Speaker 1: All right, George Bagbee, weo me to the Jay Burdon Show.
Speaker 1: How are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing well. It's good to see you again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, believe me. I'm happy to have you back on.
Speaker 1: So this is a more topical episode than you and
Speaker 1: I normally do, and it concerns the doctrine of dispensationalism
Speaker 1: and Christian Zionism. This is obviously relevant to current events
Speaker 1: with the Israel Hamas War and then kind of why
Speaker 1: there is so much support for the US. But I
Speaker 1: consider it sort of a continuation of an episode you
Speaker 1: and I did about evangelicalism kind of problems with that
Speaker 1: in the US, and then also an extension of the
Speaker 1: episode I did with Filo that will be the previous
Speaker 1: numbered episode, which is about kind of the history of
Speaker 1: Zionism and kind of the relation between Zionists and Israel,
Speaker 1: the Jewish diaspora, and then Christians in America. So do
Speaker 1: you want to kind of just launch straight into this
Speaker 1: with a very broad kind of description of what dispensationalism is.
Speaker 2: Sure, So there's no avoiding the controversy on this, and
Speaker 2: I'm perhaps especially aware of it. I come from a
Speaker 2: dispensationalist background. I was raised Low Church Baptist, and many
Speaker 2: people that I'm closely allied to and tied to are
Speaker 2: dispensationalist and they define themselves that way. So I'm not
Speaker 2: going to avoid the controversy here, I'm going to grasp
Speaker 2: the controversy. Dispensationalism is a nineteenth century Anglo theological innovation.
Speaker 2: It's mostly confined to the English speaking world, and it's
Speaker 2: also mostly popular in the United States because the United
Speaker 2: States is far more religious than Great Britain Protestants these days.
Speaker 2: Dispensationalism involves a number of teachings, but two very important
Speaker 2: markers of dispensationalist theology are an ecclesiology that recognizes that
Speaker 2: God has a different relationship to Jews than he does
Speaker 2: to Christians, and that God has a different covenant with
Speaker 2: Jews than he does with Christians. So it's a split ecclesiology,
Speaker 2: and dispensationalists believe that God has a special covenantal protective
Speaker 2: arrangement with the Jewish people, and dispensationalists see that manifested
Speaker 2: in the modern state of Israel in particular. So this
Speaker 2: is why we see so much political support that's tied
Speaker 2: with emphatic religious belief when it comes to the state
Speaker 2: of Israel. Another great marker of dispensationalist belief is the
Speaker 2: doctrine of the Rapture or what critics might call the
Speaker 2: secret Coming of Christ. And the doctrine of the Rapture
Speaker 2: is the belief that Christ is not just going to
Speaker 2: come again with glory to judge the living and the dead,
Speaker 2: but Christ will come a third time or maybe a
Speaker 2: fourth or fifth time as well, all in the context
Speaker 2: of in Times teachings, and we aren't here to talk
Speaker 2: about that. I'm not prepared to talk about that, but
Speaker 2: I am content to say that that is an innovative
Speaker 2: belief as well. It has not been something that Christians
Speaker 2: around the world have been at all acquainted with, haven't
Speaker 2: even heard of until nineteenth century innovators started preaching it.
Speaker 1: One of the things, sorry, I just want to bring
Speaker 1: up before we go into this, is that it is
Speaker 1: very rare for someone to announce themselves as a dispensational
Speaker 1: I was I was talking with a group of guys
Speaker 1: actually the Telegram group of the Art of Darkness podcast
Speaker 1: right about this topic before we went live. Yes, and
Speaker 1: one of the things that a couple of them mentioned
Speaker 1: is like, Oh, I didn't know this had a name.
Speaker 1: And so this is a system of beliefs that has
Speaker 1: sort of infiltrated a lot of kind of conservative spaces
Speaker 1: in America. And so it's important to understand even if
Speaker 1: you have kind of no direct relationship with a church
Speaker 1: like this, because you know, even in my own church,
Speaker 1: which does not teach this, a lot of the older
Speaker 1: people just kind of through cultural osmosis have picked up
Speaker 1: these ideas. That's just a note before you launch into it.
Speaker 2: No, that's that's a really important one as well, because,
Speaker 2: as I will outline, dispensationalism is not the traditional dogmatic
Speaker 2: teaching of any Christian church I'm aware of. And that
Speaker 2: seems to me, that seems to me so so radical
Speaker 2: a claim that I went and tried to try to
Speaker 2: verify it. I tried to figure out if that is
Speaker 2: actually the case or not, because it is so very popular. It,
Speaker 2: like the doctrine of the rapture, for instance, is probably
Speaker 2: the most popular dispensationalist doctrine, and that has filtered out
Speaker 2: far and wide. You find Christians all over the place
Speaker 2: that are familiar with the idea. Even if they don't
Speaker 2: they aren't sure if they believe in it or not.
Speaker 2: It's become Christian pop culture in some in some respect.
Speaker 1: Well, And it's interesting you bring up popular culture aspect
Speaker 1: because I remember this is a very specific one, but
Speaker 1: I remember going to a homeschool co op when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, and obviously a lot of the people
Speaker 1: there were these kind of like low church Protestant you know, situations,
Speaker 1: and all of the kids there. The like trading card
Speaker 1: game we played was a game called Redemption, which is
Speaker 1: literally like a knockoff like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon
Speaker 1: card game, but it's all themed around like dispensationalless eschatology,
Speaker 1: you know, like it has like little like cards that
Speaker 1: you trade back and forth, and it's like, oh this
Speaker 1: is that's that's a market a beast card, you know,
Speaker 1: it's very powerful, or this one is like the seven
Speaker 1: Countries or like the Third Like it's absurd, but it's
Speaker 1: it's true. You can look it up if you want.
Speaker 1: And so even to someone who was never taught that
Speaker 1: from the pulpit, I kind of just thought, well, that's
Speaker 1: what Christians believe. That I remember very distinctly when I
Speaker 1: asked my mom about it, She's like, uh no, we
Speaker 1: don't think that it's like, oh, okay, I just kind
Speaker 1: of assumed that we did well.
Speaker 2: I have a great friend who is is something of
Speaker 2: a mentor to me, who is also an old school Baptist,
Speaker 2: and he knows his Baptist theology very well. And this
Speaker 2: is something that I talked to to him about because
Speaker 2: it's very interesting to me, especially to meet a Baptist
Speaker 2: who is not a dispensationalist. And that's just another example
Speaker 2: that are There is no Protestant denomination that I know
Speaker 2: of that is dogmatically dispensationalist. So dispensationalism exists among Protestants. However,
Speaker 2: it is taught by several Protestant seminaries, in particular Baptist seminaries.
Speaker 1: Today.
Speaker 2: Now, if you don't know a prostant church organization, it
Speaker 2: is impossible to nail a Baptist down on theology because
Speaker 2: there is an awful lot of variety among Baptists. There
Speaker 2: is no central organization that controls doctrine among the Baptists,
Speaker 2: so there are several different seminaries. I don't know just
Speaker 2: how many Baptist seminaries there are, but every Baptist seminary
Speaker 2: could have divergent theological beliefs. So there are a couple
Speaker 2: of Baptist seminaries that I know of that are emphatically dispensationalists,
Speaker 2: and they're and they're pretty famous. You know, they're very
Speaker 2: well funded there. They've got a lot of illustrious people
Speaker 2: connected to them, specifically the Dallas Theological Seminary and the
Speaker 2: Liberty Seminary Liberty Baptist Seminary in Virginia. So so, even
Speaker 2: though even though historically Baptists have not been dispensationalists, of
Speaker 2: most Baptists today would recognize dispensationalism and embrace it, much
Speaker 2: to the chagrin of my traditionalist Baptist friend who's really
Speaker 2: enthusiastic about the old school Baptist theology. Basically, the thing
Speaker 2: that holds Baptists together is the idea that everyone should
Speaker 2: look to their local institutions and not to a central
Speaker 2: Baptist institution. Ironically, that's the thing that holds them together.
Speaker 1: All right. So let's work from the top of kind
Speaker 1: of the origin of this idea. So where is this,
Speaker 1: this innovation of dispensationalism, Where does it come from?
Speaker 2: It comes from nineteenth century innovating, innovative preachers, and there
Speaker 2: are a number of these people that we would recognize
Speaker 2: as figures in non Christian movements, or we would we
Speaker 2: would differentiate these these religious movements from traditional Christianity in
Speaker 2: a serious way. So one of one of the teachers
Speaker 2: of Zionism, or some Christian relation to Jewish Zionism, was
Speaker 2: Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Another was the founder
Speaker 2: of the Jehovah's Witnesses. I think his name was Charles
Speaker 2: tays Russell, and another was the I think his name
Speaker 2: was William Campbell of the No No, No, No, I'm
Speaker 2: getting this guy mixed up the Millerites who became the
Speaker 2: Seventh Day Adventists. The Seventh Day Adventists also had a
Speaker 2: teaching about the return of Jews to the province of
Speaker 2: Palestine and some sort of national renewal for the state
Speaker 2: of Israel among the Jewish people of Palestine. So all
Speaker 2: of those, we would differentiate them in some way from
Speaker 2: his Oracle Christian belief. They all stem out of the
Speaker 2: second grade Awakening or soon afterwards, as in the case
Speaker 2: of the Jehovah's Witnesses. But inside of of more mainstream Protestants,
Speaker 2: you have characters like a theologian named Darby, who popularized
Speaker 2: the doctrine of dispensationalism, and very famously an American Bible
Speaker 2: commentator named Schofield who managed to get his Bible commentary
Speaker 2: published by Oxford University Press. Darby and Schofield are the
Speaker 2: major popularizers of dispensationalism in English speaking lands today.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting going into this because they're kind of
Speaker 1: two and we're not, like you said, we're not going
Speaker 1: to go into the specific like eschatology. But there's kind
Speaker 1: of two parts of spensatialism that are sort of relevant. Right.
Speaker 1: There's what you mentioned, which is the dispensations, which is
Speaker 1: the idea that you know, there are sort of seven
Speaker 1: ages which kind of correspond with seven deals God made
Speaker 1: with different groups. So for instance, the idea is that, okay,
Speaker 1: well pre sort of in the early parts of Genesis,
Speaker 1: that's one dispensation. You know, at Noah, that's the way covenant.
Speaker 1: That's another one in the Arab judges, and I can't
Speaker 1: remember them off the top of my head. They're fairly Byzantine.
Speaker 1: But part of this, and this will get a little
Speaker 1: bit confusing, relates to kind of numerology and rationalism. So
Speaker 1: the weird thing about Darby in particular is that, on
Speaker 1: one hand, he was kind of firmly fundamentalist, in a
Speaker 1: biblical literalist. Right. He believed that, you know, what the
Speaker 1: Bible says, the Bible says. So on one hand you
Speaker 1: could say, well, that's a very irrational quote unquote belief,
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, he's firmly steeped in this
Speaker 1: tradition of rationalism, and he believed that as many problems
Speaker 1: to do, essentially everything in the Bible you can figure
Speaker 1: out using nothing more than the text itself, like you
Speaker 1: can understand it all. And so what this leads to
Speaker 1: is this idea that you know, there's kind of like
Speaker 1: a mathematical schema in the Bible we can figure out
Speaker 1: to find out exactly what these prophecies meet. And so
Speaker 1: he kind of jumps back and forth between the Book
Speaker 1: of Daniel, right, which is old testing the prophecy, the
Speaker 1: Book of Revelation, which is in the last book in
Speaker 1: the Bible, New Testament, and kind of combines those into
Speaker 1: this complicated mathematical scheme where they refer one to the
Speaker 1: other to support his argument. And there I don't want
Speaker 1: to get too into it because the numerology is somewhat tedious.
Speaker 1: You're kind of going through on one level. When it
Speaker 1: was written at the time that numerology was fairly common.
Speaker 1: Like if you've ever people at home, I've ever read
Speaker 1: OVID when he references, you know, trust not in Babylonian numbers.
Speaker 1: It was quite common at the time, right, There were
Speaker 1: these kind of systems of numbers which had symbols. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, seven the idea of completeness six less than that,
Speaker 1: hence the number of the beast. It's so on and
Speaker 1: so forth. So he does attempts to ground this in
Speaker 1: the text. I think from the outside looking in, it's
Speaker 1: a bit of a stretch. A lot of his justification
Speaker 1: for this, but the specific doctrine of the rapture is
Speaker 1: almost unjustified. He allegedly got the idea from an ecstatic utterance,
Speaker 1: which means that he was having this sort of extremely
Speaker 1: charismatic worship service, and this woman went into a fit
Speaker 1: and started speaking in tongues and prophesying and mentioned, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of this rapture, which I believe is a
Speaker 1: phrase used in a different context some point in the epistles.
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly where, but he kind of from
Speaker 1: that idea kind of built his whole system. Incidentally, one
Speaker 1: of the other things that is less common now but
Speaker 1: is very common with the early dispensationalists is he viewed
Speaker 1: that the Bible was not equally relevant to different groups
Speaker 1: of people. So we've mentioned that, you know, dispensationalist view
Speaker 1: God is still having a special relationship to the Jews,
Speaker 1: and part of that is he believed that, well, there
Speaker 1: are section of the Bibles that are I think it's
Speaker 1: rightly ordained is the is the kind of doctrinal phrase
Speaker 1: for Jews and for Gentiles. And so essentially the idea was, well,
Speaker 1: we don't have to pay attention to anything that doesn't
Speaker 1: explicitly pertain to the Gentiles, you know, we only have
Speaker 1: to effectively deal with the epistles. And so that's kind
Speaker 1: of fallen out of fashion, but if you read the
Speaker 1: kind of founding fathers of this school of thought, that
Speaker 1: was very much kind of baked in at the ground level.
Speaker 1: So sorry for that digression.
Speaker 2: Back to you, Jordan, No, that that's very helpful. And
Speaker 2: I've got some material in front of me from from
Speaker 2: dispensationalist writers about their feelings there. They're teaching about Zionism
Speaker 2: in particular, just to illustrate how important this stuff is
Speaker 2: to them and how central it is to their understanding
Speaker 2: of what Christianity is all about. One dispensationalist fellow named
Speaker 2: Mike Evans wrote that nations will be judged by whether
Speaker 2: they helped Jerusalem or tried to destroy her, and rewarded
Speaker 2: and punished accordingly. So this is a really extraordinary thing
Speaker 2: that our feelings about the modern state of Israel determine
Speaker 2: our relationship with God as Christians. This is a very novel,
Speaker 2: innovative idea, as is the idea of the rapture itself.
Speaker 2: Your mention about numerology and trying to figure out what
Speaker 2: these biblical prophecies mean. I mean, if you were to
Speaker 2: pick up the Book of Daniel, you would find that
Speaker 2: it is rather inscrutable to the lay reader. It certainly
Speaker 2: mystifies me more often than not, and I don't I
Speaker 2: don't think that I have a special duty to figure
Speaker 2: out what it means either. But here's here's a major
Speaker 2: difference in approach between dispensationalism and a more traditional approach
Speaker 2: to Christianity. I'm not I'm not trying to be partisan
Speaker 2: in my interpretation of this doctrine. I am Eastern Orthodox,
Speaker 2: but I'm not trying to give a partisan position here.
Speaker 2: I'm trying I'm trying to uh to be more ecumenical
Speaker 2: in my interpretation here. But here's a difference of approach.
Speaker 2: There is the Christian who will encounter the dispensationalist arguments
Speaker 2: like Darby and his obsession with numerology, and you can
Speaker 2: get very very deep into that subject. You can be
Speaker 2: like Sir Isaac Newton and right shelves of material analyzing
Speaker 2: biblical numerology. There is an awful lot there to analyze,
Speaker 2: and there's some really compelling patterns there that invite interpretation. Okay,
Speaker 2: so that's one approach. And we know that Darby came
Speaker 2: up with some really weird ideas doing that and had
Speaker 2: some strange inspirations for doing that, some irrational inspirations perhaps,
Speaker 2: And we know that people like Sir Isaac Newton were
Speaker 2: obviously very heterodox. By the time he finished his analysis
Speaker 2: of scripture. Isaac Newton was denying the trinity and denying
Speaker 2: the incarnation. You know, he's going very far afield from
Speaker 2: traditional religious beliefs of Christians. But here's another approach. The
Speaker 2: other approach is that there has been a lot of
Speaker 2: holy analysis, a lot of trustworthy analysis that's already been done.
Speaker 2: And unless you yourself are going to devote yourself to
Speaker 2: biblical scholarship under the guidance of trusted authorities and become
Speaker 2: a scholastic or something, if you're just a lay person,
Speaker 2: you need to be more reliant on the traditional interpretation
Speaker 2: of these things unless you would like to become a
Speaker 2: Christian innovator or a heretic or an apostate. Obviously, if
Speaker 2: you're open to being those things, you want to become
Speaker 2: a religious entrepreneur, then go to town, you know, analyze
Speaker 2: a way, go have fun, dabble in it. On the side,
Speaker 2: it is obviously isn't all that important to you to
Speaker 2: share community with people through time, right, But if you
Speaker 2: want to be a Christian, that means you want to
Speaker 2: believe what Christians believe. Therefore, the traditional interpretation is always
Speaker 2: going to have more weight with you than not. And
Speaker 2: this is this is not just the orthodox approach to
Speaker 2: these things. I'm giving you an orthodox perspective here that
Speaker 2: the tradition is sacred, the tradition itself is sacred. That's
Speaker 2: an orthodox perspective here, but that's also just a practical approach,
Speaker 2: and they're all manner of Protestants that would agree with
Speaker 2: me on that point. You know, if you want to
Speaker 2: know what Christians believe, look at what Christians have had
Speaker 2: to say about the subject. And I'm here to tell
Speaker 2: you that your attitude towards the state of Israel is
Speaker 2: not the most important thing according to traditional Christian beliefs
Speaker 2: and doctrines. Baptists historically will not emphasize that point. Presbyterians
Speaker 2: will not emphasize that point. Methodists will not emphasize that
Speaker 2: point that your attitude to the state of Israel determines
Speaker 2: your salvation, all right. Dispensationalists will. They will emphasize that point,
Speaker 2: and that is why we recognize dispensationalism is innovative.
