Christian Nationalism: Faith and Politics Collide

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship and author of three books, the latest is some say they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City Profits, and the International House of Prayer.

Bob, it's good to be back and to talk about Christian nationalism. I have been asked by various people in various ways about Christian nationalism. I've responded to a lot of them but quite honestly there's so many different varieties of ways in which people ask this that it's hard to address it all. So I'm actually glad this was your idea.

I'm glad you brought this up and as we'll get into later today it ties to some of the current events we're having and it ties directly to, I always talk about mentioning this book at the end of the podcast, this weaponized religion from Christian identity to the NAR.

It's actually the sub-theme that runs throughout this book if you understand what Christian identity is. Christian identity and Christian nationalism, they go hand in hand. You literally can't have one without the other. But to break it down and to help people understand it, it's probably good that we talk through it because even when I respond in an email, one single email trying to answer this question doesn't do it justice and people can't really grasp the complexities of it.

Because on the one hand, yes, you want to be in a Christian nation. If you're a Christian, you want your nation to be Christian. You want your government everything to be Christian. On the other hand, what does that mean?

You've got people of a variety of different Christian religions and faiths and denominations. Each believing that some part of their faith and religion is fundamental to the Christian faith. While another version of Christianity says, no, it's not, that's not fundamental.

You're built on all of this theology that we don't agree with. What's interesting to me, and this is the way my brain operates, is I start by taking the Christian off and just go, what is nationalism?

Because there's different versions of nationalism. But what is that event? And I find that most people... are utterly confused. And even when in talking with people, they'll throw out a term, right? And I'm asking them, well, what does that mean to you? Because they'll use the same word, or people will use the same word and have different meanings of what that is, right?

And so one of the things I find interesting is that even in our current modern world, the idea of nationalism, just that word itself, in many circles, not many, in some circles is a bad word. And what's interesting to me as a historian is that never was the case.

As a matter of fact, until the last few decades, nationalism was the default worldview of every civilization from the beginning of time, right? So it's been kind of interesting to me that, wait a minute, why did nationalism, just the concept of nationalism suddenly become a bad thing?

Well, who's the ones that are saying it's a bad thing? It's the globalists, right? It's the people who see national boundaries and culture, right? Distinct culture as being the source of all conflict, right? Defending boundaries, defending these geographic boundaries or defending this culture, or defending this religion in our culture, that's the source of all conflict.

Therefore, nationalism is bad. And then Christian nationalism gets thrown into that as well, and that just makes it double bad, right? So we need to separate out Christian nationalism from just nationalism, because there's an anti-nationalist worldview that's become very prominent in our lifetime, which has never been the case, right? I mean, the idea of nationalism in the ancient world, which I basically go, when people say, what's nationalism to you and the ancient world, I go, oh, it's just the worldview that works special.

I mean, I know there's all kinds of intellectual things we can say, but just so people don't understand nationalism is basically works special, and we're better than you. What you said is really key. People need to understand that.

You take the Christian off and just think about nationalism. But in America, things have changed a little bit. You also have to take off the political party. When you say Christian nationalism right now in the United States, they all think, oh, it's the Republican party. They're all Christian nationalism.

And that's not really the case and whenever I do the I have done bits and pieces on the subject matter And I'll get these people who really don't understand the history. They'll say well, you're targeting the Republican party Why don't you study the democratic nationalists and what's really funny is whenever when you look at the Republican party today Which it it's in an utter mess as is the Democratic party They're both in masses in my opinion But if you look at it today people think that's the way it's it is now That's the way it has always been and therefore I'm going to be Republican die hard to the core and they don't understand

That there was a period of time in the 1940s when the parties actually flipped. Yeah, that's right So yeah, so what you have today you've heard the term old Southern Democrat and they're referring to the good old Well, I shouldn't I should not use that phrase. That's offensive I guess that they're referring to the times in which the Democratic party had a Completely different set of ideals and I cover like I said in this book. I cover all of that history There was a there was an event that happened whenever the people were so tied up in

race tied to religion tied to their Ideology some of which did have white supremacy and that was rooted in especially in the Southern states and They saw for England Delano Roosevelt as the face for the invasion of the United States and all of you could even see it in the Newspaper whenever they would advertise their sermons They're talking about an invasion when they talk about politics and they saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the face behind this and the parties actually flipped because of this So there's a point in time in which you if you if you claim that you're Republican because you stand the way that the forefathers did or whatever is the

Whatever is the mumbo jumbo? It is not quite accurate if you go back in history. Yeah Well nationalism I'm you know, like I said I in order for me to sort of dissect this Or you know unpack it I have to take Christian off and just start at nationalism right and when I do I Realize well wait a minute. We're talking about the norm for thousands of years, right?

