This episode chronicles the history of Christian nationalism up to about 1300, interspersed with commentary from James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments. Madison concluded that the mixture of church and state produced "pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both superstition, bigotry, and persecution." Informed by the history of power working through depraved humanity, Madison saw a close mixture of church and state as invariably corrupting both. The episode describes the quid pro quo arrangement between church and state emerging out of the creation of the "Holy Roman Empire. Both Church and State sought to co-opt the other, leading to a very unholy Holy Roman Empire, not to mention a corrupt Church. Madison found the Church's unholy collusion unbiblical, "every page of it [the Scriptures] disavows dependence on the powers of this world."
