← The Josh Hammer Show
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In 2025, Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. That's why so many people are turning to Aura. Aura helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. And if you become a victim, Aura's 24. 7 US based support team is there to help. Don't wait until your identity is stolen. Start your free trial today@aura.com safe. That's Aura.com safe.
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Well, we are now in full America 250 mode. The great celebration is this Saturday. Look, it's been a tough week at times at the U.S. supreme Court when it comes to our sovereignty. What should we be thinking about to best ensure that this republic endures for another quarter millennium? I'm Josh Hammer and this is the Josh Hammer Show. Well, I know that I am in full America 250 swing right now. I presume that if you are listening or watching, then you quite possibly are as well. It is going to be just a raucous, in the best possible sense weekend, not just the nation's capital, but really from sea to shining sea. As John Adams many years ago famously said, he hopes that this day, the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, will be remembered from here until eternity when it comes to shows and parades and fireworks and gunshots and every way that you can possibly conceive of how a man in the late 18th century would have thought of as a celebration. So it's going to be a wonderful, wonderful celebration. It's already been a great celebration this week on the National Mall with the Great American Fair. I have not been there. I don't live in the nation's capital, but I have a lot of friends who have been there. I've seen all sorts of photos, all sorts of videos. You probably have to this administration, from what I can tell thus far, doing a simply phenomenal job when it comes to celebrating this nation's monumental milestone of being 250 years old. By the way, the broader context this happening while the United States is hosting the World cup, you cannot overlook that context as well. There are all sorts of foreigners who are coming here who are loving America. They are loving what they see, loving everything from the Buc ee stores and the Walmarts and the Bass Pro shops to the large homes and the very large burgers and the fries at the drive through and they're just loving it. And it is such a rebuke to the haters. It is such a rebuke to those who say that America is just a backwater bastion filled with all these bigots and xenophobes and insert your phobia of choice there. No, what's happening with the World cup is a living, breathing reboot to that. And I think it is powerful symbolism that is happening at time where we are celebrating our 250th birthday. I think a lot about the American founding. I love this country dearly. I have my entire life. I grew up in a very patriotic home. I looked forward to July 4th every single year. I truly earnestly look forward to going to the local parade. I played and marched in the local bands when I was in middle school and high school playing Genky Doodle Dandy and My Country Tis a Fee and all these patriotic songs. I remember going to sleepaway camp at West Point at the United States Military Academy. I have always loved reading the writings of the American founding, reading the Federalist Papers, poring over many of the great speeches that were given around that time, and even extrapolating to some of the other great leaders in American history, men like Abraham Lincoln. This is truly legendary stuff. And if you are a younger person who unfortunately if you have been deprived of this education in your school, which unfortunately would not surprise me if you went to a woke school, a public school or even a woke private school, the beauty is that there are so many tools at your disposal to try to learn about the jewels and the gems that have permeated this great nation's history. Everything from online videos. There's so much good information out there just on the Internet, on YouTube, PragerU resources like that that are trying tell the actual correct version of American history. And we'll be joined a little bit later in the show by Eric Metaxas, longtime talk show host and author who talk about his new book and how he is doing his own part to try to re imbue the masses with a proper sense of how great this country is. What was actually founded on and what was the corollary? What was actually frankly not founded on. I want to talk a little bit about self governance. We celebrate the Declaration of independence on July 4th. That is why it is on July 4th. In theory, America's Independence Day could be, if you want it to be. It could be on on the day of the final state that ratified the Constitution, thereby making sure that this republic actually got up and running after the failures of the Articles Confederation. We could have chosen. My point is any number of days we chose this date though. We chose the date of July 4th because that is the date of the decoration. It was kind of sort of finished a couple days early, actually on July 2nd, but July 4th is the date that we popularly affixed to it. The decoration stands for a lot of things. And one thing that I like to remind my audience every year is that you should actually read the declaration on July 4th. That's not a pedantic exercise. It is well worth your time. Because what you will see, among other things, is that the bulk of the document is centered around a list of enumerated grievances against the tyrannical British monarch, against King George iii. This is important for a few reasons. One is you actually see, among other enumerations, you will see one grievance whereby they accused the British Crown of sending out bureaucrats, let's call them, or administrators, to enforce the King's edicts and Parliament's decrees in an overly oppressive fashion. Which is a very fancy way of saying that among other things, they were complaining about their version of the deep state, their ver of Westminster's deep state, and how it affected the colonists back at that time. But the key takeaway from the Declaration is not necessarily this as important as that is, and it is very important. But the biggest takeaway that we think of is we think of those famous words early on in the text that we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are entitled by the Creator to certain inalienable rights. Among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You take those words and you combine them with the first three words of the Constitution as was drafted 11 years later in