Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of Faith and Culture. It's the WallBuilders Show, taking all the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And yes, you can actually take a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective, even from California, which is where I'm at today. Rob McCoy's church, just an amazing, amazing trip out here. David, you've been out in California a lot speaking as well. It's, you know, it's not a state to give up on. There's a lot of good people out here. And I was with you over the weekend for just a few hours for the pro family legislators conference, but then headed to California, and then I'll be heading home today. But what a weekend we got to see legislators from across the nation gathering in Texas for the Pro Family Legislators Conference. What was this? The 20th? No. Maybe 19th? How many have we had of those? 

David Barton [00:00:55] Rick, I think this is the twenty first that that we've had, so this is year number twenty one of that conference. 

Rick Green [00:01:01] That's great, man. And and the I mean, just continues to grow. David, I was blown away just looking out and there were just for the few hours I was there with you, just seeing so many legislators and spouses and all the different organizations now that are coming in and being a part of it. Just such an encouragement because now, as we know from the past conferences, those legislators will go home and they'll work on implementing all the things they were sharpening each other on this weekend. So just a really good seed planting time. 

David Barton [00:01:31] Yeah, this is the largest one we've had. It's well over four hundred. I think there were thirty-five states represented there. You had some states like Delaware, that's such a tough place to be. Folks from Hawaii were there as well. That's another tough state to be. And then you had places from Arkansas, or legislators from Arkansas and Oklahoma and Wyoming. And strangely enough, that's a really tough place to be too. Once you get so many Republicans, it's like we have to fight somebody, so let's fight each other. And it's just it's a strange thing. So you you've got mega majorities and you got mega minorities, and it's just inspirational for all of them, even if they're in a really conservative red state, it works real well. And and it's it's really cool too, because over the last year, you know, we worked with so many, so many hundreds of these legislators, and so many of them are unable to come just because they don't make much money. If if you're a New Hampshire legislator, you get paid a hundred dollars a year to be in the legislature in New Hampshire. So everything is on you. So if you're gonna fly to Texas, and if you're gonna spend four nights here in a hotel and everything else, that's that that just starts biting them pretty good. And so for a lot of folks, it's just tough for 'em, and that's why people who contribute, thank you very much. You have get many legislators here and they'll go back home to their states. But l last year there were so many good things introduced, and you know, Rick, you, me, Tim, we've been all over the nation testifying to these state legislatures, getting good stuff done. But then there's always people in these legislatures that come up with new and novel ideas. It's like, hey, what if we tried this? You know, suddenly it takes off and becomes really big. One of those at Barbara Earhart, Idaho legislature, must have been six, eight years ago, came up with that idea. But what if we passed a law that said you can't have men and women's locker rooms? And, you know, now 29 states have that. She just came up with that random idea, nobody had done it. So we see a lot of that, which is really cool. And then these guys, often you get in a circle where you know what's in your circle, you don't know what's out of your circle. And when they get here and get surrounded by several dozen other states and legislators that have the same passion and convictions they do, and they're not even aware of, and you know, they don't get news from other states what's happening in the legislatures. It's just a really good, wholesome time. And so we sent them back this time with a spiral notebook of laws introduced in other states that are really good, or laws where we've helped create model legislation because we worked with the experts on it, and and sent them back probably with, I don't know, maybe a hundred and fifty bill ideas. Had a senator just text me just before we got on, he said he's already gone through it on his way home, and he's marked 20 bills he's gonna introduce next year. And he's a super successful legislator, and and I expect a lot of those will pass. He's in a great state for that. But there's just a lot of good stuff that comes out of that conference, and this is the 21st year of it. 

Rick Green [00:04:22] Well, I'll read you one of my favorite texts, and this comes from a state legislator who's married to a congresswoman. They're a powerhouse team and both of them do a great job. And this was his comment, David, you'll love this. It was real short, but he just said, what an amazing event. We are recharged. So they're ready to go back to work and take those ideas and and get busy on them. I do want to ask you, and of course, to the audience, hey, you know, this time of year, if you're a regular listener WallBuilders, we'll be bringing you some of the presentations that were that happened for the legislators. We'll be sharing those with you on the WallBuilders show on here on radio over the next few weeks and months. But David, I always enjoy, and I didn't get to see it this year. You tend to set the stage for the conference with kind of a almost every year, it's kind of a Men of Issachar moment where you're basically saying we got to understand the times and know what to do, and and just helping to put into context, you know, where we are as as a nation. Could you share just a little bit of of your take on that and kind of what you encouraged the legislators with over the weekend and in that mindset of of what's our moment in time? What time is it right now in America, and what can these legislators and then us as citizens be focused on? 

