Transcription
One paragraph published June of this year. No news outlet has touched it yet.
I've supported blue laws, state laws that shut down businesses on certain days like Thanksgiving because these days are sacred and everyone ought to be able to participate in them equally, but we've got a long ways to go. That that's not a pastor. That is the sitting vice president of the United States, JD Vance, in his new book, Communion. Three things in one sentence. I've supported blue laws. That's present tense. Laws that shut down businesses, government power over commerce because these days are sacred. A a religious word doing the legal work. And then we've got a long ways to go towards what? Here's why that stops me cold.
In 1888, an American Christian writer predicted that one day in Free America, the nation that invented separation of church and state, lawmakers would be appalled for using state power to protect a sacred day. And she said it wouldn't arrive looking like tyranny, it would arrive looking like compassion. I read all 262 pages of this book. And tonight, I'm going to show you that very old prophecy assembling itself in plain sight inside a warm, funny, sincere memoir about a man finding Jesus. And the strangest thing isn't the blue laws. It's what Vance's own grandmother believed about the church that he joined. This is not a manifesto. It's a conversion story. And honestly, it's a likable one. He loses his faith in Iraq and becomes an atheist at Yale. And slowly he walks back into the Roman Catholic Church. His logic in his own words is, "If the Titanic is going down, I'd rather be on board than hop on a lifeboat." Boy, I I think I'd rather get in a lifeboat. I The Titanic is going down today. Vance calls himself the most senior Catholic in the United States government. Nothing in this book twirls the mustache. And that's exactly the point. The the 1888 prediction never said this would come from villains. It said sincere people solving real problems with arguments so reasonable that opposing them sounds cruel. So look, the question is, what happens when good intention government power and and a sacred day show up in the same paragraph? Hit that subscribe button because you're not going to see me again and you want to know the answers to some of these questions in the future because the next video coming out is amazing.
Start where Vance starts. His grandmother chapter 8. He's wrestling with becoming a Catholic and he remembers Mamma. His own pen uh on page 113 says she felt the Catholic way of worship was rather formal but what mattered to her was Jesus. Revelation 18 may have been about corruption of the Catholic Church, the horror of Babylon, and all of its hocus pocus, or it may have been about something else. The vice president put Revelation 18 and the Catholic Church and the horror of Babylon in the same sentence. Revelation 17 and 18, John sees a woman. In scripture, a woman is shorthand for the church. Jeremiah 6:2, I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate woman. Paul in 2 Corinthians says, I have espoused you to one husband, to Christ, pure women, faithful church. So, an impure woman, what's that? Well, it's a church that has been unfaithful. How? Well, Revelation 17:2 says, "She commits fornication with the kings of the earth." A church in bed with state power. That's the whole scandal in the image. Not a church that loved Jesus badly. A church in a relationship it was never meant to have with the government. Hold that. Don't conclude anything yet. Know this. Mama's suspicion was once the standard reading for every Protestant reformer. Luther, Wesley, Wliffe. That view was normal. Now it's strange.
Now the most important chapter in the book chapter 8 is titled of new things that's a translation raram nirvaram an encyclical from the pope Leo I 13th in 1891 vice president named a chapter of his spiritual autobiography after a papal document on politics and economics. What does it teach? It teaches that the state should protect the vulnerable, guarantee wages, and ensure workers get rest from labor, not for vicious indulgence, but for their religious and familial obligations. Vance reads that and thinks of his relatives in retail, missing Thanksgiving and church over brutal schedules. Then he writes the most quietly loaded sentence in the book. Churches will struggle to attract workingclass people if those people are forced to work on Sundays. And the Pope's vision, Pope Leo, the 13th theory of human nature strikes a balance so perfect it seems divinely inspired. Divinely inspired. A vice president on the Pope's blueprint for how the state arranges labor, rest, and worship. Here's where this show is different. I'm not going to tell you he's 100% wrong because 99% truth is 100% error. He's 95% right here. And that's the hook. Why? Wh happens here. Is rest sacred? Just go to the second page of your Bible, Genesis chapter 2. And he rested, it says, on the seventh day. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it. Sanctified it. Made it sacred before sin, before Israel, before any church existed. God built a sacred rest day into the architecture of the world before any sin existed in it. Is it cruel to send a 16-year-old to a register at 400 p.m. Thanksgiving to 4:00 a.m. on Friday? Vance calls it gross. And Jesus agrees with that instinct. I think Vance compassion here is the most biblical thing in the book.
So, so where's the missing 5% then? Which day did God bless? The 7th. Exodus 20. The only commandment that starts with remember. As if God knew we'd forget. The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord God, thy God. Why? For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. It's a memorial of creation. And a memorial can't be moved. Your birthday doesn't work on someone else's birthday. The seventh day, Saturday, and the funny thing is it's in the same language. Sabbath and Saturday are the exact same word. For instance, Spanish is sabado. And in 66 books of the Bible, there is not one verse transferring that sacredness to Sunday. So if the Bible never changed the day, who did? The answer is in Vance's book. He just doesn't know it yet. Final chapter, he he's in the Rome telling the early church story. Nero, Peter's martyrdom, then Constantine, the emperor with the cross in the sky who ended the persecution. Vance closes with the line he loves. Caesar was dead. Christ still lived. It's beautiful, but he skips the most consequential thing Constantine ever did. On March 7 of 3:21 AD, Constine, still stamping the sun god on his coins, issued the first sun day law in history. On the venerable day of the sun, let the magistrates and people rest and let all the workshops be closed. The day of the sun, not the Sabbath of scripture, Rome's Sunday worship day. It's Pagan sun worship fused with Christianity by imperial decree. A generation later, the council of Leadyia ruled from the church side. Christians must not rest on the 7th day Sabbath. They must work on it and rest on Sunday instead. Church and state passed one law back and forth. Caesar didn't die. Caesar got baptized. And Rome has never hidden it. The converts catechism of standard doctrine, standard instruction for converts says this, which is the Sabbath day. Saturday is the Sabbath day. Why do we observe Sunday instead of Saturday? Because the Catholic Church transferred the solimnity from Saturday to Sunday. Rome points to the transfer as proof of her authority. Daniel saw 25 decades ago that this would happen in Daniel 7:25. A power rising from Rome that would think to change times and laws and not succeed. You you can't change God's law. You you think to. You claim to. Which commandment involves both a time and a law? Exactly one. There's no other commandment like it. the one that starts with remember. So when a modern statesman calls for the papal blueprint for state protected sacred rest divinely inspired, there's a very old prediction that says watch that space because it names a country ours.
