Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith in the culture. It’s, WallBuilders Live. We are taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective.

My name is Rick Green. I’m America’s constitution coach and a former Texas legislator. And I get to serve here with David and Tim Barton. You know Tim Barton as a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. You know David Barton as America’s premier historian and our founder here at WallBuilders. And we’re actually going to be spending all of today, tomorrow and the next day with David giving a presentation out there on this American Restoration Tour. It’s all over the country.

And I’m telling you, folks, be praying for David and Chad Conley and Faith Wins; they have been covering so much ground, meeting with so many people, pastors and churches and just having a huge impact in restoring the biblical foundations of America. It’s really, really exciting to see. And so we just wanted to bring you one of those presentations that David has been doing throughout this tour across the country because it’s just such good information and such a good time to share it. So we’re going to dive right into David Barton speaking on this tour and it’ll take us three programs to cover this.

So make sure if you are going to miss tomorrow or the next day, just be sure to go to our website at wallbuilderslive.com and click on the archive section and you can grab all three of these programs once they have aired. So let’s dive in. Here’s David Barton on the American Restoration Tour.

AMERICAN RESTORATION TOUR

David:

Thank you guys. I’m going to cover tonight some things that I think we can document as truth. We own 160,000 documents. We have everything from documents from Columbus all the way. We have the Bible that landed on the moon in Apollo 14. So we have 160,000 documents out of American history. I will take things tonight back to the original. So it doesn’t matter what someone’s opinion is. It doesn’t matter how many PhDs they’ve got. It matters what truth is. And we have original documents from which we know what truth is.

And so I want to start tonight by going to the American Bible Society State of the Bible report. Every year they do a State of the Bible report. This year they did a State of the Bible Report for 2022, what we found is that last year we lost 26 million Americans who no longer read the Bible at all. Just, nosedive. Now it’s interesting, the American Bible Society defines a Bible reader as someone who reads the Bible outside of church at least four times a year. That’s a Bible reader. And we lost 26 million who won’t even crack the book now.

You see, what’s happened is the Bible tells us, Jesus tells us in Matthew 4:4, he says man doesn’t live by bread alone, he lives by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. So we should understand that we’ve got a spiritual man that we have to keep alive. Not just that, we’re really going to keep the physical man alive. We’ll do our three squares a day; there’s no way we’re going to miss a meal. But the spiritual man doesn’t get the same emphasis. He actually needs more emphasis.

As a matter of fact, if most Americans will make the commitment that I’m not going to eat a physical meal until I have had a spiritual meal, most Americans would have starved to death a long time ago. Because we don’t take care of the spiritual man the way we should on the physical man, and that’s the one that’s really important. And that’s where America’s strength comes from, is that spiritual strength. So when you look at where we are, I’m going to encourage you, I don’t know how much you read the Bible, but I’m going to encourage you to at least read the Bible every day. Know for sure that Pastor Tim, he’s already emphasizing that, but I’m going to take you, show you historically what it used to be for Christians and maybe that’ll kind of say, wow, that’s a different bar, I’ve never seen that one.

So read the Bible. And why every day? Because Jesus tells us in the Lord Prayer to pray for daily bread. And so if spiritual bread, let’s get it every day. On top of that, I’m going to ask you to go a step further. Start trying to memorize a Bible verse every week. Now, Bible memory is a lot more work. You have to go over something in rote memory time and time and time again. But it’s really important. And I’ll show you why it’s important.

If you go to 1787. In 1787, we’re having the Constitutional Convention, there’s 55 Founding Fathers there writing the Constitution of the United States. And as they are there, there is no one among the 55 that’s more elated than Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin is the first guy in American history to call for the United States of America. We had 13 nations and they weren’t states, they were nations. A lot of them didn’t even like each other. And so he says, guys, why can’t we be one? Why can’t we be a nation with 13 states? And so he called for that in 1754, 33 years before the Constitution Convention. Couldn’t get it done back then, nobody was willing to do it.

22 years later, he is one of the 56 guys who signs the Declaration of Independence announcing that we’re going to become an independent nation. Seven years later, it’s one of only three guys who signs the peace treaty to say, we’ve done it, we’ve become an independent nation. And then four years later, he is sitting at the Constitutional Convention helping create the United States of America. It’s what he’s dreamed about for 33 years. The problem he has was it didn’t go the way he wanted to.

