Eschatology Matters

Jon Harris: Virginia First - 1607 Project

Jon Harris of Conversations That Matter discusses American history, the founding of Virginia and the nation, and his new film, Virginia First-The 1607 Project

Virginia First - The 1607 Project

Duration:: 54m
Broadcast on:: 13 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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Call click Granger.com or just out by Granger for the ones who get it done. Welcome to Eschatology Matters. We are part of the FightLathBeast Network. And I am your host for today, Jacob Tanner. And we are excited to have returning to the show. John Harris, part of Conversations That Matter. John has recently released a great new documentary that we're going to be discussing. Today, Virginia 1st, the 1607 project. And so guys, we're going to be getting a little historical today. We're going to be getting a little political today. And of course, as you're going to find out, Eschatology truly does matter in a multitude of different ways. But John, thank you for coming back on the show today. I appreciate it, Jacob. It's always good to be invited back somewhere. Yeah, yeah. And this documentary, I don't want to give everything away because obviously we want people to watch what you've created with this. But even the title itself was interesting to me when I first saw it because Virginia 1st, the 1607 project immediately made me think of the 1619 project from a few years back. And I think people are still trying to push that. So was this kind of a direct front to that? Was this kind of a combat against that? Yeah, it was an idea that I had back in 2020, I think is when I first thought about it. And it might not have been until 2021, I actually sent an email out. I don't remember, but the idea was that the 1619 project was and still is highly influential was being picked up by all kinds of educators and high profile figures. And at the same time, you had at the end of the Trump presidency, a 1776 commission and their job was to answer the 1619 project, essentially, and that narrative. And so they created a short document, you can go look it up online. I mean, it's a dead document at this point because the Biden administration obviously didn't honor it, but it frames American history differently, at least they think it's differently. And it's more of a right-wing take. And so you had these competing narratives. And I looked at both of them. I just said, neither of these is correct. And actually, they're more similar to each other than I think either would probably want to admit because they both buy into this proposition nation idea, which is just the understanding of America, that it's this universal idea, not a particular people or place. And in both cases, they start out with that assumption. The difference between the two, broadly speaking, is that the 1619 project says that the America of 1776 and 1787, and, you know, really, it's the Declaration of Independence where they source this mostly, but say that that dream of equality has all men being created equal. And that's where they take the equality from, has never been realized. That's 1619. 1776 commission said, no, it has been realized. We had a civil rights movement. And so everything's good to go. That's pretty much if I've figured the difference between the two. So they recruit in the 1776 commission report, MLK, and civil rights leaders as quintessential, you know, great Americans, but more than that, they're also conservatives now. And so they become part of the pantheon. And of course, they give the shaft to historical figures that I think probably deserve a greater place of prominence and always enjoyed a greater place of prominence until recently. And so I see it as a somewhat of a cave to the left, the narrative that we're currently, unfortunately forced to adopt in most neo conservative circles. So anyway, long story short, sorry, I'm rambling, but the 1607 project was my attempt to say, look, it's not 1776, it's not 1619 when supposedly we had, they were really probably more indentured servants, but slave show up in Virginia. It's not, it's not even 1620 when the pilgrims came. There's already America existed before that, and that was in Virginia, and Virginia really does have an outsized influence in early American history, and even continuing past the Civil War, when they lost a lot of their political influence. There was cultural influence that we can still feel. And so I think the real tangible America, what we think of when Europeans think of America really stems back more to Virginia. And Northeasterners and people from Massachusetts in particular have treated the South, kind of like a stepchild, they're the odd kind of other. And I think it's time to say that's not right. Actually, for most of the beginning of American history, at least, the Northeast was considered to be the more odd kind of part of the country. They're both part of the United States, obviously. But, but Virginia really does deserve a place of prominence. And so that's what the project is about. Yeah, and not only is it helpful, but speaking as somebody who grew up in the North, obviously, in fact, Long Island, New York. What I learned from, you know, elementary school history was completely like 100% the opposite of what you're presenting within the documentary, because as you're, as you're saying, there was this idea presented to us over and over and over again that the South was terrible. And it was the Northeast, in particular, from which you had American culture, even the founding of America, spring forth, you know, with Plymouth and everything else. But you're absolutely right in the documentary that actually it's from Virginia, 1607, where we start to see America take shape, take root, take form. Culture begins to develop in a multitude, a manifold of different ways. Now, let's go back to this idea, because I think this is fascinating. One of the ways that you open the documentary is with different sort of quotes, different sort of interviews that you're showing where people keep talking about the idea of America. Let's return to the idea of America. And we have that, like you said, on both liberal and conservative sides, the idea, the idea, and usually it relates to the first part of the Constitution that we are created equal. We have an alliable rights. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Let's go a little bit more in depth on that. What, what are they saying when they do that when they take like MLK and they say he was suddenly a great Christian leader, which he wasn't. He did a lot of awful things. What are they trying to present? What are they trying to do, modern day? That scene was added in later, actually. So we had a premiere at an event in Georgia. And after we were done with the premiere, there's a few edits we wanted to make. And one of the things that we talked about was, hey, there's really no shark attack scene. And as a documentary filmmaker yourself, I'm sure you're familiar with that, that there needs to be a kind of a problem that's presented, or something that grabs your attention in the beginning of the documentary. And so we actually just decided, hey, let's open with the shark attack scene with the, like this, this is the problem and it's a problem you probably never noticed before, but now that I'm putting all these clips next to each other of every president. I think since Jimmy Carter, I think I put clips from Jimmy Carter to every president up to with the exception of Donald Trump to Joe Biden. And then, of course, other figures that are in national prominence entertainers and politicians. And they all keep saying it's like they're in a choir. They're all saying they're saying the same song America's an idea. And some of them expand a little bit on that. But, you know, all the clips are intended to convey to the audience that there's this really odd notion that no other country on earth shares with us. No other country says our country is an idea. You know, French don't say, you know, France is just an idea. People from the Sudan don't say Sudan's an idea. People from Israel don't say Israel's an idea. In fact, Israel right now is very much a people and a piece of land, right? And they're very adamant about this that it's these boundaries. It's this land. But it's in America that you have this very odd in the history of the world conception of the country from the elites as being this abstraction. And really what it is, is it's for the left equality, for the right, I would say broadly speaking, it's freedom, but you'll hear both. In fact, I just saw before we started recording Kamala Harris, talking about both freedom and equality that that's what America is right so often these two come together. But there are very vague notions and they are bendable. You can change them. So if someone, some aggrieved party says, we need gay marriage, then hey, you can bend it a little and say, hey, we're about equality. So of course, come on in and we'll extend that to you. In other words, you can keep appealing to the idea, you know, that there's an idea of America and you can bend it any way that you want. And that's what we see happen with the Constitution a lot of the time to right. We see people coming along and they're suddenly defining the terms that are used within it, not at all in the way that they were meant, but they're defining them from their modernistic post Christian 21st century viewpoint. And it does absolute damage and violence to what the original authors intended. It's funny, because as a pastor, I relate this a lot to hermeneutics. And when you're studying scripture and interpreting scripture, you want to understand the historical and the grammatical and the redemptive themes that are happening here. But it's like when it comes to political theory, when it comes to understanding history, hermeneutics are thrown out the window and people are always trying to look at it from our modern vantage point, which you simply can't do if you want to understand history. I think in theology, you have the same thing, because how many people say, well, the intention of Jesus was love so we can ignore what Paul says here about women, right? So it's the same exact thing. They'll say, well, the intentions of the founders were equality. So even though they didn't live up to that standard themselves, perhaps, and they didn't achieve it in their lifetime, we're carrying on their mission. And that's why we can actually even override the institutions and arrangements and things that they valued in the name of them. It's kind of crazy, but that's how it works. And I think it's the same exact thing happening in theological circles, you know, when you use that hermeneutical love or whatever to override grammar. And I think, too, we even see it because there's a lot of people are going to listen to this that are going to go, well, it's just the left. The right doesn't do this at all. But actually, the right does do the same exact thing sometimes. For example, taking Martin Luther King Jr. and saying, well, he's one of us and he's a representation of conservatism or Christians even do this. You know, how many years ago was it now? They did the MLK conference. I don't know if you remember that or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, where they tried to make a big deal that, you know, he was a great Christian leader, but seemed to neglect the fact that he was an adulterer, that he cheated on it. He did all of these crazy things. And it's like, even if he had a couple of good points that we can say, yeah, okay, that was good, it's not good to take these leaders and say suddenly that they were something they weren't. And that's what we see happening on both the left and the right. They kind of try to preemptively take these individuals from the other side and say, actually, they belong to us. And it's one of those things too that we see happening, like I said, with the Constitution, where people are trying to rewrite it, they're trying to reinterpret it in a way that it simply never was meant to be interpreted. And so as we're talking about this, let's talk about Thomas Jefferson for a second, because he pops up a couple of times throughout the documentary. Jefferson, I was always told growing up, and I've come to change my view on this, but I was always told growing up that he was a deist that he rejected Christianity. Let's start with that. What was Thomas Jefferson