Speaker 1: So one of the things, and I voiced before my
Speaker 1: lack of interest in public theological debates, So that is
Speaker 1: not what I'm trying to get into. But I think
Speaker 1: that some people may question, like, okay, like we've laid
Speaker 1: out our problems with juralism, but why do they care
Speaker 1: so much about Israel? So one, obviously you'll hear constant
Speaker 1: references to kind of parts of the Old Testament when
Speaker 1: God referring to shall we say the pre Christian nation
Speaker 1: of Israel, and that's an important distinction there. We'll say
Speaker 1: something like, you know, those who bless Israel would be
Speaker 1: blessed those who curse Israel, Okay, and the.
Speaker 2: Confer obviously you know that that's from the Book of Genesis.
Speaker 1: Right, And then there's a conflation between the kind of
Speaker 1: tribes of Israel in the Old Testament and the modern
Speaker 1: nation of Israel. That's a little bit odd, right, I
Speaker 1: don't want to get too much into the specific kind
Speaker 1: of like genetic histories of those two groups of people.
Speaker 1: That's a discussion for another day. Such one another one
Speaker 1: is the in the disputationalist version of the end Times.
Speaker 1: You know, we talked about the rapture, the idea that
Speaker 1: the Church will the Church will be kind of removed
Speaker 1: from the earth and Christ will reign on earth for
Speaker 1: a thousand years.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And part of that is that they're the third Temple.
Speaker 1: So the original Temple destroyed, Solomon's Temple destroyed by the Romans,
Speaker 1: a third temple will need to be destroyed for the
Speaker 1: end times to happen. In the rapture to occur. And
Speaker 1: so part of this is that dispensationalists view that like
Speaker 1: leading that to occur as part of their necessary duty.
Speaker 1: So if you go back to my talk with AA,
Speaker 1: we talked about the idea of the kind of like
Speaker 1: Christian idea of history as a slow kind of winding down,
Speaker 1: you know, entropy taking over. And so a lot of
Speaker 1: these dispensationalists, who are I would consider sort of good people,
Speaker 1: you know, view society as coming apart at the scenes,
Speaker 1: something that you know, you and I might have some
Speaker 1: sympathy and say, like, all right, what's all coming to
Speaker 1: an end? What are these signs of, you know, the
Speaker 1: end times? You know, things being renewed and remade. And
Speaker 1: part of that is the construction of the Third Temple. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, right, you see this big push from people
Speaker 1: like Pompeo and Trump, who, let's be honest, I think
Speaker 1: Trump did this as a play to his base, not
Speaker 1: out of any to sort of support Jerusalem as the
Speaker 1: capital of the nation. It is. So that's one way
Speaker 1: in which this theology matters in kind of like the
Speaker 1: here and now. One of the other things is that
Speaker 1: part of that, in this prophecy, they're viewed as being
Speaker 1: seven nations against Israel which need to fall again, you'll
Speaker 1: notice this repetition of the number seven that goes back
Speaker 1: to the digression about numerology. But those seven nations among them,
Speaker 1: it's and I don't remember all them off the top
Speaker 1: of my head, but it's Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Syria, Iraq
Speaker 1: and some others, right. And you may notice that a
Speaker 1: lot of these were invaded by and so essentially, in
Speaker 1: addition to just being an innovation, you know, something wrong
Speaker 1: to believe, which has its own consequences, especially if you're
Speaker 1: dealing in matters of theology, it also comes into effect
Speaker 1: and kind of the foreign policy arena. And I know
Speaker 1: a lot of people and George you know Doubt as well,
Speaker 1: who essentially signed up for the Global War on Terror
Speaker 1: because of this belief, and they viewed it as a
Speaker 1: holy war. Yes. And one of the things that I
Speaker 1: really hate about this is that it takes what I
Speaker 1: consider the kind of like the best instincts of Americans, right,
Speaker 1: which is an instrict towards patriotism, and distorts it for
Speaker 1: things that are not in their interest, you know, distorts
Speaker 1: it so that they believe that they are fighting a
Speaker 1: Holy War, you know, fighting on behalf of Christ. And
Speaker 1: essentially they are without mincing words, you know, bombing civilians
Speaker 1: in the Middle East.
Speaker 2: Well or any words about it. And the justification for
Speaker 2: the war in Iraq was particularly disgusting. I was I've
Speaker 2: said several times before, and I don't mind people knowing
Speaker 2: I went to Liberty University. I knew Jerry folwell like
Speaker 2: I knew him in the sense that I was a
Speaker 2: student at his university and he could just remember everybody's name,
Speaker 2: because that's the kind of fellow that he was. That's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why he was a remarkable man,
Speaker 2: is he could shake your hand once and he could
Speaker 2: remember your name forever. Not that I was at all
Speaker 2: important to him. I had no influence. He didn't know
Speaker 2: who I was really, But I was there during the
Speaker 2: war on Terror, and I saw how everyone there, everyone
Speaker 2: in authority there, justified the invasion of Iraq. And they
Speaker 2: were all talking about in times prophecy, they were all
Speaker 2: talking about dispensationalist talking points. They were talking about how
Speaker 2: Saddam Hussein had launched scud missiles at Israel during the
Speaker 2: Gulf Storm or was that the name of the operation
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety two. I heard, yeah, Desert Storm, he
Speaker 2: just he just lobbed missiles at Israel randomly, as as
Speaker 2: an action of revenge. And I heard people talking about
Speaker 2: that when the United States invaded in two thousand and three.
Speaker 2: But we need to remember the record of that, like
Speaker 2: the justification for those those military adventures, was built on
Speaker 2: allegations that were unfounded. The CIA was cooking up information
Speaker 2: on order for the Bush administration, and they people like
Speaker 2: Colin Powell, made a fool of himself presenting evidence for
Speaker 2: weapons of mass destruction at the United Nations that that
Speaker 2: could not withstand scrutiny. Even just a few years later,
Speaker 2: Colin Powell was apologizing for that, calling that the lowest
Speaker 2: point in his whole career, saying that he was surrounded
Speaker 2: by people telling him to do this, and he gave
Speaker 2: in when his judgment should have held his hand.
Speaker 1: The result of the war.
Speaker 2: In Iraq was a million dead civilians at least, and
Speaker 2: the end of Christianity in that land, and what justified
Speaker 2: the intervention itself, at least with some Americans, I'm not
Speaker 2: saying with all, but with the crowd of conservative Christians
Speaker 2: who were very engaged in politics, at my university in
Speaker 2: that crowd, dispensationalist talking points and allusions to those talking
Speaker 2: points in the speeches of politicians, that was enough to
Speaker 2: secure their support for these things. And not only does
Speaker 2: this tax them, not only does it send their young
Speaker 2: men to fight and die in distant lands with no
Speaker 2: positive outcome for the United States. No good is done
Speaker 2: for Americans in this Iraqi intervention, but Christians in that
Speaker 2: place itself bear a disproportionate amount of cost and suffering,
Speaker 2: to the point that Christian belief isn't in Iraq anymore.
Speaker 2: It used to be ten percent of the population there
Speaker 2: and now there are no Christians left. We see another
Speaker 2: example of this manifested in our politics. A number of
Speaker 2: years ago, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas had an invitation
Speaker 2: to an event hosted by Arab Christians. And so these
Speaker 2: are mostly Orthodox and Catholic Arabs, and there are a
Speaker 2: number of organizations of those groups of Christians here in
Speaker 2: the United States. There are people like the Antiochian Orthodox Church,
Speaker 2: which is an Eastern Orthodox group in the United States,
Speaker 2: and also Roman Catholic groups like the Merronites and the
Speaker 2: Melkite Catholics. They're all Arab Catholics with Eastern write liturgies.
Speaker 2: They all sat down and listened to Ted Kruz, and
Speaker 2: ted Kruz decided to use his time with them by
Speaker 2: talking about the important relationship between the United States and Israel,
Speaker 2: and in the midst of his talk about how much
Speaker 2: he loved Israel, these Arabic Christians, who are not dispensationalists,
Speaker 2: started cat calling and hooting at him because Israel is
Speaker 2: extremely unpopular among them. The Zionist movement in the Holy
Speaker 2: Land has ostracized Christians and exiled Christians from this place
Speaker 2: where they have been settled since the time of Christ.
Speaker 2: These people have been there believing in Jesus for two
Speaker 2: thousand years, and if you go to the Holy Land
Speaker 2: you can still see their churches, though most of them
Speaker 2: are empty now right they've been displaced by Jewish Zionism
Speaker 2: in the Holy Land, and Christians also in that area
Speaker 2: have happened to have more resources to leave than the
Speaker 2: Muslim population in that area. So if you go to
Speaker 2: Palestine today, if you go to a Palestinian town like
Speaker 2: Nazareth or Bethlehem, you'll see that there are Palestinian churches
Speaker 2: there that were built by Palestinian Christians hundreds of years ago,
Speaker 2: and now those churches are virtually empty because everyone that
Speaker 2: has left, everyone that can leave those communities has left
Speaker 2: those communities because the situation in that part of the
Speaker 2: world is so miserable for people who are not Jews.
Speaker 2: So we we think of the Palestinians as overwhelmingly Muslim,
Speaker 2: and and when we when we look at at the
Speaker 2: territory of Palestine today, we see that is the case.
Speaker 2: They're overwhelmingly Muslim. But we forget that there was a
Speaker 2: large group of Christians in that in that place, and
Speaker 2: now now they're mostly in diaspora communities around the world.
Speaker 2: They've left. So, going back to your point, support American
Speaker 2: support for these adventures done in the name of the
Speaker 2: State of Israel or done for the benefit of the
Speaker 2: State of Israel, it does not help Americans. It does
Speaker 2: not help American Christian communities. I would argue strongly that
Speaker 2: it undermines the future of both. It's not sustainable to
Speaker 2: ship ship all all this money and resources abroad indefinitely
Speaker 2: and with with no limit to any of it. But
Speaker 2: it also undermines Christian belief in America because it discredits it.
Speaker 2: This is an innovative belief, and it discredits it. It
Speaker 2: gives it gives Native American Christians, people who grew up
Speaker 2: in this country believing in Christian doctrines. It gives them
Speaker 2: a bad experience, bad political experience, with an innovative Christian belief,
Speaker 2: a new Christian belief that does not correspond to historical
Speaker 2: Christian beliefs, and they see it as counterproductive and personally,
Speaker 2: just personally, I'm thinking back to all of the classmates
Speaker 2: I had at places like Liberty University who strongly identified
Speaker 2: all the Christianity that they had been brought up in
Speaker 2: and taught to believe with disastrous adventures like the invasion
Speaker 2: of Iraq, and they thought that Christianity meant George W.
Speaker 2: Bush and dead children and I. And if you were
Speaker 2: to talk to them today and ask them, well, why
Speaker 2: why don't you identify yourself as a Christian anymore? They
Speaker 2: would identify the War on Terror I had. I had
Speaker 2: friends that joined the Marine Corps and went to Fallujah
Speaker 2: and leveled city of blocks in Falluja and came back
Speaker 2: talking about how there were civilians in those city blocks
Speaker 2: and they were not allowed to do searches before they
Speaker 2: leveled the place, and these these people came back with
Speaker 2: major feelings of guilt, and they believed that they were
Speaker 2: serving their country. For one they weren't serving their country.
Speaker 2: This had nothing to do with American national interests. This
Speaker 2: was a money pit. Trump was absolutely right when he
Speaker 2: identified this as a complete waste of American resources. That
Speaker 2: we have nothing good to show from this adventure and
Speaker 2: just just a ruined country and millions of dead people
Speaker 2: who now hate us for what we did to their homes. Right,
Speaker 2: this is counterproductive, this is blowback. And my friends came
Speaker 2: back from tours over there. I have family that was
Speaker 2: there on military service, and they look back at that
Speaker 2: period of their lives with regret that this was misplaced,
Speaker 2: that this was a waste of resources, a waste of
Speaker 2: their lives. It took them away from their families for years,
Speaker 2: and there's nothing good to show for it. And many
Speaker 2: people walked away from their faith because of this, because
Speaker 2: it was so closely tied to their religious beliefs. And
Speaker 2: I see that as incredibly tragic and wrong, and this
Speaker 2: should not be this should not happen. But aside from
Speaker 2: all of that, it has resulted in the suffering of
Speaker 2: Christians in the Holy Land. It's resulted in the suffering
Speaker 2: of Christians and the eradication of Christian communities in the
Speaker 2: Middle East, and Christians are Christians in this country seem
Speaker 2: completely unaware of that. They don't know that it resulted
Speaker 2: in the the extinguish, the extinguished light of Christianity in
Speaker 2: places like Iraq.
Speaker 1: Well, and there's another layer of it that I find
Speaker 1: incredibly irritating. And I cannot remember the name of this
Speaker 1: book off the top of my head. Maybe maybe you
Speaker 1: can't do. Do you remember the book that came out
Speaker 1: maybe five or ten years ago. It was specifically about Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: And it's one of these books from progressives basically saying like,
Speaker 1: why do you know, why does Oklahoma vote for the
Speaker 1: GOP when they get no benefit from it? No, basically
Speaker 1: they really should vote for Democrats.
Speaker 2: What's the matter with Kansas?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what's the matter with Cansas. That's again what
Speaker 1: it is. And the thing that drives me crazy about
Speaker 1: that is that that's that's pure gloating. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: exactly what's them. It's that essentially what the two options
Speaker 1: placed in front of kind of like white Christian and
Speaker 1: flyover Americans, right, is you have a party that explicitly
Speaker 1: hates you. You know, there's no bones about that. The
Speaker 1: Democratic Party has made it clear that there is no
Speaker 1: patronage available for these type of people, or a party
Speaker 1: devoted to a completely other country, which is the r
Speaker 1: NC right. And through this combination of church and state,
Speaker 1: you know, these flyover Americans have been sold a bill
Speaker 1: of goods where they're sort of given a proxy nationalism.
Speaker 1: So they don't get anything they want within the contiguous US,
Speaker 1: but they get to, you know, support Israel, feel good
Speaker 1: about it, have their tax dollars go somewhere else. And
Speaker 1: that is essentially what they get. That is their patronage
Speaker 1: from the Republican Party and no material benefit to them.
Speaker 1: And so what they get is basically no, they have
Speaker 1: no advocate at all for their own interest within the country,
Speaker 1: and their only reward is essentially, will you get to
Speaker 1: sign up and die for someone else? And again it
Speaker 1: I am struggling for polite words on this, but there's
Speaker 1: something just ghastly about the fact that, you know, these
Speaker 1: people are having their kind of good and natural instincts
Speaker 1: towards patriots. You know, they're they're kind of natural American
Speaker 1: idealism towards you know, becoming a you know, good and
Speaker 1: righteous country abroad, used to essentially propagate violence against other
Speaker 1: Christians in other countries. And when you go into it,
Speaker 1: you know, you recently recorded a reading of an article
Speaker 1: the Untold Story of Christian Zionism's Rise to Power in
Speaker 1: the United States by Whitney Web. So you can find
Speaker 1: a full hour plus lung reading of that on your
Speaker 1: YouTube channel. I'll link it where essentially it is clear
Speaker 1: that the Foreign Service of Israel has been directly promoting
Speaker 1: this belief. So prominent, prominent dispensationalist preachers like Jerry Folwell
Speaker 1: essentially received large monetary gifts from the State of Israel.
Speaker 1: And I'll put it this, given the hatred that our
Speaker 1: government has towards Russia, for instance, right, even the fact
Speaker 1: that Orthodox Christians are vaguely connected in some ways to
Speaker 1: Russia has put them under suspicion. Right, there's a hit
Speaker 1: piece that came out a few months about this. But
Speaker 1: the fact that through all of that, you know, there's
Speaker 1: been no concerned you know, looking into the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, Jerry Folwell's private jet, what was purchased by
Speaker 1: a Lakud party member, you know, or that his entire
Speaker 1: organization was was bailed out at least twice. Yes, exactly
Speaker 1: what the.
Speaker 2: President of the Prime Minister of Israel or a president
Speaker 2: of Israel that bought Jerry Folwell's jet exactly.
Speaker 1: And look, I have complicated feelings on mister Fallwell. I
Speaker 1: never met him personally. I have had a number of
Speaker 1: people who's told me that in his personal dealings he
Speaker 1: was a very good man, nice man, treated them well.
