Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Today at American Glory, we're answering a vital question. Was America founded as a Christian nation? And how does national inception form national revival? In my weekly audit, we're going to be discussing one of Charlie Kirk's best takes and why Christian monarchy is the only form of government supported by scripture. All that and more coming up right now.

>> [music] >> Welcome to American Glory. This is season 2 on American Christianity. I'm your host Dale Partridge. This is the first episode in this season and it's titled Colonial America was more Christian than you've ever been told. Now, if you didn't know, American Glory is both a podcast and a video show and if you want to listen, you can listen on the NX R podcast feed or from my personal podcast feed, just search Dale Partridge's podcast on Google and you're going to find me on Spotify or Apple podcast or anywhere else that you can listen to different podcasts. Now, if

you want to watch the video, which I recommend because it comes with all these helpful slides and again, it's like a documentary style that we're trying to add on to this season, um you can watch it on my YouTube channel at Dale Partridge TV. Now, this season, I'll be covering eight new topics around American Christianity. Now, in addition to today's episode, I'll be discussing and I'm going to list these out, the curse of Ham and the historic Christian view of race in America. The next episode will be race and

slavery in Christian America, what they got right and wrong. Dispensationalism, the satanic lie that ruined American Christianity. Uh the next episode will be how Christian Zionism strangled the American spirit. Then I'm going to move into the feminization of the church and how patriarchy is our only hope. And then I'm going to be talking about two powerful episodes. One will be you've been lied to, Jesus isn't coming back soon, and that's a good thing.

And the last episode of the season will be the case or the Christian case for ethno-nationalism and why you're not allowed to believe it. So, if you're new to Christianity, whether you're Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, and have maybe you've never been deeply discipled in the foundations of biblical theology, maybe you struggle to see how theology ought to shape culture and law and politics. If that's the case, my hope is that this season will establish that for you.

And I want to introduce you to the robust, confident, civilizational building Christianity that wants to find the American people. I also want to introduce you to the theological errors and the Christian cowardice that recently has replaced it. So, this season is about tracing how our rich Christian inheritance was gradually surrendered, not through some like radical rebellion, but through small compromises over long periods of time, through these

theological retreats, and and what I would say is the abandonment of hard truths our forefathers once held without hesitation. Now, the point I'm trying to make, ultimately, is that the decline of America was a combination of both politics and the pulpit. And so, my goal is not to simply look backward at some sort of spiritual nostalgia. It's to recover the theological convictions that were

lost. And we're living in an age of what I call like an age of retrieval or recovery. And that's much of what this show is about. I'm trying to help Americans reclaim forgotten truths, recover biblical, you know, convictions, rebuild what previous generations allowed to erode. And while I always advocate for both, you know, a top-down political and bottom-up local church approach to Christian nationalism, I do believe politics are downstream from religion. So, laws, customs, institutions,

uh cultures, they're reflections of what people worship. Every person and nation worships. It's not whether, it's which thing we will worship. And that is why Christless conservatism will never save America. Yes, elections matter. Yes, policies matter. Yes, laws matter. You can make a nation externally moral without mass spiritual revival. But, without Christ, the nation will still

function as kind of an organized rebellion against God, preserving again this external order in one place while planting seeds of judgment in another. And so, if America is going to be glorious, and that is the mission of this show, it needs to be operating according to God's will. And Christianity must reign as the national religion as it once did, and that is the hope for this episode. So, let's begin. Imagine 10,000 Muslims leave their

homeland, cross an ocean, settle a new land, establish communities, write laws, build schools, elect leaders, and create a government. Every one of them is Muslim. Their leaders and everybody there is Muslim. Their judges are Muslim. Their teachers are Muslim. Their families are Muslim. For the next 100 years, nearly every immigrant who joins them is also Muslim. Now, imagine someone comes along 200 years later and says, "Well, you know what? This country wasn't really conceived as a Muslim nation because

