0:05 Before I introduce my guest, you need to know one thing. There is a deadline, and it's Monday, July 13 at 5 p.m. Eastern. That's when the public comment window closes on the presidential commission report that recommends tearing down the wall of separation between church and state in America. Government money flowing into churches, the Ten Commandments edited by the state of Texas, and the law that keeps your partisan politics out of the pulpit repealed. Most Americans don't even know this report exists. Now you have days to say something about it. My guest read every page, and he's going to tell you what it exactly is and what you must do about it before Monday. So I'm going to bring him in.
0:59 Jonathan. Thank you so much for coming on tonight. This has been very interesting what has happened in these last, I mean, weeks. I mean, things are going so fast. What can you tell us is going on right now, and what does your company do that is helping do this? Yeah, things really are moving fast. About a week ago, President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission issued their draft report, and in that draft report, they did a couple of really key things that we need to pay attention to. They asked, well, basically, they declared that separation of church and state was a lie and that it was not in the Constitution. And they said that we need to build a bridge between the church and the state. And then there's a lot of other things about government funding and a few other things about speech that they addressed in their report. But the key thing is, is that we have this narrow window of opportunity where we can, as members of the public, reply to this report.
1:59 And I think that's a big part of it. And I think that's a big part of it. And I think that's a big part of it. And I think that's a big part of it. And I think this is extremely important, because when this report becomes accepted and no longer a draft, future presidential executive orders and perhaps legislation will be based upon this report. And if we complain at that point, they'll say, well, you should have complained back at the time of the report. So this is one of those critical moments where we need to pay attention and we need to reply. We need to send responses. And it's as simple as sending an email to the Department of Justice, in order to do that. Now, I've put together a guide, and you can go to my web page, pillaroffreedom.org, and it'll give you all the instructions you need to make an effective response. So, pillaroffreedom.org, and you go there, and there'll be a couple different places I've got it on the web page where you can click through and find a guide on how to respond. How to respond. Wow. Man, my capture device isn't showing my laptop for some reason, unfortunately.
2:58 So, it's... It's pillar, not pillars, pillaroffreedom.org, correct? Correct. All right. And it has like a background of the flag banner, and it says, Pillar of Freedom, and it has Defending Liberty of Conscience and Religious Freedom. Very, very important things to think about. Yes, absolutely. And I really want to impress people that this is a time for action. And if you look at that web page right there, it says, They didn't give us an actual time of day, but I would assume to be safe, we should probably consider 5 p.m. Eastern. It might be able to go to midnight, but I really don't know. Yes, so we really need to respond to this. Yeah, yeah, we do. I have a few questions for you, I think, that are fairly important. But I want you to first tell us more about what is your company?
3:56 I mean, you obviously do this for a living. Are you a lawyer, or what do you do? Yeah, I'm actually a lawyer. I'm more of a trial attorney by trade. I have, over the years, I've become more and more involved in religious liberty, and I've kind of wound down most of my practice. I still take the occasional case. But what I'm really emphasizing is on religious liberty, and the Lord really put it on my heart last summer, actually, to go into this full time. And so I'm transitioning into full-time religious liberty advocacy and education. So that's what we do. And if you go to our webpage, you can actually see a little bit about the organization and what we're trying to do. All right, very good. So give our audience the six-second overview. We've already talked about how to do it, how to get there.
4:51 Do you have the exact email address to email and stuff that you can say on the screen here? Yes, I do. Thank you. R-L-C at U-S-D-O-J dot gov. R-L-C at R, say it again. R as in Robert, L as in Larry, C as in commission. I see it, yeah. At U-S, Department of Justice, so it's U-S-D-O-J dot gov. R-L-C at U-S-D-O-J dot gov. And you can put the subject, public comment, and your topic and the name, right? A name of the person that's emailing in. Correct, exactly. Well, I think we should talk a little bit about what the report is trying to do. I guess you wanted the quick nutshell. You just put that in an email, you put your comment, and you send it.
5:44 And one thing I would like to say while you're thinking about this, there are going to be excellent comments that are going to be made to this. However, don't think that you have to write a wonderful comment like a lawyer might write. This is one of those situations where it's important that the commission know that you as a citizen care. And so even just a small one-liner, it could be as simple as I've read the Pillar of Freedom response and I agree with it. I would prefer, and I think we should try to do more than that. And the other thing is try not to do a cut and paste because if it's all cut and paste, it'll look like a bot or something like that did it. And so it'd be much better to have you actually do something. But I think we probably ought to give everyone a chance to do something. I'm going to give everyone a little bit more of a background as to what's really going on here. Please take a little time to do that. So basically what happened is about a year ago, Trump convened the Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty and they've been meeting, I think that they've had seven meetings and they've looked at different subjects of challenges of religious people in the United States, all different kinds of aspects.
6:52 And then they had a final meeting where they kind of went over everything and made their findings. And then it produced this draft. If you have time, I highly recommend watching the final meeting. You'll learn a whole lot of things. But basically the themes that came out of those meetings was the idea that separation of church and state is a lie. That's the way they said it. And that it's not in the constitution. Well, the phrase technically is not in the constitution. They're correct about that. But the concepts are there. And what the... The founding fathers and the drafters of the constitution were doing is they were trying to actually create a separation of church and state. It's just very obvious. It's not... It doesn't rely upon that phrase. And so that's the main underlying logic of their entire report is to eliminate the separation of church and state.
7:51 And at one point they even say they want to build a bridge between church and state. And then with that in mind, they... They then give a really bad history of the United States. And from there, they make all kinds of claims. For instance, there's a very famous quote from Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist where he said that the constitution created a wall of separation between church and state. And in the process of doing that, they try to make Thomas Jefferson sound like some, I don't know, atheist kind of guy. And then they accuse the court of being some kind of a progressive court that quotes Jefferson's letter. Well, the actual case that involves that particular quote in that letter, the big case is from 1947.
8:48 In 1947, there was nothing about the Supreme Court that was a progressive, radical court and certainly nothing that we see on the court today. And yet they try to paint that picture, and they try to make it sound like you're some kind of a radical for thinking that there should be a wall of separation of church and state. But if you look now, one other thing I want to say about my website, I have the guide on there for how to respond. And we talked about that. I also have a link and I've posted my response that I've given to the Department of Justice. I sent that on July 6th because I wanted it out there early so that people could look at it. And form their own opinions. And so if you look right there, you can see those buttons. One of them is to look for the guide and the other one is to read our response. And if you go down to the next spot there where there's kind of like, yeah, that's good. Just go ahead and pull it up if you want.
9:45 But if you go down to the next one and if you click through to that response to the report, there's more instructions on this particular post kind of laying a little bit of a background for what you'd be doing. But I got multiple ways into it. They're the same documents. So one thing that I did in my response is I kind of stepped them through the true history. I think this is really important to understand. The idea of a wall of separation between church and state didn't start with Thomas Jefferson. And it wasn't something that was kind of forgotten until 1947. It actually started with Roger Williams. Roger Williams is the founder of Rhode Island. And he was a peer. He was a Puritan pastor. So he comes over to Massachusetts Bay Colony. And he doesn't like what he sees because there's no religious liberty there. True, he was able to flee the persecution of the Puritans.
