Politics & Power Quote by Rod Parsley

Parsley’s line isn’t history; it’s a loyalty test dressed up as a civics lesson. By claiming “no secular state ever existed” until after the French Revolution, he collapses centuries of messy governance into a neat morality play: societies are either properly God-soaked or doomed to Jacobin chaos. The move is rhetorical judo. If “secular” equals guillotine-era France, then church-state separation stops being a constitutional design choice and becomes a civilizational threat.

“America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic” functions less as a descriptive claim than a boundary marker. “Judeo-Christian” sounds inclusive, but in this context it’s often code for a culturally conservative Christianity that wants the prestige of pluralism without the inconvenience of pluralistic outcomes. The phrase turns national identity into an inherited moral property, something you can “uphold” like a flag, not debate like policy.

The real tell is “this nominee.” Parsley is using origin-myth language to sanctify a political appointment, likely judicial. He’s not arguing for a specific ruling or legal principle; he’s asserting that a nominee’s job is to enforce “truths” pre-political and pre-constitutional. That frames courts as instruments of restoration, not interpretation. It also subtly delegitimizes opponents: if these are “truths,” dissent isn’t disagreement; it’s rebellion.

In the broader culture-war ecosystem, the quote is meant to fuse religious authority with state power while maintaining plausible deniability. It’s a sermon delivered in the idiom of patriotism, designed to make theocracy sound like tradition and secularism sound like an extremist experiment.