Unmoored: America Adrift in Historical Forgetfulness and Finding Our Way Back

Carl and Matthew are back in the studio with this next, but new, podcast. This "episode 0" is an overview intro of the coming podcast. Episode 1 will come out September 16, 2025 with the following episodes coming weekly after that.

This podcast does have a link back to the first podcast, Unmoored as that podcast argued that the US founders believed that to make this governing idea work ("government of the people"), there had to be a common moral virtue foundation. For those founders, the foundation was based around Christianity. Should we care today about that? What evidence is there that Christianity is real or worth our time?

To study or understand any religion or philosophy, you must look at the foundational documents. For Christianity, that is the Bible. This podcast will not be looking at the religious concepts within the Christian faith, but rather we will examine the Bible as a historical document. We will consider the tests and concepts that Historians apply to any moment, event, or personage from the past.

Episode 1 will be coming out September 16, 2025.

Surprise! I am so happy to share this fourth bonus episode with you in which my friend Kurt Powers joined me for a last examination of the argument of the podcast. Kurt used to manage his own podcast called "The Powers Project." He examined a far-ranging set of issues including personal health, philosophical issues, and historical topics. I was privileged to be on the podcast 8 times, and you can hear those at this playlist on my YouTube channel.

Through my doctoral project research, Kurt was a participant in some of the meetings I hosted with invested thinkers, seeking to fine-tune my project. As the project became this podcast, Kurt was also one of the podcast experts I interviewed to learn more about the intricacies of producing and publishing. Kurt holds a different worldview than my own, though at points we are in lockstep. Through our many podcast interviews, I found Kurt to be a deep thinker, eager to listen, and willing to engage in fruitful conversation. Having his contribution in the initial planning stages was crucial to be accomplishment for my Doctoral project.

As the Unmoored Podcast went live, Kurt soon was in communication with things he was hearing. Coming from his worldview, he found ideas and concepts I was presenting to be in need of challenge. We began talking then about doing a bonus episode where he could present other views, and then have the two of us converse further about the points raised. Getting us both in the studio took longer than I wished (both of us with busy travel and work schedules), but we were able to pull it off in the Spring of 2025.

As always, would love if you sent me any questions or comments at [email protected]

Throughout the entire podcast, the audience was designed for both people of no spiritual religious faith claims and those who openly state that they are Christians. Matthew and I did our very best to keep the approach academic in nature, examining the primary sources, and simply seeking to uncover historical evidence that can guide us as a nation to a safe harbor, a place for flourishing for everyone.

If you listened to any of the episodes, you noticed that I cast two characters as representative of the tension and struggle of the nation over the past decades, building in intensity over these last 15-20 years. One of those represented the Conservative Christian who, I argue, has seemed to lean deeply towards some sort of "Christian Nationalism" as the solution for the nation...a stance I reject.

Through my study, now going back over 15 years at least, and with deeper focus since 2022, there were more conclusions that really aim directly and singularly at the Christian community. I point out yet again that such community includes me and Matthew. I've been an ordained Christian pastor for over 30 years, previously having served as the Senior Pastor of a small church for 18 years. My desire for "my group" to do well, to live wisely, to be a positive influence in the world is great. And sadly, I beleive in many respects "my group" has gotten off target.

So this bonus episode is Matthew and I examining more of the historical documents pertinent for Christians, found most easily in The Bible. And my focus is to highlight the specific things God says to those who claim His name about how to live, especially in days in which it may feel like you are the minority culture in a society.

As always, would love if you sent me any questions or comments at [email protected]

Continuing the examination of solutions, we bring the podcast (at least season one) to its conclusion. Here in part two, we return to the three crucial problems that I laid out in episode 1: our national addiction to ease and comfort, hyper-individuality leading to collapse of community, and postmodernism which enshrines a viewpoint that "the only thing that is true is whatever I deem true for me." We spend time discussing these three issues as a part of finding safe harbor, offering ideas and actions one could take to address each problem. Individually, each of us can take action to mitigate the problems that have negatively impacted society.

To conclude, we come back to our two characters of the story and address each. Each has the opportunity to be brave in confronting their stance about or relationship to Christianity, especially with that faith's core position in our national history. Whether a person or group will actually want to help find safe harbor remains to be seen, but I believe we can find our way forward, away from this unmoored dangerous situation if both of our characters address the spiritual interior issues.