Philadelphia in 1787. Those three words beginning the Constitution in the preamble with we the people, what do you arrive at? Well, you take the Declaration's natural rights theory, you take we the people, and you arrive at a theory of popular sovereignty, of consent of the governed. It was an utterly radical proposition at the time. When you compare to the ancient monarchies of Europe, whereby you had a king who had a lot of subjects, you did not necessarily have citizens who were free, were able to govern themselves and to establish their own institutions and to inculcate and pass down, disseminate their own values, their principles, their customs, their folkways, their way of life, all of this was, broadly speaking, novel. Now, it didn't appear out of nowhere. There is plenty, plenty of precedent for it. Above all, I would argue, and I suspect our guest today might argue above all, in the Bible, a lot of this really does come from the Good Book itself. But I think a lot about how we are doing. Are we meeting the test, are we meeting the test of actually engaging in Republican self governance? Are we actually conducting ourselves, comporting ourselves in a manner that best assures that this great experiment in order to liberty will last for another 250 years? And one thing that comes immediately to mind is that we need to reprioritize the virtue of gratitude. Frankly, I think that gratitude is the quintessential conservative virtue. Think about what it means to be conservative. You like to conserve. That which is burned down is very. It's very hard to rebuild, it's very easy to destroy. It's very hard to rebuild. So conservatives tend to think about, well, conservation, about preservation, about being grateful that which we have not necessarily longings for the utopia that we don't have. So gratitude is a very important thing. And if you, if you are grateful, they should think about as I try to do as often as I can, think about how we are doing. Well, how, how are we doing? How are we doing? To get back to Benjamin Franklin's famous quip in Philadelphia in 1787 where he, he referred to the handiwork of the Constitutional Convention as a republic, if you can keep it. How are we doing when it comes to keeping it? Well, the long and short of it is that we frankly could be doing a lot better. It doesn't help that half of America is led by a political movement, the American left and a political party, Democratic Party that actively hates this country. Unfortunately, that's not an exaggeration. It was not always that way. By the way, the American left, American Democratic party, in my lifetime, certainly in my parents lifetime, was not an actively anti American force. Democratic Party of Harry Truman, the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, you might have disagreed with that party, but it was not an activity actively anti American force. Even Bill Clinton to no small extent as well, that has started to change and there is now a deeply anti American force operating in our midst. But we on the right have to do a better job of making sure that we are also working towards greater lowercase all Republican self governance. I have a new essay out this week. It's coming out for Front Page magazine which is the online magazine for the David Horowitz Freedom center where I am a Shulman fellow talking about how we are doing when it comes to meeting this challenge of a republic. If you can keep it. There are at least three areas that come to mind as far as the undermining, the vitiation, if you will, of Republican self governance and popular sovereignty and this notion of consent of the government. The first area is the rise of the Ministry of State, the all important unelected fourth branch government. This has been going on for over a century, going back to Woodrow Wilson, who famously initiated the Ministry of State, who was inspired by Germanic European philosophy by not so great thinkers like Hegel. The good news on this front is that we are starting to unwind the Ministry of State. There was a fantastic ruling of the Supreme Court just on Monday in the Slaughter case that overturned a 90 year old precedent whereby it famously held that the President does have the ability. It finally held that the President had the ability once and for all to fire all those within the Executive branch. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but that's more or less the holding of the case anyway. That is one area we have to get better when it comes to ascent of the government that to overturn the administrative state in its entirety. Number two is judicial supremacy. We discussed this on the show this week in the context of the birthright citizenship loss at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. This is the notion that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter, the end all, be all of all of our constitutional questions. And that simply is not the case. If we care about consent and government, if we care about lowercase or Republicanism, Article 1, the Congress above all, and Article 2, the presidency. Executive branch must reassert themselves when it comes to an overweening, out of control judiciary. This was a challenge that Abraham Lincoln faced. He met that challenge. Will we meet that challenge today? It's an open question, but we sure need to try. And finally, the final challenge that I can identify when it comes to consent of the governed is a cultural one. We the people are increasingly ruled by an out of touch cloistered elite, a bicoastal elite, the ruling class, if you will, that do not share our opinions, that do not share our worldview or customs or way of life. They definitely don't don't share our biblical outlook. They have their own values. They are values of wokeism, of intersectionality, of Marxism, of the burn it all down, anti civilization, pro barbarism left. That is a problem. There is no world in which there will not be a ruling class. The inevitability of classes I think is self evident. Marxism is here then ever alive. Rather we need our people in the ruling class. That's a generational challenge. It's one that I've tried to work on in my own small capacity. It's a long task for sure. I do think that we will get there. So those are just some challenges that I'm thinking of as we think about America 250, which we will celebrate this Saturday. But I'm sure a man who's also thought a lot about our challenges and much more is our guest, Eric Metaxas, who will join us after a short break. Folks, we're gonna go to a short break. We'll be joined on the other side by Eric Metaxas. Don't go anywhere.