And what underpin that this is really this is really important because this directly impacts

the writer the biblical writers and and here's what I mean by that is Underpinning the idea of nationalism was divine mandates Given the fact that in the ancient world Humans believe that the gods right control the affairs of men Nationalism was rooted in our God Who gave us a divine mandate to rule all the other gods and the other nations. And I don't know if people kind of understand that you cannot in the ancient world separate out nationalism from religion, right? And and and got so in Babylon, you know, their divine divine mandate came from Marduk, or Marduk, right? In Egypt, their divine mandate came from Ammanra. In

Assyria, it was Asher. So it's all these nations basically had divine mandates from God that they were superior. The reason this is important to understand this is when you read the Old Testament, and you see the Hebrew people writing that their God Yahweh is the one driving their divine mandate. That's normal. Like that's what everybody else is doing, right? So sometimes modern Christians don't understand the context, right? And so they see this as this sort of unique phenomena that's only the Hebrew people, right? Because they're reading it in a vacuum of understanding him in history. Every nation believed they were birthed by the gods.

Every nation, every people group believed they had a divine mandate. And so the Hebrew people and the writers of the Old Testament are writing from the perspective that everyone had. Where this gets interesting is is then every conflict, right? Every battle that was fought if you really want to unpack it was our God versus your God, right? Because everybody went into battle believing their God was superior. Therefore, their armed forces were going to dominate. And at the end of the battle, whoever was the winner or loser was not just that civilization or that nation or that people group, it was that God, right? That's why you see in the Old Testament,

right? When the idols fall down, right? I think it's in Samuel there where the statues of Bale fall down, right? That's that's so typical of the worldview of the ancient people. And that's not unique to Hebrews. So the reason why this is important is is I think sometimes we over and flate things thinking that what the Hebrew people are doing is their worldview is different.

And you're like, no, no, no, no. Their worldview is the same worldview everyone had. The real issue was is it Yahweh, Marduk, Amin, Rahr, Asher. Who's the dominant one, right? It's WrestleMania. Who's God is going to pin the other one?

right? And then what's even funny to me. And again, I'm trying to, you know, laugh about it, but just helping people understand the profits were the admin of the ancient world. And if you don't know what an admin is, an admin, I'm not talking about admin, like administrator, I'm talking about admin, like the guys doing ads, right? The profits were the promoters, right? They were the PT Barnum, right? They were the, the promoters going out proclaiming that their God was more superior than your God, right? And that's how the ancient world thought, right? So profits were

the admin, they were the promoters of the big event. And then the battles were all actually God versus God. And that's how people viewed it, right? So it's not like the Hebrew people are special other than the fact that they believe that their God was superior. And that history ties into a lot of my opinion on this. And it's more than opinion, if you read, there's a book by Michael Barcoon called Religion and the Racist Right. If you read that, it's going to cover a lot of this, but it's covering it from again, from the Christian identity standpoint. But when you read and

understand the history surrounding the Bible, which you and I talk about often, whenever Jesus was sent to earth, there was this belief that a great military figure is going to come because it's the battle of the kingdoms, just like we have been talking, like you just explained. So they're expecting a military leader and they get a person who's a carpenter and he's going to lead them through humility. And he says things like my kingdom is not of this world, right? He is basically separating the politics of the day with his kingdom, which is not of this world. There's a, well, one of the

greatest examples is whenever Satan tries to offer him all of the kingdoms of the world. He makes it not interested. Yeah, this doesn't matter to me. Why would I want this mess and confusion, right? And I think it's Philippians has a passage that says something to the effect the citizen, our citizenship is not of here. It's of a better place. So if you take that concept, the Christianity was different. It was separating itself from the politics of the era and that there's another passage that talks about the vain genealogies. What was happening was you had all

of these men and women who were gathering together trying to get all their family trees and trying to discover, okay, whose lineage comes to David? We're looking for the Messiah. Which one of you has the royal seed basically? And Jesus says, why are you following these vain genealogies? You need to look beyond this. Well, what happened is quite the reverse. And about the late mid to later 1800s, there was this movement that was called British Israelism, where they were trying to do the same thing.

Our lineage can be traced all the way back to David. And the interesting part is that wasn't really new. You go back to the days of King James and the King James Bible. One of the reasons why he commissioned the whole thing was because he believed that he was truly the heir to the throne, the Davidic throne.

So the bloodline, right? The bloodline, right? Well, what happened was that idea began to grow and develop until it turned into a movement. And like all movements, it goes off the rails and turns into a cult.

But what happened was they believed that they were part of the royal seed and the land that was given to them was given to them by God. Therefore, our God is bigger than your God and when we battle it's God against God.

That is literally what happened. So we went from having Jesus saying we don't live like this. We don't have kingdom in this world to the people trying to declare and establish and bring down a kingdom, declare for God and say this is God's kingdom.

When all at the core of all of it is really politics, not religion. So you have to separate, like you said, Christianity from this movement. That passage that you just talked about or Jesus rejects that it was offer has really been a point of pondering for me.