David Barton [00:05:34] Yeah, it's an interesting time in America because I think we can statistically prove that America is in the midst of a revival and that may a spiritual revival. That may sound weird to people because it doesn't look like it with all the stuff in the news, but I'll point out that with every previous major revival, they didn't know they were in a revival to after the revival has ended. George Whitfield, who preached thirty-four years in the first Great Awakening, never realized he was in a revival. It was called that after he died. And so most of the time Charles Finney, second, third Great Awakening, he didn't know he was in a revival till after he was gone. And that's the way it is with most people. But what we have different from them is we have statistics. And the statistics show some spiritual things going on that are just absolutely phenomenal. Things we haven't recorded in American history with media records. We haven't been able to document this in in maybe a hundred years. And so as as you look back on revivals, we had one around the the turn of the century. Billy Sunday, famous baseball player, became a Christian, then he did Billy Graham Crusades all across America for thirty seven years, but about twenty, twenty two years of that is considered a genuine national revival, and historians look at it that way. They look back at it now. Of course, Billy Sunday didn't know he was in one, he was doing Billy Graham stuff. When you look at at where we have been since the eighteen seventies and look at the revivals we've had, and we've had three major revivals since the eighteen seventies, you look at where we are now, and it's pretty easy to say, hey, we're in a spiritual revival. We're seeing all across the nation now at secular college campuses, massive gatherings, particularly there's a group called Unite Us, and they spend time on campuses, but recently at a University of Arkansas, they had 10,000 kids at that secular university gather to praise Jesus. You had 9,000 at Oklahoma University, you had 10,000 at Texas AM University, you had 8,000 at Ohio State University, you had 6,000 Mississippi State, and I just go down all these other other secular colleges, and what we're seeing is those kids gather, and somewhere between ten and twenty percent of them are coming to Christ at the end of each of those meetings. So we're seeing not tens, not scores, but thousands and thousands of kids at secular universities coming to Christ. They're actually conducting baptisms right there that night when they come to Christ. They have all these mass baptisms set up, and so it's an awesome event. But even as you look outside of college campuses, there was recently an event in California where that in one beach event, twelve thousand people were baptized who had come to Christ. Greg Laurie was preaching out of Angel Stadium, 6500 people came to Christ in that one event. Up in Portland, they had a gathering of 35,000 people in Portland and 3200 came to Christ. I mean, these these are not easy cities. This is not the Deep South, the Bible Belt. This is this is tough ground. And and especially in these universities where the professors are are usually pretty wacky, this is just great to see. And and now we're seeing indications that Bible sales have increased seventy-one percent in the last year. And it's been going down for several years, and that's a seventy one percent increase, particularly among Gen Y and Gen Z young men. I mean I've got all these stats, I can go through all th there is no question that something spiritual is happening. When you look even at Charlie Kirk's memorial, when you have and by the way, we talked at The leaders from Turning Point a couple of weeks ago, and they have been able to affirm that more than one billion people watched that Charlie Kirk Memorial. And when you look at what happened, how Rob McCoy went out there and opened that thing with a clear gospel message, come to Jesus message, which was great. And so many people across that arena raised their hand. But then you have Marco Rubio who comes out afterwards and does almost the same crystal clear gospel message, sounding like Rob McCoy, and has the same kind of altar call, and and then you have Pete Hegseth who talked about Jesus and coming to Jesus and Even Vice President Vance who said, Man, in the last 10 days since Charlie was assassinated, I've mentioned Jesus Christ more than I have my whole life. And you know, I mean, we're we're getting that from federal, national leaders. We've no time in my lifetime can we point to that. You know, Ronald Reagan was a religious, but I don't remember him having Christ centered, you know, speeches in that same way. So I think it's happening, no question. Now, here's the trick. Does that mean the culture will change? And this is where we went into history with all the legislators. America's had eight major revivals historians agree on over time. And in the last 150 years, no revival has changed the culture. We've had plenty of revivals. They have not changed the culture. And so the question is, when does revival change the culture? And the answer is when it becomes a great awakening. So what's the difference between a revival and a great awakening? Is a revival centers on evangelism, where a great awakening centers on discipleship. That's where you have the the George Whitfield saying, Hey guys, the Stamp Act Act that Great Britain's trying to do, not only did he bring people to Christ, he talked to the colonists about how you cannot put up with that Stamp Act tax, and that is anti biblical. And that tax you you gotta resist that. And he actually went to England to fight against that tax. So you've got the greatest evangelist in early America doing public policy. And he's the first one to tell the Americans, you guys, if you want to keep your freedom, you're gonna have to separate from Great Britain. And he's the guy who came up with the original motto for the US military. Nobody knows Whitfield in that sense, but that's the way he was. And the same with with people like Charles Finney in the second, third grade awakenings. He started a college, but you couldn't go to his college unless you're actively involved in the Underground Railroad and in leading resistance to federal laws that were unjust, like the fugitive slave law. So what happens is if your faith gets so involved that it affects the policy around you and it affects what you tolerate and don't tolerate in the culture, then it makes a big deal. You know, me, I was part of what was called the Jesus Revolution. We were known as the Jesus people. We had massive revivals across the country and just big stuff coming out of the hippie movement, coming out of the drug culture and and the sexual revolution. We had this big revival. I had a hundred thousand kids show up at at the Cotton Bowl in in Dallas and had six days of of Christian teaching. Billy Graham taught every day and other ministers did. It was just massive. But the deal was we didn't do anything to slow the sexual revolution down. As a matter of fact, it became the gender revolution and we're worse off now than we were at the time of that that revival, the Jesus Revolution, Jesus people. That's what we let the legislators know is there's going to be a lot of emphasis put on changing policy. It's not going to be an easy thing to do, but there's going to be a lot of pastors that are now going to be behind these guys because that's what we've been talking to pastors about is guys, if you let this stay as a revival, America may be destroyed. If you can turn this into a great awakening where you start changing the culture and changing education and and changing military and changing other things, then we've got a good shot. So that's a long answer to your short question, Rick. But that was kind of the charge that we started with that night. And strangely enough, nearly everything throughout the next couple of days pointed in that direction in the way of policy and other things that are out there that will kind of help get us back on our feet and get sanity back in the midst of us. 

