Allen Jackson NOW

Allen Jackson: We have a treat today. I have my friend, Eric Metaxas, with us. Welcome back to Tennessee, Eric.

Eric Metaxas: Thrilled to be here.

Allen Jackson: I was trying to remember. I think we met, the first time I remember meeting, you were doing your tour promoting Bonhoeffer. How the world has changed. How God has blessed our lives. There is more than water under that bridge, but you have a new tome. I love the tiny books you write. This one is *Religion*. You need to see this part of the book too. I have read it. It is doable.

Eric Metaxas: I have to say this upfront because people don't believe it. I cannot tell you how many people have said to me, "I couldn't put it down. It's a page-turner. It reads like a novel." That, as a writer, is the greatest thing you could hear. I have heard that even if you just read the Amazon reviews. I'm not soliciting them.

It's an amazing true story. It's inspiring and it's encouraging, so I would encourage people to read it. Then I will bully them into reading it because we have to know our history. I say this emphatically.

Allen Jackson: Can we send a copy to the lady at the Smithsonian? It's clearly having a little trouble interpreting our history. I said "the lady." I was being very generous to that woman who's directing the Smithsonian.

Eric Metaxas: These people are crazy. They have bought into the propaganda over decades. Basically, it's why I wrote the book. I said we need a true accounting of the story. We haven't been getting that in our lifetime. We've getting a lot of crazy negativity, and the true story is beautiful. I just wanted to tell that story.

Allen Jackson: I want to get to the story, but it's more than that. They're not crazy; they're intellectually dishonest.

Eric Metaxas: It's a spectrum. Some of them are intellectually dishonest. You're absolutely right. Some people are just deceived. It's a spectrum of crazy. It really depends because you talk to some people, and you and I have had this conversation. Some people do not understand certain things. Even if it's in front of them, they can't read it. It's like reading Chinese. When they see the language of faith, it doesn't compute.

Now, there are some people that just hate the language of faith, but there are other people that genuinely don't get it. They just don't get it. So they kind of ignore it and talk about what they understand. I believe that.

Allen Jackson: If you've dabbled in the occult, whether you do it intentionally or not, I think you get spiritual impediments that make it almost impossible to understand it. So, *Religion*, this is readable. I started out to do the cheat like I do when I have lots of books to read. I was going to read every fourth chapter. I got a bit in and I thought, "To heck with this. I want the rest of the story."

It really pulls you in. It's a narrative that pulls you through, and you get to know the people. By the time you get to the end, there are not a lot of history books I read that bring tears to my eyes. I know the story of Washington's farewell speech when he pulls his glasses out of his pocket, but when you're telling that story again, I've got tears running down my face. I will confess that while the camera's running.

Eric Metaxas: This is all true. This is not a novel I wrote. This is all true. I just found what I think are the most exciting, important, and humorous stories and put it all together. I think that we're responsible for this information. This is not extra credit. I didn't write this book for history buffs. I wrote the book for Americans.

If you're an American, you need to know this stuff. If you can get this information better in a better place than this book, go for it. But I just said I want to put everything in one book so that everybody in the year of our super-centennial 250th can refamiliarize themselves. I think it's an encouragement to us at this season, which, frankly, we need.

Allen Jackson: Why the Revolution? You mentioned that in your *Seven Men* book, you had a chapter on Washington.

Eric Metaxas: I never in my life ever thought I would write about the American Revolution. It never even crossed my mind once. Then about a little over two years ago, a very close friend, I mentioned him in the acknowledgments page, said to me that he had just read my chapter on George Washington in my book *Seven Men*. He said he was so moved by it. He said, "Eric, you need to write the whole story of the Revolution."

Now, this friend, Seth Ward, when he talks, I listen. He's a very dear soul. I have millions of friends that have ideas for books, but there was something about Seth. If you know him, he doesn't just say things. When he said it, it kind of hit me like, is this the Lord speaking? It was one of those things. Normally, I just go, "Nah." But this really kind of stopped me. As I thought about it, the scope of it made me think.

First of all, what is the Revolution? What does that even mean? It's like, who's given me this assignment? Is the Lord giving me an assignment to write the American Revolution? I got to think about this. What is this going to be about? Then I realized the American Revolution we think of starts at Lexington and Concord, the shot heard 'round the world, Bunker Hill and the war, and it ends basically in Yorktown in 1781. That's the American Revolution.

