Thank you for being a valued subscriber to The Washington Times. We appreciate your support for honest, in-depth journalism and hard-hitting commentary. Please enjoy this exclusive conversation on the path to restoring our country’s spiritual and moral foundations. Bold & Blunt podcast host Cheryl Chumley sits down with Lt. Col. Allen West, host of the podcast Steadfast and Loyal, for an open and frank discussion on faith, politics and the rule of law.
[CHUMLEY] One of the things I love discussing with you is the intersection of faith and freedom. Because, as you always say — and as I completely agree — the foundations of America’s liberties are faith in God. And it’s with interest that I saw President Donald Trump hold an event at the White House faith office. I want to read a couple of quotes and get your response. President Trump said, “A nation that prays is a nation that prospers.” And then his senior advisor for that faith office, Paula White, said America’s spiritual and moral foundations have been restored. Do you think that our moral and spiritual foundations have been restored?
[WEST] Well, it’s in the process of being restored. There’s no doubt about that. And there are a lot of things that we still must work toward. And you know, the important thing is that we have to have a continuum of leadership that keeps us on that restoration process. So when I look at our faith and our freedom, we have to understand that natural rights theory, which says that our life, our liberty, our property, our pursuit of happiness are endowed to us by the Creator God, the Judeo-Christian faith heritage God, and that’s enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. So the individual is sovereign in America because they have a relationship with a sovereign God, and that’s from whom they received their unalienable rights.
But I think it’s so important that we continue to press on this and not just say “okay, we have achieved it” because the progressive socialists left, the Marxists left, are always going to try to reimplant that secular humanism in and that centralized government control over our lives. I want to see us stop dismembering our unborn in the womb. I want to see us stop the mutilation of our children, and this whole thing about putting little boys into girls’ sports and things of this nature. So I think we’re on the right path, but we can’t start dancing in the end zone yet.
[CHUMLEY] Where do you think it turned in this country? Because when I was growing up, I knew plenty of people who were atheists. But in my school, and this was a public school in the blue state of Massachusetts, every day started with a moment of silence where you could also pray, and it just seemed like, even atheists, people back then were tolerant of other people’s religion. But somewhere we turned the corner where it’s just been hostile openly toward those of faith. When did that happen?
[WEST] Well, I think it happened when we went to the courts and the courts made all these decisions about you cannot have prayer in schools and you cannot have any type of worship outside of the church. So what we’re really doing is we’re violating this whole thing called the separation of church and state, which is what the left, the secular humanists, try to use against the Christians and people of faith. Because what the separation of the church estate did, it tried to protect the church, it tried to protect religion, it tried to protect the faith from the government. And that’s going back to, of course, King Henry declaring the head of state and also the head of the church, being the Church of England. So I think we went to the courts to decide these things. Once upon a time, you couldn’t go out and openly burn the American flag. Then, all of a sudden, the courts decided it’s part of freedom of expression. So I think that we have to stop running to courts to implement an ideological agenda of the secular humanists and progressive socialists left. And we’ve just got to sometimes use common sense and get back to our fundamental documents.
[CHUMLEY] How concerned are you when you look at, for instance, what’s taking place in New York City with Zohran Mamdani, and then there were a couple of mayoral candidates out in Minneapolis, card-carrying members of socialist parties out there. And it just seems like these types of politicians are being, not only welcomed in the Democrat Party, as if they’re just other Democrats, but cheered, especially by America’s youth. How concerned are you with that? And how is that tied to the state of America’s faith?
[WEST] You go back into our system of education, you look at Harvard. Harvard was established as a religious institution many years ago. You know that. You’re from Massachusetts. But look at what Harvard has become today, to the point where we’re allowing people that aren’t even citizens to come in and incite violence against a certain group of people just because of their heritage and their race and the Jewish students there. So I think once again, it’s important that we get back into the system of education and have a system of education and not a system of indoctrination that is basically raising the next generation of little Marxists and Socialists, and Communists, even. And when you look at someone like Zohran Mamdani, I think you see the is manifestation of this Red-Green alliance, this alliance between the communists and Marxists and also Islamic fascists and Islamic jihadists.
We kind of got a sense of that with Barack Obama, who was definitely a centralized government figure, a socialist. But then he was also someone who tended to lean toward Islamic jihadists. He was very comfortable with the Muslim Brotherhood, invited him to his speech in 2009 at the University of Cairo. So I think it’s an education issue, and I think it’s also an issue of understanding that these are subversive elements that are contradictory to our rule of law, and we’ve got to start articulating that. We have to have the boldness and the bluntness, to borrow your podcast name, to be able to talk about these things and not run away in fear of really identifying these people for who they are.
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