The spiritual condition of America, politics, culture, and current events, analyzed through the lens of scripture. Welcome to the Alex McFarland Show. In 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which was very influential, some of the decisions they made that would lead to policy within the Declaration of Independence and ultimately the creation of our Constitution, they said this to the inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay, quote, nobly defend those rights which Heaven gave and no man ought to take from us, end of quote. Hi, Alex McFarland here. Welcome to the program. I've got a very special show today because we're going to be talking about some of the founding principles and procedures by which our nation has operated from the very beginning that have contributed to your freedom, your stability, and your prosperity.
I mean, think about that. Liberty, security, stability, prosperity. These are things that we all value or we should value, but I would really say, and you know this, I'm sure if you watch the news at all, these things are endangered.
These things are jeopardized right now. You know, George Washington, our first U.S. president, he gave a speech May 10, 1789. This was during the era of the writing and ultimately ratification of the Constitution. George Washington, our first president, said, quote, if I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution, which was framed in our convention where I had the honor of presiding, Washington said, if I had entertained the slightest apprehension that this Constitution would possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical society, that means a church denomination, he says, certainly I never would have placed my signature upon it, end of quote. Our founders understood that we had rights from God, and morality, family, moral boundaries, and yes, religion, and by that they were Christian in their orientation.
Morality, religion, family, moral boundaries, these were the structures, the pillars that our civil society would rest upon. Well, we want to talk about these things, and I've got with me a guest, Gary Harris, and we're recording this, I wish you could be here folks, for five days lecturing and teaching at East Rankin Academy. It's in Mississippi, just outside of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and I'm down here, very honored to be invited to speak to the students, but I met Gary Harris, he is one of the faculty here, and we instantly found a bond around the subject of politics and our country, and I wanted to pick his brain a little bit and talk about, among other things, the Electoral College and just the structure of our government. So first of all, Mr. Harris, I want to say welcome to the Alex McFarland Show.
Thanks for making a few moments to be with us. It's my pleasure, Alex, and we're certainly grateful that you're here with us here in central Mississippi. We kind of find this as a hidden gem, nestled kind of in the country of central Mississippi, but we're trying to honor God with the way we teach our students. Well, you know, I love Mississippi. I've been privileged to preach and teach all over the state, and of course, for more than a decade I've been on the American Family Radio Network, which, while it's all over North America, it emanates from Tupelo, Mississippi.
I want to say this, I mean this with all my heart, the Christians I meet in Mississippi have got a fire and a conviction and a commitment to this nation, to God and country, so there are a lot of great leaders that are in Mississippi, a lot that have come from Mississippi. Your background, you've got a background in politics, and not only the service of the Lord, but how our country operates. Tell us about your background a little, if you would. Well, just briefly, ever since I was in middle school, I was involved in student council.
That was always a passion of mine. I knew that I had a God-given gift to speak in front of others. I enjoyed the political side of things, not necessarily the politics of it, more so the governance of it, and I enjoyed serving for others. I grew up in a broken home.
My parents divorced when I was 12. I always wanted to speak for those who couldn't speak for themselves. I flirted with law school, got a degree from Mississippi State University in political science. I was a U.S. Senator John Stennis scholar, had the opportunity to meet Senator Stennis while he was still in office, and an opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. I was involved with the Mississippi Secretary of State's office. Started out just as a grunt, so to speak, just hauling books from one place to the other.
I eventually became an assistant speechwriter, and his primary speechwriter went on maternity leave. They put me in the role when I was 23 years old, didn't know anything about anything, but enjoyed that role, got to travel all over the state of Mississippi with him while he ran for governor, got to meet some great people, and kind of saw that he always told me that politics is not a dirty word. We've allowed people to co-opt what politics is. So when someone says that politics is a dirty word or politics is a nasty game, it's not. We've allowed it because we've had good men withdraw, and women, withdraw themselves from the marketplace of ideas.