But John Adams said there was a revolution before the revolution. That is very interesting. That's when you start realizing what led up to Lexington and Concord. I keep saying in 1960, if you went around with a microphone on Main Street America, everybody knew this stuff. Everybody knew everything that's in that book. They knew the names.

We have drifted away. If you want to know why we're losing our liberties or you want to know why things are crazy, why we're on this kind of crazy war with the insane left, or why the insane left even exists in America, it is because we have forgotten this. So I said I need to put it in a book. I need to make it readable. I need to get it out there and get people excited about knowing our history. I said to people, I'm half-joking, this is like mandatory beach reading. If you're an American, you have to suck it up and read this. You need to know this. You will be blessed. I believe that. But I think it's too late for us to say it doesn't matter. We need to know this. We cannot get through what we're going through now unless we understand that, because that's our DNA. That's who we are. To get through what we're going through now, we need to be armed with this history and this encouragement of the truth.

Allen Jackson: It reminded me in a way, the Book of Acts doesn't have a conclusion. I've always said it's because we're the 21st-century edition; the story's still unfolding. One of the things I took away from this is this story is still unfolding as it's supposed to. Don't read this like we're reading a history lesson; read this to inform our decisions, not to go take up arms and shoot our adversaries.

Eric Metaxas: This book to me is like the instruction booklet for how I live in a free nation. How do I keep freedom? How do we govern ourselves? How does that work? Where's the instruction? The ultimate instruction book is the Bible. Where did all the ideas of the Revolution come from? The Bible, which is the main takeaway of my research on this thing. This was all Christians doing Christian stuff. This is not compatible with Christianity. This is Christianity poured into political life and into the form of a new nation.

That's what this is. Every American needs to know that. Every Christian certainly needs to know that because it's true. But most of us didn't really know that. People always think like, "Eric, you must know all this stuff. You're smart. You went to Yale." I know nothing. I just know enough that I'm going to do the research. When I do the research and I see this stuff, I'm embarrassed that I didn't know it. Then I feel this zeal. I've got to tell the world. We're late to the party. We've got to get on the stick.

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I have a degree in history. But the cultural divide that you highlight and particularly the opulence. I wasn't thinking of the Gilded Age before the Gilded Age. You highlight that so well, and I think it's a relevant story for us because there was a consequence for standing up, and it had to do with comfort and convenience. It wasn't just principle.

Eric Metaxas: I'm not going to pretend like I knew this beforehand. This is as I'm doing the research. I knew very little. I just knew my assignment was I want to tell the whole story. So starting with the end of the French and Indian War kind of starts off the conflict between Great Britain and the colonists, which leads to all the crazy stuff: the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, all that stuff, and then the war. I just want to tell the story.

In the course of doing the research, I mean I kid you not, I was not expecting any of this. I saw what I had never seen and never really heard ever: that this was a culture war. The British elites were like the Hollywood elites. If you think of the Hollywood elites or the elites of the New York Times governing a town of homeschoolers in Oklahoma, the cultural divide was infinite. They spoke the same language. They were in the same country, but they could not be more opposite.

Everywhere I looked, I saw more and more evidence of this. I thought, "How come I've not heard this before?" The British were decadent. The British elites were decadent, cynical, corrupt, sneering at the Christian faith of the American colonists. Not just not sharing the faith, but sneering at it, mocking it. That's kind of where we are today. You have the cultural elites. They don't speak the language that we do, and they think we're the bad guys. They think, "You're just a hypocrite. You're just nothing but a religious hypocrite because nobody really believes that. We all know nobody really believes that."

Yes, we do really believe that, and the colonists really believed it. Most of the folks in the 13 colonies were steeped in the Bible. The whole culture was Christian. Again, how come most people don't know that? Because that's true. This is not a Christian version of this history. This is the history.

Allen Jackson: In fact, I thought you went out of your way, but it was very fair-minded. You told the story in a way that you're not always selling Christianity.

Eric Metaxas: No, because I want everybody to read this book. This is not a book for Christians. This is a book for anybody who's an American. I want people to get this. This is the true story. This is not my version of the story. Believe me. As I did the research, it became clearer and clearer and clearer to me that even I had just not heard this. I thought, "How can we be laboring in the dark for decades, not understanding that this is the founding of the nation?" This was profound Christians. The lie they were deists, the lie that only a few of them were Christian, that is such a lie. But again, it's only in doing the research that I realized the magnitude of this lie that's been sold to us.