10:42 The Puritans were being persecuted in England. So he flees that to be with Puritans. And then when he gets there, he finds out that the Puritans don't allow any freedom for anything other than Puritans. And he realizes that's not right. And he starts speaking out against it, which of course gets him banished. So he... And there's a famous story about him being with the Indians through the winter and founds Rhode Island. And in the process of doing that, he preaches and writes about the concept of a wall of separation between church and state. And specifically what he says, he says, God has created a garden like the Garden of Eden. And inside the garden, inside that wall is God's people and God's church. And outside of that wall, is the state, the public, the thorns and briars of daily life.
11:33 And therefore there should be a wall of separation between church and state. And that's what he does in Rhode Island. And that's back in 1636 or so when he starts Providence, Rhode Island. And by 1644, he's writing a book that one of its main metaphors is what I've just talked about. And then that gets passed down eventually to the Baptists. And around the end of the 16th century, and around the time of the revolution, so 1770s, the Baptists are taking the same concept of a wall of separation. And they're talking about that to James Madison and the other founders and drafters of the United States Constitution. And when they do that, Madison understands. And so he drafts that concept into the US Constitution.
12:24 That's the story of how we get separation of church and state. And the commission would have you believe that separation of church and state is some kind of an atheistic, secular idea, and that it's bad people, bad atheists that are trying to ruin our country that are demanding separation of church and state. Yeah, this is nothing against the current administration. This is not getting political. This is basically, hey, we're talking about Bible prophecy here. Something big has happened. Revelation 13 is happening. I didn't mean to cut you off there, but I get really excited about this. Oh, that's fine. Do you mind if I read a quote? Real quick? Go for it. OK. It says, let me see if I can find it here. This is the exact kind of warning that we had in 1888. This is the Great Controversy, 581, page 501. She says, she is silently growing in power.
13:17 Her doctrines are exerting their influence in legislative halls, in the churches, and in the hearts of men. Stealthily and suspiciously, she strengthens her forces, to further her own ends when the time shall come for her to strike. All that she desires is vantage ground, and this is already being given her. Silently, stealthily, unsuspectedly, two weeks. So that's what I said. You know, it's silently, stealthily, unexpectedly. It's basically a two-week window that nobody knows about, and that's the vantage ground that nobody really talks about. Because nobody's watching C-SPAN or wherever it's broadcasted. Yeah, well, honestly, I did not know that there was a two-week comment period until I read the report.
14:08 And then when I read the report, I'm all like, oh, look at the fine print right here. There's a two-week comment period. And these commissions, by law, they have to have a comment period if their commission report is going to be relied upon for rulemaking. And this particular commission is, I don't want to get into the legal details, but it's a little bit of an oddball. Yeah. Yeah. It's an odd one, as far as the comment period and what's required of it. So I saw that, and I went like, wow. And that was after I read the report. So the report's issued on Friday. And it took me probably a day and a half or two to actually read the report. Sure. I remember I read it until Sunday on Friday, and then I picked it up Saturday night, right? And that's when I saw that. So then that put me into high gear to do something about this. But I think we should get back to kind of the historical story, because basically, what happens is that when you have this separation of church and state, so Rhode Island does it first, and they're just separated from the very beginning.
15:07 And then William Penn comes along, and he sees what's going on. And William Penn is a Quaker. Now, one other thing that we should give credit for is Roger Williams is a Puritan, and he's the first one to do this. He's the first one to implement it. But he's actually relying upon a long history of Anabaptists who have been persecuted. So you've said a few different things that I don't think everyone knows about. What's a Quaker? What's a—and some people might, but I want to make sure everyone understands. What's a Quaker? What's an Anabaptist? And what's a Puritan? What's a Quaker? What's an Anabaptist? So this is—I love teaching about the story of the Reformation and religious liberty. So Martin Luther, in 1517, he does his 95 Theses, right?
15:52 And everyone starts to go back and read their Bible, and it's only a few years later—I can't remember exactly how many. But it's like three or four years later that there's the Anabaptist start. These are people that believe in what they call Believer's Baptism. So you learn, and you repent, and you are converted, and then you're baptized. That's Believer's Baptism. Prior to that, everyone was sprinkled, right? You have a christening and the sprinkling. And that's also what the Lutheran church and what Luther was doing. So the Anabaptists come along. This creates a tension in the church, and the Anabaptists are persecuted. Hmm. And they're burned at the stake for wanting baptism, and they're burned at the stake by Protestants. Wow. It's not Catholics that are doing it, it's Protestants that are doing it, although the Catholics are doing it because they'll do it to any Protestant. So be that as it all may, you have this history of this going on, and Roger Williams actually draws from that.
16:45 And then by the time you get to Pennsylvania, which comes on a few years afterwards, I guess this would be before Roger Williams founded Rhode Island, you have the Quakers form. And the Quakers are another religious group, but they're not—they have a different set of beliefs. They don't believe in coming together more than I think—I think their official belief at the time was like, you need to come to church once a year. And there's a lot of things that they believe. It's very heavy freedom of conscience. And because of that, they're heavily persecuted by Protestants, Catholics, everybody persecutes them a lot. So. So. And then he takes him along and decides that—he really did give it a run for its money. If you look at the history of the revolution, a lot of important things happened in Philadelphia, not New York. And so and he did that based on the idea of religious liberty.