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In 2025, Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. That's why so many people are turning to Aura. Aura helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, dark web monitoring and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. And if you become a victim, Aura's 247 US based support team is there to help. Don't wait until your identity is stolen. Start your free trial today@aura.com safe that's aura.com safe.
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Welcome back to this America 250 themed edition of the Josh Hammer Show. So we are pleased to bring back the show, our friend Eric Metaxas to talk about America 250 and more. Eric is a longtime broadcaster and author and all around right thinking individual. He's also the author of the brand new book the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World and he joins us right now. So Mr. Metaxas, always a pleasure to have you here on the show. Congratulations on the highly successful from what I can glean, launch of that brand new books. Why don't we begin there because your book is obviously times to America 250, this great celebration this Saturday. Tell us about this new book.
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Well, first of all, the title is the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the history of the world. So not just the world, but in the history of the world, kind of a, you know, a big thing to say. But I think I can back that up because I think that America is God's idea. If you don't believe in God, you're going to have problems. But maybe the data can impress people. But I just think that the concept of a nation where the people govern themselves, we have lost touch with the wildness of the idea that 250 years ago they thought we don't need a king, we can govern ourselves. It was an insane idea. Unless you look back to Sinai, unless you look back 3,000 years earlier to the Israelites coming out of Egypt, being in the wilderness, looking directly to God. We have no earthly king. We have God as our king. I mean, it's an extraordinary, I Mean, it's the definition of the west, right? This is the idea that this idea, which we get from the Bible, comes into history all these years later. So I think, yes, this is the time Americans need to know our history. And the bottom line is, it's not a book about that. It is the story of the revolution. In other words, people who don't. Maybe you learned it in school or maybe you never learned it, but I think we need to know our history. I know that we need to know our history. And this is just a telling of the extraordinary history, the crazy beautiful stories that make up the epic narrative of the American Revolution. So that's essentially what it means to be.
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You can follow Eric Metaxas on xrrichmetaxis. You know, Eric, when we had you on the show last time, I thought that you were preaching to the host by talking about the Israelites and Sinai and the Old Covenants. And here you are again preaching it again to the host. I'm just jesting, of course, but I'm
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just trying to get in good with the Jews. I know that there's probably five of them out there who listen to this program that I'm just trying to get in. That's all. I just throw that in. No, look, this is the central idea. And again, I don't want my book to be about that. My book is the story of the revolution. But everywhere I go, I preached three times in a huge church in Houston a couple of days ago. I'm talking about this wherever I go. Cause this is the central idea. Everybody in the revolutionary era understood this concept. All of the leaders in the 13 colonies, they got this idea, but we've kind of brushed it away or forgotten it or some people are just hostile to it. It's central. And I think that, to be honest, you have to talk about. That's how they saw it. They all saw it. This way. Jefferson saw it, Franklin saw it, they all saw it. So if it's so central to them, how can we have forgotten about it?
