Participants: Lincoln Steed (Host), Greg Hamilton
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI000324A
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00:28 Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
00:30 This is the program bringing in news, views, discussion, 00:33 analysis, and up to date information 00:35 on religious liberty developments 00:37 around the world and in the United States. 00:40 My name is Lincoln Steed, I'm editor of Liberty magazine. 00:44 And my guest on this program is Gregory Hamilton, 00:48 Greg as I know him, 00:49 President of the Northwest Religious Liberty Association. 00:52 Yes, sir. 00:53 From the best quadrant of the US, I'll give you that, 00:57 still speaking as in Australian in origin. 01:00 There's nothing like summer in the northwest. 01:01 It's the most beautiful place in the whole planet. 01:04 And you're a great defender of religious liberty 01:07 and your organization has a great history. 01:09 And I'll give you an ad, 01:11 we've got an article in an upcoming issue of Liberty, 01:13 with the activism there. 01:15 It's been very effective. 01:17 Now you are also holding a position 01:21 for the Seventh-day Adventist Church 01:22 in the union in that quadrant. 01:25 Let's talk about religious liberty involvement 01:30 or political involvement for religious liberty, 01:32 and indeed, other things. 01:34 It's not that clear for most Adventists, is it, 01:37 whether they should be involved in politics 01:40 or what degree or how, 01:41 or is that just a personal level 01:43 or does the church have a political role to play? 01:46 Well, even Ellen White, based upon our last program. 01:50 Now, Ellen White is the pioneer 01:52 and visionary of the early Adventist Church. 01:54 She says in this same book 01:56 "Fundamentals of Christian Education" 01:58 in two places that, she says, "It's not a sin. 02:02 It's good for young men and women 02:03 to aspire for high political office." 02:06 She said, "Would that we had more who did, 02:08 that we had more Daniels, that we had more Esthers," 02:11 like that, and so-- 02:13 I had a Daniel get into his position. 02:15 Well, it's true, that both through captivity, 02:18 both Esther and Daniel. 02:19 And he came to the attention of the king, 02:21 because of his spiritual insight. 02:25 Esther-- 02:26 Yeah, and Esther, and all the things 02:27 she had to do to even become queen 02:29 is unmentionable. 02:30 Yeah, we don't want to talk. 02:31 I think it was God leading through 02:33 an unfortunate series of events. 02:34 It was. 02:36 And you could go on further, what about Joseph? 02:41 But, but that was just a-- 02:42 I make a bit of a distinction myself 02:45 between many Adventists, many Christians 02:48 who are in government positions of responsibility, 02:53 often appointed sometimes career, 02:56 government employees. 02:58 And those that run for these national offices 03:00 where they have to be beholden to the party, 03:03 have to make promises for political reasons 03:06 and then, you know, 03:08 operate within the hurly-burly of what is often, 03:12 unfortunately, almost like mafia type operations. 03:16 You know, the big party busses. 03:17 And I think, then the moral equation gets a little fuzzy. 03:21 But Ellen White even as, She's a good historian. 03:23 And she was not keen on the parties, 03:24 as you will know. 03:26 She was a good historian in the sense 03:27 that she recognized the distinction 03:29 between brutal dictatorships and Joseph's day 03:32 and Daniel's day and Esther's day, 03:35 even to the point of extinction of the entire Israeli people, 03:41 the Jewish people. 03:42 But that's further to my point. 03:44 Those were brutal dictatorships, but yet God, 03:47 I believe, not only used them, placed them there. 03:50 'Cause they were not supportive of that dictatorship, 03:55 they operated within it. 03:57 Where, to be a party creature here, 04:00 this is not a brutal dictatorship, 04:02 but you are synonymous with the ruling power. 04:07 And which is always morally ambiguous. 04:09 But she distinguishes between those brutal dictatorships 04:12 like I was saying, and a democratic republic 04:15 which we have today, which we-- 04:17 It represents-- 04:18 Afford a ton of freedoms 04:19 that no other country on the planet has ever had. 04:22 We live in a wonderful country, and we have an opportunity, 04:26 to exercise our citizenship rights, 04:29 so to speak that are guaranteed by the Constitution. 