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What is Christian nationalism? And should we worry? Mark David Hall · One Universe, Two Books

• speaker-0: Welcome to a new episode of One Universe Two Books, a podcast brought to you by the National Association of Scholars. This is the podcast where we examine the deeper issues of science, faith, and the interplay between them. Today we have a special guest, Mark David Hall. He teaches at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University and is one of the most outstanding scholars of early America. His publications have persuasively argued for the crucial importance of Christianity in the flourishing of the American experiment and ordered liberty. He is widely regarded as a student of religious liberty and church state relations in the US and has served as an expert witness for the U.S. Department of Justice, the state of Arkansas, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, and the Institute for Justice. Prior to Regent, he was the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University. And has written quite a few books, including Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism? Why Christian Nationalism is not an existential threat to America or the church? Proclaimed liberty throughout all the land, how Christianity has advanced freedom and equality for all Americans. And did America have a Christian founding, separating modern myth from historical truth? This is just a sample of some of the books that he's written and the timely. The timeliness of this debate can't really be overstated because we're in a period of national flux and questions about what does a America mean? Is there a spiritual dimension to being American? What is the meaning of liberty, the role of government? These are just some of the questions we're gonna tackle today. We hope you enjoy. Welcome, Mark. How you doing? speaker-1: Doing very well, thank you. speaker-0: So we came across your work through a colleague, and when she mentioned it, it was it was kind of fascinating how timely and prescient all this stuff is, because we see t things like Christian nationalism in the media and everybody tenses up like they're looking for a booby man. And you've written extensively on what I would say is the Christian founding of the United States, which is kind of different than the way it's portrayed in in many. venues, including higher education. So let's to kick it off, what is Christian nationalism? It seems like a term that's almost used as a pejorative by the political left to demonize the right. and there also doesn't seem to be a neatly valid comparison to a concept of Christian nationalism, unlike some of the other isms out there, like Islamism or Zionism or Marxism or anything else that has a a superstructure overtone to it that relates to religion. speaker-1: So I'm very happy to discuss the American founding, but let me begin with Christian nationalism. So basically, no one in America is using the term Christian nationalism. No one is saying I am a Christian nationalist, Christian nationalism is a good thing. It begins being used in 2006, where you get a a steady stream of books decrying the threat of Christian nationalism. So according to these critics, Christian nationalism Is about Christians who want to take over America for Christ and oppress pretty much everyone, certainly women, certainly racial minorities, certainly non-Christians. And so it's a really, really scary thing. We should be very, very afraid of it. And this steady stream of books becomes a river as we enter the age of Donald Trump, who is is of course ahead of the Christian nationalists. And then after January 6, 2021, this this river becomes a flood. And so there's this great and dire threat of these mean-spirited Christians who want to take over America and oppress everyone else. In in this context, it really is remarkable that when you get to about 2022, for the first time, you get Americans who say, yeah, I am a Christian nationalist. So a Doug Wilson, a Marjorie Taylor Green, a Stephen Wolfe, a Torba and Isker. And so now you actually have people arguing for something they call Christian nationalism. What they mean by it is something pretty different than what the critics mean, although there's a areas of overlap. So you're exactly right. It's a very pejorative phrase that is primarily used by critics, although you have this handful of advocates out there that actually want to claim it as their own. speaker-0: Okay, so that's interesting. So it doesn't le it doesn't seem like an endogenous term to that's used by, Christian Americans until very, very recently. and even then it's in a very narrow context. But you mentioned that this didn't really emerge till two thousand six. So what was that reaction to? was it something in the Bush years in nine eleven or like the rise of evangelicals of loading block? speaker-1: Yeah, so basically I think it's a logical extension of the anti religious right literature that began in the nineteen eighties, right? Where the religious right is a thing, and people like Jerry Fowl, Pat Robertson, and others actually claim that label as their own, maybe the moral majority or it might be called different things. But definitely it's a movement of Christians saying we need to engage in politics and capture political institutions and bring about our desired results, results that are understandably scary to some people. If you're very pro-choice and you have this movement out there that wants to say we want to protect human life from conception until it's until the natural birth, yeah, you'd be afraid of that. And of of course a religious right was for things like teacher led prayer in public schools. And so non-Christians and religious minorities are understandably scared of that or worried about that. And so you do have this literature that begins in the nineteen eighties. Again, I think it oftentimes overstates a threat. We can be critical of the religious right, or we can be critical of some of their policy aims without thinking that there's this organization out there that wants to return us to Jim Crow legislation that wants to kill heretics and that sort of thing. And so this literature against the religious right really overstated the threat, I think. And then around two thousand and six, I think maybe the old rhetoric of religious right, moral majority just wasn't doing it anymore. And so the critics sort of shifted to this new idea of Christian nationalism that very much took root. So I had to read a lot of really bad books. There are probably 50 books that are solidly aimed at American Christian nationalism. And then we're getting some that are looking at the phenomenon in other countries, especially countries like France, Germany, Hungary and places like that. speaker-0: Right. Interesting. you've made the point in some of your articles, actually many of your articles, Mark, that that you know, the the th the connection of Christian faith to the founding of the republic, there's this kind of tendency to emphasize what I might call non threatening deism versus versus actual doctrinal Christianity and and that this notion of deism is kind of a safe refuge for people to to you know bring in religion safely into the public square. and there was one article that you wrote that I was unfortunately unable to get behind the paywall about the Supreme Court jurisprudence, about you know, where the boundary is