Latest / Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo / Larry Reed: America, Faith & The Covenant That Changed The World

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Larry Reed: America, Faith & The Covenant That Changed The World · Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo

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Welcome to Worldview Matters.
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Discussing controversial issues.
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Discerning current events.
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Defending biblical Christianity.
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No topic.
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Off limits.
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And now, here's your host, David Fiorazzo.
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Friends, family, and Christ, thank you so much for tuning in.
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Very important topic and book.
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And we're going to talk about history today, American history, and some things that I hope we have not forgotten, for example, about the Mayflower Compact and others.
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But I want to introduce you to Lawrence Reed.
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The website is lawrencereed.com.
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And this book is available on Amazon.
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Before I tell you that, his recent books, The Buried Stories of Communism and Socialism.
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He also wrote a book called Was Jesus a Socialist?
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And his brand new one, it's called Born of Ideas.
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Born of Ideas.
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Great book for you on how principles, faith, and courage exist.
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Forged America.
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Lawrence Reed, welcome to Worldview Matters.
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Good to see you, brother.
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Thanks for your time.
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Hey, thank you so much, David.
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It's a pleasure to be with you.
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Yes.
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Well, thank you.
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This is important history.
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Unfortunately, it's not all taught in government schools anymore.
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So it's good to refresh our memories and talk about this.
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I want to dive right in and just talk about how you start the story in 1620, not...
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Yes.
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1776, and certainly not in 1619.
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We've heard a lot about that in recent years.
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So please talk to us about the Mayflower Compact and why 1620 is so important to our history.
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Okay.
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Yeah, you're right.
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A lot of Americans, if you were to ask them, when did America begin, they might say,
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But it actually begins long before that, in a very quintessentially American event, resulting in a document called the Mayflower Compact.
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Everybody knows, of course, that the pilgrims came as victims of religious persecution in Britain to America in 1620 and founded the Plymouth Settlement in what is now Massachusetts.
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They may not know, however, that the investors in the project put about an equal number of so-called strangers on the ship with the pilgrims.
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And they were not there on the ship for the same reasons.
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They were there because the investors thought that their talents would be needed in the New World.
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But the ship was blown wildly off course, hundreds of miles to the north.
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They were supposed to land in Virginia.
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But a day before they landed in Plymouth, the strangers began to complain, saying, hey, if we're not going to land where we were supposed to, then we're out of here.
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We don't feel obligated to carry through what we promised.
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But the pilgrims realized they needed these people.
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So they worked up a document called the Mayflower Compact, which was the first document.
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document in the history of the world about governance that did not involve a king or a queen, a monarch, or a government of any kind.
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It was just between two groups of people.
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It was voluntary,
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And it said that once we land, we will establish a government of mutual consent.
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It will not be a tyranny of any kind.
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It will be a tolerant place, and everyone can participate in it.
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That is quintessentially American, in my belief.
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And what I've heard, there's a quote by a historian, Rebecca Frazier.
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She said that this compact was the first written democratic constitution.
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And that's a pretty bold statement.
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And also, you write that the American Revolution was first a revolution of ideas that produced a revolution in governance itself.
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Tell us a little bit more about those ideas and about that statement about this is one of the first democratic constitutions.
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Well, I think it might be a bit of a stretch for the historian Rebecca Fraser to call the Mayflower Compact a full-blown constitution.
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It didn't go into detail about the nature and scope and duties of the branches of government, for instance, but it laid down in broad terms the nature of the new government, that it would be representative, that it would be tolerant.
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And that set a tone that became very important in the development of ideas leading up to the
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Declaration of Independence.
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America's second president and a great patriot during the revolutionary era, John Adams, made it quite plain.
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He said the revolution didn't begin in 1776.
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It began in the hearts and minds of Americans decades before that, influenced by such things as the Mayflower Compact.
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The Enlightenment, some of the better ideas of the Enlightenment, and also the Great Awakening, a Christian revival of the 1740s.
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This is very interesting to me.
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I love John Adams, of course, most of those early presidents, and they were grounded on biblical truth and lived out biblical principles.
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And so how could they not want that kind of influence in their government?
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We've gotten so far away from that kind of worldview and that kind of idea and mentality that, of course, we want the morals of Christianity and the Bible—
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to influence government and legislation.
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My goodness, things are not going the way they were originally started or intended, are they?
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No, unfortunately.
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And I think our founders, if they could see where we are today, would be...
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I'm rather shocked at how far we have drifted from those original ideas.
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If Thomas Jefferson, for instance, who was a great believer in balanced budgets, if he knew that we have a $40 trillion national debt, I think he'd be turning over in his grave.
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astounding.