It's like he is just not interested in ruling earthly kingdoms. And that's where I sort of developed this perspective, which I kind of use this phrase to define it. Jesus seemed to believe that the transformation of the soul was the soul of transformation, where we tend to want to use systems and law and try to enforce change from the outside in, right?

We want to use authority to change behavior. Jesus did the exact opposite. I think Jesus' worldview was if I can change your heart. If I can deal with your selfishness, if I can deal with your ego, if I can deal with your default self-centeredness and transform you into a lover of others, I will transform the world.

And that's something that really has impacted me deeply. And I struggle all the time right now when I, you know, with this thing where it's like we got to be in control. And if we're in control, we can change everything.

And Jesus is going to know, actually, if you have the spiritual power to bring conviction to the human heart and cause people to see their self-centeredness and repent, right? Change their mind, change their direction and become lovers of others, then you'll bring change. And it seems as though, and this has been, again, I'm throwing my heart out here, it seems to me that whenever the religious world loses its spiritual power, i.e. influence, it reverts back to trying to use civil or political or military force to bring change, right? It's like, and so we're this gets so interesting. So let's

bring this together here. So I think all of us are familiar with the phrase the Third Reich, but I don't know if a lot of people know what it means. Like they just know that's, you know, you say Third Reich and they go, oh, the Nazis, right? The word Reich actually means empire or government, right? So the Third Reich is actually the Third Empire or the Third Government, right?

So Hitler believed that he was forming the Third. Well, what's the first two? So this is where my brain goes. Well, we're at the Third. Well, what's the first and the second one, right?

Well, here this is interesting. You know what the very first Reich was? The very first Reich was the Holy Roman Empire that was that was launched in 800 AD with Charlemagne. And what had happened, what had happened was, is you had 800 years, well, let's just say 700 years, you know, after the book of revelations where in chapter 20, there's this whole concept of a thousand year reign. Satan's going to get locked up and God's going to rule for a thousand years, right? And that's revelations 20 versus 1 to 3. Well, the Holy Roman church had a problem.

And the problem was it had become grossly corrupt, not just financially, but sexually. I mean, the whole thing was off the rails. So what did it do? It had lost its spiritual influence. Nobody was listening, but what did they have? They had wealth and they had possessions, but they had no army. They had no way to defend themselves. So what did they do? They turned to Charlemagne, who's the king of the Franks, and they make him the Holy Roman Emperor, meaning that now we have a political force, we have a military army that's going to defend us. And that was the first Reich,

the first government. So that's where you begin to see Christian nationalism, right? You begin to see Christians are up to this point, until like 400, it's the Romans controlling. Christians have no influence, politically, militarily. They're back to trying to survive.

because of the persecutions. You know, Constantine actually was kind of the first, you know, that kind of used national, like a divine mandate from God, right? But then you get here to 800 in the Catholic Churches in trouble, so they kind of annoyed Charlemagne, he's going to fight.

Well, the second Reich was the German Empire ruled when the Prussians were in control of Germany. And that was from around 1870 to 1920, right in that realm there. And that's the second Reich.

So Hitler comes along and he's going to do the third Reich, the third government, right? What's interesting about it is I actually was friends with Colonel Eugene Bert. And that's a name most of our generation doesn't know, but our dads would know him because Colonel Bert was a part of the unit that crossed the Romagen bridge during World War II.

They were the first American soldiers to set foot in Germany during the Second World War. He went on to become the Commodate, Spandau Prison in West Berlin. And in Spandau there was a number of Nazi leaders that got put there after the Nuremberg trials, and the two most famous ones were Rudolf Hass and Albert Speer.

Well, Albert Speer was Hitler's architect. And if you know anything about what Albert Speer built, you can go to Germany today or all through Europe, and you will find things that he designed that are still there because they're so fortified, they can't even blow it up.

So when he asked Albert Speer why he built like that, you know what he said? Because Hitler told him it had to last a thousand years. And Hitler's mind, the third Reich, was the millennial kingdom.

That's what he was trying to build, which is so bizarre, right? Because we just think about him as being the most evil person. But in his mind he had given his top engineer the mandate build because we are going to reign for a thousand years.

What's really funny to me is whenever you look at, say in history, you're looking at a specific era and you look at how to opposing seemingly ununited forces collaborate together to a common agenda.

And the best example of this is you look at the way that the government has loosely worked with the mob to overthrow certain empires or certain business opportunities, whatever. It seems like an unlikely thing because there are laws preventing the mob and yet the mob is halfway controlling some of the some of the shenanigans that go in in Washington.

