Rick Green

Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's the Wall Builders Show on a Thursday, which means we've got Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Today We'll be taking your questions and if you'd like to ask one, send it in to radio at wallbuilders.com. That's radio at wallbuilders.com. And yes, wallbuilders.com is the place to go for great information, lots of tools for yourself and your family to get educated, equipped, inspired. We want you engaged, not just listening, but engaged. We need to do our duty and leave the results to God, and that requires action on our part. So check that out today at wallbuilders.com. I'm Rick Green, America’s Constitution Coach, serving here with David and Tim Barton. David's America's premier historian and our founder at Wall Builders. Tim's a national speaker and pastor and president of Wall Builders, and all three of us are going to take your questions today. You can learn more at wallbuilders.com and then, if you miss some of the radio programs, go to wallbuilders.show. But today we're going to be diving into some of those foundational principles and we ask you, by the way, when you go to our main website, wallbuilders.com, consider a donation one time or monthly. That helps us to reach more people, more pastors, more legislators, all the folks out there that we're training to help restore America's constitutional republic, and you can be a part of that by going to wallbuilders.com today. All right, David and Tim jumping right in.

Seth's got our first question for this Foundations of Freedom Thursday. He said could y'all help give some perspective to the extent of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution and its balance with legal consequences for certain speech? Oftentimes with this topic, you hear the phrase you have freedom of speech but not freedom from the consequences of your speech, which seems like it would apply to every tyrant in history For America. For America, it seems like things like verbal threats on the president, slander and libel come to mind. Could you speak to that nature of speech that does have legal consequences, and at what point does that evolve into just freedom of most speech?

I've started thinking more and more about this and as many people have been fired from their jobs for posting their regrets on social media that the shooter missed Trump, and while I agree that such speech is heinous, it has highlighted that I'm not crystal clear on where the line is for constitutionally defending free speech that I disagree with. Thank you so much for everything y'all do to protect and restore the republic. Many blessings, Seth. Seth, thank you for sending that in and guys, let's dive in. So yeah, obviously First Amendment doesn't allow you to say anything and everything there's no limits whatsoever but it does protect what we might consider offensive speech or nasty speech or mean speech. Where is the line? If you're lying, obviously there should be consequences for hurting somebody's reputation. If you're causing a riot because you're saying things that are literally saying take up your arms and let's go storm this hill, I mean, what do you guys think? Where do we define that easily for folks?

Tim Barton

I think one of the most confusing parts for a lot of people is when we talk about the freedom of speech, especially in the modern era, we've changed this thought of what speech is in fact, aybe a couple of weeks ago we had the program where you talked about, when the founding fathers talked about a right to life. It's probably better understood in our generation if we change the phrase to a right to be born, the right to be alive, because we've confused what this right to life actually is in the context of how they're writing it, why they're writing it, what they're addressing. And if we go back to the freedom of speech, it wasn't specifically that they were protecting the ability to use every word in whatever kind of vocabulary vernacular you have. It was about the freedom to engage in conversation, engage in disagreement, that under the kings all over Europe, you were silenced and you couldn't voice and vocalize your opinion, you couldn't vocalize your position. And we've so distorted that now that we are saying that someone being nude in public that's their freedom of speech. Well, no, that's not them arguing and articulating an idea against a tyrannical government.

Well, that's what the First Amendment was really for when it comes to the freedom of speech. It was the ability to have conversations and speak out against the unjust lawfare in many cases of what the federal, in that case, what monarchs were doing, what parliament was doing, what appointed lords, nobles, whoever else were doing. So I think it's a little misconstrued to think that we should protect everything everybody says. It's one thing if you say I think this politician has terrible ideas and I don't think we should elect them. It's totally different if you say this person is a threat to democracy and we should eliminate them, which I'm pretty sure I've heard people say about Donald Trump, which has not been a good thing, now that there have been two assassination attempts on his life. But this is where, again, we've confused the freedom of expression with the freedom to say whatever we want without having to face consequences for any words we use.