[music] their founding documents never explicitly declared Islam to be the national religion." You'd laugh at that argument. Well, why? Because when a people share a common faith and culture and moral vision, they don't need to constantly announce it. It's woven into everything they built. Their identity is assumed because it's universal among them. The same principle applies to America's founding. 98% of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

professed Christ. They lived within a Christian civilization and operated from a Christian assumption. At the founding, 99% of the population was Christian. The nation's laws, customs, moral standards, institutions, and public life were shaped explicitly by Christianity. Naturalization was limited to free white men of good character, which was a synonym for really white Christians. And these came from almost exclusively other

Christian nations of the British Isles and Europe. The founders did not need to write America is a Christian nation. For the same reason, a group of 10,000 Muslims would not need to write this is a Muslim nation. It was already understood. It was a fact. So today, many Americans have been told that Christianity was merely a private belief held by some founders and had little to do with the nation's identity. But that claim becomes harder and harder

to maintain when you examine the historical record. And that's exactly what we're going to do today. Now to understand America's identity, you have to go back to the beginning. America was not founded by a religiously neutral people. [music] It was discovered, it was explored, settled, and built by Christians. In fact, as we discussed in season 1, episode 2, America is the only continent [music] named after a Christian Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, whose voyages helped reveal the scope of the

New World at the close of the 15th century. But then came the settlers in the early 1600s, Protestant Christian families began crossing the Atlantic Ocean from England. And they were not searching for diversity. They weren't searching for multiculturalism or secular, you know, some sort of secular experiment. They came seeking freedom to worship Christ according to their convictions and to build communities ordered by the Bible. They were leaving a nation whose established church and political authorities often imposed forms of

Christian worship and religious conformity that many of them found burdensome. Now, the Christian colonization of America began with Jamestown in 1607 and continued with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, which established the Plymouth Colony in New England. And before these pilgrims ever stepped off the ship, they wrote a covenant. We know it as the Mayflower Compact. The first governing document drafted by the settlers themselves and it declared that they had undertaken their voyage,

{quote} for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith, {end quote}. [music] Just think about that for a second. If the first governing political document produced by the first Americans did not appeal to religious pluralism, individual autonomy, religious neutrality. No, it explicitly stated that its central purpose was the advancement of Christianity. Now, this shouldn't surprise us. The American colonies didn't emerge out of thin air.

Okay, they were an extension of England, which was a nation that was openly and officially Christian. The colonists brought with them English law, English customs, English institutions, English culture, and of course, the English religion, which was Christianity. It's why the region that they planted and settled was known as New England. It was Christian England transplanted across the Atlantic. So, from the names of the colonies to

the language of their charters to the laws that they enacted to the churches and schools that they established, Christianity was not a footnote in early America. It was the cultural, [music] moral, legal, religious framework from which the colonies emerged. The question is not whether Christianity shaped early America. The question is how anyone could study the historical record and conclude otherwise. Okay, they do this because if you can change inception,

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feeding to your family. In other words, if America was not conceived as a Christian nation, then it can be reimagined and remade into a secular nation or a liberal nation or a Muslim nation or Hindu nation or anything else this age demands. But if America was founded on Christian principles, then we need to embrace that. And it's so funny when people say that it's not if if it's not, then someone needs to

explain what exactly was happening between 1620 and 1776 because when you step into the colonial America, you do not find a society attempting to separate itself from Christianity. You find the exact opposite. For more than 150 years before independence was declared, the colonies operated with the assumption that public life was expected to be Christian. Just Let me give you some examples. Consider voting. Today, voting is viewed as this

like universal civic right. In many of the colonies, most of the colonies, it was viewed as an extension of church membership. So in the Massachusetts Bay Colony beginning in 1631, only men who were members in good standing of a Christian church could become what they called freemen, which was just the status or the name required to vote and participate in government then. Now, similar standards existed in the Connecticut colony and in New Haven colonies throughout most of New England. The reasoning was simple. If a man could not be trusted to govern himself under