And by the way, this is Franklin right there. And at this point in his life, he is 81-years-old, and we’re not impressed with that today because the average lifespan in America is 80 years old. Okay. The average lifespan in America is 1787 is 33-years-old. So there he sits at 81. And by the way, if you’re a high school senior and you’re here tonight, it and if you’d been alive back then, you would have already had your midlife crisis, because when you get to 17, it’s half over for you, you’re done. So there he sits at 81, and at this point in time, he really came in, he elated that finally getting to do it. It didn’t go the way he wanted to because the states were nations, they didn’t like each other…

North and South Carolina had border wars with each other. They didn’t like each other. You had to change money to go from North Carolina to South Carolina. You had to change money to go to other colonies. They were all independent and don’t want anything to do with. And so he’s trying to get these guys together. So when they got together at the Convention, everybody had their own agenda. You had the Virginia plan. You had the New York plan, the New Jersey plan, the Connecticut plan. Of course, Connecticut didn’t want New York’s plan. New York didn’t want Jersey’s plan. Jersey didn’t want Virginia’s plan.

So five weeks into the Convention literally is falling apart. Alexander Hamilton said, I’m tired of all the bickering, I’m going back to New York. I got better things to do. George Mason of Virginia said, me, too. I’m tired of the bickering. I’m leaving. George Washington had to talk him into staying; this thing is falling apart. At that point in time, Franklin gives the longest speech, Thursday, June 28th, 1787. And in that speech, now, Franklin gave a lot of speeches at the Constitutional Convention, and he wrote them all out and had someone else deliver the speech for him. He didn’t speak. He wrote it all out.

But this one, this, he stirred up, his passion is there. This is the only speech he gave at the Constitutional Convention from the heart. He had no notes. He did not write it down. We know what it was because James Madison kept the notes of the Convention, and he recorded all the things that were said. So he wrote the speech down. So that’s how we know what he said. But this is the only speech Franklin just off the cuff, he just talked it. And he was frustrating and said, gentlemen, he said, “In this situation, in this assembly, groping as it were in the dark, to find political truth and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we’ve not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understanding.”

He said in the beginning of the contest of Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection: a little time out here. That’s the room in which eleven years earlier, they signed a Declaration of Independence. That’s the room in which the Continental Congress met eleven years earlier. And Congress back then was not bicameral. We didn’t have a House and a Senate, it was just one Congress, but it had three chapters, and we prayed a lot.

As a matter of fact, by the time you get to 1815, there had been 1,400 government issued calls to prayer by 1815, and we’ve got hundreds of those, from Patrick Henry and from George Washington, and you’ve got John Adams and Sam Adams and John Hancock. These guys prayer all the time. He said, guys, don’t you remember what we used to do in this room? He said, and our prayers, sir, were heard and they were graciously answered. He said, all of us engaged in this struggle, must have observed frequent instances of superintendent Providence in our favor. And have we not forgotten this Powerful Friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance?

He said, “I have lived sir”, “a long time”, and yes, he had. He said, “and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth that God governs in the affairs of men.” He said, “If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We’ve been assured in the sacred writings that accept the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” He says, “I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without His concurring aid, we should succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel, and we should become a reproach and a by-word down to future ages.” He says, I therefore beg leave the move that henceforth prayers imploring the existence of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed the business.”

Now, may I suggests that’s kind of a religious tone to what he just delivered there? May I also point out that without equivocation, Ben Franklin is considered our least religious Founding father. He is. I don’t dispute that at all. But least it’s a comparative term. Least as compared to what? Somebody here tonight is the least religious person here, that doesn’t mean you’re antireligious or God-hostile. It just means maybe you’re 99.6% when everybody else is 99.7%. So he’s the least religious Founding Father, no doubt about that. But here’s what’s interesting.

In that speech he just gave, that speech was 14 sentences long. How many Bible verses did you see Ben Franklin quote in that speech? 14 Bible verses. These are the Bible verses Ben Franklin just quoted in that speech. Now remember, this is a passionate speech off the cuff, he’s just speaking from the heart. How in the world did he recite 14 Bible verses in a speech 14 sentences long? Jesus tells us the answer.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 12:34, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Whatever you’ve hidden in your heart is going to come out your mouth, if it’s anger, if it’s rage, if it’s forgiveness, whatever it is. He had hidden God’s word in his heart. We’re told to do that. And that’s why I encourage you to memorize Bible verses. You see this throughout the American founding. As a matter of fact, it’s significant.

