0:00 One paragraph published June of this year. No news outlet has touched it yet. I've supported blue laws, state laws that shut down businesses on certain days like Thanksgiving because these days are sacred and everyone ought to be able to participate in them equally. But we've got a long ways to go. That's not a pastor. That is the sitting vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance, in his new book, Communion. Three things in one sentence. I've supported blue laws, that's present tense, laws that shut down businesses, government power over commerce because these days are sacred, a religious word doing the legal work, and then we've got a long ways to go. Towards what? Here's why that stops me cold. In 1888, an American Christian writer predicted that one day in free America, the nation that invented separation of church and state, lawmakers would be appalled for using state power to protect a sacred day. And she said it wouldn't arrive looking like tyranny. It would arrive looking like compassion. I read all 262 pages of this book, and tonight I'm going to show you that very old prophecy. Assembling itself in plain sight. Inside a warm, funny, sincere memoir about a man finding Jesus. And the strangest thing isn't the blue laws. It's what Vance's own grandmother believed about the church that he joined. This is not a manifesto. It's a conversion story, and honestly, it's a likable one. He loses his faith in Iraq and becomes an atheist at Yale, and slowly he walks back into the Roman Catholic Church.
1:55 The Titanic, in his own words, is, if the Titanic is going down, I'd rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat. Boy, I think I'd rather get in a lifeboat. The Titanic is going down. Today, Vance calls himself the most senior Catholic in the United States government. Nothing in this book twirls the mustache, and that's exactly the point. The 1888 prediction never said this would come from villains. It said sincere people solving real problems with the arguments so reasonable that opposing them sounds cruel. So the question is, what happens when good intention, government power, and a sacred day show up in the same paragraph? Hit that subscribe button because you're not going to see me again, and you want to know the answers to some of these questions in the future because the next video coming out is amazing. Start where Vance starts. His grandmother. Chapter 8. He's wrestling with becoming a Catholic, and he remembers Mamaw, his own pen.
2:55 Ah, I'm going to start over so you know. Is it true that in the last three � tutti sec Fifteen years the Catholic religion Designer said we realized that prayer's the root of我们 resolution feel the Catholic way of worship was rather formal but what mattered to her was Jesus revelation eighteen may have been about corruption of the Catholic Church the horror of Babylon and all of its hocus-pocus or it may have been about something else The vice president put revelation ten in the Catholic Church and the whore of Babylon in the same sentence Revelation 17 and 18, John sees a woman. In Scripture, a woman is shorthand for the church. Jeremiah 6.2, I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate woman. Paul in 2 Corinthians says, I have espoused you to one husband, to Christ. Pure women, faithful church. So an impure woman? What's that? Well, it's a church that has been unfaithful. How? Well, Revelation 17, verse 2 says, she commits fornication with the kings of the earth, a church in bed with state power. That's the whole scandal in the image. Not a church that loved Jesus badly, a church in a relationship it was never meant to have with the government. Hold that. Don't conclude anything yet. Know this, Mamaw's suspicion was once the standard relationship. Reading for every Protestant reformer, Luther, Wesley, Wycliffe, that view was normal. Now it's strange. Now the most important chapter in the book. Chapter 8 is titled, Of New Things. That's a translation. Rerum Nervarum, an encyclical from the Pope Leo XIII in 1891.
