.

standing up and saying, well, why don't we institute daily prayers? And I thought to myself, gosh, maybe I'm wrong about this whole secular American business. That's fascinating. I can't believe it. But the interesting thing is the response. Yes, Franklin, old man Franklin gets up and says, we need to, you know, return to our faith and bring prayer into this chamber. And the convention say, no, we don't want it. We don't need it. And Franklin writes in his notes. Again, I really wish I had the words here. It says they thought it not necessary, you know. And sure, it says a lot that he was surprised by that. But I think it says more that it happened than Franklin was surprised that it happened. Well, and I certainly see the point, too, that political revolutionaries

sometimes put God out of their minds. And this was not true of all of them. I mean, I'm not really disparaging the American revolution in this way, which that Limey, who we previously cited inman Burke, would view as a conservative revolution of such a thing as possible. But Washington certainly saw the hand of providence. I mean, you especially think about the escape from Brooklyn when the American Revolution just should have been destroyed. And the Brits were closing in, the colonists, the patriots, you know, the Americans are on Long Island in Brooklyn. And they somehow make it across because of fog rolls in. You know, I mean, and there were so many instances like this in the war that maybe I'm not convincing you of the providential aspect of it, though it would

seem to me just a truism that God, the sovereign of the universe, orders all human affairs to his purposes. But even if you don't buy any of that, the revolution was understood as a matter of providence to these men, including the greatest of them, George Washington. But revolutionary politicians, I agree, they don't focus on God very much, including those sprightly little jerks who didn't listen to old man Franklin. Yeah. Washington's an interesting case. I mean, he, again, certainly used language of Providence and God, but his Christianity, I suppose, is under dispute by some historians. I mean, there is an unbelievable number of publications dedicated just to the faith of George Washington. I suppose the interesting points to remark on here are that, you know, during the constitutional convention that we've been talking about, Washington was the first man in and the last man out.

He did not miss an hour of that convention, and he was respected for it. the whole four months that he's in Philadelphia, he visits church three times, once for potentially ceremonial purposes on the 4th of July, and then gets the denomination of the church wrong. He wasn't even quite sure where he was. It seems to me in other words that maybe he wasn't as devoutly Christian as people like to make him out to be. He didn't take communion, for example, as far as we can see. We don't know for sure, but it's another commonly observed interesting fact about Washington is that he's often reported by his contemporaries to not have taken communion. And so again, no, I would never argue that George Washington were some devout

Orthodox Christian or anything like that. I mean, the man, in as much as he had a religion, it was probably freemasonry. But I don't think there's, I don't think it would be compelling to say that Washington was an atheist or anything like that or a secularist. I think he believed in the existence of God. I think that's clear enough from his writings. And, you know, he's a political man too. And so some of his writings to the various religious groups, including and especially to the Jews, are kind of interesting because he recognizes the importance of religion to civic life. And this is something that all of our founding fathers, even the ones who were a little more secularly inclined, recognize the importance of that states always have some relationship

to religion, just as the body has a relationship to the soul, perhaps. But his views, yeah, I probably wouldn't be able to convince George Washington to come to a traditional Latin Mass, that's for sure. I might be run out of town in that era for going to a traditional Latin Mass. It's quite possible. I mean, it's funny. I've been twice now to a traditional Latin Mass and once was in Nashville, just I think the day before I met you for this project that we were working on. So perhaps I'm more amenable to that than George Washington himself would have been. But I think that says a lot.

I mean, sure, George Washington was a religious man. And you said not an atheist, I agree, probably not. You said not a secularist. I would say, I don't know. I'm not sure if you was a secularist. So these words are often conflated, atheists and secular. It's where you get people describing the Soviet Union as a secular, as a secular country. And I think to myself, just describing a country which proactively tries to deconvert religious believers

and is deeply, deeply concerned with what they believe in terms of their theology, describing that as secular, as George Orwell writes in a different context. It seems that words and meaning have parted company in instances like that. But, okay, you know, Washington, sure, maybe a Christian, maybe a deist. Relevant to the question of America being a Christian nation, I think when people bring him up, in other words, they might be surprised to learn how unorthodox his religious beliefs were. But what I wanted to talk about because, you know, I want to make sure we've got time to just touch on this because you did mention it. You talked about moving on forward towards the civil war and the abolition of slavery and the abolitionism movement as being a Christian movement.

Now, I understand the idea of referring to the fact that a great deal of the abolitionist movement, especially in England, referred to Christian values, just as the furthering of justice can't. campaigns related to race by people like the Reverend Martin Luther King made references to Christianity. However, I think it's a separate question to say, did these movements refer to religion and Christianity, and were they in fact Christian? I've had a lot of discussions recently, including with your colleague Ben Shapiro, about whether not just modern America, but the modern West is Judeo-Christian in its moral essence. And a lot of people point to things like the abolition of slavery.