Well, if you look throughout history, that Kind of relationship happens with the church and the the leadership in these kingdoms Yeah, you have you have the political realm like like you said They're enacting divine power to achieve their political ends and they say that God is with us Therefore we're going to battle our God against your God Well, how does this work? You have these religious leaders that are really pulling the strings within the monarchies or kingdoms and They have their own armies of people who might become literal armies for the realm and if you can convince the common person that the battle that we're getting into as a spiritual battle not a political battle

We're fighting to defend God. Well the forces will fight all the harder So that that union is important so it goes both ways and when you understand the complexities of that The question of whether it's good or bad becomes very very murky because in some ways yes There is good agendas behind it, but in some ways this is purely evil what is happening here and To think that in the United States today we're seeing this again We're seeing all of this type of weird union and I look at it and I think how many times will history repeat itself before people wake up and say

We can't keep doing this Yeah, the word I have for that is unholy alliances Yeah, right. It's it's odd And it's one of the strange Testimonies of human history is is there's these weird alliances that just You know Looking at it on paper should not be working together So when you tear off The facade what's underneath what what brings those two things together?

And in my view Is always status and stuff Right that the common thing that brings the unholy alliances together It's just two groups of people that are both trying to hang on to their stature and their wealth Right and they need each other to do it and so they compromise their standards And it comes back to this often used phrase the end Justifies the means and it's all through human history and sometimes you just scratch your head going, huh?

Like what like how do those two things go together and yet they do and again when you unpack it It's always because they're afraid of losing something right and so they'll compromise Right and so this is where it gets really interesting because you know the rubber really meets the road in these situations because it really Reveals who you actually really are, you know, I'm thinking of situations right now where the biblical, and while let me just go there, Mike Bickel. Mike Bickel is in a very interesting situation. He's being accused, or he just recently, this report came out that

basically says you cannot ever go back into ministry. That was a bunch of Christian leaders said that, right? And the reason was, he's not repented, which is the biblical Christian thing to do, right? In other words, you repent. Well, why is he not repenting publicly? Because he's going to end up like Robert Morris, if he admits it, then, you know, in Missouri when they change the Statue of Limitations on it, they're going to take him to court, and he's already admitted he did all this stuff. So he's not going to repent. You see what I mean? So now is a real thing

here. So which is it? Do you really serve? Do you really believe that God's divine justice is more reigns over civil justice? Right? It's like when you're really in trouble, it's suddenly your standards. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others

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In the roots of what you've just talked about with Mike Bickle, IHOPKC, you can trace those roots, which we've done fairly well, through the latter reign movement. And if you look at the timeline as it relates to world history and look at the wars that were raging in the political battles leading up to those wars, there was an interest in the government using the religion to push the agenda of the people and prepare them for the war. And once it turned into the cold war, this turned into this political theme that had to be, you know, had to be pushed through

throughout society. I don't know if you and I have talked about this. this, but President Nixon met with the, it's during the National Prayer Breakfast, he met with the heads of the full gospel businessmen, I've got a photograph of William Brandham sitting there during this meeting, and he's telling them basically that the battle that we're going to fight now is the one raged in the mines, and we need you people to go out as ministers and evangelists, and basically combat communism as a battle of the mind.

And so what they were doing, they were weaponizing Christian religion against the people, and the end did justify the means in some ways, because yes, communism is bad, we don't want communism, but the ways in which they did it turned out to be quite, quite evil, it wasn't a good way in which they did it, and that resulted in many of these cults.

Some of these things, you know, I could go off into rabbit trails, but some of these things turned out into compounds where they're torturing people, that's how bad this got, right? So as you've got this idea that this is God's nation, and the opposing forces of communism are coming in, they're going to destroy our nation, this is it, this is the big one, I don't know if you watch Sanford and so on, this is the big one Elizabeth, that's how it seems to be, every single political turmoil that happens in history, this is the big one, and

they fight it to tooth and nail, and they always enact the book of Revelation. As you can see right here folks, this is it, this is this jamper of Revelation being revealed, but what it turns out to be is it is Christian nationalism, it's not Christian, and if you separate Christian from it, like you've said, this is just nationalism, you're going to sit in a Sunday service, and you're going to listen to nationalism being preached, not Christianity, because Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.

So this is where I think it gets really confusing, because one of the things that you hear a lot of now, especially on those that push back on Christian nationalism is that we're not a Christian nation, are we a Christian nation, are we not a Christian nation, right?

This is so interesting to me. So one of the things that, again, I'm trying to unpack this, it's like this onion, right, and there's these layers, and so there's pieces of this. So one of the things that I remember having a discussion a few years ago about prophets

claiming that a certain person is God's choice to rule the nation. So I'm like, okay, so how many votes does God have? See, the problem is as much as we may think we're a Christian nation, our political system is actually humanistic.

People go forward to democracy, where we're not actually a... democracy. It's rooted in democracy. Democracy was what the ancient Greeks built, where every male in Athens had a vote. That was democracy. We have what's called a republic, which is a representative form of government, and we elect people to go to Washington and make decisions for us.