17:39 And so he went over to Europe and recruited people who are victims of religious wars to move to Pennsylvania. And that's how a lot of my ancestors actually came to America, was to avoid persecution or the religious wars. They come to Pennsylvania. They come to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania. And so Pennsylvania gets it. Delaware's watching and they go like, that's a good idea. And so they have religious liberty from the very beginning. And New Jersey pretty much has religious liberty from the very beginning. Meanwhile, the other state or colonies, I keep calling them states, the other colonies are watching and they have established government. They have persecution. The most persecution was probably Massachusetts, but there's a lot down in the South too. And some of them are realizing we're not attracting colonists. And so they started to get rid of state churches and allow for separation of church and state and religious freedom. Orange County, Virginia specifically is where this really happened. And they're talking to Madison and they're saying, we need religious liberty now. Now the Baptists, you have to understand, they're not, I have to talk to a real theologian to get my history 100% straight. They're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, they're not really, really descendants of the Anabaptists, but they have the same belief in baptism that the Anabaptists do. And so they would be persecuted in other colonies and other places. And so they were very, very big, very adamant for religious liberty and they understood. And so they're standing in that line of reasoning that goes from Roger Williams down to the Baptists. And they're standing in that line of reasoning that goes from Roger Williams down to the Baptists. And they're standing in that line of reasoning that goes from Roger Williams down to the Baptists. And Jefferson wrote to the Baptists. And it's interesting because Thomas Jefferson is writing to the Baptists to reassure them of what the Baptists believe, which is separation of church and state. So to pin the whole idea on Thomas Jefferson is so ridiculous. Anyway, and then they give a history. If you look at their report, they criticize the justice who wrote the opinion because he was a Klan member. But the opinions that he wrote go completely against everything the Klan wrote. And so they're standing in that line of reasoning that goes from Roger Williams down to the Baptists. And so they're standing in that line of reasoning that goes completely against everything stood for. And he wasn't a Klan member at the time. He's a Supreme Court justice. One of the problems with politics in the United States is that politicians will actually join a lot of different organizations to try to get votes. And this guy's a politician. Anyway, they try to do that and then paint the guy as a radical, kind of like a French revolutionary, which couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, the Klan has nothing to do with that, right? And so they're they try to paint that in this in this report that they've written to try to say the idea of separation of church and state is basically a radical French Revolution idea or modern higher criticism idea, which leads to what we have today, which is this strong secular atheism in the country. Now, I want to make one point because I think that the commission could have even made this point stronger. And that is today we do have a problem where secular atheism is fundamentally functioning as a religion. But because it doesn't claim a creed
21:27 or a God, the courts treat it as if it's not a religion. And that's a problem. We have a problem in our country. And I agree with the commission on this, where when the courts favor secular atheism, and they think they can because it's they don't think it's a religion, right? It does put religious people in kind of a bad situation. And so one of the things that I say in my letters that we we should urge the courts to recognize that secular atheism does function as a religion and that the courts and the government needs to remain neutral on that. Yeah. And so that, you know, one of the things they made some good points. If you go back and watch the commission, there were some excellent points that were made there. And so how do you do that? The conclusions? Oh, so if you go to the guide, I believe I have the actual link to the page. I'm not sure if I put it in the guide, but but you can Google Religious Liberty Commission. And there's a DOJ page that has all of the instructions on how to reply. And it's also got links to transcripts and video of all of the different commission sessions. Is it is it justice right here? Yes. And that one scroll down a little bit. Scroll down. That's not the one. I would Google like how to respond to the Religious Liberty Commission. Yeah. Because it's on the page where they give the instructions on how to respond.
23:03 OK. And you can actually see there's there's already some responses to the individual sessions that have been posted. In a way, I was asleep at the switch because I didn't realize we could respond to individual sessions. I I was assuming we'd only respond to the to the draft. And I wasn't sure if we could even do that because of the type of. Commission that it was. So anyway, be that as it may, I'd like to be able to see if there's video footage of, you know, you said that when they were responding back and forth, is there video footage of that? Because I'd like to watch that. You said there was good points. The they don't respond to the comments on video. That's. Oh, yeah. But but what they do is they bring witnesses in and you can watch witness testimony and then they spend some time talking to each other. And if you go to the final session, they actually mainly talk to each other and make kind of broad statements. And that can be that can be really instructive to watch that last session. And I would say that that if you watch the last session, you've picked up on a lot of it. There's some really important fireworks we may talk about that happened in some earlier sessions. But but be that as it may. So I think we go ahead. No, I was just asking, do you know, do you think it's possible to find some of those right now? Is it easy to find or is it kind of buried?
24:27 Google how to respond to the Religious Liberty Commission, Department of Justice. Yeah, I kind of said that in my broken typing here. All right. We are how to respond to religious liberty. You said Department of Justice. I think that it found it. Yeah. Now go down. It may be a link even in the A.I. I would go down a little bit. Well, OK, it's going to be like that first link didn't look right. Or maybe instructions on how to respond. I'm not sure. Sure. And if we can't find it right now, that's OK. I thought it would be. Yeah, sorry about that. No, no. And I'm going to try to find it because I'd like to use some of those clips and talk about this. I think this is an important issue that we need to we need to talk about. And the the the fascinating thing to me is that this is happening until Monday.
25:26 And so what happens after Monday if we don't respond? Well, so what happens after Monday is the the the response period is closed and then the Department of Justice should collate the responses and they will they should divide them up basically on issues. And then they're supposed to consider all of those responses because there's no actual rulemaking being done at this commission. There's no formal response. Issued. But the commission should be required to consider the responses, even though they don't have to make a written response, is my understanding. Once again, this commission is a little bit different than what we normally see with commissions. Normally, these commissions are are convened for rulemaking purposes. This one is an advisory commission to tell the the executive branch kind of issue a report on the commission. You know, issue a report on the commission. on religious liberty and they made a bunch of recommendations like so so far we've only talked about the history but we could talk about that too yeah yeah well i i'm interested in knowing yeah i mean obviously a religious liberty revelation 13 law isn't coming right around the corner but it i mean it this is the precursor to it right this is like what what what would happen uh what are the steps that would happen if if uh this thing doesn't pass in what we believe is our our uh in our favor well first of all i'm not convinced that the climate we're living in that they're going to change their report they might uh change some of it just because we've pointed out like like the things that it was interesting i was very encouraged because the things that i was complaining about from a historical standpoint i just found there's another group it's an american history uh i can't remember their title but it's like the associated association of american history teachers and something like that and for the history part they're saying the same thing i am and that was very encouraging so so what i'm telling you about the history is not this is this is absolutely mainstream history that i'm telling you that they absolutely should have been aware of especially if the high school teachers of america recognize it right um but as far as the bearing as far as what happens um this will form a foundation you will see executive orders issued you will see rules being made in other departments that rely upon the idea that we don't need to have a strict separation of church and state so this is a statement to go yeah so to go right to the heart of it um department of labor right now is considering a rule that says you'll have to pay time and a half for work on sunday and that's very clearly that's in project 2025 and it's very clearly something that they're absolutely working on and they're working on it and they're working on it and they're working on it and they're talking about in fact some of the people involved in that were saying they wanted to give it as a gift to the country on july 4 well that didn't happen so it hasn't happened yet but i'm convinced that this is very close and will be very soon and so when they issue a rule like that they can rely on the religious liberty commission report for the idea that there doesn't need to be a strict separation of church and state and it's okay to have legislation in fact this is a big theme is that the state should be passing legislation to support religion yeah and so this will be they're not saying they're not saying that hey whatever your religious day is we'll give you time and a half if you work on it they're saying uh sunday we're gonna have you work on it that's that's what you were saying before right yeah it's pretty much sunday they've got some weird little exceptions carved out that really won't work for 99 of the people um and i'm not sure we don't have the final rule and i don't know what the final rule is going to be so it's speculation but it's clearly a heavy emphasis on sunday and it will clearly heavily favor sunday