Speaker 1: So I don't mean to speak ill of the dead. However,
Speaker 1: this is wrong and in addition to just being mistaken,
Speaker 1: it is taking good people and ruining their life. It's
Speaker 1: driving them away from the faith. And John Slaughter, who's
Speaker 1: been on here multiple times, he used the phrase I
Speaker 1: like we basically said, like these churches are atheist factories,
Speaker 1: and we've talked about before that this is contributing to
Speaker 1: the brain drain in the American right and American conservatism,
Speaker 1: where essentially anyone who is smart enough to see this
Speaker 1: is a false bill of goods, you know, because it
Speaker 1: obviously is, you know, there's nothing to it. Anyone who's
Speaker 1: smart enough to see that basically is presented a dichotomy
Speaker 1: where it's like, well, you can either be dumb in
Speaker 1: conservative or smart and get out and become an apostate,
Speaker 1: you know, become a rabbit progressive. And it's really part
Speaker 1: of the reason that I have nothing but disdain for
Speaker 1: the kind of leaders of the American conservative movement. So
Speaker 1: I want to.
Speaker 2: Add it's it's an incredible waste of resources. I reflect
Speaker 2: often on the the beliefs of so many of my
Speaker 2: classmates and how and how they fell away from the
Speaker 2: they were raised in. These were people who were homeschooled
Speaker 2: by their parents. These are people that went to Christian
Speaker 2: private schools their whole lives. These are people that were
Speaker 2: sent off to Liberty University, which was the you know,
Speaker 2: the flagship school of their variety of Baptists. And yet
Speaker 2: these these kids, my classmates, who were the recipients of
Speaker 2: all of that investment, walked away from the faith their
Speaker 2: parents most wanted them to preserve. So you're you're quote
Speaker 2: from our friend mister Slaughter that these churches are atheist factories.
Speaker 2: I certainly am witnessed to that, and I think it's
Speaker 2: incredibly sad. But I'd like to I'd like to go
Speaker 2: back to the point. What is dispensationalism exactly?
Speaker 1: This is.
Speaker 2: Let's be nice to it and say it's an enthusiasm.
Speaker 2: All right, I think that this is I think that's false.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't want to make any bones about it.
Speaker 2: But let's let's be nice and let's call it an enthusiasm.
Speaker 2: You you were crediting, uh, the the ecstatic utterances of
Speaker 2: a woman in a charismatic sort of service as as
Speaker 2: inspiration for some of Darby's teachings a little while ago.
Speaker 2: That that's an example of an enthusiasm, like a private
Speaker 2: opinion that's brought into a worship service and grabbed by
Speaker 2: the leaders and inflated into a Christian teaching. Now we
Speaker 2: we all, we all experience private religious opinions or enthusiasms.
Speaker 2: Some of us have had major spiritual events in our
Speaker 2: lives where we feel like we've we've been inspired in
Speaker 2: some way, or we've received something from God.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: Not everyone has major spiritual events in their lives. And
Speaker 2: this is this is one thing that would that would
Speaker 2: divide some some Protestants or some some Christian believers from
Speaker 2: some groups of Protestants. There are a number of Protestants
Speaker 2: that say you have to have a spiritual event like
Speaker 2: that in order to call yourself a Christian. I'm not
Speaker 2: one of those people, and I don't I cannot identify
Speaker 2: a particular time in my life where I felt like
Speaker 2: I was receiving a tremendous amount of spiritual inspiration. But
Speaker 2: spiritual inspiration is one thing. Bringing it into church and
Speaker 2: proclaiming it as a teaching that Christians ought to believe,
Speaker 2: that is something else. That is something else. And if
Speaker 2: I could make a metaphor for this, church is a
Speaker 2: place where we are supposed to put on our best clothes.
Speaker 2: Church is a place where we're supposed to go with
Speaker 2: a proper frame of mind, a sober frame of mind. Obviously,
Speaker 2: some people think that church is a place to go
Speaker 2: in order to get very emotional and enthusiastic. I will
Speaker 2: take exception to that. All right, I'm gonna say no,
Speaker 2: that's not proper, and make of me what you will.
Speaker 2: But church is a place where we are supposed to
Speaker 2: put on a certain frame of mind. We're supposed to
Speaker 2: be sober, we're supposed to be dressed up properly, we're
Speaker 2: supposed to behave ourselves right. We have phrases that we
Speaker 2: used to describe that put on your Sunday best right,
Speaker 2: and that really does change the way that we behave
Speaker 2: when we dress up well. If we dress up better
Speaker 2: for work, or dress up better for the supermarket, then
Speaker 2: we dress up for church. Then there's a disparity there
Speaker 2: that there's something there's something amiss. Church is not supposed
Speaker 2: to be vulgar. Church is not a place for commonplace things.
Speaker 2: It's not a place for pajamas and slippers.
Speaker 1: It's not a.
Speaker 2: Place to let your hair out or let your hair down.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's a place where we're supposed to present ourselves better
Speaker 2: than we are typically because we're presenting ourselves to God
Speaker 2: in some way. So my metaphor is this, we should
Speaker 2: not bring vulgarity into religious teaching. To bring vulgarity into
Speaker 2: religious teaching discredits religious teaching. It brings in, It brings
Speaker 2: in mockery against our religious teaching. It invites the mockery
Speaker 2: of our religious teaching. It brings shame on all Christians.
Speaker 2: And this is one of the reasons why innovation does
Speaker 2: not belong in the teaching of the church. If we
Speaker 2: can identify that teachings like dispensationalism originated from a historical
Speaker 2: period and do not correspond to the traditional teachings of
Speaker 2: Christian groups. Then it does not belong being taught in seminaries.
Speaker 2: It does not belong being taught in church. Now to
Speaker 2: your point, you mentioned something really important. You said that
Speaker 2: Americans are allowed to have an affection for the nation
Speaker 2: state of Israel, and they are not allowed to have
Speaker 2: an affection for their own country, for their own national group.
Speaker 2: We're allowed to fund and otherwise support the sacred boundaries
Speaker 2: of the nation of Ukraine, but we are not allowed
Speaker 2: to support or fund boundaries for our own country. This
Speaker 2: is ridiculous and it's a kind of a proxy nationalism.
Speaker 2: As you said, Similarly, I would say that in this
Speaker 2: problem of ecclesiology, that is the theology of the Christian Church,
Speaker 2: what what is the church in the beliefs of Christians,
Speaker 2: there is a proxy ecclesiology going on here in dispensationalism.
Speaker 2: So many Protestants, so many low church Protestants in particular,
Speaker 2: don't believe in a holy calendar. They don't they don't
Speaker 2: celebrate religious holidays, or perhaps some of them still do
Speaker 2: in in the form of holidays like Christmas, but they don't.
Speaker 2: They don't see that as something particularly connected to worship
Speaker 2: in the church. They don't don't have a holy calendar
Speaker 2: that they keep in their minds, and so they they
Speaker 2: praise the holy calendar that they see in the ceremonial
Speaker 2: law of the Jews in the Old Testament. They don't
Speaker 2: see themselves as a chosen group by God. They don't
Speaker 2: have uls to perform in their own churches. They don't
Speaker 2: see that as a group set apart by God, and
Speaker 2: so instead they see the Jews as a group set
Speaker 2: apart by God. They see the Jews as having rituals
Speaker 2: to perform that have religious significance, and they themselves do
Speaker 2: not see that they have any corresponding rituals as Christians.
Speaker 2: And this is a moment to make a controversial aside.
Speaker 2: I have sympathy for Protestants that embrace things like freemasonry,
Speaker 2: because it is an exclusive group with rituals and practices
Speaker 2: and has a temple and things like that. I think
Speaker 2: that it's natural to want those things. And if you're
Speaker 2: a Baptist out in Mississippi or something, and you don't
Speaker 2: have any of those things, and you're taught by your
Speaker 2: church leadership that Christians are not supposed to have those things,
Speaker 2: that those things are like Roman Catholic apostasy or something.
Speaker 2: I think that it's there's something humane and understandable about
Speaker 2: wanting to go and become a Freemason so that you
Speaker 2: can have some of those things. I think it's natural
Speaker 2: for people to want those things, so at least it
Speaker 2: goes some way explaining that phenomenon among Protestants in particular,
Speaker 2: but in dispensationalism, we see a lot of Protestants that
Speaker 2: are praising the Jewish practices and saying, no, God, God
Speaker 2: blesses these things. These are good things. We want to
Speaker 2: see these things flourish, and moreover, we want to see
Speaker 2: another temple constructed in Jerusalem so that the Jews can
Speaker 2: can better practice their religion, which they say God has blessed.
Speaker 2: This is extremely perverse, this is wrong. Dispensationalists will say
Speaker 2: that the belief that the Church was established by God
Speaker 2: for his people and that the Church manifests the chosen
Speaker 2: people of God in the body of Christ. Dispensationalists call
Speaker 2: that quote replacement theology. That is, the idea that the church,
Speaker 2: the Christian Church, replaced the Jews in religious rituals, in calendar,
Speaker 2: in the church calendar, in the true and proper worship
Speaker 2: of God. Dispensationalists dismiss that doctrine of ecclesiology, but that
Speaker 2: is the doctrine of the Church for all of historic Christianity,
Speaker 2: and in that I'm including the Protestant denominations. That's what
Speaker 2: Presbyterians believe, that's what Methodists believe, that's what the Church
Speaker 2: of England believes. That the Church is the promise given
Speaker 2: to Abraham. And I don't want to get us bogged
Speaker 2: down in scripture today, but I will quote one piece
Speaker 2: of scripture to this effect. What we need to do
Speaker 2: if we're wanting to understand these points better as Christians,
Speaker 2: we need to go back to the Bible and see
Speaker 2: what the New Testament has to say about this. The
Speaker 2: New Testament has an awful lot to say about people
Speaker 2: who continue in the beliefs and practices of the Jews
Speaker 2: versus Christians. They see them as opposed to one another.
Speaker 2: And the Apostles are emphatic on this that the Church
Speaker 2: is the covenanted group with God, and that Jews are
Speaker 2: supposed to believe in Jesus, that this is the culmination
Speaker 2: of the Old Testament, that Christ full fills all the
Speaker 2: promises of the Messiah in the Old Testament, and that
Speaker 2: Jews are not supposed to continue on in Judaism without
Speaker 2: professing their faith in Christ as their Messiah and as
Speaker 2: God incarnate. The New Testament is very clear on these points,
Speaker 2: and I'll quote just one verse to this effect. I'm
Speaker 2: going to quote Galatians three six and following, the apostle says,
Speaker 2: consider Abraham, he believed God, and it was credited to
Speaker 2: him as righteousness. Understand then, that those who believe are
Speaker 2: children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify
Speaker 2: the gentiles by faith and announce the Gospel in advance
Speaker 2: to Abraham. All nations will be blessed through you. So
Speaker 2: those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the
Speaker 2: man of faith. Okay, So here the Apostle is telling
Speaker 2: us the gentiles who believe in Jesus manifest the promise
Speaker 2: given to Abraham. It is not Jews who may literally
Speaker 2: be descended from Abraham. That is not what God wants.
Speaker 2: God wants belief in our hearts. God does not want
Speaker 2: physical descendants of the patriarch. And that's the major difference here.
Speaker 2: If we want to identify it with scripture and with
Speaker 2: dogma between dispensationalists, these innovators, and traditional Christian belief. The
Speaker 2: traditional Christian belief is that the faith in Jesus is
Speaker 2: the thing that marks the people of God, and we
Speaker 2: call the members of that group the Church. The dispensationalists
Speaker 2: say that there are two groups of God, that it's
Speaker 2: the modern state of Israel and the Jews that belong
Speaker 2: to that group, and the Christian Church, which some how
Speaker 2: exists alongside. And as you said previously, the dispensationalists want
Speaker 2: to bring about the end of the world by helping
Speaker 2: the Jews in Israel reconstruct the Temple in Jerusalem, which
Speaker 2: is also a very perverse thing to want. This is
Speaker 2: this is perverse to want the world to burn. That's bad, Okay,
Speaker 2: to want to see people die all around the world
Speaker 2: in a fiery cataclysm, that's bad to want that, And
Speaker 2: that is that is equivalent to washing one's hands of
Speaker 2: one's one's inheritance and all the beauty and value everywhere.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: It is right to to desire the reconciliation of God
Speaker 2: and Man, okay. And it's it's right to want to
Speaker 2: be reunited with your dead loved ones.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: That those are good desires, but to desire the judgment
Speaker 2: of mankind, that that reveals an incredible disconnect with realities.
Speaker 2: We are not ready to meet God. You and I
Speaker 2: are not ready to meet God. We need to spend
Speaker 2: the rest of our lives preparing for that. And to
Speaker 2: want the end of the world is to want death.
Speaker 2: That's that's the death wish manifested in it. It's very
Speaker 2: upsetting to me. I had a ride in my taxi
Speaker 2: just recently that at the time was amusing to me.
Speaker 2: And it's funny because I was preparing for this stream.
Speaker 2: I've been doing a lot of reading on the side,
Speaker 2: getting ready to have this interview with you. And one
Speaker 2: night I was I was driving these folks around and
Speaker 2: I picked them up in this in this rather rough corner,
Speaker 2: and they were tourists. They weren't They weren't used to
Speaker 2: New Orleans. And they said they had had some street
Speaker 2: people harassing them and they saw drug addicts lying in
Speaker 2: the gutter. And they asked me about that because they
Speaker 2: weren't used to presumably they weren't used to American cities,
Speaker 2: much less New Orleans. And I said, well, the police
Speaker 2: just don't enforce laws relating to those things like, even if,
Speaker 2: even if you were to call the police because these
Speaker 2: people conned you or threatened you, or you saw people
Speaker 2: shooting up in the gutter, the police wouldn't do anything
Speaker 2: about it. And a woman turned to her husband in
Speaker 2: the back seat and she said, you see, you see,
Speaker 2: it's the end times. We're about to be raptured out
Speaker 2: of here. And I couldn't help but smile. And my
Speaker 2: mental response to that moment was I'm afraid it's a
Speaker 2: lot worse than that. This is what we're dealing with,
Speaker 2: and no one's going to snap their fingers and get
Speaker 2: out of this without paying a price. Right, this is
Speaker 2: our society, These are our political circumstance. We shouldn't bet
Speaker 2: on getting raptured out of here. We shouldn't bet on
Speaker 2: the end of the world taking place so that we
Speaker 2: don't have to deal with any of them. We are
Speaker 2: going to have to deal with this stuff. It's going
Speaker 2: to involve a lot of suffering. It's going to involve
Speaker 2: a big cost because we've just let all this stuff
Speaker 2: go for so long. So I think that's another explanation
Speaker 2: for why dispensationalism has become popular. We've been able to
Speaker 2: externalize a lot of our a lot of our political problems.
Speaker 2: We've been able to export them to some rapidly approaching
Speaker 2: judgment day that will resolve everything with no cost to anyone.
Speaker 2: God will intervene and fix everything in the blink of
Speaker 2: an eye. But that's just fantasy thinking. And we we
Speaker 2: believe as Christians that the world will end. We believe
Speaker 2: in the second coming of Jesus Christ. This is doctrinal
Speaker 2: teaching of ours. This is dogmatic. All Christians believe that,
Speaker 2: and I'm not I'm not taking any exception to that.
Speaker 2: I believe that too. But we we also think that
Speaker 2: this world is our home for the time being, and
Speaker 2: we have a responsibility to take care of it. We
Speaker 2: shouldn't we shouldn't absent ourselves from that saying, oh, well,
Speaker 2: it's all it's all ending right now any second now,
Speaker 2: it's all going to end. Uh, and take no provision
Speaker 2: for the future of our communities. We're supposed to take
Speaker 2: provision for the future of our communities. And perhaps it's
Speaker 2: because we've had a couple generations that have externalized all
Speaker 2: all of these things, not made the proper investments in
Speaker 2: the future of Americans. And see these chickens coming home
Speaker 2: to roost. Perhaps perhaps that's why they've embraced this doctrine
Speaker 2: that oh, well, none of that matters now, because we're
Speaker 2: we're in the end time now and it's all about
Speaker 2: to be ended well.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I think that there's a
Speaker 1: reason that this service coology is so popular among baby boomers.
Speaker 1: But one of the things I want to talk about
Speaker 1: is the way that this arose in a crisis of leadership.
Speaker 1: So the doctrine of dispensationalism sort of originates in England
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, but it rose to kind of
Speaker 1: media popularity in the US in the early nineteen twenty. Now,
Speaker 1: this relates to two historical events are important to understand.
Speaker 1: Which is one what's called the modernist crisis, which is
Speaker 1: this situation where a lot of this is where the
Speaker 1: main line evangelical or mainline conservative split happened in Protestantism,
Speaker 1: where essentially all of these denominations had two camps in them.
Speaker 1: There was an elite liberal camp that kind of around
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties sort of dropped all pretenses of being
Speaker 1: genuinely Christian. This aside, here this sinks up well with
Speaker 1: what Muldbug writes about kind of the progressive Christian elites
Speaker 1: becoming what we consider the woke religion. Now, if you
Speaker 1: want to look at the kind of early forerunners of this,
Speaker 1: the you can look at the Quakers, but essentially started
Speaker 1: doing things like denying a virgin birth, denying Christ. And
Speaker 1: in evangelical circles they call this the Great Betrayal because
Speaker 1: all of these legacy American institutions, these legacy American seminaries
Speaker 1: like Harvard, like Yale, like Princeton, which were elite organizations,
Speaker 1: essentially stopped being Christian Christian in name only. So you
Speaker 1: have these congregations that are in many cases still very conservative,
Speaker 1: they're still very devout, and they're essentially left leaderless. And
Speaker 1: so the Schofield reference Bible, which we've mentioned multiple times is,
Speaker 1: you know, dispensationalless and the reason and it sold so
Speaker 1: well is because it's sort of coincided with that. So
Speaker 1: you have a large number of people and their elite
Speaker 1: structure has been cut off. They've been cut off from
Speaker 1: their access to new leaders and so they're sort of
Speaker 1: left rudderless. They're sort of forced to come up with
Speaker 1: a new leadership organization from the groundhop and the Schofield
Speaker 1: Bible has an addition to commentary, it also has sermon notes.