So we're actually a republic, right? But we still have elections. And we vote. So guess who ends up being president? Whoever we choose. So I kind of get confused a little bit when people go, well, it was God's choice. Well, God didn't get a vote. We did. So at the very core of our nation, our political system is Greek, right? It's an ancient Greek political. It's humanistic. Humans make human choices for human ants, right? So there's that side of it, right? So it's humanistic. On the other hand, when the Brits started settling in America, a lot of them were doing what? They were fleeing

religious persecution in Europe, in nations where the church was controlling the political spectrum. Right? So you had the Roman Catholic Church controlling Italy. You had a battle in Germany between the Roman Catholic, so when I ended up becoming the Lutherans, right? So all the whole political world of Europe was dominated by religious leaders, right? And it was important when kings got what they crowned, right? When they took over the throne, they had to have the blessing of the patriarch, the pope, whoever was the head of that nation's religion's blessing, right? So it's just like the old days, right? It's prophets, you know, confirming the divine choice of this particular

king, right? And most of these houses were ruled by royal families, right? Well, it was impressive. This is the dark side of this, and I think this is where Christian nationalism is a little bit scary for a lot of people because if you go back and study human history, whenever the church is in charge of controlling nations, it becomes very oppressive. It's not freedom.

That's so pressive, right? Right. So what happened? Our funding fathers go, guess what? We don't want that here. Like we don't want religious leaders and religious denominations to rule our national government. Every state, like people may not realize this, but every state was of the original 13 states were 13 colonies all formed by religious groups.

The Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Baptists down in Georgia, the Catholics in Rhode Island, right? You can go through all of this, right? You had the Presbyterians up in Massachusetts. You know, I mean, you had all these, you know, so the state, at the state level, that was deeply influenced by these different leaders.

But from a national level, they didn't want one particular religious denomination or group to dominate and control everybody else. So they made it perfectly clear religion cannot, religious leaders cannot run nations. That was basically where they were going with that, right?

Having said all that, virtually all of the funding fathers, if you read their letters, were all driven by deeply Judeo-Christian values. Even Thomas Jefferson, who considered himself a dias and didn't like a lot of the Bible, didn't get rid of it.

He just got rid of the parts he didn't like, right? Ben Franklin, who was probably the most he mystic of all of the founding fathers, belonged to like five or six different churches that he supported.

So it's kind of interesting here. There's this weird sort of, I don't know, it's like a mess, right? Because it's like, well, we don't want you controlling things, but yet these values, these morals, and these ethics, we want woven into everything we do politically.

Right? So this is where it gets confusing, right? So are we a Christian nation? Well, sort of. Right? Structurally, no. Right? Politically, system, no. But yet, our values, morals, and ethics influenced our legal system, influenced everything.

So to say we're not, it's not right either. You know, I was debating on whether to go here or not, but since you had put Pandora's Box. You had opened Pandora's Box, man. So I've studied history like no man's business for the past over a decade.

And there are things that you study that you just scratch your head thinking, well, I never really knew that. I never thought of it that way. And it gives you this different perspective of everything.

You start to see things aren't as... black or white as we're led to believe. Messy. When you look at the founding fathers, what they did was actually brilliant. And I mean brilliant, because they watched all of the examples of these kingdoms that got involved with specifying what was the religion that they would support, because if they could tie the religious leaders to the political leaders, then you have that unholy alliance, right?

And they did not want this. So you had a group of founding fathers, some of which, I'm not going to say all of which, because that doesn't match history, some of which were Christian.

And when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, it was written specifically so vague that you could apply it to pretty much any religion. And the main argument that this is a Christian nation comes down to, well, they said the word God, and these people are, some of them were Christians.

Therefore, it must have been the Christian God, right? But that's not necessarily the case. And you can take one example of several examples with Thomas Paine. And I don't know if you've studied Thomas Paine or not.

Thomas Paine is the one, he was an activist who wrote the, what was it called, the Common Sense, I think. Yeah, the book that basically launched the revolution. The book that launched the revolution.

It took the concepts and put it in layman's language so everybody could understand. And again, to your point, all these people had come from monarchies, right? So the idea of a democratic government was foreign to everyone.

Like nobody understood what that meant. So Thomas Paine, no, just sidebar here. My grandmother, my dad's mom, is a descendant of Dr. Benjamin Rush. So when you get into this, I know this inside out in backwards because it's family history, right?

So Benjamin Rush was the editor for Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Wow. And if you know anything about Dr. Rush, he's the founder of American medicine, right? He was a, but he was a diehard quaker.

He was a lover of God. He didn't hide it. Like he believed that without Christi-Gannity, the moral ethics and values of Christianity, we would not survive as a nation. So he was unabashedly pushing his world view into our government.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Thomas Paine wasn't a quaker. No, that's right. He was, he was actually a deist. He was, he believed that there was a God. He did not believe the Christian God. And this came to, came to full head.

Whenever he was, I think he was a diplomat to France, if I recall correctly. Something happened and he was put into prison and he wrote home, can you get me out? And whenever this turned into this political mess, He wrote other books which aren't quite so familiar in the United States.

