Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show with your host, Eric Metaxus.

Oz, you were just bringing up an issue.

I was so glad to hear you bring it up because I'd forgotten.

But oftentimes we hear people with tremendous vapidity talking about the early church and comparing where we are now to the early church.

And I think what could be more preposterous? The early church was horrifically persecuted under the Roman

empire, so the idea that we can act the way they did. In some ways, it's just preposterous,

but people don't seem to really understand these historical parallels. I don't know if that's

where you were going, but please continue your thought. No, it was indeed where I was going, because

the early church, of course, could not engage politically. They were under a dictatorship of the

Roman Caesars and the Roman Empire, as you say, many of them paid for it with their life.

But it's so foolish because they don't know the Old Testament, and above all the way the Old Testament, is the precedent and the blueprint for America.

So just as in the covenant in Exodus, every Jew responsible for every Jew.

So in the American experiment, every American responsible for the American experiment.

We, the people, a collective responsibility, and so on.

So it's both a lack of faithfulness in terms of being the Lordship of Christ acted out in society, but also a complete failure to

understand American citizenship. Now, of course, citizenship hasn't been taught. So you take, say,

the immigration issue. Is it the wall or is it sanctuary cities? In all the debate I've heard

in Washington for 30 odd years now, nobody mentions citizenship.

The point of boundaries is identity.

You've got to know who you are.

And as Samuel Huntingdon used to say, it's still relatively easy and even easier under President Biden to get your naturalization papers become

American. But it's increasingly difficult to know what it is to be American. And we should know

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