A Perspective On The Elections, Part 2 – ProFamily Legislators Conference: Are there any silver linings to notice from the recent elections? What parallels might we find in God’s Word that reveal strategy for our current situation? How can political parties gain new leadership? What is happening to Biblical literacy in America? Click the link to hear David Barton’s inspiring perspective from the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

Air Date: 11/22/2022

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders and we’re in the second of a three part series where David Barton was sharing just a few days ago at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. Great opportunity, by the way, for you to be a blessing to your state rep or state senator or assemblyman from, they don’t have to be yours, I mean, they can be from anywhere in your state or anywhere in the country, frankly. Share with them the opportunity to come together with other like-minded, ProFamily legislators, biblically-minded folks that are serving in legislatures across the country.

I can tell you for us at WallBuilders, it’s always an encouragement to see how many there are, but it’s also an encouragement for the legislators. They realize they’re not alone. They get to exchange all kinds of ideas. They get to hear great presentations, including the one we are sharing with you right now here on WallBuilders radio. And this one is David Barton, it’s a kickoff night, the opening dinner of the conference. And you heard yesterday, if you were listening, the opening of that presentation. We’re just going to jump right back in today. This is David Barton at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

ProFamily Legislators Conference

David:

I was in Virginia Beach yesterday and I talked to Congressman Randy Forbes, former congressman, retired now, Randy had just helped in Virginia Beach and they won 11 out of 12 seats in Virginia Beach on the local level in Minnesota, where they got back on election night. I got a call the next day from a pastor up there said, hey, guess what, I just got elected to school board. So we’re winning local elections. And let me just take you through some headlines real quick.

This is Minnesota. Even in Minnesota, we won a bunch of school board races there and churches are getting organized and churches are starting to understand local stuff and local community. Here is in Denver, both Denver and Colorado Springs, 1,500 churches got engaged, took 78 school boards. So Christians now have the school board in Denver and all four in Colorado Springs, which is pretty amazing stuff. That’s a big victory.

Colorado

And the state, I think this church actually stopped Colorado from going as blue as it did, pollish ran away with it. But the Dems only picked up one state in Colorado, which is a fairly blue state, and it’s because there were one million voters contacted with voters guides on Christian stuff, get out and vote. And so we saved the legislature there. Lauren Boebert isn’t run for her, she wasn’t a plus 8R district and she’s now down to a count…

That’s how strong the blue wave was in this thing. Things that should have been safe districts, you have Harold with with congressional district three in New Mexico, Steve Chabot up in Ohio, they should have been safe races, they got overrun with that blue wave. But Colorado did not and I think it was largely because of what the churches did there.

So school boards in Colorado up Wichita, three or four on the school board, there are Christians now. Treasure Valley, Boise, most liberal city in Idaho went with Christians. There’s 51 churches got together in Dallas, they took 15 out of 15 school boards in Dallas, which that’s the liberal part of our state. Houston, the same thing churches got together; they took every single position on the school ballot. 

For the city of Houston, Christians got every one of those. In Fort Worth, they got 20 out of 21, a church got organized there and they got 20 out of 21 school board positions in Fort Worth. All across Florida, Miami-Dade County, they got 28, 5 out of 30 races, Miami-Dade County all over the nation. So that’s the kind of stuff we’re seeing.

None of that’s national news, but it’s still good news because you’re getting healthy from the bottom up. We always get healthy from bottom up. Matter of fact, if you go to the American War for independence, look at the first four battles in the American War for Independence, top right is Lexington, top left is North Concord, bottom left is right at the Boston, bottom right is Bunker Hill. Nobody contacted George and said, George, you’re the national commander in chief, get in here now and save us. Never happened. Nobody asked for George. They all said, it’s our community, we got it, we’ll take care of it.

And so when you look at the American War for independence, on the ground, there’s more than 120 battles that happen on the ground. Now, how many can you name? Maybe Yorktown, Lexington, Concord, maybe we come up with 8 or 10 between all of us, there’s more than 120 battles. The thing is they were all local battles. And so these are many of the battles. I mean, if you look at the names up, probably don’t recognize hardly any of those. But this is all part of winning the American Revolution. 