Franklin, with the Bible knowledge that he had, we don’t think of it as a Bible guy and yet you just saw one speech, and I can show you tons of others because we’ve got so many of his speeches. Franklin had an interesting conversation with the minister, Samuel Cooper. Samuel Cooper’s famous preacher up in the Boston area. And Franklin was really close to all the preachers back then. He was really close with George Whitfield in The Great Awakening. As a matter of fact, Ben Franklin built a room on his house so that when George Whitfield was anywhere close to Philadelphia, he stayed with Franklin. They were just great friends. And the same thing with Pastor Cooper. He’s up in Boston and Franklin’s down in Pennsylvania, but nonetheless, they write all the time, and they’re really good friends. And Franklin wrote Pastor Cooper, and he said, pastor, he said, you know, I’ve really seen a difference between what we have in America and what we have in Europe.

He said, “When I speak to a crowd here in America, here in New England where we are, when I speak to a crowd up here, I never have to tell him the Bible verses when I quote it.” And this is what he said. He says “it’s not necessary in New England, where everybody reads the Bible and is acquainted with scripture phrases, that I should take note the Bible references from which I take them.” He didn’t at the Constitutional Convention, said guys, as the Bible says. He didn’t say that once. Why? Because they all knew that. He said, I don’t have to tell anybody in America what the Bible phrases are, because everybody reads and studies the Bible. He said, but when I go to Europe, because he was ambassador to France, he was ambassador to England, he said, when I get to Europe, those guys don’t have a clue what the Bible says, and I have to tell them what I’m quoting the Bible. He says, “But I’ve observed in England as well as in France, the verses and expressions taken from the sacred scriptures and not known to be such appear very strange and awkward to readers.

When I’m in Europe, I have to say now, guys, that came from the Bible. Oh, I would argue that America today is what Europe was back then.

Rick:

Alright, folks, we got to interrupt David for just a second. We’re going to take a quick break, we’ll be right back. You were listening to WallBuilders Live.

PATRIOT ACADEMY

Have you noticed the vacuum of leadership in America? We’re looking around for leaders of principle to step up and too often, no one is there. God is raising up a generation of young leaders with a passion for impacting the world around them. They’re crying out for the mentorship and leadership training they need.

Patriot Academy was created to meet that need. Patriot Academy graduates now serve in state capitals around America in the halls of Congress, in business, in the film industry, in the pulpit and every area of the culture. They’re leading effectively and impacting the world around them. Patriot Academy is now expanding across the nation and now’s your chance to experience this life changing week that trains champions to change the world.

Visit patriotacademy.com for dates and locations. Our core program is still for young leaders 16 to 25 years old, but we also now have a citizen track for adults, so visit the website today to learn more. Help us fill the void of leadership in America. Join us in training champions to change the world at patriotacademy.com.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. You are listening to David Barton give a presentation on the American Restoration Tour. We had to interrupt for a break. Let’s jump right back in.

AMERICAN RESTORATION TOUR

David:

We don’t recognize the Bible verses unless someone points them out to us. We’re like France and like England. And back in the day, we did so much Bible study, and we knew it so well. Another example. Let me just give you another example.

Let me take Patrick Henry. You know the speech he gave: Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death. The reason he gave that speech was he’s a young legislator in the Virginia House of Burgesses; and at that point in time, Great Britain has already started attacking Americans, already started doing all this stuff. And he says, we need to stand up and fight the tyranny. We got to resist this. And all these senior guys say, oh, we can’t do that. We don’t have an army. We don’t have a navy. They do. They’re the world’s greatest military power. You know, there’s nothing we can do. And it’d be really silly to take on people that got that kind of strength. We just need to get used to living a different kind of lifestyle, because whatever they…

Aand he’s had it up to here. And so the young guy stands up and he just goes after it, and that says, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death speech that he gave. He said, have you guys have you lost your mind? Do you not like freedom or you’re not willing to stand for something?

And so as he gives that speech, that speech is 14 sentences long. And it’s interesting when you look at the speech, how many verses did you use? He used 11 verses, and these are the verses. And again, this is just another passionate speech, and these are the 11 verses he used. Now, I’m going to suggest that these are not the verses that most of us normally memorize when we memorize verses. Probably nobody knows what Ecclesiastes 9:11 is or 2 Thessalonians 1 say. But see, this is what he had hidden in his heart. And so as the feelings came, the word came, it came right out with him.

And even George Washington, when you look at George Washington elected president 1789, the only president of the United States ever elected unanimously, as he’s president, he said, you know, we’ve been 13 nations for so long, we have to change our thinking. We have to understand we’re one nation with 13 states. He said, so I need to travel to every single state and make sure they understand we’re part of the United States.