And so now it's become the cesspool that we sometimes see. But make no mistake, we have 535 elected representatives when you count the House and the Senate. There are some good Christian men and women that are serving in both parties. Seemed to be that we, we tend to break into camps and fight like crazy against one another. But at the end of the day, there are some very godly men and women in Washington, D.C. We just need a lot more of them. You know, that being said, and by the way, thank you for your service to our country, and thank you for serving the upcoming generation as a teacher.
Now, let me ask you this. What things, with your background of politics, your knowledge of our government, what things do you see presently that are most concerning to you? I would say the ero- some of what you talked about with our students this week is the erosion of civility, but more importantly, the erosion of morality.
What you're seeing is right is wrong, up is down, left is right. And there is no standard of what is true anymore. Anytime I hear someone start a sentence with the words, my truth, I just cringe. It hits me at the base of my spine, because that's an admission that their truth triumphs actual truth. And, you know, one of the things about the gospel, you and I talked about this this week, it's very confrontational, it's cutting, it's not smooth and easy and puppy dogs and rainbows. It is very damning, so to speak, of the soul. And the thing about it is that we don't have that ability anymore to say, this is right, this is wrong. We have people that now say that it may be right for you, but it's not right for me.
And there is no definition of what true truth tends to be anymore. You're listening to the Alex McFarland show. We're talking with Gary Harris from East Rankin Academy. We've got a brief break coming up. One thing I want to pick your brain on is just how the government operates and the Electoral College.
I mean, Hillary Clinton, ever since her defeat to Donald Trump in the 2016 election, she's been calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. And I want to talk about what the implications of that might be. But we've got a break. We're going to come back. You need to care about America, folks, because until we leave this world, this is where we live. Stay tuned.
We're going to be back right after this. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this.
Do you have a desire to deepen your faith, better understand Christian apologetics, or to get a biblical perspective on current events? Well, I've tried to make it simple for you to do just that. On my website, alexmcfarland.com, there's a new section called Ask Alex Online.
It's simple, it's clean, and you can read my answers to common questions about God, faith, and the Bible. So visit the website alexmcfarland.com and look for the section that says Ask Alex Online. He's been called trusted, truthful, and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show.
You know, whenever I read Acts chapter 14 and I talk about the appointment of elders in the churches, in the cities, elders that would pray and fast and serve the Lord and be over the people, I think about the representation of our republic, and we elect not elders to run our government, although that would be a fine thing, but senators and congressmen, and it's very much like a church from the first century that our government is structured around. Hi, Alex McFarland here, and by the way, before we resume our conversation with Mr. Gary Harris, I want to remind everybody that next summer, July 7-9, I will be at the Cove again, the Billy Graham Training Center in western North Carolina, teaching 2 Peter. The theme is Thrive Until He Comes. I hope you'll be there. It would be a great time to enjoy the scenery of the Appalachian Mountains, just the Spirit-filled presence of God at the Billy Graham Training Center. Great food, great fellowship, and we'll study the Word together.
Go to thecove.org, T-H-E-C-O-V-E, thecove.org, and I'd love to see you. Angie and I will be there July 7-9 next summer. But right now, Mr. Gary Harris at East Rankin Academy, thanks again for your time, and may I commend you for building a great school.
I've been in a couple of hundred schools around America, many Christian schools. East Rankin is a great school, and you and your colleagues, I commend you for what you're doing. Well, I have to give credit, first of all, to the Lord Jesus and God, because without them none of this would be here. But there's a family, the Gates family, Robert and Dee Gates, of course Ms. Dee Gates is our elementary principal, Robin Winstead, our headmaster, they've been integral in the development of this school for a long, long time. You met Ms. Modine Cross earlier today, her husband Paul.
All of those were very, very instrumental in making East Rankin what it is. I've just gotten to dovetail onto that success. I was an admirer of this school from afar in some of my other appointments. So it's been a pleasure to come join the administrative team over here, and as dean of students, I get to see both the best and the worst of our kids, but it's a reminder that we're all centers, we all have frailties, but God knows where we're going to be in five, ten years in these students.