04:33 And so she recognized that, 04:35 and I think that it's important for us 04:37 to remember that. 04:39 I really believe going back to the Mark 12 analogy 04:42 of "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's 04:44 and to God what is God's," 04:46 where Jesus was speaking to the Herodians and Pharisees 04:49 who were trying to entrap him 04:51 over the issue of taxes and Caesar. 04:53 I think it's important to remember 04:55 that we have a duty to Caesar. 04:58 We have a citizenship duty and Caesar here, 05:02 in our country, in terms of the analogy here, 05:06 we live in a democratic republic, 05:08 we don't live in a brutal dictatorship 05:10 as in Caesar's day. 05:12 Okay, so, so we don't live in Caesar's time. 05:16 Yes, we live in probably the most powerful country, 05:19 the lone superpower left in the world, 05:21 but it's still a free, very free country, 05:24 and people still long to come and live here, 05:27 lots of immigrants want to come here. 05:29 Okay. 05:31 And so we live in a wonderful country. 05:36 I want to emphasize one of the thing 05:38 about Fundamentals of Christian Education, 05:40 page 475, by Ellen White. 05:42 She says, "We cannot, with safety, 05:44 vote for political parties, 05:46 for we do not know whom we are voting for." 05:50 I find that to be a very interesting statement. 05:53 I find her to be very astute and insightful prophetically, 05:56 because I view that as a prophetic statement, 06:00 in this sense. 06:01 If you look at how our political parties, 06:04 the two main dominant parties have shifted over the years 06:09 since the Civil War, it's dramatic. 06:12 And if you start with-- 06:14 If we go past Lincoln quite a ways, 06:16 clear up to the 1950's, 06:19 when the Civil Rights Movement really started to gain steam, 06:22 they were really upset with the Jim Crow laws, 06:27 the segregation laws, 06:28 which were preceded by the Black Code, 06:32 that was all part of the reconstruction period 06:36 after the Civil War. 06:39 You know, you look at John F. Kennedy, 06:43 and you look at his emergence and what did it do. 06:47 The Civil Rights Movement was occurring in the late 1950s, 06:50 John F. Kennedy who was a senator from Massachusetts 06:54 was a devout Irish Catholic. 06:57 All right, now that was a real no-no, 07:00 to where most of Democrats resided, 07:02 where did they reside? 07:03 In the south. 07:04 So they were mostly Southern Baptists, 07:06 Methodists, God bless them, wonderful people. 07:11 I went to school at Baylor University, 07:14 the Southern Baptists people are just as fine a Christians 07:18 as Seventh-day Adventist Christians. 07:20 I believe God smiles on them as much as he does on anybody. 07:24 Maybe you won't accept it, but in my view, 07:26 the Civil War changed the parties 07:28 and change continued apace 07:29 after the Civil War and Reconstruction, 07:32 but that's when there was a shift, 07:33 but it's worth remembering, 07:34 the Constitution doesn't even speak of political parties. 07:38 That's right. 07:40 Although-- 07:41 They were an invention of Alexander Hamilton 07:42 and Thomas Jefferson, they're debates. 07:44 The Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, right. 07:46 Yes. But-- 07:48 Hamilton led the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists 07:51 by Jefferson. 07:52 But the framers of the Constitution 07:54 were well aware of parties, 07:55 the Whigs and the Tories in England, 07:56 that was the routine. 07:58 But what was the whole basis between the debate 08:01 between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists? 08:03 Jefferson believed 08:05 in a very small rural agrarian government, 08:09 where basically, you had no strong central government, 08:13 where basically, communities, local communities, 08:16 basically, shape their own governments. 08:18 In fact, he believed that-- 08:19 That was the dream of America. 08:21 He believed that city councils and county councils 08:24 shouldn't even have to answer to state governments. 08:26 And so, it was-- 08:29 It was a Protestant view, 08:31 derives directly from Protestants. 08:33 It's a Confederate view. 08:34 It's a confederacy view, 08:36 which basically meant a loose ad-hoc governments 08:41 with virtually no oversight, no accountability whatsoever, 08:45 which led to all kinds of abuses, 08:48 which make up your own rules as you go sort of thing, 08:51 on your own playground. 