Charlie was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on what would have been his 32nd birthday. His wife said 5 profound statements in about 40 seconds. We break them down in today's episode.
Welcome to Politics by Faith. Oh, I was on vacation last week and I had big plans to record episodes and I didn't. A lot of high hopes, always on vacation. Alas, we're back. I want to play this clip of Erica Kirk at her husband's Medal of Freedom ceremony. I think in this 40 second clip, there are five profound truths that are worth knowing.
Charlie often said that without God, freedom becomes chaos. and he believed liberty could only survive when anchored to truth. And I remember in one of his speeches, he told the audience that the opposite of liberty isn't law, he said it's captivity, and that the freest people in the world are those whose hearts belong to Christ. But what's so powerful is that Charlie had the ability to communicate so brilliantly across all generations. And he reminded us that in a world that tells us freedom is doing whatever you want to do, the real freedom is the power to live freely and to do what is right. And in one of his journal entries, he wrote that he wanted everyone to know that you can't have liberty without moral responsibility.
Freedom divorced from faith eventually just destroys itself.
It's incredible stuff there. Incredible truths there. Without God, freedom becomes chaos. The opposite of liberty is not law, it's captivity. The freest people are those whose heart belong to Christ. Freedom is not doing whatever you want.
True freedom is the power to live freely and do what is right. You can't have liberty without moral responsibility. and freedom divorced from faith ultimately destroys itself. Again, going back to chaos. Our founding fathers knew these things. I'm so grateful that Charlie brought them back to the forefront.
It's our job to take them and run with them and live, live them and share them with as many people as we can. John Adams knew that the American system of government was designed only for a moral and religious people. And if you live a life of the flesh, With your mind set on things of the flesh, you will do things of the flesh and it will lead to death. It will lead to a bad life. You'll become a slave to those things here on earth, not to mention what will happen to you for all of eternity. But our founding fathers knew that true happiness did not come that way.
And they knew that a country can never survive if people were living in the flesh. This idea that the opposite of liberty is not law, because that's the idea is like, Oh, you can't tell me what to do. I'm gonna do whatever I want. You can't make a law to tell me. It's like, all right, fine, but you're going to go down this road and it's not the law, but it's going to be captivity. It's going to be chaos and captivity and destruction and slavery.
You're going to become a slave to the flesh, a slave to your sin. John 8, 34, Jesus says, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. Romans 6, 16, to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey. You are that one slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness. 2 Peter 2, 19, they promise them freedom. but they themselves are slaves of corruption.
For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. " I want to read a few more quotes here from this book I've been going through, Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. I've got like three quotes here that I think echo what Charlie had said and Erica is going to continue to say, and we need to know. This is Noah Webster of the dictionary. And of course, to prevent crimes, war, and disorders in society, no human laws dictated by different principles from those in the gospel can ever secure those objectives.
All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible. These are our founding fathers. For instruction then in social, religious, and civil duties, resort to the scriptures for the best precepts and most excellent examples of imitation. Reverend Sam Cooper gave a sermon. He preached in front of the governor of Massachusetts, one John Hancock, also preached to the Massachusetts assemblymen at the time. And this was on the very beginning of the Massachusetts constitution in 1780.
And the preacher man said this directly to the leaders. He said, our civil rulers will remember. that as piety and virtue support the honor and happiness of every community, they are particularly requisite in a free government. Virtue is the spirit of a republic. for where all power is derived from the people, all depends on their good disposition. That's such a good point.
If power comes from the people, power to the people, power from the people. If that's where the power comes from, you better make sure they're good people. If they are impious, factious, and selfish, if they are abandoned to idleness, dissipation, luxury, and extravagance, if they are lost to the fear of God and the love of the country, all is lost. Having got beyond the restraints of a divine authority, they will not brook the control of laws enacted by rulers of their own creating. You think they're going to, if they disobey the laws of God, you think they're going to obey the laws of man? Having got beyond the restraints of a divine authority, they will not brook the control of laws enacted by rulers of their own creating.
They elect these fools. They're going to listen to their own laws. And now we live in a society where those people don't even enact laws. And we have judges that just let people free after they break the law. I'm going to look up. Two words here.
Dissipation, I want to make sure I get that one right. Dissipation, scattered attention, a dissolute, irregular course of life, wandering from the object to object to object in pursuit of pleasure. Oh, that's a good idea. They're abandoned to idleness, dissipation. Oh, there's lost. A course of life usually attended with careless and exorbitant expenditure of money, indulgence in vices, which impair or ruin both health and fortune.
Very good. And then I wonder what the old time definition of brook is. Having got beyond the restraints of a divine authority, they will not brook the control of laws. They will not brook, bear, endure, support. I never heard that used before.
I'll give you one more.
We'll go back to Benjamin or Noah Webster. The Christian religion is the real source of all genuine Republican principles. It teaches the equality of men as to the rights and duties. And while it forbids all oppression, it commands due subordination to law and rulers. It requires the young to yield obedience to their parents. and enjoins upon men the duty of selecting their rulers from their fellow citizens of mature age, sound wisdom, and real religion.
" Check this out. Real religion. Men who fear God and hate covetousness. It's Exodus 18, 21. The religion of Christ and his apostles and its primitive simplicity and purity, unencumbered with the trappings of power and the pomp of ceremonies, is the surest basis of a Republican government. Those men who destroy the influence and authority of the Christian religion.
Oh, the sentence right here. Those men, and we've had decades of these men and women, those men who destroy the influence and authority of the Christian religion, sap the foundations of public order, of liberty and of Republican government. We see the chaos. Noah Webster was totally right. Completely right. We've had decades now of people of influence and authority sapping the foundations of public order.
We have on the SiriusXM show tomorrow, a lot of stories about crime. And there's two things that will stop crime, the law and God. The law is there for when you get caught. There's the law, you break it, there's proper punishment. We have breakdowns all throughout that, which we'll talk about more tomorrow, but you know it all, right? Just letting people, people have been arrested 30 times for violent crimes, letting them back on the streets.
That's a breakdown. But those are all the things that we see. But do you know, we only solve about 44%. The last time we had these numbers was in 2023. It's worse now, surely. We solve 44 % of violent crimes.
What percent of murders do you think get solved? If you asked me, I'd be like, oh, like 98%, 99%, 57 % of murders. And I've heard some numbers as low as 45. Obviously, it depends where you are too. That means there's some cities probably where maybe 30 % of murders get solved. So what do we do with that?
The law is there for when you get caught. But what about when no one sees what you do? I should say, what about when no one sees what you do? He does. God does. He sees everything.
And going to hell is a pretty good deterrent to stop people from doing bad things. But we've replaced God with Santa Claus and his naughty list. It's one of many reasons why there's so much crime today. No more idea of hell. But to bring it back to Charlie Kirk, freedom is not the point. Freedom is not the end of the story.
Freedom is the beginning. Virtue is the goal. Freedom is only good if it directs people to virtue. If freedom leads people to sin, that leads to death. You know, the suspect of the LA Palisades fire was captured. This fire he started destroyed 6 ,000 homes, killed 12 people.
A month before he lit the fire, he told a family member that he burned a Bible. He said, I literally burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amazing. I felt so liberated. Liberated. I'm so free.
I can do whatever I want. And he did. He went on to do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted to do was to start a fire that destroyed a community. Freedom.