4:44 Vice President named a chapter of his spiritual autobiography after Rerum Nervarum. A papal document on politics and economics. What does it teach? It teaches that the state should protect the vulnerable, guarantee wages, and ensure workers get rest from labor, not for vicious indulgence, but for their religious and familial obligations. Vance reads that and thinks of his relatives in retail, missing Thanksgiving and church over brutal schedules. Then he writes the most quietly, loaded sentence in the book. Churches will struggle to attract working class people if those people are forced to work on Sundays. And the Pope's vision? Pope Leo, the 13th theory of human nature strikes a balance so perfect, it seems divinely inspired. Divinely inspired? A vice president on the Pope's blueprint for how the state arranges labor, rest, and worship? Here's where this show is different. I'm not going to tell you he's 100% wrong, because 99% truth is 100% error. He's 95% right here. And that's the hook. Watch what happens here. Is rest sacred? Just go to the second page of your Bible, Genesis chapter 2, and he rested, it says, on the seventh day. And God blessed the seventh day. And sanctified it. Sanctified it. Made it sacred before sin, before Israel, before any church existed. God built a sacred rest day into the architecture of the world before any sin existed in it. Is it cruel to send a 16-year-old to a register at 4 p.m. Thanksgiving to 4 a.m. on Friday? Vance calls it gross. And Jesus agrees with that instinct, I think. Vance's compassion here is the most important thing. Vance calls it gross. And Jesus agrees with that instinct, I think.
6:54 It's the most biblical thing in the book. So where's the missing 5% then? Which day did God bless? The seventh. Exodus 20. The only commandment that starts with remember, as if God knew we'd forget. The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord God, thy God. Why? For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. It's a memorial of creation. And a memorial can't be moved. Your birthday doesn't work on someone else's birthday. It's a memorial of creation. And a memorial can't be moved. Your birthday doesn't work on someone else's birthday. The seventh day, Saturday, and the funny thing is, it's in the same language. Sabbath and Saturday are the exact same word. For instance, Spanish is sabado. And in 66 books of the Bible, there is not one verse transferring that sacredness to Sunday. So if the Bible never changed the day, who did? The answer is in Vance's book. He just doesn't know it yet. Final chapter. He, he's in the Rome telling the early church story. Nero, Peter's martyrdom, then Constantine, the emperor with the cross in the sky who ended the persecution. Vance closes with the line he loves. Caesar was dead. Christ still lived. It's beautiful. But he skips the most consequential thing Constantine ever did. On March 7 of 321 AD, Constantine, still stamping the sun, God on his coins, issued the first sun day law in history. On the venerable day of the sun, let the magistrates and people rest and let all the workshops be closed.
8:40 The day of the sun, not the Sabbath of scripture, Rome's sun day worship day. It's pagan sun worship. It's pagan sun worship. Fused with Christianity by imperial decree. A generation later, the council Laodicea ruled from the church side. Christians must not rest on the seventh day Sabbath. They must work on it and rest on Sunday instead. Church and state passed one law back and forth. Caesar didn't die. Caesar got baptized and Rome has never hidden it. The convert's catechism of standard doctrine, standard instruction for converts says this. Which is the Sabbath day? Saturday is the Sabbath day. Why do we observe Sunday instead of Saturday? Because the Catholic church transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday. Rome points to the transfer as proof of her authority. Daniel saw 25 decades ago that this would happen in Daniel 7.25, a power rising from Rome that would think to change times and laws. And not succeed. You can't change God's law. You think to. You claim to.
10:00 Which commandment involves both a time and a law? Exactly one. There's no other commandment like it. The one that starts with remember. So when a modern statesman calls for the papal blueprint for state-protected sacred rest, divinely inspired, there's a very old prediction that says, watch that space. Names a country. Ours. Episodes like this take quite a while to produce. So if you want more of this stuff, join us on Patreon, patreon.com slash strange normal. Now back to the country. Revelation 13, a first beast rises out of the sea and waters, says Revelation 17.15, are peoples and multitudes and nations. Crowded old Europe. Churches fused with state. Dominating for centuries. We just told that story. Then in verse 11, a second power up out of the earth. Empty land. Young. Two horns like a lamb. Gentle. Christ-like. A nation built on two lamb-like principles.
11:09 And the world had never seen this before. Civil liberty and religious liberty. No king, no power. Rising up in the 1700s exactly as the old power went into decline. History offers one candidate. Only one. But the verse keeps going. It says, He spake as a dragon. And this gentle power ends up causing the world to worship and pressing a mark so that no man might buy or sell without it. Look at the pressure point. No armies, commerce, economic laws wrapped around the worship issue. A Thanksgiving blue law is not the mark of the beast. Hear me plainly, but watch the wiring. I've supported blue laws, he says, because these days are sacred. Now that connects. In one America's tenets, the exact three wires, Revelation 13 says get connected. Government power over commerce. We're sacred time. The wires aren't live yet, but somebody's done with the wiring. And his book, Commerce, keeps handing me recipes that most readers never even notice. Vance himself, twice.