Christ at the local church, why should he be trusted to help govern a commonwealth? Now, just let's let's look about another territory. Let's look at public office. Political leadership was not religiously neutral. Pennsylvania's Charter of Privileges declared that those qualified to serve in government must, quote, profess faith in Jesus Christ as the savior of the world, end quote. South Carolina required public officials to profess the Christian religion and

swear their oaths on Bibles or the Holy Scriptures. The Delaware Constitution required office holders to swear, quote, I do profess faith in God the Father and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed forevermore, and I do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration, end quote. In Massachusetts, the governor and the high officials of the area had to declare that they were of the Christian religion. Several other colonies and

states, New Jersey and Georgia and North Carolina, South Carolina, et cetera, they restricted public office strictly to Protestants. The question was not whether Christianity should influence government. The question was more, how Christian convictions would be applied in civil law. Now, consider blasphemy. Okay, modern Americans often assume that like religion belongs only in the private sphere, but colonial Americans would have found that idea to be

incomprehensible. Okay, public attacks upon God, Christ, or Scripture were treated as offenses against the nation's moral order itself. Several colonies imposed severe penalties for blasphemy, including fines and imprisonment, and in some cases even capital punishment. Massachusetts colony stated, quote, "A cursing of God by atheism or the like was punishable by death," end quote. The Maryland Toleration Act in 1649 made it a capital punishment to deny that Jesus

Christ is the Son of God or to blaspheme God. The same was true of the Lord's Day. Okay, throughout the colonies, Sunday was protected as a law. Businesses were closed, commerce was was seized, uh public recreation was even restricted, church attendance was expected. In Virginia's earliest years, uh Sabbath observance was enforced with extreme severity. Their law stated, quote, "Every man and woman shall repair in the morning to the divine service and sermons preached upon the Sabbath day.

And in the afternoon, the divine service and catechizing. Upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and the allowance for the whole week following, for the second to lose their set allowance and also be whipped. And for the third to suffer death." End quote. So, across the colonies, the Lord's day was not treated as some sort of personal preference, but as a public obligation because the colonies believed that honoring God was

essential to the health of the greater commonwealth. Now, even in education, it was explicitly Christian. The famous Massachusetts law in 1647, often called the Old Deluder Satan Act, required communities to establish schools so that children could learn to read. But why? So that they could learn the Bible and read for themselves and not be left vulnerable or ignorant to deception. So, the primary educational concern of the colonies was not some sort of workforce development or economic advancement. It was biblical literacy.

And beneath all of this stood an even deeper evidence of our Christian foundation. The legal system of every colony drew heavily from scripture. The Ten Commandments informed obviously moral infrastructure and legislation, but biblical principles shaped criminal law, civil authorities were constantly citing scripture as a source of legal and moral authority. Their charters literally ended sentences by saying, quote, "According to the rule of the word of God." End quote. And when Connecticut, for example,

listed its capital laws, it didn't just like prohibit murder or blasphemy or idolatry or kidnapping or adultery. It actually cited chapter and verse. Deuteronomy and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers. This was extremely common. The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 opens up by saying, "For as much as in a well-governed and Christian Commonwealth, matters concerning religion and the honor of God in this first place to be taken into

serious consideration." End quote. In other words, scripture was not treated as this private inspiration or this privatized faith. Okay, it was treated as a public legal authority. And yes, the colonies differed in practice and in emphasis, but they shared a common conviction that the Bible was not some sort of irrelevant thing to public life. Now, you just have to think about this. Consider how far we have fallen. How far

we have drifted from this time. We went from literally creating schools specifically for the Bible to outlawing the Bible from schools. I mean, it's absolutely insane. You need to remember that this is like this is how far we've gone and and it's important because when you're fighting against our enemies, you are not extreme. Okay, in fact, you are moderate compared to your forefathers. This is not an extreme

position. They are actually extreme. You are simply just I'm a normal guy from the founding of this nation. And if you fight for that, they will literally want to kill you for it. Now, I get it. Christian law does not prove that every citizen was a sincere believer. It doesn't prove that the colonies were perfectly righteous or or free from some sort of hypocrisy. Uh they certainly had sin. But it does demonstrate something that is increasingly difficult to deny.