It seems to me that if you want to refer to Judeo-Christian values, I don't know what you're referring to, but it can't be the actual scriptural tradition. It can't be the text itself, because if it were, then I could probably make the case that, okay, maybe America was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation insofar as it had the institution of slavery, which is explicitly condoned in the Old Testament. When people talk about the abolitionist movement being Christian, in other words, what is it that they mean? What do you mean? Do you mean that the actual scripture of the old and the New Testament point towards the inevitability of the abolition of slavery? Or do you mean something else? I'm only making an historical point, which is that

the abolitionists grounded their arguments on Christianity, so much so that their motto became an actual religious hymn, right, the battle hymn of the republic. But, you know, I share some of your skepticism of the notion of Judaism. Theyo-Christian values because, you know, there's no knock on the Jews. I like the Jews very much. There just haven't been that many of them. You know, there are a relatively small religious minority. And so in as much as a religion animated the West, you know, we used to call the West Christendom. So it's obviously Christianity. And that is derivative of Judaism in as much as salvation comes through the Jews, you know, and our Lord is incarnate as a Jew in Bethlehem. But then this raises a question of what is the nature of the church and to what are we pointing when we cite Christianity for social movements.

And so part of the problem that you're bringing up with abolition is that there were plenty of people who were pro-slavery who were citing verses of the Bible to justify slavery. And then the abolitionists were pointing to other verses of the Bible to justify the abolition movement. And so we've now put aside the, I guess, Jewish perspective of that. Now we take on the Protestant perspective, and it creates a lot of problems because, you know, we've both got our scripture, even though some of the books have been taken out of the Bible, and we're going to point to our scripture, and we individually are the ultimate authority. So, you know, I guess it's just a battle of wills until one of us is louder than the other. We end up killing the other one, and then we'll see who wins the war. But again, that's not me that. Sorry, go ahead. It says to me that what religion does or allows people to do is just take whatever they morally believe. leave and refer to scripture to justify the position that they already hold. Well, my religion does not allow me to do that because I am neither Jewish nor Protestant. I'm a mackerel-snapping papist, which, again, in the context of America, I think

that necessarily Catholicism has shaped the country. I mentioned earlier, and I'm only one or two percent joking, that the view of government articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas is the view of government that we ended up getting. basically in the United States. The coincidences are a bit eerie. But it shouldn't be that eerie because there was one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, more or less universally accepted in the West, for 1,500 years. So, you know, the building up of this civilization occurred in the conditions of Christian unity. And then you see breaking a part of that unity in the early 16th century

and then once that monopoly on truth and power has been cracked, then you see all sorts of schisms and different sects and denominations crop up. So that's how you get to this idea that I'll point to my scripture

and you point to your scripture and that's what we have it. But in my view, I don't just point to my scripture. There is an ultimate authority that I have to defer to and that authority will be the deposit of faith.

That will be the Magisterium. That will be the sacred tradition. That will, of course, be inerrant scripture, but it's not only up to my individual conscience. So then when we turn to the mackerel snapping papists on this question, we see consistency going back not only to the earliest days of colonization in the Western Hemisphere, but actually even earlier than that. So I think it was Pope Eugenius the 4th. You can check me on which Eugenius it was, had a papal bull, which was Sikutudum in 1435, which told Christians who were on a colonial project in the Canary Island, to quit enslaving the natives and to free the slaves within 15 days or they would incur an

automatic excommunication. And you see this kind of statement in the form of papal bulls and encyclicals all the way down the line up until the present day against slavery. So much so that actually in the Spanish New World, some of the governors would prohibit papal bulls from being read because they kept saying stop enslaving people and free your slaves. So again, you know, the Pope didn't have all that much influence in the United States, especially in the 19th century. But, you know, if we're talking about consistency on the matter of slavery, certainly the Catholic Church has had it. Yeah, I suppose I think that the link between Thomas Aquinas and the system of government

established in Philadelphia is maybe probably more tenuous than the link between No, I don't know. I mean, we joke about it because, you know, we struggled to imagine that John Adams was there reading the Summa Theologia or something like that. I guess if he wasn't, who knows, these guys had pretty big libraries, so perhaps they came across it. But even so, what I'm really talking about. But the influence of the thought, right? It's the influence of the thought that is being mediated, actually by the very Enlightenment philosophers that these guys are reading. Yeah, I suppose I have no problem with that. And I don't want to comment on the history

of the Catholic Church, except insofar as I'm familiar with the episodes that you're talking about, but it does seem to me that if you were to step into a time machine and go back to antebellum America or you know the heyday of Christian Europe and find yourself on a plantation surrounded by slaves and you try to speak to the master of the house and try to convince him that it's immoral to do so where is the first place that he would turn and plausibly so in order to justify slavery as an institution of course if he's making a moral or religious argument he'd turn to his moral and religious beliefs which in the case that you're pointing out in those particular sects would allow you to separate scripture from sacred tradition or from

the authority of a bishop or a pontiff. So they, according to their religious views, they would have a credible claim to do it. But this gets to something, a word that has fallen out of fashion, but it's an important word, which is heresy. You know, heresy is not just someone spouting off a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. That's usually what it amounts to ultimately. But heresy just means choosing. Heresy is just when you choose one thing, but not the other. And so one could take a line or two out of context from scripture or from any other text and make basically any point that one would wish to. So this gets to a much deeper problem in the sects of religion that these guys might have been identifying with. But it's not a knock on them. It's not a knock on