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So, Eric, I just announced publicly that I signed my deal for my next book, which is tentatively called, as of now, Covenant and Constitution. And it's about the Hebrew Bible in America and so forth. And this theme of covenant, I think, is underappreciated when it comes to a lot of conservatives, when it comes to a lot of folks who think about what the American founding is. We think a lot about the Declaration and its soaring rhetoric when it comes to natural rights and liberty. And that's all great. I'm totally not downplaying that at all. Of course, it's the anniversary of the Declaration this Saturday. That's why we're celebrating this great quarter millennium mark. But this notion of covenants, which we see clearly in declaration, frankly, this notion of all these men who come together to sign their names, their fortunes, their lives of sacred honor, we see it clearly in the first three words of the Constitution, which begin with those three famous words. We the people. Talk to us a little bit about this notion of covenant. I'm sure this is a concept that you touch on in your book as well.
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Yeah. And again, I mean, my book, you know, I just want to be clear. People have been saying, and I'm thrilled as the writer, that it reads like a novel, that it's a page turner, that, you know, because it's a book of stories. So it's not a book about anything. Sometimes books about something are difficult to read. This is easy to read, or at least I hope it is. And the stories are amazing and interesting, and I didn't make them up. It's all true. But behind it is this idea that you can't get away from. And this is what I find so fascinating, is that when you start to study who were the men behind this? You look at Samuel Adams in the 1760s. Even before that, they all were Puritans. They had Puritan theology, Reformation theology. They're looking back to the Old Testament. This is the way they see the world. And so they weren't just, hey, we want to get away from England and kind of do our own thing. No, they wanted to do what the Israelites had done in getting out of Egypt. And that's how they saw the story. And so the idea that we've forgotten about that, that this is so central. So, yes, they were people of the covenant. They believe that if we obey God and honor God, God will honor us, and if we don't, he won't. And all you have to do is read the Old Testament and see that, you know, when the people of Israel honor God, things go well. When they stray, things go poorly. It's kind of basic, but it was really built into the warp and the woof of the colonial generation and the previous century and the 17th century. So in the 18th century, this is the idea. And they don't really, you know, they never expect that the 13 colonies are gonna melt together into some nation. As far as they're concerned, they've all done this on their own. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is, you know, taking care of business and, you know, Rhode island is doing its thing, and Connecticut, and they're all doing their own thing. But because of the Great Awakening, because of the preaching of George Whitefield, these ideas are fanned into flame once again. There's religious revival. And then suddenly, because the British decide to tax the colonies in 1765, these issues suddenly come into conflict with the British idea of things. And so when the Americans start talking about maybe we need to unite to deal with this, they're not thinking about going independent for a long time. At first, they're just trying to figure out, how do we maintain our rights? All of it is along biblical lines. The idea that our rights come from God, all of this stuff. I mean, of course, everything is filtered through, you know, the Scottish Enlightenment, whatever, but where do you get the idea that our rights come from God? It comes from the Bible. That's where these ideas come from. Liberty comes from the Bible. All of this stuff. These are biblical ideas. And so. So there is nobody in that era who wasn't thinking along these lines. And to speak specifically about covenant, it's almost funny because people think like, oh, yeah, maybe Samuel Adams was thinking that way. No, George Washington is thinking that way. The first thing that he does, the first order that he makes when he has ridden his horse from Congress in Philadelphia up to Cambridge and Boston to take command of the Continental army, his first order is to his officers that all of their men must behave in a way that is worthy of God's blessing on our efforts. No gambling, no swearing, make sure they go to church on Sunday. Why would George Washington care about that? The whole idea is that they actually believed that if we honor God in how we fight, in how we comport ourselves, God will honor us. This is a sacred cause. This is not some political thing. So this is like everywhere. And as I wrote my book, as I did the research, I was astonished at how little I really saw this, that this is not escapable, this is not a piece of the story. It's at the center of everything. And secular historians have generally either missed it because they don't kind of speak that language of faith, or some secular historians have just sneered at it and tried to bury it, tried to pretend that it's not there even when they see it. And so the reason we're in the mess we're in in this country is that we've had decades of us not understanding who we are, where our liberties come from, what the stories of the founding are. We must understand this. I think I keep saying that we used to understand this up until about 60 years ago, everybody in America pretty much understood all this stuff. Whether you like it or not, these are the facts. Most Americans knew these facts. They knew the players, the names, the stories. I said, I want to write a book that tells all these stories. But in telling these stories, this background stuff, it's just again, it's unavoidable. Everywhere you turn, you see this, folks.
