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Additional support comes from the Lachman foundation, translator and publisher of the Amplified Bible. This translation reveals the depth of the original languages through expanded words and phrases. New two tone editions use gray type to highlight amplified words and preserve a natural reading experience. More@AmplifiedBible.com.
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You're listening to a special edition of the World and everything in it. I'm Lindsay Mast. Happy fourth of July. Today we're talking to Eric Metaxas. He is a Yale educated author of seven New York Times bestsellers. Those include large scale biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther and William Wilberforce. His latest book, the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World, tells the story of America's founding on its 250th anniversary. Eric, good morning.
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Good morning. Thanks for having me.
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Thank you so much for being here. You call this a definitive book and I think many people would say that they have a basic, at least understanding of the revolution and how America came to be founded. I'm curious, from a Christian perspective, what would most surprise Christians with that basic American education? Someone who hasn't gone far outside A K through 12 secular college education, what would most surprise them about what you found in this book?
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Well, I guess it's what surprised me. I, you know, I'm a popular level writer, so it's not like I'm somebody that has spent 30 years on the subject and now I'm just going to put it in a book. I just know enough to know that this is worthy of a book. But then I need to do the research, which is almost endless because I want to know what's the scholarly consensus? What's the, what am I missing? Am I missing anything? And everywhere I went, people ask me, oh, you're writing about the revolution. What's your angle? I said, well, I don't have an angle. I just want to tell the story. I don't think there's been a one volume telling of the whole story which has to start, you know, 10 years before Lexington and Concord. But at the heart of this conflict between the 13American colonies and Great Britain, it was a moral and spiritual conflict. And I never really saw that before. In other words, the American colonists were dramatically Christian. I mean, no matter where you look, you see robust Christian faith everywhere. Everybody knew the Bible. Everybody is quoting the Bible. When they talk, they're quoting the Bible. It's just a culture suffused with Christian faith, which makes perfect sense because you realize, oh, why did everybody come across the Atlantic, you know, 100 plus years before that for their faith? They came here, they risked life and limb because of their devout Christian faith. So these are the descendants of those folks. So by the time you get to the 1760s, when this conflict happens, and then into the war after that, you're dealing with an explicitly, dramatically Christian population for whom virtue and character and principle are everything. And that is a fact that. And on the British side, this is where it really kind of hit me. The British were not just. Not that they were really anti that they were really irreligious mocking of the Christian faith of the colonists. The British elites were really cynical, corrupt, openly godless in the way they kind of lived their lives. And I mean, a perfect example. One of the first things that kind of tipped me off to this, I thought everywhere I looked, when I'm reading about George Washington, he is extremely upright. He's known to be upright and he's known to care that all of his officers and the people around him behave in a way that is virtuous, that, you know, they go to church on Sunday, there's no swearing, there's no gambling, that we have to honor God in this army, otherwise God will not honor us. And everybody knows this about Washington. And everywhere you look, you see it. And on the British side, his British counterpart, who is General Howe, is known to have a mistress while he is here in the colonies. It's not just that he has a mistress. He's known, everybody knows it. And it's part of the British elite culture. Like, well, that's what we do, of course, you know, and we, we gamble and we drink and that is who we are. I was astonished. That was like the first thing that I thought, wow, this is a culture war. I mean, these are. Couldn't be more different. But then the way the British fought the war, it makes sense from that worldview. They were genuinely barbaric. Barbaric. I mean, John Adams and Washington write letters to General Howe and others complaining and saying that this is. You're behaving in such a barbaric way. We don't know what to say. We will not stoop to that. You know, we are Christians and we will not stoop to barbarism. But by barbarism, I mean the most classic example was that the British, when Americans would surrender, many times the British would bayonet them to death. And I read this, I thought, oh, this is a one off. And it kept coming up over and over and over. Barbarism, the kind of thing that the Nazis or the Japanese in World War II, the way they would fight a War based on their worldview, like, we're not going to play by the rules. We're going to crush you because we can. We don't believe in rules. And the Americans were just the opposite. The Americans said over and over, we've covenanted with God. This is a sacred cause. And we want to honor God even in how we fight, how we treat our prisoners. And the way the British treated the prisoners is another huge example of their barbarism. I mean, 10,000American prisoners died in captivity. That's far more than died on the battlefield because the British conditions were so. Even reading about it is painful. So those are just a couple of examples. But I was astonished everywhere I looked at this thesis that is emerging, that you, you have people dedicated to power and winning on the one side who are cynical and there's. There's a lot of corruption. And that's just. They kind of wink at that. They're like, well, that's just the way it is. And the Americans really believed in these principles and really believed that if we behave in a Godly way, if we fight this war, God's way, God will give us the victory. I mean, that's real faith. That's just kind of the first blush. But I was. Everywhere I looked, I saw this. And I was, I was absolutely amazed at that spiritual and religious component of. Underneath everything.
