Ep 61 | Thanksgiving Is Not Racist & Neither Were the Pilgrims | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Late this past summer, you may have heard about something the New York Times got a lot of media attention called

the 1619 Project.

It was their way to celebrate the pilgrims while ripping them apart.

It's a very well-funded, far-left effort to reframe and rewrite American history.

Specifically, it argues that America's true founding took place in 1619 when the first African slaves arrived in Virginia.

I don't think it's a coincidence that 1619 project was unleashed just a few short months before a very significant anniversary in 2020.

1620.

Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the covenant that the Pilgrims made when they signed the Mayflower Compact in

Plymouth, Mass.

We're going to be talking a lot about that covenant in the next year.

Anticipating that anniversary, I recently went to Plymouth where where I had three separate conversations that I want to stitch together here for you.

The first is from a gentleman called Leo Martin.

He's from the Jenny Museum.

He is dedicated to preserving Plymouth's history.

He is the town's premier guide.

He walks visitors through

a very distinctive and definitive story of the pilgrims.

You want to hear from him.

Later, I talk with historian David Barton on the meaning of the 1620

covenant

and then with Tim Ballard.

Tim Ballard from the Nazarene Fund on the vital and unfinished business of this covenant.

America is under attack like never before.

There is an unprecedented effort to discredit and change our history to fit a new left-wing progressive agenda.

And there is definitely no room for the antiquated covenant with God in the left's new version of American history.

Join me in finding out exactly what this covenant is and why it matters for America and for the rest of the world now more than ever.

Leo,

you live an interesting,

difficult life, I think.

I do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You admit it.

I do.

I love that.

You are, here we are in Plymouth.

Give me quickly the history of this house, just quickly, the history of this house.

Well, it's not much history to this house.

The Pilgrims and the Indians signed a peace treaty where this house is located.

Right.

And the front yard, there was a little dinner or something.

Yeah, a little thing called Thanksgiving.

Yeah, the first one.

The first one.

The first one.

With the Indians and with the Pilgrims.

And that's the significance of our Thanksgiving.

Okay.

So, and I want to get into it because you're this fantastic historian for this area.

But

this is

the

divide of America on steroids, Plymouth.

There are those who know what this is

and revere it and

are really working tirelessly alone

to preserve and and and to put it up in front of people.

And there is a great movement to do the exact opposite.

I mean, I think if it wasn't for you and some of the other people in the community, that this might be these might be condos.

They could be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But fortunately, we do have people here who love the history of our country.

Yeah.

So

let's start with

Thanksgiving weekend.

Let's say

you're in high school and all you've learned is pilgrims stink on ice.

It was nothing but oppression.

They came over here.

They oppressed the Indians.

They slaughtered the Indians.

Smallpox, blankets, all of that.

Tell me who the pilgrims really were.

The pilgrims are really people who are a product of the Reformation.

And they were, for the first time, reading the Bible.

And as they read the Bible, they brought on a biblical worldview.

And that's what they brought to our country, a biblical worldview.

So the Bible, so people know, was not read because most people were ignorant, couldn't read.

Correct.

And the churches over in England and in Europe, they were all controlled by the government.

So

they were really, the government was dictating.

The head of the Anglican church, which the pilgrims had come from, was the king or queen.

Correct.

And so it's a political organ, and I can't imagine going to a church like that, but that's where they came from.

Then Tinsdale dies.

When does he die?

William Tinsdale for the Bible, he's translating the Bible in English in the common tongue.

Correct.

King James Version of the Bible.

I'm not sure when that comes out, but it's around the time of the pilgrims.

That's right, and the pilgrims used the Geneva Bible.

Right.

Developed in Geneva.

And the difference between the Geneva Bible and

why did that play such a role here?

Well, it played such a role here because, again, they were reading the Bible for the first time.

What's the unique idea behind the Geneva Bible?

It was relatively easy to read because it listed chapter and verse.

It was small, sort of.

It was inexpensive, and one-third of the Geneva Bible was footnotes.

So it was virtually the first first study Bible.

And these people could relate to it.

Now, imagine

from this time on, before, you have to have someone intercede between you and God, king, bishop, priest.

Now you don't have to do that.

Now you can read the Bible and you can talk to God yourself.

In other words, you can pray.

But here's the thing with the pilgrims.

They thought God talked back to them.

It was a two-way conversation.

Which only the kings would have felt that way.

Correct.

They would have taught that only the priests or the bishops or the kings

hear from God.

Who are you to tell me?

Exactly.

King James.

The divine right of kings.

Once somebody starts telling you you're God's representative on earth, eventually you're going to think you're God on earth.

Yeah, right.

And that's what happened with King James.

You're going to pray in England?

You're going to pray to me.

And they don't want to come here.

As we will tell later with

David Barton, it's really pretty much certain death for them to come here.

Correct.

The speed well goes out, and where are they heading on the speed well at first?

They're heading on the speed well from Holland back to England to meet the Mayflower and come over.

Okay.

That's what the speedwell did.

Keep in mind, the pilgrims owned the speed well.

They leased the Mayflower.

But they were going someplace else.

They weren't coming here.

They didn't want to come here.

And didn't the mast of the speed well break and have to limp back?

Correct.

So, well, what actually happened with the speed well is the captain didn't want to come.

Right.

Yeah, so he put oversized sails on the boat

so that it would shake the timbers and cause the boat to leak.

So the boat leaked twice, so they had to turn back twice.

Eventually, the speed well was repaired and it was used for about seven more years.

But the captain wanted to bail out on the trip.

And when you see, because they just built a new Mayflower here.

Yes.

I would never get onto that ship.

Never.

That's insane to get on.

It's a lot smaller than you would think it is.

That's actual size of the Mayflower?

Pretty much, yeah.

That's a nuts.

It's a nuts.

With 102 passengers, about 30 crew members, and two dogs.

Holy cow.

For 66 days.

That's insane.

Yeah.

And so they come over here.

And they land just across the street, Plymouth Rock.

The plank comes down on that rock.

Well, what actually happened is the Mayflower stayed offshore about a mile or so, and they came in on a boat called the Sharlop, a 30-foot boat with a mast and a rudder.

They came into Plymouth, and they stepped on Plymouth Rock off of the sharlop.

But this was not the first land that their feet touched?

No, it is not.

Where did they first land?

Well, they landed on the tip of Cape Cod in Provincetown.

If you've ever been to Provincetown, you might notice it's a bit sandy.

Yeah, not really great place to build a plantation.

So what they did is they put the Charlotte together that they carried on the Mayflower and they explored Cape Cod for a place to stay.