Losing Battles…Winning the War

We won so many local battles than we won a national victory. The big battles, yeah, they were there, and we talk about in some and we didn’t win all that many big battles. But we won so many local battles that it made a difference in the end. And so that’s how we end up winning, which is why we’ve got to get our focus off the national stuff and get back on local stuff. That’s where a lot of the change does happen.

So we did really well on local stuff. There’s, I think, a silver lining to what happened on election night, because we are so terrible in civics right now. And by the way, if you’ve seen the polling, 68% of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. So if you got 68% that can’t name the three branches of government, that’s a real problem. By the way, polling also shows 48% of elected officials can’t name the three branches of government. And you probably know some of those guys.

We understand the process so poorly, then let’s say that we get 55 seats in the Senate and let’s say that we picked up 40 in the House. You guys know process, what difference is that going to make in the next two years? All it’s going to do is stop laws from going through. It will not stop any executive agency actions. It will not stop the judges. It will not stop all the other stuff that goes on. And so the economy is still going to keep going down because they don’t have control of the purse strings because they can’t get the president to sign anything they do. So if it goes as predictions, the economy is going to be worse in two years than it is now. And what would voters say? Well, we put the Republicans and look how bad it is, that’s not worth it. And so there goes the 2024 election.

So what happens is it would have been nice to have, but there’s very little substantive difference that would have been made overall. And at the end, two years from now, when it’s not there and people vote on soundbites, we’re back to losing what we had because we put them in, they get anything done. It doesn’t matter who you put in, it’s always bad. That’s not a narrative we want to deal with. 

So it could be that that’s a silver lining in that if things go down like we think they’re still going to go down and you’re going to hear about some of this tomorrow, some of the efforts with ESG and what’s happening with that. So that kind of direction is still happening.

What Does God’s Word Say?

So there’s two Bible lessons I want to throw at you. One is in Numbers 11 versus 31-33, in that God had His people out in the wilderness, He was taking care of them, He’s providing for them, and they just kind of get bored with stuff. Get bored with God taken… 

We’re so tired of this, thinking manner, what, can we have quail? We won’t quail. Give us some quail. And if you remember that story, God said, you want quail? I’ll give you quail. I’ll give you quail till you’re sick of quail, till is running out. You want quail? You don’t want what I have for you?

So he gave them exactly what they wanted and they got sick of it and said, we’re back to manner, our bad. We should have been happy. So I guess you kind of wonder if this is America getting some more quail, you know, till they finally get sick of this and say, this is not what we wanted, it’s time for something substantially different? There’s an attitude change that can happen over the next two years that we didn’t see this time. And it’s going to be hard to sell some of the things that they sold this time if things are rougher and tougher two years from now, which we think they may be and might be.

The other verse I would send you to us in Joshua chapter 7 versus 3-6, this deals with the battle of Ai. The battle of Ai was supposed to be a real easy battle. Joshua hadn’t lost any battle in the Promised Land and here’s this little sneaking community over here, just kind of a bump on the log, just kind of a pimple on the way, and we’ll go over there and squash them and move on. Let me just read you the verses here, 3-6 of chapter 7. 

It says, “On returning to Joshua, they reported, “There is no need to send all the people; two or three thousand men are enough to go up and attack Ai. Since the people of Ai are so few, you need not wear out all our people there.” So Joshua sent about three thousand men went up, but they fled before the men of Ai. 

And the men of Ai struck down about thirty-six of them, chasing them from the gate as far as the quarriesd and striking them down on the slopes. So the hearts of the people melted and became like water. Then Joshua tore his clothes and fell facedown before the ark of the LORD until evening, as did the elders of Israel; and they all sprinkled dust on their heads.”

So they lost what should have been a guaranteed victory. There is no way that they’re going to lose that battle. They got hundreds of thousand soldiers, that’s a little dinky town, we’ll just send 2,000 or 3,000, they’ll just wipe it out. They lost what they shouldn’t have lost, which may be what happened on Tuesday night. 

