Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. It's The WallBuilders Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective into the new year. Here we are. Let's see. Second day of the year and we're already getting to your questions. Thank you for sending them in. You can email those to radio@wallbuilders.com. Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton Foundations of Freedom Thursday. So we'll see how many questions we can get to guys. First one up is from Janice. She says, I have a Christian friend who is a voracious reader who has read many biographies of famous people, including Founding Fathers. He claims George Washington brought out managing of his letters and journals after his presidency and his own, in his own words, did not believe that Jesus was God. This is confusing to me. Where can I go to find out the truth about our Founding Fathers online? There have been so many rewrites of history that I don't know what to trust. David and Tim, this is actually in the same vein as a lot of questions we get. They're like, Man, there are so many sources out there and people say this and different sides. And you know, David, four years ago you said finding truth is getting harder and harder. Even with all the information out there, it's harder because there's, you know, so many people trying to stop the truth from coming out. So Faith of the Founders is something WallBuilders absolutely is the expert on. And David, I think you have probably read more of the founding fathers than anybody alive today or maybe anybody in history. So this is a great question for you. How do we find the truth about the faith of folks like George Washington? 

David Barton [00:01:28] Or I'm going to punt this to Tim in a minute because this is the kind of stuff that we deal with. And Tim particularly deals with every summer with Summer Institute, where we have college kids come in and and this is the kind of stuff that they need help with because this is the kind of stuff that professors do on a regular basis. Today. I'm going to start by saying, well, when you're after information here, what you're after is the truth. You're not after one side or the other. You want to know what the truth is on this. And the way you go at truth here is the way that a court of law is supposed to work and used to work and hopefully is getting back to working. Certainly in the last, I don't know, 4 or 5, eight years, it's gone a lot more woke than it had. But the objective of the court was to find truth. And with that you had hierarchy of evidence. You always take an eyewitness above hearsay, and in courts you just don't allow hearsay. If somebody told you that they heard that, somebody said that doesn't matter. You have to find out the eyewitness who was there, who saw it at the time. And so you have hierarchy of evidence. You have first, first tier evidence and second tier evidence. And and if you can't get anything else, then you can go to hearsay. But that's only because you can't get original sources. On the case of George Washington, there's original sources, there's a ton of hearsay, and most of it has a Ph.D. average name in terms of professors and others who need to be critics and to make a name for themselves. They've got to come up with some new approach to something that nobody's ever seen before. And and by the way, they've gone through 30 years of progressive education, so they don't like the founders anyway. So the thing that I would set up is you're after truth and truth made. You have to use really what's used in the court of law, and that's hierarchy of evidence. Now, having said that, Tim goes into this in great detail, helping kids understand how to go about this. And so, Tim, I'll turn it to you and kind of go through here. 

Tim Barton [00:03:18] Well, Rick, and let me back up. So let's let's review the question, Rick, if you don't mind reading it. Like what is what's the premise of what we're asking? George Washington is like the idea he didn't believe in Jesus, but like, it's based on what evidence? Again? 

Rick Green [00:03:32] Yeah. Yes. She makes it sound like apparently that George Washington released or I'm not sure I'm following her language exactly, but basically released a lot of his letters and journals or they were released after his presidency. And that in his own words, this is what she was told by someone. They claimed that in in Washington's own words, he did not believe Jesus was the son of God. And and so based on, you know, a lot of the other things that we hear him quote and say and do is that, you know, you know, and of course, like you said, where you get into areas like some, I can generally say, well, I read that George Washington didn't say this, but we don't have an exact quote or an exact letter here or a journal entry from Washington to back or back up this this claim. 

David Barton [00:04:14] And I'll I'll add to that what she's saying. There is stuff that I've heard since the 80s and it's stuff that I've seen a lot of that that he was not a Christian. He denied Jesus as being the son of God. He denied the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth of Jesus. 

Rick Green [00:04:29] David, to clarify, you're saying that these are things you've heard people say about him? 

