Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today's episode is the final episode in our sub series entitled, When We Do as the Gentiles Do. We have explored the early church and how it changed significantly with the wedding of the church and state. Freedom of association and excommunication as the most extreme measures of censure turned into forced association and sacralism, with torture and execution becoming means considered legitimate for the church to use. While it led to much power and the appearance of Christianity, has also led to the contrived concept of the visible and invisible church.

This idea that we can't really judge who is inside by their fruit like Jesus said we could. Sacralism and waning church discipline created centuries upon centuries of cultural Christians who are not really Christians, at least not quality ones as judging by their actions. Out of Christendom, we get the Crusades, Inquisitions, antisemitism, internal wars, and a Reformation that didn't really reform, at least if James is right about how our works reflect what we truly believe. Because as we saw, the works of the reformers and the sacral societies they fostered and perpetuated, they were not good works. And that brings us up to today, to God's new promised land, The United States.

The first thing I want to note is that I recognize the debate around whether our founders were Christian and in what meaningful sense they were, if they were. I also recognize that you can find leaders who saw the new world as a divine experiment or as the new Israel and God's promised land, and there are those who probably didn't see it that way. Now I'm really not concerned in this episode with attributing our to our founding fathers a Christian notion because that's not really the case that I'm I'm exactly trying to make, nor do I need to make it. I don't need to make it because the people to whom I'm speaking the most, conservative Christians, already grant me that our founding father founding was saturated with Christian values and thoughts. So since this sub series is focused on how Christianity is mingled with power, and since the audience I'm most speaking to grant me that our founders were Christians or Christian influenced, and the founding documents saturated with Christian principles, I just don't have to make the case that that we're a Christian nation.

I'm arguing from the vantage point of those who think that we are. So let's let's take a look. What do we get when we encounter Christian enlightenment thinkers and leaders who have an opportunity to create a new world? Well, we get genocide, slavery, and the protection of elite interests. Now there is a lot that we could go into here.

We could talk about the murdering of Tories after the the revolutionary war, the Tuskegee experiments, Oda Benga, a black man being put into the Bronx Zoo, the Supreme Court case Buck versus Bell legalizing forced sterilization, the Filipino genocide. I mean, we could talk about a lot of atrocities committed by The United States. However, I'm planning on doing a whole season on that one day, so it's not really the scope of this episode here. In this episode, rather than discuss all of the atrocities committed by our Christian nation, often in the name of or justified by God and His Word, I'm going to hone us in on some major themes. We're going to look at how our Christian forefathers used power and for what reasons.

We're going to look at the overarching idea of American power and atrocity. One day, we'll dig into the minutiae of of all the other atrocities. But this episode, we're we're just gonna give good framework to eventually understand that minutia later down the road. Because atrocities always have underlying motivations, and those motivations are often in the same vein. Since motivation is so important, let's set the stage for the motivation of our founders.

Now, we don't have time to get into the depths of American history, so I I do want to challenge you to do that for yourself if if it's something that that is of interest. What I'm going to do here is provide a basic rundown of what I think is important, and then you can move out from there and try to prove me wrong and bolster the facts that I give you, try to make a well rounded case. It's common knowledge that most of the founders and influencers during the Revolutionary War were wealthy, white landowners. In fact, being a WASP, as they call it, a white Anglo Saxon Protestant, was often vital to achieve your rights. Oh, and a male with land.

When the Revolutionary War began, the colonies were paying an estimated 2% in taxes, an amount significantly less than their British counterparts and way, way, way, way less than what we pay today. So while there were some issues with what we would today consider rights infringement, most of those infringement of of rights came as a result of number one, a response to colonial rebellion against other British taxes and laws, or number two, as a result of the colonies not putting up their fair share. See, the French and Indian War was extremely costly to the British Crown, and the soldiers stationed on the Western Front were paid by Great Britain with practically no tax money coming from the colonies, as they had been in a time of salutary neglect, which is just basically the a British hands off policy that let the colonies do pretty much what they wanted to. So when there there came a time that the colonies were asked to contribute something, they were like, nah, we don't want to pay anything. We haven't really been paying anything, and we don't want to pay more than nothing right now.