Christianity. I suppose the question is who's the one taking things out of context here, in that I did a debate recently about this kind of subject area, and somebody, my opponent in the debate said, yes, some people may distort Christianity. Some people may do this. And my question was, well, who's distorting here? Is the distortion of Christianity the one that says, look at the text? I don't think I'm picking it out of context to say that the Old Testament, certainly in numerous places, endorses and legislates and gives precise instructions about how to sometimes just,

take and steal, sometimes seemingly as sexual property, other human beings as private property. And then you get some people saying, but don't you know that Paul writes in Galatians that there's neither slave nor free, my question is who's the one taking things out of context here? An interesting thing about that. I mean, I'm sure you've heard people refer to that particular verse in Galatians to talk about the New Testament, not endorsing slavery. Paul says that there's neither slave nor free. We're all one in Christ. I mean, Paul says in the very next words, neither is their male nor female, but I don't see many modern Christians making a biblical case for gender abolitionism on the basis of that verse. Clearly, he was still recognizing the establishment

of slavery on earth. In other words, you said a moment ago, yeah, you could take some verses out of context. Is it the abolitionists or is it the pro-slavery crowd who were taking the verses out of context? If I were to take a verse out of context to make a pro-slavery argument, the one you just selected is not the one I would take because what Paul's saying is just manifestly and historically observable, right? You know, he's saying there are Jews and Greeks, there are slaves and freemen in our society. That's just an historical fact. And what he's saying is that actually all are one in Christ Jesus. So no one's denying the historical existence of slavery. But to your deeper question, which is, well, who's the one taking things out of

context? The answer, Alex, is you. You are the one doing it because, though I know it's very fashionable today to believe that each man can be his own pope and have his own religion, that is not the case, you know, from the early, at least what I believe is that from the early days of the church, the church has four markers, that it's one holy Catholic and apostolic. And we can trace that succession down through the bishops and actually through the bishop of Rome all the way to get back to St. Peter, to whom our Lord gave the keys to the kingdom of heaven and said, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven, what you bind on earth, will be bound in heaven and gave him sacramental authority, for instance, to forgive sins

and that this passes on to the successors of the apostles. And so actually, when there is dissension, just as there was in the early church between, say, the church at Alexandria and the church at Athens, when there would be disagreement there, they would defer to someone. They would defer to the bishop of Rome. In fact, you see this at the Council of Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles, when you have the spokesman of the Apostles, the first among them, St. Peter, resolving differences. So you need to have some kind of authority, ultimately. Authority is a naughty word these days, but it's inescapable. Someone's going to make a decision, whether it's you and your wife having an argument

over where to go to dinner or whether we're talking about whether slavery is to be encouraged according to sacred scripture and holy tradition. And so what I'm pointing out here is, and this obviously takes us a little bit outside the American political context, but when you're saying, well, which sect do I believe in or who do I believe is the true interpreter of Christianity. In this case, I'm a member of a church that says there is an unbroken line, an actual sacramental church that was founded as the visible expression of Christ's kingdom on earth, and that the bishops and the pope in particular, the first among the bishops,

have a particular ability to, and a requirement, you know, a responsibility that they can't evade to resolve these differences. And it just so happens that when this controversy over slavery first cropped up in the 15th century with the colonial episodes that began and, you know, really culminated in the Western Hemisphere, the Pope spoke consistently for now, you know, almost 600 years to say that no, actually the Christian faith does not condone or encourage this kind of slavery that we're seeing. It didn't, again, it didn't resound too much in the United States, but I suppose it could have. Well, the subject we have is broader than the time, I think, that we have together. And you're right that we've strayed a little from the original subject matter. And it's not something that I don't want to take up with you. I just feel, I fear that if we attempted to do so in the next few minutes, we would run well over time.

So in what will appear to be an explicit running away from debate, I think I'll have to terminate the interview there. But perhaps this is something we can revisit in future. It would be great to delve into that more deeply. I'm glad we got to at least touch on it at the end and you've got to offer at least one defense of the Catholic tradition in this conversation about otherwise non-Catholic subjects. Well, thank you, sir. I appreciate the, it's been great fun. I appreciate the invitation and I hope next time we not only get to the unfinished business about slavery and the magisterium and authority, but also the unfinished business of the scotch and the cigars. Yes, I'm sure I probably still have half of one of those mammoth cigars sat somewhere on a shelf that

I never got to finish. That may even be the self-same cigar that we started back in Nashville. That would be fun. And I'm interested to see what people will think of this conversation and whether they would be interested in something of a part two. Whether that happens or not, Michael Knowles, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been fun. Thank you, sir.

See you next time.