David Barton [00:04:33] Yes, I have not read those claim from him. I have read things on the other side of that. And so that's where Tim's going to get in the hierarchy of evidence. But all these things that she's saying is stuff that's been out with professors since at least the 80s. I've heard this sense since the beginning of WallBuilders. This is that's one of the big things that came was going after George Washington and then it was Jefferson. There was always that 3 or 4 top founding fathers they wanted to go after. And then we introduced the fact that, well, there's really about 250 founding fathers. When you throw on Rush and Witherspoon or Robert  and you throw on. You're shocked at all these other guys. It changes the debate. But nonetheless, what she is saying is stuff that's been out there for a number of years and it gets recirculated every 6 to 8 years, it seems like. Seems like there's a new crop of kids that go through college or a new book that comes out by some professor and he just recirculated stuff that's been out there for the last 40, 45 years. So I can tell you, I've heard all of those claims and this is like the fifth or sixth iteration that we've gone through of answering these claims. And they do come out with every every four to 5 or 6 years a new group of young people. They get inundated with this stuff. 

Rick Green [00:05:42] It almost sounds like the judges who pontificate about what the previous judge said about what the previous judge said, but they don't go to the actual constitution. So in the same way here. 

David Barton [00:05:49] That's exactly right. 

Rick Green [00:05:50] This professor says this professor said this professor, but they're not quoting the actual founding father. 

David Barton [00:05:55] It's a new group of PhDs that just got their page day and they're now professors and they're quoting the guys who taught them for the last 4 to 6 years and school who are quoting the guys who taught them for the last 4 to 6 years in school. And so it is a result. It is a recycling of the same same stuff for sure. 

Rick Green [00:06:13] It's a PhD, but it should be a B.S., you know, Bachelor of Science. But it sounds like any anyway. Yeah, go ahead, Tim. 

Tim Barton [00:06:19] Well, and you know, I don't even know that it's always quoting the professor that was right before them. Sometimes it's quoting Howard Zinn. Right? Sometimes quoting Woodrow Wilson. Right. Right. So it's not it's not just I'm presiding my professor because they might have this historical like that, as you're kind of mentioning, like a hierarchy and like. Well, no. Howard Zinn, born of this at Woodrow Wilson, wrote about whatever another Woodrow Wilson wrote about George Washington's faith necessarily, other than just looking at kind of who they reference. But whenever somebody says, going back to the original question, whenever somebody says, well, George Washington actually said this, well, that's a really easy follow up. Well, where did he say it? Yeah, because. Right. If we're offering well, we know this is what he believed. How do we know he believed it? I mean, it's it's a very basic question, but this is what. Is a challenge for so much of the modern accusation because they rest their authority on somebody who explained something instead of going back to the original source. And so the basic questions are, well, what is the source? And if the source is not George Washington's writing, if you're telling me George Washington said this, George Washington wrote this, I want to see from the original document. And by the way. We are coming from a place that I don't think George Washington really believed that at all. But if if one day a letter showed up where it was actually in George Washington's handwriting, he said, I don't believe in the divinity of Jesus. I don't believe in Christianity. I don't believe in God. We would have to go, Wow, George Washington did not finish where we thought he was going to finish in his faith journey. And we'd have to be intellectually honest about that and go, man, that's that's not what I thought. But we've never seen that letter, and I don't think that letter exists. I think it's very inconsistent with everything we know about George Washington. What we see of his life, his character, even of his death. But the questions are, again, very simple. What's your source? What's your proof? Right. What what are we referencing? How do we know this is what he believed? And you just start asking some basic questions in search of truth. And if it's not going back to your original document. Right. It's it's not some critic of his from the 1830s or 40s. It's not some critic from the 1930s or 40s and maybe not even a critic, but but somebody who clearly didn't know George Washington. And it could even be different if it was somebody who said, you know, I was a soldier in the American Revolution and I served with George Washington, and I don't think he really believed in Jesus. Well, that's something that you would have to weigh because that's someone that had been around George Washington. But if that person's thoughts are inconsistent or contradictory with everything else that people said about George Washington, everybody else that knew him said something different. George Washington, his own writings are different. This is where you start to weigh some of the available evidence, just like a judge would do in a courtroom. What is the best available evidence? What is most likely? What makes the most sense? What is incontrovertible? Irrefutable based on the evidence? And so these are things that I think sometimes we are searching for answers of trying to to resolve the question instead of going back to the premise of the question and saying, well, how do we know he said that? How do we know that's what he believed? What is the source? What what is the information that led you to that conclusion? And when we begin to investigate some of that information, some of the source, that what led us to think that a lot of times we realize that we don't have really good proof similar to. Right. The things about Christopher Columbus or the Pilgrims and and so many of the modern accusations we get when we go back and say, well, how do we know what's the source? What's the proof? We realized that the true story is very different than the modern narrative. And the modern narrative is not supported by fact. It's only supported by professors. 

