Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and cautious perspective. And we are diving right back into David Barton speaking on the American Restoration Tour. It’s an opportunity for you to get this really powerful information, timely information for where we are in the culture right now, and also possibly get a chance to hear David live. You can go to Faith Wins and check out their website and see where else they’re going to be speaking over the course of the next few months.

But we want to bring it to our WallBuilders Live listeners. And if you missed yesterday, it’s available on our website right now in the archive section. And if you happen to listen to yesterday, well, good news, we’re about to pick up right where we left off at the end of the program yesterday. Alright, folks. Here’s David Barton at the American Restoration Tour.

AMERICAN RESTORATION TOUR

David:

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 because that’s what they love doing, is trapping and hunting and furring. 

And so they’re out there and they all get out there and a lot of the converts come out there as well. A lot of Harry’s converts, and they get out there. The other trappers look at these guys and say, those guys are really strange. What’s up with them? And the answer was, they’re a bunch of those Hoosiers. It happened to be the Indiana territory.

I wonder how many people who live in Indiana know they were named after a black evangelist. Probably not many. It would seem like if somebody had a state named after him, we might stick him in a history book somewhere. We don’t. He’s just not there today. And that’s by the way what we hear today from 1619, theCRT is, oh, the American founding is all a bunch of white guys. Well, granted, you take the signer’s Declaration, that picture, it’s all a bunch of white guys.

Portraits of Influential Men

Now, why do we even know what those guys look like from back then? Here’s the deal. Back then didn’t have cameras, obviously, and it took a lot of money to have a picture made of someone. And so only if you’re really famous, if you’re a governor or general, if you did something significant, you get a picture made of you. 

So when this painting was made in 1821 by John Trumble, he collected the portraits of all the signers in Declaration because they’re all important and that’s how he did the group picture of them because he had a portrait to work from. He knew what they all looked like. Okay, got it. Yeah.

But how come we never talk about all the portraits of black heroes we have in early American? I mean, hundreds of them. This is not an easy thing to do to have a portrait, man, you have to be significant and done something really significant. But we don’t even know who this guy on the right, that’s Jack Sisson, above him as Benson Bannecker, then you got Richard Allen, then the next row over on the left is John Chavez. Above him is Harry Hoosier. 

Then you got Peter Salem. The middle center left is Lemuel Haynes. Above him, as James Armistead. I just keep going through these guys. We don’t know these guys at all. Does that mean they didn’t do something significant? Oh, yeah, they really did.

As a matter of fact, the guy on the left here on horseback with the blue jacket, his name is Wentworth Cheswell. Wentworth Cheswell, a patriot in New Hampshire, as a matter of fact, that black man Wentworth Cheswell, patriot in New Hampshire was elected to office in 1768. He was re-elected in his community for the next 49 years. He held eight different political positions: considered a Founding Father, was significant in the American Revolution. Was one of the founders of New Hampshire. We don’t hear anything about him.

Wait a minute. He was elected to office? Back up! When was the first black person elected office in America? 1641. Mathias de Sousa. He’s in Maryland. He’s elected to the legislature of Maryland in 1641. 

When is the first black person elected to office in Great Britain? 1987. When is the first black person elected to office in Russia? 2010. By the time we’re even talking about that, we have had thousands of blacks elected office. We don’t talk about them.

And, I mean, I can take you through the founding area. I can take you through the colonial era and take you to the Civil War, thousands and thousands of pictures. We just don’t get them today. And because we don’t get them, we say, oh, it’s all racist, they’re all a bunch of whites. 

No, no, no. We used to know our history. We don’t know our history anymore. That we didn’t teach CRT 30 years ago, because 30 years ago, we still knew enough our history to know it was nonsense to teach the stuff that we’re teaching today because we don’t know it.

We Built this Nation on the Bible

And again, we’ve got original records from these guys, we’ve got all sorts of documents from these guys and books about them and what they did. They’re just not available today. So we’ve become historically illiterate, and that’s significant. We shouldn’t be. 

So when you look at what we have from the beginning here, what we used to teach in our textbooks, America is a special nation. And we used to tell students the reason America is a special nation is because of the Bible. 

We built this nation on the Bible, use Bible teachings. Now, today, we haven’t heard that in two or three generations and so it seems like a really foreign concept to say that.

