Rick Green: 0:04
Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It's WallBuilders. We're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. Our website, WallBuilders.com, has all kinds of great DVDs and books and resources there, and one of those is a television series called Foundations of Freedom, and this week, on WallBuilders, we're sharing those programs with you, and yesterday we dove into the Foundations of Law with Michele Bachmann. We're going to get to the conclusion right now Foundations of Freedom. Here's David Barton and Michele Bachmann

David Barton: 0:44
Michele great to have you with us. Thanks for being here.

Michele Bachmann: 0:45
Great to be here today and I'm looking forward to unlocking some secrets here as well that a lot of Americans aren't familiar with, and that's really dealing with important issues in a scary word called jurisdiction. But it's actually such a blessing not only for Americans, because just that issue alone will unpack it during the course of this conversation, but people will learn how this gives us freedom and how this gives us the ability to be able to take what our talents are and be creative and build up the society, and how, where you have violations of jurisdiction in other countries, people aren't quite so free, and now we see even see that impact here in the United States. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about it, so I'm looking forward to it. As a matter of fact, do you mind if we start with our first question?

David Barton: 1:30
Let's do.

Guest: 1:32
There seem to be so many laws addressing moral and religious issues, where you can and can't pray, how you can pray, the marriage issue, all those things. I was just wondering what's up with all these laws.

David Barton: 1:46
Very simple answer is jurisdictions, that word you were talking about.

Michele Bachmann:
Let's define it first.

David Barton:
Jurisdictions, probably the best way to find it is... Let me give a couple of examples. I'm from Texas, you're from Minnesota. I've got to pick up, you probably don't. Mine's red, yours probably isn't and I decide I really like red. So I go over to your house and spray paint your car red. I can't do that. That's not my jurisdiction. That car belongs to you. It doesn't belong to me. I can spray paint anything I want red if it belongs to me, I can spray paint stuff that belongs to you.

Michele Bachmann: 2:16
So jurisdiction, it's an area.

David Barton: 2:20
It's a fence.

Michele Bachmann: 2:20
It's a fence.

David Barton: 2:21
It's your neighborhood.

Michele Bachmann:
And it says I have authority right here.

David Barton:
Right here, this is my stuff. I'm in control of this.

Michele Bachmann:
but I don't have authority here.

David Barton:
That's right.

Michele Bachmann: 2:30
And I don't have authority here.

David Barton
That's right.

Michele Bachmann:
Or here or here.

David Barton:
The neighborhood with all those fences.

Michele Bachmann:
But I do here

David Barton:
Right there.

Michele Bachmann: 2:36
It's not just geography.

David Barton: 2:38
Oh no. No, it's more than geography, it's responsibilities, that's your jurisdiction.

Michele Bachmann: 2:43
Give me an example of your jurisdiction in your own life. Where are some areas where you have jurisdiction?

David Barton: 2:49
In my own life, I have jurisdiction over what I learn. I'm responsible for what I learn. I'm responsible for what I say. I have jurisdiction over my words. I have jurisdiction over my behavior. I'm accountable to God for my behavior. I'm accountable to civil laws for my behavior. Those are all things that I can control. No one else can control that. I can't control your behavior. Now, I might could punish you if you do something wrong, because that's the jurisdiction of government but I can't control your behavior...

Michele Bachmann: 3:16
And here's another example, One night I was watching a show and they have 19 children in this homeschooling family and one of the little boys said that he had an area of jurisdiction. He was a five-year-old and he had to go, and, I think, take the laundry out of the washing machine and put it in the dryer. He understood that this was his area of authority, Where he had something to do. So it isn't just a government official, it isn't just an adult. Each one of us has an area of authority, an area of responsibility, if you're a husband, if you're a wife, if you're a child, if you're an employee, an employer, if you're a neighbor, if you're a government official, and so where it impacts all of us, this issue of jurisdiction, because government is supposed to be limited under our form of government, so the president only has so much authority. No further. Because the Constitution tells the president, under Article 2, you get to do this. It'd be the executive. You get to enforce our laws, but, Mr President, you can't make the laws, that's Congress.