David Barton

One of the things the founders talked about was that you have a freedom of speech, but you have to be accountable for the consequences thereof, and so if your freedom of speech incites someone to do something harmful, violent, dangerous, if you incite them to go rob a store, you've got to be held accountable for that, and so that's where they made the difference. But I think what's happened today is we're using the standard based on where we are right now in the culture, and where we are in the culture is the culture the morals have denigrated. We are so far away from where we were in the 40s, 50s, anywhere else, and so the use of free speech to call for someone or to celebrate the murder of someone would never have been tolerated in previous days, because the morals would not have allowed that, the culture itself would not have bought into that. And this is where Washington said if you want the Constitution to work, if you want political prosperity, you have to have a religion of morality, and there used to be a sense of decency that Americans held together. There were certain things we were just not going to tolerate, and, Tim, to your point, saying something is one thing, but nude behavior is not speech, that's behavior. And the founder said you're responsible for the consequences of your behavior. You could call for the burning of the American flag, but if you burn the flag, that's not calling for it, that's not speech anymore. And so suddenly the same court that took God out of schools and took prayer out of schools and that changed all the morality and just did a whole different standard, they're the ones that started saying well, if that's the way you feel about something, if that's the way you want to behave, your expression is your speech. No, it's not. Your expression is your behavior. And they made behavior into speech.

And that's where we've really goofed up is, in that very progressive liberal court of the 1960s and 70s and some in the 80s, where they said that speech and behavior are the same thing. And they are not. And so the founding fathers were talking about discourse of ideas. The government might be federalist and you're anti-federalist and you want to criticize the government, go for it. But if you do something to lead an insurrection against the government or if your speech is used to foment a riot against the government, you're accountable for that.

So it used to be the expression, the exchange of ideas in the sense of debating something and helping come to a finer point. Now it's the sense of yelling at someone and denigrating someone else and saying I hope he gets murdered in a really bloody way. That was never the design, but that's what happens if you have no moral standards, if you have no common sense of decency as a nation, which we don't. The behaviors that are tolerated used to be reprehensible to every person from every political spectrum just 25 years ago, and now we're protecting them as part of free speech. That was never in the design of the First Amendment, never what it was designed to do.

It was to allow you to have an exchange of ideas, even disagreeable ideas, but it wasn't to alter your behavior. But even today, if I were to say, Rick, I know he's our co-host man, he beats his kids and look what he does to Kara and I went through everything he said. And if that caused, as a result of me saying that, if that was to get publicized, and if that was to shut down Patriot Academy and if it was to shut down all the Constitution Coach and biblical citizenship and take his income away, then I'm liable for my speech, because that was a lie, which is defamation, could be slander, depending on whether I wrote it or speak it.

Rick Green

Hang on, guys. We got to go to break while I call my attorney and get my defamation lawsuit ready, that's right.

David Barton

So even today, there's still consequences for it and, quite frankly, I don't like people saying that Trump you know shooter shouldn't have missed, but at the same time, that's not the role of the government to keep an employer from firing someone for bad behavior. I mean the government doesn't step in and say, hey, you're an employer at Costco, you need to fire this employee who said something bad about Trump not being shot. That's not the role of the government and so that's a problem as well. So if private companies want to discipline and hold a standard, they can do that.

The private companies aren't required to uphold free speech. That's what the government's required to uphold to allow that forum to happen. But in speech, I can choose what my employees say or don't say, if I want to keep them or not keep them, and that's just the choices out there. And I think we're confusing the government with the private sector a lot of times, because the government keeps getting into the private sector and mandating what they do and mandating what they can and can't post on social media and everything else. Now this is where this thing gets really complicated in a hurry.

Rick Green

Yeah, great distinctions, guys. I mean that's exactly. You know. That's part of why we want people to study the Constitution more, to really understand how to live out their freedoms and what some of those boundaries are. But, as you're pointing out, David, I mean the boundary on this one should be very broad. It should be. You know, we want to err on the side of caution, and I've heard it several times during this Orwellian time in history that we're living in, even Elon Musk saying it many times Listen, the ones that are silencing the opposition have never been the good guys in history, so really important to keep in mind. All right, let's go to the next question. Thank you, Seth, for that one. By the way, sarah sends in this one. She said let's see why are so many Christians against Zionist Jews? In my understanding of the Bible, we should stand with Israel and never against. From the history that I found, the man that started Zionism sounds a lot like Nehemiah. Okay, so, man, I don't even know where to start on this one. Guys, go ahead.