David Barton [00:10:10] And what I would add to that is, as you've seen what Tim just said, there's three pieces of evidence I would send people back to. Number one is eyewitnesses of George Washington, not the least of which I would start with a guy named Jared Sparks. Jared Sparks was the president of Harvard University, but he is the guy. He's a historian and he's the guy who collected all of George Washington's writings in that the first published set 12 volumes of George Washington's writings. So he curated all that. He collected all the handwritten documents he could find of George Washington, those who knew him, those who wrote to him, letters that he wrote to others, he got access to it from from the Washington family. He was able to go through Washington's own materials. And so he compiles that into the first ever edition of Washington's Writings 12 volume set. And in the last of that, 12 volumes and the 12 volume, he he dug into Washington's faith and digging into Washington's faith, he talked to those who knew Washington best, and that was Washington's family, not the least of which was Nellie Custis, whom Washington it was his granddaughter, but he adopted her as a daughter. And she lived 20 years with him there at Mount Vernon. She's the one who says, I saw this. This is what he did with the Bible. This is what he did every day with reading. This is what he did with Jesus Christ. ET cetera. And so it's it's really Jared Sparks asking Nellie, tell him tell us what you know about Washington's faith. And she goes through with a long description of what we would call a very evangelical Christian type of belief. And she goes through and says, you might as well question his patriotism as to question his Christianity. Now, you're going to have to come up with a better eyewitness than someone who spent 20 years living with them in his family as part of his family. And you're going to have to come up with a better eyewitness than the man who compiled all of his writings, who has the first edition of everything, who has the most access. And there's enough of that kind of stuff out there that in 1917, a book was done called George Washington The Christian because this is the progressive era in the 19187s, and this is since about the 1880s, we've been attacking our heroes in America. And this is the rise of progressives. And by the time you get into the 1916, 1917, 1980, progressives have taken over so much of stuff and they're attacking our heroes, including George Washington. And so this this man named Johnson, he went back through everything he could. On all the biographies of Washington, all the writings of Washington's generals, and pulled out all the things that they said about Washington. And this book called George Washington, The question is nothing but the clips of all of these previous writings of those who knew Washington, those who were with him, those who fought with him, those who served with them in politics. And there's no question that he was George Washington, the Christian, which is the title of the book, and it's based on those eyewitnesses. So based on the type of stuff that Tim was laying out, you go back to the hierarchy of evidence and I would send it to Stanley Custis. I would send you to Jared Sparks, and I would send you to the compilation that Johnson did in 1917. And that by itself will pretty much blow up any modern progressive stuff. And this will win in court because these are eyewitnesses and this is hierarchy of evidence that gets a lot higher grade than somebody who's got three Ph.Ds and taught at Harvard and Yale and Princeton and in the 1970s, 80s, 90s. So there's much better evidence. And that's what I would always send people to. But to have had the right question you asked the right question beginning what's your source? 

Tim Barton [00:13:37] And nobody making these accusations today, to my knowledge, has taught at Harvard, Princeton and Yale together. That's a pretty elite guy or girl. 

David Barton [00:13:44] Yeah, that's right. 

Tim Barton [00:13:44] If they're a professor, right. And busy, it's normally. Yeah. And then no doubt it's normally not somebody who is at a high level and they're normally not really intellectually honest. Yeah, it's someone who's bought into the modern narrative without doing a research. And so, I mean, you know, Dad, not to contradict your thought other than recognizing the modern professors, even though they might have all these credentials and all this alphabet after their name of all the different degrees they have, it doesn't mean they are actually relying on original sources. They might be relying on something some other professor wrote. And if that professor had an agenda or was buying into some of the woke Marxist Kool-Aid, then they're going a very different direction as opposed to what the original documents say. But to clarify, there is nobody who has this really elite, prestigious Harvard, Princeton, Yale background that's making these kind of arguments. Now, there might be a professor at Harvard. There might be a professor at Yale or Princeton who thinks this, but not somebody that's incredibly well-traveled, that has a a level of intellectual honesty that's actually done research. It's generally people that are not even from the history world, that are not from the American History Department, that have a distaste for America or maybe even a distaste for Christianity. And they're the ones that are usually promoting these kind of ideas. And it's not based on original source documentation. 

