This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program originally aired on 8/31/23. To listen to this program, please click HERE.
Sam Rohrer: Well, hello and welcome to this Thursday edition already of Stand In the Gap today, and another in our bimonthly emphasis on the Constitution with a very special guest and a favorite from a lot of you as you write to me, constitutional attorney and historian and author David New.
Now, when it comes to these bimonthly constitutional update programs, that’s our focus on these, sometimes if you’ve been listening to us, we’ll cite a current controversial cultural issue, as an example, some things out in the headline, and then possibly some court ruling that goes with it. In most cases, these examples that we pick are related to, well, some current egregious, immoral and unconstitutional court ruling. But sometimes we will highlight moral and constitutional court rulings, although I will say there are increasingly less of them perhaps than the bad rulings. But nonetheless, we try to cover what is out there.
And I would suppose like for today, we’re going to look at something that will include some history, which we generally do. We’re going to pick up some unknown related facts. David’s going to give some of that to us. Purpose for that is to encourage and to inform all who fear God and understand the biblical underpinnings of our Constitution to hold in there and understand what is at stake when there are others who try to undermine it.
Now our goal is to always help each of you to better understand the original view and the understanding of God and his design for government, we talk about that a lot, and the direct underpinnings of the Bible and the Constitution, and we’ve made that connection many times. Now, in all cases, we emphasize how that the prevailing biblical worldview, that which was a prevailing view held by clearly the majority of our founders in the formative years of our nation, how that produced the most profound document of all times outside the Bible itself.
That’s the US Constitution, and the various earlier State Constitutions. But we must also emphasize that within this time and today, our political, academic and cultural leaders have systematically set about to replace that biblical worldview with a secular worldview. And as they have done it, we’ve seen a commensurate attack to our Constitution, a beautiful document. They ignore it, attack it, undermine it from all sides, and based on that is kind of our title today that we’ve made and that is this Caution: Your Lawyer May Be a Revolutionary. And you’ll see how that all fits together when we get going. David, thanks for being back with me today.
David New: Well, blessings to you and to everyone that’s listening with us today.
Sam Rohrer: David, let’s get into this first. Let’s just talk about the overall aspect of the Constitution. I was thinking about it and I’m going to ask you what word you use to describe the Constitution. But when I think of the Constitution, I’ve often done it in terms of it’s a beautiful document, beautiful in composition, beautiful in structure, and the framing of truly great thoughts and ideals and beautiful in its simplicity and logic. It’s beautiful in its comprehensiveness, yet it’s also… it’s concise, beautiful in its capturing of both the understanding of the character and the nature of God and the character and the nature of sinful man and depraved hearts. Our founders talked about all of that. Beautiful in its capturing of the longing of the human heart to be set free.
Now, when I say that, David, I think of the Declaration of Independence. That comes to mind as I link somewhat the declaration as a statement of purpose, more or less, and the Constitution as a declarative document, and I know we worked those both together, but those are just my thoughts. For you right now, to get us going, out of curiosity, you’ve gone to law school, you’re a constitutional attorney, you’re an historian, you’ve been around, when you think of the Constitution, how do you describe it and why?
David New: Well, to me, when I think of the Constitution, all I need to think about is the first three words, we the people. That tells you everything you need to know about the US Constitution and about the United States of America. In this land, the people are the government.
And the various presidents that are elected, their bodies are called administrations. They’re not called governments. You go down south in the South America and they’ll say, “This is the new Mexican government. This is the Ecuadorian government.” Here, we don’t say that. We call them the Truman Administration, the Obama Administration, the Trump Administration. They are to administer. They’re not governments separately, they are to administer the government on behalf of the people. The people are the government and they are called administrations for that reason.
Sam Rohrer: David, that’s great because inherent in what you’re saying is where we get the entire concept of those in office are supposed to be servants of the people. Now that comes from a very biblical term, Romans 13, servants of the people, servants of God. But it’s that aspect that you say, of the people, and then those who are elected, put in position are there to serve the people and uphold all that. That’s pretty interesting.