One of which was the Age of Reason, and the Age of Reason, he wrote directly as an attack on the Bible, and he went through, and just meticulously, things about the Bible that he didn't like.

He did not like, and he's pointing out things that if you take the fundamentalist view, it turns your world upside down. One of the things that he wrote that made me just scratch my head, is he said that there is a passage that says, King David, his only sin, was in the matter of Uriah.

Yet he had 5,000, what, 5,000, 10,000 wives, and according to the Mosaic law, a king could only have one wife. So he goes off into things like this, and what happened was unreal, because I've actually read the responses to Thomas Payne from all the Founding Fathers, and most of the responses are an attack against his person, not against his content, which is interesting.

But Benjamin Franklin is the one who summed it up best, and Benjamin Franklin, he didn't invoke the, you're attacking the Christian God, how could you? He said basically, and this is an exact quote, if men are so wicked with religion, what would they beat without it?

In other words, we need something, we need something to guide the nation. And so by the most hedonistic of all the Founding Fathers, which is so, again, these paradoxes of human history, right? Yeah.

Like this is the guy sleeping with all the French women and doing sexual diplomacy. Yeah. That's right. Right. What's interesting though is Jefferson comes from that same French influence, right? This very liberal sort of morality, you know?

Yeah. Well where I'm heading with all of this, it isn't that, you know, people will hear that and just because I mentioned the name Tom common sense and they'll look at this and they'll think, John's attacking the Christian religion.

Just like those guys did the Founding Fathers, but if you understand the complexities of the Founding Fathers, you recognize that what they established wasn't a Christian nation, it was a godly nation. There is a difference.

Yeah. It is a huge difference. It wasn't Christian nationalism that they were pushing. It was godly nationalism. There is a difference. I think they had the same worldview, Jesus' transformation of the soul is the soul of transformation.

They understood that if these morals, values, and ethics aren't woven into our culture, right? If our hearts aren't changed, right? We're in trouble. But to your point, they also didn't want political religious leaders controlling everything.

Interestingly enough, you know, Jefferson and Adams worked so hard writing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, which... James Madison did, right, all of that. But then they went sideways with each other and didn't speak to each other for years because Jefferson's this very liberal, French influence sort of, you know, he's trying to reason everything.

Adams comes from that, what we call the Scotch Irish John Knox. What's the,

I'm can't even think of the theology, yes, suddenly I'm having a brain thing here, but they're worldview, right? So they had a, they collided. Like, you know, even though they were together on how the government should set up, their worldviews of life couldn't be more different to the point they quit speaking to each other.

And it was Benjamin Rush at the end of their lives that ended up, he was friends with both of them and God I'm talking. And then you see all these letters that they wrote in the last decade or so of their lives where they find each other again, right?

And there's this mutual respect and love for one another. And oddly enough, what did they do? They both die on July 4th. It's the most, I mean, you talk about weird, just historical things, like these two men die on July 4th together within a few hours of each other.

That's the friends worst of enemies, you know, collision, you know, but so let's fast forward. So you have this battle, but then let's get up to the 1900s, right? Cause what do we have in the 1930s?

We have religious leaders who believe alcohol is the curse, the greatest curse on American civilization. So they convince political leaders to outlaw it, we get prohibition. On paper looks really smart. Let's get rid of the bad thing.

But what do they create? And even better thing because suddenly, a whole world called the mafia develops because people still want to drink. And I don't really care what the government has to say or what the religious leaders have to say they want to drink.

So we end up having boot lagging. And the mafia just goes from being this little sort of neighborhood thing to millions of dollars in this massive battle, right? So again, the church imp, you know, gets involved thinking it's solving a problem only to create an even worse problem.

And so what? They repeal it, right? So then you see all that. Then you get up to the 1980s. And this is the reason why I want to fast forward up to the 1980s because what you see now in terms of Christian nationalism and our lifetime is actually rooted in the 1980s.

I remember because I was founding a church at that point. And Jerry Flawwell. And Pat Robertson and theologian Francis Schaeffer kind of came together and they were the guiding lights of the Christian community.

They had a great deal of influence, right? And they found the moral majority. To the point where then Pat Robertson ends up running for president, right? And their whole idea is we need Christians in power. We need Christians in government.

And so they're really the kind of the foundation for that. Well then what happens is that's on the right side of the political spectrum. So then on the left side of the political spectrum because as Newton talked about for every action, there's a corresponding and equal reaction, what does the left do?

Well you have a Norman Lear, probably one of the most famous Hollywood producers all in the family. Like he's got like 20 hit shows, right? He forms people for the American way, right? And so now you have these two, right? So what you're seeing now did just happen.

In other words, it's important for people to understand this, this battle that you're seeing on the news networks and between the current administration and on the right and the Democrats on the left goes way back to the 1980s. And that's where it's all rooted, right?

And there's again this battle. So one of the things that's important, I think. And again, I'm going to take us down another road here because I think yesterday was a hugely significant moment in human history.