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Eric Metaxas brand new book is the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World. You can get it anywhere books are sold. It is topping a lot of the charts, at least as I see those charts. Congratulations once again on that, Eric. You can follow Eric on xericmetaxis. And Eric will be joining us for some more conversation after a short commercial break. Folks, stay with us. We're just gonna go to a quick break. We'll be right back with much more. This is Josh Amersaud with guest Eric Metaxas.
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Welcome back. And we're pleased to be rejoined by Eric Metaxas, who is, among other things, the author of the brand new book the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World. Eric, before the break, we were talking a little bit about, among others, George Washington and I think a lot about Washington's second inaugural address, which is one of the great works of oration, you might say, in the early Republic, where to your point, he famously says let he indulge, let he foolishly indulge the notion that this republic can be sustained without not spirituality or even kind of ethereal, amorphous morality. No, he says revealed religion without actual biblical revealed religion.
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Revealed by whom? By God, obviously. That's what revelation is, right? So this is not a deist talking and we've heard our whole lifetimes, oh, Washington, he was a deist. That is a preposterous lie. He was not a deist. He's clearly a biblical Christian. He speaks that way over and over and over. And that's the classic case, what you just quoted. I mean, in case you want to know what he says, you can read his first and second inaugural addresses, his farewell address. He doesn't need to go there, but he goes there over and over. He makes the point kind of like he's saying, well, if I've got five minutes, here's the pith, here's the center of how we keep the Republic, here's the center of what we have done in this nation and how we keep it. Why would he say that if he didn't feel strongly about it?
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Now, I want to dovetail off that and pick up on something that you said before the break as well, which is you kind of buried in there. I think quite accurately that this was the understanding of America until let's call it 50, 60, 70 years ago. And something did seem to change. I think back to my own education. I went to public school K through 12, and I think back to the way that I was taught the American founding. In middle school, high school, I was essentially taught that it was a European enlightenment founding. And it's very easy to see that in the abstract when you read Jefferson's Declaration, you see a lot of John Locke. But the story obviously, as we've already touched on, is way more complicated than that. And I guess my question to you, Eric, is putting on your historian cap. I don't think you or I are historians, but we can play one perhaps on tv. But putting on your historian cap, how did this happen? Was there a concerted effort to try to change the story of the American founding? Was this part of a Cold War era? What happens in your telling of tale?
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I think that's part of it. I mean, I think that's part. Listen, there are people, there are always going to be people that are really hostile to the idea of God. They've pretty much existed for at least the last 250 plus years. The French Enlightenment, I mean, part of what you just said. Just to clarify too, like when people say the Enlightenment, what Enlightenment, broad term.
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Exactly.
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Scottish Enlightenment is all about God, right? John Locke, what is he? He's a fire breathing Christian. Our rights come from God. The French Enlightenment is the opposite. The French Enlightenment, these are deists, they don't believe in God. They decide they want to Have a revolution. They don't just kill the king and queen, they kill the priests and nuns. They don't want God in the picture. The American Revolution, the only real revolution that succeeds, says that without God, we cannot succeed. We need him to smile on our efforts. We need to make a covenant with Him. He will sustain us. Couldn't be more different. So when we talk about the Enlightenment, even that is confusing because people go, oh, Enlightenment. They sort of think French Enlightenment. The French Enlightenment has nothing to do really with what we're talking about. The French Revolution was a disaster. Our revolution was a success. What's the difference? God is the difference. It's inescapable. And I think that people slipping past that, I mean, including Jefferson and Thomas Paine, foolishly thinking, well, it's sort of the same. No, it's not sort of the same. It's dramatically different. And there's a reason we succeeded and the French Revolution utterly failed. You know, they traded their king for what, a dictator? Emperor. That's a pretty bad trait. It didn't work out.
