Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is the program bringing
in news, views, discussion,
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analysis, and up
to date information
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on religious
liberty developments
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around the world and
in the United States.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
I'm editor of Liberty magazine.
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And my guest on this
program is Gregory Hamilton,
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Greg as I know him,
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President of the Northwest
Religious Liberty Association.
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Yes, sir.
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From the best quadrant of
the US, I'll give you that,
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still speaking as in
Australian in origin.
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There's nothing like
summer in the northwest.
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It's the most beautiful
place in the whole planet.
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And you're a great
defender of religious liberty
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and your organization
has a great history.
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And I'll give you an ad,
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we've got an article in
an upcoming issue of Liberty,
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with the activism there.
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It's been very effective.
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Now you are also
holding a position
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for the
Seventh-day Adventist Church
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in the union in that quadrant.
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Let's talk about
religious liberty involvement
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or political involvement
for religious liberty,
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and indeed, other things.
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It's not that clear
for most Adventists, is it,
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whether they should
be involved in politics
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or what degree or how,
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or is that just a personal level
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or does the church have
a political role to play?
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Well, even Ellen White,
based upon our last program.
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Now, Ellen White is the pioneer
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and visionary of the
early Adventist Church.
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She says in this same book
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"Fundamentals of
Christian Education"
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in two places that,
she says, "It's not a sin.
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It's good for
young men and women
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to aspire for
high political office."
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She said, "Would
that we had more who did,
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that we had more Daniels,
that we had more Esthers,"
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like that, and so--
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I had a Daniel
get into his position.
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Well, it's true, that
both through captivity,
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both Esther and Daniel.
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And he came to the
attention of the king,
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because of his
spiritual insight.
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Esther--
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Yeah, and Esther,
and all the things
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she had to do to
even become queen
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is unmentionable.
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Yeah, we don't want to talk.
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I think it was
God leading through
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an unfortunate series of events.
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It was.
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And you could go on
further, what about Joseph?
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But, but that was just a--
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I make a bit of a
distinction myself
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between many
Adventists, many Christians
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who are in government
positions of responsibility,
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often appointed
sometimes career,
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government employees.
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And those that run
for these national offices
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where they have to be
beholden to the party,
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have to make
promises for political reasons
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and then, you know,
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operate within the
hurly-burly of what is often,
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unfortunately, almost
like mafia type operations.
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You know, the big party busses.
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And I think, then the moral
equation gets a little fuzzy.
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But Ellen White even
as, She's a good historian.
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And she was not
keen on the parties,
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as you will know.
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She was a good
historian in the sense
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that she
recognized the distinction
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between brutal
dictatorships and Joseph's day
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and Daniel's day
and Esther's day,
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even to the point of extinction
of the entire Israeli people,
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the Jewish people.
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But that's further to my point.
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Those were brutal
dictatorships, but yet God,
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I believe, not only
used them, placed them there.
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'Cause they were not
supportive of that dictatorship,
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they operated within it.
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Where, to be a
party creature here,
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this is not a
brutal dictatorship,
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but you are synonymous
with the ruling power.
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And which is
always morally ambiguous.
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But she distinguishes between
those brutal dictatorships
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like I was saying,
and a democratic republic
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which we have today, which we--
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It represents--
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Afford a ton of freedoms
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that no other country
on the planet has ever had.
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We live in a wonderful country,
and we have an opportunity,
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to exercise our
citizenship rights,
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so to speak that are
guaranteed by the Constitution.
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And so she recognized that,
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and I think that
it's important for us
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to remember that.
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I really believe going
back to the Mark 12 analogy
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of "Give to
Caesar what is Caesar's
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and to God what is God's,"
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where Jesus was speaking
to the Herodians and Pharisees
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who were trying to entrap him
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over the issue
of taxes and Caesar.
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I think it's
important to remember
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that we have a duty to Caesar.
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We have a citizenship
duty and Caesar here,
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in our country, in
terms of the analogy here,
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we live in a
democratic republic,
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we don't live in a
brutal dictatorship
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as in Caesar's day.
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Okay, so, so we don't
live in Caesar's time.
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Yes, we live in probably
the most powerful country,
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the lone
superpower left in the world,
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but it's still a
free, very free country,
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and people still long
to come and live here,
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lots of
immigrants want to come here.
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Okay.
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And so we live in
a wonderful country.