From voting to public office, from education to marriage, from Sabbath observance to criminal law, the American colonies were operating within an unmistakably Christian framework. Christianity was not some sort of decorative feature attached to the edge of American society. It was the atmosphere the nations breathed and the foundation upon which they built their civilization. See, but the evidence of our Christian identity goes even further. Okay, in the Declaration of Independence it declares

quote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." End quote. Now, I just want you to notice something. Notice the foundation of the

argument. Human rights do not originate with the state, or with the people, or with nature itself, but with the creator who endows mankind with the dignity of rights given to us by God. In other words, government exists not to invent rights, but to protect those rights God has already given to us. And this is not like the language of secular humanism or Enlightenment deists. This is the language of men who understood Christian doctrine, that man is created by God in the image of God,

possessing inherent worth because of that imago Dei, and is accountable to a higher law above any earthly rulers. Now, every time this discussion occurs, you get some historian that says, "Oh, sure, the colonies may have been Christian, but the United States was founded by Enlightenment people who wanted a separation of church and state." Okay, their argument

usually centers on the First Amendment, uh approved by Congress 1789, which we know states, quote, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." End quote. Now, many modern Americans read those words through, again, a 21st century lens and assume they were creating some sort of a secular nation with a strict wall between Christianity and government. But, that interpretation ignores all of

the historical context. Okay, the founders had just separated themselves from a system in which the church and state were institutionally fused together. They had been seen the problems that arose when kings governed churches and when churches executed capital punishment. They didn't want a national church controlled by the federal government, nor did they want ecclesiastical authorities wielding the sword of the state. They understood that God had established

three distinct spheres of authority. He had the family, the church, and the state. And each one of those had its own responsibilities and limitations, and each to be under the authority of Christ. The First Amendment was designed to prevent the federal government from establishing a national denomination like the Church of England. It was not designed to remove Christianity from public life or politics or law or government. In fact, the objective was to keep the state out of the church, not so much the church

out of the state. When James Madison wrote, quote, "The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man." End quote. He was not advocating for a modern concept of religious freedom or religious pluralism in which all religions were like viewed as equally true and equally beneficial to society. To think that the same generation that would kill citizens for blasphemy would legally support the buildings of

or the building of mosques and Hindu temples across our nation is an absurd idea. Okay, the founding generation of America understood that the first and second commandment in the 10 Commandments condemned false worship. They understood that Christ is not for the freedom of religion in the way that we think about it today. So, what was the purpose of this legal ethic? See, their concern was not freedom from Christianity,

but freedom from ecclesiastical coercion and denominational persecution. Okay, again, you have to remember that they witnessed centuries of conflict between Rome and the Church of England and various Protestant groups. So, they sought a nation where Christians could worship according to conscience without state-imposed denominational control. In other words, religious liberty was among Christian communions. Okay, you could be Baptist or Congregationalist or Presbyterian or Anglican or Lutheran or

even Catholic. It was not an endorsement of religious pluralism. And we know this because the state, which you know, the vast majority of the power in a republic was with the states. The states continued to maintain explicitly Christian establishments. Okay, they had religious tests, they had public Christian standards and confessions and Christian laws long after the First Amendment was adopted. In fact, one of the clearest pieces of

evidence comes from the very moments after the First Amendment was adopted. Uh on October 25th, 1789, Congress approved the language that would become the First Amendment. Now, the very next day, uh Elias Boudinot, uh a founding father, he was a former president of the Continental Congress, uh he actually became later the president of the American Bible Society, and he proposed that Congress request George Washington to proclaim a national

day of prayer and Thanksgiving. And what happened? The House agreed, the Senate agreed, and President Washington complied. On October 3rd, 1789, George Washington, again, he's our national patriarch, issued a national proclamation calling upon the American people to observe November 26th as a day of public Thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God. Now, some people say, "Oh, but Dale,

it's a general call to prayer, right? It could apply to any religion." Okay. 99% of the nation's population was Christian. It's probably, honestly, it was 100%, but maybe 99.98%, okay, was Christian. Do you think George Washington was calling the nation to some agnostic God? Okay, no. He was speaking of God, the father of Jesus Christ. The writings of Washington are filled with devotion to