and and and those sorts of things. What is the legal history, if you will, of this boundary between safetyism on the on one side, which many, many people practice in many different ways. You spoke about the founding fathers doing it, but you still see it in modern times right now in and in in the same context, versus actual doctrinal Christianity. You know, where's where's the court actually drawn the boundary between those things? speaker-1: Let me begin answering that question real quickly in the founding era, and then I'll move to the specific question. So if you go to the American founding, ninety-eight percent of Americans of European descent are Protestants. They would have identified themselves as Protestants. Two percent are Roman Catholic. You have maybe a thousand five hundred Jews in four or five American cities. So it's just an overwhelmingly Protestant country. The number of founders, the number of people in the founding era who approximated anything that looks like deism is just a handful or two. Hardly anyone. Now we we get confused, I think, because they're very prominent Americans, people like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine. And so there definitely are these folks are at least heterodox Christians, if not actually deist. But if you think about that that that small group for a minute, Thomas Paine is from England. Jefferson Adams and and Franklin all spent significant time in Europe in an era where almost no Americans did. Franklin spent over half of the last thirty-five of years of his life in Europe. And so these folks are simply put, they're not a representative sample. If if you leave these very elite, very important founders, I'm not trying to take anything away from them, but you go down to the sort of people who are serving in the first federal congress, the state legislatures, ratification conventions, basically you have run in the mill. Protestants who are not at all deists. Now there are profound debates going on about religious liberty and church-state relations in the founding era. Fortunately, from my perspective, pretty much everyone had come to recognize that religious liberty requires religious equality. We aren't going to have religious tests for office. We're going to protect the ability of all Americans not only to believe what they want, but to worship as they want and to act on their religious convictions whenever possible. So there's a lot of consensus there. But on the question of are we going to have an official established church, there was certainly division. So by most counts, nine of the thirteen colonies and then states had religious establishments. In the late 18th century, some begin to disestablish. Massachusetts finishes the process in about 1833. But none of that was driven by deism. People like Jefferson and Madison were involved, to be sure, but usually it was Pretty indisputably pious Christians who are saying, wait a minute, when the government controls a church, this is bad for the church, so we need to get the government out of that business. But it definitely is a state level movement. The First Amendment doesn't even apply to state governments. This all changes in 1947. So now we're getting to your actual question. In a case called Everson versus a Board of Education. The US Supreme Court for the first time said the establishment clause applies to the states. The establishment of clause, of course, is that first part of the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Now, we can go into this in greater detail if you want. I think the original understanding of that is really quite straightforward. We are not going to have an official established church of the United States of America in the same way that England had. And still has an official church, the the Church of England, right? We aren't going to have that. And so by incorporation, now we're gonna say that Massachusetts, New Mexico, Virginia cannot have official established churches either. But that's not really an issue since none no state had an official established church. And one one hadn't been around until 1833. But what the court did in that in in that opinion is they made an argument, a very bad historical argument. As an originalist, I don't like mind the first premise. The court said Wiley Rutledge for the dissent, Hugo Black for the majority. They both said these are progressive justices, but they said we must interpret the establishment clause in light of the founders' views. Well, so far, so good. But then they went on to say Thomas Jefferson and James Madison equal the American founders. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wanted a strict separation between church and state, a wall of separation between church and state. Therefore, the establishment clause requires a wall of separation between church and state. And so the court then embarked on decades of jurisprudence trying to figure out how exactly that applies. Can New Jersey subsidize children taking buses to private religious schools? can there be teacher-led prayers? in public schools? Can you read the Bible over an intercon? Can a student say a prayer before a football game over an intercom? Can diagnostic tests be given by the state at private religious schools? And so there's just a twangmire of really oftentimes contradictory decisions that went back and forth and it wasn't always in the separationist direction. It was just Truly unpredictable. And it was all because of this very bad syllogism that attributed to Jefferson and Madison pretty much godlike powers when it comes to the establishment clause. Even though speaker-0: No. speaker-1: Jefferson wasn't in America at the time. He didn't help write the First Amendment. He didn't help ratify the First Amendment. And so why we should look to him to shine light on the First Amendment is really quite beyond me. speaker-0: Yeah. I I can't help but wonder how much of this debate and conception goes to just the situation of the founding itself, where you had most Americans aren't aware of it, but these were not like this was not a cohesive country. There was like thirteen kind of different countries that were called states for a reason. And they they began to w Have to overcome these coordination problems that ultimately led to the Constitution. But you have this sort of federalism issue where each colony brought their own legacies with them vis-a-vis religion, but you also had a public sphere versus private sphere aspect to this, an elite versus, I would say, non-elite, like what you're talking about with the deists. So it's almost like just structurally, Christianity was built into it and also not just because of this whole. game theory problem of actually trying to how would it actually translate doctrinally into the founding of the country? speaker-1: Yeah, think that's such an important insight. So since nineteen thirty six, we, the United States of America, we Americans pretty much let Congress get away with whatever it wants. It can pass legislation on any issue on any matter, and there's no real constitutional constraints on it. If you go back and read Article One, Section Eight, you'll see that Congress actually is given relatively few enumerated powers, and they're powers to do the sort of things that a national government really needs to do. Have armed forces, do international relations, regulate interstate commerce, have a post office, coin money. And so really it's quite limited. There's