exactly? Well, the project doesn't really get into answering that question. And it's not because we can't, it's more just, it's not the focus, but, but yeah, since you asked Thomas Jefferson, I think would have been, actually, I did, Sam Smith actually may say this in the documentary that I think about it. He may actually, there might be like a passing quote where he says that he was kind of like a secularized, I don't remember what word he used, but I think he was the word nominal nominal. Yeah, I think I figure out nominal Anglican. So he respected Christianity, respected the teachings of Christ. He had a relationship with Charles Clay, which Sam Smith does talk about. Of course, in the documentary, that's in relationship to federalism and Christianity's relationship to the system that we adopted. But I think beyond that, some of this is speculation, but Thomas Jefferson, you know, he gave a lot of money to setting up a church in Charlottesville. I think it was called the Calvinistic Reformed Church or something like that, but it was Charles Clay was the one who was overseeing that. And it shows that Thomas Jefferson had a, to him, at least Christianity was very important, civically, he was willing to give his personal wealth to the creation of this church. You see the same thing with Benjamin Franklin, giving to George Whitfield. I mean, they're so supportive of cultural Christianity. And Thomas Jefferson also wrote the Sabotarian law that got passed in Virginia, basically making it an offense to break the Sabbath, or at least to cause a disturbance, I should say, on the Sabbath. And that's a fascinating one, isn't it? Because I thinking back on this, I don't remember a single time growing up where I was ever, even in church circles, you know, if people brought up Thomas Jefferson, it wasn't necessarily that he was a bad guy, but it was more so. He just wasn't, he wasn't one of us. But then as you hear all these things and you actually study history, you find out, well, the guy actually supported the planting of a church, basically. He put a lawn to a fact that made it so that you couldn't break the Sabbath. This seems as though he actually wasn't an opponent of Christianity, but was in fact somebody who was, who was a friend of Christians. In fact, I would go so far as to say it seems as though he was himself a Christian, maybe had some strange beliefs, of course, but it seems as though. Well, yeah, you could say in a cultural sense, certainly. There are things, for example, he thought the Trinity was somewhat ridiculous, which is that kind of thing that gets him the deus label, or they'll say the Jefferson Bible, which is really just the life and teachings of Jesus is proof that he was a deus. I don't think that that's proof. Jefferson was just compiling Jesus' teachings. It wasn't because he was denying the miraculous necessarily, whether he did or not. I suppose could be an open question, but that in itself is not proof of that. He valued the teachings of Jesus so much, he wanted them in a compact form so he could reference them. And he saw within the nation, within the founding of America, that there was great value in Christianity. He wasn't opposed to it. He was in fact promoting it in different ways. And again, we can have a lot of debate. Was he a Christian? Wasn't he? The Trinity thing is actually where I get the most hung up with him of trying to figure out what was going on with this guy. But regardless, as we think on Jefferson and sort of his framing of some of our most important founding documents, how did he understand something like separation of church and state, for example? It's hard to put on a modernist lens and look at this because we think of separation of church and state. I think is where we need to start as anything goes, including Satan statues in the capitals of states. So we have a very expansive view of it. Jefferson didn't live in our world. So it's somewhat, I guess the word, anachronistic, it's somewhat, you know, it's a fallacy of presentism to go back and try to read all those things into Jefferson. And say Jefferson believe that we could have Satan monuments or Jefferson believe that Islam should be tolerated the same way as Christian Christianity should be tolerated. Some people will argue based on things like, well, he had a copy of the Quran, but he was fighting the Barbary pirates. So, yeah, I mean, he had to understand who he was dealing with. That's really why he had that. It wasn't because he was attracted to Islam. That's all speculation. And we didn't have Muslims in the country. So the way that I would put it is this. Thomas Jefferson lived in a day and age where there were different flavors of Christianity present in the United States and different mixes of those flavors in different colonies or states. In Virginia, it was primarily Anglican, but you had a lot of Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians coming in on a fairly pretty early stage. And this is what led ultimately to the adoption of Jefferson's and Madison's religious toleration bill, which essentially made it so that you're not penalized for not agreeing with the, I think it was 32 of the 39 articles. When the book in the Anglican tradition, you can have a license to preach. You can have the freedom to have a Baptist church, for example, without that being a problem. And that's really what they were addressing, I think, more than anything else. So it's a pan Protestantism that they're doing this in. There's very thin evidence to try to suggest, really, I don't think there is any, but people will try to suggest that this was expansive. This was supposed to be extended beyond that to all these other religions. They'll look at a letter from Richard Henry Lee, where he talks about Mohammedans, and this is going to lead to their acceptance as well. But that's just one letter from one guy who wasn't part of drafting the bill. And it's also, it's a world even Richard Henry Lee couldn't conceive of what that would look like today. What are we going to have like two Muslims maybe here and let them do their thing? I mean, that's a very Virginian thing to do is to kind of look at the situation you're in and ask yourself, what is the best for this particular