Joshua

What was the result of that is that Joshua and the leaders hit their knees and said, hey, we think we missed you out here. What do we need to know? What are we not seeing? It really went back to asking some spiritual questions and getting in touch with God again and seeing what God had planned. 

I think we had a lot of confidence in what was going to happen Tuesday night and didn’t ask God for a whole lot of direction because we knew it was going to happen because people are so sick and tired of eating quail that they don’t want this anymore.

So it’s a good opportunity to say, okay, this is a great chance for us to hit our knees and go back and say, okay, God, what’s the problem here? Because you didn’t bless us when we went into this battle, we should have won, we didn’t. There’s something going on in the camp that we’ve got to take care of. And let me kind of throw out something with that. 

There’s a big difference between the people and leadership. And I don’t mean elected officials. I mean leadership. Let me talk top party leadership for a minute, the National Leadership Party, Ronna McDaniel just got reelected as the national chairman. On what basis? Well, how did the election turn out from you?

RNC

And by the way, time I spent in DC when I was most recently there, they said there’s 70 paid staff at the RNC. Of the 70 paid staff, 32 are openly LGBTQ+. How are you going to connect the faith people with that? See, that’s where they brought in the law, cabinet Republicans.

Now, as the official auxiliary of the Republican Party didn’t bring in Christians or evangelicals or anybody else. So you’re reaching out for 2% that’s already committed to the Democrats and you’re ignoring the 65% over here that you don’t want to… It doesn’t even make sense.

And so the same thing with Tom Emmer. Tom Emmer runs the Congressional Campaign Committee. How did he do on election night? Well, we just promoted him to number three in the House, He’s now the new whip, and he is pro-ESG and pro-LGBTQAI+ and he’s now in charge of pushing policy through the House? Why are we rewarding people that haven’t earned a reward? 

They didn’t do well in this last election. See the same thing with some of our party leaders. And we just get so disgusted with party leaders, we just turn them off a lot of times because those guys are so out in the boonies and we’re so tired of all the fights. We’re going to have to get engaged at some point with cleaning up our own leadership.

We’re going have to get engaged and getting better state chairs and getting better committeemen at the national level and getting a different set of votes and philosophies there. And that’s a battle none of us want to wade into.

I prefer to stay out of that party politics and party guy, but I don’t like fighting at that level. And it’s worse at a county and a precinct level than it is at the national level. You guys all know that, it’s ugly down there.

We’re going to have to get involved, and at some point we’re going to have to change the institutional makeup of the way the party does its stuff. And this is what had to be done back in the 80s, and it was also done in the early 2000 as well. And that’s something we’ll probably have to get back into at some point. So what do we do now?

Rick:

Alright, folks, quick break, we’ll be right back. You are listening to WallBuilders.

AMERICAN HISTORY

Hi, friends, this is Tim Barton of WallBuilders. This is a time when most Americans don’t know much about American history or even heroes of the faith. And I know oftentimes we, parents, we’re trying to find good content for our kids to read. And if you remember back to the Bible, to the book of Hebrews, it has the faith Hall of Fame where they outline the leaders of faith that had gone before them. Well, this is something that as Americans, we really want to go back and outline some of these heroes, not just of American history, but heroes of Christianity in our faith as well.

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

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

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders. We are sharing with you a presentation from David Barton at the ProFamily Legislative Conference just a few days ago and it’s going to be an encouragement to you. If you missed yesterday’s program, it’s on our website right now and then we’ll have tomorrow the conclusion. But let’s jump right in. We got a few more minutes with him today and then we’ll get the conclusion tomorrow. Here’s David Barton at the ProFamily Legislators Conference.

ProFamily Legislators Conference

David:

Here’s recommendations, I think, that are scriptural and are good. Proverbs 22:21, it says A wise person can scale the city of the mighty and bring down the stronghold in which they trust.” Go on the offensive, start attacking. A wise man attacks and he doesn’t just attack the city, he attacks the stronghold. So instead of attacking around the fringes and trying to get a little bit of stuff done in the culture we’ve got, man, just go straight at it, attack the stronghold. 