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I want to
emphasize one of the thing
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about Fundamentals
of Christian Education,
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page 475, by Ellen White.
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She says, "We
cannot, with safety,
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vote for political parties,
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for we do not know
whom we are voting for."
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I find that to be a
very interesting statement.
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I find her to be very astute
and insightful prophetically,
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because I view that
as a prophetic statement,
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in this sense.
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If you look at how
our political parties,
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the two main dominant parties
have shifted over the years
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since the Civil
War, it's dramatic.
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And if you start with--
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If we go past
Lincoln quite a ways,
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clear up to the 1950's,
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when the Civil Rights Movement
really started to gain steam,
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they were really upset
with the Jim Crow laws,
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the segregation laws,
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which were
preceded by the Black Code,
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that was all part of
the reconstruction period
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after the Civil War.
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You know, you look
at John F. Kennedy,
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and you look at his
emergence and what did it do.
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The Civil Rights Movement
was occurring in the late 1950s,
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John F. Kennedy who was a
senator from Massachusetts
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was a devout Irish Catholic.
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All right, now
that was a real no-no,
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to where most of
Democrats resided,
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where did they reside?
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In the south.
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So they were
mostly Southern Baptists,
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Methodists, God bless
them, wonderful people.
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I went to school
at Baylor University,
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the Southern Baptists people
are just as fine a Christians
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as Seventh-day
Adventist Christians.
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I believe God smiles on them
as much as he does on anybody.
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Maybe you won't
accept it, but in my view,
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the Civil War
changed the parties
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and change continued apace
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after the Civil
War and Reconstruction,
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but that's when
there was a shift,
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but it's worth remembering,
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the Constitution doesn't
even speak of political parties.
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That's right.
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Although--
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They were an
invention of Alexander Hamilton
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and Thomas
Jefferson, they're debates.
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The Federalists and the
Anti-Federalists, right.
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Yes. But--
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Hamilton led the Federalists
and the Anti-Federalists
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by Jefferson.
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But the framers
of the Constitution
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were well aware of parties,
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the Whigs and the
Tories in England,
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that was the routine.
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But what was the whole
basis between the debate
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between the Federalists
and Anti-Federalists?
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Jefferson believed
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in a very small
rural agrarian government,
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where basically, you had
no strong central government,
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where basically,
communities, local communities,
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basically, shape
their own governments.
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In fact, he believed that--
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That was the dream of America.
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He believed that city
councils and county councils
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shouldn't even have to
answer to state governments.
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And so, it was--
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It was a Protestant view,
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derives directly
from Protestants.
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It's a Confederate view.
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It's a confederacy view,
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which basically meant a
loose ad-hoc governments
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with virtually no oversight,
no accountability whatsoever,
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which led to
all kinds of abuses,
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which make up your own
rules as you go sort of thing,
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on your own playground.
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And the problem is that
it created a lot of abuse
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especially among minorities,
especially with the slavery,
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slave trade and so on.
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The fatal flaw
of American society
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and slavery, of course,
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caused the most
problem with this Independence,
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but that clearly was that we're
getting off religious liberty.
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But constitutionally, I believe
that was the original intention
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and the Civil War and
the legal and social changes
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that followed were extreme
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and opposed in many ways
to the original intention.
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And the grand
centralized federal government
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that we have was not
comprehended by people
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or the
Constitution in the beginning.
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If you look at the
Anti-Federalist's viewpoint,
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basically Jefferson's viewpoint,
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he believed in
austerity, economic austerity
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without raising
revenue, meaning no taxation,
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from a strong central
government, all right.
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He also didn't believe in the--
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he did--
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Well, here's what he believed.
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He believed in the
doctrine nullification,
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his idea that states
were ultimately sovereign
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over the federal government,
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that they could
nullify any federal law
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that they wanted at a
whim, like waving a magic wand.
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And that's been the Southern
Confederate view ever since.
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And when you look at
the rise of John F. Kennedy,
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okay, in the 1960's,
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there was two
no-no's against him,
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okay, that Southern
Democrats very much opposed.
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Him being a
Catholic, a Catholic president,
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the first Catholic to
run or not to run, but--
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I can remember the
times and the fuss over it.
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Yes, it was huge.
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Yeah, he wasn't the
first, I think it was Wilkie,
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was the first guy
who ran for president.
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I think he was a Democrat back,
way back in the early 1900s.