David Barton [00:15:02] Yeah. And to add to that, there's one of the books we would point to that we use all the time to show how bad they are on this. And it's called the Godless Constitution, and it's written by two professors at Cornell University. But they are not history professors, either one of them. I think one's the literature and one was something else. But nonetheless, those are at least in the progressive world, those are highly cited books, highly, highly relied on books to make the point of the godless constitution. But it's not done by historians. We go back to Howard Zinn. He was a historian and he had credentials, etc.. And he's kind of the one that started off of this whole revisionism thing in the 1967 and 80s that's turned into what it is. But nonetheless backed attempts point. There's there's often professors that are not history guys and they write history books and they get picked up by other history professors and cited and that's not even a good source. 

Rick Green [00:15:54] Well, it was it was so funny to me how your number one critic, David, the guy that was totally obsessed with you for years, he's kind of disappeared now, finally. But it was a psych professor. He wasn't even a you know, it wasn't even a history guy's psychology guy. And, you know, that stuff happens all the time. But one thing before break, Tim, Tim used a phrase that I think is what sets WallBuilders apart from so many other people, and that's intellectual honesty. The fact that you guys have always this was what won me over to you, David, from the very beginning, 25 years ago, was the, you know, the citations in the back of every book that you write, how many citations you give and how you document this stuff. And then the intellectual honesty. If somebody points out that a quote is is wrong or is is, you know, the source is different or whatever, when that rarely happens, out of 500 citations that you give, you're always willing to say, well, let's go look, let's double check. Let's triple check list, quadruple check. And if we get it wrong, we're going to come out and say, hey, this one was different than what we thought. And in the, you know, 40 years you've been doing this, maybe there's been a half a dozen of those. But I just think that's so important. And that wins the respect, in my opinion, of anybody that really wants to know truth when you're intellectually honest and you truly go for even even like not overdoing it, saying, Hey, this particular founding father, yeah, their faith was all over the place. This part of their life, they claim Jesus as Lord and then this part of their life. They didn't. That's what makes WallBuilders different is that you give the whole truth, the good, the bad and the ugly. And I think that's why people enjoy learning from WallBuilders. So quick break. We'll be right back. Folks, we've got more of your questions coming up. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:18:36] Welcome back to The Wall Show. Thanks for staying with us on this Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Next question call, by the way, all that in the first half of the program. If you really want to learn truth, go to wallbuilders.com. Get the American story both volumes that are out already. Start taking the classes that we offer. Start getting into these things and learning and then go to other resources too. Don't just listen to us here on WallBuilders. Be intellectually honest yourself and be hungry for truth. All right. Next question comes from Zachary. He said what he said, What is your opinion on women in the military, especially considering biblical and American history? He didn't go into detail, guys, on what part of biblical American history he was referring to. But what is your opinion on women in the military? 

David Barton [00:19:19] You know, that's that's going to be a tough question because of where the culture often goes and ebbs and flows with that. So I'm going to back up to what I think was kind of the objective throughout American history, particularly with women in the military. And there were always there was always women in military and in some degree in American history. Always. 

Tim Barton [00:19:38] And let me let me interject, too, because I think one of one of the things that has become confused in culture, even for Christians in this biblical idea, you know, because we've lived in a moment where men and women are equal and that's what's been promoted and we can all do the same things and there's no differences. And that's why a biological male can play a woman sports. And not every not everybody believes that, fortunately. And a lot of people are waking up now to some of the ridiculousness that's been out there. But one of the things that was long understood, whenever there was war or there were battles, the men were the one that went to war in battles. And it's not because we we had some idea in earlier generations of world history that women are weak and incapable. No, the men went to war fighting to protect the women and children. Right. Like that. That was the whole idea of being a man was putting yourself in front of your family to protect them from the danger that was coming at them. And so where we are today. Yeah, but are you saying women aren't capable or shouldn't do it? Well, we've lost part of the perspective of of why God made family structures the way they are. Right. Parents should be protecting their kids. Husbands should protect their wives. This is not a confusing or complicating thing, and it's not a belittling or demeaning thing. I have the opportunity to do jujitsu and some different combatives and martial art things, and there are some girls in there that can destroy most of the boys when it comes to some of these martial arts. But when all things are equal, right, if you have a a male black belt at 145 pounds and a female black about 145 pounds, that male is going to win 90 whatever times out of 100. And it's it shouldn't be a competition where we are competing between the two to see which one is superior and dominant. That's not what it's about when you're talking about war. War is not about who's physically capable. War is about protecting what is valuable and what is valuable to the husband. It should be the wife and the kids. And so it's the reason that for so many of us, for me, I'm in my 40s and growing up, movies like Braveheart, like Gladiator were so incredible because you have this hero who's willing to lay down his life to protect, to fight, to defend those that he loved, or maybe even trying to get some level of redemption, culture, whatever it is. But you see this this sacrificial hero going out. That's part of what guys Invision like me. And I want to be the hero. I want to I want to save my wife and my kids. And so I just want to give a premise because before we even back up historically in show, yeah, there were always women that were part, but but really, their roles were minimal. And it's all because people thought they were incapable. It's because they thought we want to protect them. That's part of why we're going to war. That's why the men were going forward to protect the women and children. And it was actually because of how much they valued their wife. They valued their children, that they would do those things. And so before we even get into the history, I just want to throw out this kind of bigger picture thought that I think we've lost in culture as we're arguing. Everybody is equal. We're not talking about value in the way that well, if you don't let women be in combat roles and you don't value them, that's stupid because I value them. I don't want women in combat roles. I want to protect them because I value them, not because I think they're less. 