Then to conclude the episode and the podcast overall, we come back to our two characters of the story and address each. Each has the opportunity to be brave in confronting their stance about or relationship to Christianity, especially with that faith's core position in our national history. Whether a person or group will actually want to help find safe harbor remains to be seen, but I believe we can find our way forward, away from this unmoored dangerous situation if both of our characters address the spiritual interior issues.

Thank you for listening through this podcast. If you ever had any questions or want to make any comments, you can always reach me at [email protected].

We come to the end of our journey and its time to draw out conclusions, hopefully seeing possible solutions that will help us move into a safe harbor. Episodes 8-10 examined the core foundational documents of the USA and from those we have see how our "Founders" constructed the nation. From that, we discerned within the founding the vital element of the Christian spiritual ethos that they believed were central to that founding, and yet that faith was not enshrined as a singular or sole core founding theme.

Due to time considerations, our conclusion will stretch over two episodes. In this first part, we begin the conversation going slightly deeper into "civic lessons" related to the USA founding documents. Then we look at some general observations based on the information we've previously discussed. We lay out then core points that comprise what a solution broadly can be for us, painting a path forward. We review the lessons from Rome and Athens that remind us how easily "government of the people" can be lost.

Finally, noting that IF we do want to try and keep our unique structure, then we must be willing to work collectively to restore our spiritual moral and virtue foundation. To that end, we consider how a spiritual foundation could be restored or, potentially, constructed anew, even if the society no longer holds one singular majority religious faith.

We can find common ground around morals and virtues, and then we must determine to teach those morals and virtues to the children of the nation. We can leave this unmoored, "in danger", state and move forward to a safe harbor.

For our second Bonus Episode, I am returning to a historical point that I made in Episode 8. In that episode, I first introduced my concept of "Four Founding Themes" that emerge from an examination of English colonization. When I cover European colonization in my college classes on early US History, one thing that I do with my students is to look for larger patterns to help us understand what is going on. I do this with them as we look at Spanish, French, and Dutch colonization, and then go into even more depth on English colonization. With the English colonies, we spend more time here is because the British won the geopolitical struggle for dominance in Europe, and that played out in the New World. So, what clues can we discover that helps us understand how those colonies developed into a new nation called the United States? For me, then, there are four dominant themes that one can uncover with these early colonies: Capitalism, Christianity, Risk, and Rebellion. In this bonus episode, I explore this in-depth with you to help explain what I had briefly described in the earlier episode.

If you want to read more about some of the historical moments that I mentioned, here you go:

• Bacon's Rebellion
• Paxton Boys or you can read more in this Brittanica article
• Shays Rebellion
• Frederick Turner's "Frontier Thesis" about the impact of the closing of the US Frontier, paper given in 1893
• About the concept of "Frontier Thesis"

Episode 10 considers the creation of our second set of governing documents, what we today call "The Constitution," in 1787, ratified in 1788, provides us our last bit of evidence to the larger point of the podcast–what did the Founders want to do with Christianity?

We have been examining what was necessary to sustain our unique foundation for the USA civic society. We've been seeking what was lost, prior to this time we described in episode 1, where the data is overwhelming that something massive has shifted to where all metrics point in a downward trend, with multiple crises clearly evidence throughout society.

If the Founders wanted to create a "Christian Nation" as our Conservative Christian character proposes today, they could have. If they wanted to create a nation with no religion, no Christianity even acknowledged, banished to private concerns or even fully banished from society, they could have.

They did neither thing.

The podcast seeks to find evidence in our history to help us regain safe harbor, the very structure that had allowed for our great national success, a success that was obvious until things began to unravel over the decades after WW2, especially in the last 30-40 years. The US Constitution is the last governing document produced in our national history, and so is the last thing to consider in seeking to grasp the mind of the Founders.

We also examine the state constitutions created in the years immediately after 1776. You can go read them yourself at the links below. Note that Rhode Island did not write a new constitution until 1842.

