Jim DeMint on What the Bible Really Says About Creation, End Times, and American Politics

Is the real crisis in American politics actually a crisis of biblical authority and interpretation? 

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram sit down with former U.S. Senator Jim DeMint to talk about his new book, What the Bible Really Says: About Creation, End Times, Politics, and You. Drawing on more than two decades in business, Congress, and the conservative movement, DeMint argues that Western civilization—and especially the United States—was built on biblical, Judeo-Christian assumptions about morality, family, and public life, and that those foundations are now being systematically discredited. 

Will presses DeMint on what it actually means to say America was founded on Christian values, especially in light of the violent treatment of Indigenous peoples, while Josh reflects on his own journey from “America as a Christian nation” to a more complicated, historically informed view. Together, they explore DeMint’s big claim that the Bible itself is true, but many of our long-held interpretations—about creation, science, and the end times—may not be. The conversation ranges from Galileo and the church’s resistance to science, to how Christians should think about nation-states, markets, and political power without confusing America with the kingdom of God. If you’re wrestling with faith, Scripture, and the future of American democracy, this is a thoughtful, challenging listen.

Buy the book: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781956454901

Guest Bio:
Jim DeMint is a conservative leader, author, and former U.S. Senator from South Carolina. After a career in marketing and business, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005 and in the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. He later became president of The Heritage Foundation and now serves as chairman of the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization focused on training and supporting conservative lawmakers and staff in Washington, D.C.