Christ. In a speech to the Indian Chiefs of Delaware on May 12th, 1779, Washington said, "Quote, you do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are." End quote. You got to remember, Washington was a member of the Anglican Church his entire

life. So, you just have to think about the timing here, okay? The same Congress that approved the First Amendment around the separation of church and state immediately turned around and asked the president to call the entire nation to pray and have Thanksgiving to God. Like, that alone should cause us to question the modern narrative. Okay, Washington's proclamation is incredible. I'm going to read it for you. At least a portion of it for you.

It says, "Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for all his benefits, >> [music] >> and humbly to implore his protection and favor. And whereas both houses of Congress have by their joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving >> [music] >> and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of almighty God,

especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness. To be devoted by the people of these states to the service of that great and glorious being who is the beneficent author [music] of all good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering under him our sincere and humble thanks for this kind care and protection of the people of this country

previous to the becoming a nation. That we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and ruler of nations, and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, >> [music] >> to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually to render our national government a blessing to all people."

And quote. If that's not Christian nationalism, I just don't know what is. Okay, he went even further urging at the end of this, parts that I didn't read, urging Americans to pray that in the United States that God would quote, "Promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, end quote. So, you got to notice the language, right? Not religious in the abstract, not private spirituality, not secular

morality. Okay, but the promotion of true religion and virtue among the American people. Now, unfortunately, the word religion has been largely hijacked in modern times. So, today many people assume it refers, you know, oh, religion like as a general equality of all faiths. But, that was not how the founders used the term. In 18th century America, the word religion was synonymous with Christianity. And it's a massive massive

mistake. If they would have just put Christianity in place of religion, so much would be more clear on our identity as a Christian nation. Now, as a result, a lot of people they wrongly interpret statements like these as evidence that the founders just viewed all religions as equally true or equally foundational to the Republic. They did not, okay? When Washington and his contemporaries spoke of promoting religion, they were speaking of the Christian religion. We know this for a fact by cross-referencing so many

quotes, but I'm just going to give you one for an example. Uh in his general orders, Washington said on May 2nd, 1778, he uses the term religion and Christian in the same quote I'm going to read it. He says, quote, "While we are zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of patriot, it should be our highest glory

to add the more distinguished character of Christian, end quote." In Washington's proclamation of 1779, he also said, "American citizens ought to pray to God that God would {quote} bless America with good government, peace, and concord to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion. {end quote} Okay, again, he viewed public virtue, Christianity, national prosperity as

inseparable realities. Which are, again, the fundamentals of Christian nationalism. In other words, when people try to tarnish you for being a Christian nationalist, you are no different than the founders of your own country. Okay, the people who do this are trying to rewrite its history to support their evil and steal your nation. You cannot cower to these people. You have to push back. You have to endure. You have to

continue to understand history because when you understand inception, you understand identity. When you understand identity, you understand allegiance. Yes. The founders did reject a federally established church. We know that. But rejecting an established church is not the same thing as rejecting a Christian nation. So, the America of 1789 was not attempting to become less

