The American Revolution was rooted in the biblical ideas of its Founders and ended in success for over 250 years of stability. The French Revolution, however, was rooted in atheistic humanist ideas and ended in ten years of chaos, death and tyranny. Stay tuned for a Revival Radio TV story that you've never heard before, and you'll learn the importance of a biblical foundation.
♪ [Narrator] In every generation there have been revivals Massive moves of the Spirit that changed the course of history. In every revival, there were believers like you who chose to answer the call to become the one in their generation. Discover your call to be the one in your generation.
♪ In the years leading up to and including the American Revolution, there was an excess of Christian leaders, including preachers like George Whitefield and John Witherspoon, and philosophers like Adam Smith and William Blackstone. All of these guys were contemporaries and they knew and they respected each other's work.
Now, Whitefield, who spread the Great Awakening to America, recruited Witherspoon from Scotland to be head of Princeton, where he taught most of the Founders from Adam Smith's book on Morals. Blackstone's book, English Common Law, was so full of scriptures that Finney got saved studying the law. Blackstone went to school with this guy, Edmund Burke. These guys were not the American founding fathers, but they influenced them.
I like calling them the Founders' uncles, and they were part of setting the stage for the American Revolution that took place in between the revival fires of the First and the Second great Awakenings. But let's talk today about this guy, Edmund Burke. He was one of those founding uncles of what God was doing in America. Burke was a member of the British Parliament and he spoke out in defense of the Americans.
He said, from the House of Commons that "The Americans were Englishmen and just wanted their rights under the English Constitution." He was proposing that England address their grievances and avoid war. Edmund Burke was an Irish statesman. He was a philosopher and a writer, but he's widely regarded as the father of modern conservatism. He was even a voice for the rights of colonial America way back in the British Parliament.
But is best remembered for his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France that was published in 1790. It's a very powerful, strong critique of the French Revolution and its principles. Now, Burke argued that the French Revolution was based on a very, very dangerous and very radical ideology. It sought to completely upend traditional and social political structures.
He believed now that the revolutionaries were blinded, completely blinded by the commitment to abstract concepts such as liberty, equality, and that their attempts would impose these ideas on a society. It would end up and lead to chaos and violence. He was right. Burke's opposition to the French Revolution was based on his belief in the importance of tradition, stability and hierarchy. He argued that society is a very complex, extremely delicate organism.
It can't be just re-engineered by political theories and activist. Instead, he believed that change should be gradual, organic and guided by the accumulated wisdom of the past. [Gene Bailey] Today, I want to talk about his book. Edmund Burke saw the threat to Christian society and even the existence of Western civilization that was emerging as the new atheism and humanist thought coming out of the European Enlightenment.
Now, in this day, Burke's book was very controversial when it was first published, but very quickly became a classic of political philosophy. Its influence can be seen in the work of later conservative thinkers, such as the evangelical conservatives in the American Republican Party, who also stressed the importance of tradition, order and biblical truths. His ideas continue to be an influential, very influential on the conservative thought for today.
He saw the dangers in what was happening on the continent under the momentum of the anti Christian Enlightenment ideas that was about to drive France off the cliff and secular humanism, revolution, then chaos because they were abandoning the fundamental rights of the individual in favor of the collective. ♪ Imagine a group of revolutionaries tired of tyranny, hungry for liberty and ready to throw up the chains of political oppression. They are prepared to risk everything for freedom.
They want an end to the monarchy. They want a democratic form of government based on we the people. So they launched this revolution for human freedom. And to the amazement of the world, they were successful. The overthrew the old regime. They defeated the king and his army. And they declare a unique document titled The Rights of Men. The values of the revolution are the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment. The motto "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" first appeared during the French Revolution.
But something went terribly wrong with this revolution. And instead of liberty, equality and fraternity, we got new forms of oppression and human misery. Instead of a quest for enlightenment, we got crackdowns on free speech and the freedom of the press. And they did away with the freedom of religion. Instead of democracy and the rule of law, we got the mob rule and the reign of terror. I'm talking, of course, about the French Revolution. It began with a rage against absolute power.
But he ended with the government powerless to govern and a dictator for life. [Gene Bailey] So why did this happen? One reason was that the leaders of the revolution were true believers in the humanist principles of the European Enlightenment instead of biblical principles. The underlying difference is the worldview of the nature of man. Is man basically good and therefore shaped by his environment? Or does man have a fallen nature as described in the Bible?