no power for the national government to get involved in education, in punishing crime, in helping poor people. And I'm not saying governments shouldn't do that. The assumption was those things would be done by the state or local governments. If we're gonna have the state involved in education, it's gonna be the state of Virginia or the state of Massachusetts or the state of Kentucky, right? it's gonna be those states that decide how we're gonna punish even serious crimes like murder in some states that might have the death penalty, in other states it might not have the death penalty. It's states that will decide at what age people will can't get married. Boy, I'm not sure what it is nowadays. I it's my understanding that in Louisiana used to be able to get married at the age of fourteen. That seems like a horrible idea to me, but it's a state that gets to make that sort of decision. And many of these laws were in fact informed by Christian morality and let's be honest, Protestant morality. And this continued well into the 20th century. I can give you a nice concrete example of this. As late as nineteen sixty one, forty nine of fifty states had laws requiring at least some businesses to close on Sunday. Not one day of the week, but Sunday. These are laws that are clearly informed by by my Christian morality, right? By the fourth fourth commandment, depending on how you how how you count them. these laws were challenged by a variety of Jewish individuals and businesses who basically said this is unfair to us. we voluntarily closed our businesses on Saturday, and now we're forced to close them on Sunday. So we're at a disadvantage. And so they asked for these laws to either be declared unconstitutional or for them to be given. An exception to these laws, remarkably, this is 1961 or 1962, I forget exactly, but it's one of those two years. Earl Warren, for the majority of the Supreme Court, said, these laws are just fine. They might have had their origins in in a Protestant and Christian understanding of the Sabbath, but we have other good reasons for them nowadays. And so we're going to keep them in place. But all that's to reinforce your vital point. that really until we hit nineteen thirty-six, states are doing tons of things that we now look to the national government to do. And oftentimes these things were informed by Christian Christian morality, but they would vary. They would vary from state to state. That's exactly right. As and especially then as you get waves of immigr immigrants from Europe, especially Catholic immigration, the states then became even more more diverse. speaker-0: Yeah, the the the in the public square where you know, there there's a very interesting problem here in terms of defense of cultural norms. You know, the the the idea that you cannot have an established religion, okay, I think that's pretty clear from the Constitution, if we understand the if we all agree on the terms established religion, what that means. But then when you get into the kind of a deistic idea where, okay, it's it's important that we have some faith in a higher being or something along those lines as a as a as a set of guardrails on public morality, that really is kind of a leads us into a dangerous situation, And I'm thinking of fights over crushes or prayers in schools or religious groups in schools or things like this. You see all kinds of bizarre things like all right, well, if you can have a a nativity scene, then the Satanists have to be allowed to bring in their their statue of the goat god and and and then you have issues like church of Scientology. I I mean i is the is Scientology a church or is it something else? And of course in in my area of biology, you know, see a kind of quasi religious cult of of of Gaia. Our last guest on One Universe Two Books spoke about the emergence of what he called religious ecology, you know, that that kind of sneaking you know the higher power if you will into in through the back door. And is there anything in the Constitution or is there anything in the case laws that that that you know of that allows local communities to say to the Satanists, no, that's nonsense. You're not putting up your your your goat god here, you know, and and you know and similarly with with the the cult of Gaia, you know. I mean in if you truly i if you look at Teaching of ecology, ecological principles in the schools, that's a that's a cult, religious cult going on there. So is there any guidance in the law or anything like anything like that that can protect I'm gonna say at normal religion against those kinds of crazy ideas? speaker-1: Let me take a step back to the founding to begin to answer that question and I'll bring it up to the present day. So very good law professor, Michael McConnell down at Stanford, has come up with what he calls the six hallmarks of a religious establishment. So obviously saying something like the Church of England is the official church of Virginia and everyone's going to be taxed to support the Church of England. That's an established religion, and we aren't going to have that. But establishments went way beyond that. It included, for instance, literally, they did this in Virginia, the House of Urgency's. Told the Church of England in Virginia how it was going to govern itself. It told priests how often they would preach. There was a law in New York that required established clergy to baptize any baby that was brought to them, even if they might have objections to doing that. Quakers and Catholics were banned from both Massachusetts Bay and And in and Virginia. And we keep k keep going on. So there are a lot of things that are prohibited by the establishment clause, other than the creation of a single formal established church. But then there are some things that are clearly permitted. government officials encouraging individuals to be religion. And note the encouragement they're not coercing. so the day after, I think it was the day after Congress finally passed the what what eventually became the First Amendment. the House of Representatives asked President Washington to issue a Thanksgiving Day proclamation. There was some debate about it, but eventually the the House agreed to do this. The Senate agreed with the House, and Congress requested George Washington to issue a Thanksgiving Day proclamation. It's remarkably theologically robust. Your listeners, your viewers can look it up. George Washington Thanksgiving Giving Day Proclamation 1789. it it really is robust. He he encourages Americans to pray on a particular day. And he gets into detail. He says, look, we should get down on our knees and beg forgiveness for our national sins and give God the glory for everything that is good. That sort of encouragement is perfectly fine. There is absolutely no reason to think any founder would have thought a monument of the Ten Commandments, a memorial cross on public land, a crush on public land would be an establishment of religion. They just simply were not. And so today, and I think the Supreme Court has finally gotten its act straight on this. When the government speaks, the government doesn't have to say everything. So we can have a a radio free Europe, right? We we used to have that. I think it might still be around. The fact that we do that as the United States government doesn't mean we also have to have a fascism for Europe or a communism for Europe or a socialism for Europe, right? That the when the government speaks, it