I know again because we're not really knowledgeable about history. For most people, they think, oh, we solved a relatively new problem. The reality of it is is what makes yesterday so interesting if what they hope happens is you're actually solving a 700-year-old problem.

And what I'm talking about is Islam. So just like there's a whole group of people that believe in Christian nationalism, there's a equally powerful force called Islamic nationalism. And they have a phrase called a caliphate, which is almost the equivalent of a Reich in Germany or what we call a government.

So Islam for 700 years has been on a mission to establish the government of Allah across the world. But here's the problem. And this is where our political leaders, but primarily the media, have absolutely fallen down on the job. They're so ignorant of how that world works.

People don't understand that the whole of Arab culture is tribal. You know, we... See, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Emirates, all of that, right? Because the Brits came along and like they did in Africa, they drew lines in the sand and said, okay, that's a nation.

But the reality of what happens on the ground has very little to do with the nations and what these ancient tribes that have been battling each other for hundreds, not thousands of years, then you bring Muhammad in.

Well, what did Muhammad do? Muhammad brought in Islam. What does Islam mean to submit, to surrender, right? So Muhammad believes that he's setting, he's going to establish what, the millennial kingdom again. He's going to bring these Arab tribes into submission and he uses force to do it.

And they've been battling it out for 700 years. Well, then he dies and there's a family fight and it splits, right? And you have the Sunni and the Shia, right? Which I think the Shia are, the Sunni are like Iraq.

Oh no, Iran, I think, and then the Shia are everyone else. Like the war between Iran and Iraq was Shia versus Sunni. People think it was two nations going to work. No, it was too sex of a single religion fighting each other for dominance to control the caliphate, right?

To control the kingdom. And what's going on right now, which is so interesting, is that the Sunnis, which were very prominent in Saudi Arabia, had a revival. This is going to sound weird to Christians, because they're like, what do you mean?

Well, in the early, in the 1700s in Saudi Arabia, there was this dude who basically said, you know what, Islam, since the time of Muhammad has become corrupt, we've lost our way. And just like religion does, we got to get back to stricter laws and rules.

So therefore, if you still were cut in your hand off, if you committed adultery, we're stoning you. And that was called the Wahhabi movement, because the guy that was the prophet, that practiced revivals, the last thing was Wahhab.

So Saudi Arabia is the strictest of all of the Islamic sects, right? And so that's what controls Saudi Arabia, especially since the early 1900s, right? So there's this battle going on. And what's so fascinating is, to me, now it's explaining it to you earlier, that since the time of Muhammad, these religious leaders have controlled this world, right?

And these tribes, well, there's a massive shift going on. And it's the same shift that's happened here, and it's happening. happen in Europe, it's just a historic reality that what's happened is that over the course of time, there's been cultural shift.

And what's happened is the original rulers that embraced old, you know, that basically we're looking for the religious leaders to endorse them sent their sons and grandsons to the west to get educated. And they came back with engineering degrees and technology degrees, and then they took all that oil money.

What did they do? They started building these massive cities, high-tech, right? Billions of dollars. And then they looked over at Gaza and went, God, you think, like, I don't want that to happen to us, like we just put all this money into building.

What people don't understand is don't Trump speaks their language. He's a builder, they're builders, right? It's very little to do with politics in the sense. That's the result. But what's underneath this is guys that want to build, want to take their money, build gorgeous things, and they don't want somebody to blow it up.

Yeah. I mean, this sounds really simple, but sometimes these egghead guys get on TV and they get all way up here in the stratosphere, and what's really going on right now is that this third generation, the grandsons, they don't want to blow each other up anymore, like they want to build and have it last.

So they're all like ready to, let's talk, like, let's be friends, like, let's work with each other and, oh my God, we might even work with Jewish people. Like that, can you imagine that?

Like what an incredible shift this is after 700 years, it's mind boggling, actually, if they can pull this off. Underneath this, this is what's important to understand. Islamic leaders still believe that they have a divine mandate to rule the world.

So revelations 20 and their mind is Islam. So when you go to Dearborn Michigan right now, what you're going to see is a whole many little civilization in America who's bent on their religious worldview dominating American culture.

And they believe that by population, by them having more children than us within the next 100 or 200 years, they will take over America. So the reason I bring this up is that I find it really wild that the news media spends all this time going, or anti-Christian nationalism and don't talk anything about Islamic nationalism, which is actually a bigger problem.

which is that I ruffle with, it's like, you guys not get this. And that's really the problem with not understanding history and psychology. Those two things also go hand in hand. If you understand the history that you've just described, and then compare that to what we're seeing today, you're talking about thousands of years of history when in the United States we have hundreds of years of history.

So take, there's a passage in the Quran. In fact, I'll read it. There's a passage in the Quran. And I'm gonna get blasted for reading the Quran. But you have to understand this. It says, this has come from Allah, a light and a clear book, which Allah guides those who seek pleasure in His ways of peace.