David Barton [00:23:12] And that's exactly what I would point to in history, because everything through history was maintained in gender roles. God created genders. He made them male and female at the beginning, one he made weaker than the other. But that does not mean an equal or inferior in any way. And many ways, the Founding fathers thought that the women were much more valuable than the men because they're the one who preserved the culture there. Preserve the education. They preserve the faith, everything else. And so for them, it was a matter of, hey, the Bible calls the wife the weaker vessel, the females, the weaker vessel. You protect that. And that's the role of the man. So it really was about gender roles, not about who was equal or not equal. 

Tim Barton [00:23:51] Well, and just for anybody out there that's that's been drinking some of the woke Kool-Aid. Right. When the Bible says they're the weaker vessel, it's not talking about mentally weaker necessarily emotionally weaker nodes. It's physically weaker. Right. That because it talks about there's there's in a kitchen, you have different kinds of bowls and pans and plates and like the guys are like the iron cast skillet. Right? We're kind of like indestructible. We carry stains with us, like we're hard to clean. The girls are the fine China, right? Well, fine. China is weaker than the iron skillet, but they serve a very different purpose. And when it comes to value, well, the value would be determined by by what you need and what your users in that moment. For many of these situations. But this is the reality when the Bible talks about them being the weaker vessel. A vessel was a known word, right? This is a a bowl, a dish in the kitchen that's being used. So for anybody out there is like, well, how dare you say women are weaker? Well, physically they are right like that. That shouldn't be complicated. And it doesn't mean there's not really strong where women at times are really weak men physically at times. But but as a whole, like God made us different. And it was on purpose and for a reason. 

David Barton [00:25:03] Yeah. And when you look at that, that that is really where the Bible is very clear. And even history, I mean, no one's going to dispute the role of Abigail Adams and what she did intellectually, what she did with intelligence, what she did with spy work or no one's going to dispute the role of the lady who did the Enigma machine in World War Two, that that turned everything on the Germans and allowed us to discover. So, you know, numbers said that the ladies who were involved in the space program, all of that is still within the gender role and there are very valuable they're invaluable in so many areas. And so it's not confusing the gender roles and it's respecting those gender roles. And within that, I mean, it's just women in the military is absolutely fine. Look at Israel. But those women in the military in Israel don't do all the things the men do. They just have different roles. And that's the way it had been in the American military for a long time. Until we start trying to become woke and make everybody equal genders. And it's just not that way biblically or historically. And so that's the position I think, that that we would take at WallBuilders is that biblical, traditional historical position that's a little different from where things are today. 

Rick Green [00:26:09] And not buying into this whole making the exception the rule, right? So there are exceptions to the rule there. There's some people that come along. That's right. And you got those cool stories in the revolution where, you know, some some lady picks up the, you know, fires the Cannon or Margaret Cochrane. 

Tim Barton [00:26:22] Corbin Yeah, yeah, right. The Molly pitcher. 

David Barton [00:26:25] Deborah Sampson. 

Rick Green [00:26:26] That's right. There's going to be exceptions to the rule. That doesn't mean you turn around and say, well, that means you know the rules out and now we're going to change it. So good answers, guys. We got more questions next week. Make sure you tune in next Thursday for Foundations of Freedom Thursday. And don't Miss Tomorrow. It'll be our first good news Friday of 2025. Thanks so much for listening to The WallBuilders Show.