08:52 And the problem is that it created a lot of abuse 08:57 especially among minorities, especially with the slavery, 09:00 slave trade and so on. 09:04 The fatal flaw of American society 09:06 and slavery, of course, 09:09 caused the most problem with this Independence, 09:14 but that clearly was that we're getting off religious liberty. 09:17 But constitutionally, I believe that was the original intention 09:21 and the Civil War and the legal and social changes 09:26 that followed were extreme 09:28 and opposed in many ways to the original intention. 09:31 And the grand centralized federal government 09:34 that we have was not comprehended by people 09:37 or the Constitution in the beginning. 09:40 If you look at the Anti-Federalist's viewpoint, 09:43 basically Jefferson's viewpoint, 09:44 he believed in austerity, economic austerity 09:49 without raising revenue, meaning no taxation, 09:52 from a strong central government, all right. 09:54 He also didn't believe in the-- 09:59 he did-- 10:00 Well, here's what he believed. 10:02 He believed in the doctrine nullification, 10:04 his idea that states were ultimately sovereign 10:06 over the federal government, 10:08 that they could nullify any federal law 10:10 that they wanted at a whim, like waving a magic wand. 10:14 And that's been the Southern Confederate view ever since. 10:18 And when you look at the rise of John F. Kennedy, 10:21 okay, in the 1960's, 10:24 there was two no-no's against him, 10:27 okay, that Southern Democrats very much opposed. 10:30 Him being a Catholic, a Catholic president, 10:33 the first Catholic to run or not to run, but-- 10:35 I can remember the times and the fuss over it. 10:38 Yes, it was huge. 10:39 Yeah, he wasn't the first, I think it was Wilkie, 10:41 was the first guy who ran for president. 10:45 I think he was a Democrat back, way back in the early 1900s. 10:50 Wendell Wilkie, I think was his name. 10:54 But John F. Kennedy had another strike against him, 10:58 and that is he embraced, for the first time, 11:01 the Democratic Party embraced the Civil Rights Movement. 11:04 Now that was a double whammy. 11:07 And so Southern Democrats which made up about, 11:11 you know, the largest part of the Democratic Party, 11:13 about 70 percent, across the nation, 11:16 if you look at what happened, 11:19 they started to do a little dance with Richard Nixon 11:22 in the 1960 election. 11:24 Richard Nixon quartered Southern Democrats. 11:27 And later, Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, 11:32 with the slogan Reagan Democrats. 11:34 By the end of Reagan's second term, 11:37 the entire South, okay, 11:39 went from being 70 percent Democrat 11:42 to 70 percent Republican, 11:45 but they did not change their values. 11:47 They kept their values of the economics, 11:50 which was Jefferson's economics as opposed to Hamilton's, 11:52 which was big corporation, big business, big banks, 11:55 Wall Street, National Bank, the Federal Reserve etc, etc, 12:01 to this idea of austerity without raising revenue. 12:05 And then also the idea of the doctrine 12:07 and nullification, 12:09 that is states were ultimately sovereign 12:10 over the federal government. 12:11 I mean, that's why you had a constitutional convention, 12:14 that's why you had the Federalist Papers. 12:16 The Federalist Papers 12:17 that Alexander Hamilton mainly wrote, 12:21 along with James Madison and John J. 12:23 You read those papers 12:25 and the whole reason for a central government 12:27 is so they could be united as a whole, okay, 12:30 to act as a whole, 12:32 and not to run off separately threatening to break away 12:37 and to be independent in their own country. 12:40 And so that was very important in those times, 12:45 we faced the same thing, the sort of the same movement, 12:48 same mentality that exists, 12:49 the same arguments that occurred 12:52 at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, 12:54 the same arguments that we see going on today, 12:58 whether it's the Tea Party, the Republican Party, 13:00 the Democratic Party, and we see the same thing. 13:02 The problem is that 13:04 even though the Republican Party now 13:07 embraces the Southern Confederate mindset, 13:11 so to speak, those principles, those values, 13:14 they are no longer the party of Lincoln. 13:16 Lincoln clearly-- 13:18 They both changed radically. 13:19 Yeah, but so have the Democrats. 13:21 Now what do we mean by that? 13:23 You've got-- 13:24 In some ways, they've alternated with each other. 13:26 Before we get on to the explanation of this, 13:28 let's take a break. 13:30 Stay with us, we'll be back shortly 13:32 to continue the discussion. |
Revised 2016-07-28