Go where they’re strongest. That’s what they did with us. They came right after us on the abortion issue in a nation where we’re 68% of the nation is opposed to abortions and the third trimester and they just got the whole thing done. What they did to PROP Three and Michigan, great example. Just repeal all the pro-life stuff down there for decades. So it’s time to attack strongholds. Be offensive. Go on the aggressive.

In the same way I would say it’s time to really get offensive on things like 10th Amendment. We are seeing now because of the judges we got, particularly under Trump, the courts are giving us back so much ground on areas we’ve never been able to do anything before. 

The courts now, I’ve seen two in the last year that have said, no, it’s fine for the states to get involved in immigration, especially if the federal government is not going to uphold a federal law if the states can uphold a federal law: so, immigration. Energy, they’re doing the same thing. Education, they’re doing the same thing. Areas that have been in federal hands for 20-25 years, the courts are giving back to the states. 

So it’s time for the states to get aggressive on some of that and go back to reestablishing federalism. They did that with abortion. That was Dobbs position on abortion.

An Oxymoron

Now, when the court makes a decision, we don’t win the battle. All they did was open the door and now we got to start fighting the battle. They threw it back to the states, so we have battles in all 50 states. Democrats nationalized that battle this time and did a great job of nationalizing the battle. But we have to start pushing back on this at the state level. So I’m going to encourage you get really… You know, there’s so many areas.

Another area where we’re winning a lot is religious liberty. Mike Ferris is here, Mike, what they’ve done with ADF has been phenomenal. But he and Kelly Shackelford, Mat Staver, others, generally, you win a religious liberty case every 4 to 5 years at the Supreme Court. They won five this year at the Supreme Court. We literally have more religious liberties available to us now than we’ve had in 60 years, and that’s not hyperbole. I can show you what the court has rolled back.

Matter of fact, one of the things that Kelly Shackelford was looking for is that this year and one of the decisions they rolled back the Lemon decision, which is the case from 1971, where the court said that when you know of a religious activity is constitutional is if the primary purpose of religious activity is secular, then is constitutional.

That’s an oxymoron. The primary purpose of religious activity will never be secular, first off. About 8,300 cases have been decided on that. So what they’re doing now is raising the money to go take all of those 8,300 cases back into court and get them overturned. 

Because now that they’ve thrown Lemon out, you can get all those cases thrown out which means here comes nativity scenes and here comes prayer graduations, here comes back the laws, all the things we could do until the courts took it out in recent decades are coming back. But that means we’ve got to fight back.

I encourage you. Just start getting bold on religious liberty, try to medal around the school prayer, you know, mix some school prayer back in or something with the Ten Commandments back in the classroom. Give these guys ammunition to work with. They need cases. They need something litigated. So give them a law that they can take and work with. 

And your guys are going to say the court will strike that down. No, we don’t know that anymore. Go ahead and pass it anyway. Let’s see if the court strikes down. It may be exactly the law we need to get something done. So instead of predetermining the outcome of these things and say, no, I’m not even going to try because it’s going to get struck down, no, no, go ahead and try it. Now is the time to start pushing the envelope and being aggressive in some good areas.

Make Moral Arguments

So religious liberties, moral issues, we got to get back to making moral arguments. We’ve got to hang out the other guys on things like infanticide and where they are on gender and so many other things. I’ll hit that a little in a minute.

Build relationships, we’ve got to win Gen Z back; they didn’t understand that voting for freedom meant to killing lives. And they’re the most pro-life generation out there. They’ve got to be won back on that issue. Mail-in ballots, huge thing. The more mail-in ballots you have, the more blue the state becomes. So there’s two options to that. One is, if you’re a red state, just get rid of mail-in ballots. 

Remember, DeSantis won by 4/10 of a point margin four years ago and it took months to count the election. He came in as part of election reform. They got rid of mail-in ballots to a great extent. And so now you get results within hours and he wins by 18 points. It’s a big difference.