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Wendell Wilkie, I
think was his name.
00:10:50.95\00:10:54.35
But John F. Kennedy had
another strike against him,
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and that is he
embraced, for the first time,
00:10:58.92\00:11:01.06
the Democratic Party embraced
the Civil Rights Movement.
00:11:01.09\00:11:04.93
Now that was a double whammy.
00:11:04.96\00:11:07.66
And so Southern
Democrats which made up about,
00:11:07.70\00:11:11.40
you know, the largest
part of the Democratic Party,
00:11:11.43\00:11:13.34
about 70 percent,
across the nation,
00:11:13.37\00:11:16.60
if you look at what happened,
00:11:16.64\00:11:19.41
they started to do a
little dance with Richard Nixon
00:11:19.44\00:11:22.54
in the 1960 election.
00:11:22.58\00:11:24.25
Richard Nixon
quartered Southern Democrats.
00:11:24.28\00:11:27.75
And later, Ronald
Reagan did in the 1980s,
00:11:27.78\00:11:32.05
with the slogan
Reagan Democrats.
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By the end of
Reagan's second term,
00:11:34.56\00:11:37.33
the entire South, okay,
00:11:37.36\00:11:39.49
went from being
70 percent Democrat
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to 70 percent Republican,
00:11:42.86\00:11:45.03
but they did not
change their values.
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They kept their
values of the economics,
00:11:47.37\00:11:50.14
which was Jefferson's economics
as opposed to Hamilton's,
00:11:50.17\00:11:52.87
which was big corporation,
big business, big banks,
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Wall Street, National Bank,
the Federal Reserve etc, etc,
00:11:55.94\00:12:01.45
to this idea of austerity
without raising revenue.
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And then also the
idea of the doctrine
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and nullification,
00:12:07.76\00:12:09.09
that is states were
ultimately sovereign
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over the federal government.
00:12:10.63\00:12:11.96
I mean, that's why you had
a constitutional convention,
00:12:11.99\00:12:14.66
that's why you had
the Federalist Papers.
00:12:14.70\00:12:16.43
The Federalist Papers
00:12:16.46\00:12:17.83
that Alexander
Hamilton mainly wrote,
00:12:17.87\00:12:20.97
along with James
Madison and John J.
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You read those papers
00:12:23.61\00:12:24.97
and the whole reason
for a central government
00:12:25.01\00:12:27.78
is so they could be
united as a whole, okay,
00:12:27.81\00:12:30.95
to act as a whole,
00:12:30.98\00:12:32.38
and not to run off separately
threatening to break away
00:12:32.41\00:12:37.62
and to be independent
in their own country.
00:12:37.65\00:12:40.76
And so that was very
important in those times,
00:12:40.79\00:12:45.03
we faced the same thing,
the sort of the same movement,
00:12:45.06\00:12:48.00
same mentality that exists,
00:12:48.03\00:12:49.90
the same arguments that occurred
00:12:49.93\00:12:52.23
at the Constitutional
Convention in 1787,
00:12:52.27\00:12:54.84
the same arguments
that we see going on today,
00:12:54.87\00:12:58.04
whether it's the Tea
Party, the Republican Party,
00:12:58.07\00:13:00.11
the Democratic Party,
and we see the same thing.
00:13:00.14\00:13:02.71
The problem is that
00:13:02.74\00:13:04.68
even though the
Republican Party now
00:13:04.71\00:13:07.15
embraces the
Southern Confederate mindset,
00:13:07.18\00:13:11.19
so to speak, those
principles, those values,
00:13:11.22\00:13:14.29
they are no longer
the party of Lincoln.
00:13:14.32\00:13:16.69
Lincoln clearly--
00:13:16.73\00:13:18.06
They both changed radically.
00:13:18.09\00:13:19.43
Yeah, but so have the Democrats.
00:13:19.46\00:13:21.56
Now what do we mean by that?
00:13:21.60\00:13:23.47
You've got--
00:13:23.50\00:13:24.83
In some ways, they've
alternated with each other.
00:13:24.87\00:13:26.90
Before we get on to
the explanation of this,
00:13:26.94\00:13:28.67
let's take a break.
00:13:28.70\00:13:30.21
Stay with us,
we'll be back shortly
00:13:30.24\00:13:32.17
to continue the discussion.
00:13:32.21\00:13:33.74