But David, that mentality to which you just alluded and I commented briefly, that was very well understood, much better I think by our founders than today. Guys like William Penn here in Pennsylvania who laid out his frame of government, he termed this colony here as a holy experiment in freedom, holy because it was from God and experiment because it had never really been done before. But that began to change over time and people begin to say, “No, we don’t need God, what other things.” Here’s my question to you. Approximately when and from where do you think the shift began where we said, “Holy experiment? No, God, we’re going to make it whatever we want”? When did that shift begin to take place?
David New: Well, you’re absolutely right that the leaders of the United States are servants of the people, and that concept of the President and the members of Congress being servants of the people is a biblical concept. Jesus Christ taught servant leadership. Leaders are not people to overpower their subjects and abuse them and treat them like objects. They are to serve the people that they lead. Jesus Christ taught servant leadership, and that concept is directly reflected in the US Constitution without question.
When did it start to change? Well, at different points in time. Even in the 19th century, there were people who were against the Constitution. There were, in rare cases, people who were really crazy secularist or atheist, but it really starts to really permeate well in the 20th century with various people that came out against God and religion. And of course, a big, big thrust against God would be the theory of Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.
Sam Rohrer: All right, David, let’s just hold it right there. That’s a great place to end that. Ladies and gentlemen, major changes in worldview. When we come back, we’re going to actually talk about in the next section about there are actually some there who’ve been using the words scrapping the Constitution.
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Sam Rohrer: As we talked about in the last segment, our founders absolutely did much better than we are today. They understood well the foundational aspect and the connection of liberty and freedom and that what we value, liberty and freedom had an origination, a source, and that that concept came from God as creator, and they acknowledged Him as such.
These founders with this view carefully, meticulously built into our constitutional structure of civil government basic principles, understanding these kinds of things that rights come from God to people as individuals, that God as creator and judge of the universe has the absolute right to establish his expectations for all who are there, individuals in government and parents. And he lays it all down that this God has the ability and the right to declare what is right and wrong, moral and evil. And based on this understanding flows the definition, built in with our system, that of justice and equity for all.
Now over the years though, contemporary academics, in particular, but not only, driven by a secular humanistic worldview, and David mentioned it just on the other side of the break, was a big influencer was Darwinism, evolution. There is no God, we just come out of the mud. That concept found its way into all academic locations, and it began to quietly attack the Constitution as a document. And like termites, to begin eating out the underlying substance of the Constitution. And like the serpent in the Garden of Eden who went to Eve and questioned the reality of truth. Does God exist? These individuals like that raised the questions of viability of the Constitution and suggested that there was in fact, well, a promise of something better.
All right, there it is. David, modern day serpents, I use that illustration of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. There are modern day serpents, there have been, questioning the integrity of the Constitution, the underlying biblical principles that we find in many places. One is certainly law schools, who teach the up and coming lawyers. In many of these, David, these leading ones, these leading law schools, some have actually used the word scrapping the Constitution, haven’t they? Would you just find who are these people? What are the platforms which they’re spewing this poison? And specifically, what are they saying?
David New: Well, what they want to do is they want to get rid of the US Constitution. Some of the schools that are involved in this kind of activity are Stanford Law School, Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, Yale Law School. Now, here’s an article published in the New York Times August 19th, 2022. You can download it for free on the internet. Let me give you the title of the article. The article was published by a Harvard Law professor, Ryan Doerfler and a Yale Law professor, Samuel Moyn. Here’s the title of the article, The Constitution is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed. Let me say it again. The Constitution is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed.
Let me translate that for you. It means we need a revolution, not necessarily a violent revolution, but we need a revolution. We need to get rid of the Constitution. The Constitution is a document that is filled with racism by a bunch of old white slave masters and it’s time for it to go, and this is what they’re teaching their students. So I’m frightened that a lot of these students are going to believe this junk and they’re going to become the future judges of America in the future, many of the legislators of the future and many of the lawyers in the future, and hopefully your lawyer is not one of these people.
Sam Rohrer: And David, that was the reason for the title today. Caution: Your Lawyer May Be a Revolutionary. But you know, David, you were very kind in what you just said. And what you just said was that, well, if that continues somewhere, you kind of alluded to it down in the future, these guys can be in office and they will be behind the bench. You actually really meant, if I can rephrase it, ladies and gentlemen, they are in those positions. They are in the courts. They are throughout government. They’re in classrooms, hence what we see today.