29:33 and it will be the same for an entire corporation so it's not like amazon can say well for all of our adventist employees we'll give them time and a half on saturday and for our and for our sunday worshipers we'll give them time and a half on sunday i mean there's so many problems with that example but but you get the point right um amazon would be just doing it all on one day and you can tell with a company of that size there's only one day that is the majority of people and that's that's sunday so um so that would be an example there may be uh other things that they talked a lot about funding and this is one of the areas that they really go into practical recommendations and that is they believe that funding for religious activities um they should be able to get government funding and so examples of that would be things like education so if you have an educational program and you want to include religious education in it then you can get government funding for the entire program that would be an example another example is in philanthropy and they gave some really good examples um and it is something that we need to think about as christians and i think we need to grapple with as americans and that is the idea that if you have a humanitarian aid program um they used examples of like a um this was like a home and a shelter for pregnant women that didn't want to have abortions they said these people need spiritual care when they're coming into these environments and i agree they absolutely do need spiritual care and so and so they're saying well if we're going to get government funding to operate these facilities and we can't provide spiritual care then we aren't providing what the people probably need the most and and there's an interesting logic to all of that but it is that all of these services are for spiritual purposes and so you know it highlights the idea that the church itself needs to be funding its operations you know when the church runs these organizations and then uses government money to do that that's a little bit disingenuous you know it's the church pretending to provide the services and really the government's providing it because they're the ones footing the bill and so i don't have a lot of sympathy for this argument you know god tells us to look after the poor the sick the fatherless uh children and things like that but if we just look to the government to give us money to do it are we really doing what christ said so so when the government comes in and does all the philanthropy it it short circuits the church yeah and i think we need a society where the churches actually step up to the plate and i and i believe that that it that it will um you know and and you know this has been an issue all over the place if you've been watching very carefully there's been some um um controversy over participation in the united nations because the united nations does exactly the same thing and so big humanitarian aid organizations um have to agree to do nothing evangelistic to get un money and then the question becomes why participate if you're christian at all if you can't do your core mission and so and so these are issues that have to be grappled with but i i think on the flip side let's look at it from a different angle let's say the government is going to fund this stuff well the government's going to have to make choices as to what they're going to fund and they might find themselves coming into a situation where they're all like i'm going to fund this but i'm not going to fund that right and it can easily leave like okay if you don't have the right you don't have the right position on abortion for religious reasons you don't get funding for instance now abortion's really uh i wish i hadn't used that example because i am staunchly pro-life and i think that that you don't need to be religious to understand that um and so i am of the opinion that the government should take a staunch pro-life position in everything and like i said you don't need to do something that's at all personal and you can't do it when it's in your control so i i believe one example where the government's already engaging in this kind of doctrinal um work is in the 10 commandments i don't know if you've been watching but texas and i believe florida and maybe some other states they're posting the 10 commandments and they're making it required to be posted in school they're required to be posted in the courthouse and places like that well here's the problem what 10 commandments are you gonna post and you're all like oh i thought there's only one but the reality is is that you can't be the first person to be posted in the court house and you're first of all the scripture itself uses to you know there's the the deuteronomy and the exodus
34:24 version and and secondly um when you actually look at it the fourth commandment is pretty clear yeah and um they don't really want to post that and so unless you use the catholic version be like let's yeah let's abbreviate it oh no they can't use the catholic version if you use the catholic version they renumber it in a way to get rid of the prohibition on graven images which makes the protestants really upset the protestants will say they took out the prohibition on graven images the catholics will say we didn't really we just renumbered it but if you actually go to look it seems like the protestants actually carry the day on that and then you got the problem the the controversy over the fourth commandment what are you going to say because you don't want people to wake up to the idea that saturday's the sabbath so let's abbreviate it completely we'll number it like the protestants i'm just telling you what texas did they abbreviate it so the fourth commandment is keep the sabbath day boom done right wow and then and then they order it like the protestants right and then they say this is the official version of the 10 commandments that we're going to post you can't post anything else and be happy with it and so far the catholics have been quiet about it so um you get this abbreviated protestant um 10 commandments posted that really aren't the 10 commandments at all yeah in my opinion you don't you don't mess with the law of god and so you really need to post a direct quote so and they don't do that i'm going to have some people in here saying so why why does it matter if uh if there's if it's different between exodus and deuteronomy can you kind of go over that real quick well so i think the 10 commandments are absolutely beautiful and god did something really cool with them so if you look at exodus he says um remember the sabbath day keep it holy for in six days i made the heavens and earth it goes back to creation and it points to the fact that sabbath was made on creation when you go to the deuteronomy one though it says it says remember the sabbath day because i delivered you out of egypt and so when you keep the sabbath on the deuteronomy you're remembering deliverance and i think that this house is just house is just as important when we keep the sabbath we remember and recognize that christ is coming back to deliver us again amen and so wow you have the two the two renditions of the sabbath but um anyway so so that that's the differences between exodus and deuteronomy yeah yeah yeah very good and so texas you said texas is kind of leading leading the way on this i i i think i have my go ahead texas is and the chair from the commission is from texas and so in my letter i i referenced the texas stuff because i knew that he'd be intimately familiar with it yeah yeah and i think it's it's interesting because this is i think all prophesied it says in daniel 7 24 that uh they would think to uh change times and laws and there's only one commandment that in the 10 commandments that is a time and a law and if you just put remember the sabbath day you're not really referencing which one god specifically said in exodus and i get a look in deuteronomy i believe deuteronomy said so too it says the seventh day is the sabbath of the lord thy god and that's the whole reason they the the egyptians they're not going to be able to in egypt and that's the whole reason they're not going to be able to or were leaving egypt so they could worship excuse me with egyptians the the uh the uh the slaves in egypt were leaving so they could worship god and keep his commandments and so it's fascinating to see that this this whole law was way before the the the the 10 commandments were ever written on stone and and because that absolutely that happened in exodus 20 and back in exodus 6 yeah and and and i think that this is really important too just to emphasize that is that even if they don't change the i think it's really important to say look we planted our flag we told you the truth we object and you don't want to be a late comer to the objection because otherwise they can say to you hey we did this commission you had the opportunity to comment you didn't do that so live with it right and so i think it's really important and the other thing too is that is that people can go on all of these comments are going to be posted online and people can go on and read them and so we can point people in the future to the idea that we objected and that we're going to be able to go on all of these things the reading in that they knew better because i think you know one never knows there's the four angels holding back the four winds i cannot predict when all of this is going to end and when those four winds get unleashed but if it happens soon i have a feeling that this commission report is going to play somewhat of a role in it and if that's the case
39:11 I'm a Seventh-day Adventist, and I object. I always objected. We always object for this, and we believe in religious liberty for you and for me, for everyone. I think that's really important. Otherwise, you might come across as being like, well, I don't like the law because it hurts me, you know? Yeah, what do people say? They say, well, if it's Sunday, then—I mean, if it's Saturday that we instituted, would you be okay with that, right? Not at all. We're not going to— Yeah, absolutely not. No. And that's—the Adventist position has always been that way. A.T. Jones, when he argued in front of Congress, which, by the way, if anyone wants to become adept at arguing all of the Sunday law issues, the same issues are coming up today that were in 1888. Read the little book, National Sunday Law by A.T. Jones, and you will get all the arguments you need. I have that. I get the exact same arguments. And anyway, but I can't remember where I was going with that. I deflected you.