When they found this place, our river, right out here, they stayed here because the river gave them three things they had to have.

The first is water power.

The second is fertilizer.

That river fills with fish.

And it is spring-fed, so they had fresh drinking water.

Keep in mind, fertilizer are herring.

Herring live in the ocean, but when they spawn, they spawn up in our pond.

So So every spring they migrate by the mill, the pilgrims take them out of the river, put them in the ground, fertilize and grow the corn.

By the way, Glenn, they did go upstream for six weeks.

This spring, we had a little over 230,000 fish go up the river.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

For six weeks, you can't see the bottom of the river.

That's amazing.

So when they come here,

first,

don't they hit some place where they hit it on Saturday?

And they know they're not going to stay there, but because it's the Sabbath the next day,

where was that?

Well, keep in mind, they came in on the sharlop coming through Plymouth Harbor.

Okay.

And they got caught in a nice storm.

The mast broke on the sharlop, the rudder broke.

They rode the boca up into an island called Clark's Island.

You can see it.

It's right out here in the harbor.

The next day they repaired the boat.

The next day was Sunday, so they had their first church service on Clark's Island on that Sunday on another rock called Pulpit Rock.

Pulpit Rock.

Correct.

If you go down the Cape nowadays, there's almost a pulpit rock in every town because there were no buildings back then, so all the sermons were delivered from a rock, and they became known as pulpit rocks.

Now, pulpit rock out on Clark's Island is 30 times the size of Plymouth Rock.

Plymouth, I will tell you, it's not a pebble, but it's a little close.

It's close.

Yeah, I mean, I grew up on the West Coast where you have rocks on your beaches.

And when you come to it, you're like, hmm.

It's a little, it's like going to, and I live in Texas, so I can say this.

You can't, but I can say this.

The Alamo, a little disappointing.

You know, you get there and you're like, huh, that's it.

And there's a Popeyes across the street.

Let's go have chicken.

Yeah.

So

it's a little different than what you think.

It is.

When I bring people down there on my tours, I tell them most people come to Plymouth, they are somewhat underwhelmed.

Yes, a little underwhelming.

Yeah, yeah, right.

So, but, and people don't even know about, I mean, in this area, they don't even know about pulpit rock.

Correct.

Yeah.

There used to be, I think there was, didn't they used to have a ceremony every year that

I think you were pulpits?

Weren't you disinvited from that at one point?

Well, on occasion.

Yeah.

But also keep in mind, pulpit rock's difficult to get to.

If you go out there on the island and the tide goes out, you stay on the island.

You can't get off.

So it's hard to put tours out there, too.

But it's a great, great place, a great location, and I believe we'll be doing hopefully some things out there for the 400.

So

the pilgrims come here.

They come right

there off the boat.

For a while, they live on the Mayflower.

In the winter.

Right.

It's cold here.

Very cold.

I can't imagine how many died.

How many were left by springtime?

Of 102, 51 died, exactly half.

So by the spring we have 51 remaining pilgrims.

And how many were young and able-bodied?

Well, most of the young and able-bodied survived.

The biggest casualties?

Married women.

Married women.

Married women.

We have a little statue down here on the waterfront called the Pilgrim Mother.

That represents the 18 married women.

Again, when the pilgrims came here, they had those two ships, the Speedwell and the Mayflower.

The Speedwell leaked twice and had to go go back.

20 of the original passengers had to stay behind and they left late.

When they landed on the tip of Cape Card, they had to run out of food.

The men looked around the cape, found a stash of corn buried in the ground by the Indians, and they took it.

They did not steal the corn, they borrowed it.

They paid it back later.

Had they not taken the corn, they never would have survived because you see, by the end of that first winter, They were doling out a quarter pound of corn bread per person per day to survive on.

So as you can well imagine, the mothers took their bread and fed their children.

They covered their children with their own bodies to keep them warm.

Of those 18 married women, 14 died the first winter.

Only four women left.

Sacrificing themselves for the next generation, knowing if they did not survive, we would not survive.

And written on the back of that statue, it says they brought their families in a sturdy virtue and a living faith in God without which nations perish.

That's what we think of our women.

Tell me about the covenant that was made.

Because I am convinced,

Leo, we've known each other for a long time.

And

I have been looking, because of my job, I have been looking for ways to teach.

I've been looking for ways to restore some of the lost things.

And I've been looking for, for the last 20 years, I mean, 20 years ago, I was studying with scholars all around the world,

having phone conferences with them, asking them,

what does revolution look like?

How does it start?

How do civil wars start?

What are the things?

And how do you deprogram that?

How do you stop it?

And we've gotten to a point now to where

it's only God.

Only God.

There's nothing anymore, I think, that man can do by himself to save us.

And as I learn history, I realize

we have a choice.

And that choice is

Plymouth

or Jamestown.

And Jamestown brought all the bad to America.

Plymouth,

you know, there's a reason why they've dismantled all the history of Plymouth and not dismantled the ugliness of Jamestown, because Plymouth has the answer, and it was a covenant.

Tell me about the covenant.

Well, Glenn, you and I can make a promise to one another.

Yes.

And then we can easily break it.

You want to make a promise?

Make a covenant promise under God.

Now, you've got something.

And when the pilgrims formed their church in Scrooby, they made a covenant one to another to honor each other under God.

Now, Glenn, you didn't have to belong to their church.

But if you did, you follow their rules

and you conform to what they're doing.

And when I tell people that, they say, well, weren't they legalistic?

No, you have to have law.

You have to have rule.

You have to have an understanding.

And a covenant promise under God is a completely different thing than me telling you, I promise you I'll do something.

We're all like-minded.

We're all biblically based.

So that covenant promise is what grew the plantations through John Robinson, the pastor.

What happens when we get to Plymouth?

We land in the wrong place.

We have no law to be here.

We have to write our own law.

We made a covenant promise under God to honor one another in a body politic.

where we all take responsibility for our people, for ourselves, not the king, not the leader.

What does this do for us now?

William Bradford, the governor, is the same as me, the poor guy, when it comes to the law.

If he breaks the same law I do, we both receive the same punishment.

Not the king.

This eventually becomes America.

But

this is the germ.

This is the first kernel of corn planted in the world with that concept.

Exactly right.

And that's why Plymouth is so important.

A lot of people gloss right by Plymouth.

Okay, you know, Buckles, turkey, yay.

They go right by, but that's not Plymouth.

Plymouth started that kernel, started civil government based on a covenant promise.

All right.

So

we're very clear.

Jamestown came here

through religion.

Yes.

There's a difference between religion and

God people.