situation for keeping the peace? What's the best for our people? It may be that there are Jewish people, very small minority of Jewish people, but they are going to worship in the synagogue. It's not bothering anyone else specifically. They're not trying to go and, you know, tell people to convert them to their religion. They just want to go do it somewhere. So you have like in Washington's army. This is kind of thing is allowed. But in New England, you don't see as much of that. New England, it is very much a forced. It's congregationalism. There is no other option. And if you are against what we're doing, you know, you're going to be taxed anyways to support the congregational church or you might be booted if you cause too much of a disturbance by rejecting the religion. So you have kind of different sentiments developing in these different places. But no matter where you're looking at in the United States, including in Jefferson's Virginia, it's a pan Protestant project pretty much. We're talking about different flavors of Protestantism and whether or not we're going to allow them to live side by side in peace. And that's what Jefferson was about. And that's one of those things again. I was never taught growing up because what I was taught was this idea that separation of church and state and this whole idea of religious tolerance was all about allowing Islam, allowing all of these different religions to come in atheism, all of these different things to come to America. And to participate in this idea of liberty, justice and equality for all. But what the documentary presents is that, at least within Virginia, as opposed to the Northern England states, was that we were establishing, as you said, a pan Protestantism, which I think is vitally important to understand that it wasn't Christianity against Islam and we're coming and uniting together. It was just different branches of Christianity, different branches of Protestantism coming together and saying, okay, and, you know, like you said, if we're going to have two Muslims or two Jews, then, you know, we'll figure that out as we go on. But this Virginian perspective obviously is very different. And what amazes me, I've talked about this before, I don't think on the podcast, though, what amazes me is that you have the pilgrims, the Puritans coming over, because they want to escape religious persecution. You know, you have a guy like John Bunyan, who's being jailed in London, England, for not having that license to preach. And so you have in Virginia, they're saying, well, you'll be licensed to preach regardless, you don't have to worry about being thrown into prison. But then in the northeastern states, what you have is actually religious oppression being afflicted upon those who are actually brothers and sisters in Christ. And so it's an interesting dilemma that is forming there where it seems as though the Puritans who were escaping religious persecution actually begin to persecute their brothers and sisters. That was a critique that Cavaliers had a Puritans even back in England that that, you know, you just, you want the essentially the freedom to tyrannize us. That's what you want. You're not going to be satisfied with being left alone or living side by side until you have to have it your way. And we see that, you know, that same spirit with modern leftists. I should probably know, because, you know, we talk about the Virginia perspective, the New England perspective. I mean, there, there is obviously exceptions. It took time to kind of develop some of these things. Someone like Patrick Henry was fairly critical of the bill of religious toleration. You know, obviously not everyone voted for it. So there were people in Virginia who still wanted an Anglican or Piscopalian church to be the official church. But I think as demographics changed that contributed to the change and, but I do think there is, I said sentiments, but if you want to say attitude, there was this, I think different attitude where you have landed gentry who are pretty much farmers they're plantation owners. And there's a perspective, I think that comes with that, whereas in New England, it's a lot of, not saying there weren't farmers, but it's a lot of shipping. It's a lot of business, right? And when you're a planter and you're in the planet aristocracy and you view yourself as having a responsibility to your people and your people are the ones that you have connection to who live around you. You tend to be, you tend to have your hands in the soil. Everything's more tangible. And it's less dollars and cents values and more, I would say, a personal kind of relationship values. Is this going to hurt the connections we have to each other into our land? Not whether or not it lines my own pockets. And so, you know, this extends, this attitude extends out into all kinds of other things as well, but I think religions just simply one of them, where they're looking at the situation and they're saying, "What's best for our people?" And what seems to be best is for us not to continue with this official Anglican church that everyone must subscribe to, but to extend a toleration out to these other sects. And that attitude, I think, predated even before that bill was passed, that attitude was still present. That's kind of a cavalier mindset. Right. And so, I have to ask the question then, just because why not? We're talking about all these things. If we're looking at 1607 as being really where America starts to find its founding, did America have a Christian founding? Huh. I would say, undoubtedly, yes. And I think if you ask people at the time, they probably didn't know that they were founding, you know, the United States or something like that, but they would have, if you said to them, you know, did Virginia have, it's Virginia Christian. Everyone would look at you like you had two heads. Like, what do you have? Of course. Like, that's just, like, it's a weird question to ask. Obviously, obviously, we're Christian people. So you see in their charter from 1606, it specifically talks about something very controversial today, but it mentions the Christian prince and it acknowledges other Christian princes. And so, so the understanding that other European countries with Christianity are settling in the new world and that the Christian prince or the magistrate in Virginia has a duty. And one of those things is to evangelize the. Hello, it is Ryan, and we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere with daily bonuses. So sign up now at Chumba Casino dot com. That's Chumba Casino dot com. Sponsored by Chumba Casino, no purchase necessary, VGW group, void, we're prohibited by law, 18 plus terms and conditions apply. 