Rick Green [00:13:10] Well, I remember you saying a couple of months ago you were talking about and you can tell that God's doing it when you see multiple sources, unrelated, saying the same thing or the same message and same kind of you know bottom-up growth thing happened. And the reason I say that is because it's interesting that what you just said, and here I was at Rob McCoy's church over the weekend, filling in for him while he's in Israel to with a big group out there. And he filmed an intro and sent it from Israel right before I went on, and he said almost exactly what you just said, and had no idea that you were gonna say that on a radio today for sure. And and it just all points to discipleship and the importance and the necessity of doing that. And David, let me ask you one other thing before we go to break, because you were talking about Whitfield, and I couldn't help but think about all of the time that he spent and the hard work of those 18,000 sermons and you know, horseback every day and multiple speeches a day, and and just sewing in. And we tend to give up so quickly on movements like this that are so important if we don't get the big change overnight. Last night, or night before last at Rob's church, one of our mutual friends was there, Joe Messina, who's on a school board out here in California and has a radio program and he's been on WallBuilders a few times, and he's in our Biblical Citizenship class. At the end of the class talking about serving on a school board in California and losing all the time. And and he was in the minority at the time we filmed that. Well, David, he told me Saturday night, they now have a majority of four. They're now passing all the things that we've talked about for years needed to be done. That's on a school board in California where he started. I asked him Saturday night, I said, when did you start this effort? He said it was 2001 when he first ran for the school board. He lost that race, got elected later, served in the minority for over a decade, now has a majority, now getting that's a 24-year fight. Whitfield, I don't even know off the top of my head how many years he was doing that. But I say all that to ask you do these legislators and do we as a people have that long term view? And and if not, how do we get that? And how do we get ourselves to say it doesn't matter how long this takes or whether or not I get to enjoy the shade under these trees? I'm gonna keep planting, I'm gonna keep working. 