David Barton

I would say Zionism is a lot earlier than the man who did it, really in the 20th century. Zionism goes back to God, because God is the one who said look, I'm going to give you a land and here's the boundaries of the land and this is your land. And Abraham, this is what your inheritance will eventually get. God is the one who made Israel the nation it is and gave them that land and said that's your land. So Zionism has to go back to God.

Tim Barton

Hey Dad, let me also clarify too. So for those that might not know, Zionism is what calls for the nation of Israel, and so it was the Zionist movement that called for Israel to be reunited as a nation, the development establishment of Israel. Now, so when you're saying it was God's idea, well, yeah, it was God's idea to take Abraham, to give him many descendants, as numerous as stars in the sky, as sand on the seashore, to make them a great nation, to bless those that bless them, to curse those that curse them. So that was God's idea to make the descendants of Abraham, which then it was Jacob that wrestled with God. His name was changed to Israel, he had the 12 sons, the 12 tribes of Israel, et cetera, et cetera. That was where the nation of Israel came from. So to your point, that's God's idea.

But just for those that might not be familiar with the term Zionism or kind of the context surrounding it, this was not something that just happened in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, et cetera. This was something that God originally designed the nation of Israel. God determined their boundaries, their borders. And even after Israel, if you go back to the time of Jesus, when they've been captured, they've been living as a not free nation or no longer. Their nation was recognized as Israel, largely even at the time of Jesus.

To some extent there were Christians early on after the time of Jesus already calling for the Jews to be reunited and for there to be a nation again. So you can almost go in every generation for the last 1,000, 1,500 plus whatever years, and find for people calling for Israel to be a nation again. But just to add to your point of what Zionism is, when you say God's the one that came up with the idea of Zionism, God's the one that came up with the idea of Israel being a nation, having their own land, their own location, their own boundaries, borders, et cetera, which is really what Zionism is.

David Barton

And one of the things that happened within the Christian community was when Israel ceased to exist as a nation back in the Roman era, when she was kind of wiped out as a nation. A lot of people read the Bible and said, well, wow, god made a lot of promise to the Jews, but Israel isn't there anymore, and so who would that be? Oh well, that's Christians. We're the new Jerusalem, we're the new Jews, we're the replacements, because we're the new covenant. And so it was called replacement theology, in that Christians replaced the role of the Jews, because Jews aren't there anymore. But then, when Israel was reborn in 1948 as a nation which fulfilled scriptural prophecies, God had also prophesied that Israel would come back and she would be there. And so when that happened, you're stuck with a whole lot of Christians that said wait a minute, the Jews, we're the replacement for the Jews. And so that has hung on with some generations and with some denominations to some degree. And so in that sense, there is some anti-Jewish sentiment.

And in the Crusades a lot of bad stuff got introduced when people were not reading the Bible. They said you know what and this is what they would tell Crusaders is hey, you guys do realize it was Jews who killed Jesus, Jews who crucified Jesus. You need to kill Jews, and that's where the Rhine Valley. They killed 15,000 Jews. It wasn't Jews who crucified and killed Jesus. It was sinners who crucified and killed Jesus, and it was our sins who killed Jesus, not any race, not any particular race, and so that was another bad biblical thing that got introduced, and we're still dealing with some of the remnants of that here, even centuries later got introduced and we're still dealing with some of the remnants of that here even centuries later.

Tim Barton

Well, and also Dad, just one note that if you look back at the Crusades, it's also where we know so little history, even inside of Christianity. As Christians we know so little about the history of Christianity. We often will admit on the show about how little Americans know about American history. But it's also true that Christians don't usually know the Bible all that well, just statistically. And very much we don't know the history of Christianity. And when you look at the Crusades, the Crusades often get a bad rap today without people knowing the full context that the Crusades were largely a response to some of the holy Christian sites that were being conquered by Muslim nations and there were Muslim jihads that were going on and there were hundreds of jihads that happened during the span of the dozen or so crusades that happened, and not every crusade Jews were not targeted as kind of the primary group that was attacked, but there definitely were moments that in the Crusades there were some really, really bad things that happened, and often happened in the name of Christianity, because this is back when, under some of the Kings, they blended their government and their religion to make this kind of theocracy. And so, instead of recognizing that the government has a role to protect people, the government has an army that that army can march. They said, well, it's going to be the church, and the church is going to march and we're going to do this in honor of Jesus, in honor of God. We're going to go kill people for God kind of, for a king and country kind of scenario. So that's where some of it derailed, but I do want to point out, because I don't want people to hear that and think, oh my gosh, okay. So everything I've heard about the Crusades was right. The Crusades were all evil.