• South Carolina in 1776 and in 1778
• Delaware in 1776
• Georgia in 1777
• Maryland in 1777
• New Hampshire in 1776
• New Jersey in 1776
• New York in 1777
• North Carolina in 1776
• Pennsylvania in 1776
• Vermont in 1777
• Massachusetts in 1780
• Virginia in 1776
• also the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom

In trying to understand the unique concepts of the USA, we need to start with two key documents written in the heady days of the Second Continental Congress: The Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

We saw in the last episode, Christianity was one of the four core themes we can glean from the colonization efforts that formed the USA. In case you missed it, the other three are Capitalism, Risk, and Rebellion. There's a larger point here about that hypothesis regarding understanding the USA, but that's not this podcast. Perhaps I will add a bonus episode going into depth about this to help people better understand the nation called "the USA."

Does that fact that the colonists were intentionally bringing Christianity with them, asserting its importance to their future success, mean that decades later, at the founding of the nation, that they were expecting a "Christian Nation" to follow? What about decades later, as national leaders gathered in Philadelphia in the crucial days leading to the American Revolution…did they perceived themselves creating a "Christian Nation"?

You can read the Declaration of Independence and also the Articles of Confederation for yourself. In the Declaration we focus on the opening explanation, noting editorial changes that were made by Franklin and Adams ("hold these truths to be self-evident") and a few other parts there. Then, we shift focus to the concluding paragraph to two key editorial changes made that inserted the general consensus of the group about the involvement of the Christian God in their effort. With the Articles, we specifically noted Article III and the conclusion that starts, at the end, with "And, whereas...."

We've seen that Christianity is vital to the type of society that everyone seems to want—individual rights, protections in liberty, etc… This vital need is both in acknowledging how Christianity brought these concepts to the West (and then others through "the West") and how Christianity as guiding structure provided US culture the means for its success (that others strive to move here for).

So, we NEED Christianity…but WE ALSO HAVE SEEN that the "Christendom" concept ("Christian Nationalism") is ruinous to the faith and also how the faith is expressed, especially in a civic structure. So, what did our first colonists believe?

Were the first colonists trying to establish a "Christendom," a "Christian nation"…a nation only for Christians where there would be religious faith requirements before holding office or opening a business, as was true in the nations from which these colonists came? Or, were they somehow trying to escape religion altogether, eager to create a nation on some broad concept of "Natural Law" in which formal religions would be either absent, or at worst, only something for the individual, something kept quiet and private? To find these answers, we must examine the first English-speaking colonies to see what lessons they can provide.

We will read The Mayflower Compact and also excerpts from the Sermon of John Winthrop. Both documents are crucial to understanding the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. We will also examine Jamestown and St. Mary's. For St. Mary's we will read excerpts from their revolutionary Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.

In our first Bonus Episode, Dr. Sandy Shugart joins me for an indepth examination of the Enlightenment Project and my contention that the promises of such were really a myth, one that has left society disillusioned and bordering on cynicism due to discovery that they were misled. The humans are not improving, not really changing at all from what our species has been all along, certainly not changing when the only agency of change is human will. But why? Dr. Shugart, one of my most important mentors, currently serving as a Senior Fellow at The Aspen Institute and also Quo Vadis Institute (based in Salzburg, Austria), stopped by to help me understand this tension within our modern secular society.

In the early episodes, particularly 1 and 3, I spoke about the Enlightenment and its impact on how we view the world. Starting at some point in the 1600s and building steam in the 1700s, a new way of thinking and considering life, both individually and corporately in civic structures, was emerging. With the American and French Revolutions, the Enlightenment took full form and was soon being elevated to a high plane, perhaps a mystical plane, and in that growing sense of a new way of thinking, the sense of "promises" from this Enlightenment emerged.

And yet, by the late 20th century, it has been manifestly apparent that those promises never arrived, particularly the myth that the human as species could and would improve. Some "Enlightenment Prophets" seemed to believe that a utopia would be soon achieved, but the horrendous 20th century, a century often held up as the triumph of the Enlightenment, was evidence enough to the failure of this concept.

So, as the 21st century has emerged, disillusionment has set in, particularly among the young (say, 40-under crowd). Since faith or even simply "the transcendent" has been marginalized, many have moved into cynicism, depression, and a general sense that life is not worth living. Of course this is part of my raison d'être for the podcast, and we needed to take a deeper dive in order to see the complexities of this topic.