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And not just the debt, but things like the morality of what we're seeing in our culture.
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Wasn't it John Adams who said the Constitution was written only for moral and religious people and it's not good to govern any of a secular nation?
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Boy, and look where we're at today.
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One of the things I wanted to ask you is in 1776
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The Declaration of Independence asserted that all men are created equal and that to secure their unalienable rights, it says governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
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we kind of lose sight of that important concept that our representatives work for us.
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We are, they're supposed to be, you know, representing those who elect them.
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But that even that has changed the roles of our government and those in power, hasn't it?
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Yeah, it certainly has.
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And I think we've also forgotten just how revolutionary these ideas were at the time in 1776.
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I mean, for a people to embark upon a project of creating a new nation grounded in the notion that your rights don't come from the king, but rather from your creator, that in itself was remarkably revolutionary in 1776.
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Yes.
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I mean, the reason they wanted to establish this nation was, first of all, to expand the gospel.
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Christians came over here for religious freedom.
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They didn't want to bow to the king in England, right?
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So, my goodness.
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Tell us more about—you get into more details in the book on just the development of these ideas.
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And like you said, this was started in 1620, 1720, 1820, 1920, 1920, 20, 20, 20, 20.
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400 plus years ago.
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My goodness, we need books like this to remind us how this was birthed.
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Our nation was birthed after now 250 years.
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Yeah, there are certainly many hallmarks along the way as these ideas percolated, became ever more deeply ingrained in the psyche of the American people.
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And they took these ideas from one point to logical conclusions.
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They didn't go the full distance in the sense that we didn't abolish slavery in 1776.
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But they took liberty for more people further in the right direction than any previous generation in the history of the world.
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And they expected that the aspirational qualities of the Declaration, that all men are created equal, would be fully carried forth.
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in subsequent generations, that they went as far as they could go.
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They had to compromise for the sake of union on some important issues.
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But boy, did they take us further than anybody else ever has.
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Thomas Paine played a key role in that in January of 1776, seven months before the Declaration.
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You have this guy who had just immigrated to America from Britain the year before, writing this fantastic pamphlet called Common Sense in which he questioned even the notion of hereditary monarchy, which the whole world had for centuries.
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Paine says it's ridiculous.
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Nobody should be all powerful just because his daddy was all powerful.
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You have to base political power on something more real than just hereditary circumstance.
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It was a unique idea because that was common in world history.
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Hereditary, the king will have a son and then he will reign.
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He will have a son.
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You open the book, going back a little bit, by asking how many governments in world history have been overthrown by revolution.
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And then you argue that ours stands really alone, pretty much.
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So talk to us a little bit more about that.
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I don't think people understand world history in that light.
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Yeah, there have been too many revolutions to be counted in the history of the world, but ours stands apart because it actually delivered.
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So many revolutions promise this will be for the people, but then they end up being for the dictator, the new dictator instead of for the people.
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But America was founded by people who were interested in ideas.
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We didn't become America simply because of ethnicity or because of a common denominational faith or regional background.
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We became America because of ideas, ideas that each and every person has a right to live a peaceful life so long as he does no harm to other people, he has rights.
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that come his way by virtue of the nature of each of us.
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And that is something that God is the author of.
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Our rights come from God, not from the King.
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Again, friends, you can get this book on Amazon and at Lawrence Reed dot com.
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So.
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I'll call you, Larry, because you gave me permission to do that.
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Just one minor correction, David, there is a W in my Web site.
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It's Lawrence W. Lawrence W. Oh, thank you for pointing that out.
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Absolutely.
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I want to give the right address.
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LawrenceWReed.com.
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All of his books are there as well, friend.
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So get some great information there.
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I want to talk to you about some of the people you profile.
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It's very interesting to me that I think a lot of us have not heard about.
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And I'm going to ask you why.
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Anne Hutchinson.
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Phyllis Wheatley, Mercy Otis Warren, Joseph Warren, the all-black, First Rhode Island Regiment.
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You deliberately profile figures who don't always make the standard American history curriculum.
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Why?
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Well, I thought that Americans at this time of our 250th anniversary need to remember not just the most memorable names from our history, but the ordinary people who rose to the occasion, left their mark, helped to make America what it is in its earliest formative days.
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Those include people like the ones you've named, Mercy Otis Warren, who she was a playwright.
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And she wrote plays that were so subversive in the eyes of the British that she often had to put somebody else's name or a pseudonym to her plays.
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But she opened up her home for the earliest meetings of the Sons of Liberty.
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which was a staunchly patriotic anti-British movement throughout the colonies.
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And she later wrote a history of the run-up to the revolution that Thomas Jefferson as president required his entire cabinet to read.