But, you know, it’s even possible still in this very secular culture today to prove that the Bible shaped America in ways that we don’t even recognize. Now, for example, the way we talk to one another is largely due to the Bible. We have idioms, phrases that we use on a daily basis to each other. Do you know that we have 257 idioms that come directly out of the Bible? 

You will hear these all the time, and every one of them is a specific quotation of a Bible verse. I’ve said a lot of these. You’ve said them. I can give you my two cent worth. A leopard can’t change its spots. All of these, these are all Bible phrases, and we hear them all the time in the way we speak. We’re quoting the Bible to each other without having any clue.

And by the way, younger generation, the ones that they’ve picked up on in the last 8-10 years, these are the Bible phrases we hear all the time from those generations. And one of the things I like doing is I’m listening to radio or watching TV or whatever–

When I hear someone use a Bible phrase, I will note I’ll say, this commentator at this time in this program, I’ll send it to the office, and we keep a record of it. And these commentators have no clue they’re quoting the Bible. But I will tell you, over the last four years, the network that has quoted the Bible more than any other network, hands down, ESPN. Now, they don’t have a clue they’ve quoted.

I mean, even go back four years ago. LeBron is now with the Lakers, he’s going to take them to the Promised Land. Didn’t quite work out that way. But they’re all the time using these Bible phrases and they don’t have a clue it’s a Bible phrase. But see, this is so much a part of our culture. 

Next time you go to Walmart or McDonald’s or you go to Home Depot or Lows, wherever, you’re going to hear somebody quote one of those Bible phrases and you ought to stop them, say, hey, do you know what Bible verse you just quoted? 

And they’re going to look at you like you’re crazy and say, no, I don’t. What Bible verse was that? And you won’t have a clue either. I mean, that’s the problem we’ve got. We don’t know where this stuff came from. Every one of them has an address on it. There’s an address to every one of these Bible verses.

Rick:

Okay, folks, hang on for 1 second. We’re gonna 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:

I think where we are today is well described by President John Quincy Adams, who said this. He said, “With regard to the history contained in the Bible, it’s not so much praise worthy to be acquainted with it as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.” 

I think today we’ve had a cultural default. If you had known those Bible references we would pray as you say that’s so amazing, I can’t believe you know the Bible or what…. In their day, they would look at that and say, wait a minute. You didn’t know the Bible references to that? Shame on you. How can you consider yourself an educated person and not know the Bible?

And by the way, notice that that’s a President of the United States who said that. You know, for the next several minutes, I’m just going to unquote President of the United States, and you’re going to see that for 170 years, it was the President of the United States who carried the water on the Bible in America. 

They’re the ones who kept and you expect me, expect Pastor Tim to say good things about the Bible. What you don’t expect, especially in today’s culture, is that for 170 years, it was the President of the United States who kept saying, guys, we can’t be a nation without the Bible. I mean, they’re the ones cheerleading in the Bible.

For example, if you take Zachary Taylor, Zachary Taylor was a war hero. Zachary Taylor said, “The Bible is the best of books. I wish they were in the hands of everyone.” He said, “It’s indispensable to the safety and permanence of our institutions.” Why institutions? 

The Free Market

Today, we don’t recognize it, but our free market system was built on five Bible verses. And historically, I can show you where they got implemented and who implemented them and what verses they quoted. But it’s 1 Timothy 5:8, it is 2 Thessalonians 3:10, it’s Matthew 20, it’s Luke 19, it’s Matthew 25. That’s where we get the free market system. By 1627, the free market system was running in America [inaudible 11:15] Massachusetts, it wasn’t running anywhere else in the world that came from us.

And also, our institutions, like our republican form of government, the Bible shows seven different forms of government. Our Founding Fathers chose one of the seven that’s known as a republican form of government. It was not a democracy. The Founding Fathers pointed to that. There’s examples of democracy in the gospels and they said, a democracy is a “mobocracy”. 

They said, a democracy is worse than having a dictator. See, we were a republican form of government. They quoted Exodus 18:21, Deuteronomy 1:15-16, Deuteronomy 16:18. The Bible says, choose out from among you leaders of tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands; having elections, choose your local, county, state, and federal leader, and choose able men such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness. There’s your qualifications for office right there.

So we’re told at the very beginning, elect leaders. And here’s the kind of leaders you want to elect. Our institutions, we don’t even… Do you know that even I’ve been involved in 13 cases in US Supreme Court, involved in a case this year, already involved in a case for next year. 