Speaker 1: So it was sort of a ready made solution for
Speaker 1: someone who is not a classically trained teacher to preach
Speaker 1: to a group of people. And it was used not
Speaker 1: only to train kind of that generation, but also to
Speaker 1: start new seminaries. So one of the and this is
Speaker 1: something that you really only see in the South, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the Bible Belt is the Bible school and
Speaker 1: Bible schools are sort of they're not even quite seminaries.
Speaker 1: They're sort of in that mold, but they're much less formalized,
Speaker 1: they're much less institutionalized, and the vast majority of those
Speaker 1: draw their teaching from the Schofield Bible, and so of
Speaker 1: have this. And honestly, I think in a world in
Speaker 1: which the leadership class of the American Protestant movement kind
Speaker 1: of kept its senses, dispensationalism would have been a side
Speaker 1: note in history, you know, one of like any number
Speaker 1: of you know, spinoff heresies. But because the leadership, the
Speaker 1: leadership completely gave up, you know, turned around and betrayed
Speaker 1: their base, sort of had a massively outsized impact. And
Speaker 1: you know, you and I have said before that we
Speaker 1: have a lot of disdain for conservative leadership, and this
Speaker 1: is a part of it, that they're sort of like
Speaker 1: second tier leaders. And I guess that's another thing in this,
Speaker 1: that this is sort of something of, you know, sheep
Speaker 1: looking for a shepherd. And at the same time as this,
Speaker 1: right you have the Zionist movement picking up steam in Europe.
Speaker 1: You know, more Jews are moving to Israel, and so
Speaker 1: sort of you can forgive people for thinking, well, it
Speaker 1: looks like it's happening, you know, the prophecy is coming.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, I have kind of two feelings
Speaker 1: about this, because I think that what these people believe
Speaker 1: is harmful and bad and stupid, to put it bluntly,
Speaker 1: but also I feel a lot of sympathy for these people,
Speaker 1: you know, the people that they should be able to
Speaker 1: count on, hate them and despise them. And yeah, other
Speaker 1: relevant things kind of happening is this is also relevant
Speaker 1: to the Scopes monkey trial, things like that, And this
Speaker 1: is really the moment in which the kind of split
Speaker 1: between conservative Christians and broader culture began, you know, where
Speaker 1: these people were vilified, they were mocked, and it became
Speaker 1: more and more difficult kind of up to the current
Speaker 1: day to be a respectable devout Christian. Anyway, it's probably
Speaker 1: not said.
Speaker 2: I correspond with your statements on this. I agree with you.
Speaker 2: I have a lot of sympathy for these people. I
Speaker 2: want to be very clear. These people are my people.
Speaker 2: I'm one of them. I come from these people, and
Speaker 2: I love these people. And they seemed to me deluded,
Speaker 2: misled led to support things that seem obviously against their
Speaker 2: interests to support. And I think it's really sad and
Speaker 2: it's very frustrating. But you're quite right that their elites
Speaker 2: conspired against them. And this happened all over the country.
Speaker 2: There was this big division that resulted in a civil
Speaker 2: war over Protestant institutions all across the United States. And
Speaker 2: this is the Great War between the modernists and the fundamentalists.
Speaker 2: And what happened was the leaders of various American denominations
Speaker 2: came out against traditional teachings that Christians have always believed.
Speaker 2: They we're embracing things like the higher criticism out of
Speaker 2: Germany and saying, oh, well, the Bible is not what
Speaker 2: it purports to be. The Old Testament prophecies were written
Speaker 2: after the events that they described, which means that they
Speaker 2: aren't really prophecies. And the miracles of the New Testament
Speaker 2: which undergird Christian teaching, things like the virgin birth and
Speaker 2: the resurrection, those are miraculous things, and modern people know
Speaker 2: that such things never really happen, and so they're denying
Speaker 2: basic Christian teachings, and they face a revolt from the
Speaker 2: lower ranks, and the people in the pews say.
Speaker 1: Wait a second.
Speaker 2: We believe what the Creed says. We believe what the
Speaker 2: Bible says. We're taking these things at face value. And
Speaker 2: when the Bible says in prophecy that a virgin shall conceive,
Speaker 2: we believe that's exactly what happened. And this is manifested
Speaker 2: in the life of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.
Speaker 2: And these people then made a stand to try to
Speaker 2: hold on to the institutions their ancestors had built for them.
Speaker 2: So you saw fights over things like colleges and seminaries
Speaker 2: and even for the control of various denominations. And I
Speaker 2: don't have a taally. I don't know which fundamentalist sects
Speaker 2: were able to retain the control of their institutions around
Speaker 2: the country. I do know that here In the South,
Speaker 2: the fundamentalists one in the Baptist Church, and you can
Speaker 2: count that to their credit. They retained control of most
Speaker 2: of their educational institutions. And up north, where the Baptist
Speaker 2: Modernists won out, the Baptist Church has just withered.
Speaker 1: In the North.
Speaker 2: It became more like the Episcopal Church in doctrine, of course,
Speaker 2: not in practice. And it turned out there wasn't much
Speaker 2: reason to continue believing in those things. If you can
Speaker 2: just believe whatever is fashionable, why not stay at home
Speaker 2: on Sunday? Why give your money to that institution. If
Speaker 2: they're telling you that the Bible isn't actually true, and
Speaker 2: in Christian teaching isn't actually true, it's only spiritual or something,
Speaker 2: there's not as much reason to be a part of it.
Speaker 2: And we see that the falling away from from leftist
Speaker 2: and liberal denominations that continues on into the present day.
Speaker 2: But you're quite right what you're describing about the elites
Speaker 2: embracing leftist causes in this period. A very good book
Speaker 2: on that subject, by the way, is Richard Gamble's book
Speaker 2: The War for Righteousness, which was published by is I Press.
Speaker 2: I believe in that he's he's documenting the support of
Speaker 2: leftist Christians, and that would be those modernist Christians for
Speaker 2: Woodrow Wilson's war to save the world for democracy, to
Speaker 2: make the world safe for democracy, and to fight the
Speaker 2: war to end all wars. You know, these very utopian goals.
Speaker 2: It's a really interesting study. But that's left the fundamentalists
Speaker 2: without without that elite leadership, and they've been left with
Speaker 2: people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Folwell and John Hagey
Speaker 2: as their leaders. They've been left with tele evangelists for
Speaker 2: their leaders, and those people have been particularly interested in
Speaker 2: trying to grab the reins of the political process. We
Speaker 2: see that at least the one that stands out most
Speaker 2: to me, and it's because of my personal experience, the
Speaker 2: one that stands out most to me is Jerry Folwell,
Speaker 2: who always wanted his school to be a training ground
Speaker 2: for future congressman and he wanted his law school to
Speaker 2: produce future Supreme Court justices, and his school has attracted
Speaker 2: any Republican aspirant to the presidency, including Donald Trump. I
Speaker 2: remember when Donald Trump came to speak at Liberty and
Speaker 2: revealed that he did not know how to talk to
Speaker 2: low church Baptists, and he didn't know how to talk
Speaker 2: about the Bible. He tried to talk about the Bible
Speaker 2: in his speech and messed it up. He tried to
Speaker 2: quote Second Corinthians and said, you know, in two Corinthians
Speaker 2: whatever reference, and everyone laughed at him for that because
Speaker 2: he didn't know how to quote scripture. He was obviously
Speaker 2: out of his depth. But it only it only goes
Speaker 2: to show that that liberty was always about getting involved
Speaker 2: with politics. But in in my judgment here, given the
Speaker 2: metaphor that I drew a little while ago, bringing up
Speaker 2: current political events in church to make an argument about
Speaker 2: where Christian should stand on these things. If it's if
Speaker 2: it's something that's in conversation right now and is controvertible,
Speaker 2: that's something that intelligent people, informed people can disagree about.
Speaker 2: Politics has no place there. Politics is very vulgar. Now
Speaker 2: I want I want to explain myself to say, Christians
Speaker 2: believe that marriage is between a man and a woman
Speaker 2: is not a controversial thing. But that is a political thing. Now,
Speaker 2: when I say not a controversial thing, I'm saying that's
Speaker 2: obviously what Christians have always believed, okay. Or when Christians
Speaker 2: say Christians have always argued against abortion, We have records
Speaker 2: that date back to the first and second century on
Speaker 2: that point that that's not controversial to say that that's
Speaker 2: what Christians have always believed, but it's become political now.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that Christians should not say those things
Speaker 2: in a teaching position in their churches today. I'm saying
Speaker 2: the exact opposite. Actually, Christians teach what Christians traditionally believe
Speaker 2: in church. What Christians should not do is opine about
Speaker 2: the controversies in the local race for congressmen or county
Speaker 2: commissioner from the pulpit, because that's vulgar. That's the point
Speaker 2: that I'm making. And so at at places like Liberty,
Speaker 2: where the beliefs, the Christian beliefs of Baptists was so
Speaker 2: closely wedded with national political concerns and even the concerns
Speaker 2: of wars abroad, it had the effect of vulgarizing what
Speaker 2: is sacred. And that is an only negative effect, that
Speaker 2: only discredited what is holy. And this is why we
Speaker 2: have such a profound duty to make sure that holy
Speaker 2: things are not sullied, that holy things should never should
Speaker 2: never be sullied by combining them with vulgar things. We
Speaker 2: should not give our enemies any reason to mock us
Speaker 2: on those grounds. We should not give our enemies any
Speaker 2: reason to point out, Oh, look at them, they were
Speaker 2: advocating for this political policy, and the whole thing was foolish.
Speaker 2: The whole thing was a failure. You see, you can't
Speaker 2: trust those people. If you can't trust those people on
Speaker 2: what's going on right now, what makes you think you
Speaker 2: can trust them to teach you about the hereafter? What
Speaker 2: makes you think that you can trust them to teach
Speaker 2: you about God and about how to relate to God.
Speaker 2: Those arguments are reinforced, those arguments are strengthened every time
Speaker 2: a pastor weighs into the mud of politics to make
Speaker 2: an opinion from the pulpit. Church is not a place
Speaker 2: for opinions, is what I'm saying. We should only get
Speaker 2: what is real there. We should only get what is
Speaker 2: tested there. We should only get what Christians have been
Speaker 2: believing for the history of the Church.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 2: And occasionally the church has to deal with a modern heresy,
Speaker 2: and that's when we traditionally have counsels to decide those things.
Speaker 2: But the councils are always very careful to frame their
Speaker 2: language and what Christians have always believed at all times
Speaker 2: and in all places. That's why that is so very
Speaker 2: very important.
Speaker 1: I think that there's another layer to this, which is
Speaker 1: when I you and I are both familiar with kind
Speaker 1: of the points of elite theory, and when I look
Speaker 1: at you know, who are the like, where are where
Speaker 1: is there still some kind of spark left in the West.
Speaker 1: It's in these communities. You know. You you mentioned it
Speaker 1: a kind of an unscripted video on your channel that
Speaker 1: these are the only group of people in the West
Speaker 1: who still seem to be having children. And as you've mentioned,
Speaker 1: they invest an astonishing amount in their children. You know,
Speaker 1: they pay to send them to private school, which is
Speaker 1: very expensive. You know, they send them to private universities,
Speaker 1: which are also very expensive, and with the expectation that
Speaker 1: they will kind of continue in their you know, broad
Speaker 1: let's just say pro nomion. But the problem is, you know,
Speaker 1: when you build all of that on something as incorrect
Speaker 1: as this, you need captures. And so as far as
Speaker 1: is what I believe are kind of the the core
Speaker 1: kind of growths that need to be excized from this
Speaker 1: movement there, and they're kind of linked. It's Christian Zionist dispensationalism.
Speaker 1: I'll just kind of lump that into one and then
Speaker 1: maybe you know something for another day, which is the
Speaker 1: kind of like milk toast civic nationalism. And in each case, right,
Speaker 1: we're sort of we have a community of people who
Speaker 1: has good instincts, but they are playing with to borrow
Speaker 1: a term from the the anti colonialist right, they're playing
Speaker 1: with the master's tools, and because of that, they will
Speaker 1: never be able to kind of keep that premise and
Speaker 1: break out. Now you've mentioned before, you know that there's
Speaker 1: sort of this dissonance between what these people think and
Speaker 1: what they believe, you know, with regards to your own employment,
Speaker 1: with what they you know, these people will say, oh,
Speaker 1: we want to be dissident, you know, Oh we want
Speaker 1: to be you know, kind of insulated from the world,
Speaker 1: and yet they're kind of not committed to it. And
Speaker 1: I see doctrines like this as being a part of that.
Speaker 1: And so I realized that, you know that you and
Speaker 1: I didn't get into kind of the theological nitty gritty.
Speaker 1: I don't see it as that important really, But the
Speaker 1: reason that this matters is I view this as being
Speaker 1: one of the things standing between our people and they
Speaker 1: are our people. You know, you know where I live,
Speaker 1: you know, the kind of circles that I run in
Speaker 1: and essentially getting out of this. You mentioned again this
Speaker 1: idea of like, oh, we'll just stand back, it'll all
Speaker 1: sort itself out. And that's another major stumbling block, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea that you don't need to work, you don't
Speaker 1: need to prepare, you know, essentially God will will come
Speaker 1: back and you know, make everything better. And again that's
Speaker 1: why this matters, you know, because in addition to motivating
Speaker 1: people to do the wrong thing, it keeps them from
Speaker 1: doing anything positive. So again, George, I appreciate your time.
Speaker 1: We're sort of, you know, wrapping this up. Is there
Speaker 1: anything you want to say?
Speaker 2: And in summary, yeah, I made an impromptu stream just recently,
Speaker 2: you just mentioned, I went to a homeschool co op
Speaker 2: and I saw our people. They weren't saying explicitly dispensationalist
Speaker 2: things at this meeting, but they were saying all sorts
Speaker 2: of absurd things about the American flag and what it symbolizes.
Speaker 2: They were saying obviously untrue things about it. And they
Speaker 2: were doing this with noble purpose. They want their children
Speaker 2: to love their country. They want their children to want
Speaker 2: to serve their community and defend their community. They want
Speaker 2: to preserve the freedoms they've inherited from their ancestors, specifically
Speaker 2: their freedom of religion. They said, all of those things.
Speaker 2: What they're unaware of is that their own government is
Speaker 2: acting against their interests. Their own government is ignoring the Constitution.
Speaker 2: Their own government is not protecting their freedom of religion,
Speaker 2: or their freedom of speech, or their freedom of assembly,
Speaker 2: or their property rights, or their protection against warrantless search
Speaker 2: and seizure. All of this, all of those things have
Speaker 2: been swept away, and they are unaware. They thought that
Speaker 2: their government was still worth the blood of their children,
Speaker 2: that this government is worth the blood of their children,
Speaker 2: And that just floored me. I don't know how they
Speaker 2: can cope so hard as to believe that. But also
Speaker 2: what really disturbed me about about that service that I
Speaker 2: witnessed was that the only children there that would continue
Speaker 2: to believe that were children who had deliberately close their
Speaker 2: eyes to what their government is doing and refuse to
Speaker 2: believe what is obvious about what their government is doing.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of another loved one that I have,
Speaker 2: someone I'm closely connected to who believes in the Q conspiracies.
Speaker 2: And I was talking to this man and getting along
Speaker 2: with him. I don't seek out to have fights with
Speaker 2: people about things like this or even to contradict them,
Speaker 2: especially when it's a loved one of mine. And he
Speaker 2: was telling me how Trump was still president, that Hillary
Speaker 2: Clinton was dead and we aren't seeing actually Joseph Biden,
Speaker 2: we're seeing a clone of Joseph Biden or something like that,
Speaker 2: and that John F. Kennedy Junior is vice president. He
Speaker 2: believes all of these things, and he says, yeah, and
Speaker 2: everything is going to be fine. And he also he
Speaker 2: said something very interesting to me. He said, none of
Speaker 2: the churches are ready for what's going to happen. And
Speaker 2: I said, well, what do you mean and he said, well,
Speaker 2: when it's all revealed that Trump is still in charge,
Speaker 2: and that John F. Kennedy Junior is still alive, and
Speaker 2: that the United States government has been overthrown in this
Speaker 2: secret revolution behind the scenes, he said, millions of Americans
Speaker 2: are going to return to faith in Jesus. And it
Speaker 2: just blew me away. I was like, how would that follow?
Speaker 2: What does the one have to do with the other?
Speaker 2: I don't understand. And it is people. It seems to me,
Speaker 2: I have no other way of describing what's going on.
Speaker 2: It seems that these people are deliberately closing their eyes
Speaker 2: to what's going on, and they have a sunk cost
Speaker 2: in these things. To go to a less radical example,
Speaker 2: the homeschool moms who were telling that their children, telling
Speaker 2: their children that the flag had symbolism of the Trinity
Speaker 2: associated with it, and the sanctity of womanhood was associated
Speaker 2: with the colors of the flag and things like that.