And therefore you have to build safeguards to restrain human nature and police it while still protecting individual God given rights. The leaders of the revolution rejected God and absolute truth. So this also included the rights of man. Since they were not absolute or God given, they were all violated at some point in the revolution, in the name of the Common Good over the rights of the individual. Thomas Paine is famous for his book Common Sense, written during the American Revolution.
♪ Born in England, Paine emigrated to America, where he became a prominent advocate for American independence. He is best known for his book Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and helped galvanize support for the American Revolution. Paine's Common Sense was a powerful and persuasive pamphlet that argued that the American colonies should declare their independence from Great Britain.
The pamphlet made a compelling case for independence using simple and straightforward language that appealed to ordinary people. It quickly became a bestseller and helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of independence. ♪ Thomas Paine's common sense was not at all like his writings at the end of his life. In Common Sense, Paine uses arguments from Scripture and in this way, credit Scripture with authority in matters of human government.
This was because most of Common Sense was written by Dr. Benjamin Rush for the scripturally literate American audience. Rush even provided the title. [Gene Bailey] Thomas Paine. He left his adopted America and went to help the French Revolution, where he wrote a book, The Rights of Man to defend the Revolution against Edmund Burke. [Ron Jutze] The Rights of Man argued for the humanist and atheist ideas of the French Revolution.
Burke, a prominent conservative Christian politician, responded with his own book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which criticized Paine's utopian ideas and defended the traditional order. Paine and Burke engaged in a heated public debate over the merits of democracy and the role of government. Paine argued that government should serve the interests of the masses over the individual.
While Burke believed that government should be guided by biblical values, protecting the rights of the individual against the will of the masses. - So in these two books, we see the roots of the debate between the American progressive Left and the conservative Right.
- The debate between Paine and Burke highlighted the fundamental differences between their political ideologies of the Left and the Right, as eventually demonstrated in the chaos of the French Revolution versus the success of Britain and American democracy. - The French Revolution was a period of great change and upheaval, but it was also marked by disregard for human rights and a willingness to use violence and terror to achieve political goals.
The legacy of the Revolution has been whitewashed, denying the chaos and the murder. Today, all that people know the Revolution is the lie that they're told it was the birthplace of democracy. It's held up as an ideal of liberty and freedom. Very few people really understand the truth because of the apologists of liberal historians who still believe in the utopian ideas.
- As the revolution gained momentum, the leaders of the movement, who were largely atheist and anti-clerical, began to target the church. The National Convention passed a decree that suppress all religions and confiscated their property. This led to the immediate killing of tens of thousands of priests and nuns who refused to renounce their faith and accept the new state religion, which was called the "Cult Of Reason".
The revolution also saw the establishment of a brutal dictatorship known as the Reign of Terror. ♪ Look what I have here. It's a model of a machine that they invented because the French Revolution was killing people on an industrial scale. In spite of the proclamation of the right to a trial, they couldn't keep up with the executions. So the state murdered the people without a trial on such a grand scale they needed a machine to keep up with it.
This is what happens when the rights of the individual are trumped by the common good. This is why a living constitution and pure democracy mob rule is a bad idea and is why we are a democratic republic and have a fixed Constitution that protects individual rights from mob rule. The reign of terror eventually came to an end in 1794 but the revolution continued to be marked by violence and chaos.
In 1799, a military general named Napoléon Bonaparte seized power and established a military dictatorship, which will last for the next decade. The Napoleonic Wars would kill millions of Europeans and basically destroy an entire generation. - Conservatives and liberals and therefore often Republicans and Democrats consistently find themselves on opposite sides of contentious debates on a very broad range of subjects. So why is there a right and a left? Why do they seem to hang together?
Where do they come from? And what really divides them fundamentally? ♪ Let me set this up. Ten years after the American Revolution, the French Revolution broke out and there's never been a more clear comparison of the two worldviews side by side. The biblical ideals of the American Revolution versus the humanist ideals of the French Revolution. I'll explain. I have here two coins, an American coin and a French coin.