So he does a two year plan to go to every state, go visit them personally, be there so they feel like they’re part of the United States. And so as he lays out what states he’s going to in 1790 and 1791. In 1790, one of the states he’s going into is Rhode Island. As he’s going into Rhode Island, word gets out, he’s coming to Rhode Island, and the Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, they hear that George Washington is coming to town and they are happy campers. And so they write him this really effusive letter, says, oh, we can’t believe you’re coming, this is so great. Thank you for what you’ve done for religious liberty. Thank you for what you’ve done for our freedom. We’re such a different nation because of you. And it’s just a really, really cool letter. I mean, they’re just really thankful.

And so Washington writes back a presidential letter, and it’s kind of a cursory letter. He said well, that’s really nice of you, thanks for saying that, and I’m looking forward to seeing you. That’s a pretty short letter. So when you see Washington’s letter, it’s only two sentences long; and in that two sentences, he quotes ten Bible verses in two sentences. That’s tough to do. When you read his letter, it’s just one Bible phrase after another stuck together.

See, one of the things we do is because we have all these documents, we do a lot of training. We do a lot of training of legislators. We do a lot of training for legal stuff. We do a lot of training for lots. And in the summer, we’ll do training for 18-25 year olds going into college because we know what to get taught in college. We do a lot of work in college. We do a lot of work with all sorts of government stuff. And so we know what they’re going to get trained. And we want them to see the original documents so that when some professor says, here’s what happened, they go, no, I actually held a document. That’s not what you said. And so we want them to have truth.

And one of the things we’ll do, in one of the mornings for just a couple of hours, we’ll pull out letters of Abigail Adams and letters of George Washington, and Ben Franklin, all these guys will let them out. And then we’ll hand out Bobble Concordance, said, okay, there’s the letter, here’s the Bible Concordance, see how many Bible verses you can find in that letter. And they start looking, wow, that’s a Bible verse. It’s not the verses we’re accustomed to seeing or reading or hearing or memorizing, but their letters are written with it. That was the culture of the day in a very real sense.

And so it’s out of that culture that we have the country that we enjoy today. And by the way, these are the verses that Washington used. But it’s out of that culture from these guys that we have the country we have today. And they had memorized those words. That’s what you’re going to find through all of those letters. And that’s why we show them to the young people. So here we are today with a nation and in a lot of ways, we don’t really study much of what happened or why or how it came to be. And we are different, but we don’t even recognize that anymore.

And again, I don’t say that loudly because we have these 160,000 documents. Some of you have are old school books. We have the first school book ever done in America, 1690 in Boston, Massachusetts. We have school books over the next 350 years. We know what’s been taught in schools across the generations. And here we are in America, and if you look at the history of the world, there’s 5800 years recorded history, there’s been thousands of nations. There’s 195 nations of the UN this year. We’ve had thousands of nations. And that means there have been thousands of constitutions.

Cornell University Law School said, what’s the average length of a constitution in the history of the world? And so they researched it. They went through all the countries, all the constitutions, all history. And they said the average length of a constitution in the history of the world is 17 years. We have Constitution Day, September 17th. On that day, we will celebrate 235 years under the same Constitution. Now nobody in the history of the world has gotten anywhere close to that. That’s a blessing that we take for granted. We still take it for granted that we’re playing around with changing our form of government. Let’s do something different.

Do you know, right now, polling, we did tons of polling. Polling so right now, 75% of college students say we want to get rid of the constitutional system and go to socialism. And 49% of millennials say we want to get rid of the constitutional system and go to socialism. Wait a minute, guys. 5800 years of history, there’s not a single socialistic nation in history of the world that’s preserved individual liberty and maintained national prosperity. Yes, but it would work if we do it. No, it won’t. Anybody who puts their hand on the stove is going to get burned every time they do it. And I don’t have to put my hand on the stove to learn that, I can study history, except we don’t study history anymore.

So what happens is we don’t even know to appreciate how unique we are. In addition to the stability that we have, we also have creativity at an unrivaled level. We measure creativity through international copyright, patent protection, whatever. If you look at America, we are 4% of the world’s population.

Rick:

Okay, folks, hang on for one second. We’re going to take a quick break, we’ll be right back. You are listening to WallBuilders Live.

THE AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called The American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that’s just not known or not told today.

And we would say very providentially in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project that say America is evil, and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things, like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not out the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we’re against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There’s so many things attacking America.

Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln, we tell the story of America not as the story of a perfect nation of a perfect people. But the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It’s a story you want to check out, wallbuilders.com, The American Story.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Let’s jump right back in with David Barton speaking on the American Restoration Tour. Here’s David.

AMERICAN RESTORATION TOUR

David:

4% of the world’s population should produce 4% of the world’s whatever. Our 4% of the world’s population has produced over 96% of the world’s inventions out of America. Really? We’re surrounded with stuff that other people wish they could just get part of, but we take it for granted because that’s our lifestyle. We’re used to this every day, not the other countries who want to get in and come.