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No, it didn't. And look, to be fair, there were some Frenchmen, like Montesquieu, who were definitely admired by the founders. But Voltaire, for instance, was an absolute secular radical. He was lionized by the Jacobins, by Robespierre, by the revolutionaries. And yes, the American Founding was biblically based. It was God based. I would even argue in many ways it was Torah based. As we discussed here, when it comes to notions of covenants and the origins of the rights of man and so forth there. And in many ways, Eric, this is the reason, I think, for the success of the American Founding, in contrast to a lot that is happening over in Europe for the past few hundred years. I wanna switch gears a little bit there and talk about July 4th itself. So July 4th, we famously celebrate it for the Declaration. It's Thomas Jefferson as the lead author. Many other men spoke movingly about this day. John Adams famously said that he hopes that this day will forever be remembered with shows and parades and fireworks from sea to shining sea. And there's so much great rhetoric that's been said about this day. I wanted to ask you about the Founding Fathers more generally. You've written a book on this. You've said this your entire adult's life. I'm gonna ask you a very simple, straight up question. Who's your favorite Founding father, Eric Metaxas. And why?
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C
Well, at this point, I think it has to be John Adams. Now, George Washington always has to be in the lead, but right Next to him is John Adams. And John Adams, I keep saying, should be a thousand times more famous than Thomas Jefferson. I'm amazed, really. I mean, when people even say Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of that's basically not true. That implies all kinds of things that are not true. All of these ideas preexisted Jefferson. It's not like he came up with it and said, hey, what do you think of these ideas? Every single person involved already knew every one of these ideas. They just needed to put it in a document. And they tasked him. John Adams tasked him specifically with writing it because they knew he was a great writer. He had a felicity of phrase. And there are phrases in there that are poetry. So it's not boilerplate legalese. But Thomas Jefferson didn't come up with these ideas. These ideas were all of these founders where they were talking about them. They wouldn't have come up with independence, they wouldn't have even begun the revolution if they hadn't already understood everything that ends up being in that document. Even the phrase, we hold these truths to be self evident. Jefferson didn't write that. He wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. And Ben Franklin gets in, there goes, nah, that's kind of redundant. Eh? Change it to self evident. You know, the Yankees drunk in white. So, I mean, I tell that story in depth in my book because I think it's very important for us to understand exactly how it all came together. But, you know, so there are ideas in there that rise beautifully. I mean, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain aliens. But to pretend that somehow Jefferson came up with this, all of these men were willing to die for this before Jefferson ever wrote those words. And they all came to him with these ideas. I mean, Adams and Franklin and Jefferson and two others, I always forget Roger Sherman, they were committee, and they spent two days talking about what we need to put in this document. And then Jefferson goes away to write the first draft. But so I. So I think Jefferson gets really dramatically overrated, honestly. But John Adams, my goodness, in my book, you know, I keep saying this. When I said I want to write this book, I had no angle. I had, you know, no particular ideas. I just said, I just want to tell the stories of the revolution, how we get to Lexington and Concord, what happens after Lexington and Concord and the war. All of these great stories. Every American needs to know these stories. And I just want to write about them. And I want to tell it in a way that, that's captivating and I Hope I succeeded. But in the course of doing that, John Adams just popped out over and over and over again. He wrote an essay. I wrote a whole chapter in my book on an essay that hardly anybody knows, that John Adams wrote in 1765. He's 30 years old. This is before anything is really happening. And he writes an essay where he says all of this stuff, you know, 11 years before the Declaration of Independence. And he says amazing things. And I thought, wow, most people don't even know about this essay because it was chopped up into four parts and published in the Boston Gazette under preposterous pseudonyms. He picked as his pseudonym Humphrey Plowjogger. Not making that up. Right. So when I found this, I thought, john Adams is amazing. I mean, he is thinking about the notion of liberty on this very high level. He defines what is liberty. And an elder colleague of his, a famous lawyer, Josiah Gridley, asked him, you need to write this stuff down. You know, he sees the genius in Adams. And so Adams really is remarkable. And also for his Christian faith, I mean, this is a man who understood early on, we need to honor God in how we conduct ourselves. We can't just win. Because I think sometimes, you know, he saw things going on where they would stray. You know, some of the mob. There's mob violence in Boston around the Stamp act. And, you know, he gets uncomfortable. And then there's a signal moment in 1770 when we talk about the Boston Massacre. He chooses to defend the soldiers, the British soldiers. Why? Because he basically says, you know, if we want to win, we have to play fair. God will not honor us if we win.
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Eric, sorry, we're up against a hard break here, so hold a thought for the other side, folks. We're gonna go to one final break. We'll be right back with some more thoughts. Ericman taxes say this. We'll be right back with Ericman taxes.