Speaker 2: They could continue to believe in this ersatz civic religion
Speaker 2: and continue to sacrifice to these people and institutions that
Speaker 2: want them to be destroyed, or they will wake up
Speaker 2: to the fact that this is all counterproductive. But where
Speaker 2: does that leave them if they if they see, oh
Speaker 2: wait a second, my government really does want me dead.
Speaker 2: I've been sacrificing to them and telling my children to
Speaker 2: have confidence in these institutions when in fact this is
Speaker 2: all against my interests. Does that cause them to lose
Speaker 2: their faith?
Speaker 1: Then?
Speaker 2: And I was talking to a good friend of mine
Speaker 2: about this just recently. He and I. He knows he
Speaker 2: knows a lot more about dispensationalism than I do. And
Speaker 2: I was talking to him about this, and he said, well,
Speaker 2: it could be that the religion of a lot of
Speaker 2: these people is in fact that counterproductive civic religion, and
Speaker 2: it does not merit their faith, and it should not survive.
Speaker 2: So maybe they maybe we're looking at massive disillusionment. Can
Speaker 2: you imagine where these people will be left if the
Speaker 2: state of Israel is discredited, repudiated as genocidal by the
Speaker 2: United Nations, say, by a consensus of world powers. And
Speaker 2: if the United States has a new administration that repudiates
Speaker 2: its support of Israel or announces hard limits to that support,
Speaker 2: it could shake the faith of many of those people.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to I don't want to misrepresent
Speaker 2: these things, but this is what the dispensationalist writers and
Speaker 2: leaders have to say about it. How Lindsay, who wrote
Speaker 2: a very important book called The Late Great Planet Earth
Speaker 2: a dispensationalist interpretation all right, an important dispensationalist thinker, how Lindsay.
Speaker 2: How Lindsay said, the United States has been protected by
Speaker 2: God because it has been a haven for Israelites and
Speaker 2: an ally of their survival. That's what makes America exceptional.
Speaker 2: This is very close to what people at Liberty were saying.
Speaker 2: The whole time I was there, that America is special,
Speaker 2: America is exceptional because we support Israel. That it's not
Speaker 2: at all unusual to hear a dispensationalists say that what
Speaker 2: happens when these illusions are dissolved. If support of Israel
Speaker 2: is what makes them crit in their view, and not
Speaker 2: their confession that Christ is God, where does that leave them? Well,
Speaker 2: it's a very disturbing question. I feel very sorry for
Speaker 2: the suffering that they must go through. That suffering is inevitable.
Speaker 2: It's going to happen. They will be disillusioned because these
Speaker 2: beliefs are false. It's not going to trouble me. I
Speaker 2: mean it'll trouble me because people I love are suffering,
Speaker 2: because people I love are having their faith tested. But
Speaker 2: that faith must be refined, it must have their impurities
Speaker 2: burned out of it.
Speaker 1: And I think that's something we're witnessing. I'm, as you
Speaker 1: probably picked up on, kind of pessimistic by nature. But
Speaker 1: when I look at what's currently happening in the conservative movement,
Speaker 1: there has been a turnover and people like Glenn Back,
Speaker 1: people like Ben Shapiro, who I mean, Glenn Back is
Speaker 1: a Mormon, you know who? And Mormons buy into this.
Speaker 1: Ben Shapiro is Ben Shapiro. They've sort of begun to
Speaker 1: alienate themselves. And I think that this is partially generational.
Speaker 1: The baby Boomers and gen Z buy into this much more.
Speaker 1: And maybe it's just the fact that millennials in gen
Speaker 1: Z are less Christian or less churched, and so they
Speaker 1: get less of it. But it does sort of seem
Speaker 1: that this is an idea that is dying, you know,
Speaker 1: whether you want to say it or not. And on
Speaker 1: one hand, you know, I would prefer to live in
Speaker 1: a more Christian country than not, even if it's kind
Speaker 1: of a suboptimal form of Christianity. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I think you're right, this needs to die. It is dying,
Speaker 1: and I don't think we should bemoan it.
Speaker 2: Well, I will, I will reserve my sympathies for those
Speaker 2: that suffer from this, because I love them. But this
Speaker 2: is not what Christians believe, and this is counterproductive to
Speaker 2: Christianity in this place. This is counterproductive to American Christianity.
Speaker 2: It causes people to despise the Christian message, and the
Speaker 2: Christian message is the Gospel. It's not any specific innovative
Speaker 2: teaching about the modern state of Israel. It does not
Speaker 2: involve our crazy, are insane modern political problems. The Christian
Speaker 2: gospel is that Jesus is God and he saves us
Speaker 2: from our sins, and our sins cause us to suffer
Speaker 2: and die. All right, So this is good news that
Speaker 2: Jesus saves us and that we're supposed to believe in it.
Speaker 2: That's the Christian gospel, and dispensationalism is contrary to this.
Speaker 2: Dispensationalists say, no, it's more important for us to support Israel,
Speaker 2: and that's ridiculous. That is vulgarity as opposed to what
Speaker 2: is holy and true and golden. And so this does
Speaker 2: not deserve to survive, and it's going to cause a
Speaker 2: lot of suffering to those that have so heavily invested
Speaker 2: in it. And we see, we have all these major
Speaker 2: institutions all over the place, and they have been perpetuating
Speaker 2: this belief, and they've been popularizing this belief. This is
Speaker 2: something that's even out in pop culture. Nicholas Cage was
Speaker 2: in a movie about this. It was one of those
Speaker 2: lesser known Nicholas Cage movies, but they actually got Nicholas
Speaker 2: Cage for that. The movie was called Left Behind, which
Speaker 2: is a very popular series of novels about this theology.
Speaker 2: And that is not what Christians have historically believed. And
Speaker 2: you don't have to look far outside of the United
Speaker 2: States to find that no one's heard about this stuff.
Speaker 2: This stuff is really weird. As ask Christians from the
Speaker 2: Middle East if they've heard about this stuff and they
Speaker 2: think it's crazy, they think that it is. It's parochial,
Speaker 2: right in the sense that it's isolated to a certain area.
Speaker 2: It's isolated to like the like anglophone Americans, and those
Speaker 2: are all all signs this is not the Catholic teaching.
Speaker 2: This is not what Christians have always believed in all times,
Speaker 2: in all places. So it does not deserve to survive.
Speaker 2: And it's done a lot of harm and it I
Speaker 2: think it will cause a lot of people to lose
Speaker 2: their faith in Christ such such as they profess it,
Speaker 2: because it has marred that teaching so badly. So I
Speaker 2: want to and I don't want to see that happen.
Speaker 2: You know. I'd prefer more people confessing than not, and
Speaker 2: I'd prefer a level of cultural Christianity. But like I said,
Speaker 2: it will refine people's teachings, and that is necessary and inevitable.
Speaker 2: It has to happen at some point.
Speaker 1: So Bagbee, we're have time. If people want to find
Speaker 1: more of your work, what's a good way for them
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 2: Well, I have my YouTube channel where you can find
Speaker 2: some of these recordings. We've mentioned that storage Bagbee on YouTube.
Speaker 2: I am also releasing a book. It's an old history
Speaker 2: book that I have edited and I'm re releasing. It's
Speaker 2: called The Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama by Walter Fleming.
Speaker 2: It has been delayed several times. I've had a lot
Speaker 2: of formatting problems. But my work ought to be done today.
Speaker 2: So it depends on if the publisher can get this
Speaker 2: approved for publication today. It might go online today. So
Speaker 2: we'll figure that out and I will certainly publicize its
Speaker 2: release once it's actually for sale. I expected we'll go
Speaker 2: for sale on Amazon very soon.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I will be sure to short of
Speaker 1: link that as well. If you guys want to support
Speaker 1: my show in this available on Apple Spot, YouTube, anywhere
Speaker 1: you want to listen to podcasts. If you want to
Speaker 1: support the show more directly, you can check out my
Speaker 1: fitness sponsor, Axios doing some good work really expanding the
Speaker 1: program there and again, Bagbe, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: your time. Thank you good to be here, and everyone
Speaker 1: at home remember keep your head up. Well, I can't
Speaker 1: last forever. Good night, all right, George Bagbe, Welcome back
Speaker 1: to the show. How are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing well. I've been driving very hard this holiday
Speaker 2: weekend and so I'm kind of recovering from that. But
Speaker 2: We've got a really good subject today and I've I've
Speaker 2: been really looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for those listening in the future, it is New
Speaker 1: Year's Day and both Bagbie and I are are somewhat
Speaker 1: the worse for where in each case though it's not
Speaker 1: because we were up late partying, but I'm stuck with
Speaker 1: this kind of eternal throat sickness, which you can probably hear.
Speaker 1: And obviously Bagbe drives a cab and turns out that
Speaker 1: New Year's is a pretty busy day for him. So anyway,
Speaker 1: we'll get into it. So you have recently republished a book,
Speaker 1: and that book is about our topic today, So do
Speaker 1: you want to first introduce our topic and then maybe
Speaker 1: the book that you've republished as well.
Speaker 2: Yes, the topic is the reconstruction of the United States
Speaker 2: that follows the War between the states the Civil War,
Speaker 2: and the book is The Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.
Speaker 2: This is one of many books published by the so
Speaker 2: called Dunning School of the Civil War historiography. They were
Speaker 2: all students of a certain professor at Columbia named William A. Dunning,
Speaker 2: and they all got very deep into the primary sources
Speaker 2: in their native states and wrote state specific histories of
Speaker 2: the reconstruction period. And these students, the most famous of them,
Speaker 2: went to the Southern States and did their work there,
Speaker 2: but there were northern state histories that came out of
Speaker 2: this school of historians as well. These were mostly published
Speaker 2: around the turn of the century, and they are rather inaccessible.
Speaker 2: They're extremely good quality because they are compendums of the
Speaker 2: sources of the times. They draw very heavily on these
Speaker 2: primary sources, and that's one of the reasons why they
Speaker 2: are very durable and valuable. But it's also a very controversial,
Speaker 2: very controversial period in American history, and the Dunning School
Speaker 2: has been purposefully marginalized because they take an older view.
Speaker 2: It used to be the establishment view of this period
Speaker 2: of American history, but it's been marginalized and deliberately excluded
Speaker 2: from the conversation about this period. What's really interesting about
Speaker 2: this at the moment as a contemporary concern is suddenly
Speaker 2: these reconstruction policies and laws are front page news all
Speaker 2: around the country, mostly because of controversy about the upcoming
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four presidential election. And these these laws, in
Speaker 2: particular the fourteenth Amendment, are being used to justify very
Speaker 2: radical policies in our own time. So it's a curious
Speaker 2: thing that this old conversation about what happened in American
Speaker 2: history and what justifies or or makes makes these things unjustifiable,
Speaker 2: that is now a topic of popular interest once again.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because the two other and I realized
Speaker 1: this may be seen as overly broad, but the two
Speaker 1: other major post war I guess kind of social planning
Speaker 1: operations that the Empire of Lies has embarked on. Well,
Speaker 1: obviously there's the denossification, right what we did to Europe,
Speaker 1: But the blueprints for that and what is sort of
Speaker 1: maybe going to come back after the next election, well
Speaker 1: that the blueprint of that is found in reconstruction. So
Speaker 1: let's start kind of immediately when you know, the hostilities
Speaker 1: end as far as the War between the Straits is
Speaker 1: how long does it take between that moment and the
Speaker 1: start of I guess what we would know is reconstruction. Actually,
Speaker 1: you know, before I get into that, do you want
Speaker 1: to maybe define what reconstruction is? Because I realize I
Speaker 1: have a more international audience than I I often say,
Speaker 1: and so there are perhaps some of us who don't
Speaker 1: necessarily know their America.
Speaker 2: Sure, yes, reconstruction refers to the period after the American
Speaker 2: Civil War. It's a period of military governments in the
Speaker 2: South of the imposition of martial law and political policy
Speaker 2: made by force of arms, not through normal means of
Speaker 2: consensus and political process, but through military governments and through
Speaker 2: the intimidation of soldiers in the Southern States. And it
Speaker 2: refers to this period of radical idealism that nominally motivated
Speaker 2: the Republican Party, which dominated the federal government after the war. This,
Speaker 2: of course, was Lincoln's party, and the Democrats were marginalized
Speaker 2: as the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion.
Speaker 1: At this time.
Speaker 2: These are the things that were associated with the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: This is back when the Democratic Party was much more
Speaker 2: interesting and fun than it is now. I really like
Speaker 2: the legacy of this particular political It was associated with
Speaker 2: the immigrant Catholics, with people that liked alcohol, so anti
Speaker 2: prohibition forces, and with the former Confederate States, thereby calling
Speaker 2: it the party of rum Romanism and rebellion. Sounds like
Speaker 2: a lot of fun to me. But they were marginalized
Speaker 2: during this time. Lots of Democratic voters, these are white
Speaker 2: ex confederates in the South were disenfranchised during this time
Speaker 2: very importantly, and this is the probably the number one
Speaker 2: emphasis in most of the history you'd read on the
Speaker 2: period today. The slaves were all legally freed by the
Speaker 2: thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This is the first of
Speaker 2: the reconstruction Amendments. That was the legal end of slavery
Speaker 2: in the United States, not the emancipated proclamation by the
Speaker 2: thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty five. In eighteen sixty six
Speaker 2: we see the fourteenth Amendment, which redefines citizenship and also
Speaker 2: excludes ex confederates from voting and holding office. And then
Speaker 2: finally you have the Fifteenth Amendment, the last of the
Speaker 2: Reconstruction Amendments, which guarantees voting rights to all American citizens,
Speaker 2: regardless of their former status of being slaves. So reconstruction
Speaker 2: is this time of the rebuilding of American American constitutional government.
Speaker 2: It's a reforming of Republican institutions, particularly in the South,
Speaker 2: Republican meaning representative government institution. And it's a period that
Speaker 2: was done by force. These reforms were done by force,
Speaker 2: not through consensus. The constitutions of all the Southern states
Speaker 2: were rewritten during this time. And it was also a
Speaker 2: time very famous for corruption in high places. Mark Twain
Speaker 2: famously referred to this period as the Gilded Age. So
Speaker 2: it looks really glittery on the outside, but on the
Speaker 2: inside it's worthless gilded. It's an age of corruption in
Speaker 2: high places. You have probably the most infamous American presidential regimes,
Speaker 2: like the US Grant regime, which sees the vice president
Speaker 2: arrested for corruption, the president's personal secretary and several cabinet
Speaker 2: members all indicted for corruption and the embezzlement of public funds.
Speaker 2: Even the word lobbyist first comes into use during this
Speaker 2: period because the Republican Republican regime in Washington, d c.
Speaker 2: Is handing out huge sums of money to special interest
Speaker 2: groups during this time. So the way that the United
Speaker 2: States government operates fundamentally transforms during this period, and that
Speaker 2: makes it of particular interest the civil rights aspect, the
Speaker 2: end of slavery, the radical sudden enfranchisement with no previous
Speaker 2: plan of all black Americans in the South, not in
Speaker 2: the North. We should specify these reforms that enfranchise black
Speaker 2: voters in the South do not initially affect northern states
Speaker 2: at all, not that that matters very much. There are
Speaker 2: very few black people living in the North at this time.
Speaker 2: The vast majority of them live.
Speaker 1: In the South.
Speaker 2: But that is a huge issue during this period, and
Speaker 2: that is usually what is focused on.
Speaker 1: So let's go through three constitutional amendments and contrast that
Speaker 1: to how American governance was handled before. Does that sound reasonable? Sure?
Speaker 2: And that's very topical for us right now, because the
Speaker 2: Fourteenth Amendment in particular is very emphasized in our discourse
Speaker 2: right now. So let me go back to an earlier
Speaker 2: question you had, just when did all this reconstruction begin.
Speaker 2: Historians start tracking the progress of reconstruction policies during the
Speaker 2: war itself. So while the South is being invaded in
Speaker 2: the course of the Civil War, military regimes are set
Speaker 2: up around the South and military governments are established. And
Speaker 2: Lincoln was always adamant that the Southern states had not
Speaker 2: left the Union. They remained in the Union, and they
Speaker 2: were commandeered by rebel factions that did not represent the
Speaker 2: states that they portended to represent. So Lincoln never recognized
Speaker 2: that the South had left the Union. He never recognized
Speaker 2: the legitimacy of the Confederate States or the Confederate Government,
Speaker 2: the Union of the Confederate States. He never recognized them
Speaker 2: as legitimate bodies. And he said that they were all
Speaker 2: in conspiracy, in rebellion against the federal government. So when
Speaker 2: the federal armies went into Southern states, they would set
Speaker 2: up rival Union governments when when they didn't just run
Speaker 2: things like a military camp. So this happened in several states,
Speaker 2: and this is this is an important feature to talk
Speaker 2: about the Reconstruction Amendments because it makes sense of several
Speaker 2: of them. In states where the federal government had a
Speaker 2: long standing occupation, states like Tennessee, which was invaded very early.
Speaker 2: In states like Louisiana, the Union army established rival state
Speaker 2: governments in those states, and those governments actually sent representatives
Speaker 2: to Congress, and these were all Republicans. The most famous
Speaker 2: instance of that is the future President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.