can limit what it says. And so if my hometown in Newburgh, Oregon, wants to put up a Christ a crush for Christmas, it can do that. And the satanic temple has no right at all to say, okay, we also want the goat goat god. Now, sometimes what towns do is they create what's called a limited public forum. They said, Well let private groups put displays on public property. When a government does that, It can't discriminate on the basis of view viewpoint. There was a famous case a few years ago coming out of Boston that actually discriminated in the opposite way. Boston would allow they had like three flagpoles in front of City Hall, they had the American flag and the Massachusetts flag, and then a third flagpole, and they would let different groups run their flag up that pole on special days. So on Columbus Day, Italian Americans could run up the Italian flag, BLM would run up its flag. LGBT ki types would run up the rainbow flag. And then a Christian group says, okay, we want to run up the Christian flag. I forget the date. Let's say it was a July 4th. And Boston said, no, no, no, you can't do that. They took their case to the Supreme Court and they won. Because Boston had made that limited public form available to a wide degree of groups, it can't discriminate. It can't discriminate against the the the Christian flag and it can't discriminate against the LGBTQ flag. And if you don't want either or both of those flags, just get out of the business of letting private groups use those the flagpole. And so that's where we hear these cases. A case in the Iowa state house where in fact the satanic temple was able to put up their their altar to bail or whatever exactly it is, is because of this limited public forum, not because of the First Amendment. speaker-0: It it's it's interesting how this orientation towards neutrality as a positive principle seems to almost be a slow-moving move towards, I would say, alm almost layism or almost nihilism in some sense. And I know in a 2023 interview, you talk about James Wilson, who is one of the first Supreme Court justices. I think he was like the first associate justice. And he wrote extensively on different types of law, moral law versus cosmic law, versus human law, etc. And he and if digging into that, it's almost he's he's almost a theologian in some of what he's writing, but he he comes up with this idea that you you have to have something of an alignment between moral absolute law and civic law in order for that law to really be valid. So basically you have to have this alignment between reason on the one hand and revelation on the other. And I think that that's almost a completely overlooked aspect of how the American legal system may have at one point connected to the greater Judeo Christian Western tradition. And I'm I'm not sure that that exists anymore in our constitutional or legal system, at least explicitly. speaker-1: That's exactly right. Let me just highlight James Wilson to reinforce the the the the point you're making. So he signs a declaration. He played a very important role writing the Constitution, early Supreme Court justice, gave a series of law lectures at the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. And when you read parts of those lectures, you could be mistaken to think you're reading St. Thomas Aquinas. He makes distinctions, as you already suggested, between divine law and human law. Of the divine law, there are three types: eternal law, celestial law, moral law, and natural physical laws. Human laws, human positive laws, must be based on the the natural moral law. An unjust law is no law at all, he says, echoing Saint Augustine, of course. And so yeah, he he's laying this out. Practically, he clearly says that if Congress were to pass a law that violates a natural law. The U.S. Supreme Court could strike it down. And in fact, every single justice prior to John Marshall, with one exception, is on record saying something very similar. And this is remarkable because it's all before Marbury versus Madison, right? Judicial review is still a contested idea. And yet a justice like Wilson thinks obviously an unjust law is no law at all. And so therefore it could be eliminated. This sort of logic continues into the 19th century, but it very quickly is swept away by the Positivism, which we import from Europe, where we really kind of we Americans kind of arrive at the law, the idea of law as a command. Law is simply the command of the sovereign, and whatever the c sovereign commands is law. Now, of course, you still have this idea that unjust law is no law at all. So we have the famous letter from the Birmingham Jail. where the the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King makes this exact same distinction. but he of course is is a reverend and a civil rights activist, not a judge. Judges very rapidly get out of the business of saying we're gonna strike that law down because it's immoral or it goes against the natural law. Yes, I d I I do find it yeah, i i I think it is problematic. That we've made this divorce. And oftentimes, legislators, I think, are not even particularly, they are free to pass laws based upon the natural law, to pass laws banning segregation on the basis of race simply because it's wrong, right? They're free to do that. but I think there's a lot less inclination to do that nowadays, and and our law is probably impoverished by it. There is an element of neutrality though, when it comes to governments choosing between the the good. I and I think at least I I'll just say this speaking for myself as a Burke and Conservative, I I really worry if we just say, Okay, states are free to completely require whatever they want in terms of public education, maybe prohibit private education and say, Okay, we're just gonna use public education to indoctrinate children and the virtues of LGTBQ rights and this sort of thing. I I I think the results are going to be horrific in about half of the states. Certainly it would be horrific in the state of Oregon, Washington, California. And so I kind of like the idea that we say, well, no, there's significant limitations on the power of the state. States simply cannot ban private education, right? Oregon tried that and the US Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. and then when it comes to states, in effect, attempting to indoctrinate children. I think there should be limits on that. And of course there's no such thing as complete neutrality, but we could perhaps agree, okay, we aren't going to take five year olds and try to train them to be Orthodox Jews or conservative Catholics or pro LGBTQ activists. Why don't we train them to read and write and think and let let their parents or let institutions of civil society take care of these other sorts of concerns. speaker-0: So going back to the legal basis for this, you know, let's let's imagine that we can go back to that that Supreme Court decision that you outlined that basically made that statement from Jefferson and Madison into effectively constitutional law. Suppose it had gone the other way. do you think that we would be in a different landscape of this debate between religious liberty, what can be taught in the public square or in public schools or things like this. Do you have any thoughts on what would have happened if that Supreme Court decision had gone the other way? speaker-1: Well, I I like that question a lot. first of all, we have to recognize that you know, we still