Correct.

You know, one of my favorite quotes from Gandhi, I love this Jesus guy.

I just don't necessarily like all of his followers.

Exactly.

Man will disappoint you.

It goes wrong.

Especially when power is involved.

How did they remain

humble?

I mean, I guess just the conditions.

How did they last and build this?

What was the secret?

Well.

Simple.

The secret was their faith in God and putting God first.

I'm going to be honest with you.

The 400th is coming up, and I'm having some anxiety.

My wife and I run a museum, and we're planning for the 400th, and we're helping plan a parade.

I'm getting a little uptight.

You know why?

I think I'm running it.

I'm not.

God is.

And as soon as I put my eyes back on God, then we've got something.

Now, we talk a lot about the first Thanksgiving.

Did you know we had a second Thanksgiving?

Where have my museum is on a river.

One side of the river is where Habermas village was, the Indian village.

On the other side of the river is where the plantation was.

Now, the pilgrims went from socialism to capitalism.

They changed the world, and they after starving to death, they never had a starving day after that, except they had a drought.

That drought lasted two months.

All their crops wilted.

On a Wednesday morning in July, 90 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, Governor Brevitt turned to his people and he said, I want to get on our knees and I want to ask God what we've done wrong.

And they began to pray.

Not a cloud.

Noontime, nothing, too, nothing.

4 o'clock, a little cloud right above the plantation.

By 6 o'clock, it began to rain.

And I do not mean the kind of rain we're used to here in Plymouth, the Nor'easter, where everything gets knocked over.

But a soft, gentle rain fell on Plymouth plantation for two weeks, and the crops were saved.

Somebody went up to Governor Bravin and said, Governor, what'd you talk to God about?

What'd you pray about?

He said, Well, you know what?

Maybe, just maybe,

we were no longer humble.

We thought all the success we were having was us.

And there was a visitor there when that took place.

That visitor's name, Habermach, the Indian chief.

Habermach went up to the governor and said, Governor, I like your God.

I just watched him save your crops.

And Habermach became a Christian.

And that is when he built his village next to the plantation

so he could be closer to his Christian friends and his Christian God.

There is a difference.

And it's a governance from the inside out.

A covenant is an if-then

proposition.

And

the pilgrims

were driven by

their family and raising their family to God

and raising them

and really just concerning...

They had small vision, if you will.

Instead of this big vision of, hey, let's go over and build a country.

They said, let's just, I just want to go and worship God with my family.

Correct.

So they had this small vision, but that kept them on the, if I do these things in a covenant, then God will do these things.

Too many people

right now, I think, are looking for God to save us or man to save us or a politician to save us.

And they think that if we just start to ask God,

but that's not what Bradford did.

He didn't ask God for rain.

He asked God, what?

What did we do wrong?

Right.

Where have we gone?

We are not humble.

How have we not recognized you?

Exactly right.

And when they do that, and the point is good, that it's in the family.

The difference between us and Jamestown, we came as families.

And that family, they learned in the family.

Now, imagine you're going to come over here on that ride, on that boat.

Can you even imagine that?

But the men in that group were making that decision to come here.

The children had no decision at all.

They had to come.

But why did they come?

What was that?

Because the men had a covenant relationship with God that they would pass that down to the next generation.

And that generation had to hold on to that.

That was their hope to come here, that they would get that same thing, that their parents, godly parents, were taking care of them in the best way they could.

Tell me about the

struggle to even do the parade,

to

talk about this truth here.

Tell me what it's like having a museum that will talk about God.

It's interesting.

Yeah, to say the least, my wife and I do it six days a week, and I actually dress like a pilgrim.

I walk around Plymouth dress like a pilgrim.

Everybody knows who I am, not because I do what I do, because I dress weird.

And

I'll be honest with you, a lot of people of faith come visit us on TripAdvisor.

We have a strong standing on TripAdvisor, and they tell the message that we tell.

So we get a lot of Christians in,

but we also get some pushback.

There's no doubt about it, for people who are not happy with our story.

And we do get pushback.

But our job is to show people what a wonderful place Plymouth is.

that our country was founded on biblical principles here in Plymouth.

And for the most part, people appreciate that.

There are some people who

are in some sort of positions of authority that think we ought not be doing what we do.

But that's okay.

Pushback's good.

Because if we didn't have pushback, we wouldn't be in the game.

And we're okay being in the game.

Thank you for everything you do.

My pleasure.

God bless.

God bless you.

So, David, on this street, this is lot number one in America.

It's unbelievable.

It's It's crazy.

And,

you know, we know what this house sold for 10 years ago, and it's a crazy house because it's so inexpensive.

And yet the first Thanksgiving happened on the front yard, right here.

Right here.

And where we're sitting is where they signed the first ever peace treaty between Native Americans and Anglos, the longest lasting peace treaty in American history.

And the peace treaty that the pilgrims didn't break.

The pilgrims did not break the treaty.

Native Americans broke the treaty.

And that was the chief who has this beautiful statue up at the head of the.

Massasoit, Chief Massasoit.

Okay, and so they had 50 years of peace.

54 years of peace.

54 years of peace.

And why was it broken?

It was broken because Massasoit's grandson, his name was Metacom.

He had the English name King Philip, so we call it King Philip's War.

He declared war against all whites, all Englishmen, all settlers, and all colonies.

Because we are.

Not just here.

Culturing them or.

Well, Christian missionaries.

He objected to Christian missionaries because he said they're changing our culture.

Right, but weren't Christian missionaries?

I mean, Squanto was here.

Was a Christian.

And he was a Christian.

He was a Christian.

And so.

At least he made that declaration at the end of his life.

He asked William Bradford, I want to go to the white man's heaven.

I want to be with you guys.

So we assume.

So, and they were for 54 years around Christians with the pilgrims.

Why all of a sudden

there were 3,600 Christian Indians here in Massachusetts at the time?

So they're in trouble because the Christian Indians were saying, you know, you really need your lifestyle to reflect your belief.

And this thing about torturing your enemies before you kill them and what they would,

I've got the accounts out of the books, but they would disembowel them, make you hold your own guts while you're dying.

That was just what you did to an enemy.

That's the culture of the Indians was you really

butcher your enemies.

And by the way, when Columbus landed here, as much as we like to blame Columbus for stuff, when Columbus landed in America, academics tell us that between 20 and 40 percent of Native Americans were slaves to other Native Americans.

That's before any Anglo arrives.

So the culture, the Indian culture, was one of slavery, one of torture.

The Christian missionary said, you don't need to gut people before you do this.

And that's where Philip objected, Metacom, he said, you're changing our culture.