Christian than the colonies that just preceded it. It was attempting to preserve Christian civilization without recreating the abuse of the European state church system that they had just left behind. In the year 1800, approximately 98% of the United States population was Protestant. The remaining 2% was basically Roman Catholic. Now, most of the Catholics, they lived

in Maryland, which is Mary's land. And uh if you just look at those numbers, if that was the fruit of the nation, what does it tell you about its root? Again, to argue that such a people uh founded by Christians, governed by Christians, and overwhelmingly populated by Christians somehow established a religiously neutral nation requires a level of historical revisionism that borders on insanity. Now, this claim that Christianity played

only a minor role in America's founding becomes even more difficult to argue or to sustain when we examine the research of political scientist Donald Lutz in 1980. Now, this guy surveyed thousands of political writings published between 1760 and 1805. I'm talking pamphlets, newspapers, essays, political tracts, sermons, all

of it. And he found that the Bible was the single most cited source in the founding era. And he's accounting for basically his results at approximately 1/3 of all citations in written literature came from scripture. It was cited more than any other European thinker uh and often more than any other uh enlightenment school of thought. They were thoroughly biblical. Now, interestingly when I was looking into the research,

the biblical book that was cited most frequently was Deuteronomy. And it was obviously because they were constantly referencing Christian law. And according to Lutz and all of his findings, Deuteronomy was referenced nearly twice as often as the writings of any philosopher or politician. The Apostle Paul was cited about as often as Montesquieu and Blackstone, which were two of the most influential secular politician and have their political theories at that time. And so, whatever else must be said about

the founding generation, the historical record shows that when Americans discussed politics or law or liberty or government or nation, they turned to the Bible more than any other source. Now, why is this important? Because the claim that America was founded primarily by enlightenment rationalists and deists simply doesn't square up with the historical record. And the dominant political vision of the

enlightenment was not a constitutional republic that was built on checks and balances and divided powers. It was an aristocracy of elites that are running the nation. Okay? The American system emerged from a completely different understanding of man and government. They had witnessed the abuses of concentrated power in both the English monarchy and the Roman church. So, this massive nation of Protestants essentially it it's it taught them that

man is fallen, prone to corruption, incapable of being trusted with unlimited power and authority. And so, this biblical view of human nature shaped their political philosophy. They didn't assume men would use power virtuously, they assumed that they would abuse it unless it was restrained by checks and balances. James Wilson, a signer of the Constitution, grounded the necessity of government in the doctrine of the fall itself writing, quote, "Government is

indeed highly necessary, but it is highly necessary to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of paradise." End quote. John Adams, he expressed the same principle when he famously declared, quote, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any

other." End quote. George Washington explained the need for constitutional restraints by appealing to the sinful tendencies of man. It says, "Quote, a just estimate of that love of power and proneness to abuse it which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us the truth of this position." Talking about checks and balances. He goes on to say, "The necessity of reciprocal checks in the

existence of political power by dividing and distributing into different depositories." End quote. Okay, these are not the words of men building a nation on enlightenment humanism. Okay, they are the words of men who believed what Christianity teaches. That man is fallen, that unlimited power corrupts, and that civil government must be structured according to scripture. But that system was never designed for a nation that ceased to be overwhelmingly

Christian. And that checks with reality. America functioned fairly well until we decided to import millions of non-European pagans. And what did they do? What did these people do? They took the freedoms that had protected the robust Christianity that we had and weaponized it and reinterpreted it to be openly hostile to the Christian faith that built the very nation they're coming to.

In other words, what had been a framework for a Christian people became a tool used against against Christian identity, against Christian law, against, you know, Christian culture. And now we have a national mess. But in that mess we can say without a doubt America's inception, founding, and the vast majority of its history was explicitly Christian. Don't let anyone tell you

and you know what? It's too late. This thing's too far gone. Uh you can't turn it around. No. It's never too late for the reformation or revolution when a nation has strayed from its identity. Imagine if like Luther or Calvin just said, you know, hey, it's too late. Like it's too late. No. The the Having the courage to go, "No, it's not too late. We're going to return and restore to our identity as a Christian

nation." We need that. I believe that the next 10 years are going to be filled with intense political, moral, and religious upheaval. And so, now is the time to boldly voice your convictions, generate greater what I would call ideological agitation and polarity. And that's because we want to cause the necessary disruption to inaugurate real

change. I think it was Abigail Adams who in the midst of waiting for the Revolutionary War, she said some quote, I wish I had it before me, but it was like, "If we're either going to start or not, but the middle way is no way." And I feel like we have that right now. We are in a ideological, religious, nationalistic cold war. We are living