Now, David, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, I think you agree with that, but this has been by the fact you talked about, this began a generation ago, at least. Now, let’s go here. We talked about this example was one area, the position of teachers of lawyers. If you can alter the thinking of those who make the law, interpret the law, give counsel about the law, and you can turn them in their thinking from a biblical worldview to a well, a Darwinian, secular worldview, everything changes, but that’s not the only place that was targeted, is it?
Because David, the Constitution establishes the concept of law, civil law, Constitution law, statutory law, the law, the law of the land. But underneath our Constitution, as we’ve already talked about it, comes the concept that God is creator. God is the giver of rights. God is the definer of right and wrong. And at the beginning of our country, there was God’s interpretation of right and wrong that hung on the walls of every courtroom and was placed on the classroom walls. That was called the 10 Commandments. So they actually had to go after that area too. How did they go after altering the whole definition of what is moral and true? The law room and the lawyers wasn’t the only area, was it?
David New: Yes. So what they did is they basically rewrote history. They changed it completely. They believed that the Constitution was written by a bunch of Darwinists, even though Charles Darwin had yet to be born. And basically, was a secular document.
Well, the only problem with that view is that it did not… That concept of government, of a secular godless government didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written. It really, in the modern sense of the word secular, doesn’t really start to take full bloom in this country in starting in the 1960s. Before that, you didn’t hear people talk about the Constitution being a godless document or any of these kind of things, and they didn’t use the word secular. None of the framers used the word secular. None of them, Madison, none of them. They did not say they wrote a secular Constitution. They never even used the word. They said they wrote a Constitution as a civil government. That is the word they used.
And when you hear these groups talk about the separation of church and state, one of the biggest mistakes they make is they assume the separation of church and state automatically establishes a secular government. Well, that is not correct. When you read the courts that use the term separation of church and state, and some of them used it as early as in the 1840s, when they used it, they freely talk about the relationship between Christianity and the government. When they said separation of church and state, they meant no one single church would dominate the government, or any church would dominate the government, but the cultural appetite of the government would still be Christianity.
Sam Rohrer: There you go. And what they did, partly, David, history of Revisionism, the Darwinistic thought that came along, was this strategy separation of church and state, but at the heart of it, it was really the separation of God from government.
Now that goes to the heart of something I want to ask you here about a minute left in this segment. There are some people who have wrongly thought for a long time that, well, the power of a great nation, our nation, which became great, lay in the fact that we had this Constitution that we’re describing. If you have a Constitution that is beautiful like ours, then you will have a beautiful and just nation. But that’s not true, is it? One of our founders at least made it very, very clear that there were some requirements for this Constitution if you’re going to have freedom. Who was that?
David New: I’m not sure where you’re going. Which founders are you talking about?
Sam Rohrer: Was that John Adams that said by who our Constit-
David New: Oh, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. The Constitution, he gave a quote, and he says that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and it’s not fit for any other. So the foundation of the US Constitution is religion. And so these people who want to scrap the Constitution, what they’re saying is religion and government should never mix. What they failed to understand is that when the Constitution was written in 1787, it gets ratified the next year in 1788 and it comes into legal force on March 4th, 1789. When that happened, religion had just as much role in American political life than ever before, including the government, because what they were fighting about all the way up until 1865, was slavery a sin? That was the big argument.
Sam Rohrer: And ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Again, our Constitution, a beautiful document, but it was only made and only works for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. That was President John Adams. What kind of people do we have today? When we’ll come back, we’ll go further into scrapping the Constitution and why.
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Sam Rohrer: Well, our program today, this is one of our bimonthly constitutional update programs with constitutional attorney David New and myself. The title that we’ve chosen today is this, Caution: Your Lawyer May Be a Revolutionary. And what we’re talking about here today is the Constitution. We’ve talked a lot about it before, obviously. And some of the things that we’re sharing today, maybe a lot of them are things, let’s put this way, that you may well have heard before. And you may wonder, “All right, well am I learning anything new? Why are we spending time on this today, kind of going back and looking at how it started and looking how those who came into the process and have been undermining our Constitution, how that has happened and why they are doing it.”