40:10 I can't remember. It's my fault. It's my fault. I lost my train of thought. But the—you said that the commission convicts itself in this. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? You probably are talking about—I think it's Prejean Bowler or Bowler Prejean. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. Kerry? Yeah, Kerry Prejean. Yeah, Kerry Prejean Bowler or Kerry Prejean. I always get her name. She's got multiple names. I apologize to her in advance. I'm very sorry. But anyway, she was a commission member. She's a very interesting person. She had been kind of a Trump supporter for a long time. I believe she's a recent convert to Catholicism. I'm not sure about that, but I think that's true. And so she's on the committee. And in this commission, they spend a lot of time actually looking at anti-Semitism, which also is sort of interesting because it seems like it gets more of an emphasis than you might expect.
41:11 If you are having a colorblind or a religion-blind commission. Is that because they're thinking about Sunday? Is that—I mean, in the background, is that your thoughts? What are you thinking the reason is they're thinking about anti-Semitism? Boy, well, I mean, you're going to really step in politics right now. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't do that. Don't do that. I'm just curious if that's— I'll just say this. I think it—I don't want to get into politics too much other than I think it probably has more to do with other world events that are occurring right now. And people can think about that. I just leave it like. Ah, okay. So she is asking questions about how the state should react to Judaism and Israel. And in the process of doing that, she basically enunciates what I understand to be the traditional Catholic belief on Judaism that they've had for centuries. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
42:12 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because basically, the Catholic belief about Judaism is not compatible with Zionism at all. And so she's making these comments and she's asking questions about this. And she's obviously exhibiting this belief. And, well, this turns into a bit of an argument because the witnesses are Zionists. And— Can you define what that is? because i know what judaism is i know what uh what what um what catholicism is but um zionist isn't of the zion so what is that zionism is the belief that the state of israel should exist where it is today in israel and that the the uh the jewish people should have jerusalem and um i think in most forms it includes rebuilding the temple i don't know that all there's secular zionism there's secular zionism there's judy uh jewish zionism and there's christian zionism and all of them are different but related and all of them as a core belief say that israel is uh is a special state that should be reserved for the jewish people and and and that's what zionism uh existed long before um world war ii and after world war ii it became kind of a a big deal and that uh resulted in the establishment of the jewish state fascinating so so she's talking about this she's talking about it in traditional catholic terms before it's all done she gets accused of being anti-semitic and she gets thrown off of the commission and and the irony of it is just incredible because wow this is a place that this so much but um the layperson won't know what what dispensationalism is so what is that so dispensationalism if you're familiar with the left behind series um it's the idea of the left behind series um it's the idea of the left behind series um it's the idea of and this also comes in many different flavors and the idea basically goes along the lines is there's going to be a rapture the true christians are going to be raptured and then we're going to go back to another jewish dispensation when they'll rebuild the temple and the jewish um a sacrificial system will start up again and things like that and i don't pretend to be an expert in it because when i've looked into it i've determined there is a variety of opinions in there and to try to sort it all out when it doesn't it's not even compatible at all with seventh day adventist historicist belief in prophecy which is what i subscribe to personally and um actually is the main thread of prophetic interpretation up till at least 1844 yeah very good so sorry go on i want to make sure everyone everyone's on key here otherwise people start leaving because it's like sure what are those words well so so they kick they kick her off the commission because of what she said and they act like she never existed but if you go back and watch the videos you can see her there you know she's a real participant and the other thing that i find fascinating about what happened was there are two bishops uh two catholic bishops on the commission and neither one of them said anything about it they just they just remained silent so um i don't know i don't pretend to understand um but there's something interesting going on there and and it is a good example now i didn't mention that in my um in my response to the commission because i wanted to stick with a very straight historical american response um but i do think that anyone who cares to do a little investigation into this i think that's a absolutely valid response to point out the hypocrisy of the commission yeah absolutely and i i love some of these quotes can i quote you out of this real quick because i think they're they're very interesting um sure i said this is the radical teaching that has uh has the political back the freedoms we enjoy in this nation before and i didn't include all those but i thought that was that was quite a powerful statement to to say that this is this is this is the radical teaching that has has been proposed what what can you can you explain that a little bit
46:22 well they're laying the foundation they're laying the foundation for uh really turning back the the time and the clock to essentially pre-reformation europe um you know our forefathers in america they understood this and it's become unfashionable now to use the term papacy and it's become unfashionable to talk about what happened in the past regarding the papacy but our forefathers were happy to talk about it happy to use that terminology and and what they saw was is that um under the papal system it's a union of church and state and it's one where um you don't have to do anything you don't have to do anything you don't have to do anything you don't have religious liberty. And you can see when Luther comes along, he figures out a lot of things, but he doesn't figure out everything. And so Lutherans and Calvinists were also persecutors because they learned that from the Catholic Church. So it comes down through the Catholic, initially before the Reformation, right? It was universal. And then during the Reformation, the main Protestant movements also continued to have that. It leaks into America, right? And then it isn't until Roger Williams comes along, and the Anabaptists, of course, had already thought of it, but they'd never had any power to do anything about it. And so that's how we got our freedom. And so when we turn back the clock, we're turning back the clock at least as far as the Puritans, and we're turning it back really all the way to the Reformation. Uh-oh. Looks like we've got to go back. We lost him. He'll come back here in a second. I'm going to text him and tell him that we lost you. We lost you. All right. Oh, wow, that was fast. That's really disturbing.
48:16 What happened? I'm very sorry about that. Well, I have my phone on do not disturb, but for some reason, it still notifies me. And I pray that these people won't call back. You'll find out how busy I am if I get a lot of calls. I apologize. So, yeah, so we run into the danger of going back to a dark age. And frankly, with our reading of Bible prophecy, we know this is going to happen. And so people will ask me, why are we even doing this? In fact, some people are saying, shouldn't we encourage this? Because this will bring about the end times, right? Oh, no. Spirit of Prophecy is very clear that we're not to encourage this sort of thing. And secondly, I want to explain exactly why I think this fight is so important. In a mindset where you don't have religious liberty, worship is more of a form. And it's something that you kind of go through. When you have true liberty, the only reason why you worship God is because you want to. And when you worship God because you want to, worship is very similar to love. God wants our love. And we all know that love can't be forced. And as soon as you force it, it's almost by definition, not love. And so with religious liberty, it exposes the idea that we love God. And it also says that that he changes us personally. It's not something that we just go along to get along on. And so there's and it also says that, hey, there's individual freedom. And when there's individual freedom, that's saying, hey, you are a person made in the image of God. God gave you choice.