Inscribed on each one are the three values of their respective worldview of the Right and the Left. Look on this French coin. It's inscribed with the three values of the French Revolution and says Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And here's the American Quarter. It's inscribed with E Pluribus Unum. In God, we trust in liberty. E Pluribus Unum is Latin from many one, meaning that Americans don't care where you're from.
We don't care about your blood origins, your ethnic origins, your racial origins. You're welcome to become an American if you adopt our values. In God, we trust means that America is founded on the idea that God is the source of values. America's Declaration of Independence proclaimed Humans have inalienable rights, but solely because these rights come from a Creator, not from the King or a government, or even from reason.
Therefore, since they come from God, they can never be taken away by people. And because there is a God, there are absolutes. He's the source of right and wrong morality. Now, the third part of the American values Trinity, is Liberty. Now, you might ask, didn't the French Revolution proclaim liberty along with equality and fraternity? The answer is yes, of course. But we are the only ones to enshrine liberty and in God, we trust together.
Also, the American concept of liberty is not the same as the French. For example, the French enshrined equality as well as liberty, and equality is not part of the American trinity. That's a European value. Of course, America affirms that all humans are born equal and that we are to all be equal before the law, but ending up equal the European value, Egalitarianism is not an American value.
The Founders wrote a lot about liberty, a word that to the Founders was synonymous with an old English word licentious. They use licentious when they wrote about the abuse of liberty. The root of the word licentious is license. To the Founders, liberty was a license to do good, but it could also be used as a license to do whatever you wanted as an ...
They wrote about this and it was a concern that without a virtuous population, liberty would be used as a license to do anything they wanted and it would not end well. So they knew and they wrote it. It would take a virtuous civic population to maintain liberty, to use their license to do good. These values are what has made America great, Alexis de Tocqueville said, "America is great because America is good. The French coin is inscribed with the three values of the French Revolution.
Liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty as a license. Equality of outcome. And fraternity as the good of the many trump the rights of the individual. The French fought for liberty, equality and fraternity. Neither equality nor fraternity can be achieved through force by the state. Perfect equality is elusive, and even if it could be achieved, it would be inconsistent with liberty.
Whereas Americans struggle for tangible goals in light of fallen human nature, the French took on the impossible task of striving for utopia and denying human nature. And history has shown that never ends well. ♪ - Despite his contributions to the American Revolution, Paine's reputation suffered in his later years. His book, The Age of Reason, which questioned the authority of the Christian church and argued for rationalism, was met with fierce opposition in America.
Many Americans saw Paine's views as a betrayal of American values and Christian principles. Paine was ostracized for his views and his reception back in America was spurned. One American founding father who strenuously resisted Paine's Atheism was Elias Boudinot of the Haystack Prayer Meeting, president of the Continental Congress and founding President of the American Bible Society.
With other founding fathers, Boudinot was incensed by Paine's Age of Reason and openly challenged Paine by publishing his own response in 1801, titled The Age of Revelation, Or the Age of Reason Shewn to Be an Age of Infidelity. In his book, Boudinot not only demonstrated his contempt for Paine's Atheism, but also disclosed the contempt that America's Founding Fathers had for secular ideas beyond the French Revolution and its disastrous terror and chaos.
- Burke wrote that there is no valid utopian concepts as the French Revolution thought. There is no inherently good model of the nature of man to which all organizations should aspire. And it's this in particular that's opposed to the utopian worldview of the French humanist. And this is the basis of Burke's genius, because what Burke sees is the French Revolution's attempt at bringing the reality of France into line with this progressive vision that actually denies reality.
The idea that you can simply remake society in accordance with these principles is what he sees as the beginning of the catastrophe. He saw that the supposed moral outrage that would destroy anything stood in their way. Let me show you an example of what he used. I have here a pocket watch from the French revolutionary period. Do you see anything different? Look closer here. There's only 10 hours in the day. This is one of their better ideas that cause complete chaos.
Overnight, everything quit working. No one knew what time it was or when they're supposed to be at work. It was a complete disaster. - During the French Revolution, a radical attempt was made to change the calendar and clock system in order to create a new system that reflected the values of the revolution. The French Revolutionary calendar, also known as a Republican Calendar was designed to replace the Gregorian calendar, which was seen as a symbol of the old traditions.