were a system of federalism in the mid-20th century. And so I've seen some studies on this. I can't point right to them, but I think it's a case that only about half of the school districts actually had teacher-led prayer in public schools. So some states had said, No, we aren't gonna do that based on our own state constitutions. Other states as a matter of policy made those decisions. and so even when you had have the famous Ingall versus Vitale decision, it's only affecting about half the school districts. And if you look at that decision, it was a New York case and it involved a prayer that was written by a committee. And prayers written by committees, I I don't think are ever all that good, and they certainly aren't glorifying to God. So it went something like this, I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, God, please bless our day. Help us to be good and to be nice to each other. Amen. Right? A a really bland prayer. So I'm not sure how much that sort of thing, and I say this as an Orthodox Christian who believes in prayer, but I'm not sure how much that state imposed prayer on public school children actually helped anything from a Christian perspective. so the court fortunately you know issued this horrible opinion in Everson versus the Board of Education. The good thing about that opinion is nobody Ever really believed there can be a wall of separation between church and state? Think about that for a minute. Are churches so somehow going to be exempt from building codes? Are synagogues going to be exempted from fire codes? Are priests going to be able to commit crimes and not be arrested by police? No, no one ever thought that. Nobody, literally, no one ever thought that. And so that the the idea that there's a wall of separation that was laid out in Ever since. Never really made sense. And the court attempted to fix this in 1971 by coming up with a flawed analytical test known as the Lemon test. And this was truly a limit of a test. I I won't go through it right now. We can't watch. Basically it led to all sorts of contradictory results. And eventually the Supreme Court got so fed up with it that it largely ignored it beginning in the 1990s, except when it didn't. Fortunately, in the 21st century, we have a lot of good justices who are saying, okay, we're done with the lemon test. The test was finally killed and buried a couple of years ago. And the court now really is relying on the original understanding of the establishment clause, which leads to a lot of very reasonable results. That you can have things like a monument of the Ten Commandments in on the state house, Texas State House grounds. then in fact, you don't have to tear down a 1925 Memorial Cross that's now on public land in Prince George's County, Maryland. that children who go to charter schools, even if they're religious schools, can still receive state funding. And moreover, the court has become crystal clear that states can't discriminate on the basis of religion. And so we're really in a in a a a nice neutral situation with respect to that. And I think that's helpful. So I I I gotta lay my cards on the table. I am just not an advocate of public schools of any sorts. what I am an advocate of is giving parents the ability to provide the sort of education that they believe their children need. And so that might be an Islamic education, it might be a Jewish education, it might be a Protestant education. i i th there's all sorts of options out there. And so I love the movement toward school choice, vouchers, charters and this sort of thing. I think that's going to be far more useful than getting rid of Everson and Lemon and allowing states to teach religion in public schools, which I just don't think will turn out well for anyone. speaker-0: Yet at the same time, th th there are groups out there that the that take this idea of a separation between, you know, the the church or religion and the public square very seriously. And in one of your articles you you had mentioned of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. And and you know, I I I them primarily o over the fights of of teaching anything but the Darwinian dogma for how evolution works and and and and they are very, very adamant about it. I was I was just in Dayton, Tennessee, for example, doing a documentary on the Scopes trial and the Freedom from Religion Foundation swept in and, you know, they they regard the separation very s they take that very seriously, you know, that we cannot have anything but the the kind of Darwinian scripture being taught in public schools and and have there been any court cases where that kind of defense of this this doctrine of a separation between church and state I have a follow up to this thing I wanna touch on to this. 'cause I you mentioned in the in in a in an interview, I think it was in twenty twenty three, you know, the religious liberty can't be absolute. And I think to Scott's point that the law and the government have reverted to almost a nonstance that sort of empowers atheism, if you will, as a as a movement and a default. And the reason I bring this up is because every religion has assumptions about cosmology, the human being within that cosmology, ethics The role of what a human being can and cannot do, should and should not do. And that affects things like conceptions of natural law. And I think that there's a large enough overlap, you know, certainly between different Christian denominations, at least in their orthodoxy, as well as Judaism, and Islam to a large degree. And if you go to ethics, you could expand that probably even farther to Hinduism, but and and and Sikhism. But if you If you have atheism as a as a legal default, you're going to empower the state to break natural laws, like things like basic gender differences, things like when does human life actually begin? What is the relationship between a parent and a child? And I think it relates to what we're seeing in some of these court cases now, because it's having real ramifications on everything from abortion to transgender. ideology and schools and policy there. But, I I want to s I want to ask, how do we reobtain that that hold on natur on natural law that does seem to allow for religious diversity, as to as Scott would say, I would say sane religions, as opposed to where if you if you have atheism as the default, anything goes, and that includes in science. speaker-1: Yeah, boy, those are both great questions. So let me begin with Scopes. Scopes of course won his case, right? I'm sorry, he didn't win. He with Tennessee speaker-0: No, he lost it. He lost it. Supreme Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still Tennessee won and then it was overturned and Scopes was l let off scot free. Off of the hundred dollar fine he was assessed basically. So speaker-1: On the on the technicality, that's right. That's what I meant. But so Tennessee had a lot prohibiting the teaching of evolution. And what you had William Jennings Bryan come in to defend the law, Clarence Darrow come in to it make him look like a buffoon and largely succeeded. And then we all know about this from the play Inherit the Wind that makes the anti evolution folks look like buffoons. the important thing to recognize is Tennessee's law remained on the books and i and really Th there was a lot of teaching of evolution going on and a lot of that went away until we get to the nineteen sixties with the space race and a desired desire to do