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The podcast interview of Pastor David Whitney focuses on the inseparability of church and state in regard to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
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Excerpts
Pastor David Whitney (06:38.811)
…we shouldn’t expect our founding documents to give us a complete list of the rights that our Creator has given unto us. So there is a Creator God, and our rights come from Him. And this is so vitally important in our day because many people falsely believe that our rights come from the civil government.
Technically speaking, you can call those rights, but really they’re not rights at all. They’re privileges that the government grants you. Because if the government says, you have the privilege to, well, drive on the roads, or the privilege to fish in this lake, or whatever privilege it is, the privilege they grant to you, the assumption is that if they choose to, they can take that privilege from you. That’s not a right, because a right is inalienable. That is, nobody can take it from you. Somebody might violate your right. know, for example, you have a right to life.
Well, that doesn’t mean nobody might attempt to murder you. If they do, they haven’t taken your right to life away from you. That’s given to you by your creator. Instead, what they have done is violated the right to life that your creator has given to you. So those first two are a big challenge, I think, for many people today to understand. But if you do understand them, you see that civil government is put in its proper place with a third presupposition. There is a creator, God. Our rights come from him. And then they go on to say that the sole purpose of human civil government is to protect God-given rights. If we look at the language of how they craft that, that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, here’s that third presupposition, that to secure these rights, what rights? Those God-given rights.
Pastor David Whitney (14:48.605)
… Let me quickly go on to the fifth presupposition because in this fifth presupposition, we need to understand that they said whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, that is the ends of protecting our God-given rights, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. And so they were saying, we have an additional God-given right.
If the government fails to do the job that we hired it to do, the bodyguard leaves me, abandons me in the city, we have an additional right. I could hire another bodyguard. I can alter the contract I had, fire that bodyguard, hire another bodyguard to protect my God-given right to life. And essentially that’s what our founders were doing. saying, King George III, you are fired. You have failed to do your job to protect our God-given rights. We’re going to create a system that will protect our God-given rights. And that was the purpose laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Now, it’s important to understand this because many people, I believe, misinterpret the Constitution to talk about the government having powers and rights not somehow based in the Constitution, because the consent of the governed, for we the people, is that we consented to create this government by putting down a contract on paper. That is our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and subsequent amendments.
Pastor David Whitney (17:14.543)
What is the purpose of government? Now we’ve already seen in the Declaration of Independence what the purpose of government is. It’s to protect our God-given rights. But I tell you, Bob, most politicians that have come to my door knocking ask for my vote and support and all that sort of, and when I ask them that question, which is usually the very first question I ask somebody running for office, what is the purpose of government? They get this deer in the headlight look, like, wait a minute, one fellow said to me,
You know, nobody has ever asked me that question. Can you imagine that? You’re applying for a job and you’re asked, well, what’s the job about? You can’t answer the question. And he fumbled around and he came up with a socialist answer to create a level playing field and do for those who can’t do for themselves, all those kinds of socialist answers to that question. But our friend, there’s a very clear, the purpose of human civil government is to protect God given rights. And when it fails to do that, we have a God given right to alter.
or abolish that government. I don’t encourage any abolishing of anything because all we need to do is return to the standard. We’ve got the standard in our declaration, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, subsequent amendments. And if we understand what the founders meant by those words, which is what we are teaching at Institute on the Constitution, we want to understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights from our founders understanding of what did those words mean, not what some judge maybe 200 plus years later says those words mean. What did James Madison say they mean?
What did, you know, Ben Franklin, what did the other founders say those words mean? And that’s why we call it the American view. We’re teaching our founders’ view of law and government and teaching our founders’ understanding of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Pastor David Whitney (19:52.667)
That’s, I’m glad you brought that up Bob, because that’s exactly the same thing. Our constitution is different from the Bible. The Bible is not written by men, it was inspired by God. The men were the, the Immanuel, so to speak, writing down what God was revealing to them. So I would disagree with that Bishop on that. But the understanding of the Bible, if we’re going to truly interpret the Bible, we want to go back to the time of the people who wrote it and ask, okay, the Apostle Paul was saying these things…
Pastor David Whitney (20:22.395)
What did he mean by what he said? What would his audience back then have understood him to say? This is proper study of what they call hermeneutics, you properly interpret a document as it was written. So we could say the same about our Constitution. We don’t want to know what somebody 200 years later says it means. We want to know what the founders said it means, because they were the ones that wrote it.
So if we can go back and ask them, and many people say, we can’t find out what was in their mind. Well, no, we have much that we can. We have the Federalist Papers and actually the Anti-Federalist Papers, those who are arguing against their position. And we have their letters and speeches. We have a multitude of materials from all of the founders that if we do the research and careful research, we can discover what it is they were writing. what is true about our Constitution different than the Bible, the Bible cannot be altered.
But our Constitution provided for alteration of the amendment process, Article 5, and our founders were wise to do that. They recognized they were not perfect. They recognized the Constitution was not a divine document inspired by God. It was based on the divine document, the Bible, but it wasn’t itself inspired. And therefore, they might have made an error or they might have done something that needed to be amended later in time because of changes of technology and changes of things. But they provided for that amendment process.and the Constitution should be handled carefully as they intended whenever an attempt to amend it takes place.
Pastor David Whitney (22:50.449)
Well, the problem with let’s deal with one at a time. Let’s look at the first one because the woman says I have a right to do something with my own body. But the medical fact is the baby in the womb is not part of her body. It has an entirely different DNA. It may even have a different gender. She’s female. Maybe she’s got a baby boy in the womb. It is a separate human being given by the creator at the moment of conception. So I would argue that because our founders said…
Pastor David Whitney (23:19.761)
that the right to life was one of the preeminent God-given rights that governments exist to protect, that government should protect the right to life of that baby in the womb as well as obviously the right to life of everyone who’s outside the womb. So I would say that it’s, be like someone saying, I have the right to commit murder. No, you don’t. Murder is not a right, it’s a wrong. How do we know it’s a wrong? Read the Ten Commandments, the Six Commandments, thou shalt not murder
Pastor David Whitney (26:11.325)
…By the way, in that preamble of the Constitution itself, it refers to ourselves and our posterity, that the blessings of liberty be reserved to ourselves and our posterity. Who are our posterity? Well, the children not yet born…So I believe our founders believed the right to life of the unborn,… And our founders said that. John Adams, second president, said our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It’s wholly inadequate for any others. So the government will not work if you reject the philosophy of our founders. And so obviously, if you do not have a right to life, as part of our system of government. That means wholesale murder is permissible. Because why would you discriminate against men and say only women who are pregnant can murder their children? And after all, then why even restrict it to the woman murdering her child in the nine months of gestation? Why shouldn’t she be able to murder them a month after, a year after, five years after? I know many parents of age three and four might want to do that.
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Transcript