However, the new calendar and clock well ultimately most successful, and they were abandoned after only a few years. Despite this, the French Revolution's attempt to change the calendar and clock was an important symbol of the revolutionary spirit and the desire for utopian society.
- Burke points out correctly, he saw this whole obsession of France with changing the clock in calendar to the metric system as a symptom of their worldview of just tear it down and force it on them for their own good. It doesn't matter if it's a bad idea, you have to do it because the experts said so. Forget the fact the laws of nature have been 12 hours of sunlight since Genesis 1:16. We're going to ignore nature for a ten hour clock because we are the cult of experts.
And this is the debate that unfolds in these two books. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man. Now, let me be clear. Burke is considered the father of modern conservatism because his principled arguments reflect those of the political right. And Thomas Paine can be considered the father of modern progressive thinking because his arguments represent the ideas of the left.
These are the observations of worldview ideology that Burke points out in his book that still hold true today. Burke begins in gratitude, and Paine begins an outrage. Burke, like a lot of conservatives after him being grateful for and impressed with what works, trying to build on what's good to address what's not. Man is a fallen creature and needs to be kept in line by laws. He believed it's easier for human societies to fall into disorder and unhappiness than to find unity and happiness.
Any institutions that do work should be revered and protected, and we should be grateful and maintain them because they are few and far between. Paine, however, begins in outrage at long standing institutions and at the persistence of failure. His outrage is directed at the status quo. To him, the problem is systemic, not human nature. Payne like a lot of progressives in radical sense, is struck and outraged by what's failing.
Paine thinks we should start from a much higher expectation of human reason and knowledge. Achieving happiness and social order is coming from applying the right principles, principles that were becoming well known, thanks to the Enlightenment. And social order and happiness should be the normal order of the human race and any deviations from it, or a reason to be outraged and to change them. There was no excuse for persisting in failure.
His expectations are almost utopian, where Burke's are far lower and more realistic and modest. Paine is inclined to tear down what isn't working because he's confident it can be replaced by something better. And Burke is cautious to protect standing institutions. Burke reminds me of a quote by G.K. Chesterton. "Don't tear down a fence until you know why it was put up." Chesterton was also a fan of Edmund Burke.
Burke predicted that the French Revolution would end in a military dictatorship because it was impossible to live up to those principles as fallen human nature. Now, Burke died in 1797, so he didn't see Napoleon Bonaparte, but he knew there would be a dictatorship coming. This is the genius of Edmund Burke. He predicted the chaos and the disaster that was coming to France solely based on their bad ideology. The French Revolution began to eat its own, including Thomas Paine.
He spent over a year in a French prison and was almost executed. Even so, he was still a true believer in the revolution until the day he died. The French Revolution saw the development of a new political ideology based on the principle of the general will that the interests of the state and society as a whole were more important than the interests of any one individual. The absurdities of the French reworking of the world, according to logic, went much further than that.
They wanted to get rid of the church. They wanted equality. They wanted a decimal clock and a calendar. And they put all of those into practice. And of course, it didn't work. In trying to make it work, trying to force it through that ruthless systemization under threat of the guillotine, because you have no individual rights, the good of the many outweighs the rights of the individual. So if you oppose them, you oppose progress
in the common good. Through this type of radical thinking that pulls down and destroys and destroys and destroys and puts nothing of value in its place, that's Burke's great point. He anticipated the destructive nature of this type of thinking, and correctly anticipated the chaos and the carnage that followed. Do you see the parallels to today's left? They're going to force you to follow their agenda for the common good. You will not stand in the way of progress.
You will obey the cult of experts, even if it's extraordinarily bad ideas. Burke nailed it when he said "The catastrophic changes that were being driven by the ignorance and passion of mob politics in France." And let me say this, it's the same ideology that drives the Left today. Remember, full democracy equates to mob rule and the danger of mob rule in the age of manipulation by media and social media becomes exponentially worse.
You and I are in a spiritual battle between light and dark, stationed in the political arena. The same ideological war you see in our nation today. So let's pray together over this nation. Heavenly Father Lord, we come to you on behalf of this great nation that you establish so many years ago to become the "city like a light shining on a hill." Father, we just give You all the praise for what You're doing in America, that our nation turns back to You.
Politics acknowledge You and we start to live again under the guides of our founding documents. In Jesus' name, Amen. ♪