So in red states, still have a chance, got a limit to mail-in ballots. In blue states where you can’t do that, you just got to have plan, we got to get in the field better than they do. And they’re turning out huge buckets of mail-in ballots. It was 69% mail-in ballots were Democrat in Pennsylvania. We got to get on the field and compete with that. And we’re talking about we don’t like it. Well, that’s the tools we’ve got. We’ve got to get on that field and compete with them.

So, other thing I’ll show you is strategic. This is hard for us to do when in the middle of the battle. We tend to be very tactical, not very strategic. Take you to D-Day. You know what happened on D-Day, the invasion that went on D-Day? If you’re one of the soldiers coming ashore there and fighting, you’re surrounded on all sides by enemy. These are actually battle maps that we own of the D-Day invasion. So each of these maps and you’ll see a lot of this tomorrow when we go over to the museum area. But these are all map showing placements of all German weapons. And so this would show you about 700 yards of the shore.

So when I come off my boat, my Higgins boat here, I’m looking over there for machine gun. And right there should be a mortar and then they’ve got an AA… And so that tells you where everything is and it’s got all spotted, all identified. That tells you where all all the stuff is. So when you come ashore, you know exactly what you’re fighting. And this is what we’re doing. We’re in the trenches, we’re fighting the battles.

A Tactical View

Now, it’s interesting that you also have maps from people like Lieutenant General Geoffrey Keyes, Geoffrey Keyes and George Patton, both together. General Keyes was the EXO, the executive officer of Patton. And General Keyes is the guy who breaks off, and he does a lot in Italy. Actually, the Italians surrendered to Geoffrey Keyes, he’s the guy who secures the surrender of Mussolini and the Italians.

So, these are actually General Keyes maps. These are the maps he had throughout the war. These are the maps he had of Europe. And if you look at the maps, they’re really, really different, the way his maps are.

See, this is his D-Day map. Now, remember the D-Day maps I just showed you, this is his D-Day map and that’s all the detail he’s got on D-Day. Compare it with all the details that you have right there. He doesn’t have hardly any details on his map because his map actually shows you about 700 miles of space.

Instead of having 700 yards, he’s thinking way out what you’re going to be in the future. What’s our next step? Here’s where we got to get. We got to get over here to Munich. We’re going to Germany and going to Berlin and knock Hitler down. So I’ve got to have about 43 different battles along the way.

And so instead of looking at one battle where he’s fighting, he’s looking down the road several battles. And that’s the strategic view that we have to have. And so starting to think more strategically, and again, these are his battle maps and there’s just not much detail there.

But they didn’t have to be because he was looking at the big picture overall. And that’s something we’re going to have to start doing, is going to have to start getting back to the 30,000 foot view and not just the tactical view. 

We get so caught up in battles. We need somebody say, hey, you need to run this bill, but we need to have four of the bills run at the same time; this will help us five sessions from now. We need to start thinking way down the road.

And same way with the court. How do we get things to the court? Because we now have favorable courts that are given power back to the states. Federalism is coming back in a way we have not seen in our lifetime. So these are all ways to going at it. If you’re discouraged on the elections, I’ll remind you what happened with David.

David, in 1 Samuel, 30, Ziklag where his soldiers were at, he’s out helping everybody else. In Ziklag, they come and they conquer him and his guys and steal his family. They steal all the families, and all these guys, all of his guys turn on him and they want to kill David He goes wait a minute, we’ve been together all this time, and you’re turning on me? And so it says that David was greatly distressed. 

What Did David Do?

The outcome of that battle was not good. Kind of like Tuesday night. And so the scripture says, and David encouraged himself in the Lord. Nobody else was there to encourage him. Everybody else wanted to kill him. So he says, okay, I can encourage myself.

And that may be what we have to do after Tuesday night is encourage ourselves a little bit because there’s not much encouragement out there right now. I think two years from now we’ll look back and we’ll see more encouragement than what we realized because I do think there’s something providential going on.

It goes back to John Quincy Adams, who fought slavery all of his life. I don’t think there’s any president who’s been more vilified and more attacked than John Quincy Adams. And Trump, take Trump times five, maybe, and you’re close to John Quincy Adams. This guy was beat up by everybody, his own party, the opposition party, the media, everybody was after him. 