And if you go to Federal Practice and Procedure, which is what attorneys used to practice federal law, if you go to volume number 30, there’s 20 pages in volume 30 talking about what we call the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. Due Process clauses is the fourth of the 8th amendment. You get the right to confront your accusers and trial by jury, all that.

Federal Practice and Procedure, the federal law books point out that all of the due process clauses in the Constitution is a 20 page section of the book, said they all came out of the bible. For example, the right to confront your accusers came from John 8:10. The right to compel witnesses on your behalf came from proverbs 18:17. The Federal Practice and Procedure has 20 pages of the bible verses that created our Due Process Clauses. We don’t have a clue.

But see, that’s what he’s saying. He said the Bible is indispensable not to our faith, but to our institutions. He says, especially should the Bible be placed in the hands of the young, it is the best school book in the world. 

I would that all of our people were brought up under the influence of that holy book. A president of the United States? And he was a [inaudible 13:13] He’s not a guy we think of as a religious Bible thumper in any way, shape, fashion or form. And he’s still saying the bible. That’s our textbook.

 Ulysses S. Grant on the Bible

And then you have people like Ulysses S. Grant, he was present in 1876. Now, that’s a centennial of American. And so he came up with this card, you see top left, 1776; top right, 1876 you see centennial up top, Message of President Grant to the children and youth of the United States. What do you tell children and youth? 

He says, “Hold fast to the Bible as a sheet anchor of your liberties. To the influence of this book, we’re indebted for all the progress made in true civilization, and to this we must look as our guide in the future.”

We’ve had lots of blemishes in America, but every time we’ve had one is because we got away from what the Bible said, and every time we fix this, because we got back to what the Bible said. See, with race, that’s a problem we’ve had in America. But you know what? So is every other nation in the history of the world. Nobody got out of it faster than America did.

The first region in the entire history of the world to ban slavery was all the northern states by 1804. By 1807, March 2nd, 1807, America became the first nation in the history of the world to pass a law banning the international slave trade. In 1819, we put us Navy squadron off the coast of Africa to stop any ships going to Africa trying to take slaves out. Now, we were doing really good. 

The southern states, it took them till 1865 to get their thinking together. But nonetheless, we were way ahead of every other nation in the world. Sure, we’ve had blemishes. You know why? Because we’re humans. That’s why we all need a Savior. All of sin and comes short of the glory of God, including every single nation.

I will stack America up against any other nation. If you want to just go history to history, I don’t have any trouble with that. And we’ve got plenty of blemishes. I can show you more blemishes than you know. Doesn’t matter. We’ve done more good than any other nation in the history of the world: it’s because we get back to this when we get off track. There’s always people that take us back to God’s word.

So this is part of what we’ve had for so long. And Dr. Benjamin Rush, and by the way, Dr. Benjamin Rush, John Adams is one of the three most notable, this guys signed a Declaration, ratified the Constitution, served in three different presidential administrations. He’s also the most famous doctor in American history. 

He’s called the “Father of American medicine”. He started five universities. He’s called the “Father of public schools” under the Constitution. He started the first Bible society in America. He started the first Sunday school move in America. He started the first abolition society in America. He trained the first black physicians. He started academic education for women. It’s just unbelievable what the guy did. But “Father of public schools” under Constitution because of a piece he did in 1790.

The Bible in Schools

He said, “Now that we’re one nation, here’s what we need to teach in our public schools.” And then 1791, he did this piece which gave a dozen reasons we would never take the Bible out of public schools. So here’s the “Father of public schools” saying, here’s a dozen reasons we’ll always make sure the Bible stays in schools. 

And he says this, he says, “The great enemy of the salvation of man, in my opinion, never invented a more effective means of extinguishing Christianity from the world than by persuading mankind that it was improper to read the Bible of schools.” He says if you ever believe that lie, that it’s not proper to read the Bible schools that will wipe out Christianity. And we have seen the influence of Christianity diving in a number of years.

But you see, the Founding Fathers were so open about the influence of the Bible and how it had to be part of education. That when you look at the US. Supreme Court, in 1844, there was a case at the Supreme Court called Vidal versus Jurors executives. In this case, the US. Supreme Court said, whoa, whoa, you mean there’s a school in Philadelphia, a government-run school in Philadelphia that’s not teaching the Bible made the Supreme Court for not teaching the Bible.