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You had adventurers who were there as well, but it was families established all along the Jamest River, all kinds of settlements before the pilgrims got there. In fact, the pilgrims were trying to get there. It was a mistake that they went to Massachusetts. And they're a little different than the Puritans, I should say. They got absorbed into that. But the people who settled there were bringing their European traditions with them. And that included Christianity. So it wasn't that they were on a mission for, you know, we're going to establish a utopia here for Christ. It was more just, we're just bringing what we have with us and we're creating a life here, and that includes Christianity. Whereas in New England, yeah, there was a very much, we're coming here to create this great new society, the city upon a hill, and all the world's going to look at us and they're going to see that we're doing it right. And so there's this kind of apocalyptic mission. At the same time, though, I mean, the industries and stuff, they get involved in very quickly. They're seafaring people. And, I mean, I live in New York. I mean, you grew up in Long Island. And, you know, we're not far from Yankee dumb. Some would say we're in Yankee dumb. I mean, the society that's created here now, at least, is very much a market driven. What kind of job do you do? That's the first question. Absolutely. And the South, the first question is generally, if you're not in an urban area, at least, because I've lived in the South and people say, Hey, where are you from? That's the first question, right? That's the difference between Jamestown and I think Plymouth, too. So, you know, the Puritans having this Protestant work ethic, as Max Weber talks about there, they're all hands on deck for building this great society. They're moving towards it. Some people have compared it like a stagecoach to a farm, whereas in the South and Virginia, Hey, things get muddy on the farm. The pig does its thing, the horse does its thing, but we're all going to be living on the farm together. This is the best we can hope for because this is not heaven. Whereas the Puritans, it's a stagecoach. And each person's got a run. I think you've got rains on you. You're going to make sure you're going in this direction and you're going to achieve whatever the objective is. So, I think those analogies do well to kind of show the difference between the two regions. Right. And one of the things that I like about this, you know, from an eschatological perspective, is this idea that in the South, you had your very, if I could use the phrase, salt of the earth type of people, people who were coming along and saying, Hey, we're going to, we're going to live here. This is where we're going to build our generations after us. They're going to live here as well. Now, I would make the case that we need both perspectives. We need the perspective that others are watching. So let's be the city on the hill. But we also need the perspective of, Hey, what we're doing right now matters, you know, right now matters for eternity to borrow the sprolls quote. And so I think that's what you see happening in the South a lot of the time is they're looking at it and they're saying, Yeah, we're going to settle here. We're going to start families. We're going to have farms. We're going to start churches and we're going to live here and generations after us are going to live here and we're just going to focus on these things. And there's a beauty. There's a simplistic beauty to that I think that we really do need today as well. This idea that we're working for the future, working for future generations, not just those who are outside of our nation, right? But those who are here, those who are our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren. We want to build something for them, something tangible, right? That's not just market driven. It's not just about me getting ahead right now. It's about, what am I going to provide for my children? I think the question is, do you sacrifice your own children who you know and love and see in real life for your dream of achieving some kind of utopia or, you know, that city on the hill that we were talking about, you know, is it worth it to sacrifice your children for achieving that? And I think the answer is no. It's right. You know, and of course, if your dream conflicts with the well-being of your children, then it's probably not a good dream to have in the first place. But, but yeah, I mean, from an eschatological perspective, I mean, that's an interesting thing. I mean, my understanding, and I'm not an expert on this, but I think the Anglican Church was more on millennial. The Puritans, I know, I know there's a lot of post mill Puritans, but I think that ranges a bit with the Puritans because I know there were a lot of people think that all of the Puritans were post mill, right, and they weren't. The guys that were for sure, guys like Edward's, guys like Owen, obviously, but not all of them were post-millennial. And same thing, you know, those coming out of the Anglican Church. But what makes it difficult to try to pinpoint from a historical perspective is a lot of the time they're not really concerned with words like amillennialism, post-millennialism, because it really didn't exist. Yeah, those are modern terms. So that's why you have guys that will go back and they'll go, well, look, everybody from Augustine onward was amillennial. And you go, well, no, you can't do that because amillennialism as a term didn't exist. And so what you have really are different forms of post-millennialism and pre-millennialism onward. And so I think though, what you can make the case for arguably, you know, reading back