science a lot better. And so in the nineteen and pretty sure it's the nineteen sixties, there was a case, Epperson versus Arkansas, where the Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of evolution was struck down as a violation of the establishment clause. A very questionable decision. I'm not a huge fan of those sorts of laws. just as a practical matter, but I think as a matter of the First Amendment, it's ridiculous. And then later, I'm sure you know sure you know much more about this than I do, Scott. You had states that began to pass laws saying things like, well, okay, w if the state wants to teach the theory of evolution, it also has to teach the scientific evidences for creationism. And the court again struck in stepped in and struck th those down as a violation of the establishment clause. Utterly ridiculous as a matter of constitutional law. And I think it does go to your point, Ian. There really is this proclivity to use the establishment clause to establish atheism or scientist scientificism or something like that over and against anything that's religious. Clearly, that's not the purpose of the establishment clause. And it's it it's not where we should go. Let me retreat again to what I suggested earlier. I I've just kind of given up hope getting the public schools fixed. What I would much prefer to see is states empowering parents to send their children to the sort of schools that that they believe are proper. And I think what you would he have is certainly many parents would send their children to religious schools. Plenty would send them to non-religious schools, Montessori schools or classical academies or this sort of thing. but my guess is they would on balance be far more sane, far more r r reasonable than this kind of crazy atheism. evolution is all there is. Certainly well, we had a case out of Montgomery County, Maryland, where the the county was literally indoctrinating young children, five, six, seven, on the virtues of LGBTQ rights. And teachers were instructed if a five-year-old were were to say, Well, marriage is between a man and a woman, the teacher was instructed to say things like, Well, that's harmful. You ought not to say that sort of thing. the Montgomery County used to allow penetrators to opt out of that. Ironically, so many parents wanted to opt their kids out of that. That Montgomery County, of course, did they take the lesson that we shouldn't do this? No, they removed the opt-out provision. And what's kind of fun about that case is the parents come from a constellation of religious traditions and non-religious traditions, Islamic parents, Ethiopian Orthodox, and otherwise. And so, yeah, I I just want to get the state out of this business altogether. And I know we aren't going to be anywhere near getting rid of public schools anytime soon, but at least we're seeing profound movements towards charter schools, vouchers and and this sort of thing. And then plenty of parents just going out on their own dime and homeschooling or doing private schools on their own. so that's where that's where my hope is. So that we can then have good solid schools that provide education. that that's meaningful. Let me just real briefly say that my wife and I sacrificed tremendously to send our children to a classical Christian school that really did teach from our worldview as well as a more rigorous academic education. I served on the board and an interesting question came up. Are is this classical Christian school going to teach the theory of evolution? And we came to the conclusion that yes, any Yeah, educated Americans should be familiar with the scientific evidences for evolution. So yeah, the in bi in the proper biology class and tenth grade or whatever, children would learn about the theory of of evolution, but they would also learn about the problems with the theory and the evidences for creation. And so, you know, that's I'm not saying that's the solution that everyone needs to do. I just want to point out that even a relatively conservative Christian school could see the virtue of teaching about evolution. But certainly not to the exclusion of all other theories and certainly not to the exclusion of the problems with the theory of evolution, which as you know, advocates of evolution just want to want to ignore oftentimes. speaker-0: Yeah. And you know, in in the in the case of the school choice issue that you were just describing, Mark, you know, the the the the hidden subtext of the whole scope's trial was actually about school choice. You know, prior to prior to nineteen twenty five, there was no state of Tennessee involvement in schools. It was all run by locally elected school boards who took the responsibility themselves to fund the schools and to run the schools and to set the curriculum and and what was going on in the nineteen twenties was this rise of a kind of a an urban scientistic o approach towards towards education and the r what science was and all these sorts of things. And the opposition came to to local school boards came as much from the state of Tennessee as it did from outside groups like the ACLU then. the the local school boards didn't want the state of Tennessee involved in in in in in helping educate their or actually s I sorry, not helping, dictating what what students would be taught in schools. And you know, I think I'm I'm in alignment with you, Mark. You know, I I I mean my my feeling is that if we could get back to actually locally controlled schools, that were responsive to the local communities that I think we'd be a lot better off. And I often tell this story. I had a friend who was a school board president, w we live in a rural school district, and he was president for many years and he's he he told me that ninety percent of their budget is state and federal mandates, you know, meeting those things. They only had effective control over about ten percent of their budgets and And those aren't independent schools, then I'm sorry. You know, so if we want to save the public schools, I think there's a strong case to be made for that. We need to get the states and the federal government. I I have a I have a contrarian view to s to some of this and and I'll pose it to both of you actually. It it all you know, you mentioned in in in an interview, Mark, you know, that reason and revelation, you know, reason and and faith Don't contradict because truth doesn't really contradict, right? And and that's a that's a very classic Western approach to understanding existence. And I think without that principle, you you lose a lot in terms of how you approach the accumulation of knowledge and then dispensing that in terms of education. And religious movements who are pushing back against a lot of the, I would say the atheism and policy that we've been talking about. They seem to lack the academic or legal, I don't want to say knowledge exactly, but the ability to articulate it in a way that builds institutions that can actually roll back the nihilism that we're seeing. And, you know, in order to defend the founders' ideas, because you know, it'd be great to get rid of public schools, but how do you have a commonality enough to ensure that you have a cohesive civilization also? Because, we're in a very different situation now. If you if you remove that, I could see us becoming a a weird Western version of the Ottomans where we have these different millet system, you know, identity groups with their own education systems that