50:00 If you take the position that, no, it needs to be forced, you're denying that the person has individual liberty and individual autonomy. And so when you do that, you end up painting a different image of God and a different image of the church. And it's fairly easy, because anybody knows if they've been forced to do something that's a matter of the heart against their will, it's really obvious. And I think at the end, that this distinction is going to be important, because people may not know, like, doctrines of the Bible, right? But everybody can watch persecution and know the difference between someone who's being forced to do something and someone who isn't. And when they see people making sacrifices, because—yeah, go ahead. We have some stream issues since it's raining right now. It's always raining right when I stream and have some issues. But no, I think we're back online. We're back okay now. But no, I 100% agree with you. I didn't want to cut you off there, but I wanted to make sure that— You weren't talking when it wasn't streaming. Okay. So I have another question I wanted to ask you. You started talking a little bit about money and how it changes the church in it. Can I go over that real quick with you? Sure.
51:20 I think that was fascinating. It's something I had not thought about. And you said, anytime the government money is available, a religion will modify—maybe not our religion, but I don't know. I want you to talk about this a little. A religion will modify—maybe not our religion, but I don't know. I want you to talk about this a little. A religion will modify—maybe not our religion, but I don't know. I want you to talk about this a little. A religion will modify—maybe not our religion, but I don't know. I want you to talk about this a little. A religion will modify its beliefs to adhere to the values of the government so that it can obtain funds. Public money always brings public control. Furthermore, different religions may claim fairness requires equal funding, even though they do not provide equal services. This is certainly the devolve to—will devolve into a quagmire that the state would do well to avoid. What happened here? Tell me. Tell us more about this. Well, let's use the example of schools. Schools want government money, but they can only get government money if they're accredited. Well, if they're accredited, then they have to teach certain things. Now, I'm not one that's completely opposed to accreditation.
52:19 I think that accreditation has done a lot of great things. And right now, the accreditation bodies are kind of—what can I say? They're kind of neutral on religion. They actually have reasons to be neutral on religion, where the kind of religion that they're trying to teach is the one that's conflict comes in usually is with teaching of evolution. The accrediting bodies will fiddle around in there. But now, imagine a situation where the government now is funding the education component as well. The accreditation is likely to come into that. Even if the accreditation doesn't come into it, the government's going to have some way of looking at what's going on. And take the example of Carrie Prejean Bowler. If you teach, say, a traditional Catholic doctrine or maybe an Adventist doctrine of Judaism, that might be labeled anti-Semitism. And one of the things that this report has said is that we have to not teach anti-Semitism. And so that would be an example. And you can see how this could go into other directions, because if the government were to say, like, maybe you were teaching in your classroom that it was wrong for there to be time and a half for Sunday work, which is a forerunner of Sunday laws, and maybe the government says you can't teach anything in your school that would lessen the respect for law. Oh, so now you can't mention that? So they could take that away. And I can think of a lot of other examples as things go down the road, so to speak. The other thing is that there could be an organization that has, you know, some really lousy school system, like really substandard. And they say, well, you know, you gave this church this much money for their school, so you need to give us this much money for our school. And they could claim that, you know, equal money for equal whatever. And so you can get things going back and forth. And as we all know, when you've got government money, it becomes a political thing. The politicians get involved to be sure that their district gets the money that they want. Yeah.
54:29 Yeah. And all of a sudden, it's a mess. That's why I said it's a quagmire. We could easily get into a quagmire over this. And that's what they want to do, essentially, is that's part of this whole statement, is that they get to be a part of who gets money in this. Yeah, exactly. Now, I want to talk about another area of the money that I think is really important because it relates to this. And that's the Johnson Amendment. Yeah. They're asking for a repeal of the Johnson Amendment. Right now, the Johnson Amendment is not being enforced by the Trump administration. But we need to explain what it is because most people don't know what the Johnson Amendment even is. So the Johnson Amendment says that a church cannot support a political candidate. That's it. A lot of people construe it to be a little bit broader than that about partisan politics, but it's essentially you can't support a political candidate. With that in mind, why did they have the Johnson Amendment? Why did they have the Johnson Amendment? Well, you have to understand that if I give money to a candidate in a political campaign, that's not tax deductible. I have to pay taxes on that. Okay. If I could give my money to a church to support a candidate, that'd be awesome. I don't have to pay taxes on it. I get a tax deduction for supporting a candidate. So there's a lot of incentive for the candidates to use the churches.
55:55 And the churches, in return, love to get money. Every church loves to have money. So they're going to get money from the candidates. And now there's going to be starting to be quid pro quos where you say to the candidate, hey, I'll help you, but you need to help us and vice versa. And you can just see where this all goes. And then if you combine the idea that government money can be used to support traditional church activities like religious education and other things like just helping humanitarian aids and all these other kinds of things, all of which, you know, these different areas are known for having corruption, wasted funds. We just added a whole new level of this, and it's going to include the churches. And we all know that even if most churches are too good and upstanding to be involved in this, we all know that there's going to be one church down the road that's happy to be involved in it. And it's going to create an ugly mess. And so now, right now, the Trump administration is not supporting the Johnson Amendment themselves. And this creates a little bit of a problem. But I think a lot of churches are still abiding by it because Trump's not always going to be in office. And if the other party gets in, it's important to keep it illegal because that keeps the main flow of funds out of it. The Johnson Amendment. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Yeah, because if the new administration could come back and just be like, oh, yeah, all you guys, you can you were violating the law, even though they weren't doing it before. You were guilty now. Yeah, I get that. Absolutely. Right. Wow. Right. So so that's that's the money. The money in the church will corrupt the church. And that's the Bible text. I quote, The love of money is the root of all evil. Yeah. And and we need to keep that out and we need to keep the the church in the state as separate as possible. You know, it's really funny. We're going down my, my, my, my list of things I want to talk about. I kid you not. This is exactly what I was talking about. I was going to talk about part one. Clock is running. Part two. What? What? Monday decides, you know, part three, the Ten Commandment trap. And that's what we just talked about before. And then part four was the commission conflicts itself. And part five was that note is basically it's talking about money. So I don't know how you're doing this, but you're reading my notes.
58:30 Well, that's good. I there's there's one thing that I don't put in my in my particular response that I think people need to be aware of. And after I put my response into the Department of Justice, I think myself, you know, I probably should have put something in there about this. If you read the report, you're also going to see the idea that, well, they want to take basically their findings and have them posted at the workplace and having them posted at schools and places like that. Much like today, they have some civil rights that are posted at the workplace about discrimination and that kind of thing. So they want to have those postings, which I think would be fine if they were accurate. But what they want to post there is that there is no separation of church and state. And so it's an indoctrination process. So, you know, the people don't believe they have the constitutional right. Even if they do have it, they're not going to exercise it or protect it. So that's that's one thing that I think is important. I think that's one thing that I think is important. I think that's one thing that I think is very disturbing about this because it's a very much of an indoctrination kind of a thing. And the other thing that they do that I think is really kind of interesting is they say that perhaps, like, if someone violates your rights at school, for instance, or at work, and there's a finding that they violated your religious liberty rights, then they want to require you to write an essay about how there's no separation of of of church and state. And I'm thinking to myself, man, that sounds an awful lot like a communist struggle session. And if you know the history of China and the cultural revolution, these are the kinds of things they did there. They would pull people aside. The young people would pull people aside and say, we think that you have some belief that's opposed to the party, and they'd force you to get up there and denounce it. And there was these huge amounts of the United States that went on and it became very violent. And a lot of people were actually killed in that in that situation. This is so anti-American. You know, part of the idea of freedom of speech, if you actually look at the idea behind freedom of speech, it actually goes back to the idea of freedom of thought. And the thinking was that if we allow people to say whatever they want, then they can think whatever they want. But if we require people to say certain things, well, that's a way of saying you can't think certain things.