We've had this culture for hundreds of years.

We don't want our culture changed.

And so they launched surprise attacks against all the whites they could find.

They even burned down Roger Williams' home in Rhode Island, and he had been an advocate for Native Americans.

He bought all of his land from Native Americans.

Here in Plymouth,

the Plymouth governor

said, there's not a square foot of land we we own, but what we didn't buy with a deed from the Indians.

So the Indians, the pilgrims kept their word.

They had great relations until Metacom says, you guys are messing with our culture.

We don't want to lose our culture.

We like torturing people.

And so that's where the treaty got broken.

And that resulted in King Philip's War, which is the highest casualty rate of any war in American history.

Over the Civil War.

Over the Civil War.

Highest percentage of Indians killed, highest percentage of settlers killed by percentage of any war at that point in time, of any war we've ever had.

So it was a brutal war, war, lasted several years, and it ended when other Indians killed Metacom.

It was not the white guys who killed him because when Metacom went after the pilgrims, he also went after all the converted Indians because he didn't like the Christian culture changing their culture.

So he fought Indians just like

he fought the pilgrims.

You know, that would be,

I mean, in that story, the way you've just told it,

that's probably spun as

the white man was bad because he was taking the culture.

He was taking care of it.

That's right.

Even though it was slavery and

torture.

So slavery, did it happen with the pilgrims?

Did the pilgrims have slaves?

I cannot tell you how significant the pilgrims are to so many things we believe today that we didn't know where it came from.

One is slavery, because you have slavery get started in the Jamestown colony.

It starts in Virginia.

One of the indentured servants there, a guy named Anthony Johnson, and I don't think most folks know what an indentured servant is today, but

let me just explain it quickly.

It's

basically I need a job or I need to move over here

to America from England.

I go to a wealthy store owner or somebody who needs an employee and say, okay, well, it's going to cost me this amount of money, so I'm going to take that out of your salary.

That's right.

And you will just live on my funding.

I become my own collateral.

I put myself up.

If you'll fund me to go to the New World, I'll give you seven years of work.

And so that's an indentured servant.

That's not a slave.

That's an indentured servant.

I'm paying off a loan.

So a black guy named Anthony Johnson came here as an indentured servant, became prosperous, wealthy.

He started funding other indentured servants.

And one of the indentured servants that came was a black guy.

And Anthony Johnson said, this guy is so worthless, so lazy, I'll never get my money back ever for him.

So he went to court in Virginia and said, I want to own this guy for the rest of his life, not the seven years, because he's worthless.

It'll take me his whole life to get my money back from him.

And I want to own this guy.

And the court said, you can own him.

And so that's the first occasion of slavery in America, lifelong bondage and slavery, was a black man owning another black man in court in Virginia.

But what about the pilgrims here?

When the slave ships came to the pilgrims, pilgrims and Puritans both, Massachusetts made up two colonies, the Pilgrim Colony in 1620 and the Puritan colony in 1630.

When the slave ships arrived here, they said, oh, no, no, no, no.

What they did was they imprisoned the slave owners and they freed all the slaves.

And so Massachusetts has always been the first birthplace of abolition in America.

This is where all your major abolitionists came from, whether it's John Quincy Adams, whether it's Charles Sumner, whether it was Frederick Douglass who spoke for the Massachusetts Abolition Society.

This is the birthplace of freedom and anti-slavery is Massachusetts.

And it came from the Pilgrims.

And the Pilgrims had lots of Bible verses to point to on why this is wrong.

So the Pilgrims give us this

equality.

position, if you will.

And it's up in this New England area that you have your first blacks elected to office way back in 1768.

You've got all this equality going.

As a matter of fact, black congressmen from Massachusetts in the Civil War said there's never been a time in Massachusetts when blacks could not vote.

You know, we know so much about the South and the oppression of the South, we hear little about what happened in this land of the pilgrims, and they really started the freedom.

They also started economic freedom.

They started economic freedom.

Two houses up

from this house, up this little street, is the, what it was it called, the common house?

Common house, common storehouse, common storehouse.

And explain what that was, because they were socialists

when they first came here.

And socialism can be okay, I mean, morally speaking, if it's voluntary.

If you and I want to say, hey, let's just share what we've got, okay, we can do that.

We can argue that the early Christian church did that in Acts II, but it was not government coercion.

When the government starts putting power to it.

Yeah, once somebody puts a gun to your head and says, you will participate,

that's different.

Totally different.

And so what happened was, as a congregation, they came over and they said, we just want to take care of each other.

All right, I buy that.

You've got 55 people out of the same congregation, 102 pilgrims.

Let's share together.

So what happened was they shared things.

They had a common storehouse.

But the problem was it took them about two years to find human nature is,

because if you look at the picture of the pilgrims hanging in the rotunda of the Capitol, you can go online and see it really easy.

You see a bunch of old guys.

You see a bunch of kids, 27 kids, you see a bunch of women.

And you only see six or seven able-bodied guys, maybe in their 30s, maybe in their 20s.

And so when sickness hit the pilgrims, because they're sitting out in that harbor inside a ship for months while they're trying to build houses here in December, January, February, and all before the women die.

I mean, it's just brutal time.

What happens is you've got six or seven guys doing the work for 102.

And no matter how much work they do, everything they do is shared with everybody else.

So they noticed Governor Bradford said, essentially, guys started calling in sick.

You know,

I'm too sick to go work today.

Because he's still going to get his share, whether he works or not.

And so they learned from human nature that they needed to break that up.

And so, and taking the principle from 1 Timothy 5, 8, that if you don't provide for your own household, you're worse than an infidel, they said, oh, we're providing for everybody else's.

Let's provide for our own.

And so they broke it up and they gave land to everyone because they bought the land from the Indians at the price set by the Indians.

That was part of the great relations they had.

And they said, you've got your own land.

Make it work.

Make it produce.

And you know what?

I'm not a good farmer, but I am a good barrel maker.

And I'll trade you one of my barrels for

three bushels of wheat or whatever.

And so this free enterprise system starts going where whatever I'm good at, I can trade with others to get stuff.

I need a pair of hinges from the blacksmith.

I need a coat from the hunter, whatever it is.

And so by 1627, they actually built a trading post here.

And that is the first free market system thing that happened in the New World.

Because Jamestown Colony was completely socialistic, run by the government, and it was government coercion.

They had a

voluntary socialism here, but they broke that up pretty quick after only two years.

And then by the time you get to 1627, they've actually engaged in business and they're trading with Indians and they're trading with other ships that come to the shore and the beach.