David Barton: 4:20
Nor can judges make the laws.

Michele Bachmann:
Nor can Judges, that's right. They're another area of jurisdiction because they get to interpret law. And that's when we get messed up a little bit.

David Barton: 4:30
You see, what becomes an important thing here is who's in charge. Who can tell me what my jurisdiction is? And that's a question that has to be answered. Now, it was answered originally for 380 years in America was God defined jurisdictions first, and then, within jurisdictions, people define those jurisdictions. For example, you have Matthew 22:21 where Jesus said look, you render to Caesar what's Caesar's. You render to God, what's God's. You got a line here that separates them. That's where we had institutional separation of church and state. We never separate God out of anything, but we don't let church officials run government.

Michele Bachmann:
So government is not secular.

David Barton:
that's right. Government's not secular. But government doesn't run the church and the church doesn't run the government. Until we got into about 371 AD, Emperor Theodosus...

Michele Bachmann:
When was he?

David Barton:
He was considered world emperor at the time. He was taking over the world.

Michele Bachmann: 5:16
Emperor of the world? Why don't we hear about him?

David Barton: 5:20
Well, we don't and we should, but we do such a lousy job on history. There's a lot of people we don't hear about, but Theodosus is the first guy to say oh wait, a minute, I'm a Christian, I decree Christianity the only religion you can follow. If you're not a Christian, you're going to get killed.

Michele Bachmann: 5:33
So he was a government ruler?

David Barton: 5:35
He was a government ruler.

Michele Bachmann:
And a government ruler who mandated what everyone's religion...

David Barton:
What everybody's going to believe and what they're going... and punish them if they didn't follow the religion.
 
Michele Bachmann:
And I imagine that didn't work out real well.

David Barton
Well, it led to 1,200 years of what we now call the Dark Ages, and the government officials put the Bible out of reach from the common person and, as a matter of fact, when Wycliffe and Huss and other guys just tried to make it in English so we could read it they, got themselves killed by simple officials. Original laws...

Michele Bachmann: 5:59
This is the right time, I think, to interject what most of the viewers have heard, which is Thomas Jefferson's separation of church and state. And so most viewers think that what Jefferson was saying is that government should have absolutely nothing to do with religion. Right?

David Barton:
Dead, wrong.

Michele Bachmann
Dead wrong. And what we learn is that not only should government not have anything to do with religion, but we shouldn't even be allowed to speak about religious things in the public square. But he was writing a letter to the Danbury Baptist, wasn't he? And in that letter he was saying just the opposite, right?

David Barton: 6:34
Well see, what you have is coming into Jefferson's time frame. America was founded fighting for separation of church and state because you had Henry VIII who said I'm going to sit at my own church, I'll do what I want to do.

Michele Bachmann: 6:46
Another civil government official mandated religion.

David Barton: 6:51
Across Europe, It was the state taking over the church and saying here's what your doctrines are going to be.

Michele Bachmann:
The state taking over the church. That's the important point.

David Barton:
And when that happens, when the state takes it over it, you do not get freedom of conscience, you do not get freedom...

Michele Bachmann: 7:04
You lose your liberty. And that's what was so big in the United States. We changed things.

David Barton: 7:08
That's right. For example, the French said you will be Catholic. Well, 400,000 people left the country for not being Catholics. They came to America. They founded largely New York and South Carolina, but they came here seeking religious freedom. So you have Protestants who came out of France. You have Jews that came out of Portugal because they were told you've got to be a Christian. Well, they come to America and...

Michele Bachmann:
People don't recognize it.

David Barton
No, no, no.

Michele Bachmann:
There was a large Jewish population that came in. Again, seeking freedom of conscience, freedom to worship.