1:00:59 And so that's in there. I didn't address it in my response to someone who wants to really track it down and address it to a response to the commission. I think that that would be great. The thought police are coming. Yeah, I totally understand. We're going to have a minority report here pretty soon. I'm referencing a movie from a long time ago that I shouldn't have seen. But I think it's fascinating what we have that's happening right now. And it's coming. It's coming. It's right around the corner. And I think an important verse would be Isaiah 820 to the law and to the testimony. If you speak not according to the Word, the Word of God, that's the Bible, it's because there's no light in them. And that's specifically talking about spiritualism. But I think it applies to everything today that we need to, number one, ground ourselves in the Bible. You know, I've had people—and this is a little bit off topic, I realize that—I've had people come up to me and say, well, I've asked God things, and he told me. And that is already established. He's already told us exactly what we need to know about the freedoms that we have, and that can't go against our conscience. Exactly. And honestly, if you're a—so the Bible is clearly the absolute standard, and you need to resort to that. I know that Scripture says, though, if anyone lacks wisdom, he should ask God, God will give liberally. That's in James chapter 1. And I believe that. One of the things that I also believe is the idea that we should be aware of how God has led us in our past. And I think that applies actually to the entire Christian church.
1:02:40 And when you actually look back at church history, you can go all the way back to the time before Constantine. And there are people there, Christians, that are enunciating the same thing, that Thomas Jefferson is writing about. In fact, I think Jefferson was probably reading them. And so I think God has led throughout church history so that there's always been a strain of people. You can see this doctrine of freedom is throughout, and it's definitely scriptural. And I guess one thing is that I'm a big believer in history. You can kind of understand what's going on when you have the light of history. And it becomes much more easier when you also have Bible, prophecy, because you combine history with Bible prophecy, and then you really know what's going on. Yeah. And so I think that people can resort to that. And the most dangerous thing is the person who resorts to feelings and emotion. And so, yeah, we've really got to be grounded in Scripture. I think we need to have an increase of our knowledge of where we've been and how God has led us. And then you can tell from Scripture, we're commanded to prophesy again. We're commanded to participate.
1:03:52 Yeah. And that's one point I'd really like to make over and over again. We need everyone's participation to have the strongest witness right now. And let's go back and tell people how to do this again, because repetition is key. And now we have the actual visuals. So I'm going to go to the website. And how do we find out on the website how to do this, how to reach out to these people and say, hey, there's something that we can do about this? Yeah. So right there, you can see there's two buttons. You can press either of those buttons and you'll go right to the documents you want to download. If you go down one more to the blue, the one with the blue image, if you click that one, it'll lead you also through to those same buttons, but it'll also give you a little more instructions. I think it's best if people actually press that button. But I wanted a more direct access in case, you know, you want to get it in multiple ways, right? So you can read all of that. And it's simple, as simple as that. Yeah. I mean, it's not just sending an email. I don't know how they could have made it simpler. So you just want to be like, you need to have an idea as to what the commission was really interested in. And so your comment makes sense. Now you can see there, I put a little cross through on July 12, because when you go to look, they initially said we had to do it by July 12, and then they changed it to July 13. So that's why I did that there. But anyway, you need to you need to, you need to become a little bit knowledgeable. And just listening to what we said today goes a long ways towards that. And then just write a simple statement. You know, I believe separation of church and state is important. And I give some examples of things you could put they like personal stories, and I agree with that. And so I think it'd be great when the person responds in their email, to actually give personal stories about how religious liberty meant something special for them or their family. Yeah. And I would, I would say, you know, say, say it first, these, these, these are, when you're eating, at least this is my experience, I didn't realize this when I went to DC until I went to DC. But the people who are taking these emails, the people are taking these calls, they're 25 years old. And so they're going to be like, some of them are going to be interested and sent forward your, your message on like your stories and stuff. But others are going to be like, I got to tally these up. Give me the give me the straight what are you what do you want to say real quick? And so what you tell me this is what I would do.
1:06:19 Say what the statement is, I agree with da da da da da. And then give your story. That way. It's straight to the point, if they if they need to make a rush statistics, but it also has the ability to forward your story on to the doing. All right. Very, very good. Yeah, I think and again, go to pillars of freedom. Pillar Sorry, not pillar. No s. Yeah, pillar of freedom, freedom.org. And I'm gonna go back to the front page here. Pillar of freedom.org. Beautiful. The web page, by the way, very, very, very, very good. Thank you. And thank you. I made that myself. But I had AI coaching me. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's amazing. These these days, it can it can do kind of amazing stuff. But, but so before we go, I'd like to point out a couple other things about the web page. One thing that I'd like people to do is go down and sign up for a pillar of freedom. I've been thinking about this for a long time. It's not a one issue organization. And I have plans and thoughts and I'm praying about it and God's leading to do more things. And so by joining the email list, you can you can be apprised of that. And also, donations would be appreciated. But what I really like to be able to go and spend some time in Washington, DC. I saw your video where you went to Washington, DC, and my friends were texting me and they said, Jonathan, this is exactly what you're planning to do. You've got to watch this video.
1:07:55 And what I think needs to happen is there need to be some of us there boots on the ground, keeping track of what's really going on. I've lived in Washington, DC before. And it's really kind of a small town, actually, if you're right inside the beltway, you can interact with people interacting with the staffers is really important. I think you probably realize that. Yeah. And just find a way to do that. Find out what's going on. The other thing that's very interesting about DC is it's a town of highly educated people who are very extroverted. And so it's pretty easy to go up to people and start talking to them and figure out what's going on. And I think that there's a lot to be done there. I also know that in Washington, DC, you have the leading embassies from around the world there. And all these other countries have religious liberty issues themselves. And I'm trying to figure out a way of how to approach that. And I think that's a really interesting thing. Of how to approach them. I think that DC is the fertile ground for doing this kind of work. And so I would love it if people would sign up for the email list so that they can keep track of what we're doing. There's going to be more things coming quickly. One of the things that I think needs to be done is we need to get in the habit of knowing how to contact our representatives, both on the state and federal level. And I think that's a really important thing.