And so they've got a business going, and they've become prosperous.

And after those first two years, when they abandoned socialism, they never again had economic want in Plymouth.

They got out of all economic want.

Their whole colony turned around.

What's the difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans?

They both theologically believe the same thing.

They're children of the Reformation, and they were all part of the Church of England.

But

what happened was the Pilgrims said, you know, that church is so corrupt, we can never reform it.

I mean, I can't even imagine.

Church of England, and this is why Europe and England are so atheist now.

They're still run by the government.

Still run by the government.

I cannot imagine paying my tithe or going to a church that was a government church.

Well, here's the deal with them is they were reading the Bible.

And if you read the Bible, from the Christian viewpoint, Christ is head of the Christian church.

The pastor of the pilgrims,

John Greenwood,

he told Queen Elizabeth, he said, Jesus Christ is head of the church.

She said, you're dead.

I'm the head of the church.

She killed him for saying that Christ was head of the church.

So here you have the pilgrims who have just lost their pastor because they believe what the Bible says, that Jesus is head of the church.

And Elizabeth said, no, no, no, I'm head of the church.

It's always been that way.

Whoever the king or queen is is head of the church, which is why they have a state-established church.

So that's where, and after she killed the leader of the past, the pilgrim pastors, she then passed a law that says if anyone criticizes Her Majesty's ecclesiastical supremacy.

In other words, if you say that I'm not the top theologian, whatever, and that I'm not the head, she said you'll be committed to prison without bail.

You will never get out of prison again for the rest of your life.

If you say I'm not the head of the church, and that's when the pilgrims said, Let's go to Holland.

And so they went to Holland.

And so, what they did was they didn't try to stay and reform the church.

The Puritans said, No, no, no, we can get control of the church.

We can reform these guys.

We can get it done.

So, they were the real persecuted ones.

They were persecuted as well.

Pilgrims were persecuted, but smarter, perseverance.

Smarter, that's right.

Because the Puritans decided to come when after they were making the same same points.

But what happened at that time was the king said, I'm tired of you guys criticizing me.

So he took 10,000, cut off tongues, chopped off ears, slit noses, say, anything else you want to say?

We think we'll go to America.

Took 10,000.

There were 10,000 Puritans that fled.

Not 10,000 got their noses chopped off.

He chopped off a bunch of them.

And that's when the others said, No, let's get out of here.

We can't do this.

Which ones gave us the

Salem witch trials?

The Salem witch trials were from the Puritans.

And the Salem witch trials are a lot of fun because of how they got started.

I mean, I'm going to say historically speaking.

They're a lot of fun, yeah.

Historically speaking, they're a lot of fun because every history book I have ever seen will cover the witch trials in Salem, and they should.

It's 18 months.

It was done by the Christian leaders in Salem.

There were 27 people put to death in Salem.

This shouldn't have happened at all.

But the trick is, at the same time, the witch trials are going in Salem, they're also going in Europe.

500,000 are put to death in Europe.

Now, why do we talk about the 27 in America and not the 500,000 in Europe?

Because what America was doing is the same thing everybody else in the world was doing.

So why are we singled out?

Well, here's the rest of the story.

The witch trials came to an end after 18 months instead of after decades like they went in Europe.

Because three Christian leaders, the Reverend John Wise, the Reverend Increase Mather, and

Bratton, these three guys went to Governor Phipps and said, Phipps, we study the Bible here, and here's what the Bible says about due process rights.

You're supposed to be able to confront your accuser, John 8.

You're supposed to be able to call witnesses on your behalf, Proverbs 18.

Went through all the verses and said, You're following the English customs.

You're not allowing people to confront their witnesses.

You're using hearsay testimony.

You're everything wrong.

And Phipps, Governor Phipps, to his credit, said, You are right.

He called in Judge Sewell and said, We've got to stop the trials.

So they got the trials stopped.

Judge Sewell stood up in church and said, I confess my sin.

I've shed innocent blood because I didn't read the scriptures.

I didn't know what it said about due process.

I confess that I was wrong.

The governor then calls for a statewide day of humiliation fasting to seek to avert God's judgment because they shed innocent blood.

Those guys weren't guilty.

The state then exonerates all of them and pays restitution.

for all of those that were.

Now that's the rest of the story.

I challenge you to find any textbook in America that talks about the witch trials that talks about how they got stopped, what the rest of the world was doing, or how due process rights came out of that.

And restoration.

And restoration.

Restitution.

They have their name back.

All of that.

It's just not there.

Walking around here, this town is

divided.

It's kind of polarized, maybe like America.

But

it's bizarre because you have it right here.

You have it all right here.

And

the role of the covenant is

critical.

Critical.

And history is truly being erased.

I mean, we talked about this home.

I would pay more than double for this home.

More than double.

Of market value here.

Yeah.

That's right.

And

this should be priceless.

It's really priceless.

I'm glad it's in private hands, and I'm glad it's in the hands of the couple who bought it because they've dedicated it to Christ.

But no one knows.

They are

walking around all these things, and it's just invisible.

And in thinking about it, you know, this year with Thanksgiving in the 400th year,

we were in Gettysburg yesterday.

We bought coins from the 1920s, in fact, 1920, minted.

And it has the Pilgrim on the front, the Mayflower on the back, didn't know it.

The columns over Plymouth Rock, where we just were right across the street.

Did you see the date?

1620.

No, did you see the date?

Oh,

the columns.

1820.

Yeah.

200th anniversary.

The 200th anniversary.

The statue, 1920.

They were all put here

on an anniversary.

You wouldn't even know it was the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims.

You wouldn't know it's the 400th anniversary.

And

if you ask kids today in school, name three good things that we can track to the pilgrims.

I bet the answer is who?

Track to who?

They won't even know who the pilgrims are.

I mean, we just, we have no clue that the education system we have of every kid being educated goes back to the pilgrims.

The pilgrims,

as they came out of Europe being persecuted, they said the only reason that the people have let the queen get away with what she's doing is because they can't read and they can't read the Bible.

She keeps saying the Bible says, and they can't read, and they don't know that she's lying to them.

But we do.

That's George.

George Whitfield stopped trying to preach to the people in the church.

That's right.

And he started preaching to the poor.

And there's a great story of him going out

into the coal mine areas of England.

And it's raining and horrible, and everybody's muddy.

and it's it's you know it's every Monty Python movie you've ever seen of what it was like and Whitfield starts talking about Christ and the birth of Christ and Mary and Joseph and the wise men and one guy in the back says to

probably his son or grandson I remember My grandmother telling a story like this.

Yeah.