David Barton: 7:36
Because the state's not supposed to tell us what our doctrines are. That's a church response. That's not a state response. That's a jurisdiction of the church, not of the state. But the state is taking over the jurisdiction of the church. So you get all these people coming to America that say we want a separation church estate. We don't want the state telling us what our doctrines are going to be.

Michele Bachmann: 7:53
Yet one more reason why the United States was truly a shining city on a hill, because the whole thinking in the world at that time was civil government overstepping their authority, out of their jurisdiction. Because if you read the Bible, the Bible tells us what civil government can do and what they can't do. 

David Barton:
That's right. And what the church can do and what parents can do.

Michele Bachmann:
But it doesn't say that civil government can tell you or tell me what our religion is going to be.

David Barton: 8:24
It tells you exactly the opposite, actually. Because you had King Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26, who steps into the temple and says I've decided, I'm going to become a priest, I'm going to offer sacrifices in the temple. And the priest said whoa, you're the civil leader, we're the religious... He said don't ever tell a king what a king can't. And he tried to offer it, but God struck him down at the altar because he overstepped the jurisdiction.

Michele Bachmann:
That's how important it is to God.

David Barton:
The government won't recognize jurisdictions. The church wasn't taking over the government. The government was taking over the church. And it's the one that encroaches most often. And that's what Jefferson saw. So you have this background. These guys come to America. When they get here, they separate church and state. The pilgrims separated church and state. Now, they didn't take God out of anything.

Michele Bachmann: 9:04
Now think of what that means, separation of church and state. What did it look like to our early fathers and mothers?

David Barton: 9:11
It was keeping God in the middle of everything. But you did not allow the leaders of the civil government to tell you what church to attend, what your conscience beliefs were, what you would be penalized with. I actually have laws that...

Michele Bachmann:
Because penalty was the key. That was your key word, because now civil government would penalize me because I didn't believe the way they wanted me to. And guess what? That is not civil government's jurisdiction, only God.

David Barton: 9:36
Only God. And let's roll it forward 300 years. T hey objected to the government telling you what words you could and couldn't use when you prayed. They objected to the government telling you what your beliefs of conscience would and wouldn't be and what you would do as followers. They objected to government saying you can't do these religious exercises in public, you'd have to do them in private. All the things that are happening today, that government's doing and government's now coercing conscience, those are religious decisions.

Michele Bachmann: 10:01
That's right, because what you've just done, David, is you tied what's happened here in America in the last few months with what the founders foresaw in the Declaration of Independence. Because the Declaration of Independence made it very, very clear that governments were instituted among men. Why? To secure for you and me and all of our posterity, my inalienable rights. In other words, government doesn't have the jurisdiction to give me the right of my conscience.

David Barton: 10:30
Well, let's go back to Jefferson because Jefferson got the letter, as you said, from the Danbury Baptist. Now why is it significant to that from the Baptist? Because Jefferson lived in a state of Virginia that had a state established church. It's the Anglican church, the same official church in Great Britain.

Michele Bachmann: 10:46
This is before we became America. The different states had their own religion. A lot of people don't realize that there was a state religion.

David Barton: 10:54
And in Virginia you had the Anglicans jailing and killing and imprisoning Baptist and Presbyterians and Methodist and Quakers because you aren't doing the Anglican thing.

Michele Bachmann:
And you were forced to pay for it, and follow it and violate your conscience.

David Barton:
That's right. And Jefferson is the guy who stepped in and said no, all denominations are equal in Virginia. And so in 1776...

Michele Bachmann: 11:19
And that's so huge that Jefferson said on his tombstone, I mean, think what you want on your tombstone, what I want on my tombstone. He said, rather than putting on that he was president of the United States. He wanted written on his tombstone that he was the one who was involved with religious liberty, to secure religious liberty for every man and Women.