today into yesterday is that, yeah, in the Anglican Church, you would have more of a sort of streamlined amillennialism as opposed to the Puritan post-millennialism. But again, you're going to have differences in both of those. Yeah, I think many of the Southern Presbyterians, like Dabney and Thornwell, I think they were both post-millennial if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, so later on, and it's interesting, this is something I would love to trace more of because it's fascinating to me, that what you have in the North, and you touch on this in the documentary, is somehow that Puritanism sort of veers off course and makes way for liberalism and rejection of Christianity, whereas in the South, you have Christianity beginning to take even greater hold on these people, so that you have later on a Dabney and Thornwell, all of these different great Southern Presbyterians who were in fact, not just post-millennial, but they were again reading back today and yesterday, they were conservative in their beliefs. They were orthodox, they were holding decreeds and confessions, and it's fascinating that you see that change of course happens, so do you want to touch on that in the North? How do we go from that to liberalism? Yeah, and we talk about it a little bit, we touch on it, I suppose in the documentary, it's about Virginia, obviously. Right. So we contrast with New England, but it's not a documentary about New England or Puritan. And by the way, let me just throw this in there, it doesn't attack New England either, that's not the goal. No, but I've been accused of that by even some of my own fans of my podcast are upset that this documentary, they think attacks Puritans, and you know, I don't see that, I don't think so. As a guy who loves the Puritans, I will say, I don't feel like it attacked the Puritans, I feel like we sometimes practice hero worship and Christianity. We are great at making idols of even fellow Christians, and we have to be very careful about that, rather than worshiping these men, we have to realize that they were imperfect, just like us, they had blind spots, just like we do, and that's why we read them, right? They had a lot of really helpful material, I mean, I don't know if anybody's able to see on my shelf, they're watching the video. I am surrounded by Puritan books, I love the Puritans, but they weren't perfect. Yeah, and I've gleaned a lot from the Puritans as well, so I would not stand for it if it was an outright attack that just dismissed everything Puritans ever said or did. And Sam Smith, who's the chair of the history department at Liberty University at one point, says, "Hey, I love the Puritans theology." And he says, "I don't think they wore their Calvinism well when it came to constructing a society." But he commends Geneva Calvinism, I mean, someone was saying it's anti-Calvinism, and I'm like, "I don't know how you get that," because he's basically arguing that our system of government comes from Calvinism. But what he means by-- I would agree with that. He doesn't think they constructed a good society, and he's talking about American Puritans, to be fair. He's not talking about just English Puritans, he's saying that if you look at their society and you see what happened to it within about a generation, they're already having problems. Jonathan Edwards talks about this issue, that they're willing to accept all these higher critical ideas, and eventually Darwinian ideas and stuff. But in the early 1800s, the congregational churches in New England go Unitarian overnight. It's incredible how fast-- I mean, we've never seen anything like this in the history of the country, I believe, on a denominational level, where you have such a flip. And what is that? What is Unitarianism? Well, it's this rationalistic kind of abstractions. It's against tradition. And that's the main thing I think that separates the south and the north, is the south does retain tradition more, and that includes in their Christianity. But they end up going Unitarian and transcendentalist, and you have all these reform movements that form around the same time and continue during the second part of the 19th century. Social gospel movement comes from that. So I'm talking about anti-Masonry and abolitionism, and women's suffrage, and not even just suffrage, women's rights, and I don't know, there's more than that. But anti-drinking, all of this stuff arises where? In New England, it arises in the north, and then eventually in some parts of the Midwest where that influences felt. And it turns into the social gospel, and that eventually turns into really, you know, a few steps later, modern liberalism, or if you want to call it leftism, it's probably a better term, but you have the modern left. And you can look at an election map some night, you know, and just look at the northeast, and you can see exactly what I'm talking about. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. So it's perplexing to me sometimes that modern conservatives and modern Christian conservatives, in fact, well, they want to say that the key to getting back to everything is we got to just copy the Puritans on everything. I would say, copy their good stuff, but also try to locate where they had a problem, because obviously there was a problem somewhere along the lines, and that's really, I think, what happened was when they secularized, when the Puritans became Yankees, as some people say, and they lost their Christianity. And they kept that spirit of perfectionism and conforming everything to the abstractions in their mind, that ideology was still there. It was really a fanaticism. And I think that's the key thing. It's not that they were post-millennial and post-millennial, because we will say, well, that that's what led to the social gospel. And then the fundamentalists had to react to that, and they were more disbeep, pre-mill, but even the fundamentalist movement comes out of the north, which is funny, and they retained a lot of the same thing, a lot of the same rules and things. So history's complicated, but it's the fanaticism. It is a little bit complicated. It's not the eschatology that I think drove them to that per se. They use that as a vehicle. We're creating the