among people that hate us and would kill us if it was legal to do so. And so, we need to be praying right now for genuine nationalistic revival with a robust Christian foundation. And that is why this episode so important. I want us to make sure that we really know that something has been stolen from us. Something has been taken. We have

drifted. Who we were at the inception and our identity has been perverted. And it's going to require Christian patriots to restore and fight for that identity. Whether it's through Balkanization, whether it's through something else. But this is a vital episode for us to understand and be confident in who we are as Americans. So, let's move on to the weekly audit.

>> [music] >> In this first clip, I want to look at one of my favorite clips from Charlie Kirk. And it's basically just going to inform uh or reiterate everything that I just talked about. But I love Charlie Kirk's absolute ability to retain knowledge on the fly. I really do believe that he was a savant on political theory. Uh just to have a question like this come out and the ability to recall the information

with such accuracy is incredible. So, let's go ahead and watch. >> was founded on common law uh because the Declaration only refers to God four times. The Constitution doesn't refer to God at all. And it only articulates the structure of government. >> So, first of all, remember that we were a collection of states and colonies. And you need to read the state constitutions before anything else. Nine out of 13 of the original states required you to be a Bible-believing Christian to serve in government at the time of the founding. All 13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith. Nine out of 13 required you to

be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith. Almost every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions. You Remember we're a collection of states before that. Secondly, 55 of the 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing, church-attending Christians. So, common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian. It A common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures. So, let's go to three principles of common law: presumption of innocence, due process, and jury of your peers. All three are biblical principles

wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are richer or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself. But, before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice. We get that in the West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal, neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is the great idea of human equality. These are all biblical ideas, they're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time. But, more importantly than that, they say that God

was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence. Well, that's a big deal. Okay. Laws of nature and nature's God. The last paragraph of the Declaration reads as a prayer. It says, "We appeal to the Supreme Judge of the Universe." Who's the judge of the Universe? Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne. This So, in the Declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically. Thirdly, as I said on the stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the

founding when they were putting together the Constitution. More than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone. The book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions, it was most famous well address as he's, you know, about to say goodbye. Say, "Hey, good luck in Canaan, guys. Here's how you should set up your form of government." But, finally and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said. John Adams famously said the Constitution was only written for a moral religious people. It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other. The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant

that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord. One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government and they're incompatible. So, you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population. >> What an incredible ability to recall such I mean, I had to do a bunch of research for this episode. He had it just right off the top of his head. Now, the next clip is from my friend John Welnik. And it's on the topic of Christian monarchy.

I think it's a really great conversation. Let's take a look. >> God's uh best form of government is theocracy. It was Moses and it was God. Moses was the religious leader and he also led the nation. That's definitionally theocracy. But now we have, you know, end of judges, people are begging for a king. We just want a king. Uh so, God's like, "Fine, you want a king? So that I will give you kings." So, no we're no longer theocratic now. We're now uh monarchical. Post-lapsarian, pre- second coming, that's our best bet is a monarchy. A monarch who is submitted and

uh obedient to the Lord. So, you have that. Now you have the French Revolution. You have regicide. You have the people rising up and killing their king. What's so funny about that is the very first thing they do a handful of years later is they install another monarch. To me, that shows that people were made to be ruled. And I That's going to sound tyrannical, but I don't think it is because we are in hierarchy with God above us, right? Everything in in nature works in man's nature works in a hierarchy. There's God. In the family, there's the husband. There's the wife. There's the kids. It's

hierarchical. We are made to be at our very core level submissive to a higher authority, a higher power. >> Yeah, you have father and mother. You have elder, deacon, pastor. These are very clear oversight mechanisms for the two things that God created. >> Right. >> You're saying that naturally because we're like that, it also works that way politically best. >> It's in our nature. God's Yeah, so I don't believe America can return to the constitutional

arrangements of the founding era. Uh those arrangements were crafted for a different people. Now, sure, yeah, maybe with 100 million deportations, a massive revival in the church, but if you ask me, um how are we going to get out of this national mess? I think the only form of government that possesses both the biblical legitimacy and the the concentrated authority to enact these

sweeping structural changes that are necessary to restore America's Christian identity is a constitutional monarchy. And because that's basically impossible in our current situation, I believe that we need to form uh some degree of balkanization in the United States. We need an honest recognition that a single sprawling republic that we have right now can no longer hold together a people who do not share the same general ancestry, the