I don't. All we can do is try to, our mission is to train up a child in the way that they will go so they will not depart from it when they're older, and that's kind of the mission of what we aspire to here. Well, with your background not only in Christian education but in politics and a speechwriter, let's talk about just how our country operates. We've got the three branches of government, which many have pointed out.
It really comes from the Scriptures. What's unique about the American system? I think that it is a bottom-up government. It's not a top-down government.
You and I talked about this today. Most people think that we live in a democracy. We don't. We live in a republic. It is a representative form of government, and that those people that speak on our behalf do so as agents for us. So if any time, you know, one of the things I hear people say all the time is that government this, government that, like it's some entity out there alone. We are the government.
You and I are the government, and we get the government we deserve. So if we don't like it, we have the means to change that government. We've been able to do that for some 200 years without violence, without bloodshed, whereas other nations have not been able to do so. They've had coups. They've had attempts to, you know, assassinations. They've had other means of changing governments.
We do it peacefully, for the most part, peacefully. And while we have differences of opinion, parties come and go. There was no Democratic Party and no Republican Party in 1796, but now we have them. Will we always have those parties?
Maybe, maybe not. But you mentioned something a while ago about the Electoral College, and that's something that's kind of something that hits near and dear to my heart is that there's been all these calls, like you mentioned with Hillary Clinton and others, to abolish the Electoral College. Doing so would completely change America. It would change the trajectory of our nation.
Well, let's talk about how does it function? I mean, what is the Electoral College? Sure, we don't vote for president. And most people think when you go to the polls and vote in November that you're actually voting for a president.
That's not exactly the case. You're voting for electors who are pledged to vote for those candidates. Those electors, depending on the state, most districts and states have a winner take all system. Whoever wins the most votes in that state wins the electors for that state. You have a couple of split districts like in Nebraska, and I think there's one in Maine, but for the most part, it's a winner take all system.
So if you get 50% plus one in California, you get all of the electoral votes for California. So it's not a popular election. You know, we've had many instances in our past where one candidate won the popular vote, but the other candidate won the electoral vote. We had, you know, the conundrum in 2000 with Bush and Gore. That was a moment in American history that people still look back on and say, how did this happen? But we had an even crazier situation back with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson way before that in the election of 1800, where before that time, whoever got the most votes was president, whoever got the second most votes was vice president.
We don't have that anymore. So you had one party had control of the White House. One party was the vice president of that same in that same administration, and it caused friction, of course. So the Electoral College is a way to protect the states. We are the United States of America.
There's 50 laboratories of government. It would a state like Mississippi, who's had a strong history of leaders like like a Trent Lott. You know, John Stennis, I mentioned he was a Democratic senator, but he was a Southern Democrat, like a Sam Nunn or or others very conservative. Or like a Sam Ervin from my home state of North Carolina.
Exactly. They were men who were incredibly conservative, who fought very hard for their states. And without that representation in Congress, without having strong leadership, if Mississippi didn't matter, if if a let's say another small state like, OK, South Carolina is very similar to Mississippi. If we did not have a true representative where those votes didn't matter, if I could just go campaign in Los Angeles, campaign in New York, I wouldn't need a Mississippi. I wouldn't need to go to Colorado. I would need to go to Vermont or Iowa. You know, Iowa is always hotly contested.
You could just they call them flyover states for a reason because I was just going to say, listen, I've been in Manhattan to do media and I've heard people dismissively refer to flyover states. And it's like celebrities, politicians, leaders would never go to Nebraska, Iowa unless they want the vote. But in a way, the electoral system whereby really from the remote hamlet of rural America to L.A., Chicago, New York, there is representation. I think it's a genius system.