Speaker 2: He was a Democrat. He was a Southerner from the
Speaker 2: highlands of Tennessee. He was a Unionist. He had the
Speaker 2: distinction of being the only Southern Congressman that did not
Speaker 2: leave the capital when his states seceded from the Union.
Speaker 2: He did not recognize the right of secession, and so
Speaker 2: he stayed in the capitol and became a favorite of
Speaker 2: Abraham Lincoln because he was a loyal Southerner, loyal to
Speaker 2: the Union. So Abraham Lincoln rewarded him by making him
Speaker 2: vice president on his Republican ticket in eighteen sixty four
Speaker 2: when he ran for reelection. And this very ironically, after
Speaker 2: Lincoln is assassinated, makes Andrew Johnson President of the United States,
Speaker 2: which is the craziest thing. Following the Civil War. You
Speaker 2: have a Southern Democrat who is President of the United
Speaker 2: States immediately following the Civil War. It's the most unlikely accident.
Speaker 2: Not surprisingly, he does not get along with the radical
Speaker 2: Republicans and is impeached unsuccessfully. They do not remove him
Speaker 2: from office. He's acquitted by a single vote. But he's
Speaker 2: a very important example of these Union governments that were
Speaker 2: set up in these occupied states in the South. Well
Speaker 2: immediately after Lincoln's assassination. Andrew Johnson is president because he's
Speaker 2: Lincoln's second vice president. The process of renovating the Union
Speaker 2: at this point, following the Great American Civil War, where
Speaker 2: half of the country destroys the other half of the country,
Speaker 2: the big question of the time is how is the
Speaker 2: Union going to work at this point. Previously, the conservative
Speaker 2: position in Antebellum America, in pre war America was that
Speaker 2: the states had formed a consensus about what functions of
Speaker 2: government the federal government would have, what powers does the
Speaker 2: federal government have, and they wrote down and agreed upon
Speaker 2: this consensus, and that is what the Constitution is. So
Speaker 2: the Constitution is a long list of things the states
Speaker 2: agree the federal government can and cannot do. And after
Speaker 2: they wrote down the Constitution, or their representatives wrote it down,
Speaker 2: it went to the state governments for ratificate. And that's
Speaker 2: the story of all the states of the Union up
Speaker 2: until the Civil War. After the Civil War, we have
Speaker 2: this big problem because it's obvious that there are many
Speaker 2: more powers in that federal government than people had imagined before.
Speaker 2: The federal government has waged a war against the states
Speaker 2: in the name of union, and this was how Lincoln
Speaker 2: justified his military actions that began the war. Now, Lincoln
Speaker 2: added further justifications as the war progressed. Most famously, he
Speaker 2: said the war was going to end slavery, and that
Speaker 2: the war was justified because it would end slavery. He
Speaker 2: very famously alludes to this in the Gettysburg Address and
Speaker 2: then states it much more plainly in the second Inaugural Address.
Speaker 2: But if we read the first Inaugural Address, he is
Speaker 2: very careful to skirt the issue of slavery. He says
Speaker 2: that he isn't doing anything in regards to slavery and
Speaker 2: doesn't think that he has any right to do so.
Speaker 2: But by the time we get to April of eighteen
Speaker 2: sixty five, Lee surrenders at Appomatox Courthouse. The other Confederate
Speaker 2: armies are in a hopeless condition. They quickly surrender. The
Speaker 2: question is what sort of government does the United States
Speaker 2: have at this point? Andrew Johnson President Andrew Johnson is marginalized.
Speaker 2: He has his ideas about how to bring the Union
Speaker 2: together post war. Andrew Johnson seems to illustrate Abraham Lincoln's
Speaker 2: conciliatory ideas about restoring the Union. Andrew Johnson stays up
Speaker 2: all night long signing pardons for ex Confederates who write
Speaker 2: to him asking for the restoration of their citizenship rights.
Speaker 2: Andrew Johnson tells the ex Confederate states that all they
Speaker 2: need to do is send representatives back to Washington, d c.
Speaker 2: And they are restored to their status in the Union.
Speaker 2: But this runs into problems. Congress at this point is
Speaker 2: dominated by the Republican Party. The Southern States, the former
Speaker 2: Confederate States were the major Democratic stronghold in the South.
Speaker 2: They were the stronghold of the Democratic Party. When they
Speaker 2: left the Union, they withdrew their Congressional representatives. All except
Speaker 2: Andrew Johnson left. So Congress from the moment of the
Speaker 2: secession of the Southern States has been overwhelmingly dominated by
Speaker 2: Lincoln's Republican Party, and through the course of the war,
Speaker 2: this party becomes very radicalized and very antagonistic against the South,
Speaker 2: not surprisingly because it's a war, right, they feel very
Speaker 2: bitter towards the South, and their people are encouraging them
Speaker 2: in this. It is a reflection of popular sentiment. More
Speaker 2: or less Andrew Johnson's conciliatory attitude, just as Abraham Lincoln's
Speaker 2: conciliatory attitude towards the end of the war. Lincoln was
Speaker 2: famous for saying, with malice towards noun and charity for all,
Speaker 2: let us bind up the nation's wounds. He's known for
Speaker 2: saying these very nice and soothing things about the Union.
Speaker 2: Following the war. Andrew Johnson seems to be working that out,
Speaker 2: and that is very unpopular in Congress. So Congress does
Speaker 2: a couple of things here. Well, Congress starts doing a
Speaker 2: great number of things, but most importantly, they decide they
Speaker 2: are going to run the restoration of the Union out
Speaker 2: of Congress, and they are going to get around the
Speaker 2: president's conciliatory policies towards the South. The Republican leadership in
Speaker 2: Congress is very close with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton,
Speaker 2: who is Lincoln's Secretary of War, not surprisingly Lincoln's last
Speaker 2: and most effective secretary of war. He is a radical Republican,
Speaker 2: Edwin Stanton, and he starts disobeying the orders of President Johnson.
Speaker 2: President Johnson tells Edwin Stanton that Southerners are to hold elections,
Speaker 2: that these ex Confederates are allowed to reform their state
Speaker 2: governments to hold constitutional conventions. The idea is that these
Speaker 2: ex Confederate states need to repudiate their former Confederate Constitution
Speaker 2: and rejoin the Union. Ratify the Philadelphia Constitution once again,
Speaker 2: and rejoin the Union. Edwin Stanton is commanding the army,
Speaker 2: and he's sending out the orders to all the Southern generals,
Speaker 2: and he is actively subverting the political process in the
Speaker 2: Southern States at this point. So Andrew Johnson attempts to
Speaker 2: remove Edwin Stanton from office, and Edwin Stanton refuses to
Speaker 2: leave and is backed up by his allies in Congress.
Speaker 2: Then the president's enemies in the Republican Congress, they pass
Speaker 2: articles to impeach the president for attempting to remove a
Speaker 2: cabinet officer for attempting to remove Edwin Stanton from office. Now,
Speaker 2: that is a remarkable and crazy episode. Andrew Johnson was
Speaker 2: wanting to appoint ulysses As Grant as Secretary of War
Speaker 2: to replace Stanton. And Grant is the most popular man
Speaker 2: in America at this point, He's the victor of the
Speaker 2: army right. He couldn't have picked a more popular fellow
Speaker 2: to take this position. And yet Edwin Stanton barricaded himself
Speaker 2: in his office to resist removal and gets backed up
Speaker 2: by these really wild anti Southern Republicans in Congress. Congress
Speaker 2: then decides that they're going to impeach the president. They
Speaker 2: very very narrowly fail on that point, but then they
Speaker 2: start imposing very strict terms on the South, very punitive
Speaker 2: terms on the Southern state. Firstly, the Republicans turn away
Speaker 2: the representatives sent to Congress by the Southern States. Not surprisingly,
Speaker 2: these are people that were voted on by these ex
Speaker 2: Confederate Democrats in the South, and the Southerners vote Alexander
Speaker 2: Alexander Stevens to be the senator from Georgia for instance.
Speaker 2: Alexander Stevens was the former vice president of the Confederate
Speaker 2: States and a notable statesman from pre war Georgia. Well,
Speaker 2: he's the leader of these people. These people are voting
Speaker 2: for their wartime leaders to lead them after the war.
Speaker 2: They vote ex Confederate generals into Congress, and these men
Speaker 2: show up in Washington, d c. And are barred from
Speaker 2: entry into the capital by the Republicans. The Republicans in
Speaker 2: Congress declare that there are no legal governments in the
Speaker 2: Southern States, and they declare martial law throughout the South.
Speaker 2: And this is getting around the president's authority with the
Speaker 2: Secretary of War. The Secretary of War isn't answering to
Speaker 2: the president with all of this, He's answering to radical
Speaker 2: leaders in Congress. So this is not the way that
Speaker 2: the American government was designed to work, but this is
Speaker 2: how it is is working effectually during this time. Now,
Speaker 2: at the exact same time, taking the long way around
Speaker 2: to your original question, what about these reconstruction amendments. At
Speaker 2: the exact same time these things are going on in Washington,
Speaker 2: d C. We have these major constitutional questions, this big
Speaker 2: crisis is brewing. The Southern state governments are ratifying the
Speaker 2: thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution at this time. Now, the
Speaker 2: thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution is the amendment that formally
Speaker 2: abolishes the institution of slavery. Every Southern state abolishes the
Speaker 2: institution of slavery. There's one weird exception when it comes
Speaker 2: to the thirteenth Amendment. The state of Mississippi does not
Speaker 2: ratify the thirteenth Amendment, but they do write a new
Speaker 2: state constitution which abolishes slavery. So it's not as if
Speaker 2: they are trying desperately to hold on to slavery. At
Speaker 2: the end of the Civil War, it's just a different
Speaker 2: way of doing it, and they don't want to be
Speaker 2: strong armed into ratifying amendments to the Constitution down there
Speaker 2: in Mississippi, so they do it their own way. But
Speaker 2: every Southern state abolishes slavery, and this is through their
Speaker 2: representative governments. At the exact same time, the radicals in
Speaker 2: the Republican led Congress in DC say there are no
Speaker 2: legal governments in the South and that justifies their treatment
Speaker 2: as conquered territory to be administered by martial law. And
Speaker 2: this is one of the very many reasons why reconstruction
Speaker 2: is a maddening period to study. It is a very
Speaker 2: frustrating period. It is a very confusing period because legally
Speaker 2: this doesn't make sense. It's not a time that it's
Speaker 2: not a time where anyone can justify what's going on.
Speaker 2: No one can make sense of what's going on or
Speaker 2: how it's all, how it all makes sense constitutionally. Even
Speaker 2: even if you are trying to take the side of
Speaker 2: the radical Republicans, you have to admit that they are
Speaker 2: there going far beyond the law to do all.
Speaker 1: Of these things.
Speaker 2: So in the South, at this time, the slaves have
Speaker 2: been declared free. This is certainly the most important result
Speaker 2: of the American Civil War the end of slavery. I
Speaker 2: do not dispute this. This was a This was a
Speaker 2: huge social, economic, and political change in the United States.
Speaker 2: But there are a lot of other things going on
Speaker 2: at this time as well. Just to give you an example,
Speaker 2: a wartime example, but it still fits. One of the
Speaker 2: things that I'm doing right now is I'm giving Civil
Speaker 2: War tours in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Occasionally
Speaker 2: I have some people and I give them this tour.
Speaker 2: And one of the stories that I tell is how
Speaker 2: the Union army arrived in New Orleans and declared Confederate
Speaker 2: currency void. This shut down the banks in New Orleans.
Speaker 2: Everyone was using Confederate currency and this was declared not
Speaker 2: legal tender. When the Union arrives, then the Union publicizes
Speaker 2: that Congress has declared the confiscation of all rebel property.
Speaker 2: This is one of the things that the Republicans do
Speaker 2: when they take over Congress in eighteen sixty two. The
Speaker 2: Confiscation Act of eighteen sixty two declares anyone in arms
Speaker 2: against the United States Government has forfeited their property rights,
Speaker 2: and their property may be seized and auctioned and This
Speaker 2: is one of the original things that's used to justify
Speaker 2: the manumission of slaves. So people who own slaves who
Speaker 2: are in arms in the Confederate States have forfeited their
Speaker 2: property rights to their slaves. Some Union generals take that
Speaker 2: act to meanness and declare the emancipation of slaves in
Speaker 2: military districts based on this law. Down in New Orleans.
Speaker 2: What this meant was General Butler, the Union general in
Speaker 2: New Orleans, warns the people of New Orleans that they
Speaker 2: have to take oaths to be loyal to President Lincoln
Speaker 2: and to the Union, or the military authorities could seize
Speaker 2: everything that they own. And there are lines outside of
Speaker 2: the army headquarters in New Orleans for people to come
Speaker 2: in and take the oath with their hand on the
Speaker 2: Bible that they will be loyal to Lincoln and his government.
Speaker 2: Not surprisingly, the people with the most to lose, the wealthy,
Speaker 2: the merchant class, are the ones most tempted to go
Speaker 2: and take this oath to safeguard what they own. The
Speaker 2: women of the city, which are the majority of the
Speaker 2: people in the city at this time. You know, most
Speaker 2: of the able bodied men are off at war at
Speaker 2: this time. The women of the city come and be rate.
Speaker 2: The men that stand in line to take this oath,
Speaker 2: they call them cowards, and there's this very emotional exchange.
Speaker 2: It's this very sad thing to imagine. But one of
Speaker 2: the things that follows is that General Butler goes around
Speaker 2: New Orleans seizing the property of ex confederates. He sezes
Speaker 2: the property of Confederate generals, Confederate officers, people that he
Speaker 2: knows are in arms, and he can use newspapers as
Speaker 2: evidence for this that they are in command in posts
Speaker 2: outside of the city, and he starts seizing their property,
Speaker 2: and according to the military law, and according to the
Speaker 2: martial law, it is auctioned off. Now this presents a
Speaker 2: big problem because Confederate currency has been outlawed. So unless
Speaker 2: you have assigned loyalty oath which safeguards your property rights,
Speaker 2: and you have a lot of gold and silver, coin
Speaker 2: or or some other some other source of wealth that's
Speaker 2: that's liquid and exchangeable, you have no ability to participate
Speaker 2: in the auctions that follow from the seized property. So
Speaker 2: General Butler auctions off seized Confederate property around New Orleans,
Speaker 2: and he turns up to the auctions himself and wins
Speaker 2: a lot of these auctions and sends the movable property
Speaker 2: back to Boston, where he was from. And he leaves
Speaker 2: New Orleans after after a tenure of only nine months.
Speaker 2: General Butler leaves New Orleans a multimillionaire. And this is
Speaker 2: this is all arguably legal under martial law. After the
Speaker 2: end of the war. This is happening throughout the South,
Speaker 2: not just in in the great city of New Orleans.
Speaker 2: It's it's something that's happening everywhere. After the war, twenty
Speaker 2: five percent of the able bodied men of the South
Speaker 2: have died. A whole quarter of the military age male
Speaker 2: population is dead. Another quarter is wounded or maimed, lots
Speaker 2: of them with missing limbs. A whole twenty percent of
Speaker 2: the farms in the South in eighteen sixty five have
Speaker 2: been abandoned. And this is very surprising when we think
Speaker 2: of the death toll right and the proportion of men
Speaker 2: lost in battle. There simply aren't enough men around to
Speaker 2: save the farms, to do anything with them, to even
Speaker 2: make them liveable or habitable, and so they are abandoned.
Speaker 2: A huge proportion of the population is reduced to penury
Speaker 2: and even made into refugees dependent on friends and family
Speaker 2: elsewhere at the exact same time in eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: when federal authority is enforced throughout the South, the federal
Speaker 2: government imposes four years of back taxes on the South.
Speaker 2: So the Southerners said, well, we are at an independent country.
Speaker 2: We've seceded from the Union. You know, we aren't paying
Speaker 2: taxes to the federal government. When the federal government came back,
Speaker 2: they imposed punitive taxes and back taxes on all of
Speaker 2: the Southerners and told them to pay up. And when
Speaker 2: they couldn't pay, they seized their property. So a huge
Speaker 2: amount of property around the Southern states went to the
Speaker 2: auction block for back taxes. This caused property values to
Speaker 2: plummet throughout the South. In some states, this was particularly bad.
Speaker 2: In places like Mississippi, one fifth of the state was
Speaker 2: auctioned off for back taxes. A whole fifth of the
Speaker 2: state was put to auction because the people there could
Speaker 2: not pay the taxes. After the war, it's difficult to
Speaker 2: explain just how utterly destroyed the South was in the
Speaker 2: years after the war. I have a quote here to
Speaker 2: illustrate this. A Massachusetts journalist his name was Sidney Adams.
Speaker 2: He made a tour through Southern States in eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: and he said you can only get over the roads
Speaker 2: walled by desolation. He described Charleston, South Carolina, as a
Speaker 2: city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of widowed women,
Speaker 2: of rotting wharves, deserted warehouses, of wild gardens, of miles
Speaker 2: of grass grown streets. A British traveler who visited Tennessee
Speaker 2: wrote that the area consists, for the most part of
Speaker 2: plantations in a state of semi ruin. The trail of
Speaker 2: war is visible throughout the valley, in burnt up ginhouses,
Speaker 2: ruined bridges, mills and factories, and of large tracts of
Speaker 2: once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. One
Speaker 2: of the things that we should remember when we're talking
Speaker 2: about this period of reconstruction. It is a time that
Speaker 2: is cunningly labeled because we know that war is so destructive.