If you turned on, God forbid, you watched Ken Burns' PBS series, 12 hours on the Revolution, you would think that faith had nothing to do with it. I'm here to tell you, faith had everything, not a big part, everything. Everything came out of the scripture and Christian faith. That's not debatable once you do the research. Then you think, but people aren't talking about it. People act like you could get liberty in America without the Christian faith. None of the founders believed that. Not one, including Jefferson and Franklin. Why don't we all know that? Because that's true. So I put it in the book, but the book is not about that. The book is just the stories. But when you read the stories, there it is. You don't need to read a book about that. You just need to read the facts and it comes out.

Allen Jackson: You highlight beyond the history, which I want to come back to some of the characters, but that even the birth of this nation, coming forth on this continent prior to the Reformation, was from this vantage point, you can see the hand of God.

Eric Metaxas: We could see it, and they could see it. But modern historians never talk about it. They act like that's just crazy talk. Everybody involved at the time, including Thomas Paine, who was not some big Christian, all saw the hand of God in the Reformation. They saw the hand of God in the discovery by Europeans of this new continent where dissidents, people who suddenly discovered the God of the Bible, want to read the Bible, want the Bible translated to their own language, they're being persecuted in their countries in Europe.

Now there's a place they can go. Where would they go before? It was like let the nut jobs go across the ocean, and they can form their little Christian communities and see how they do. Well, that's what happened. Everybody involved saw it as providential history, that this is what God has done. He's preparing us for a new era.

Once you get to the 1760s and 1770s, the men of the Revolution start putting it together like, "You know what? We may have an opportunity now for these 13 colonies because we're being persecuted together by Great Britain, that we could unify and create a nation based on this." Not just a colony in Massachusetts or a colony here, an entire nation based on these ideas. They were kind of aware that this looks like God's plan. Is God opening a door?

They all believed that this is a reprisal of the Israelites leaving Pharaoh and bondage in Egypt, coming out into the wilderness to look directly to God to govern themselves, to make a covenant with God. That's how they all saw it. Again, even if you don't see it that way, you need to know that's how they saw it. So if you have a secular historian today who says, "I don't believe that," you don't have to believe it, but you need to be aware that's how they read the tea leaves.

Allen Jackson: You do a nice job that it's not like everybody involved were church mice. The Sons of Liberty were on the edge of scoundrels, and they used the mobs, which you're very candid about. But they still had a sense of faith and destiny and all of that woven into their carnal.

Eric Metaxas: Again, like anything, there's going to be a spectrum. But the leaders did get this stuff. They especially, like John Adams, were aware of the fact that we need to play this right. This is not about winning. This is about is this God's idea? If this is God's idea, we better behave correctly. So we can't have mob violence. We can't have, so you get some of that, but that does not continue. They're aware of the fact that that's not the path forward. This is not the French Revolution. This is something else. It's very much in contrast to that.

Allen Jackson: I have learned as a pastor there is a tremendous difference in a crowd and a community of faith. When people decide to step out of the crowd and invest their time and their resources, they become a part of a community and it changes their lives. I want to give you that invitation. I'm grateful you're a part of the crowd who watch the ministry. I want to ask you to consider becoming a monthly ministry partner. I believe if you'll make that regular commitment to what God is doing through this ministry, it'll bring momentum to your spiritual life and it will help us reach more people than we've ever reached with the gospel before.

America is turning 250 years old. That’s something that should unify us. We have so much to celebrate. There is no place like America. Our freedoms and liberties, they are unmatched in this world. Everything that’s good about America—our laws, our opportunities, the prosperity we’ve enjoyed—they’ve come to us because of our faith.

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Did you do the research? Have favorites? Did you come out with some surprises of somebody you really enjoyed as you did the work?

Eric Metaxas: The number one is probably John Adams. John Adams should be a thousand times more famous than Thomas Jefferson. John Adams was an amazing man of God and very humble and very funny, very acerbic. He, like any of these great figures in history, cared more about the cause than about their own glory. Because of that, in some cases, we don't know them so well because they said, "It's not about me. It's about we want to win."