And we talked in the last segment about in our law schools, our Harvard’s that David talked about, you actually have your lead professors, your teachers of the lawyers talking about scrapping the Constitution. It’s no good. Needs to be thrown out. Broken, that’s what the word David used, one of them used, and how these people throwing off a biblical worldview, view of God, embracing a Darwinism, secular view of God said, “We’ve got to clean out everything.” They’ve tried to revise history, throw out God in government, make that wrong interpretation of church and state. These techniques, they have tried to put in there. And they have infiltrated as well.
We didn’t actually get into it too much in the last segment, but they actually targeted as well our seminaries, Bible schools, institutions where teachers, professors teach pastors, professors teach Bible teachers. They have gotten in there as well, with a number of different things. Social gospel messaging, prosperity gospel messaging, critical race theory messaging, and they’ve infiltrated, like termites, our institutions of religious instruction.
So you attack the morality and truth of God and then you attack the civic underpinning of the Constitution. It’s been very effective, hasn’t it? We’re doing this today, because even as scripture says, the Apostle Paul said Timothy a couple times, “Now I put you in remembrance of this,” because sometimes it’s good that we just go back and revisit and remember that which was because the purveyors of this faulty information today, this unbiblical worldview are coming at us continually every day from all different perspectives and it’s amazing how many people don’t know what we’re just talking about.
You know, as a matter of law, our US Constitution, we know, is our highest body of law. It is by law the controlling law over all of law. All the judges in their respective jurisdictions with the US Supreme Court at the top are bound by their oaths to make sure that their rulings are tightly bound within the provisions and limitations imposed by the Constitution. The legislative branches and those on the state and federal level by their oaths are bound to make no law, which violate in any way the provisions or limitations of the Constitution. The executive branch personnel, the President and all on the branches of the executive branch by their oaths of office, are similarly bound and further bound by the statutory law passed by the respective legislative branches. All of them, since they take their oath of office before God, as an oath, bind themselves to the moral law of God.
That’s the way the system is to work. That is how our founders established it. But as David said in that last section, President John Adams said, this wonderful beautiful document only works though for people who actually fear God and are moral people. If you throw that off, it doesn’t work for anywhere else. So in any regards, just some of that. But David, these I’m calling termite scrappers based on the professor from Harvard who said, “Scrap the Constitution.” It’s very deceptive. If you were to term it, what is their leading, most compelling argument for why they say the Constitution is broken and for how they justify teaching the other lawyers that they need to view this Constitution as no good anymore? What are they actually saying?
David New: They’re basically influenced by critical race theology or teachings. Basically, it’s Marxism repackaged. For example, one of the classes taught at Columbia Law School for these students to go against the US Constitution, the title is, quote, “Legal Methods to Critical Race Methods, Practices, Prisms and Problems,” end of quote. A title of a course at Stanford, this also is critical race theory, is titled quote, “Violence, Resistance and the Law,” end of quote.
And in fact, what they’re saying is they want to save America from the Constitution. They believe the Constitution favors old values of the 18th century like racism and America needs to be free from the chains of the Constitution. Here’s an interesting quote in that New York Times article, this is what the Harvard Law School or the professor said, and the guy from Yale, he said, quote, “But constitutions, especially the broken one we have now, inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed upon once in upon a time.” In other words, the Constitution is taking us back constantly to 18th century values and we need to be free of that. That’s what they believe. And of course, what they’re talking about in the most important way is God.
Sam Rohrer: Okay. Let’s go to another, David. This argument many people would hear, and that is that these scrappers, these proponents of scrapping the Constitution say, “Well, you know what? It’s a living document.” Sounds good. Meaning, well, I want you to define it, but I do know this, the late Justice Scalia went on the record stating that the document, the Constitution, frankly, he said is a dead document. Now that doesn’t sound good, but the distinction is extraordinary. What is this living versus dead Constitution? Which one is right?