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And you also mentioned Phyllis Wheatley.
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I have a chapter on her.
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She was a black poetess.
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She wrote a book of poetry, but she came to America as a slave.
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Wow.
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And her owners, their last name was Wheatley.
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That's how she got the name Wheatley.
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But they were good people who realized early that Phyllis was a particularly precocious young girl
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And they emancipated her while she was still in her teen years and encouraged her to become better educated.
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And she not only wrote fantastic poetry, she caught the attention of General George Washington, who in the midst of the war invited Phyllis Wheatley to come visit him and his tent where they talked for an hour over time.
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you know, matters of theology and of the war.
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Can you imagine having an hour with George Washington as battles, raids, not very far away?
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Jeez.
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That's pretty amazing, actually.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, what a story.
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So I want you to talk a little bit more about Anne Hutchinson, because from what I understand, she was banished by the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts and eventually killed for her convictions.
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Talk to us about that.
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Okay.
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Anne Hutchinson was from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, not Plymouth where the pilgrims settled in 1620, but Massachusetts Bay, which was started 10 years later, 1630.
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And for the first few generations, that colony was a kind of theocracy and a very intolerant one.
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Anne Hutchinson had some ideas about Christianity that didn't square very well with the established church and pastors of the colony.
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They weren't heretical in any serious way at all.
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But she not only had some of those controversial beliefs, but she held meetings in her home,
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with other women and sometimes men to discuss the sermons of the pastors in the Boston area.
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And they didn't like that.
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You weren't supposed to question what the pastor said.
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So she was ultimately put on trial, first a civil trial, found guilty, and then a trial by the church, and she was excommunicated from that and expelled.
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And she went to nearby Rhode Island, which was founded on religious freedom,
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But unfortunately, there were some nasty Native Americans not far away who attacked her whole family and killed every one of them except for one.
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But Anne was one of the victims.
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But she goes down in our history as one of the earliest and most courageous female fighters for the freedom to worship as you please.
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And isn't that a bedrock principle that we are so thankful that this country is founded upon?
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You mentioned the Sons of Liberty.
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I remember reading more about the black-robed regiment and pastors and reverends who would just preach from the pulpit.
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And then they'd go out and lead the men of their congregation in battle if and when necessary.
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And they were part of the American Revolution.
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But I think I'm getting off track a little bit.
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Yeah.
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You you've written about liberty, Larry, for about five decades.
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It's a concept that your book talks a lot about.
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So early on, how and why did this become so important to you?
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It became important to me, David, when I was a teenager.
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Yeah.
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And my mother was not particularly interested in current events or political philosophy, but my father, who was not a reader of these things, but nonetheless, he had some darn good instincts.
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He was a small businessman, a hardware store owner.
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And I think he taught me early on that a person of good character is one who,
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lives in peace with others, who doesn't expect the government to take from others and give to him.
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And he really thought that we should be courageous and speak truth to power.
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I'll never forget when when I was a teenager, there was a law on the books in Pennsylvania where we lived,
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that forbade anyone from buying milk in neighboring Ohio and bringing it into Pennsylvania and selling it.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Or if you did, you had to sell it at the higher state mandated price.
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Wow.
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And my dad thought there was no purpose for government to be doing that.
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So every Saturday, he would make arrangements with our neighbors, hey, you want a gallon of milk?
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We'll get you some.
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And we went over across the border, 11 miles into a little dairy town in Ohio,
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brought a carload of milk back and sold it to the neighbors.
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And he would say in the car, and I'll make sure that keep the blanket on top of the milk.
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If the cops pull this over, don't tell them we've got milk.
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So we were milk smugglers.
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That's funny.
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But my dad told me, hey, dumb laws need to be broken so that they'll stop passing them.
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That's a great story.
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So along those lines of liberty, also, you claim that liberty, and this may have something to do with George Washington and this men of integrity back then, but you claim that liberty and character are two sides of the same coin.
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So what's the connection there and its relevance to, for example, 1776?
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I believe strongly, David, that liberty, which is a kind of social political structure, you might say, concept in which you get to live your life according to your choices so long as you do no harm to others, I think that it is more than any other system based upon personal character.
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I don't know of any country in the history of the world or any civilization that ever arose to true greatness
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without having a major reservoir of personal character.
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But even more importantly, I don't know of any country that ever lost its character and kept its liberties.
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And by character, I mean things like honesty, speaking truth to power, being courageous in a dangerous world to fight to preserve your rights and your liberties against all comers, being humble, recognizing that as much as you know,
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There's still a universe of knowledge out there that you don't know.
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And other important character traits that are indispensable to not only personal success, but to the success of a free society.