So Samuel Adams, second cousin to John Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, all the figures of the Sons of Liberty in the 1760s while this is developing, they were engaged in something. They thought, "We can't stick our necks out too much here because the British are going to hang us." So we have to work behind the scenes. If you work behind the scenes, you're not going to get the glory. But if you care about the cause, you don't care about getting the glory. But John Adams is kind of like that. He should be on Mount Rushmore. John Adams is a giant. As I say, this is not to denigrate Jefferson, but Jefferson cannot hold a candle to John Adams. I'm just amazed how—

Allen Jackson: But he made a tremendous sacrifice. The time he spent overseas working on all the things that had to be done.

Eric Metaxas: There's a ton of things you could say about John Adams, but I'll tell you just to since I mentioned Jefferson, the reason I think Jefferson is so well-known is because I think the people who don't like the God side of the story, they kind of picked Jefferson as like he's our guy. He's the French Enlightenment rationalist guy and we're going to go with him. We're going to push him. Now, that's not even that true of Jefferson, but the point is that they kind of created the Jefferson in their own image, that he was this French Enlightenment guy. He was for the French Revolution, blah, blah, blah.

So that's that lie that you could get liberty and equality without God. That's a lie. The contrast, the reason the book is called *Religion*, not the American Revolution, is because there has been only one revolution in world history that succeeded in doing what it wanted to do. That's the American Revolution. Why? Because they replaced an earthly king with God as king. They knew that.

The French Revolution said, "We're going to kill the king and queen. Then we're going to start killing the priests and nuns. We don't want God to have anything to do with this. This is a secular utopia." This is like a proto-Marxist view. How does that end? How does it go for the French? Can you get those things? They don't. They get a bloodbath. They get a nightmare bloodbath. Then they trade the king and queen for an emperor dictator named Napoleon. That is a very bad trade. It totally fails.

So the lie that the secularists, many secular historians in our lifetime that kind of act like, "Well, this all came out of the French Enlightenment and it came out of that," they have really muddied the waters and confused it. Some of it comes out of the Scottish Enlightenment, whatever. But the point is where did all these ideas come from? They only come from the Bible. That's the only place these ideas come from. So if you push the God of the Bible out, it's not going to end well. That's part of why I think they keep pushing Jefferson as opposed to Adams because he's their guy. They act like you can have your cake and eat it too, but it just doesn't work.

Allen Jackson: I want to give you a personal invitation to join my podcast, *Culture and Christianity*. You don't compromise the truth, but you say it where the people know that you care about them. We're trying to understand how to take our faith outside the walls of the church and live it out in the marketplace. I just never understood the double standard because they punished me while my peers were allowed to talk about how devastated they were that Roe v. Wade was overturned.

I brought in some friends, people that are trying to do this on a regular basis. They're never going to stop me because the truth is the truth. I'd rather be on God's side than be a coward. We've been living in a season of unprecedented deception, propaganda, manipulation. Our best option was to run. We were timing ourselves. I was trying to think, "How can I protect my kids?" Well, I want to be a part of seeing culture and Christianity intersect. I hope you'll join the podcast soon.

The reminders about Washington were really helpful to me, that on more than one occasion, he declined the opportunity to have been the ruler.

Eric Metaxas: He is so godly he just embarrasses all of us, doesn't he? This is a man of such character that you just think, was he real? Yes, God created someone who had stellar character. I'll tell you, Allen, it's interesting. It made me realize, I've been thinking this for years, but I haven't really said it. We don't talk about character enough. We talk about theology. Oh, you're saved by grace. It's all Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. It's like, okay, and then what? You're saved, you believe. Now it's supposed to be reflected in your character.

We've kind of forgotten. We kind of act like, well, that doesn't matter, that's works righteousness. No, it's not works righteousness. It is obedience to God. The men of the Revolution, they got that. Washington got that, that virtue, character, you got to work on this stuff. It's not easy. I really believe that the only path forward for us in America today is we have to get back to that, talking about character, talking about your character.

Allen Jackson: But it started young. They were young men when they stepped into this. The pressure of it revealed their character. I think we have this imagination, "I'm going to get some character when I'm through sowing my wild oats and having my fun. Then I'm going to go find some character at Walmart or order some from Amazon or something." It seems to me that we either start to build that in when we're young or it's really difficult to sort that out.