David Barton: 11:42
It's not a secular move. He wasn't making things secular. He was saying government, leave them alone. And so when he becomes president of the United States, the Danbury Baptist are in a state that still has a state to established denomination even at that point. While he's president, they still had it. Connecticut did not disestablish their denomination until 1818. So we're talking 1801, the Danbury Baptist wrote Jefferson, said we're really concerned. I mean, we are guaranteed our free exercise of religion, but that's a government guarantee. It's not supposed to be. That guarantee came from God, not from government.

Michele Bachmann:
Recently this has been a big, big issue.

David Barton:
Well, let's take that, because God establishes jurisdictions and God comes in... 

Michele Bachmann: 12:22
Areas of authority.

David Barton: 12:24
He said here's what the family does, here's what the church does, here's what civil government does. Now, within civil government, these are the areas that civil government can do. So in that area, the people become the authority in that area. God's already established the fences. Now, how things are going to run inside that fence, we determine. So we come up with the Constitution, We The People, and it says federal government, there's a lot of governments out here. We got local governments, we got school board governments, we got city governments, we got state governments, we got federal governments, here's the deal, we're telling you, federal government, there's 17 things you can do out of all the tens of millions of things under the Constitution. We're giving you a Constitution. That Constitution says you can do 17 things and nothing else. Everything else belongs to us.

Michele Bachmann: 13:07
Okay, now that's a really big point. That's a really big point, because now government has irrigated to itself so much more than that limitation. So again, I think we'd want to encourage all of your viewers to pick up a copy of the Constitution, pick up a copy of the Declaration. You'll be floored when you see the president is only told to faithfully execute the laws on the books.

David Barton:
Who makes the laws?

Michele Bachmann:
Congress!

David Barton:
Oh!

Tim Barton: 13:39
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 often times for 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 outlined 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 and 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 WallBuilders.com that's www.WallBuilders.com.

Michele Bachmann: 14:44
I am one of the privileged 435 members of the House of Representatives. We make the laws because that's what our Constitution said.

David Barton: 14:53
We, the people, told you you guys make the laws.

Michele Bachmann: 14:55
So let's rightfully understand our government. It begins from an understanding of a holy God. Then, it begins with that understanding of a God and people, The people, of this country wrote down in a Constitution for our protection the limits of what our government are,  was written in that document.
  
David Barton: 15:14
Let me first say for just a minute, why did we write it down? Because that was not what they did in Great Britain. To this day they still do not have a written Constitution there. But you had all these Bible minded people that came to America. And so, as you look at the early sermons for example, Thomas Hooker, one of the founders of Connecticut, preached a great sermon on this, why do we write everything down? By the way, Reverend Nathaniel Ward gave them the first written Bill of Rights, 100 rights are protected from government. Why did they do that? 

Michele Bachmann: 15:38
Why not? Otherwise you don't know.

David Barton: 15:41
Well but see, the reason they did was because that's the Bible, when God says hey, I've got a nation, I'm writing the laws with my own finger. And then Moses wrote down the laws of Moses, and then every king of Israel after that, when they were anointed, were to write down with their own hand every law. And then that way we got something to go back to. And so we have a written Constitution so that every individual citizen can go back to it and say whoa, this is your jurisdiction. It's written down right here, article one, section 8, paragraph eight.

Michele Bachmann: 16:11
And that's why there's this whole postmodern idea called deconstruction. That words are meaningless. That's the whole philosophy of relativism. We aren't about relativism. We're about a fixed moral absolutes, because if you want success you need to have a fixed moral absolute. For instance, if you and I make a contract together, it protects us.

David Barton: 16:33
It needs to be fixed.

Michele Bachmann: 16:34
It has to be fixed. Whereas, you lose the most important thing you have, your liberty, your ability to be able to construct contracts property law, tort law, whatever it is. You lose that benefit of certainty. So you have a God who is the example of law. Then you have a written Constitution. Then, under our Constitution, you have an executive who enforces the law, the legislative who writes the law, creates it, and then the judicial that interprets it. But the judicial can't be the legislative, the legislative can't be the judicial. Legislative can't be executive, executive can't be judicial. If the law is not on the books you can't execute it and you can't make it. But if there are laws like, for instance, marriage is between a man and a woman, and the president said I'm not going to execute that law, I don't think it's constitutional. He is not the Supreme Court. The court is the court. They're the ones who need to decide if marriage is between a man and a woman. That's what people wrote it as. You see, it impacts every person watching the show. Every person's life is impacted by jurisdiction. What's your area of authority? Because when somebody oversteps their bound, you lose.