Well, there definitely was bad things that happened during some of the Crusades maybe during all the Crusades, if we're fair about it, but it was a very different era and time as well, and the Crusades did not start to go kill Jews. They started to go reconquer and recapture some of the Holy Land, like Jerusalem, that had been conquered by Muslims during that timeframe. However, with all that being said, dad, to your point, one of the reasons that Christians could justify maybe some of that in the Crusades is because they said well, you know, jews are the ones that killed Jesus and we're Christians now. So we're the special ones now, which is contradictory of what the Apostle Paul taught in Romans, chapter 11, that we are grafted as Christians. We are grafted into the tree, and the roots of that tree are Israel. That's what we're grafted into. It's part of God's relationship, god's covenant with Israel, that Christians are invited into. We don't replace them, we join them in part of that covenant with God.

David Barton

The other thing I'd point out that I think is a factor in this is just that there are so many people who have become so secular that when you become secular, you're also anti-God. And as you become anti-God, one of the things you dislike are God's standards. And that's why some people dislike the Ten Commandments. They don't like being told what to do by God. In the same way, they dislike God's people. And so you'll find that among secular people, particularly anti-biblical secular people, that they love the enemies of God. They love God's enemies, they love Hamas, they love anybody who'll kill the Jews. And that is more of a characteristic of people who are secular thinkers and very ill-informed biblically or reject biblical thinking.

So you have the historical component and some bad doctrine got in the church and bad behavior came in, and in both cases it was because people did not read all the scriptures and did not understand what the Bible said. And then you've got another component that's just based on people who don't like God and don't like God's people, and they don't like Christians, they don't like Jews, they don't like anybody. But, as Tim pointed out, the big key is Christians exist because of Jews, not vice versa. We're grafted into the Jewish tree. It's not the other way around, and so any Christian who's confused about that needs to go back and read Romans 11. And I have seen, at least in my lifetime, a decreasing number of churchgoers who are kind of anti-Zionist. There's a lot of secular people who are anti-Zionist, but within the church, particularly prior to 1948, there was a fair bit of anti-Zionism because they never thought Israel would come back, but that's changed a lot in the last several decades.

Rick Green

All right, guys. We've got time for one more question when we come back. Quick break here.Speaker 2: 18:18

We'll be right back. You're listening to the WallBuilder Show 

Break

Rick Green

Welcome back to the WallBuilder Show. Thanks for staying with us on this. Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Last question for the day is about Thomas Jefferson. Why do seminaries attack Thomas Jefferson? I've been reading books on biblical doctrine and I keep seeing Thomas Jefferson being used as an example because of the clippings of the teachings of Jesus. I've read your book, the Jefferson Lies, and I've done some research into Jefferson, but I don't understand why he keeps being attacked. That question from Joshua. Joshua, thanks for being strong and of a good courage and sending in that question. All right, David, Tim, what do you think? Why, specifically here I hadn't heard about this the seminaries lambasting Jefferson and, of course, folks, please go get the book, because David goes into great detail on these questions in the Jefferson Lies WallBuilders.com today to get that, David. What would be the quick answer to this?

David Barton

There's really several, and it really deals with a lot of seminaries, and I don't know which ones they're talking about. A lot of seminaries are becoming as progressive as colleges are not quite as progressive, but almost as progressive. And if you're progressive, you don't like the founding fathers, you don't like America, and you can take every chance you can to attack America, attack the founding fathers. So that's part of it. Another part of it is they've been educated in soundbites and their professors probably told them that Jefferson was a secularist. We've seen him called atheist, agnostic, deist. He's immoral, all these adjectives used to describe Jefferson, and they're wrong.