David New: Well, everything is in the definition. So when you say living document, [inaudible 00:25:45] to which the Constitution is a living document. We live by it every day. Every time you walk into the United States Post Office, you are living out the Constitution.
But the way these individuals are saying living document means that the Constitution can basically be amended on a annual basis, that the Supreme Court basically holds a continuous constitutional convention where they find all kinds of rights that nobody has ever heard of before, such as same-sex marriage. It doesn’t exist anywhere in English or common law. In fact, homosexuality and American history, for the vast majority of it, was a crime.
But these characters on the US Supreme Court, not the current ones, they’re pretty good, but the ones that were before them, the Anthony Kennedys and all of these people, they invented this out of thin air. The Constitution is to be a dead letter. Why do you want it dead? So that nobody, including a court, can redefine words that can effectively take away your freedom. The words are dead. They’re solid. They cannot be moved.
Sam Rohrer: David, that’s excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, do you get that? Justice Scalia said a dead document, dead meaning no longer any value, dead as in fixed, permanent, unmoving. You can’t redefine the terms from what they were originally done. The living document, people say, “Well, sounds good,” but they’ve used it to determine, well, we can redefine the terms, and they’ve set about to do that, like termites. I’m telling you, like termites. David, you touched on a little bit, but there are some who also say, “Well, the Constitution is, well, need to be scrapped because it’s racist.” Okay, build that out just a little bit more in the last minute here.
David New: Constitution is not a racist document. When the Constitution was written, slavery was in transition in America. It was going from being accepted to being unaccepted. So like Massachusetts got rid of slavery, even before the Constitution was written, they were transitioning away from it.
Now, the best way to understand how slavery and the US Constitution relate, this is where you want to go. Go to the Dred Scott decision. There are two dissents in that decision. They give the best statement to explain how the Constitution recognizes slavery. It recognizes it for the limited purpose that a state can have it if it wants it. After that, it’s over.
Sam Rohrer: All right. And that takes it right there, ladies and gentlemen. We dealt with the basic argument of those who say scrap the Constitution. Some of these teachers in our law schools teaching our lawyers, and those who are out there actually in seminaries long ago teaching critical race theory, social gospel theology, prosperity gospel theology, questioning the authority of scripture, it’s all the same. It’s all done to undermine, like termites within the system. And they’ve done a really good job, haven’t they? Now in the last segment we’re going to talk about, all right, now how do we defend those principles that they have been trying to undermine? Because that’s where all of us come into it. So in the next segment when we come back, David and I will offer some ideas as to what we should do and can’t do to defend the Constitution.
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Sam Rohrer: Well, on the program today, we’ve been talking about Constitution, visiting some history, going back and looking at well, worldview that existed by our founders, the firm connection and adherence and understanding that God is creator, God is judge, God is the giver of rights, God lays down moral law. And from that then emanated the Declaration of Independence, the early colony charters and Constitution, and ultimately then the US Constitution and elements that go into that.
And God did remarkable things, didn’t He? Because our people then put Him first and build a system that William Penn talks about in Pennsylvania, a holy experiment. They were hoping and praying that this new nation, that this people here, if they would actually do what God told the people of Israel, contained in the Bible, that it could happen to any people in any nation who did what God said to do. And they did that, and we see the result. But as David said, over the last generation, you’ve had people with Marxist thought, the evolutionary thought, Darwinism thought, who says we don’t need God.
Who, God? Well there is no God. We came out of the mud. Therefore, there’s no value to human life. So why not take and kill our babies in the womb because they’re not of value? Why not redefine marriage, male and female? Well, that’s an accident. That has nothing to do with God. And so you then just are free to go and change anything you want. Redefine history, redefine justice, redefine truth and law.
Well, that’s what happened. It’s all a result of that. So we’re going to talk about here in this next segment about how to defend or respond to this to the extent that we can. So in this program today, I’ve used this word termite scrappers. Scrappers come from what the, say, Harvard Law professors teaching students and termite meaning is that you don’t see those little boogers come into your foundation walls, but you do see the effect of it after time.
