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Is it wrong for the church to be engaged in politics? Should Biblical principles guide our nation’s civil laws? What is the real meaning of “separation of church and state”? In this episode, we explore these questions and more with Pastor Rob McCoy, co-chair of Turning Point USA Faith.

Turning Point USA Faith offers free online courses, in-person events, resources for teachers and pastors, and more. To explore their offerings or support them in their mission of defending our God-given rights and restoring traditional biblical values in our nation, visit https://tpusafaith.com/.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Rob McCoy from Turning Point USA Faith. Rob, welcome.

Rob McCoy:
Thanks, Marlin. Good to be with you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Great to have you here. Through the advent of modern technology, we can be 3000 miles apart and yet together in the same space. I love it. As we get going here, I always like to ask people about themselves, your family, your background, your education, and your interests. Tell us a little bit about yourself, please.

Rob McCoy:
I was born and raised in Coronado, California, which is a small city in San Diego County on the other end of a large bridge at the end of a peninsula. Used to be an island, but now it's a peninsula. It was an idyllic childhood. My dad was a naval officer. My mom was very politically active, but we weren't churchgoers.

I don't remember praying with my folks or reading the Bible. I was an athlete. I swam and played water polo and got a scholarship for such. Came to Christ in college. Started a local chapter of a national Christian fraternity at Fresno State, started a Bible study, graduated, went into sales, got married, and went back into ministry.

Then I was ordained in Calvary Chapel, gosh, 30, 31 years ago maybe. And I've been doing ministry ever since. I've been the pastor at Calvary Chapel Thousand Oaks. We call it Calvary Chapel Godspeak. We've been there 26 years. I've been the mayor of the city of Thousand Oaks and also a city council member. As you were pointing out, I'm Charlie Kirk's pastor. I'm the co-chair of TPUSA Faith, and that's about it. Oh, Michelle and I've been married 34 years, be 35 come April. We have five kids and six grandkids.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wonderful!

Rob McCoy:
All the kids. Excuse me, all the kids are proof Michelle committed adultery because they're too good to be mine!

Marlin Detweiler:
I'm not touching that one! That's funny, I’m not touching that one. Tell us about Turning Point USA Faith. We have been engaged with people, guests here, and other conversations related to Turning Point Academy and other aspects of Turning Point. But tell us what Turning Point Faith does. What are you purposed to do?

Rob McCoy:
So I serendipitously met Charlie Kirk a little over five years ago. My youngest child, my youngest son, was asking me to look at some of these YouTube videos and some of the things posted, and I'm not really into social media. It's not something I do. I'm kind of a Luddite when it comes to things like that.

I ran into Charlie when I was speaking at a conservative radio convention in Ontario. I saw him in the wings and I was speaking before he was.

Marlin Detweiler:
Ontario, California, not Ontario, Canada.

Rob McCoy:
I said conservative, so obviously it's Ontario, California. Just kidding! California is not much more conservative. But I was on a panel with Jack Hibbs and Tim Thompson, two pastors, and they were talking about separation of church and state and pastors and politics. I was fielding most of the questions because I was the only pastor on the panel that was holding an elected office. I came off the stage, saw Charlie.

He said, “No guy like you exists.” And I said, “Why?” He goes, “A pastor in politics.” I said,”No guy like you exists.” He said, “What?” I said, “A young conservative,” and we became friends over time! Charlie had never spoken in a church before. He loves the Lord. He always expresses his faith on every campus he goes to.

I said, why haven't you spoken in a church? He says, churches don't want me because I'm political. I go, that's exactly where you should be. Politics is the highest form of community. It combines morality with sociability. If God didn't want us in politics, Charlie, he would never have invented marriage. Well, there you engage how to get along.

You know, Francis Schaeffer pointed it out. I said that's exactly where you should be. So he spoke at our church for the first time. Now he's spoken at hundreds of churches. He came to me one day and he said, how do we get the worst voting bloc in America, which is the 85 million so professing evangelical Christians, of which only half are registered to vote and about half of those registered to vote, only half of those vote? It is the most anemic and pathetic voting bloc in America, yet it's the one that holds the moral substance for the nation. It's the one that understands communism is a violation of two of the Ten Commandments. He said, “How do we get them engaged?” I said if we can't get them to come to the mountain, let's take the mountain to them. And he said, let's do pastors' conferences, let's do events, let's make a division of Turning Point and call it TPUSA Faith, because we don't want to mess with Dr. David Jeremiah's Turning Point. And honor him and let's make a TPUSA Faith and start doing that. And we did.