They didn't have

any clue.

That's right.

None of it had been passed down.

And people couldn't read, and it's a whole lot easier to be a monarch and a tyrant if people can't read, because you can tell them what it is.

And again, the churches were established to serve the taxpayers.

That's right.

You didn't get a seat in the church unless you paid for it.

Paid for it.

That's right.

That's right.

This is a revenue source for the government.

Yeah, that's all it was.

That's right.

So it was all political, and they didn't care.

It's almost like Germany.

Play the organ louder so I don't hear the train.

Yeah, with a

shoes being killed with the Nazis.

Yeah, exactly.

Sing louder so we don't hear the people who are starving in the streets right outside the window.

Yeah.

And so the pilgrims said, look, everybody's got to be able to read.

So common education goes to the pilgrims.

Civil rights goes to the pilgrims.

Private property, land ownership goes to the pilgrims because the king said, it's my land in America.

You pilgrims can be there.

They said, no, no, it belongs to the Indians.

They purchased the land from the Indians, one of the first things they did.

Treaty, racial civil rights, equality, it goes to the Pilgrims.

I mean, we can just, the free market system, what we call free market economics, pilgrims had that 150 years before Adam Smith wrote about it.

So there are so many things we track to the Pilgrims.

We just didn't know it came from the Pilgrims.

Share one last story.

The story of a guy who lived his life of really no consequence.

that came on the Mayflower.

There's a house right up the road.

It's called the John Howland House.

He was one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower.

He's a 21 or 22-year-old kid.

Well, not a kid then.

He would have been an adult.

He was working.

The average lifespan back then was about 35.

Not for the Pilgrims.

Not for the Pilgrims.

At the time, the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution 150 years later, it was 33 years old at that point.

Wow.

So you're talking a brutal life back 150 years before the Founding Fathers.

Wow.

So they come across.

He is by himself.

He doesn't have a family.

They attach him to a family.

66 days, the ship coming across.

I believe very providentially God gave them really rough storms because they're trying to sell to Virginia.

They're trying to sell to Virginia.

They don't want to come here.

They don't want to come here.

And do they know about the plague that happened here with the Indians?

No, they did not know about the plague at all.

Okay, so there was a quickly, there was a plague that happened here, killed almost all of the

whole tribe.

It was one member.

Except one guy.

Except one guy.

So if they would have landed here.

They'd have been butchered.

Butchered.

They'd been butchered.

Okay.

So they're trying to go to Virginia because that's where the charter says they can go to northern parts of Virginia.

And the further south they try to turn, the more the wind blows them north.

And it's like God's starting to say, no, no, I don't want you in Virginia.

That's a corrupt place.

I want you up here to start something new.

And so they finally get here after

66 days at sea, but it was rough weather.

The weather, the further south they turned that ship, the rougher it got, the weather actually broke the main beam of the ship, just snapped it.

And so that's what holds the ship together.

And they try to tie it back together and pilgrims use some innovative things to save them.

But 66 days and they're below deck most of the time and you're retching and throwing up your guts plus all the exquisite and everything else.

Oh my gosh.

And you've got 30 crew members and they spent time below deck because it's just too rough up on top.

So every once in a while you try to go up and see what the sunlight looks like.

And this kid, John Holland, went up on deck and got swept overboard by a wave.

Number one, you didn't swim back then.

Number two, even if they had known he got swept overboard, they could not have stopped the ship.

No.

Number three, if you could have stopped the ship and sailed it back to him and taken an hour, he's dead by then.

As it turned out, there was a rope trailing along in the water, and he managed to grab that rope, got back up on topside, saved his life.

He's an inconsequential guy, we think.

There's no big place for him in history.

He didn't do anything significant when he got here.

He lived, he married Elizabeth Tilley.

They had 10 kids.

Their kids had kids.

Now, this is a guy that should have died.

He didn't.

As a result, one

million Americans now track themselves to John Hallen.

They're his descendants.

And whether that be A-listers and movies like Humphrey Bogart, or whether you want to say the Baldwin Brothers in Hollywood, or whether you want to take three presidents, or whether you want to take athletes, I mean star athletes, Joseph Smith, founder of LDS, all these guys go back to John Hallen.

If that guy had died at sea like he should have, think how different America would be today with one life different.

And, you know, I kind of liken that to abortion or anything else.

The one life, maybe that was the one life that was going to do something significant.

You just never know the value of one life.

We were talking earlier today about

thinking small.

They didn't think big.

They weren't over here thinking, we're going to build a nation.

Yeah.

They just wanted to build a few houses.

That's right.

And they worried about and paid attention to what they were doing in their life.

They wanted to raise their kids in a godly fashion, which they could not do in Secular Holland.

They could not do in England.

Their thing was strong families.

We want strong families.

We want those families to build a community that will be strong.

And so the strong families built a strong church, which built a strong civil government, which built a community.

How did this community shaped the entire United States?

That wasn't their objective.

You know, their objective was their family.

And Jamestown, which is also a Christian community,

but the governmental Christian community, right?

They were the ones that were coming in and

we got slavery from Jamestown.

We got socialism from Jamestown.

Socialism.

Yeah, we got government tyranny,

hard-fisted rulers not serving the people.

And they were thinking big back then.

When they went to Jamestown, they were thinking colonies, we're going to colonize this land, we're going to bring back the riches of the gold and everything else.

We'll sacrifice principles to economics.

Economics is the most important thing.

Right.

It's a whole different viewpoint.

Right.

Whole different viewpoints.

So we have to decide, are we Jamestown or are we Plymouth?

David, thank you.

My pleasure, Glenn.

So, Tim,

you just got back from Leiden, Holland,

where the pilgrims were.

Yes.

You got here last night.

Yep.

How long did it take you?

About eight hours.

No sickness.

Nobody died on the flight or a little easier.

A little easier.

A little easier.

But you went over to find why they came here.

Right.

Right.

I heard, you know, I read these

reports, even from William Bradford and others.

It was a beautiful town.

We enjoyed commerce.

We enjoyed the congregation grew quite a bit.

They had religious freedom.

They were quite prominent in the town.

And going there and feeling it and seeing it, I didn't want to leave.

And I can feel it's a beautiful place.

So why did they leave?

And I went to ask that question.

I tracked down a couple of the historians in the town.

There's a tiny little American Pilgrim Museum, believe it or not.

It's a tiny little house

from the Pilgrim time period.

Did the guy answer the door?

Wait, you want to know stuff?

It was crazy.

I think no one goes there.

And he would lit the candles and he's,

it's my time.

That's kind of how it was.

Somebody here.