And the same even with our prosperity, the Constitution requires that we have a census every 10 years, which we had in 2020. We reported the results in 2021. According to the most recent census, if you live in poverty in America, and we do not want anyone living in poverty in America, but if you do, according to the census, if you live in poverty in America today, your lifestyle is higher than the middle class in Europe, which is the second wealthiest place on the face of the Earth. Poverty in America is that high? Yeah. The World Bank sets the global standard for poverty.

According to the World Bank, if you make $1,000 a year, you live in poverty.

And yet this year, America states like Hawaii, states like Mississippi, elsewhere, they said, you know, unless you make more than $61,000 a year, you should not come off government services because that’s what you get on government services. $61,000, and the rest of the world is looking at $1,000? And we’re complaining about the state of America? See, we don’t understand how special and how different it is. And when you look at where we are and what we have, what makes us so different? Who are the leaders behind this? Okay. Well, maybe the guys who gave us the Declaration and Constitution. Maybe the guys who founded the nation, maybe we can say that they have some calls for credit, well, that would be people like George Washington, that’d be people like John Hancock and people like John Adam. So maybe we give them some credit and say, hey, they came up with a pretty unique system.

But it’s interesting. Back in 1818, a young man named Hezekiah Niles wrote Old Man Adams, because 1818 is 42 years after John Adams signed the Declaration of Independence. Hezekiah Niles would be what we would call a millennial of that generation. He was a younger one, and he said openly, I’m doing a history book on the United States, came out in 1822, Principles and Acts of the American Revolution. We have with the book, it’s a cool book.

This book that he was writing back in 1818, he says to Adams, he said, look, I wasn’t there when all this happened. We really appreciate it. We really enjoy living in this, but we weren’t there, but you were. And so as I’m writing this, I want to ask you, where did you get these ideas? Because these ideas are so different from everybody. Where did you get the ideas? And John Adams wrote back and said, well, you don’t know where we got the ideas. He said, right up top, I put the reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper. And then I put the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Matthew. And then you’ve got the Reverend George Whitfield. And don’t forget the Reverend Charles Chauncey. He goes through and starts listening all these pastors.

Now, we might know who Whitfield is today, but the chances that we know anything about Cooper, Mayhew, Chauncey, slim to none, even though Adams called him out, even though they’re written about in the history book that was done by Hezekiah Niles, we don’t study preachers today, whether they’re white or whether they’re black. I mean, who in the world is Richard Allen or Absalom Jones? Who’s John Moran? Who’s Lemuel Haynes? Who’s Harry Hoosier? Let me just take Harry for a minute.

Harry was part of the Great Awakenings. And in the Great Awakenings, we have great preachers. We have the George Whitfields and the John and the Charles West, Francis Ashbury, all these great preachers who drew tens of thousands of people into open fields, and they would speak to them in open fields, massive crowds. And yet Francis Asbury says, Harry draws larger crowds than I do. Really? Never heard of Harry Hoosier.

Benjamin Rush signer of the Declaration, Benjamin Rush, John Adams said, of all the 250 Founding Fathers, he said, Benjamin Rush is one of the three most notable. According to John Adams, it’s George Washington, Ben Franklin and Benjamin Rush, we’ll talk more about him later. Benjamin Rush significant Founder Father, he says, I go to Harry’s meetings, and he’s the best orator I’ve ever heard. Wait a minute. You’re running around with Patrick Henry and you think Harry’s better? Yeah, he’s better by far.

Harry’s ministry was largely through the blue collar people of America, what we would call the “rough and tumble kind of woodsmen”, the frontiers guys, the hunters, what we call Long hunters. A long hunter is someone who goes out deer hunting and comes back eight months later and found two more states somewhere: they just go out and they stay and they just keep roaming. And that was the kind of guys that were really drawn to Harry Hoosier.

And so rough and tumble, they cussed a lot, they fought a lot, they drank a lot, and they get saved, and their behavior changes and they don’t cuss as much and don’t drink as much and don’t fight as much. And it’s interesting, Harry’s ministry was along the East Coast. He was in Philadelphia and Delaware, and he’s in Jersey, etc. But as America starts moving west in the early 1800s, as America moves west, a lot of these frontier guys move west with America…

Rick:

Alright, folks, we’re out of time for today. We’re going to pick up right where we left off. We’ll do that tomorrow and the next day. So this will be three days of David Barton speaking at the American Restoration Tour. You can find out more on our website wallbuilderslive.com. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders Live.