Speaker 2: But reconstruction is not the rebuilding of the United States.
Speaker 2: It is not the restoration of what was lost. It
Speaker 2: is not recompense or effort made to restore things that
Speaker 2: were destroyed. It was not the rebuilding of the country.
Speaker 2: Reconstruction was the rebuilding of the way our country's institutions worked.
Speaker 2: It was a radical tinkering with the fundamental laws of
Speaker 2: the country, and it was done. It was done by force,
Speaker 2: it was done by military government. Well, I've been talking
Speaker 2: here for a long time. I hope I haven't overworn myself.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. It's it's interesting you bring up
Speaker 1: that kind of the the fatal irony of that phreeze reconstruction,
Speaker 1: because you know, buried within this is one there. There's
Speaker 1: part of it that's just base looting, you know, and
Speaker 1: maybe we can get into, you know, the rise of
Speaker 1: the organization's like the plan why that that arose kind
Speaker 1: of in reaction to that. But there's another level of it, right,
Speaker 1: which is this idea that you see again in the
Speaker 1: Morgenthele plan, you know, or the Marshall Plan. You know,
Speaker 1: what is kind of teased in you know, their wildest
Speaker 1: dreams about is this idea that essentially they know better
Speaker 1: they can reconstruct, you know, certain ideas, certain proclivities out
Speaker 1: of people and society can be remade in their image.
Speaker 1: And to a certain degree they were successful, I would
Speaker 1: argue in the case of reconstruction, they were very very unsuccessful, right,
Speaker 1: It went poorly it was, it was ended early. But
Speaker 1: it is this this kind of like megomaniacal desire to
Speaker 1: remake other societies. Like say what you will. But there's
Speaker 1: something kind of honest about pre modern war. Right, it's
Speaker 1: either you know, kind of an internecine thing between you know,
Speaker 1: different factions, in which case it's a political struggle, or
Speaker 1: if it's a war between different peoples it was. It
Speaker 1: might not be pretty, it might not be nice, but
Speaker 1: it's understandable and kind of an animal level, right, Different
Speaker 1: packs of wolves fight, so Roman Carthage fights. But something
Speaker 1: like this, whereas there's this layer of social engineering, I
Speaker 1: just I find it very.
Speaker 2: Distasteful, absolutely, and that's a good transition to the so
Speaker 2: called civil rights aspect of this period. So as I've admitted,
Speaker 2: the end of slavery is the single most important result
Speaker 2: of the American Civil War, and the fact that it
Speaker 2: was done by violence and by force, not by political process,
Speaker 2: that this is a very important distinction. Every country in
Speaker 2: the world that abolished slavery did it through a political process.
Speaker 2: That means they talked about it, everyone's everyone's concerns were
Speaker 2: taken into account. There were compromises made to accommodate concerns.
Speaker 2: There was a plan. People were thinking about how this
Speaker 2: was going to play out, and it was executed through
Speaker 2: a political process according to that country's traditions. Whatever it was. Okay,
Speaker 2: this is how Turkey did it, this is how Brazil
Speaker 2: did it, This is how Great Britain did it. The
Speaker 2: United States was the only country in the world to
Speaker 2: abolish slavery. Perhaps I should say HATI abolished slavery by
Speaker 2: violence rather than by political process and consensus, and it
Speaker 2: was done without any consideration for the future. What was
Speaker 2: going to happen after that is a very important thing
Speaker 2: to remember about this process. So back to congressional reconstruction.
Speaker 2: I would I find myself talking about the state of
Speaker 2: the South after the war and kind of the practical
Speaker 2: results of the war. The fact that every bank failed,
Speaker 2: the fact that no one had any money at precisely
Speaker 2: the moment that the country became a free labor economy.
Speaker 2: The irony of this is overwhelming. Right, Everyone's supposed to
Speaker 2: have wages now and no one has any money, and
Speaker 2: no one can get any money, and the country has
Speaker 2: been decimated, and you know, a quarter of the of
Speaker 2: the white men are dead. Right, This is really really bad.
Speaker 2: And this, by the way, is one of the reasons
Speaker 2: why Northerners who came South with money at this time,
Speaker 2: the so called carpetbaggers, are an extremely important group of people.
Speaker 2: They had a political voice in a time when white
Speaker 2: Southerners were excluded from the political process. They had money
Speaker 2: when no one else had money. They were disproportionately important
Speaker 2: in every way. And if it had not been for
Speaker 2: the carpetbaggers, the so called carpetbaggers that came from the
Speaker 2: northern States into the South immediately after the war, the
Speaker 2: reconstruction period would have been far worse. I mean that
Speaker 2: there would have been terrible famine. Many people would have
Speaker 2: been dead from famine and suffering in other ways. The
Speaker 2: carpetbaggers served a very important economic role, even even if
Speaker 2: they're condemned for their political role, and we can understand
Speaker 2: why they were resented, but nevertheless, I think they're a
Speaker 2: very important group. I find myself talking about those things
Speaker 2: with more ease. But we do need to turn back
Speaker 2: to congressional reconstruction. At the same time, the Congress is
Speaker 2: insisting that no legal governments exist in the South, and
Speaker 2: they use this to declare martial law throughout the South,
Speaker 2: and the occupation of the South by the Union armies
Speaker 2: who police the voters, intimidate the voters, encourage the newly
Speaker 2: freed slaves to participate in politics, while they are excluding
Speaker 2: all of the former white citizens from the political process.
Speaker 2: This is very This is all a huge social experiment,
Speaker 2: and it has an effect of pitting the races against
Speaker 2: one another and breeding lots of resentments. We can understand
Speaker 2: how that would work. At the same time they're doing this,
Speaker 2: Congress insists that Southern legislatures, which they say have no authority,
Speaker 2: should rewrite their state constitutions with Republican committees in charge.
Speaker 2: The Democrats have practically been outlawed in the South. They
Speaker 2: have been so marginalized through disenfranchisement. In particular, even though
Speaker 2: the Democrats in the South, the Democratic Party leaders take
Speaker 2: special pains to appoint as their official leader the men
Speaker 2: of those states who were always against secession and on
Speaker 2: the sidelines of the Civil war. Naturally enough, we can
Speaker 2: say those were not their natural leaders, that those were
Speaker 2: not the people they wanted in charge of their institutions.
Speaker 2: They were just the only men around who stood any
Speaker 2: chance to make an argument to the Radical Republican Congress
Speaker 2: that the Democrat the Democratic Party of the Southern States
Speaker 2: was at all legitimate to be participating in politics at all.
Speaker 2: Even though they did those things, they were still being excluded.
Speaker 2: So the radical Republicans say that all the Southern states
Speaker 2: have to rewrite their constitution. This happens in places like
Speaker 2: South Carolina and Alabama, for instance. This happens with committees
Speaker 2: of Republican politicians who come from the North, or are
Speaker 2: collaborator Southerners who declare for the Republican Party, or they
Speaker 2: are newly enfranchised blacks from that state, or blacks that
Speaker 2: come from elsewhere in the country, and they are put
Speaker 2: in charge of rewriting those state constitutions. The Democratic committees
Speaker 2: in those states file complaints to Congress saying this is
Speaker 2: very lopsided, this is very unfair. You have taken a
Speaker 2: very small minority of our population. If you think back
Speaker 2: just a few years, in Lincoln's original election in eighteen sixty,
Speaker 2: there was no Republican Party in the Southern States. Abraham
Speaker 2: Lincoln did not receive a single vote in the states
Speaker 2: that joined the Confederate States. It wasn't as if Lincoln
Speaker 2: was an unpopular candidate by our standards in American history.
Speaker 2: There was no organization for the Republican Party in those states,
Speaker 2: and he did not receive a single vote in those states.
Speaker 2: He was seen as such an alien candidate, so far
Speaker 2: removed from the concerns of those voters. But now that
Speaker 2: political party is reforming the basic political institutions of these
Speaker 2: states for their own benefit. The radical Republicans in Congress
Speaker 2: then pass on to the Southern States. At the same
Speaker 2: time they say, is there are no legal institutions in
Speaker 2: these states, they hand them an amendment to the Constitution.
Speaker 2: They hand them the famous fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
Speaker 2: with a threat Congress. The Republicans in Congress tell the
Speaker 2: Southern states in eighteen sixty six, ratify the fourteenth Amendment
Speaker 2: or you will have no representation in Congress. And a
Speaker 2: number of Southern states try to hold out on this.
Speaker 2: Even with a lot of Republicans in charge in these
Speaker 2: Southern states, several of these states decide they are going
Speaker 2: to withhold consideration of the fourteenth Amendment because the way
Speaker 2: that it is forced on them with a Blackmaile threat,
Speaker 2: we will not give you, we will not permit you
Speaker 2: to have Republican institutions, representative government, not not even a
Speaker 2: shadow of it. With all the disenfranchisement that's gone on
Speaker 2: in the enfranchisement that has gone on in these states
Speaker 2: in this short period of time, we won't let you
Speaker 2: have it unless you ratify a constitutional amendment. It makes
Speaker 2: no sense. Are they part of the Union or did
Speaker 2: they actually leave the Union? Lincoln said they never left
Speaker 2: the union. President Johnson said, they never left the Union.
Speaker 2: They just need to send representation back to Congress, and
Speaker 2: they've been restored as states in the Union. The radical
Speaker 2: Republicans forwarded a theory to justify their behavior that when
Speaker 2: the states seceded from the Union, they committed political suicide
Speaker 2: and ceased to exist as bodies, as legal bodies, and
Speaker 2: this was their justification to treat the Southern States as
Speaker 2: conquered territory, which was basically what they were. They declared
Speaker 2: them military districts during this time. Yet at the same
Speaker 2: time they're demanding that they ratify amendments to the Constitution.
Speaker 2: The only bodies that can ratify amendments to the Constitution
Speaker 2: are states of the Union. So they're trying to have
Speaker 2: it both ways. The government of Florida in eighteen sixty six,
Speaker 2: wrote Let's see a resolution of the Florida House of Representatives.
Speaker 2: They said, beyond the postal service, our people derive no
Speaker 2: benefit from our existence as a state of the Union.
Speaker 2: We are denied representation even when we elect a man
Speaker 2: who never sympathized with the Confederacy's rebellion. We are at
Speaker 2: the same time subject to the most onerous taxation, and
Speaker 2: our civil law is enforced only when it meets the
Speaker 2: approval of the local military commanders. Now that was their
Speaker 2: reason to not consider the fourteenth Amendment. But Congress. Congress
Speaker 2: decided to drag this out as long as it took
Speaker 2: to ratify the fourteenth Amendment, and eventually the Southern States did.
Speaker 2: And this is part of the process of reconstruction. It
Speaker 2: was a process of threats, of blackmail, of cynical looting,
Speaker 2: of the enfranchisement of certain populations, not the Indians, by
Speaker 2: the way, the fourteenth Amendment deliberately excludes the Indians from citizenship.
Speaker 2: That comes later, all right, But enfranchising the black population
Speaker 2: to make them a loyal block of the Republican Party
Speaker 2: of Lincoln's party, and to make the Republican Party the
Speaker 2: dominant party of the United States in perpetuity. This was
Speaker 2: what the Republican leadership in Washington, d C. Openly avowed
Speaker 2: as their goals in this time. They also some of
Speaker 2: the more extreme members, people like Benjamin Butler, the former
Speaker 2: Union commander in New Orleans now United States Senator in
Speaker 2: Massachusetts or from Massachusetts. Benjamin Butler is one of Andrew
Speaker 2: Johnson's greatest enemies in the impeachment. UH. Benjamin Butler is
Speaker 2: is one of the leaders of the radical Republicans in
Speaker 2: Congress during reconstruction. Other others like Thatteus Stevens of Massachusetts,
Speaker 2: who has a big war, a big role prior to
Speaker 2: the Civil War, very famously beaten over the head by
Speaker 2: South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks for insulting family members in
Speaker 2: UH in speeches on on the floor of Congress.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: Thatteus Stevens is another one of these very harsh uh
Speaker 2: antagonists of the Southern people. And UH, let's see, I
Speaker 2: might be getting this wrong. Did I say Thatteus Stevens
Speaker 2: I believe, yes, Okay, Thatteus. I'm getting this wrong. Thadeus
Speaker 2: Stevens was a congressman from Pennsylvania. I'm getting that wrong.
Speaker 2: Whom I think up.
Speaker 1: I'm the wrong person to ask. We're entirely too far
Speaker 1: in the leads for my knowledge of America.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, sorry, I'm I'm I'm forgetting this. The senator
Speaker 2: from Massachusetts, he's just slipped my mind Thatteus Stevens. Let
Speaker 2: me let me refresh my my statement on that Thatteus
Speaker 2: Stevens said that he wanted to see the South depopulated
Speaker 2: of white Southerners. He wanted to force them to immigrate.
Speaker 2: So you have from from people like Thatteus Stevens, who
Speaker 2: is a who is a very peculiar character, evidently had
Speaker 2: a long affair with a a black woman.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: Really peculiar fellow, very spiteful fellow.
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't.
Speaker 2: Want to do him.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't want to malign him unfairly. But he had
Speaker 2: a reputation, even among his admirers, of being very bitter
Speaker 2: towards his enemy. Okay, but Thatteus Stevens saying saying that
Speaker 2: the Southern States should be ethnically cleansed and the property
Speaker 2: there redistributed to loyal freedmen. That those are the newly
Speaker 2: enfranchised black Americans and Union soldiers as as war booty,
Speaker 2: even taking taking like a Roman view of the Southern
Speaker 2: States as as conquered provinces uh with with all their
Speaker 2: wealth to be redistributed as plunder. This this happened on
Speaker 2: a certain scale, but it was not That was not
Speaker 2: actually how reconstruction took place. I should say Thadeus Stevens
Speaker 2: did not get everything that he wanted. But these these
Speaker 2: radicals in Congress, they force the Fourteenth Amendment on the
Speaker 2: Southern States. In the Southern legislatures, in desperation, eventually ratify
Speaker 2: the most controversial amendment to the Constitution, the fourteenth Amendment.
Speaker 2: So let's get in. Let's get into the details of
Speaker 2: the fourteenth Amendment. The first, it's the longest amendment in
Speaker 2: the Constitution, I should say first, it is the most complicated.
Speaker 2: It has several sections to it, and it has been
Speaker 2: used to justify a great many of the most controversial
Speaker 2: things in constitutional law in the United States. It has
Speaker 2: been used to justify the elimination of laws regulating abortion
Speaker 2: in the States. Row versus Wade used the Fourteenth Amendment
Speaker 2: to justify striking down all laws prohibiting abortion in the
Speaker 2: United States. It was used to justify Lawrence versus Texas,
Speaker 2: which struck down all laws prohibiting or criminalizing sodomy in
Speaker 2: the United States. It was used to justify Obergfel versus Hodges,
Speaker 2: which struck down all state laws regulating the definition of marriage,
Speaker 2: proclaiming marriage to be a institution between a man and
Speaker 2: a woman. It's been used for all of these controversial
Speaker 2: Supreme Court cases, these major culture war cases, if you will,
Speaker 2: because the first part of the Fourteenth Amendment limits what
Speaker 2: state governments can do. It gives the federal government power
Speaker 2: to strike down things that state governments have done in law.
Speaker 2: And if you note, the Supreme Court cases that I
Speaker 2: mentioned all have to do with striking down state laws.
Speaker 2: It is the Supreme Court striking down state laws. What
Speaker 2: we call the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, the
Speaker 2: application of constitutional limitations to state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment
Speaker 2: applies federal power to state governments. Now, if you recall
Speaker 2: towards the beginning of our investigation, I said that in
Speaker 2: Annabellum America, the conservative view, if you will, was that
Speaker 2: the states came together to decide what powers their common
Speaker 2: federal government might have over them, what powers they would
Speaker 2: cede to a general government, and those powers were all
Speaker 2: listed in the Constitution, the Philadelphia Constitution. The Constitution then
Speaker 2: went back to the state legislatures for ratification, and there
Speaker 2: was debate about that. The Constitution was then further defined
Speaker 2: by the Bill of Rights, which followed the ratification of
Speaker 2: the Constitution. And the Bill of Rights are another long
Speaker 2: list of things the federal government can and cannot do,
Speaker 2: summarized with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. The tenth Amendment,
Speaker 2: the last of the Bill of Rights, says that anything
Speaker 2: not explicitly listed in the Constitution is reserved to the states.
Speaker 2: The fourteenth Amendment turns this on its head, and this
Speaker 2: is one of the reasons why the fourteenth Amendment is
Speaker 2: such a consequential and important amendment. The fourteenth Amendment says
Speaker 2: the federal government regulates what state governments can do. The
Speaker 2: tenth Amendment says the exact opposite. Now, the Tenth Amendment
Speaker 2: was never repealed, but the South's defeat in eighteen sixty
Speaker 2: five has sealed the fate and interpretation of the tenth Amendment.
Speaker 2: People still talk about the tenth Amendment these days, but
Speaker 2: I think they forget about eighteen sixty five when they
Speaker 2: talk about it. I think the question was settled back then.
Speaker 2: Doesn't mean that I'm happy about that or anything, Okay.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying that that's the way it has worked out, okay,
Speaker 2: And that doesn't mean it's the end of the story.
Speaker 2: We still have these things in our law, and we
Speaker 2: still think about them and care about them, and maybe
Speaker 2: we'll do something with them. I'm not here to say that,
Speaker 2: but okay. So that's what the Fourteenth Amendment did it.