kingdom here, but it was the fanaticism. It was sort of like a tower of babble mentality that they had for conforming everything and thinking they could achieve this. Whereas I think in the south, even if you're post-mill, even if you're a Dabney, Thornwell actually has a good quote on this, and I can't remember exactly what he says. But basically along the lines of, you know, we are looking out for the providence of God. We are conforming our lives to the natural rhythms that God has laid down. And in his time, these things will take place, but we're not out there attempting to force something that God is not forcing. We're not trying to rigidly take everything, even including nature, and conform it to our ideas of what perfection looks like, because we think that that's going to usher in some kind of a great age of progress. So I think that's the difference. It's this spirit, and that's why it's a little hard to sometimes locate in discussions with people about this, because it is an attitude. It's a disposition. They're bringing just a mentality that's different to sometimes the same or similar theology. Yeah. And again, I think the thing that we need to highlight here, you said it earlier, that even as we look to the Puritans or even as we look to the south, we have to recognize they didn't get everything perfect. No, but there's good things that we can draw from them. And especially, I agree with the documentary, there's a lot of good things that we can draw from Virginia, especially around 1607 and what they were doing there. Now, here's another question, because I think if listeners are like me and you grew up northeast, you just have some things that you're confused about. Can you briefly just define what is the Federalist's perspective exactly? And what was the opposition that they were receiving? Okay, so like the Federalist and anti-Federalists then? Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, the Federalists were generally in support of the Constitution. The anti-Federalists were against the Constitution, or at least some of them were satisfied if there was a bill of rights added to the Constitution. And if people remember their American history, we had the Articles of Confederation. We lived under that before the Constitution of 1787. You think, wait, 1776 and then 1787, that gap was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which were a loose document. Ironically, in the document itself, it says it's supposed to be perpetual, but it obviously wasn't. We seceded from that and we formed something new because it wasn't working out. And we, you know, the official history, and there's some truth to this, I suppose, that we needed something that was a bit stronger, that the government needed the right to tax, and we needed to be able to compel states to do certain things, or else, you know, what's the point? And so we went from this loose arrangement to a more tight arrangement, if you want to think of it that way, and the anti-Federalists were just very skeptical of this. They didn't like concentrated power. So one of the things Barry Shane says in the documentary, though, is that actually the anti-Federalists, this is the confusing part, were the Federalists, and the Federalists were the Nationalists, because we talk about our federal government today and it doesn't make sense either. We're talking about a general kind of national government, not a federal. Federal government is, as the word implies, or confederation, is sovereigns that are banded together for a common cause or purpose, and that's what we were. That's what, as the name implies, the Confederacy. The Southern Confederacy was trying to bring back a sense of that. What the Constitution was supposed to honor this arrangement, that's why there's a 10th Amendment, even in their Bill of Rights, and there's very limited powers given to the presidency and the judiciary and the Congress. But the scary thing for the anti-Federalists, who were actually the real Federalists, they wanted states to still retain that sovereignty, was that they saw the writing on the wall. They saw this is too strong. You've elastic clauses in this, it's going to be used by the wrong people to enact centralization, and that's exactly what happened. They were 100% right. Starting with Alexander Hamilton and wanting a national bank, a means by which to have finance control, and then John Marshall, who actually is from Virginia, but he ended up, he was more of a strong Federalist. Washington was actually very influenced by Federalists. They did set the stage for what later came about, which was called the American system, Henry Clay, champion that, and then of course Abraham Lincoln. Once we get to Lincoln, this government has gotten so big and strong that we have the formation of the modern deep state at that point, and we've never been able to get rid of it since then. So yeah, it's fascinating. These things develop over time, and I think any one of them, probably even Alexander Hamilton, maybe not, but I think any of them, if they saw what we were living with today, would have been horrified. Absolutely, 100%. This is a lot of what we're encountering today is a lot of what I think they were trying to avoid, a lot of what they were trying to escape from, and the idea of limited government. I think is something that we really do need to recover. One of my sayings that I like to give to people is that I like my government, just like I like my atonement, limited. It's one of those things that people just absolutely, they miss it today. They miss it. And in the United States of America, what we need is a limited government. Otherwise, what you end up with is tyranny. You end up with a government that comes along and says, you got to get a vaccine. You got to get a shot. And if you don't get it, then you're going to be penalized in multiple different ways. And if we want to recover what classical Americanism would have been according to, you know, Virginia, we need limited government and we need also to recognize that, yeah, Christ is king, Christ is Lord. And so these heroes of ours, and we can have them. That's fine. But they had blind spots. If we want to actually have a recovery of, and not even just a recovery, if