Even though Great Britain was basically spending all this money to defend them, the colonies. Now to exacerbate this problem in the eyes of the colonists, the British government was also preventing westward expansion. They had killed enough Native Americans and taken enough land, and they figured that at least for a time, making treaties that they were actually going to keep would be good policy. It's not good American policy because we didn't make treaties that we like to keep once we became a nation, but the British actually made treaties that they were keeping. Now of course, refusing westward expansion to a bunch of land speculators who realized that money and power came in the acquisition of land did not go over well at all with the colonists.

So here's an excerpt from an article which which shows a snippet of Washington's dealings with land speculation because Washington was a huge land speculator as were a lot of of the wealthy individuals at the time of the American Revolution. So here's a snippet from that article. Quote, at first, the formal conclusion in 1763 of the worldwide war between Britain and France, of which the French and Indian War had been apart, aroused hope that the land would quickly be gained. These expectations were overshadowed by the Royal Proclamation of seventeen sixty three, which among other provisions, forbade colonial governors from issuing land grants west of the Allegheny Mountains. Yet Washington chose to forge ahead as evinced by a September 1767 letter to William Crawford, a Pennsylvania surveyor.

Washington quote, I can never look upon the proclamation in any other light, but this I say between ourselves, then as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying those lands. Any person who neglects hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from selling them will never retain it, regain it. If you will be at the trouble of seeking out the lands, I will take upon me the part of securing them as soon as there is a possibility of doing it and will moreover be at all the cost and charges surveying and patenting the same. By this time, it'd be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land.

You will consequently come in for a handsome quantity. Washington was clearly willing to take considerable risks in seeking out choice land for himself. In the same letter, however, he warned Crawford to keep the whole matter a secret rather than give the alarm to others or allow himself to be censored for the opinion I have given in respect to the King's Proclamation. He concluded by offering Crawford an alibi should his behavior be called into question. All of this can be carried on by silent management and can be carried out by you under the guise of hunting game, which you may, I presume, effectually do.

At the same time, you are in pursuit of land. When this is fully discovered, advise me of it, and if there appears a possibility of succeeding, I will have the land surveyed to keep others off and leave the rest to time in my own assiduity. In fact, the letter marked the beginning of a very profitable fifteen year partnership. Less than two weeks after he had received it, Crawford informed Washington about several tracts in the vicinity of Fort Pitt, and the two men continued to collaborate until Crawford's death in 1782. End quote.

So Washington and others didn't care about taking land from the Native Americans nor did they care about pulling their fair share of the burden and supporting the British government through taxes. They cared about power and prestige, which came in the form of land acquisition. Now to add to this claim, listen to what Thomas Jefferson wrote to Governor Monroe in eighteen o one. Quote, It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern Continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws, nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface. Maybe some of the founders thought that God was on our side and we were the new Israel.

But put more simply, they liked power and prestige and therefore they wanted land. And that's Occam's razor for you. Nothing explains the subsequent one hundred and fifty years of American westward and global expansion more than this simple idea. We were born seeking to dominate territory and we still desire it. It's why we have islands all around the world.

It's why we have over 58 army bases, while the next most numerous country is The UK with 26, then Russia with 18, and France with 11 bases in other countries. At one point in the recent past, the number of bases was near 1,000 globally. In fact, The United States has had military boots on the ground in every country in the world except for three, Andorra, Bhutan and Liechtenstein. We know now and we have always known that territory equals money and power, whether we own that territory ourselves or control it. With that understanding of original motivation, it's not too hard to fill in the remainder of US history.

We evicted and killed native Americans for control of territory. We made treaties with some tribes like the Fort Laramie treaty with the Sioux only to break it when we found gold on the land. We enslaved millions of Africans to farm our land and bring us wealth. We even baked slavery right into the founding documents. We exploited Africa's and South America's resources to enrich our nation.

We, a supposedly Christian nation, enslaved, exploited, and committed genocide. And I have to ask, if those things are congruent with what it means to be a Christian, what does it mean to not be a Christian? What meaningful information does the word Christian convey when the term seems so vacuous? No, America, like the Christians after Constantine, the Christians during the Crusades, and the magisterial Christian reformers, was doing as the Gentiles do, and thus any resemblance to Christian becomes difficult to see. Christ's kingdom is not from this world, and when we try to govern from the seats of power here, rather than recognizing Jesus reigning from His seat of power in heaven, we tip our hand and display our true theology, a theology from this world.

That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.