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Right. I want to ask a little bit more about the British mindset. You write of an early idea of John Adams that the British intended to make slaves of the colonists. He wrote about it under a pen name. It's not particularly well known, but you write about it, and I know it seems to have surprised you in learning about it. But I'm curious, did that affect how the founders built the nation, making it such that chattel slavery could later be dismantled? Because that tends to be rolled out as the trump card against the Founders.
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Well, I mean, whenever people talk about the founders, that's already sloppy. Who are the founders? Some of the founders were bitterly anti slavery. John Adams, Samuel Adams, any of these serious Puritan Christians from Massachusetts and others were bitterly anti slavery. And they were sick that they had to deal with South Carolina and Georgia. So to pretend that all of the. The men involved in this era were fine with slavery is. Is intellectually dishonest. Very dishonest. And that kind of shocked me, too, because I saw so many examples of it. And you, you realize that who started the war, who really began this whole thing was the Massachusetts Puritans. They come right out of the Reformation. They are, they are dedicated to a biblical view of things. They're the ones that are leading the charge that we will not allow ourselves to be enslaved by the British. We have to obey God rather than man. And so it's important for us at least to be honest about what happened. And I get mystified sometimes because there are these narratives that carry forward that, oh yeah, all these guys were deists and you think that's just preposterous. So I didn't set out to correct that narrative. But it's there. I mean, these were, the Americans were largely a people of robust Christian faith.
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I know. Speaking of narratives, many Americans, particularly, I think you could argue from the left, understand our federal government today as a democracy. Why was it significant for the founders to create a constitutional republic instead of a democracy?
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Well, this is a great, great question which enables me to make what I hope is a great point. A democracy gives people the power to do demonic things. Right? That was. If everybody says, you know what, we believe in X, we can make X happen. Well, what if X goes against everything in the Bible and against what is right in God's eyes? Shouldn't we have in our Constitution protections so that the majority can't do wicked things? That's called a constitutional republic. And that's why we have a Supreme Court. We have checks and balances. We have a number of things to prevent the people if they get the ability from doing wicked things. And so I think that maybe you can't prevent it 100%. But the point is that the Supreme Court, Court, for example, is like a backstop that, that if everybody voted to do something that is not consonant with our deepest values, you know, let's say we, we, we get enough people in the country who believe in Islam and say, okay, we're gonna have Sharia law all over the country. The founders would say, well, you, you can't do that because Sharia law says you could do this and this and this. And we don't, we don't believe in that. You know, we don't believe in child marriage or we don't believe that women should be treated like second class citizens. Those laws precede the will of the people if the will of the people goes in that direction. So we have checks and balances. Whereas in ancient Greece they didn't have that, or ancient Rome or anywhere where it's just like, what does everybody vote? I mean, in, in Germany, you know, if everybody says let's kill all the Jews, they'd be like, okay, let, let's, let's just we'll go with that. In our country we would say, well, we can't. Even if everyone in the country wanted to do that or enough people wanted to do that, that goes against our values. So it's a big deal to understand that we're not a democracy, we're a constitutional republic.
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Eric, you've been criticized for importing modern day viewpoints into your writing. I'm curious, has that criticism over the years changed how you research or write or otherwise approach books like this?
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Well, no, because I would like to think that I don't do that. That I wouldn't want to do that. I think, listen, I know I have to look to the Lord in this, but I mean, I take it very seriously. Are you telling the truth? I mean, we should be able to know the difference between telling the truth and pushing forward a point of view. And I think that there are people. I mean, when I wrote my Bonhoeffer book and I did all the research, I was myself astonished at how people that are politically and theologically left push that view onto Bonhoeffer. And then when I did the research, I thought, there's no evidence for this. He doesn't. In fact, there's evidence against it. And so I didn't write a book to correct that. But in Telling the truth, it corrected that. And I think it made a lot of people, liberals, angry because they had had a good thing going. They'd effectively hijacked his legacy for 50 years. And I think that's always going to be the case. If you tell the truth, there are people who disagree with you who are going to say you're not telling the truth. You're importing your point of view. And I think, well, no, I'm trying to import the point of view of the men of the revolution into the story of the revolution. And people have in the last hundred years imported a modern progressive view. And all I can say is check the footnotes, read the sources. If I ever put anything in that somebody could say, oh, you missed this, I'll change it. But I never see that because I really care as a Christian about telling the truth. Even if I don't like the truth, I want it to be historically as accurate as conceivably possible. I take that very seriously.
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Sure. Thanks. Okay, are you up for a lightning round? Here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to rattle off a list of. And these would be major players, no one obscure. I want to know something surprising that you learned about each one in writing the book. So are you ready? Okay. Number one, easy one. George Washington.