So termite scrappers to describe those who sneak into positions of influence, spew their poison. They wrap themselves in the pleasant garments, often of professors of law or professors of religion in particular. These teachers of teachers have rejected God as supreme. As we’ve talked about, God as creator. God as the judge. And have instead embraced the serpent in the garden. Satan, the father of lies.
Now in biblical terms, we’re taking this, read a little passage here. The apostle Jude used the word… He didn’t use the word scrappers. He used the word more or less creepers to describe these people. Now, here’s what Jude says in verse four and elsewhere in that very short one chapter book, he said, “There are certain men crept in unawares.” In my words, this is what Jude calls the creepers. These certain men have crept in unawares. But Jude goes on and says that they have crept in unawares, but they were before of old ordained to this condemnation. They were ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, or by definition the mentality of do what you want, and denying the only Lord God, our Lord Jesus Christ.
So Jude says that these are ungodly men committing ungodly deeds, he uses later in that chapter, which they have ungodly committed as ungodly sinners. That’s exact words from Jude. Now, another place in scripture, these types of people are referred to as false prophets, spewing false truth, appearing to be good, but are absolutely anything but.
So David, as we conclude this segment, would you identify from your perspective some of the most effective ways to defend against these attacks against the Constitution by people as we’ve identified here today? Because the attacks are out there, they’re cleverly disguised, but they are there. What do you say?
David New: Well, for example, take the preamble to the US Constitution. That is largely the inspiration of a man who signed the Constitution called Gouverneur Morris. He was a New Yorker, but he signed as a member of the Pennsylvania delegation.
He wanted to raise taxes to free all the slaves in America. And when you read the debates by Madison about the Constitution, you constantly see the delegates objecting the certain words in the US Constitution that would seem to support slavery. There’s a reason the word slave and slavery does not appear in Articles I through VII. They purposely kept it out because they were opposed to it. While the Constitution was being considered, in the month of July of 1787, the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance banned slavery from the Northwest Territory. That includes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Then when the United States comes into existence, George Washington signs the Northwest Ordinance to make it the law for the United States government.
What does that mean? That means George Washington, when he signed the Northwest Ordinance, and he did it on August 7th, 1789, he banned slavery from 30% of the landmass of the United States. That’s what Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin made up, 30% of the land. That is about as anti-slavery as you can get.
Then when you take those states from the Northwest Territory, those states I just named, and when you combine them with the New England states and Pennsylvania and those states, that became the core constituency to get rid of slavery in the United States. That’s how it ended. Christian America ended slavery. It extended suffrage to women. It defeated Nazi Germany. Christian America rebuilt post-war Japan. Christian America was the first nation to support Israel. And Christian America guided and provided the leadership to bring down the Soviet Union. And no nation, no nation has enlarged the border of freedom and the world more than the United States of America. Even Frederick Douglass said, “When properly interpreted, the Constitution does not support slavery.”
Sam Rohrer: All right, David, that is a great understanding. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you got that and walk away from this with great confidence that what underpins our Constitution is, well, biblical truth. It’s truth. It’s truth. That’s where you go.
Now, here is what I’m going to offer in the last minute. I’ll go back to the book of Jude. Jude says… Now, you’ve got these creepers, you call them scrappers. Get rid of the Constitution. They bring in heresy, then lies. Here is what Jude says in verse three. He said, “I exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith.” That’s the faith, that’s the truth of God’s word, the authority of scripture which was once delivered unto the saints. And then it goes on because there are certain men creeping in unawares. Ladies and gentlemen, how do we defend against attacks on the Constitution, the truth of the Constitution, what it means, the worldview that the founders held.
We have to understand God’s Word, the truth of God’s Word. It either is true or it’s not. If it’s true, we stand upon it, we defend it when people attack it, and we defend the truth of what God says when it is reflected in documents like our Constitution, which are clearly based by the writers on the principles of God’s Word, it’s what it comes down to always. And that’s why we say often know the truth, decide to pursue the truth, embrace the truth, and then stand in the gap. Contend for the faith, that’s what Jude says. That’s what we need to do now.
David, thanks so much for the program today. Great information. And ladies and gentlemen, now hopefully it was encouraging and informative to you. So we’ll see you back here tomorrow, the Lord willing, 24 hours from now.
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