12:24 A Christian statesman. He says, He describes his Senate run as an effort to make more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy. He writes, We're fine telling a businessman he must go to church and tithe, but not that he must pay his people a fair wage. Notice, must go to church is the controversial half of that sentence. On Europe's leaders, they had taken God out of their post-war oaths and allegiances, and they wondered why so much else had been lost as well. On Pope's preaching social doctrine, None of these popes were communists. They were just Christians. But now the 1888 prediction, word for word. Even in free America, rulers and legislators, in order to secure public favor, will yield to popular demand for a law enforcing Sunday observance.
13:46 She said church and state dignitaries would unite to bribe and persuade or compel all classes to obey the law. She said church and state dignitaries would unite to bribe and persuade or compel all classes to honor that day, and that it would ride on the real crisis with the sacred day sold as remedy for the nation in trouble. Now Vance's diagnosis, secularism has produced social strife. We ran an experiment of replacing Christianity culture. The fruit is loneliness, failing birth rates, division, but his remedy is re-Christianizing the culture. And we're helpful, the law. Protect the sacred days for the workers, for the families, for the nation. She didn't say tyrants would demand it. She said that people would demand it, and legislators would yield to public favor.
14:42 To secure public favor. Compassion first, law second, enforcement last. That's not a prediction about one man. It's a sequence. And it has visibility. One piece remains, though. None of this works while Protestants and Catholics distrust each other. And in 1888, that gulf looked permanent. The same writer made a second prediction. The decisive sign would be, Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power. And in 1888, that was laughable. But now, read the end of Communion. Vance's closest friend in politics, Turley Kirk. Lifelong evangelical, assassinated in 2025, the Catholic vice president escorted his body home and writes, Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion.
15:42 Then, here's the book's thesis. As Christians, we are all together part of the same church. Charlie Kirk and Pope Francis, despite their different views. The book is the handshake. An evangelical-raised, now Catholic vice president, telling a hundred million Protestants, the Reformation gulf is family drama. One body. Act like it. In culture. And yes, in politics. Even his theology reviewers for this book were Catholic priests and a Southern Baptist. Side by side. Hear me out. Love your Catholic neighbors. Love your Catholic friends. Love your Protestant people. Love people in general. That is Christianity. This isn't anything against the Catholics. The prediction was never about affection.
16:36 It's about architecture. Institutions merging moral agendas and reaching together for the machinery of the state. Affection is the doorway. Legislation is the room. A book called Communion, whose emotional climax, is Protestant martyr and a pope in the same church and whose policy climax is, I've supported blue laws, but we've got a long way to go. That's not fulfillment. But you can see the fulfillment from here. So where does this leave us today? There's no witch hunts. Revelation 18 says, Come out of her my people. God has a people in every communion. And nobody bears any mark today. The test only comes when the law forces a choice. And when it does, it won't be about a calendar. It'll be about Acts 5.29. We have to obey God rather than man. Because God's final call in Revelation 14 is, Worship him that made heaven and earth.
17:45 This is the Sabbath commandment. Word for word. So here's my last point. Man's sacred day will eventually be required. God's sacred day has only... ever been offered. One is enforced from a capital and one is kept from a cross. Take the gift before anyone offers you the substitute. Come unto me and I will give you rest, the Bible says. And here's the chapter I skipped tonight on purpose. See you at the after party. This is an interesting one. Vance's father dying, but certain God will heal him. And the belief Vance reaches for instead, that the dead... are awake and aware. The Bible calls that the other great deception of the last days. And it's already normal. See you in the next episode. Don't miss it.
18:37 God bless you.