Four years ago we started and we've had pastors' conferences and believers' summits. It's been remarkable. I'm just sitting back and watching from just an idea to see how Charlie and the folks at Turning Point have implemented this.

We now have multiple divisions. As you know, we have a homeschooling portion of TPUSA Faith. We have biblical citizenship, which is another portion of TPUSA Faith. It's ongoing and profound, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's wonderful. Can you characterize what your goals are over the next five years in a way that we can understand?

Rob McCoy:
Yeah, remove wokeness from the evangelical church in America and let them awaken to realize that Matthew 16:18, the word isn't church. Jesus didn't use a religious term when he said “Upon this rock, I'll build my…” He didn't say church. He didn't use a religious term. He didn't say synagogue or temple. He deliberately used a secular term, ecclesia or ekklesia. Aristotle and the etymology of it clarified that it's city hall or public square.

When Tyndale used that one word, and he put assembly for that one word, he was hung, and his remains were burned. And so, you know, upon this rock, I'll build my public square, and the gates which enslave will not prevail. You'll know the truth. The truth will set you free. And as you know, the Harvard Law School graduates hear every commencement, the law is the wise restraints that make men free.

The law doesn't save, but it points us to Christ. As Galatians 3 says, it's a schoolteacher guardian to point us to Christ until faith comes. When Jesus warned of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees and of Herod, what he was warning was civil law without the moral law is a tool to enslave mankind.

Beware of that. That's leaven. The moral law, the Decalogue must be applied to civil law. So the wise restraints will make men free. You apply restraints towards evil in order to pursue excellence. Any athlete understands it. Any parent understands this. But somehow the church just doesn't get it. We've relegated the law, the Decalogue, to say we can't keep it. And that allows us to know that we're saved by grace through faith. It's a gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. Well, that's true, but the law is also a moral preservative, and it points us to Christ, the laws of nature, nature's God, until faith comes. So that the church has abdicated and walked away from its responsibility.

Good government happens with good people, and for anyone who says, “I don't do politics, I just preach the gospel,” you are a gnostic.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I don't disagree. I'm gonna ask you a question about the separation of church and state, not its understanding. And I understand the silliness of how we've interpreted Jefferson's letter and that sort of thing, but before getting into it, what does success look like for Turning Point USA Faith?

Rob McCoy:
Success for TPUSA Faith. This is the idea that the moral law would drive the civil law. The number one book quoted by our founders was the Bible. The number one book of the Bible quoted was Deuteronomy. And there are three critical phases in American history. One is the War of Independence, the Revolutionary War.

Second is the Civil War. Whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure that we have a new birth of freedom. And then the third crisis is right now. We are in the midst of a fifth-generation warfare. We have propaganda. We have censorship. We have a complete attack on truth and the censorship of truth.

There isn't the freedom of speech. It's being censored. It's awful. Yeah. And cancellation, all kinds of things. We have diversity, equity, inclusion, which is a direct influence of communism. It's coming in. And we have class warfare. This is all fifth generation. But here's the problem. The crisis, this third crisis in American history, is what we call a constitutional crisis. We have a form of government that is Christian. It comes from common law. Common law is from the Bible.

And people say no, no, no, it's just common law. But common law comes from the Bible. The first 13 colonies. The first 13 states. Every single one of their state constitutions demanded that any elected official must have a profession of faith in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. So that is a Christian form of government, very clear checks and balances- Isaiah 44:22. The Lord is our King, lawgiver, our judge. All these things are outlined, but this is a constitutional crisis. We have a Christian form of government void of a Christian population. And now we have a crisis. And that crisis is we want to throw off these constraints. And somehow, even though history has pointed out that socialism doesn't work, it ends up in the ash heap of history with billions dead. They go, no, no, that's Democrat socialism.

Well, socialism is a pile of dog manure, and Democrat socialism is sprinkles on top of that pile of dog manure. It's the same thing. Here's your spoon. History will prove that it's awful. And it's going to result in the destruction of everything you love and hold dear, including the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, all that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you've lived the same time period, for the most part, that I have and have been part of the conversations and thoughts that have expressed separation of church and state to those conversations and to that idea. What would you say is the truth about where America is or should be with regard to that concern?