Absolutely. I mean, obviously, you know, there was no blueprint for anything like this when our forefathers sat down to draft the Constitution. You know, you had obviously James Madison, of course, ran the show in Philadelphia in those days. And the greatest thing about Madison, I tell my students all the time, Madison did his homework before he came into that room. He studied a lot. He studied Montesquieu. He studied the English Bill of Rights. He studied all these documents before and was prepared that he was the smartest guy in the room when he walked in. And he was able to help nudge things in the direction of what we have today. And I can't help but think that was divinely inspired.
Oh, I agree. Isn't James Madison called the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution? Yeah, sometimes called the father of the Constitution.
But he was just a small man, very quiet from Virginia. But he he had helped write the Virginia Constitution. He had helped other states with their constitutions. And he was very integral in setting the tone for our framework of government. Of course, you know, anybody that takes a civics class knows about the great compromise and and how they had to come together to form a a true basis of how are we going to count states?
Are we going to count, you know, the slave states versus the free states? All that debate was going on long before 1861. You know, there in Philadelphia, you know, Benjamin Franklin helped write during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. He sat in the room with Thomas Jefferson for a lot of that writing. And Jefferson talked about the slave trade way back in the in the in the 1700s, 1776. So these issues had to get hammered out and creating the Electoral College. You got to remember there's only 13 colonies, which were later states.
So you only had 13 at the time that this was drafted. But it was still an ingenious method that has continued to work. To me, I told you earlier in the week and your viewers and listeners don't know this, but I was a coach for 20 something years. I love athletics.
I love what it teaches kids about about fighting back about resiliency about, you know, getting up when you get knocked down. But to me, changing the Electoral College would be we lost the game. We want to change the rules because we don't like how we're playing.
We don't like that we're getting beat. That's not how you you fight back. That's not how if you lose an election that you come back, you get better, you compete, you figure out what you did wrong.
To this day, I don't think Hillary Clinton has ever acknowledged that she did anything wrong in that election that she's lost, actually two elections. They just want to blame the system. And they want to fix the system. As we say, move the goalpost.
Yeah, you know, it's like the late great Bill Glass, who was an evangelist and played in a Super Bowl, but he said, don't blame the system. Listen, we're going to come back. We're going to continue talking with Mr. Gary Harris about our wonderful American system.
And as we record this, we're just days away from a major midterm election. Please pray. Please be registered.
Please vote. We're going to come back with more on the Alex McFarland program right after this. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. Over the last several decades, it's been my joy to travel the world talking with children, teens, adults, people of all ages about the questions they have related to God, the Bible, Christianity, and how to know Jesus personally.
Hi, Alex McFarland. I want to make you aware of my book, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask About Christianity. You know, we interviewed hundreds of children and parents and families to find out the questions that children and people of all ages are longing to find answers for. In the book, we've got practical, biblical, real life answers that they have about how to be a Christian in this modern world.
My book, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask, you can find it wherever you buy books or at resources.afa.net. He's been called trusted, truthful, and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show. In Mark chapter 9, Jesus talked about some things, some spiritual battles being won only by prayer and fasting. Hi, Alex McFarland here, and I want to encourage you to pray for America, maybe even fast and pray. Our freedoms have to be reasserted and guarded, and in every generation, the liberties, the freedoms that were fought for, and I believe they've just ingeniously codified in terms of our government and our system, which has led to wealth, prosperity, and America, at least heretofore being one of the greatest contributors to Christ's great commission. All of these things hang in the balance, and so we're going to continue our conversation with Gary Harris, hopefully to inspire gratitude and a motivation to be the citizen that each of us can be to help preserve what we have inherited as Americans.
Mr. Harris, we were talking about the Electoral College and how it does give a voice to all the states. Let's talk a little bit, if we could, just about what the founders would have said about our current moral state. You know, we're living in a time when, you know, the natural rights guaranteed by the Constitution are often being pushed and pummeled to make way for what we believe are special artificial rights. So the moral makeup, or lack thereof, what do you think a Madison or a John Adams or a George Washington or Alexander Hamilton would say about that if they were here today?
