So welcome to the podcast. This is episode 356. My name is Douglas Wilson, and I am glad you decided to join us.

So what I wanted to do in this initial segment this time around was to talk a little bit about a phrase that's current right now and talk a little bit about what it means and why we're against it,

why we think there's a problem with it. That phrase is the post-war consensus. The post-war

consensus. I'm going to back up and give you a flyover high-level religious history of the United

States. The United States, when it was

founded, was explicitly Christian. Nine of the 13 colonies had a formal arrangement with a

particular Christian denomination. The First Amendment simply said that we would not have a church of the United States.

It was not a secular document. It was not attempting a radical secularism. There were no religious

tests for office at the federal level, but there were plenty of them at the state level.

So the United States was overwhelmingly European, white, Anglo-Saxon, and very, very Christian. In the 19th century,

things broadened out a bit when Catholics, Irish Catholics began to arrive in significant numbers,

but it was still European and Christian,

as opposed to the sort of the riot and the pandemonium that we have going on now.

In 1892, there was a Supreme Court decision that found that the United States was, in fact, a Christian nation. That Supreme Court decision that found that the United States was in fact a Christian nation. That

Supreme Court decision was Holy Trinity versus the United States of America, which is a wonderful

and exquisite court case name. U.S. versus the Holy Trinity. Holy Trinity was a church in New York

that had hired a British

minister, and they paid his passage over, and that happened to be against the law to hire

workers and pay their passage. And so there's a case that went all the way to Supreme Court over

that. This all happened. The United States was considered by Americans overwhelmingly to be a Christian nation,

and this happened without any formal ecclesiastical attachment. So in England, there's the Church

of England. In Denmark, there's the Church of Denmark, and so forth. We did not have a church of the

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