And we sat down and I asked him, why did they leave this town?

And he said, look, a lot of them were wealthy.

Others struggled, but it was like anywhere else.

And he had answers that weren't incorrect, but they weren't satisfying to me at all.

He said, you know, there was a potential recession they were heading into, an embargo on some of the wool.

They were a textile industry.

Spain might be attacking.

They didn't know.

So wait, wait, wait.

So they left Leiden, where they had a thriving church, 500 members?

Yes.

Okay.

So they leave.

They're good because there might be a recession.

Yes.

And there might be some things.

And so they decide to take a trip to where they think they're going is Jamestown, where it ended in cannibalism.

That's right.

Instead of maybe a recession.

Yeah, or maybe a war with Spain or pretty much a definite war with the Native Americans.

Right.

Like, you know, a recession versus living in the mud and dying.

Right.

So I'm just going, I said to him, I don't, I'm not buying it.

There has to be something more to why they did this.

And the truth is, they held a solemn assembly.

You know, they brought these questions to the Lord.

You got to be careful, as you know, we talked about this when you bring a question to the Lord.

You know, they said, okay, we're always trying to improve.

And so there are these issues.

Lord, is there a better way?

And there are other places, by the way, if they didn't like it, they could have gone.

Other Dutch provinces that were available and open, that they were being offered.

So there's other options.

And they came out of that solemn assembly and they said, it's America.

We got to go to that place.

Okay, so hang on.

As I understand this, and I could be wrong.

Don't half of them leave in the speed well at first?

And then the speed well, the mast is broken, and they have to come back.

And it's then that their preacher, who had not gone with the rest of them, called them all together and said, hey, I've been hearing from God, and I got to talk to you.

I think we shouldn't be going where we were going to go.

I think we should go to America.

And that's when a few of them left and said,

I'm out.

I think I'll go to the recession.

But the rest of them said, let's pray on him.

That's when they had the solemn assembly.

Is that true?

Well, the solemn assembly happened in Holland before they left.

And John Robinson, their pastor, he sent them from Holland and sent them on their way.

But when the speed wheel came back, I don't think they were wanting.

There was plenty of people that said, I'm out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm fine.

And the number, those who stayed, they're the ones I think who more than anyone else truly were converted to the idea that God is sending us here.

We have to go here.

And the point that really stumped the historian when I asked him this, I said, fine, let's just say that all these reasons you have.

America's recession-proof because there's nothing there.

There's zero infrastructure and people that want to kill us.

But the part what stumped him is when I said, okay, fine, let's just say that's the reason.

All these fears in Holland.

What about when they get there and they're dying?

And half of them are dead or dying.

And the Mayflower is still parked in the harbor.

And the captain says, hey, guys, this ain't working.

Let's go back.

Come back.

Because if I leave,

I may never come back.

And it's possible no one comes back.

Let's go.

And I'm thinking, okay,

now you really can compare

America versus how life was in Holland.

Right.

Now it's easy to compare.

Some of them left their children, their babies even, back in Holland.

Okay,

William Bradford.

If I could leave a few of my teenagers in Holland,

he had a toddler.

I mean, I have a toddler.

I can't imagine.

They left their toddler out there.

William Bradford's wife is already dead.

She died.

She fell off

in the Provincetown Harbor and drowned.

All right.

So, I mean, you're talking about just brutal things going on.

And now the recession doesn't look so bad.

And now, right?

And guess how many people of the remaining survivors jumped on that mainflow and said, I'm going back home.

Not one.

Not one went back.

And if someone's going to tell me that there was some some other influence other than God and their faith and their knowledge that this is where they needed to be, I'm not buying it.

Why is this so difficult to believe?

Why is it there is there is such an effort?

I mean, I know God people who have done crazy stuff and know that it's crazy.

They know that it's crazy.

They'll say, yeah, I have no reason to do this.

I just, I just, I feel God has told me to do this.

And you're like, dude, you're going to destroy your life.

You're going to lose all your money.

I mean, you've done that to me.

You've done that to me.

You came to me and said, hey, I want to start this thing.

And I'm like, that's insane.

It may take down your entire media empire.

Want to do it?

Yeah.

No,

is what the natural man says.

But if you are driven by God, you feel that God is pointing you in that direction.

And it's never a,

it's always Plymouth.

It's never the Bahamas.

It's always like, oh, crap, I don't want to do that.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that's why they did it?

Because there is an absolute adversarial

attack on the true story.

Why?

Because the true story has the solution to all of our problems today.

They made the covenant when they got here.

That's why they came.

They knew God would bless them.

They knew what they needed to do biblically to bring those blessings down.

The Old Testament law was their law.

They called themselves the New Israel.

The Puritans did the same when they came 10 years later.

And that was the solution.

Build one nation under God,

and we will be a land flowing with milk and honey and blessings of liberty, protection, prosperity.

And then Christ has a home.

The kingdom of God can be built.

That's what we need today.

That's what they knew they needed then.

But if we can hide that history by any means possible, then we will lose the solution.

And so I truly believe it's an adversarial attack from the dark side and influencing as many people as possible to destroy this history, which is the key to our salvation today.

And

when they're coming over,

who was it that says, we will be a byword?

We are to build a shining city on the hill.

So it's John Winthrop.

And if we don't, what?

If we don't live live by how we're supposed to live.

We'll be swept from the land.

Right.

It's not going to work.

He does, once again, he's the Puritan leader that brings the Massachusetts Bay colony and says the same covenant.

This is the ancient Israelite covenant.

We obey God, we are obedient, and we will prosper.

If we don't, we're a byword, and we're gone.

And it's not...

Let me get technical, theological here for a second, because I want to make this clear.

It's not replacement theology.

No, no.

It's not that they thought they were the Israelites.

This was the same journey, a continuation of God's people, but that didn't make them the Israelites.

But they saw this

as

their journey across the Red Sea, right?

That's right, as an extension of

the story of Israel.

It's the next chapter, the New Testament.

The next next chapter.

Exactly.

I'm leaving here to go see the monument.

And it is hard to get to.

It is kind of hidden.

You know, there's monuments everywhere here.

And this one, I'm so excited because I've heard of it.

I'd never heard about it growing up.

And I started hearing about it from Leo about

10 years ago, ago maybe eight years ago

you have been up there several times and it is

the secret of America

what does the monument say what is it the monument first I'll say it's probably the most sacred place maybe one of the most sacred places in America The spirit you will feel there, I promise you, I know what you're going to feel there when you get there.

It is a monument to God and covenant and faith.