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In 2025, Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. That's why so many people are turning to aura. AURA helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. And if you become a victim, Aura's 24. 7 US based support team is there to help. Don't wait until your identity is stolen. Start your free trial today@aura.com safe. That's Aura.com safe.
- [35:03]
B
Welcome back. And we're still joined by Eric Metaxas, who's the author of, among other things, the brand new book Revolution the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World. Eric, I called you off. I apologize. But you're talking about how John Adams in 1770, rose to defend the British troops who were accused. Well, were credibly accused of murdering people in the Boston Massacre. Go ahead and finish your story.
- [35:24]
C
Well, I guess the point is this gets back to Covenant, right? This ancient biblical idea of covenant. We have to comport ourselves in a way that honors God, even when it might work against our interests, because we actually trust God has our back. God, God will take care in the long run. Our job is to do our job and to honor him. So we don't want to cheat. We don't want to hang the British soldiers on the gallows from Boston Common just because it'll help the mob. You know, the mob will be happy. But we need to comport ourselves in the right way. We need to stake out the moral high ground so that the British see, you know, and this is the idea, the New Testament idea, of loving your enemies so that the British will see that we are honoring God. We are not just rebels. We're not just troublemakers. We want them to see us behave in a way that will be a witness to them that we are looking to God in what we're doing and let it shame them that we are honorable. And so John Adams really leads the way. And then when the war begins, that continues, George Washington and Adams and others make it really clear we will not fight the way the British do. The British were barbaric. They were brutal. They didn't care about covenant theology. They didn't think, oh, God has to smile on our efforts. They thought, who cares about God? We've got the biggest army and navy. We will crush you like bugs. Well, the Americans had a different view. The Americans said, we are going to fight in an honorable way. We're gonna treat our prisoners well. The British did just the opposite. And that's another thing that struck me in the course of the research, how amazingly different the British elites were from the American elites. The American elites were mostly very Christian, very virtuous. And the British elites were very decadent, brutal, cynical, corrupt. I'd never seen that before. And it really is just everywhere I looked, and I thought, this is a morality tale. The good guys win, but the bad guys had all the power. But the good guys win. So that's something that I hadn't seen until I did all the research, but it just popped up everywhere. It was amazing. And in some ways, John Adams is central to that.
- [37:52]
B
It's funny. I had a thought that came to mind Just now, which is when you're talking about the historical overrating of Jefferson, which I agree with, by the way. I think that actually ties into our earlier conversation about this recent historical revisionism of the American founding. I think this is probably a concerted attempt, you know what, to try to elevate Jefferson because of his. Exactly. That's the hetero views. Yeah, yeah.
- [38:13]
C
No, that's exactly correct. They think like, oh, Jefferson's our guy. He's French Enlightenment guy.
- [38:17]
B
Exactly.
- [38:18]
C
Baloney. First of all. And this is the irony, right? First of all, neither he nor Benjamin Franklin is that much a French Enlightenment guy. Like, they act like, you know, he was this deist. And. And even that is not quite right if you dig into it. But that is why they've pushed him like crazy, because they act as though you can get these ideas without God, liberty. And you think, well, how? How, If God is not involved, then what is liberty? What is free speech and freedom of religion and freedom of all these ideas that all these men suffered for and many died for? Where do they come from? They pretend like, well, it just kind of bubbles up because we evolve, you know, we just kind of. Mankind just gets better as time goes along. It's like, no, no, no. That's a utopianist lunatic idea that leads to the killing fields of Pol Pot. It leads to the Cultural Revolution in China. It leads to the Bolshevik Revolution. It leads to slavery in the Gulag Archipelago. That utopianist nonsense is worse than nonsense. It is evil. But they pretend like, no, no, no, that's what was happening there. And that's why the French Revolution is very similar to the American Revolution. And Jefferson is our guy. And I'm thinking that's. I see what they're doing there. Right? I see that. And that's one of the reasons, I think, that they shrink from elevating John Adams, because John Adams is profoundly and explicitly Christian, as is Abigail Adams. It's just inescapable.
