Knowles: Even secularists, even atheists,
even leftists have their own religious ideas
that they are foisting on other people.
They just don't happen to know it.
Student: How do you deal with, what seems to me,
to be a contradictory ideology that we...
You talked about how a lot of powers enumerated
in the Constitution have been given
to the federal government
that weren't given to the federal government,
how the states have lost power,
how even, I would say,
some of the federal offices have gained power
that they were never supposed to have originally
in the text of the document.
But the text of that document, one could argue,
does talk about keeping religion separate from state.
Especially I know Thomas Jefferson,
I'm not quite as sure about the other founding fathers,
and I don't want to speak out of information I don't have,
was very virulent about making sure
that there would never be an America
with a government-enforced religion.
So I was wondering how you handle that dichotomy, and if,
what conservativism really is
if you wanted to...
Because that's a straw man concept.
But I meant more if you wanted to say to liberals
or to people who want to be moderate conservatives
or just what you would say
about bringing together the country in moderation in general
or sliding to different scales
or being open to new opinions,
how you unite those two very disparate ideas.
Not telling people what to do,
but giving people the power to do what they want
like with their money and taxes.
Knowles: Sure.
You're asking, I think, really one of the ancient questions
about free will and grace.
We won't be able to get into that topic,
but we can get into the role of religion in America,
which is people really misunderstand the role
of religion in America.
You mentioned Thomas Jefferson.
When he ran for President,
he was called by his opponents a howling atheist.
He was one of the more antithetical to religion,
though he did come up with a translation of the Bible,
but it wasn't a great translation.
So anyway, we can leave that be.
What the Constitution says is
not that we will not have religion in America.
What the Constitution says is
that there will not be an established church,
according to the federal government.
So there won't be one church
that the federal government recognizes.
State governments could have established churches,
but the federal government could not
because there are different powers,
as you just mentioned.
What one has to acknowledge
before we even start discussing the Constitution,
or start discussing our country, is that it is founded
on fundamentally religious premises.
We are given natural rights.
We have these natural...
We hold these truths to be self evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their creator
with certain unalienable rights.
I might be able
to get the Democratic nomination for president
because I could say that and Joe Biden couldn't.
[audience laughter]
[audience applause]
We're endowed by our creator,
so the founding fathers, in the very first document,
the heart and soul of the country,
are acknowledging God.
We have God on our currency.
One nation under God.
We began sessions of...
We still begin sessions of Congress with prayer.
The country is religious.
John Adams, second President of the United States,
said, "The country is built
for a moral and religious people.
It's wholly unfit to the governance of any others."
And there's a revisionist view now
that all the founding fathers were atheists or something.
It simply was not true,
and it cannot be true because all governments
must have religious premises.
As Saint Andrew Breitbart,
the patron of Hollywood conservatives once said,
"Politics is downstream of culture,
but culture is downstream of religion."
Cult and culture come from the same root word.
What a culture worships will define that culture.
So I think now the modern Left tries
to pretend they don't have a religion.
So they say no, we're totally neutral.
We take no stand whatsoever.
But also, men can be women.
But we take no stand.
And what they're saying...
Usually, the secular Left is not very religiously literate,
but just to use that one example, this gender theory,
the idea that my body,
my physical body has nothing to do with who I am,
that actually I look like a man,
but if deep down I feel like a woman,
then I am a woman,
and my body has nothing to do with that,
and I actually have to change my body,
mutilate my body to look more like a woman,
that is an ancient religion.
It's an ancient heresy called Gnostic dualism.
Got rejected by the church a long time ago,
but these bad ideas keep cropping back up and back up.
I don't even mean to focus just on transgenderism.
I use it to show that even secularists,
even atheists, even leftists have their own religious ideas
that they are foisting on other people.
They just don't happen to know it.
So part of what politics is about is persuading one another,
coming together, having some common reverence
for the country,
having some unity to one another,
and figuring out what it is we believe
because all laws are going to relate
to our view of morality.
It is impossible not to legislate morality.
So if you've got half the country
who's not even admitting that they're playing the game,
it's very difficult to do that.
But if they would acknowledge it, I think,
then we could have a mature conversation.
We might even start to agree on something.