It explains the entire, and you have to have Leo Martin give you the tour, by the way, to pull out all the symbolism.

It's who the pilgrims were.

Morality, law, education, and most importantly, the central figure is the figure of faith pointing to heaven with the Bible in hand, that ancient covenant in hand, which is the law that will bring the blessings.

And

the entirety of the monument is

that very secret that I'm talking about, the secret that will bring us salvation today.

It teaches that entire thing.

One of the most fascinating things that Leo Martin taught me was that in 1861, as the Civil War is getting underway, Abraham Lincoln wrote a $10 check.

to help.

That $10 was no little amount in that time.

Out of his own pocket, he knew that monument was being built.

He wanted to participate in it because he understood that he was fighting for those pilgrim ideals against southern ideals born out of Jamestown: gold, socialism, slavery versus God, covenant, faith.

And that was one of the things that in the 1860s we were arguing about.

In the 1850s,

we wanted to know: was America's founding town Plymouth, or was it Jamestown?

Right.

And

wasn't William Bradford's original works lost to us?

Yes.

But it wasn't actually lost.

Unbelievable story.

Yeah.

So William Bradford's of Plymouth Plantation, this becomes the kind of seminal, the preeminent kind of

document that tells the story of the pilgrims.

He was a diarist and he explained it all.

Beautiful manuscript.

It was lost.

They believed it was kept in the South, in the old South Church Tower in Boston after Bradford had passed on.

No one made a copy of it.

No one published it.

And it was believed that when the British came during the American War for Independence that they seized it, took it back to London saying, this is our history, we're taking it back.

And it was lost.

And no one knew what Bradford had written in that book.

Well,

in 1855, a researcher doing a history on Massachusetts comes across this London published book in a Boston library.

And it makes a reference to William Bradford, a direct quote, and it says, from manuscript, Fulham, England Library, from manuscript.

And he says, could this be that lost manuscript?

So he sends the correspondents over across the Atlantic and finds some friendly people back there.

They confirm, they go to the Fulham Library, they pull it out.

Oh my gosh, I am holding William Bradford's manuscript right here, the single copy left.

And they make a copy of it.

They send the copy back to Boston.

Little Brown Company publishes it in 1856.

And now the world is exposed to what that monument teaches: the covenant on the land, through the words of that preeminent governor, William Bradford.

And the book is published in 1856, and not a year too soon.

It was providential the timing because four years later, we're diving into civil war.

And it's a war of ideas, Jamestown versus Plymouth.

And the people of the North got to read that book and understand this is what we're fighting for in the end.

We're fighting to bring this covenant back through the liberation

of slaves.

Which will end on just a sneak on that.

Uh,

I have,

I mean, sometimes the Lord just won't leave me alone.

Sometimes I think, you know, I'm like,

hey, are you around?

Other times, he won't leave me alone.

And one of those times has been in the last

year,

year and a half on

this project.

And

everything just has kind of fallen into place.

All of my friends who happen to be working on seemingly unrelated projects are not unrelated.

And

we're here in Plymouth because it is the 400th anniversary.

of the pilgrims and that covenant.

And it's that covenant, that small thinking, I will do this, Lord.

I will just do these things.

And

you

will bless my life and my family because I do these things.

And it's that which bore this nation.

And

I have felt that we needed to do another restoring event.

And

as I was thinking in the last few years of

what is going to bring us together, you and I became friends.

And I think I said this to you at one point,

and I don't even know if you believed it, that

Tim,

slavery, that's the one thing that we can...

I'd take

Alexandria Casio-Cortez.

We don't have anything that we can agree on.

But I know I could go to her and go, hey, what do you say we work against slavery?

And anyone who says no,

you know, then we know exactly who you are.

Everyone would say yes.

And then

Lincoln, I start doing stuff with the Lincoln Museum and Gettysburg.

And

I'm like, wow, you know, he never finished that work.

We never finished it.

And slavery is worse today than it ever was.

So we've been talking, along with David Barton.

And

why don't you just lay out a little bit of

the idea?

Well, it's time to take this hidden secret that was born here in Plymouth and bring it back.

The way Washington brought it back, the way Lincoln brought it back, and that is that there is a covenant on this land, and we need to renew that covenant.

And this event, restoring the covenant, will be that time.

So it's going to happen next summer.

We'll give you details soon,

but it will happen next summer and it's going to start here.

It's not going to end here, but it will start here.

And we will

take you through the places where the covenant has been made, because it's been made that we know of at least three times.

We know that it was made here in Plymouth.

We know that it was made in New York City with George Washington on his inauguration day.

And we know that it was the game changer of the Civil War.

with Abraham Lincoln.

I just read a quote yesterday of him in Gettysburg.

And he said something along the lines of, I've always known I was a man of God.

But until I went to Gettysburg, I did not know that I was a Christian.

And it changed him.

That's right.

And it changed the course of the country.

And did you know that when he went to Gettysburg, and few people know this, he sat before he gave that speech, he sat in downtown Gettysburg with William Seward, knee to knee, and he said, William, we need to reinstitute Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

That's where the idea was born.

And he said, Write the proclamation.

We're going to put it out so it's every year, not just whenever we decide, every year.

And if you read the proclamation, Glenn, of Thanksgiving,

it is a call to the covenant.

He's very clear.

What does Thanksgiving mean?

It means we serve God and we repent of our sins.

That's what he says Thanksgiving is in that proclamation that's released in 1863.

I have

since I sobered up in the 90s and started thinking about things,

I've never thought

that it was a coincidence that in America we have three holidays in a row.

And most people look at them as like, oh, good, it's, you know, I'm just, it's cookieville for the next, you know, six or eight weeks.

And time off and time with the family.

But that's really not what it is.

I've always called them the trilogy of

holidays.

The trilogy is Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.

And

because

we know this doesn't work

without all three of them, because most people will concentrate on one holiday or another, and then they'll get to New Year's and they'll make a resolution and it won't work.

You'll be done with it.

But that's because you haven't worked all three of them together.

You haven't taken thanksgiving and really said, Lord, thank you, and become humble enough to be able to see it's not you.

And in fact, you've stood in your own way so many times.

Our country is standing in the way of success.

People are standing in the way of their own success because

they think they're less than what they need to be, or they've made too many mistakes, and they don't

humble enough to look where the blessings really come from.

And when you're in that point, you're on your knees, and here comes the baby Jesus who wipes everything clean.

That's when you can start again.

But if you're not thankful, humble,

and understand why Christ was born, you can't start fresh.

I think that's why Thanksgiving is so important.

And these three holidays, launching into the 400th anniversary of this covenant, is so important.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.