At the Supreme Court”, in an 8-0 unanimous decision, the Supreme Court said, listen, if you’re going to be a government-funded, government-operated school, you are going to teach the Bible. We’re not going to have any government-funded school that won’t teach the Bible. Now, by the way, you all got that in your American history book, right? 

You all study that. It’s a US unanimous Supreme Court decision. I wonder why we don’t study much of our own history anymore because it’s really hard to make people do something that’s wrong when they don’t know the right history. If you get away from truth and remade truth and make it anything else you want, we’ve always had secular public schools. Really? Then what do you do with stuff like that?

See, we have secular public schools because of what happened in 1962-63, Abington Schempp and Murray Corlette, this is the decision in which the US. Supreme Court said we’re no longer going to read the Bible in schools. Now, why did they say that? Read the decision of the court. And that’s what we always do when we want to know. 

And if you read the decision, the Supreme Court says we’ve had the Bible in schools for 170 years. And they said our decision today to take the Bible out of schools, they said, is without historical or legal precedent. Wait a minute. You don’t have any precedent for taking the Bible out of schools legally or historically? Why did you take the Bible out of schools?

They found a psychologist who testified, and this is what the court said. They said “If portions of the New Testament were read to that explanation, they could be and had been psychologically harmful to the child.” We’ve now discovered the Bible causes brain damage. We got to save everybody from brain damage. Now, I’m going to argue that America suffered more brain damage since we’ve taken the Bible out of schools than we had before we ever took the Bible in schools.

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 are listening to WallBuilders Live. 

Biographical Sketches

Hi, friends, this is Tim Barton of WallBuilders. This is a time when most Americans don’t know much about American history or even heroes of the faith. And I know oftentimes we, parents, we’re trying to find good content for our kids to read. 

And if you remember back to the Bible, to the book of Hebrews, it has the faith Hall of Fame where they outline the leaders of faith that had gone before them. Well, this is something that as Americans, we really want to go back and outline some of these heroes, not just of American history, but heroes of Christianity in our faith as well.

I want to let you know about some biographical sketches we have available on our website. One is called The Courageous Leaders collection. And this collection includes people like Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, George Washington Carver, Susanna Wesley, even the Wright brothers. 

And there’s a second collection called Heroes of History. In this collection, you’ll read about people like Benjamin Franklin or Christopher Columbus, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Harriet Tubman. Friends, the list goes on and on. This is a great collection for your young person to have and read and it’s a providential view of American and Christian history. This is available at www.wallbuilders.com. That’s www.wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

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

AMERICAN RESTORATION TOUR

David:

Let me hit gender for a minute. I’m a cowboy from Texas. You may not know anything about country life at all. It doesn’t matter. I can take you to my ranch in Texas and put you behind my cattle herd, and all of you can tell me the genders of every critter in that bunch. It’s not a hard thing to do. And how many genders are there? There are two. Oh, wait a minute. Didn’t God say and he made them male and female? Yeah, He said that four times in the scriptures.

Now, what happened, the LGBT movement, then it became the LGBTQ movement. And then, if you will follow along the last 10 years, it went from 4 letters to 5 letters to 8 letters to 13 letters to 17 letters, that’s how long it was. When it came to Texas two years ago and they came to Texas because we’re doing our health standards and health standards means sex Ed curriculum. 

And Texas and California are the two largest states in the United States, we have 26% of the nation’s public school kids. So everybody wants to influence all of our, whether it’s history books or science books or health books or geography books, everybody comes to Texas to testify.

The LGBTQ Movement

So what happened, the LGBTQ movement came to Texas, and they said, oh, by the way, it is now the LGBTQIA+ movement. What’s that? Well, I intersectionality said, but we put a plus on the end because we just don’t know how many genders there are. We know there’s 93 right now, but we don’t know how many more we’ll find, and so we put the plus on the end. Well, that was two years ago.

Last month, LGBT community did corporate training and said, we now know there’s 150 different genders. We lost our brains. Yeah, exactly. See, the psychological damage was done after we took the Bible out of schools, not before we took the Bible of schools. And this is the kind of cultural fights that we have going today.

So when you look at Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the other things he said is the Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in his present state than any other book in the world. I’m going to give you three examples, very practical examples of how accurate he was with that statement. This is a man named Matthew Murray. Matthew Murray was born in 1801. 