Christian faith, the culture, vision of of what it means to have a good life. And if we could balkanize, um I would love to see a constitutional monarchy. I I'd love to see um a 90% ethno-state. I'd love to see a a new constitution that eliminates a lot of the stuff, you know, from the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th amendments. Now, um I would not throw out, if I'm just thinking out loud here, I would not throw out the founders' commitment to

ordered liberty and the wisdom of some of the, you know, systems uh checks and balances, but I would frame all of our governing documents in far more explicitly Christian language. Um I would also require that any monarch appointed over a people share their ethnicity. That's important. And be able to demonstrate a credible evidence of regeneration. I don't know what that would look like. And I would probably call for a clear right of resistance

clause against any monarch who openly abandons the Christian faith. But again, our mission right now >> [snorts] >> is polarity, okay? We must awaken Americans to the hard reality that long-term peace is impossible under the current demographics, whether you think about them spiritually, ethnically, whatever. Okay, we must show our fellow patriots, our fellow Americans that deportations, balkanization, they're not actually radical ideas. They're actually

moderate ideas. They're realistic solutions because the the radical idea would be civil war. And so it is it is a moderate thing to deport mass deport. It is a moderate thing to balkanize instead of having the bloodshed of civil war. So when people call you extreme for your position, say, "No, no. Having ice put 100 million people out, that that's not extreme." What's going to happen if we don't do that is extreme. We start killing people

in the streets because the tensions rise so much. No, this is the government's duty is to create a moderate solution that eliminates the possibility of bloodshed, which would be mass deportations and some form of balkanization. All right. That's a wrap for this episode. I want to keep talking, but I got to stop. And next week I'm going to be talking about a massively controversial topic titled The Curse of Ham and the historic

Christian view of race in America. Now, if you don't already know anything about that topic, I'm going to come at it from a biblical perspective and I'm going to offer scripture from Genesis chapter 9 and we're going to look at that together. I'm going to try to not make it like a sermon, but it's probably going to feel preachy because you know what? I'm a preacher. But it's going to be a great conversation that is going to be applied specifically to the American context. So, I'd love to have you on that episode. Now, if you don't follow me already on X, Instagram, and YouTube,

um, I'm posting new content there basically 6 days a week. So, would love to have you follow me on those platforms. My featured book for this episode is my book Reform vs. Rome, Why Classical Protestantism Is the Restoration of the One Holy Catholic Church. Now, whether you're, again, considering a shift from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism or from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism or Anglicanism or whatever it may be, this book was my attempt to honestly compare the two and showing why

I am a reformed Catholic and not a Roman Catholic. It's available at relearn.org. Uh, you can listen to the audio in the Relearn app, or you can pick up a copy on Amazon. My name is Dale Partridge. Thank you for watching or listening to American Glory. I'll see you next week. >> [music]

>> America will either have Christ or will have chaos. For years, conservatives believed that Trump could reverse America's decline. But, after Trump, the right is now fractured, exhausted, and losing ground. Endless infighting and electoral losses have exposed [music] a deeper problem that politics alone cannot solve. A nation that rejects Christ cannot be restored by mere personalities,

grandstanding, or Christless conservativism. So, Inklings Institute's first annual conference, America After Trump, brings together pastors, politicians, commentators, and Christians that are committed to strength, cooperation, and a durable future for the American right. Complaining [music] is not a strategy, and despair cannot be an option. Christ is king.

Let's live like it.