David Barton [00:15:27] Yeah, this is part of biblical discipleship. When you get into discipleship and not just becoming a Christian, you see in the Bible how long it takes to do things and how slow human nature is in change and how long it took God to to get some people turned around and get them changed, much less get a nation changed. But you understand that at that point, as you become more mature, that your accountability is not for results, it's for faithfulness. And if you're doing the right thing and keep doing the right thing, even if you get no results, God rewards you for that. He says, Well done, good and faithful servant. He doesn't say, Well done, good and successful servant. That is not his message. And so you learn to get in there and you learn to stick with it and you learn to keep doing it because you're gonna answer to God for whether you do it or not. And if you do it and lose, he's still gonna reward you for doing the right thing. And so what's happened is we get in these revival kind of movements and not the the long term awakening kind of movements. We give up too easy or or we don't like being attacked. We don't like the the media coming after us. We don't like whatever we don't like. And that's just not for me, I fear God more than I fear men. If I get God ticked off at me, I am in real trouble. I keep people ticked off at me all the time, just check the media. They don't like me. That's fine. As long as God likes me, I don't care whether anybody else likes me or not, as long as I'm in good standing with Him. And kind of going back to something you mentioned earlier that, you know, we're hearing this from many people. There is a scripture that is so significant to me. In Daniel when it talks about when Daniel had a vision and saw the son of Son of Man, the Son of God, and he looked at Him and as he's described Him, this flaming belt and this huge breastplate and, you know, flaming face. But he said His voice is the voice of a multitude. And I've always taken that to be that when you hear God start talking, you're gonna hear it from several places at the same time. Scripture says that in the mouth of two or three witnesses something's confirmed. And generally when God starts talking, you'll start hearing it from several sources unrelated and you go, Man, I just heard that and and you know that that's you you need to recognize that that's God talking to you when you start hearing it place after place after place, the same message 

Rick Green [00:17:40] All right, man. Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll catch up on some of the news of the day. Stay with us, folks. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show.  

Rick Green [00:18:55] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. Rick Green here with David Barton. Tim is out there with by the way, this conference that you guys put on, David, y'all put so much into this. I don't know how many times you end up speaking by the end of the weekend, but the planting of those seeds, imagine that 400 legislators and spouses going back to all these states. All the work y'all put in this weekend is going to pay off for years and years and years. Anyway, Tim's not with us today. I'm still traveling in California, but we're catching up on some of the news that's out there. David, we've got we've got the government back. I don't know if I want the government to be back. Yes, of course we're not anti government. We need, we need to have government. God created the institution. But the federal government is now back in business. What happened? How did they finally come to a deal? And, you know,  is it going to did the Republicans have to cave? Did the Democrats cave? How did they end up making a deal? 

David Barton [00:19:44] Well, they got a deal because a handful of Democrats in the Senate caved. That the House members and on the Democrats did not cave, but the Senate members finally did. They just thought it had gone too far and it was hurting too many people. And and so you finally had enough. I think there were eight Democrats that said, hey, we're ready to end this. And they negotiated with majority leader Thune in the Senate who said, Okay, I'll give you some votes on some stuff you guys think are really important. I'll break it out and give you some separate votes. So there were some negotiations. The it may not make any difference in the overall thing, but at least they're gonna have their chance to to have their say and have a vote. So what's interesting is the House seems to have come unglued over the Senate having caved in on this. And so over in the House you have Democrat House members that are really criticizing Schumer and calling for him to be replaced and how can he do this? And I was just going through some of the Democrat complaints, and every every bit of it stems on the Affordable Health Care Act, Affordable Care Act, ACA. And it all stems back to the fact that that that health care is too expensive and they want the government to pay for the health care for all the people. Now, this this is intriguing to me because back when this happened back with Obamacare now nearly a decade ago, the guarantee was it's gonna be free health care. Well, we all know in the free market nothing's free. Somebody pays for it, somebody has to pay for it. They print money like it's free, but it's not. It has to be undergirded by something. And so what they're finding is a and we talked about this a a couple of days ago, Rick, when you're in Hawaii, but the the premium for this health care has been going up about a hundred and seventeen percent a year. The government is wanting to underwrite all of that for all these people. And the problem with the Democrats is they don't know the free market system. Trump went out there and at least negotiated some major reductions, like in in some of the drugs that were being covered, the health the the weight loss drugs, for example. He got those companies to come down ninety percent on what they're charging the government. And so he's actually trying to, you know, get the price down. Democrats aren't aren't doing anything to get the cost down. They just want to take more money from everybody so they can have everything free. 