Transcript

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Well, hey there, faithful politics listeners and viewers. If you're joining us on YouTube guys, thanks for being here for another great episode of the faithful politics podcast. And you know, here we love to get all sorts of leaders and thinkers and people who are looking at what's happening in political and faithful theological realms. And guys, we are glad to be here today. I'm Josh Bertram. I'm the faithful host. And of course I have Will Wright, our political host. Will, it's good to see you. It's good to be seen. Absolutely and hey guys one second before I jump into our guests I'm super excited to talk to introduce you guys too but make sure you like subscribe do that stuff that's gonna get this content out because we want people that are sane and listening to sane people talk about sane things instead of all the insanity that is now out there and all the hostility and this is a place where we want sanity so please continue to help us and share this content. So our guest today is Jim DeMint. Jim DeMint is a conservative leader, author, and former U.S. Senator from South Carolina. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina. He's got his bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee and an MBA from Clemson University. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005 and in the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. After leaving Congress, he became president of the Heritage Foundation and later founded the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization dedicated to training and supporting conservative leaders in Washington. He's been a prominent voice in the modern conservative movement, especially during the rise of the Tea Party era, and is known for its advocacy of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the role of faith in public life. He's the author of several books, including Saving Freedom, falling in love with America again and his newest release, which we're going to talk to him about today. What the Bible really says about creation in times politics and you Jim Senator. Are we supposed to call former senators senators or sir or your majesty? I'll just make it simple. You can just call me the honorable. No, Jim is very good today. I much appreciate Jim. Senate is, well, I shouldn't say it, but it's kind of a stain on my reputation. But Jim is good and it's good to be with you because people who talk about faith in politics are likely to be lonely people. I've been... I've been told if you want to keep your friends, don't talk about politics and religion. And I'm afraid that I talk about both of those too much. So thanks for maybe being the only two people in the country who want to listen today. So. Well, you are welcome and we are super happy to have you here. So I gotta just ask, em you framed this book, we're just gonna jump right in, is that okay? Yeah, let's do. So you framed the book about truth versus deception. And so I would love to kind of hear like, what motivated you to write this book about truth versus deception and what's happening here in the United States? What motivated you to do the work that it took to get this book made and published? Well, off and on, I've been working on the research for 20 years. And I was in the business world 25 years before I ran for Congress. I've been working in house and Senate and other organizations now for 25 years. I'm trying to figure out what's wrong. Where's all the division, the vitriol, where's it coming from? And for a while it looked like we just disagreed on issues or maybe you're just loyal to your party. The more I look at it, the more I really search for root causes of what's wrong in America and really around the world, it comes back to the very basics of what we were founded on. All of Western civilization and especially America was founded on biblical Judeo-Christian values. And what I've seen during my time in Congress and really started well before that is this, the systematic discrediting of the Bible as being true, as being the Word of God, or something that we can rely on to begin to develop our opinions, whether it's about the culture or about politics. So the motivation for this is to look at why the Bible is being discredited and try to figure out is it that the Bible is really not true? Or is it the way we have interpreted the Bible? And I believe that science is there to help us discover God's Word, but it's been used to kind of discredit God's Word. so that's the point I'm trying to make. The Bible is true, but that doesn't necessarily mean the interpretations over the years have been true. One of the things I point out in the book, uh what the Bible really says is, Galileo was devout Christian. uh But he, through science, figured out that it was the earth that was circling the sun. Yet somehow through the scriptures, the church had decided the earth was the center of the universe and the sun was circling that. So when he came out with this scientific observation, he was thrown out of the church and maligned, but he turned out to be right. So part of what I do in the book is try to align what the Bible says with credible science. to see if we can again get back to making this Bible credible that we can use to build our life on. I really love that and appreciate you. You mentioned that, but I want to kind of just go back to one thing that you said that I think would probably ah anybody listening or watching may just want some additional clarification. And you said that a miracle was sort of founded on Judeo-Christian uh sort of values. So, like, when I hear that, ah I mean, I don't disagree that, you know, the people that came over here, like, had a faith. uh had, you know, we're Christians, a lot of them. uh But then also I think of like, like we did a lot of harm to like the Indigenous people that were here. So like, like help me better understand the founding of America in a Christian context, and then sort of like layer on, you know, sort of like the things we did to Indigenous people. Yeah, well, it's a good question. mean, the bottom line of all of this is Christians are probably the biggest sinners in the room. They're the ones who at least admit it. And there were certainly a lot of mistakes made. And I don't know how much of what we hear is true. But what we do know is there's not a nation on earth that was not founded by one group of people taking land from another group of people, often through violence. And so we know that, and again, I don't want to get into too much history. I'm not an expert on the indigenous people, but most of them were nomadic, moved around, did not necessarily own land as we understand it. There were a lot of territorial fights between indigenous people. so again, as we look at our history, clearly a lot of mistakes were made there and a lot of other places too. So I'm not trying to say that because we were founded on Judeo-Christian values that we were always a good reflection of Jesus. And we're not today. uh And clearly, it's one of the things I point out in the book is I just don't think Christians are actually displaying a lot of that behavior, particularly as we mix into this political world. Sometimes you can't tell the good from the evil there. So that's a good question. But when I say founded on Judeo-Christian values, I'm not talking about we were never founded, except maybe for some of the settlements on being a forced Christian nation. That was never the idea. The Constitution didn't have anything to do with forcing people to adopt any particular religion. But what the Bible did do, it established the basics of our civilization, of the concepts of marriage and family. of basic morality, uh charity, compassion, how we live together. uh so again, we don't do it perfectly, but that's the whole concept of repenting and coming to God and hoping to become better as we move forward. But the Bible again has been the guide even to the concepts like nation states. is a biblical concept, the idea of trading and markets, which we call capitalism today, was clearly in the Bible. And so it was just a part of the foundational development of our country, but in no way did it make us uh righteous in and of itself. Yeah, I really liked that. And this is something that I've been honestly, I've been wrestling with myself, to be honest. So I've had this like... I've had this um experience where I grew up very conservative um in an evangelical home. I still consider myself evangelical. I was Pentecostal and in assemblies of God for most of my life. And I very much had this view of the America as a Christian nation, but I didn't really know what that meant, right? I didn't really understand. I just thought, hey, Christianity is good. Why wouldn't we want this to be a Christian nation? You know, it was a very, very young view, an immature view, I think, personally looking back. And yet you're absolutely right that the foundations of our country were came from the soil that a Christian Western world hat, right? And the historical process from going from uh early church to Constantine and Constantine to the split in the church and the split in the church, the Reformation, the Reformation today, it's almost mind numbingly complicated. And yet at the same time, it seems very clear that our country, looking at things like the Mayflower Compact, looking at things like the confederations and the Articles of Confederation, not the one for the United States, but the Articles of Confederation that united different colonies together, they expressly say, we came over here for the purpose of spreading the gospel, essentially. And so we would look at that. And I think it's a bad historical practice to deny the heavy Christian influence and even explicit wording within many of these documents. And yet though, when we get to the Declaration of Independence, when we get to the Constitution, which doesn't mention a God, but certainly I would think uh it came out of a place where God was assumed. It's like almost like the Book of Esther maybe in some ways where God isn't mentioned, uh-oh, and yet he's assumed. You still there, I think we lost him either dropped off or I'm going to stop the recording just in he's trying to log back on again.