then ultimately all just sort of splinter apart. And that seems just as dangerous. And I'm wondering how do we get that knowledge of and not aversion to education as a concept back to these religious movements that are trying to roll these things back. speaker-1: Well, I think that's a that's a million dollar question. I I think that's excellent. I understand you're pursuing a doctorate in Holland. Holland has, from my understanding, and most of this comes from a book called The Challenge of Pluralism, a wonderful approach to education based on Abra Abraham Kuyper's notion of spear sovereignty and then pillarization, whereby the Dutch government funds a wide range of schools. They're just all over the place, right? Conservative, Calvinist, atheist, Jewish, Islamic. Montessori and this sort of thing. And so parents really do have school choice in a way we don't have anywhere in America. And yet the Dutch government still very responsibly says, reasonably says, okay, schools, you do have to do certain things. You gotta teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. You gotta teach basic science. You need to teach, you know, something about what it means to be a good citizen. And so I think that's the sort of balance we can maybe look for. Let's just limit it to the state level. right now, because that's maybe realistic. So a state, let's say Tennessee, could say, okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn over schools to local control, or we're gonna come up with this robust voucher system that allows parents to send their children to a wide range of of schools, but we're gonna have some guide rails in place. We are gonna require children to be educated, right? At least through the age of 16. If a parent says, Well, I think I'll just stop educating my child at age eight. And put them to work in a factory, the state could appropriately step in and say no. If a parent says, well, we're not going to educate our children at all in English, again, conceivably the state could step in and say, No, you we we aren't going to prohibit discrimination in German or some other language, but you are going to need to teach English, you're going to need to teach basic citizenship. So I think there's ways in which states could provide guardwood rails and empower a wide range of schools. And that would on balance be a good thing. Now there would be parents even in Tennessee who would choose models of education and worldviews that I find abhorrent. And I think that would be the that would be the cost. Maybe in the same way that freedom of religion requires a freedom to the extent to which the satanic temple is really a religious movement, and I'm not sure it is, but to the extent to which it really is, yeah, they they do have a right to build a temple and meet for worship and maybe even say things and do things that I find abhorrent. Yeah, that's that's part of the cost of being a free a free country. But it but I think a balance I have faith in the American people. I think most American parents would make good choices for their children. speaker-0: Yeah, and just to answer your question, you posed it to me as well. You know, th that that is the nub of the problem, isn't it? you know, if we're going to have locally educated schools, what do you do when you have a diversity of approaches to this and and you know, to what extent is that a a a threat to the cohesion of the community, not only locally but also at large? And it's it's a real problem. One solution, of course, is to agree on a common narrative, if you will, that you're gonna convey to students. And and I know Lothi's many decades ago, when I was a young kid, I do remember that you know, we were very strongly indoctrinated in the in the essence of of the American experiment. You know, what made the USA unique. our constitutional framework, our our the reasons for the constitutional framework for the limitation of government you know, all those all those kinds of things. That was a very strong part of our education. And of course, the problem comes when you have people, communities that are brought into our country that don't hold to those ideals. And and when you have that, okay, mm the price of religious liberty and educational liberty poses a serious problem for the cohesion of of the American Republic, I think. And and I don't know how to resolve that. I can't see any just way to resolve it. All we can do, just to echo what you just said, Mark, is we have to fall back on confidence in in in the people, not just the American people, but but but other people who are mainly interested in raising their kids, building a good life for themselves, Coming to know what the American experience is and what the benefits are of this country. And I still hold some hope for that. You know, it's challenged sometimes I have to admit, but I think that's ultimately what we have to come down to. I don't know if that satisfies you. I think it's a way forward. I it having traveled and lived in the Middle East, before, it took a while. This was years ago. But I think the idea of American identity is something that is a nebulously defined thing. And the the Christian founding is is unique in that in that it's now become politicized. Yeah, you know, even though that's definitely part of it, it's not really separable from it. Like it we had on another podcast of ours, Cafe Berlin, we had Stephanie Slade who writes about fusionism, for example. And she talks about the Judeo-Christian sort of tradition being one pillar of it, but it's also mixed with classical liberalism in and you know free market economics and something of a libertarian streak. And I'm not sure how durable that is in the long term without this bedrock of the traditionalism behind it, because it again, you bring the assumptions with it. But from an identity standpoint, I I know you know, having traveled overseas, it took a while when I was younger to say, looking back over there at America, that's me. And it actually and that's an experience that I don't think many Americans get to have. I think I think a lot of immigrants who do come here from places like Latin America and others, when they come here, they become very patriotic, for example, and they breathe a sigh of relief saying that, this was me all along and now I can breathe. And I think that there there's a universality to that that you really can't separate from religion to a degree. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear Mark's thoughts on this. speaker-1: Yeah, well thank you. So, I have a book, Did America Have a Christian Founding, and I answer that question with a resounding yes. And what I mean by that is not that America was founded as a Christian nation, but that America was founded by individuals who are influenced by imp by Christian ideas in important ways. One of the most important and obvious of these ways is they embraced a robust understanding of religious liberty for all. you think we're celebrating America at two fifty right now, right? America is a creedal nation and this is where our hope lies. w The Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. They're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I think the best understanding of this commitment to ideas, those ideas, is that they were developed within this Christian framework, but you could defend them on other grounds, secular, Lockean liberalism sort of grounds. The key, though, I think is this. These ideas benefit Everyone, whether Christian or not. So you have George Washington's famous letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, where he makes it crystal clear to this tiny Jewish minority. I'm going to paraphrase it, but it's like it is now no more that we speak of toleration as if by one class of people is simply tolerating another. But Everyone has inherent natural right to the free exercise of religion. And this is kind of our hope, right? So whether you're a Christian, a non-Christian, or an atheist, you live in a country that's dedicated to liberty and equality, properly understood. And sometimes we go askew and we apply these things inappropriately, but ultimately I think we can be hopeful that if we attempt to lead up live up to the founders' creed, that we can live together well. speaker-0: well, Mark, we're approaching the end of our time here and we've been hammering you with a lot of questions. Do you have any questions for us? speaker-1: Well, wh why why don't you tell me what so yeah I think I know because I've involved with the National Association of Scholars in the past, but what are some of your primary initiatives to help us muddle through the situation that we find ourselves in this particular cultural moment? speaker-0: well we have a number of things going on. Ian can tell you about some of his, but we've we've been trying to identify where things have gone wrong in education and to try to make them right. And so for example, one major initiative has been to formulate a series of of educational standards for K through twelve education and we have different standards for science and literature and and various various things to to try to bring the well, to inspire teachers and school boards to actually bring back lost lost value that have well to restore values that have been sort of gradually driven out of of the schools and to to try to reform it that way. in my case I've been working on reform plans for science and science has become not science anymore in my opinion and and there are reasons for that and and we've laid out some schemes for for doing that. Ian has been very actively involved in lots of very interesting things. I'm gonna let you tell Mark what you're doing. My Main focus at NAS is countering malign foreign influence within education from places like China, places like Qatar, and also combating anti Semitism. Those are sort of the the the main areas that I focus on. a lot of what I work on more recently has to do with countering Chinese theft of intellectual property and how they use our universities to gain access to policy makers on the one hand. and policy itself, but also technologies that are cutting edge but very poorly protected. And American professors seem happily, you know, involved in researching the things that can destroy us with our top adversary and they'll blindly take whatever money that they want. that that's sort of the the main part of it. anti Semitism has also has been a big part of it and how just documenting how anti Semitism in in higher education is a social virtue, unfortunately, in most places. And and how these these things are all sort of part the same toxic soup, if you will, as everything else that we've touched on in in education. And you know, we're trying to disassemble it and and get policymakers to do the right thing. And we're all we're also looking for members, you know, constantly and trying to show the world that there are good professors out there, I think the thing that makes NAS very special is that there's a presumption, I think, among most that there's no conflict between faith and reason. And because truth is is an absolute and truth is objective and it's something that should be reached towards throughout human life. And and that's sort of all-encompassing and that's Not an attitude you would see in very many educational institutions. And NAS is pretty special because it does. And on that hopeful, optimistic note, we've come to the end of our time. Mark, thanks so much for coming on. I had a marvelous time talking to you today. And yeah, I'm sure we would have more to say to each other. And I just on behalf of Ian as well as myself, I'd like to thank you for coming on to our podcast today. speaker-1: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. speaker-0: There you have it. That was Mark David Hall talking about Christian nationalism, America's Christian founding, and some of the legal aspects that have come from that and some of the legal challenges that have also evolved over the course of years as America celebrates its two hundred and fiftieth. You know, we hope you've enjoyed that and we'd like to leave you with a little reflection before we sign off. Yeah, I I I really enjoyed talking to to Mark. You know, he Some things that I learned that I did not know is valuable to learn is is just how recent the sort of confused state of the relationship between or I should say the place of religious faith in the public square, including public schools and how you balance those kinds of things. I did not know that that was in response to a kind of the confused jurisprudence that came from a Supreme Court decision in the nineteen forties. I did not know that. And yeah, and it explained a lot to me, including why we have elevated a reference in a letter by Thomas Jefferson about separation a wall of separation between church and state, how that has become quasi constitutional law and it is just so confused our public square. Well it's bad it's bad teaching, it's bad it's it's not only bad law, but it's when you take one snippet Of something from someone's work, and then you teach that one thing, you're gonna get a very skewed, very weird view of that person. And it doesn't really help. it it's it it doesn't just mask the American founding, but it it also shows how human it actually is. Because we tend to, you know, we're almost in a situation now where we talk about the founders as we're almost talking about saints or villains as opposed to human beings. very human beings that are aware of the flaws of government and and law of their own time and just how those derive from human nature. And you know, I think we need to actually in order to have a serious conversation, you need to actually move beyond the single snippets and the paintings and the cool statues in Washington that that you see when you go on the tours and actually move to real discussions. Yeah. And it's important to recall Madison's statement in The Federalist, I believe it was, that if if men were angels we would not need governments and we have governments because men are not angels, they're fallible and you know, so we should not regard anything as sanctified except for the principles upon which our republic was founded. Yeah. Yeah. There's a I was also yeah Go on. Well, I there was a quote I I came across a while back. I think it was Franklin, where, God throws us out of the Garden of Eden, but he says, I really don't need to punish you. I just need to let you govern yourselves. Yeah. And and not screw things up too badly. Okay. All right. Ian, take us out. So we hope you've enjoyed it. This was brought to you by the National Association of Scholars. We are a membership organization. you do not have to be a professor or a teacher to join. If you're a concerned parent, you're a concerned citizen, or you just like the work that we do, please do consider becoming a member. And with that, we will see you next time.