David Barton: 17:52
You lose your liberties, your freedoms.

Michele Bachmann: 17:53
And that's why the founders said this is everything.

David Barton: 17:57
This is everything, and I'm going to go into the chamber where you serve Because in your chamber, the House of Representatives Washington DC, in the US Capitol 23 law givers are honored because that is the place where the law comes out of the House. So you have 23 law givers and they're all side profile views except the one, and that's.

Michele Bachmann: 18:16
Moses, and can I just say I have literally had tears come to my eyes. I've given speeches on this on the House floor. I stand in that chamber surrounded by the greatest law givers in history Solon Sulamun Justinian.

Rick Green: 18:32
Ines of the.

Michele Bachmann: 18:33
Third Hammurabi, all of the law givers of history, like you said in their side profile. But above the main double doors, the doors that the President of the United States enters when he's going to give the State of the Union address, that door is the door above that has a full on full face view of only one law giver and that's of Moses. And, as we know, a holy God gave to Moses the moral law and the 10 commandments of the law upon which every other law has descended and upon which no other law, if it violates that moral law, could stand, because that is the ultimate law. How interesting the face of Moses looks down upon the speaker of the house. The speaker stands at the dais and looks up at Moses. So too the president of the United States when he delivers his address to the nation and to the members of Congress and the Supreme Court and the ambassadors and all the heads of state. This is a very important moment in the United States. When our president does that, he looks directly into the face of Moses, because we understand in this country that we are a nation of laws, not men.

David Barton: 19:45
But when you become secular, you ignore jurisdictions, those jurisdictions given by the law giver of the Bible, given by Moses through God. And it's so sad because it degrades us as a nation.

Michele Bachmann: 19:57
It degrades our liberties and it degrades the greatness of a nation, and that's what God understood from Old Testament times the greatness of a nation is built up by his law.

David Barton: 20:09
This is the Ten Commandments. This is what we say Moses the great logger. He gave lots of laws 613, but also the Ten Commandments. God gave it to him. This particular copy is the copy that went to the US Supreme Court case in 1980 called Stone v Graham. This is the case in which the Supreme Court said oh, you can't let kids see this. This is the one. This is the one. You can't let kids see this. They might obey things like don't kill and don't steal and don't purge yourself, don't lie. The court said, if kids were to see this, they might obey it. Now what's interesting is, moses gave this in 1440 BC. There's one other law giver in the chamber there that's preceded Moses and that is Hamar Abai, and he's 1772 BC, the Atalonian. This case that went through Stone v Graham. We were involved in a lot of the Ten Commandments cases. That was a really popular thing 20, 25 years ago and as these were hanging in courthouses, Because the effort was to remove them. Remember the ACLU and other organizations.

Michele Bachmann: 21:04
Their goal was to strip out of the United States a sense from all Americans, especially children, to not understate the moral basis of them.