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Well, he had a pair of mammoth tusks that he would wear as a joke. That's not true. That's not true. I just wanted to do a tooth thing with Washington. Washington is almost. He's like a figure from history that you think he's gotta be made up, but he's not. There's a scene in the book from 1775. He arrives in Cambridge, and the militia are, you know, so disparate. I mean, you've got guys from Virginia, you've got guys from the seaports of along Massachusetts, whatever, completely different. And they're really at war with each other. I mean, they're, like, sort of existing. But then there's like a snowball fight, and it's like the dugout's empty, and it's just like a. A scene. Washington rides his horse into the middle of this and, like, a giant grabs two of these guys and, like, practically throttles them. And it was. It was like everybody. It's almost like the children were caught at recess, the principal showed up, and they freeze. And I just think this really happened. We have a firsthand account of Washington, who's physically huge and powerful and also commands this respect.
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All right. Samuel Adams.
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Samuel Adams. There ought to be a statute of Samuel Adams in every state in America. He is the father of the American Revolution. He was onto this stuff before anybody. And he was so dedicated to the cause that he didn't care if people knew he was involved. He just wanted the, you know, good to happen. But he is one of the just most dramatic heroes of the time and deeply Christian, motivated by his faith. Just absolutely one of the greatest names in American history.
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Bold, bold King George. Let's go across the Atlantic.
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King George was, you know, he wasn't really a bad guy, but he was a. A creature of his time. And his government was corrupt. They were cynical. That was who they were. And so he had plenty of money, effectively, to buy votes in Parliament. So his own corruption prevented him from hearing the truth from members of Parliament and enabled him to lose the colonies. And it's an amazing thing because I think later on, he recognizes. When he calls George Washington the greatest character of the age, he recognizes I got it all wrong. Like, these guys really believed in these principles. I didn't know that anybody could believe in principles. We're all cynical over here. We just gotta do what you need to do. So, yeah, he's kind of a. He was not a bad person. He was not a bad man. By any means. But, boy, did he play it wrong politically.
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What about Benjamin Franklin?
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You know, Franklin emerges along with John Adams as one of the heroes of this story because he's there from the beginning, and he's there at the end. And he really. There's. One of my absolute favorite chapters in the book is when he is in England in 17. It's January 1774, right after the Boston Tea Party, and the British are furious at the Americans, and they try to make an example of Washington, and they humiliate him in the king's privy council. And it is a moment. You could see this man go from being someone who wants to reconcile Great Britain with America to being someone who says, I am your enemy. I am now an American. And he doesn't go back. It's like the scales fall from his eyes, and he sees the true nature, the corruption and the cynicism among the British elites that he had never. They were his friends. So that scene, to me, is so dramatic.
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Well, and that really was a gripping scene with Benjamin Franklin there. And I think it said his heart was set as flint towards America, I think is how you wrote it. All right, last question. Pick a founding father. I would say John Adams. You seem to have an affinity for him, but I'll leave that to you. Tell us what you think he might have to say to Americans today as they celebrate the 250th and both look back and look forward.
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Well, yeah. John Adams emerges. Other than Washington, he is the hero. I mean, there's nobody like John Adams. And he needs. He should be 10,000 times more famous than Thomas Jefferson. John Adams is deeply Christian and very funny and acerbic. He writes this essay. There's a chapter in the book about an essay that most people are unaware that he wrote. He's 30 years old in 1765, before any of this has really happened. He sees it all clearly, and he seems prophetically to see where this is going, that God has a plan for America and for the world centered around freedom, which is a biblical idea. He could see God's hand in history with this clarity. And so I think that he could see that this is not. Oh, it's just we're rebelling against the British. Not at all. This is God's hand in history to create a free people who can govern themselves and to whom the whole world can look and say, that's a shining city on a hill. How do we get what they have? How can we? I mean, in Great Britain today, for example, with all the difficulties that are going on, that there are many in Great Britain thinking, why do we feel repressed? Why can't we have what they have in America? Why do we feel that our elites are not giving us what we want? Are we governing ourselves? Are we being governed from above? I really think that God planted that model in America, which is why America is the greatest nation in history. Well, because of God, not because of us. And I really think that somehow Adams could see that. He could see God's hand. And I think that he would see God's hand on us still today, but he would know that today as back then, if we don't keep our eyes on God, it, it all goes away. So we are 100% dependent on the Lord, and we have a covenant with the Lord. And if we honor him, he'll honor us. And if we don't honor him, he will not honor us.
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All right, Eric Metaxas latest book, Revolution the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the World, tells the story of America's founding on its 250th anniversary. Eric, thank you so much for your time.
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My privilege. Thank you.
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You've been listening to a special weekend edition of the World and everything in it. I'm Lindsay Mast. Let us know you're listening. You can do that by dropping us a line with your thoughts on this episode. Email us@editorng.org that's editorng.org you can also subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk you to have a great holiday weekend.
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Additional support comes from the Lachman foundation, translator and publisher of the Amplified Bible, expanding words and phrases from the original languages. Amplifiedbible.com.