Rob McCoy:
What I would are the most tortured words, the 16 most tortured words in America. And those words came about when our founders, in the midst of a world that embraced slavery, decided to create a form of government with a sunset clause to remove slavery. We have revisionist historians who love to decry the fact that our founders were all slaveholders.

They love to throw balls and strikes into the past of history, where they can't defend themselves or their writings, but they cherry-pick those writings. And we look at a group of founders so committed to establishing a form of government that the world had never known. And they began, as the preamble to the Constitution says, to define who the sovereign in America was, because in 6,000 years of recorded history, every nation was an oligarchy.

The few ruled the many. And so they create the preamble. We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, do ordain and establish. And the idea is the first three words, we the people, that's the sovereign in America. And the Declaration of Independence, which is eloquent, beautiful, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people.

It goes on to say, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is the highest virtue. It wasn't a feeling, it was the highest virtue, according to Aristotle. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. For this reason, governments were instituted among men.

This is the purpose of government: to protect the individual's inalienable rights given to them by God. You and I will be judged whether or not we're covered by the blood of Christ. The Bible says it's appointed once for man to die and then judgment. Governments will be judged on whether or not their people had access to the freedom to pursue the living God and worship him.

And so they established this form of government. And they established this form of government with the checks and balance system, executive, legislative, judicial. And I'm getting to my point. It's circuitous, but you'll understand. They come to loggerheads at the Constitutional Convention. They have larger states, smaller states, larger populations, smaller populations, some slaveholding.

They're now about to be attacked by the largest government on the face of the earth that just destroyed the second largest, which was France. They just beat them in a war. And the British Empire is coming down on them as they're establishing a Constitutional Convention. They've got to come to unity. If they don't stand together, they're going to fall apart.

They've just survived this war of independence. 1 in 9 Americans fought, it was miraculous how they even did it. And now they're establishing this Constitutional Convention. They're at loggerheads. They separate, and it's Benjamin Franklin who stands up and calls for a time of prayer. He says, you know, in these chambers we called on God. And have we forgotten so great a friend?

A sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without his full knowledge. How can we establish a government that will withstand the test of history without his aid? And he calls for three days of fasting and prayer. They break away, they come back, and they establish something that had never been done before. A bicameral legislature. They do the lower house, and you get representation based on your population.

But they put the 3/5 clause because you had slaveholding states and they wanted a sunset clause of slavery. It was one of the reasons in the Declaration of Independence why we broke away, but they demanded it be removed, which was the southern states. Jefferson had put it in there, by the way, and they commanded it be removed.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yes, this is new, and that's new information to me. I'm not familiar with this. I need to learn more.

Rob McCoy:
Dig in! And so they establish a 3/5 clause. They say, look, if you're going to count your slaves for the purpose of representation in the lower house and you're not going to give them the freedom to vote, there's got to be a compromise in here, because we're going to sunset this out, and you can't be perpetuating slavery. No one is to be bound. We can't do it now. It's kind of like triage. You have a patient come into the emergency room, and they've got a stage five cancer on their neck, a big mass, but they're bleeding profusely, and their breathing stopped. You have to stop the bleeding and start the breathing before you deal with that mass.

Yeah, and the cancer was a mass, but they've got England bearing down on them. They do the 3/5 compromise and they come up with an agreement on a lower house and an upper house. The lower house would be the most powerful branch of government because they would give them the purse strings, the budget, the money, and it would be the only branch of government directly elected by the people.

Then the lower house representatives would appoint their two senators for the upper house, and then from the Electoral College, the president would be elected, and then the president would appoint the judiciary. So the most powerful branch of government was the House of Representatives. And they're directly accountable to the people.

And after they establish this form of government, with the eloquence of our birth certificate, where the oldest nation on the face of the earth, come 2026, we have been under one article of incorporation for 250 years. No other nation has even come close. And then after they established this lower house, they give the power to the people.

They then give these 16 tortured words. They're not eloquent, they're not beautiful, they're not poetic, they're prohibitive and angry. Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof. No government will ever get in the way of its citizens worshiping God. Period. That's the purpose of government, to protect those inalienable rights.

You talk about a separation of church and state. There is one. Keep the state out of the church. Yeah, but the church has every right to participate. We the people, that is our moral influence to infuse that in the ecclesia so that the wiser strength will make men free. That's liberty. No man's idea. It's God's idea. Second Corinthians 3:17 says that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there's liberty. Maybe 3:16 well.