I think they would absolutely tremble and fear for our nation. I think all of those men understood that the basis of our law, the basis of our government, had to be about individualism. It could not be a collectivism. You cannot adjudicate laws on a collective basis.
It has to be. If you and I have done something wrong, then we have to go before a judge individually. And our laws are such that, you know, you judge people in this nation, you judge people based on individuality. We're not going to treat you based on your skin color. We're not going to treat you based on your religion or your beliefs or that we're going to treat you as a child of God and God's image.
And we're going to treat you individually. When you start lumping into groups and having collective, you know, you'd start dividing people. Isn't that what like Ben Shapiro calls identity politics? Identity politics is really not how we operate.
Absolutely. And what you're seeing is when you start dividing into that collectivism, you know, we talked in politics about coalition of minorities. You're going to anger somebody with every decision, one side or the other. You know, it's like flipping a coin. These that like heads are going to be happy about your decision. Those who like tails are not going to be happy. Over the course of time, you add up those who disagree with you.
But when you divide into camps, what you end up doing is you basically start turning on each other. And you're seeing that right now with this wokeism, this woke monster that's been created. They're starting to eat themselves. It's a monster that has to be fed and it doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care about you.
It only goes after what's next. So the people, the very people who are trying to perpetuate this woke monster are the same ones that are getting eaten alive by now. And I can't help, but I know I shouldn't delight in it, but you can't help but chuckle a little bit that, you know, you guys created this monster.
You know, now you're getting fed to it. You know, we first really began to hear about open borders during the Obama administration. And I remember President Obama, this would have been, oh, I don't know, 08, 09, when the president was asked, what about the rights of people, the border states? Migrants are coming in, laws are being broken, the rights and the security of the tax paying citizens is being ignored. And President Obama said, well, turning away migrants, that's just not who we are. Now, that might sound good to say, oh, OK, we're compassionate. But look, people seeking asylum, if you go to the embassy or you go to INS, immigration naturalization, you say, I'm coming here and I'm seeking political asylum. And there are channels through immigration naturalization. But just to open the borders, give me your take on that.
And I remember just agonizing. He would say, well, that's not who we are. Well, no, it is who we are. It is who we are to have borders, boundaries, the rule of law and the rights of the American citizens come before the rights of non-citizens. And it's not even really appropriate to speak of the rights. Let me put it this way, and then I want your response. Let's say that there's a family and the children are fed at the dinner table, and somebody kicks in the door and says, hey, lady, fix me a meal. And the lady says, well, you're not my child. Just a minute, you're not a part of this family yet.
Well, when we talk about the rights of the migrants or illegals, I mean, they don't really have American rights yet because they're not yet citizens. Think about it. You know, I'm in Mississippi, so, you know, we get picked on in the South about our folksy-ism. But let's be honest. If you have a door on your house, right? Do you leave that door unlocked? Not at all. So, yes, I would invite someone. I would feed feed the hungry, feed the clothes. If someone wanted a hot meal, you know, would I invite them into my house?
Yes. But I'm not going to leave the doors open at night where anybody and everybody can come in because now I no longer have a home. It has become just a free for all. Same thing with our nation. We can still be a loving nation.
We can still help others around the globe, which we've done forever since our nation's history. It doesn't mean that we have to leave the door wide open. You know, you don't come through the windows. You don't come through the back door. We have a front door.
We have a process of becoming a citizen in this country. You know, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where Barack Obama lived, where our current president lives. What is all around the front and the outside of that building? A gate. You have a gate that's very high. It has Secret Service. It has Marines all around it.
Why? Not to keep anybody and everybody from coming in. It's the people's house, just like just like the House of Representatives and others. But it's to protect law and order and decency. So an open borders policy is simply a way to this. You know, you hear these talks about a one world government. You don't get to a one world government without without having open borders. You know, I heard just this morning Alex Marlow on on Breitbart News.