You can say I have trouble reading this is not something I read often. So it is talking about building peace. It's building a peaceful kingdom. Thousands of years ago, you had people that were celebrating, they're in euphoria, they're in a utopia, they're in this religion that isn't the religion, you know, it's not the Christian religion, obviously.

But they had a different mode of intent. And then it developed through time whenever you combine people who have agendas, political agendas, tying it to nationalities, like you said, tying it to tribes, tribal feuding, over time, this evolved into now, there are guys who are strapping bombs to their chest and they're going into buildings and blowing it up so that we can establish the kingdom of peace by inflicting the most harm that we can possibly cause to these people.

I mean, this is a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous theology, dangerous religion. Right. Now look at the gnar today. We want to bring a kingdom of peace. We have the seven mountains mandate. What we're seeing with gnar right now would be like looking at Islam decades millennia as ago.

If you allow this to continue without cleansing this history and without erasing everything that is unbiblical from that, if you allow that to continue, what's to say 2,000 years from now that those who adhere to the NAR standards aren't doing the same exact things because they are equal, they're the same exact representation of a false religion.

Well, again, since we've opened Pandora's box, let me share my red flag about Christian nationalism. On paper, it sounds great. You know what I mean? I call it whiteboard theology. Like on paper, having Christians driven by morals, ethics, and values that are vividly based, sounds really good.

That is the millennial kingdom. Here's the problem. I'm a historian. I've studied human history. The Christians just don't do a very good job when they have power because the truth... If it is, is that the hearts, in many cases, so many of these people that are ambitious for power are driven by selfish ambition and greed.

I have spent 40 years of my life and what I call the sewer of religion, like I have dealt behind the scenes with so many Christian leaders. I have been in the athletic world dealing with high profile athletes.

I have been in the business world dealing with executives. I have been in the political world dealing with things. There are common things I see across every sector and what power does to people when they get access to it.

Power comes from wealth, in other words, money is power. When you get it, unless you have had what Jesus talked about, which is a transformation of the soul, it destroys you. Everything you are talking about ends up happening, right?

The Christians become more oppressive because what are they doing? They are trying to hang on to their status and stuff and they feel threatened. They attack and the end justifies the means and I see this over and over again.

On the one hand, I am just to be quite frank, I am just really conflicted because I really would love what is on the whiteboard to work. The problem is, I just know that human heart all too well and it is weak and it is frail and we don't do well with power and wealth and we end up in the end using it and we oppress our brothers and that is what scares me.

It is like, I want this in theory but I don't have faith right now in humanity that we are actually able to handle it. Having said that, if there was a genuine move of God, like the millennial kingdom that is talked about in revelations where evil is bound up and the human heart has only been transformed by the Holy Spirit and we actually are lovers of others and we have let go of our lust for status and stuff.

It could work but I don't see it working now. I don't think humans and humanities in that place and I mean even the current church leadership, I don't see that kind of transformative heart.

I see a lot of guys standing on the pulpit talking but I know it goes on behind the scenes and I'm like, you scare me, like, God, you scare me. Well that is just it.

You can see the personalities of many of the people who are in leadership, our personalities that are not a result of the change that is described when you read the Gospels. Yeah. They're so full of themselves, they're more full of the agenda than they are to Gospels and that's really where this ends up.

It is a problem. Well, it's like, it's like Jesus said, there's no greater love than laying your life down for your brother. Yeah. What was the transformative, or sorry, that was the fruit of a transformed heart where you saw Christians going in during the plagues knowing they would die to take care of people.

My friends in Zimbabwe that wanted to heal their nation and died trying to be peacemakers. Those are people that I trust because they're laying your life down. And I see people lusting after status and stuff, like climbing the ladder as we like to say.

I mean, ambition. I look at that and go, that's not, I'm not saying it's bad, you know what I mean? Because the whole of our system is set up for that, right, to achieve.

But that's also, to me, the greatest vulnerability. That's where things get sideways real fast. And I just do not have confidence or trust. And anybody at this particular moment that, in a religious world, that could handle power.

I mean, they can't even have them, most of them can't even manage their churches. Yeah. Well, hopefully this has cleared up some of the confusion. I know I had a few people asking and we may have gone far beyond their confusion and confuse them on other things as well, but they're just as interesting if you follow it out to its history.

So, well, as we said earlier, it's as complicated. We're in a world of paradoxes and contradictions and it's mess. It's a mess. So this is not an easy subject to unpack because there's just, there's just too much, you know, too many things colliding with each other.

It's sort of like, if you ever see a bee land in a beehive, it's not meat and tidy. It's like they're crashing into other bees and it's like, it's a mess in there, right?

And that's, you know, that's us. Yep. Well, we're the ones that are whacking 1,000 beehives, so anyway, this whacking of beehives is fun. Thank you for doing this. All right. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. And for more about Mike Bickle and IHOP KC, you can read some say they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer.

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