Rick Green [00:22:04] Well, that's a actually let me ask you that question real quick. Sorry, David. When you say they want the government to pay for all this, where does that money come from? 

David Barton [00:22:13] Exactly. You know that I mean don't don't be logical, Rick, because that's not the way they think. You don't don't use common sense. Common sense has never been associated with Democrats in the last fifteen to twenty years. That just doesn't doesn't go. It's like they don't understand how economics works, they don't understand how a free market works, they don't understand the the benefit of competition, they don't understand negotiation or anything else. And so they just keep praying for all these rising prices without saying, Well, what can we do to cut prices or reduce? And so it is just crazy to see. And the other thing is they insist on coverage for the most risky behaviors and the most experimental things. And those are always really expensive. But you know, for a long time the the biggest chunk of health care went to white-haired people. Well, you know, people in the l last ends end of their life who had all these maladies that have accumulated over the years and all the stuff that goes with stroke and all the stuff that goes with heart attack and and and white haired people, that was the biggest cost of health care was them. Now the biggest cost of health care is in the LGBGQIA plus community. It is no longer white haired people. It is it is the behaviors that they promote that are extremely costly. They have physical consequences, and it's like we don't want you to change your behavior and improve your consequences. We'll just pay more for whatever you want to do. And and that's another anti free market principle, which makes absolutely no sense. That's why they put risk risk measurements on on certain individuals and you know, there's different premiums if people are different risk. Why should I pay as much for my insurance if I'm super healthy and have no health problems and have a very healthy lifestyle? Why should I pay as much as a person who has all sorts of medical problems and and that's where they just don't get it? So it's really interesting to watch the Democrats turn on themselves right now and and they're just it and it's be literally, Rick, because they're not asking the simple questions you just ask. I mean, if they would ask those questions, but at this point they have no vision on how to cut the cost in the future. They just want the government to keep underwriting these ever, ever expanding costs. And so we'll see what  that means. I mean, clearly, we'll talk hearing from Bessant and Commerce guys, they think next year is gonna be a pretty big economic year as far as some hardships. They think a lot of things are gonna come home to roost next year and it's not gonna be a good year leading into the midterm elections, and that's that's from the Trump officials because there's so much bad stuff they're trying to stop, it's gonna bring some hurt for a while. So we'll see what that means. But in the meantime, I mean, it's it's just crazy to watch the Democrats fight each other and the House take on the Senate and and they want a different the House wants a different Senate lead over there because Schumer gave in and they negotiated on some of these things. It it really is crazy. 

Rick Green [00:25:06] Did did I see and y'all may have talked to this one about this while I was gone for the wedding in Hawaii, but did I see that healthcare is now basically half of the budget? Am I am I is that explicit? I getting that even closer right?

[00:25:19] Well, you're it's half the budget with with the health care and with the associated programs with health care. And so all of that area together, is it's about half. It's approaching half. I don't think it is half yet, but it's it's getting in that direction. It is the fastest growing expense we have. And you know, if we were back in the John F. Kennedy days where he's encouraging every school to start physical exercise and PE and get everybody healthy, you know, that that was a Democrat program back in the day was just in encouraging health. And now it's we don't encourage you to be healthy, we'll just cover for whatever you want to do. And that's why it has grown so fast, so quickly, just in the decade or so since Obamacare went in. 

Rick Green [00:26:03] And and just think about it, that's comp all unconstitutional. There's nothing constitutional about federal government being involved in healthcare at all. So we could we could cut almost half the budget if we just get out of the healthcare business and let states do their own programs. Plus, then you get that competition from state to state and people trying different things and and seeing what works. And anyway, definitely need to get it out of the federal government's hand, get it back to the states. But that's another topic for another day. David, thanks for the updates on those things and thanks for doing the conference this past weekend. To all our legislators out there, we encourage you to go home and and make those positive changes in your state. And to our listeners, we'll be bringing some of those presentations to you over the next few weeks and months, and you'll get to enjoy them as well. Thanks so much for listening. You've been listening to the WallBuilders show.