He interviewed someone who's talking about the crisis in the Netherlands right now. And you're having a major crisis with immigration in Europe because there are no there are no rules anymore. You have open borders throughout the European Union.
And so well, and it creates really a destabilization of a culture. And you've got masses of people on the dole getting government services. And you know, they're not going to first of all, they're probably not going to vote and go through legal channels anyway. But if they do, the person here illegally is not going to help unseat the person who's got the purse strings and the snap food stamps and things like that. Folks, do not be deceived.
Those progressive liberals, the Democrats that are vying for the whole world to come here unlawfully and you're going to pay for it. They know what they're doing. That's why I beg of you pray and then be informed and vote. We've only got a little bit of time left. But Mr. Gary Harris, give us just a vision for how our country currently in a very tenuous, very dangerous place. What's a vision for how this formerly representative republic might be restored?
Well, the only way is through Christ. It has to be a nation that turns their hearts and their heads towards Christ and has to understand that we can be a loving nation who supports people around the globe. But we must maintain this nation that was given to us.
This was a gift. I have no doubt in my mind that the United States was a gift from God, a beacon in the wilderness, so to speak, a new Jerusalem. And if we don't protect that, it will be taken away. You know, you talked about socialism. You know, the great Margaret Thatcher said the problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money. And when you allow immigration to just explode, you're going to run out of resources at some point and it's going to be mass chaos. And we don't want that in this country.
We want to maintain the country that for hundreds of years has not been that. I've got missionary friends that served in Petersburg, Russia for 20 years and they said, you know, under communism there's a joke like a man goes in the store and says, can I get a slice of bread with butter? And they says, we don't have butter. And he says, well, could I get a slice of bread with meat? He says, if you want bread without butter, you can go here.
But if you want bread without meat, you have to go to the store across the street. Point is, nobody had what they needed. So folks, here's the thing, we've been blessed. But like Gary Harris said, we've inherited, we've inherited a great gift. It's up to us to preserve it. So please pray, please vote. Vote godly. Vote responsibly.
Don't vote party, vote principal. And I want to say, as we do our camps, we've got five summer camps next summer. We'll be in front of seven to eight hundred youth. You can go to my website, which is alexmcfarland.com, learn about our speaking, our publishing, our broadcasting, our conferences.
We've got major conferences in 2023. We've got our camps. Folks, we're fighting the good fight for God and country, evangelizing the lost, equipping the saved. Your tax-deductible contribution, in any amount, will help us. You may donate Alex McFarland Ministries, P.O. Box 485, Pleasant Garden, North Carolina 27313, Pleasant Garden, North Carolina, or you may give securely online at alexmcfarland.com.
Thanks for listening. Thanks to Mr. Gary Harris and East Rankin Academy. May God bless you, and may God bless America. Alex McFarland Ministries are made possible through the prayers and financial support of partners like you. For over 20 years, this ministry has been bringing individuals into a personal relationship with Christ and has been equipping people to stand strong for truth. Learn more and donate securely online at alexmcfarland.com. You may also reach us at alexmcfarland.com, P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404, or by calling 1-877-YES-GOD and the number 1.
That's 1-877-Y-E-S-G-O-D 1. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again on the next edition of the Alex McFarland Show. Christian author and speaker Alex McFarland is an advocate for Christian apologetics. Teaching in more than 2,200 churches around the world, schools, and college campuses, Alex is driven by a desire to help people grow in relationship with God. He arms his audiences with the tools they need to defend their faith, while also empowering the unchurched to find out the truth for themselves. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex is a sound voice who speaks timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. With 18 published books to his name, it's no surprise that CNN, Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets have described Alex as a religion and culture expert. To learn more about Alex and to book him as a speaker at your next event, visit alexmcfarland.com or you can contact us directly by emailing booking at alexmcfarland.com.
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