David Barton: 21:14
That's right and it's interesting. In America it was always easier to find the Ten Commandments hanging in a courthouse than a church house, because this is the basis of civil law. It was inside the US Supreme Court is more than 59 depictions of the Ten Commandments inside the Supreme Court. So with all this, as we were going through these cases Hamar Abai the court said you know, we could let you leave the Ten Commandments up if you serrated it with other documents that influenced American law. And they said, for example, if you were to put up the Ten Commandments and the code of Hamar Abai and Justinian's code, then we could leave it. Well, first off, that told me they knew nothing about history Because they think this is too religious. The code of Justinian Justinian is one of the law givers in the House. The code of Justinian begins with the phrase in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. And you've got trouble with this and you're telling me, hey, justinian. And then they say, oh, it's got to be documents that influenced American history, like Hamar Abai's code, because he's 350 years before most Time out. Now they didn't discover Hamar Abai's code till 1901. It was not translated till 1904. I don't think that. Have much and see, what's interesting is, why did the code of Hamar Abai not survive? And the code of Moses? Why did it survive? It's real easy. Let me. Let me read to you two laws from Hamar. There's there's 282 laws in his code. It says law number two if anyone bring an accusation against the man and the accused, go to the river and leap in the river. If he's sinking the river, his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river proves that the accuser is not guilty and he escaped unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaked it to the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to the accuser. See, that's why the code of homerabi did not survive.

Michele Bachmann: 23:02
And where in the world, ever in United States law, do we ever see any of this replicated? It's nonsense.

David Barton: 23:08
This is what we use and we're saying, oh, we can't acknowledge it. See, this establishes jurisdictions. This is part of God's law and this is universal. I don't care what age you live in, I don't care how far you think you've evolved. This applies 6,000 years ago, it applies now, it applies 6,000 years from now.

Michele Bachmann: 23:22
And tell me which parent wants their child to steal, wants them to kill, or wants them to go and lie about people, or desires something that wants somebody else to wish for? Well, that's right, but what's amazing is that this is our key for happiness. It has been for all time and it is today. And again it comes down to jurisdiction, areas of authority. There is one person that's watching this interaction between us that doesn't have an area of jurisdiction, because God in his love for each individual. Again it goes back to how God does the CSN groups Think of? How amazing a God is that he loves each one of us so much that we have dignity and worth and a voice? In a system of government like the United States, he has given the maximum amount of voice to the individual and yet allowed us to be able to live together at peace among all men. What a beautiful thing and why we must contend for this.

David Barton: 24:26
That's right. We can't let it go. That's our action items, because if you're going to understand jurisdictions, you have to understand God's the one who established them. Then, if you don't understand how they work, read the Constitution. That's what lays out so many of those jurisdictions and it tells us what the jurisdictions are. I mean, that's the starting point Is black and white.

Michele Bachmann: 24:44
It's as clear as it could possibly be. Article one, article two, article three how long would it take someone to read it? Twenty minutes maybe? Okay, twenty minutes, Everybody could do that, Absolutely everybody has time to do that. But before you do that, take what ten minutes and read the Declaration of Independence. That's kind of the whole philosophy behind the Constitution. You got to read that person. If you don't get the Declaration you don't get the Foundation, because then it puts meat on the bones of jurisdiction, area of authority.

David Barton: 25:11
But there's something that even backs up before the Declaration, before the Constitution, and that is Well, it's actually the Bible, Because in that jurisdiction that's there in the Constitution you have, like the three branches of government that you mentioned. That comes directly out of the Bible. What's that scripture?

Michele Bachmann: 25:28
It's Isaiah 33-22. Okay, so everybody has to read Isaiah 33-22.

David Barton: 25:32
The Lord, our God is our law giver, our judge and our king. That sounds like judiciary, legislative and executive and interestingly enough, John Adams himself said well, not only that, but the reason that we separated the powers we have checks and balances is Jeremiah 17 and 9. What Most folks have never read, that the Founder's Bible has got all these explanations from the Founders on the Bible versus the years. So you start with reading the Constitution, read the Declaration, read the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, learn these things Get to where you know these.

Michele Bachmann: 26:05
Something tells me we're going to be talking a little more about separation of powers. I think that'll be very important. This is so great. This has been a great, great time. Thank you so much.

David Barton: 26:15
Well, these are the documents that are part of our Foundation to Freedom, and that's exactly what we want to learn. We've got our work to do and we're going to do it.

Rick Green: 26:21
We're out of time for today. Folks, you've been listening to David Barton and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann talking about the foundations of law. Alright, thanks so much for listening. You've been listening to WallBuilders.