we want something better than what our forefathers in this land gave to us, then what we need is really to return to the Bible. We need to return to Scripture. So recognize these guys are good, but they're not perfect. The only perfect one is Jesus and the only perfect word is the Bible. And so we have a lot of conversations that need to take place. A lot of things that need to happen, but I think the recognition that needs to take place first is exactly what you touch on in the documentary that we can actually trace the founding of America, not 1619. That project is terrible, not even the 1776, but actually to 1607 with Virginia. So with all that in mind, I don't want to give more of the documentary away because I really do think people should watch it and I think that they will, they will gleam a lot from it if they're willing to engage it. But do you have any sort of closing words that you want to give to people so that they would be encouraged to go and seek out this documentary? Well, I think Jacob, you mentioned something that is important for Christians to understand. It said in the documentary at one point that Calvinism, Geneva Calvinism is almost a synonym with federalism because there's this idea in the Reform tradition, the Christian Reform tradition that man is evil and must be limited. And that's really what the founders were thinking through when they crafted our founding documents. It was one of the main things that we don't want a rule by the mob, but neither do we want a centralized authority that can be easily corrupted and wants power. We want something with checks and balances to make sure that man's evil is somewhat stymied. And I think that's the brilliance of the Virginia First Project because in 1619, if you want to pick that year as a significant year, that was the first elected legislature in the modern state. Now we call it United States, but on the North American continent. And that was in Virginia. And what they brought with them was English common law, which has this understanding already built into it that there should be checks and balances between those in authority and those who they are called to serve. And then you see this exemplified in the character of men from Virginia who saw as their, their duty in life to serve the people that were under them. That's why Washington was never paid. He didn't need a, he wasn't there to get wealthy. He was there to serve. He was there to make sure that the people in his proximity were taken care of. And so we see these different models of what leadership should look like in a federal system and the benefits of a federal system springing out first in Virginia. And I would love to get back to that. I don't, in our modern paradigm, it's going to be interesting to see how that would even take place. But I think the first part is to get involved in the local level. And so if people take nothing else from this documentary, localism, getting involved with the tangible people in your community doing what's best for them. Instead of always looking to the center, always thinking through, you know, Biden and Trump and what's going to be best for us politically on the national level or something. Think about the people in your actual with tangible communities. Think like the settlers did in 1607 when they had to cling to each other. And they were just trying to pass something down to the kids that came after them. Yeah. What's the saying county before country, right? Yeah, it's Michael Foster's. That's right. I think. Right. Yeah. And remember Christ is king. So if you got those things right, then we can actually see tangible differences being made. If anybody's listening to this and they're going, that's impossible. Well, remember with God, all things are possible. So we actually can see a return to this. And I would argue we can even see something better than this form, but it's going to take Christians that are committed to actually being local. Christians that are committed to their their counties and being involved, not just politically, but actually being involved in their local counties where they're living. So with all of that in mind, again, the documentary is Virginia 1st, the 1607 project. Where can we're going to try to put it in the show notes and also we'll try to link it below on YouTube, but where can people watch this if they'd like to go watch it. They can go to believe it 1607 project.com I'm just going to make sure that that's right and I'm giving you the right. Let's see if it comes up. Yep, that's it 1607 project.com and I should mention there is a book that accompanies this as well. So if people want to dig deeper into what the documentary talks about, grab the book and check it out. Yeah, definitely. And this comes highly recommended for me really enjoyed it and I thank you, John, for your work on it. And let this be an encouragement to for all of our listeners, even if you're not in the United States. Study the history of your country study, you know, what brought us to the point where we're currently at. And at the same time be asking yourself, how can I be involved in such a way that I can promote godliness that I can actually help. My children, my grandchildren, my great grandchildren to inherit something better than what I had. And let's let's focus too on this on this fact that Christ really is king. And as eschatology does matter, we know that we're heading towards a very particular very definite end where Christ is going to return and he will reign as king over everything but until then we're imperfect people were sinners. And we need to live in a government. So let's work on these different things. John, thank you again for being on the show today. And I want to encourage everybody please go check out Virginia 1st, the 1607 project. Until next time, God bless. God bless. It is Ryan C. Crest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to Chumbagocino.com. It's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumbagocino has over 100 online casino style games all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at Chumbagocino.com. Sponsored by Chumbagocino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. 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