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If a society loses its character, if they become morally corrupt, unmindful of the truth, dedicated only to the short run, not the long term, not caring about the things.
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For the kids, just themselves.
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Well, they're headed for some kind of tyranny.
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They will not be self-governing because they don't have the character to self-govern.
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I'm just letting our audience take in what you just said in light of some of the people that are in power right now that we Americans have elected.
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It's very concerning, which this is going by very fast.
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It brings me to another question.
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Many American citizens here in the year 2026 wonder how long will this American experiment last or can we preserve our freedoms with the way things are going?
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How do you respond to that?
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I'm an eternal optimist.
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And while I am certainly cognizant of the many trends that are troubling, I ultimately believe that Americans will rally and that the ideas for which we came into existence are so valid and so good and so right
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You know, sometimes we have to pay the price for straying from them, but we ultimately will come back to them.
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But even more importantly, if you're pessimistic, if you think all is lost, that, you know, we're headed for the dumpster, well, then two bad things happen.
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One, you stop working for what you know to be right because you've kind of given up.
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And secondly, you stop being a person of influence because others don't want to sign up for a losing cause.
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So they're not going to pay any attention to you.
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So if you want to be a person of good influence, if you want the country to rebound and do better in the future, you've got to be a personal example of those things yourself.
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You've got to work for them, work for the values that make for a strong and free nation.
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Otherwise, pessimism will become self-fulfilling.
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Indirectly, I'm hearing a little reference to Christians living according to what the Bible teaches, and that includes being salt and light, people of integrity, and boy, we've got to get back to that.
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But our churches have to preach it and live it first.
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But one—well, maybe two more questions, but one more question.
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What similarities do you see between the old Roman Republic and the American Republican?
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Can we avoid the mistakes and the fate of the Roman Republic?
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Okay.
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In other words, try to condense a thousand years of history into three minutes.
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You're a pro.
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You can do it.
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Okay.
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Well, both America and ancient Rome as a republic were founded for similar reasons.
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in revolt against monarchy, against one man rule.
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They set up a republic, as we did, that would defend and respect individual rights and keep the government at bay.
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And it did for several centuries.
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But then, as our founders certainly well understood,
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Romans began to forget those important values that made them great in the first place.
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They began to see government not just as a place that, or an organization that would defend your rights, but an outfit that would give you stuff at other people's expense.
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So when Romans began to build a homegrown welfare state and to engage in costly foreign adventures abroad, they were sowing the seeds for their own demise.
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And here in America, I mean, how can you not see the parallels with a $40 trillion national debt, a tax and spending burden that is just about the highest in our history and headed higher?
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And so many people expecting goodies from the government in one way or another, abdicating their own personal responsibility for things.
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Yeah.
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So, you know, civilizations like Rome, like America, always face this at some point, they have to decide, are they going to hold fast to the virtues of freedom and independence?
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Or are they going to be suckered into supporting ever bigger government, because it says it's going to take care of you?
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Oh, my goodness.
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I mean, we could do a whole nother podcast on that.
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We could talk about Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society ballooning the federal government and welfare and everything else.
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But let's just close by saying, you know, get the book at Lawrence W. Reed.
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TheFoodsBotter.com, Born of Ideas, How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America.
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Brother, it's so important to have books like this out there because, as I think I mentioned earlier, can't remember now, some of the podcasts, we talk about common things, but we don't hear a lot of the truth.
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in history taught anymore and at least a positive reflection of christianity and our government how it was founded and now how where we are today in our schools the schools and curriculums so that's why i'm thankful for your work your research your books any closing thoughts in the last 90 seconds here larry before we let you go
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Well, I'll just magnify something you just said, David, and that is that two of the most important things after getting yourself right with your creator are liberty, living a life that's free of coercion.
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personal character that we've talked about.
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And so I'll close by saying that people should take or should be aware that those are things that you must cultivate.
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You cannot sit back and expect government or government schools
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to teach liberty and character.
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They just won't.
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It's not their bailiwick.
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So start in the home, start with your kids, liberty and character.
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There are a few things in life more important than making sure people understand what those things are about.
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Amen, brother.
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Born of ideas.
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Friends, look this one up.
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Thanks for your time today.
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Congrats on the book and God bless you, sir.
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We appreciate it very much.
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Thank you, David.
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I appreciate you.
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All right.
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God bless.
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All right, friends, share this one.
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We appreciate your prayers for the podcast.
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And of course, sharing on social media.
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You're a big part of the reason the podcast is getting out there.
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So thank you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Under God's sovereignty.
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God bless you.
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And as always, keep speaking the truth about things that matter.
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We'll see you next time.