We cover that in detail in the Jefferson Lies show, actually what happened. But they've been educated in soundbites, and so that's one. And then the other part of it is you're just at a position where people don't know history, they don't know what's out there, and so they buy into narratives that they've heard from somebody, but they don't know whether they're true or not, and so a lot of this goes back to literally not knowing the truth. If you know the truth, then it's a lot easier to rebut these things. But I would point people back to the Jefferson Lies. That is a book that made the academics really, really, really mad because we went back to original sources and documents, those who knew Jefferson, those who were with him, his letters, et cetera, and it just contradicted the narratives that were out there.

Tim Barton

Well, and Dad, I would point out too that some of the largest critics of the Jefferson Lies when that was happening were Christian professors, so it wasn't even the secularist professors. Because, just as an example, if people look up and maybe we can put a link on our website today, there's an article that was written by a professor from the University of Virginia. He's now retired. He was there for, I want to say, nearly 30 years, just a really long time was tenured, but he was considered the expert on Thomas Jefferson. He wrote an article where he asked a question this is the title of the article was Jefferson America's first abolitionist? And it's interesting because he goes through and points out that Jefferson was the one leading the political movement in many respects changing the dialogue, changing the conversation, the way that Americans, but even over in Europe at times, the way they viewed or would even converse about the issue of slavery, where Jefferson is the first one to articulate in any official political governing document that all men are created equal, that Jefferson works as governor, as legislator, as part of the federal government to change some of the slavery laws in America. He's the advocate, the leader on those things. Well, I bring this up because when you knew that Jefferson lies a dozen, whatever years ago and you made some of those claims, there were people losing their minds saying how dare you say these things? And now you literally have some of the leading Jefferson experts from the University of Virginia, the university founded by Thomas Jefferson, who is saying the same thing that you were saying on these issues, the same thing you were saying more than a dozen years ago. But I'm saying that because you challenged the modern narrative, you challenged the status quo, but also it was challenging what had become embedded, that a lot of Christians had embraced this notion that the founding fathers were largely atheists, agnostics and deists. And you point out and you've done this now for decades and decades that that really is not a tenable claim. If you study history, if you know the founding fathers, you go back and see what they wrote, see what they did, see the Bibles they produced, the fact that every founding father that became a governor did these prayer proclamations Again, I mean just kind of go down the list. The founding fathers by and large do not fit the category that they're accused of today, but it was these Christian professors that were the loudest critics against what you were doing, even though now these secular professors are acknowledging some of the same things you did years ago. So the Jefferson lies does cover a lot of this, and even that you'll have to remind me.

I don't remember which author this was, but one of the reprints of what became known as the Jefferson Bible. Jefferson had a list of all the verses he was going to include, but some of those verses were not included in the reprint because the guy who did the reprint said well, I just don't think Jefferson would have used those verses because Jefferson didn't believe in the supernatural, or angels or demons or heaven or hell. That's literally in his book. It's one of his little side notes about excluding some of those. And so when people read some of like the Jefferson quote, unquote the Jefferson Bible today and they're like oh, Jefferson cut out all these things that were supernatural. Well, no, Jefferson actually didn't. It's some of the modern professors that have reprinted those works that didn't think that fit with their own version of Thomas Jefferson, not necessarily what Jefferson actually did.

Rick Green

Tim, it is not an exaggeration at all to say that they lost their minds. They did. There was so little logic. It was just crazy what happened back then. And even to this day I get people asking me hey, what about this whole thing with what David Barton said about Thomas Jefferson and all that man? Truth hurts for those that needed those lies about Jefferson. So very thankful, David, for your debunking of those lies.

And, of course, folks get the book if you want to dive in. And it's good, it's great reading. You're going to find some things that maybe you have bought the lie on and actually think that you know about Jefferson and about that time in history, and it'll absolutely blow your mind as well. And then you'll have some great party favors to talk about at the next opportunity that you're standing around chatting with friends and something comes up about Jefferson and boom, you'll be able to drop some really good facts. So make sure you get Jefferson Lies today at wallbuilders.com. Thanks for listening today to Foundations of Freedom Thursday tomorrow you don't want to miss all the good news, so be sure and tune in again tomorrow here on the WallBuilder Show.