1:09:20 And so right now, I've just focused on educating for this commission. But watch the email because I will post guides on how to interact on both state and federal level. And I think that this could have been very useful back when Texas was deciding to do its Ten Commandments. We should have been right there talking about it with them. And I would like to see a situation where Pillar of Freedom can empower people. And I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's a really important thing. to the state legislatures and talk to them. I think a lot of the future action in religious liberty is going to happen at the state level and not the federal level. Now, we know from prophecy that is ultimately going to happen at the federal level. But if you actually read the Project 2025 documents and things like that, you can see that there's a movement and they understand that they're attempting to do a full court press at the state level. And that will be particularly in the uh well i think it could be in both red and blue states um so so we need to be paying attention we need to show up this is a place where seventh day adventists have a unique understanding of where we are in earth's history and can be very useful um and and remember it's not so much about winning a lot of people understand how this whole government thing works and uh you are offered a representative i mean for your district and so every state has a bunch of them for congressmen and uh for me personally i'm in chattanooga so chuck and i can't ever say his name fleitchman uh is mine and so i just googled contact tennessee chattanooga congressman and you might be senator congressman whatever the the policy is i guess that's being put in but um i all i did was that and i clicked on then click on his uh his his name and it says here this is how i contact him send a send chuck an email and they're politicians this is their job don't think you're interrupting their day they are here to to talk to the people yeah they have a whole staff that's designed for this and and i think the other thing i personally think from my knowledge of working with some of these offices that the battle is more for the staff member than it is even for the representative because the staff member is going to grief the representative and and they're going to do the actual work the the representative will make decisions but but the the staff is doing a lot of the actual work and so so you really want to i think um talk and chat up the staff people and they're easier to contact and easier to talk to in this particular situation though we're dealing with the presidential report so this is fundamentally coming out of the white house and so at this point in time i i don't feel there's a great need to talk to our staff our our representatives on this particular issue right although it wouldn't hurt if you wanted to it's just how the the lord leads you and then all of this happens again at the state level it's all the same kind of thing just repeated at the state level it'll be different in every state a little bit but uh yeah so i think that we should become aware of things one thing that i think about adventists is that we are not trained as well with the working of governments because we have a school system we tend to send our kids to private schools in our school system but the rest of the world is out there fighting these same battles at uh the school board meetings and they learn a lot about political action right there and so i think we have a lot to learn there's a lot for us to learn yeah because the public schools are all public and so they have the kind of a mini government inside them that they uh they run by that i i guess if you're on a board meeting of a church you kind of have that too but it's not as as structured and detailed and with a lot of people and a lot of people who are in the public schools who are in the public schools it's not the same yeah no yeah you're not dealing with with the public and i think we need more experience dealing with the public i think we need to engage if that's if that's one thing uh i want to to stress is i think we need to really engage um we have a work to do and it's outward facing you you know you're you you're a liar and and uh so uh correct me if i'm wrong but i i have been able to watch some cases i have been able to um and and of
1:13:46 course there's tv shows about it my my mother is a nurse and she says i can't watch the medical shows because they have nothing to do with real life and i can imagine that's probably how you you feel too watching some of these uh law law shows but but uh i i wanted to yes it is i wanted to tell people that um and and again you correct me if i'm wrong that um there are some things i think avidists need to know especially when we get close to these last days about law for instance um depositions they are they're here to hear your your side of the case it's it's not like you tell the the lawyer everything and he fights for you you're fighting for yourself and explaining yourself uh in a deposition pretty much the the the entire time and you know the liar will tell you oh by the way you know he's trying to do this or in in the certain coded terms but but it it's a it's it was a whole new world uh for me when i was looking into this stuff and going wait a second this is not this is not liar so i think it's very important that um that we we we brush up on this stuff that that um and that you are here to to help people understand this stuff too because it's um it can get uh mind boggling for the average person to to dig into some of this stuff and it's a lot to read so i appreciate what you're doing yeah and that also brings up another point that i think is that people need to kind of develop a little bit of a ongoing interest in this sort of thing and it's worthwhile to to read and study and and just you know every now and then learn something new because there is a lot to learn and even a lot of lawyers don't know anything about religious liberty so there's there's a lot 100 well i have a and that's something that killer freedom i want to i want to do is i want to do education i want to make it i want to make it so that people can understand and make it more accessible and and um and so you so i i think you'll see some initiatives like that coming out i haven't decided what's the best way to do all of these things you know i'm my hat's off to you guys in in the in the podcast youtube world you guys do an amazing service for everyone and i'm not sure that's really my talent um but at the same time i think that we need to get a lot more out there and and in your world is a great place to do education on this so so i really want to commend you on what you're doing oh thank you thank you trying our best but it's it's a it's a you never know what's going to happen in the future so i really want to commend you on what you're doing next you you you roll with the punches but yeah but i want to get back i have one more section i want to make sure we covered it i called it back to the clock sure um uh we opened with a deadline and so we talked a little bit about that deadline and how to do that um i just want to make sure that uh people know that it is monday that uh this this thing closes and we want to make sure that um uh that that everybody knows everyone everyone your government knows that this is a this is an important issue for for your religious liberty that this thing they're creating right now is is vitally important for them to understand uh for the laws going forward that we know are coming down the road what is that is that what you would say yeah absolutely i would hope that that um adventists and all christians would spend some time this weekend like if you're hearing this video today uh when you go to church talk to everybody about it and i also think it'd be great if you said hey let's all get together and we'll draft a bunch of emails together you know a lot of people are intimidated by writing and things like that but it would be great this could be a little activity that your church could do together is to write some emails and you know you could write it personally which i think is is great which is what i'm talking about here but you also could write one that says from the church of such and such like you know from the springfield church of whatever you could write that and send out as a group too i just think that the commission needs to know that a lot of people are going to be writing and they're going to be writing and they're a lot of people are watching that a lot of people care and that a lot of people aren't fooled and know that there is separation of church and state in the constitution and in this country and that that's actually what makes us great yeah yeah good good way to sum it up thank you thank you so much is there anything else you want to say before we close up no i think we've covered it um i really love people to go to pillar of freedom.org download the guide download the examples um i have a couple short examples there as well and then sign up for the free
1:18:22 email if you can sign up for the email then we can stay in touch and this is going to be a long haul this is just this is just one battle in the in a much larger war and um and so yeah sign up so that's my that's my thing pillar of freedom.org pillar of freedom.org awesome thank you so much uh jonathan and uh let's pray together if you mind praying us out sure let's pray dear lord i thank you so much all the things that you do for us i thank you for um for all of us that are watching here from the united states i thank you for the for the freedom that you've given us and also i thank you for for the others that i know have received a certain amount of freedom just because of the influence of the united states and lord as we know that that time is short and prophetic events are coming upon us please help us to be good and faithful witnesses for you let us let us um let us obey your command the great commission to to go out and do good and faithful witnesses for you and to go out and witness for you and to prophesy again let us be participants lord that's a good way to to sum it up as let us be participants and he got frozen for a second there probably someone called him he's very busy folks thank you again for joining and we'll see you next