The George Buchanan Forum

In 1953 the CIA secretly paid for and organized a coup against Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadegh, overthrowing Iran’s parliamentary government and replacing it with the dictatorial regime of the Shah. This event, the CIA’s first coup, became a turning point in CIA history. The ease with which they were able to conduct regime change, and its apparent resounding success, encouraged the CIA to attemp...

Murray N. Rothbard critiqued egalitarianism for its unreasonableness and its truly horrific agenda. Egalitarianism, according to Rothbard, is a revolt against the order of nature, and such revolts must be exposed for their evil intents. Socialism, a political and economic revolt against nature, carries the egalitarianism agenda, and therefore its tenants and implementation must be strongly repudia...

Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. Would there have been political authority had Adam and Eve never fallen? St. Augustine famously said “no,” while St. Thomas Aquinas argued “yes,” with later thinkers being somewhat div...

Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. Every OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] nation, with the exception of New Zealand, has some form of federal agricultural policy in place. Yet most discussio...

Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. The Vietnam War has become the symbolic hot conflict of the Cold War. While the U.S. only officially entered the fight in Vietnam after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, it was U.S. mo...

Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. The interpretations of the people of Israel asking for a king in the narrative of 1 Samuel are varied, particularly in connection with Deuteronomy chapter 17, where Moses anticipates t...

Recorded July 23, 2021 at the 2021 Summer Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history.

This talk examines Christian hacktivism from an ethical, historical, and philosophical perspective, and establishes a bird's-eye view of the current climate. It touches on issues of governance, privacy, property rights, and much, more. Recorded July 23, 2021 at the 2021 Summer Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the...

Chamberlain’s failed policy of appeasement at Munich has become a byword for kowtowing to evil. It has also become the argument for every foreign intervention since WWII. However, the popular “lesson of Munich” narrative fails to capture the complexities of 1930s European geopolitics, as well as British and French foreign policy decisions. And the real lesson from Munich has more to do with how pe...

Cryptocurrency has pushed the boundaries of how economists have traditionally thought about the nature of money. Exploring the differences between cryptocurrency and more traditionally defined forms of money helps us understand a way forward toward a moral monetary system, one that has separated itself from state control. Recorded January 30, 2021 at the 2021 Winter Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The Geo...

In the antebellum South the planter-class used fundamentally anti-free market means to build a slaveocracy, with which they exploited and oppressed not only black slaves, but also non-slave owning whites. This system of state and federal coercion eventually then evolved into full blown economic socialism with the rise of the Confederacy. Recorded January 29, 2021 at the 2021 Winter Forum in Moscow...

Calvin’s “On Civil Government,” from book 4, ch. 20 of his Institutes, is a foundational text in Reformed political theory. Though Calvin situates himself within the classical natural law tradition, adapting it to a new, Protestant context, in important ways his work marks a regression from some of the more liberalizing tendencies of earlier natural law theory in favor of a new, more authoritarian...

The biblical role of the magistrate in society has long been debated in the church down to our own day, but the theological approaches to the matter have largely leaned on a systematic theological approach, where proof texts are plucked out of Scripture without recognition of an overarching biblical narrative. Without diminishing the importance of systematic theology, developing a robust biblical...

Though usually thought of as antithetical philosophical frameworks, classical natural law theory and political libertarianism belong together. Natural law theory provides libertarianism (the political theory based on the non-aggression principle) with the theological and moral framework in which libertarianism finds its proper grounding, and libertarianism is the consistent political outworking of...

This paper addresses the place of faith and reason in human apprehension of the law of God. It does so in order to offer theological clarity regarding key concepts (faith, reason, and the law of God) appealed to in Christian political thought. While drawing on Protestant Scholastic categories and distinctions, the approach offered here is more constructive and systematic-theological than descripti...

Americans, and especially conservative Americans, hold the Constitution with a certain holy reverence, as though it was the product of the founders’ unified, political ideology for how best to run a government. In reality, the U.S. Constitution reflects not just the founders’ good intentions, but also, as Benjamin Franklin described it, “their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, t...

George Buchanan was a sixteenth century Scottish Calvinist and humanist, whose “unparalleled reputation as a Latin poet, playwright, polemicist, historian and political theorist” brought him to the middle of the complex political and ecclesiastical issues of the Scottish Reformation, as well as earning great influence on the Continent through his theories on political resistance. Buchanan provides...