Speaker 2: It says no State shall make or enforce any law
Speaker 2: that shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of
Speaker 2: the United States. Nor shall any State deprive any person
Speaker 2: of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,
Speaker 2: nor deny any person within his jurisdiction the equal protection
Speaker 2: of law.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: That is the really famous statement in Section one of
Speaker 2: the Fourteenth Amendment that applies federal laws to the states.
Speaker 1: All Right.
Speaker 2: The Bill of Rights has the exact opposite formulation. The
Speaker 2: Bill of Rights very famously says Congress shall make no
Speaker 2: law a bridging freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom
Speaker 2: to press, so on, and so forth.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: The Fourteenth Amendment says no state shall make or enforce
Speaker 2: any law, and the federal government decides which laws. That's
Speaker 2: why that has become so consequential. The Supreme Court decides
Speaker 2: what due process means. The states don't have any say
Speaker 2: in that. That's why state laws get shot down by
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: Is this really the moment in which the kind of
Speaker 1: true final seat of power in American governance becomes the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court? Or is that going on before?
Speaker 2: There was a lot of argument about that. Before, before
Speaker 2: the Fourteenth Amendment, state governments would defy the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2: One funny instance of that, there was a Supreme Court
Speaker 2: case that said the Bank of the United States had
Speaker 2: the ability to operate in any state, and states could
Speaker 2: not say no to the Bank of the United States.
Speaker 2: It was McCulla versus Maryland. This is a very early
Speaker 2: Supreme Court case that federal law trump's state law. All right,
Speaker 2: it's a very important early Supreme Court case, McCulla versus Maryland.
Speaker 1: There was a law.
Speaker 2: Passed by the state of Ohio. I like these northern
Speaker 2: states that stand out in constitutional history, because I love
Speaker 2: to point out it's not just southern states that are
Speaker 2: always defying the federal government on this stuff. Northern States
Speaker 2: did it too. It was an American thing. We used
Speaker 2: to have more in common. On that, the State of
Speaker 2: Ohio passed a law taxing the Bank of the United States.
Speaker 2: This was precisely the issue that was at stake in
Speaker 2: McCulla versus Maryland. The State of Maryland had passed attacks
Speaker 2: against the federal corporation, the Bank of the United States.
Speaker 2: The idea back then was the federal government did not
Speaker 2: have the constitutional authority to set up corporations. Right, It
Speaker 2: shows a difference between our world and theirs. We kind
Speaker 2: of take corporations for granted. We can we can hardly
Speaker 2: imagine our lives without these huge federally chartered corporations everywhere,
Speaker 2: all protected by the Bill of Rights. Remember Mitt Romney,
Speaker 2: corporations are people, my friend. We can hardly imagine our
Speaker 2: world without that. But back then, states actually tried to
Speaker 2: keep them out. They didn't want wealth and power concentrated
Speaker 2: in New York City or whatever. So Maryland attacked the
Speaker 2: Bank of the United States and that was declared void
Speaker 2: by the Supreme Court in McCullough versus Maryland. Well, later on,
Speaker 2: the state of Ohio decided they would tax the Bank
Speaker 2: of the United States.
Speaker 1: In Ohio.
Speaker 2: And so they sent the tax collectors down to the
Speaker 2: Bank of the United States branch and presented the bill.
Speaker 2: And the Bank of the United States, you know, filled
Speaker 2: with a bunch of smug federal people. They're like, uh oh,
Speaker 2: you know. The Supreme Court and the authorities of Ohio
Speaker 2: sent down safecrackers and they busted open the bank vaults
Speaker 2: in the Bank of the United States and cleared it
Speaker 2: out as taxes, and the thing shut down. And it
Speaker 2: reminds you of the famous line from President Andrew Jackson.
Speaker 2: The Supreme Court has made its ruling. Let's see them
Speaker 2: enforce it, all right. Just because the Supreme Court made
Speaker 2: a ruling and it is seen as constitutional law, did
Speaker 2: not mean that the states would obey it. After the
Speaker 2: Civil War, no one was under any illusions that the
Speaker 2: states could say no to the federal government anymore. And
Speaker 2: that's a very significant change. So that is one of
Speaker 2: the main things about the fourteenth Amendment. But let me
Speaker 2: talk about the other ones. I'm not meaning to keep
Speaker 2: you here all day with all this talk about the
Speaker 2: legalities of reconstruction. But the other element in Section one
Speaker 2: of the fourteenth Amendment is extremely consequential. It redefines citizenship. Now,
Speaker 2: it is very important to note that the Southern States
Speaker 2: were strong armed, blackmailed, had to sit under a martial
Speaker 2: law through a very oppressive regime for years in order
Speaker 2: to redefine what Americans understood to be citizenship. Previous to
Speaker 2: the Civil War, every state separately regulated who was eligible
Speaker 2: for the suffrage. This is a very important point. Every
Speaker 2: state had a different law about who could vote, and
Speaker 2: that was because every state was seen to have publican
Speaker 2: institutions of its own that it was responsible for. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: the Fourteenth Amendment gives us a federal definition of citizenship,
Speaker 2: and this is a very important one. This is a
Speaker 2: this is a radical one. This has a lot to
Speaker 2: do with how American identity has developed over time. We
Speaker 2: see this this uh, this law influences American identity in
Speaker 2: major ways. We we are perhaps much more aware of
Speaker 2: that with our immigration questions today. The first part of
Speaker 2: the fourteenth Amendment says, all persons born or naturalized in
Speaker 2: the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof our citizens,
Speaker 2: all you need to do to be a citizen is
Speaker 2: to be born here.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's interesting, and this is something that I
Speaker 1: don't want to fall into this trap, you know, of
Speaker 1: merely saying, you know, oh, the the left doesn't respect
Speaker 1: the textual basis of the law, because it's obviously true.
Speaker 1: You know, this has been true arguably, you know, ever
Speaker 1: since the set of amendments, even before then. But if
Speaker 1: you look at, you know, the construction of the fourteenth Amendment,
Speaker 1: it is so clearly not talking about an infinite number
Speaker 1: of Central and South Americans. You know it was it
Speaker 1: was written with regards to slaves. And I mean, I
Speaker 1: can dislike the original interpretation of the fourteenth Amendment, but
Speaker 1: it's very clearly was not designed for its current application.
Speaker 1: I guess indeed has this has huge ramifications, of course,
Speaker 1: and we can never get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: But Section two of the fourteenth Amendment, this, this is
Speaker 1: a very long amendment, has to do with changing the
Speaker 1: way that representation in Congress is apportioned. You you may
Speaker 1: remember from Civics or if you've ever taken or if
Speaker 1: you've ever read the Constitution itself. The Constitution is very
Speaker 1: famous for the three fifths clause, which has to do
Speaker 1: with the apportionment of representation in Congress based on population.
Speaker 1: The three fifths clause refers to slaves counted for purposes
Speaker 1: of representation. Because they were not citizens, they were only
Speaker 1: counted as three fifths. This way, the South had a
Speaker 1: measure of additional representation based on its slave population. The
Speaker 1: argument was, of course, that the well being of the
Speaker 1: slave population was represented in congressman, just as a father
Speaker 1: would represent the interests of his wife and children. All right,
Speaker 1: so it's we could call it a patriarchal or feudalistic
Speaker 1: justification in a representative mode. This is of course, before
Speaker 1: women's suffrage, and men were seen as representing the interests
Speaker 1: of their womenfolk in representative institutions, and women were seen
Speaker 1: as non political members of society, that they did not
Speaker 1: have a public role in making law or executing law.
Speaker 1: And this is actually a very profound point. We know
Speaker 1: that this is mocked, dismissed. We are so used to
Speaker 1: the mockery and cynical takes about the exclusion of women.
Speaker 1: For instance, we tend to mouth them ourselves, or even
Speaker 1: to fall into patterns of thought when we think about this,
Speaker 1: think about it a different way, if you will. The
Speaker 1: idea was that God has divided humanity into at least
Speaker 1: two groups, men and women, and women have a special
Speaker 1: role in society to foster and nurture, whereas men have
Speaker 1: a special duty and burden in society to deal out
Speaker 1: legitimate violence when necessary. All right, men go to war,
Speaker 1: women stay home. Women are not supposed to shed blood.
Speaker 1: Women are not supposed to bear arms. All right.
Speaker 2: Now, it's not that they can't in extremists right self
Speaker 2: defense or something like that. But the idea is that
Speaker 2: this is why women do not make laws. This is
Speaker 2: why women do not execute. Women do not have blood
Speaker 2: on their hands. Women bring life into the world. They
Speaker 2: are the only members of society that can do that.
Speaker 2: And that's a different and important way of looking at it. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's the way they looked at it. But they also said, well, obviously,
Speaker 2: slaves don't take part in politics. Politics involves the dealing
Speaker 2: out of legitimate violence, among other things. Slaves are just
Speaker 2: not a part of this. Slaves do not bear arms.
Speaker 2: Slaves are enthralled to their masters, and their masters look
Speaker 2: over them.
Speaker 1: So the.
Speaker 2: Three fifths clause in the Constitution deals out representative the
Speaker 2: representative apportionment of the states based on the slave population.
Speaker 2: The second part of the Fourteenth Amendment undoes that. Okay,
Speaker 2: because now the slaves are all counted as freemen. They
Speaker 2: are now citizens because of birthright citizenship in the first section.
Speaker 2: All right, So Section three. No person shall be a
Speaker 2: senator or representative in Congress, or elector of President and
Speaker 2: Vice President, or hold any office civil or military under
Speaker 2: the United States or under any State, who, having previously
Speaker 2: taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as
Speaker 2: an officer of the United States, or as any member
Speaker 2: of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial
Speaker 2: officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the
Speaker 2: United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against
Speaker 2: the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
Speaker 2: But Congress may vote of two thirds of each House
Speaker 2: to remove such disability.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: This is specifically to disenfranchise ex Confederates. If you can
Speaker 2: prove any of these people have anyone that has held office,
Speaker 2: anyone related to the pre war government that supported the
Speaker 2: Confederates in any way, if they've given aid or comfort. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's a very low bar to disenfranchise. This is how
Speaker 2: the radical Republicans in Congress were going to make sure
Speaker 2: they were not going to be looking across the aisle
Speaker 2: at any of their former enemies from the Civil War.
Speaker 2: And this disenfranchise is a This disenfranchise is the leadership
Speaker 2: class of the South. Okay, the leadership class of the
Speaker 2: South participated in the war. This is this is a
Speaker 2: very consequential thing. And by the way, this is the
Speaker 2: justification for some of the Shenanigans who are seeing today,
Speaker 2: which I don't mean to get into right now, but
Speaker 2: this is what the fourteenth Amendment was written for. It
Speaker 2: was written to disenfranchise an entire class of people, and
Speaker 2: it was forced into law through these extreme malevolent ways,
Speaker 2: all right, by by garrisoning black conscripts in Southern states
Speaker 2: to intimidate the population.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: Section four, we're getting to the entire The validity of
Speaker 2: the public debt of the United States, authorized by law,
Speaker 2: including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for
Speaker 2: services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: This is because there were there were plenty of people
Speaker 2: right after the war saying, well, we've just borrowed an
Speaker 2: incredible amount of money. They issued paper currency, which acted
Speaker 2: like treasury bonds. Okay, the paper currency, every single item
Speaker 2: of paper currency, every every artifact of paper currency. The
Speaker 2: the green backs issued by Lincoln's government, the first green
Speaker 2: paper money that we had in the United States. By
Speaker 2: the way, it was all supposed to be redeemed by
Speaker 2: the by the Treasury with lawful money, and lawful money,
Speaker 2: according to the Constitution, is gold and silver coin.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: So the green backs were a temporary paper currency, and
Speaker 2: there were there there was a big controversy during reconstruction
Speaker 2: about repudiating the green backs. Let's just not redeem this stuff.
Speaker 2: Let's just make it permanent paper currency or do something else.
Speaker 2: Let's let's avoid the responsibility of redeeming the stuff.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So the fourteenth Mindment says, no, we're definitely definitely redeeming
Speaker 2: this stuff, and we're guarantee that everyone that was rewarded
Speaker 2: in war through payment in the greenbacks these certificates of
Speaker 2: future payment, they are definitely going to get their money
Speaker 2: out of the system, and no one is going to
Speaker 2: argue about this anymore. The United States will pay its debts.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: So the fourteenth Amendment, and this is something that comes
Speaker 2: up in conversation every time the government gets shut down. Okay, again,
Speaker 2: the fourteenth Amendment is brought up and says, well, it's
Speaker 2: the law. The government has to pay its debts. It's
Speaker 2: part of the fundamental law. It's part of constitutional law
Speaker 2: that the federal government has to pay its debts. So
Speaker 2: when we have a budget crisis and the US government
Speaker 2: is deciding which bills it can afford to pay, it's
Speaker 2: definitely going to pay the interest on the national debt.
Speaker 2: It at least constitutionally, unless it violates the constitution, it
Speaker 2: has to pay the interest on the debt. But the
Speaker 2: section goes on it says, neither the United States nor
Speaker 2: any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation
Speaker 2: incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States,
Speaker 2: or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave.
Speaker 2: But all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held
Speaker 2: illegal and void. All right, So, finally, the United States
Speaker 2: government will not pay any compensation for the end of
Speaker 2: slavery and the end. No one is going to be
Speaker 2: paid for their confederate bonds, no one will be compensated
Speaker 2: for Confederate currency. All of that is written off, no
Speaker 2: debate anymore. So it shuts down these big questions during reconstruction.
Speaker 2: But even though even though this is very constant quinchal
Speaker 2: in that it destroys an incredible amount of wealth in
Speaker 2: the South through the stroke of a pen, it's still
Speaker 2: brought up in conversation today when it comes to the
Speaker 2: national debt. Lastly, in an conclusion section five the Fourteenth Amendment,
Speaker 2: Congress shall have the power to enforce or appropriate legislation
Speaker 2: the provisions of this article all right into the fourteenth Amendment.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that we are at time it might
Speaker 1: be a good idea to come back if we want
Speaker 1: to discuss kind of the fifteenth Amendment and maybe some
Speaker 1: other parts of reconstruction, because there's some things that I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring up, and I guess this is just
Speaker 1: a deep topic. But as we've said before, you know,
Speaker 1: you have a book on the topic that will be linked.
Speaker 1: I've received my copy. I have not gone through it
Speaker 1: yet because there's a lot in there. You know, it's
Speaker 1: incredibly dense, and I got it just a few days ago.
Speaker 1: But if people want to find more of you and
Speaker 1: more of your work, what's a good way for them
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, I'm so excited about the the publication of
Speaker 2: this book I've been working on this book to bring
Speaker 2: it back into print for a long time, and I'm
Speaker 2: working on other projects there as well. The book is
Speaker 2: the Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. It's by Walter
Speaker 2: Lynwood Fleming and it's one of these state specific histories
Speaker 2: of reconstruction and I've brought back into print to make
Speaker 2: it accessible again. You can find it on Barnesennoble dot com.
Speaker 2: Perhaps we can link it in the show notes there.
Speaker 2: I'll make sure that you have that information. You can
Speaker 2: find more information about my work. I'm newly on Twitter.
Speaker 2: I've never been on Twitter before, but i am now
Speaker 2: kind of to promote my book. I'm at Tallman Books
Speaker 2: on Twitter, and I've got a YouTube channel as well.
Speaker 2: Look up George Bagbee on YouTube and you can find
Speaker 2: some of my recording there. I record essays things that
Speaker 2: interest me. I'm recording a couple of books there right now.
Speaker 2: I'm recording some C. S. Lewis and some GK. Chesterton
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 1: Well, great, I'm looking forward to that. I've been listening
Speaker 1: to a lot of your backlog over the holidays. I
Speaker 1: kind of lost track of it, so I'll be sure
Speaker 1: to catch those when they drop. As far as my stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, you guys can find me on any podcasterer
Speaker 1: that's Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you like watching podcasts. And
Speaker 1: also I've been putting out a lot more on substack,
Speaker 1: so you can find the Jay Burton Show on substack
Speaker 1: as well. I'll be on Urn's show on Wednesday. That
Speaker 1: will be third I believe to discuss an article I've written,
Speaker 1: So if you want to get a look at it
Speaker 1: before I discuss it live or see some other stuff
Speaker 1: I posted, that's a good way to do that. If
Speaker 1: you want to support us directly, the best way to
Speaker 1: do it is Axios Remote Fitness and Coaching. A couple
Speaker 1: of guys in my community have launched the Fat Bastard Challenge,
Speaker 1: which is free. It's not something I even came up with. Scratchy,
Speaker 1: who's been on here a couple of times, did which
Speaker 1: essentially a weight loss program for the first quarter of
Speaker 1: the year. I think it ends sometime in March. Heroic
Speaker 1: Whale and Arthur Dane, who both had been on the
Speaker 1: show before, are acting as judges. So I'll include a
Speaker 1: link to that. If you want to get in on
Speaker 1: the action and just do something. It's just accountability. There's
Speaker 1: no sales or anything to it, but you should do
Speaker 1: that as well. And again, Bagbee, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on.
Speaker 2: It's my pleasure and I look forward to doing more
Speaker 2: on Reconstruction with you in the future.
Speaker 1: Definitely. And everyone at home, keep your head up. The
Speaker 1: life can't last forever. Good Night,