- [39:50]
B
You know, in my book last year, Eric, I make a very similar argument, which is that if you use reason untethered to revelation, if you just try to expostulate and just think, what is the most reasonable thing? Well, that could end in theory. It could end in a liberty and in a just society with flourishing and all that. It could also end in the train tracks to Auschwitz. It could also end, as you say, in the Gulag Archipelago. Pol Pot, the Maoists, great leap forward. Tens of millions dead in famines and this and that. We've seen this play on history, and it ends poorly. Essentially, every single time, if you remove God, you remove flourishing. You remove all that has made America great. And that kind of takes me to my next question for you, Eric, which is, I think a lot about this Ben Franklin quote. Ben Franklin famously emerges from the convention in 1787. He sees the local Philadelphia socialite, Elizabeth Wilding, if I'm pronouncing her name correctly. And the socialite asks, Mr. Franklin, what have you good men given us? And Franklin famously quips, he says, a republic, ma', am, if you can keep it. And I think about this often because I oftentimes think about how we as Americans in the year 2026, how we are keeping it. There are a lot of threats, a lot of them. I think a lot about escalating political violence, for instance. I think a lot about the fact that the left in America today is increasingly openly cheering on America's enemies when it comes to communism and Islamism and so forth there. So how would you assess how we are doing on Benjamin Franklin's famous quip about keeping this republic at this point there?
- [41:17]
C
Well, I mean, that's kind of why I wrote the book. If we do not know our history, it doesn't keep itself. The Constitution is a worthless piece of paper. It's a dead piece of paper. It doesn't do anything unless we, the people understand it and live it out, unless we have a culture that celebrates these ideas, that teaches these ideas to our kids. That's what Franklin was getting at when he. He made his famous quip to Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia. He knew this goes away unless the people actually keep it. And that remains to be seen. Right. So, you know, three years later, he's dead. He doesn't know how it turns out. The fact that it has kept for 250 years, it is. We have fallen on very, very hard times. And again, part of the reason I wrote this book, the main reason, is that we need to know this history. Every American used to know this history, used to understand, and this is how it works, that the Great Awakening, the evangelistic preaching of George Whitefield, is what set us up for governing ourselves. God is involved. They all believed God was involved. The crazy notion that we could get liberty without God, it needs to be understood to be not true. And again, the reason the book is titled Revolution and not the American Revolution is that. That all the other revolutions fail. This is the only true revolution in history. This is the only revolution that looks back to Sinai and that says we look directly to God. Every one of the founders understood this. So even if you don't agree with it, you have to appreciate the fact that that's how they saw it. That's what they were willing to die for. They weren't willing to die for Montesquieu. You know, the point is that there's truth everywhere. And obviously there's, you know, they got truth from the Rome studying the Roman Republic and Montescuda. But at the center of it all is this is God's idea. Without God we cannot pull this off. And so we have an opportunity perhaps to do something that hasn't been done in modern history. Well, that's what they do. But we need to know this. So I joke around that my book is like mandatory beach reading, folks, if you've got other books to read, read the other books, but make sure they're about this subject because this subject actually matters. And also, we haven't said it really, but when I think of the Ken Burns PBS series, there's a Tom Hanks Netflix series, none of these versions is telling this story. They're telling the opposite story. They're giving you this secular lie that we can have all this stuff and isn't it wonderful? But we don't need God and who cares? And I think we need to know the truth. So that is why I wrote my book. Again, it's not like I wrote it it that it's going to be about that. I just wanted to tell the truth and tell the story. But behind it are all these things that we've been talking about. And if Americans don't know that because we've forgotten it for some decades and it's been pushed out, that's why communism is suddenly making inroads. That's why Islamo fascism is making inroads, because we have forgotten what is at the center of everything we hold dear. And if we don't know that and teach that to our kids, then these modern day vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, will take over our nation. And that's basically what will happen and does happen if we the people do not know who we are, where our liberties come from, God, and live that out. So it's very important right now.
- [44:45]
B
It's very, very well said. And look, I've said my entire adult lifetime, Eric, that if there's one thing that can best ensure that America survives in the long term, it would be yet another great awakening. I've said that countless times and I believe it even more strongly today. So folks, unfortunately we're out of time, but you can check out Eric McTack's new book again. It is titled the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World. Follow Eric on Xrichmetaxis. Eric, you are a gentleman and a scholar. We appreciate your time as always. Enjoy the fourth.
- [45:10]
C
Good sir, thank you so much.
- [45:11]
B
You bet. Folks, have a great rest of your evening. We'll be right back. As always, tomorrow.