Marlin Detweiler:
You know, we've seen the separation of church and state turned on its head in our lifetime and a little bit before, but it has absolutely been turned on its head from what was intended.

Rob McCoy:
Yeah. There's not a demand of adherence in the Christian faith. It's voluntary. Now, there are the laws of nature, nature's God. We're going to contend that there are two genders. Scripture declares that science declares that. You'll contend for those truths, but the truth is never afraid of a lie, but a lie cannot survive in the presence of truth.

So that's why you must censor the truth in order to put forward your propaganda, the lie. But I'm not afraid of a lie. My truth will stand up. If we want to debate this, you'll be eviscerated. You want to look at the science of genders. You'll get why you're beat. You're done. But you have to go to your safe space and it has to be censored.

And I don't need to hear that because that makes me upset. We're not contending for truths in a world like that. Government is to protect inalienable rights given by God. They want to remove God, but they want all the benefits without the accountability. And it doesn't work that way.

Christian faith is voluntary. But in the Muslim world, Islam is a political structure disguised as a religion. Secular progressivism is a religion disguised as a political structure. That's why they morphed together. You have Sharia law, which demands adherence or there will be a pogrom or you'll be wiped out over time. They'll get you. But then secular progressivism is a religion, meaning we're removing God, secularism. And we want to be thought of as a political structure, which we aren't. Sharia law is. And ultimately, it just goes right back to an oligarchy and tyranny and the enslavement of man.

Marlin Detweiler:
And that is so well put. I'm so glad that you get the opportunity to speak that into our culture, and I expect you'll get to do that increasingly. I certainly hope so. You've been mentioned in the conversation as I did preparation for this time with you. You've been mentioned in the conversation of the idea of Christian nationalism and theonomy.

And you're alluding to some of these things a little bit. What does it look like? And maybe I ought to ask you a little bit about your eschatology here. But you can tell that how you see fit. But what does it look like for the world that God created in the context of the conversation around Christian nationalism?

Rob McCoy:
Yeah. Well, what's the alternative to that? Christian secularism or, you know, secular nationalism?

Marlin Detweiler:
I think that's…

Rob McCoy:
Why is Christian nationalism on trial as opposed to secular nationalism?

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, with what you said prior to my question, you've kind of laid the groundwork to make some of my questions a little bit too late. The rest a little bit. But I want you to unpack it because the terms are terms that can be inflaming in conversations that we find ourselves in.

Rob McCoy:
Yeah, I mean, you have Rushdoony and a couple of others. I don't adhere to that. But I'll make it very simple. The Lord is a nationalist. He establishes nations and boundaries. That's what He does. And as I said earlier, nations will be judged on whether or not their people have access to the freedom of speech and to the living God.

And if you suppress truth and there isn't a pursuit of truth. Now, if legalism and nationalism come in with some sort of imagery that we're going to demand adherence, in a constitutional republic where we the people and we have a House of Representatives, a lower house and an upper house, and we can contend for truth, come, let us reason together. Though your sins were scarlet, you'll be washed white as snow. We come in, and we contend for truth. And the wheels of justice will grind slowly. That's still acceptable. Government will never be perfect. But a constitutional republic is the closest we'll have on the earth. It's like a necessary evil in a sense.

The problem with Christians is we miss the good because we demand the perfect. We don't want to participate and soil ourselves in politics because politics is dirty. I always say, well, so's the church. What's your point? Well, I'm tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. Unless Jesus is running for office, you'll always be voting for the lesser of two evils.

You're abdicating your responsibility where Jesus commands you to love your neighbor as yourself. Don't you want your neighbor's children to have what you want for your children? That they grow up in a world where it's truth, where they know there's two genders, that health care isn't a mutilation of a 15-year-old's body without parental permission, as they did to Chloe Cole with a double mastectomy.

You want them on hormone blockers that are considered inhumane to be given to serial rapists in prison, but we'll give them in California and remove your children from your home if you do not adhere to what the state is demanding. Is that what you want for your neighbors? You won't participate in the public square in California, where abortion has been legal long before '73, and it's been estimated by the totality, because we lead the nation in abortion, that we've aborted more babies in totality than the current population of Canada.