Episodes like this take quite a while to produce. So if you want more of this stuff, join us on Patreon. patreon.com/strangenormal. Now, back to the country. Revelation 13, a a first beast rises out of the sea, and waters, says Revelation 17:15, are peoples and multitudes and nations, crowded old Europe, churches fused with states, dominating for centuries. We just told that story. Then in verse 11, a second power up out of the earth, empty land, young, two horns like a lamb, gentle, Christlike, a nation built on two lamblike principles. And the world had never seen this before. Civil liberty and religious liberty. No king, no power rising up in the 1700s exactly as the old power went into decline. History offers one candidate, only one. But the verse keeps going. It says, "He spake as a dragon, and this gentle power ends up causing the world to worship and pressing a mark so that no man might buy or sell without it." Look at the pressure point. No armies, commerce, economic laws wrapped around the worship issue. A Thanksgiving blue law is not the mark of the beast. Hear me plainly, but watch the wiring. I've supported blue laws, he says, because these days are sacred. Not like connects. In one American sentence, the exact three wires Revelation 13 says get connected. Government power over commerce for sacred time. The wires aren't live yet, but somebody's done with the wiring. And his book, Commerce, keeps handing me recipes that most readers never even notice. Vance himself twice a Christian statesman. He says, "Faith is not a weird little compartment of my life. Sometimes I appeal to for more of an hour or two on Sundays. It is a lens through which I see the world." He describes his Senate run as a effort to make more explicitly Christian arguments about the economy. He writes, "We're fine telling a businessman he must go to church and tithe, but not that he must pay his people a fair wage." [clears throat] Notice must go to church is the controversial half of that sentence.
On Europe's leaders. They had taken God out of their post-war oaths and allegiances, and they wondered why so much else had been lost as well. On Pope's preaching social doctrine, none of these popes were communists. They were just Christians. But now the 1888 prediction, word for word. Even in free America, rulers and legislators in order to secure public favor will yield to popular demand for a law enforcing Sunday observance. She said church and state dignitaries would unite to bribe and persuade or compel all classes to honor that day and that it would ride on the real crisis with the sacred day sold as remedy for the nation in trouble. Now Vance's diagnosis secularism has produced social strife. We ran an experiment of replacing Christianity culture. The fruit is loneliness, failing birth rates, division, but his remedy is recchristianizing the culture. And we're helpful the law. Protect the sacred days for the workers, for the families, for the nation. She didn't say tyrants would demand it. She said that people would demand it and legislators would yield to public favor. Hm. To secure public favor, compassion first, law second, enforcement last. That's not a prediction about one man. It's a sequence and it has visibly started. One piece remains though. None of this works while Protestants and Catholics distrust each other. And in 1888, that gulf looked permanent. The same writer made a second prediction. The decisive sign would be Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the Gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power. And in 1888, that was laughable. But now read the end of communion. Vance's closest friend in politics, Charlie Kirk, lifelong evangelical, assassinated in 2025. The Catholic vice president escorted his body home and writes, "Charlie called himself the most Catholic evangelical in the world. Charlie taught me to love all parts of our Christian communion." Then here's the book's thesis. As Christians, we are all together part of the same church. Charlie Kirk and Pope Francis despite their different views. The book is The Handshake. An evangelical raised now Catholic vice president telling a 100 million Protestants the Reformation Gulf is family drama. One body act like it in culture and yes in politics. Even his theology reviewers for this book were Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist side by side. Hear me out. Love your Catholic neighbors. Love your Catholic friends. Love your pres Protestant people. Love people in general. That is Christianity. This isn't anything against the Catholics. The prediction was never about affection. It's about architecture. institutions merging moral agendas and reaching together for the machinery of the state. Affection is the doorway. Legislation is the room. A book called Communion whose emotional climax is Protestant martyr and a pope in the same church and whose policy climax is I've supported blue laws but we've got a long way to go. That's not fulfillment. But you can see the fulfillment from here.
So where does this leave us today? There's no witch hunts. Revelation 18 says, "Come out of her, my people." God has a people in every communion. And nobody bears any mark today. The test only comes when the law forces a choice. And when it does, it won't be about a calendar. It'll be about Acts 5:29. We have to obey God rather than man because God's final call in Revelation 14 is worship him that made heaven and earth. This is the Sabbath commandment word for word. So here's my last point. Man's sacred day will eventually be required. God's sacred day has only ever been offered. One is enforced from a capital and one is kept from a cross. Take the gift before anyone offers you the substitute. Come unto me and I will give you rest. The Bible says, and here's the chapter I I skipped tonight on purpose to see you at the afterparty. This is an interesting one. Vance's father dying, but certain God will heal him. And the belief Vance reaches for instead that the dead are awake and aware. The Bible calls that the other great deception of the last days. And it's already normal. See you in the next episode.