So he’s growing up under the Founding Fathers. He’s growing up in the administration of Jefferson and Madison and those guys, and he loved the sea. So he joined the navy and went to see as a sailor. Then he became a midshipman, then he became an officer, then he became a captain. He loved to sea.

So after he got out of the navy, he got his own ships, and he was a captain of his ships, and he had a fleet of ships. He just loved the sea. And one day he was ashore, and he had a stagecoach accident where it crushed the bones in his leg, and his leg never grew back right. So he could never go back to sea because he couldn’t keep his balance, because his leg wasn’t straight with the medical technology ahead at that point in time. 

But he loved the sea. So what happens as he stays connected to the sea, he studies the sea, he writes about it, he discovers all sorts of things. He’s called the “Father of modern oceanography.” He’s the guy who found out that there were jet streams in the ocean and that if you’ll put your ship in this jet stream, it’ll get you here so much faster.

For example, if you want it back in his day, if you wanted to go from Boston to San Francisco, you could, but you had to take a ship, and you had to go around all of South America. Now, you could go across inland, but you’re probably going to die before you get there if you have to go across all that area in the mountains and everything else, in the deserts. 

So you would take a ship and go down below South America, come back up over in San Francisco. It took you six months to make that trip. Because of his charts, he says, guys, there’s jet streams in the ocean, and if you will move your ship over here about 5 miles, you’ll get there weeks earlier.

What happened was that six month trip, when you use his charts became a three month trip. Man, that must be fast-moving water in the ocean. It was. And he found it for every continent. So you want to go from here to Europe. And by the way, what difference does that make? 

A Breakthrough in Transportation

Well, if you’re a ship captain, you can now get twice as many trips in the same period of time as you had before, which means a lot more income, which means a lot more prosperity, which means prices go down because more things are available now. 

So everybody starts prospering. That’s where our economy started booming. It was just amazing what happened when you could change transportation.

But here’s my question. He did this in the early 1800s, what kind of satellite technology did he use to be able to find out there were jet streams in the ocean and where they were? He told us how he learned about this. He said he was at home sick one day in bed, and he asked his family to read the Bible out loud to them, and they did. And they read from Psalm 8. 

And part of Psalm 8 says this, it says, Lord, thou madest man to have dominion over the works of thy hand. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field, and the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatever passes through the paths of the sea. He said, read that again.

See, what jumped at him was this, and he had them read it. He had them read it, reread it, reread it, reread it. He kept saying, read that again. And he wrote. 

He says, “If God said there are paths in the sea, then there are paths in the sea, and I’m going to find the paths in the sea.” That’s what set him in that direction, was to find the pathways in the sea. 

That’s where the charts came from. And by the way, if you doubt that there’s pathways in the sea, just watch Finding Nemo really easy, you’ll see pathways in the sea, it’s right there.

But that wasn’t all he discovered. Another Bible verse very significant to him was Ecclesiastes 1:6. Ecclesiastes 1:6 says the wind goes toward the south and turns around to the north. The wind rolls about continually and comes again on a circuit. The wind has a circuit? 

Yeah. Figured out that, you know, the wind goes one way in one hemisphere, goes the opposite way in the other hemisphere. And he figured out the circuit of the winds to the point where he became known as the father of naval meteorology. He could predict the weather. 

Said, guys, see those clouds of weather moving, you don’t want to set sail this week, you wait till after that’s happened. For the first time, accurate weather prediction becomes possible. No satellites. Again, Bible verses.

Faith Wins

Rick:

Alright, folks, out of time for today. This was part two of a three part series this week. We’re bringing you this presentation that David has been giving all across the country and churches across the nation over the last few months. It’s been incredible. 

I’m telling you, I’ve looked at his schedule, and I don’t know how the guy does it. He’s like the George Whitfield of our generation. I mean, he’s just city after city after city, and it’s having a huge impact. 

We’ve heard from many of you out there how much you’ve enjoyed it. And so we’re really thankful for Chad Connolly and Faith Wins and Joan Lindsey and that whole team. They’re doing an incredible job, and we want to keep bringing you this information.

And so tomorrow we’ll get the conclusion of this entire presentation. You can go to Wallbuilderslive.com today. If you happen to have missed yesterday’s program, it’s available for you right there in the Archives section. Thanks so much for listening. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.