We don't just rip the baby apart in the womb of its mother and flush its parts into the sewer system; we harvest the organs and make Nazi Germany look like Girl Scouts. Don't you want for your neighbor? Jesus said on these two commandments, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments hang the law and the prophets. It's very clear. We're back here worried about a label of Christian nationalism when we're to be contending for the welfare of our neighbor. We're afraid because we're called names. Buckle up. That's where you got the word Christian. It's derogatory. People of the way, it's derogatory. Roll with it.

I'm not seeking tyranny. I'm not seeking an oligarchy. To the contrary, I want my neighbors to have the freedom of speech. The man who held up the sign, who was so upset, I said, I am remaining open and contending for your right to hold that sign. I love you. I'm getting fined $3,000 a day every time the doors of our church are open, because the governor of California has a lot of power, but he doesn't have the right to say that the church, the bride of Christ, is nonessential.

That doesn't work. No, I'm not sitting idly by for that. I don't care what you throw at me, and I don't care the names you give me. I'm fighting for the freedom of my neighbors, and they don't have to believe what I believe. But they will have the forum to be able to stand upon that. Because the truth will set you free.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. That's so again, I'm curious, on the practical level, how did the fact that you worshiped during Covid play out with the fines and that sort of thing? I saw that there was a reversal. How did that impact you all at a financial level?

Rob McCoy:
Well I was found guilty twice on contempt charges before the judge. They never lifted those. We incurred a pretty large amount of legal fees. They fined us over $300,000. They did drop that. They offered us money to go away, but we never took that. We took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and then they ultimately dropped it. I'm not at liberty to say why, but suffice it to say, it was of the Lord, and it was profound what occurred. Someday I'll be able to share the story, and people will be in tears over it. So yeah, it didn't matter if it cost us $1 million.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Rob McCoy:
What in life, what is the hill you're willing to die on?

Marlin Detweiler:
What are you willing to pay?

Rob McCoy:
I've been married to my wife Michelle, as I said earlier, for 34 years. Come April, it'll be 35 years. Now, remember, the church is the bride of Christ. You tell me that my bride is nonessential. I may be 60 years old and a little out of shape, but I will. You'd be picking up your teeth with your broken arm.

You don't call the bride of Christ nonessential. We're the shepherds. We sat by and we quoted Romans 13 as justification for submission to tyranny, when the passage clearly states, and Jonathan Mayhew, the eastern seaboard preacher, so eloquently exegeted the text, he says, they're there for our good. When they cease to do good, they cease to be the authority.

That's why we listed all of the grievances. Not for light or transient causes. He's the one who said disobedience to tyrants is obedience to God. It was John Adams who said he. He's the one who instigated the War of Independence. He died in 1766. He knew it back then. Where are the pastors today? We have a backbone and can say to a tyrannical governor Mousalini, the church will always be essential. The church will always be essential.

Marlin Detweiler:
Amen. Well, we're running out of time. And I got one more question I want to ask. Another term that I saw was the challenge that you can't legislate morality. In brief, tell me why that's a bunch of hooey.

Rob McCoy:
Well, it's probably one of the dumbest statements ever to leave a human being's mouth. Every law is based on someone's morality.

Marlin Detweiler:
Exactly.

Rob McCoy:
You have some sort of a worldview, right or wrong. Typically, atheists or agnostics will always borrow from a Christian worldview because you turn to them and say, so, you don't believe in God. You don't believe. Yeah. And then you say, well, upon what do you base your morality to say what is good and what is evil? Because there has to be a standard somewhere. You're making a law for people to obey. What makes it a law that's just?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Rob McCoy:
I know from whence comes good and evil and how it's laid out. Where are you getting your philosophy and your views? Mine have been around for thousands of years. Have you? No. You can't prove something from the scientific method through literature or history. But the way you do it is by cross-referencing original manuscripts.

The Bible blows every other work of antiquity away. We even have papers that existed in the time that the apostles walked the earth, the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's the oldest land grant in world history. It's a title deed given to the Jews. You can argue that if you have replacement theology until you're blue in the face.

But they've got a title deed. Deal with it. They found that the year that they became a nation. I mean, there's some pretty cool things that you would want to find in the scriptures, but to say you can't legislate morality, oh, come on, don't be so stupid. Come up with something a little more creative than just dismissing somebody by calling them names ad-homonyms. That’s just dumb.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Hey, we could go on a long time, and I don't want to keep you any longer. We've run out of time. Thank you so much for joining us.

Rob McCoy:
Thank you.

Marlin Detweiler:
This has been great, folks. Thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian Education. We hope to see you next time.