And he probably changed America more than any other president did in a good way. But it was over huge opposition and his motto was really significant. He said, “Duty is ours, results are God’s.” I don’t do this because I’m going to win the battle because I probably won’t, but I’m going to do it because this is what God has me doing.

So he eventually won the battle, but it was after his death. All the stuff he fought for, we eventually got done, but it was after he was gone. But that mentality of “Duty is ours, results are God’s”, I’m going to keep fighting even if everybody hates me for it. I know it’s the right thing to do. I answer to God, not to everybody else. And so that kind of mentality will keep a strong in this.

Final thing I want to share with you tonight is kind of a personal note for all of us personally. It’s not necessarily political. It’s for us as believers, as people of God, as children of God, there was a report that came out this year by the American Bible Society. They were started in 1816 by Founding Fathers and tomorrow night you’ll see some of the original Bibles in the American Bible Society and the Founding Father who helped start the Bible Society. Every year they come out with a report on the state of the Bible.

This year, 2020, they documented, you see on the right, you see the fall, it’s been trending down for a good while. What they documented was that last year we lost an additional 25 million Americans who no longer read the Bible at all. This is the most biblically illiterate America has ever been in recorded history. As far as measurements go, we’ve never known the Bible is little as we do right now. 

Biblically Illiterate

And we still got a lot of people in church, they just don’t have a clue what the Bible says. And if you remember what Jesus said in Matthew 4, he says, man doesn’t live by bread alone; he lives by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. So just as we have a physical man that just got fed with the meal, we have a spiritual man that has to be fed.

Now, here’s the deal. Americans are really good at taking care of their physical body. We’re not going to miss three squares a day, we will catch that. But we’re not nearly as good at taking care of the spiritual body. If we made a commitment that says, you know what, I’m not going to eat a physical meal until after I’ve eaten a spiritual mea, most Americans would have died a long time ago from starvation because we don’t have that commitment to feed our spirit as much as we feed the body.

So literally, if you look, my first recommendation is get a daily spiritual meal. Feed yourself at least one meal a day out of God’s Word. Read the Bible daily. Get into it on a daily basis. It’s not enough just to go to church or listen to a devotional. Read the Bible on daily basis. But go a step further. Start memorizing a Bible verse at least once a week. And I’ll show you why this is significant and why it’s important.

If I take you back to the Constitutional Convention, and by the way, I should have told you this. This is the Lord’s Prayer. Remember, he told us to pray for daily bread. So that would be like getting one good meal a day. So memorize a Bible verse a week. Let me take you to Ben Franklin. 

At the Constitutional Convention 1787, of the 55 delegates who wrote the Constitution, nobody is happier about it than Ben Franklin was. He’s the first guy in our history to call for the United States of America. He did so 33 years before this happened. He did in 1754 when nobody thought was possible. Back then, we were much like Europe, we were 13 nations. We were not a nation with 13 colonies. 

We were 13 nations. We didn’t even like each other. North Carolina. South Carolina had border wars at each other, as did Virginia and Maryland. Every colony had its own currency. You have to change currency to go from North Carolina and South Carolina and going back. We were 13, we’re just like Europe is. France and Poland don’t like each other and etc.

So when they finally got together at the Constitutional Convention, this is what he’s been dreaming about for 33 years. And it didn’t go the way he thought it would because instead of wanting to unite, everybody came with a separate agenda. There was a Virginia plan, there was the New York plan, there was New Jersey plan, there was a Connecticut plan. 

A Perspective On The Elections, Part 2 – ProFamily Legislators Conference

And Connecticut didn’t want New Jersey’s plan. New Jersey didn’t want New York’s plan. New York didn’t want Virginia’s plan. And so five weeks into it, they’re literally falling apart. At that point in time, you have Alexander Hamilton said, I’ve had it. I’ve got better things to do than fight with you guys. I’m going back to New York. You have George Mason of Virginia and I’ve had it, I’m going back to Virginia. I’ve got better things to do than bark with you guys.

And so it’s starting to fall apart, which is when Franklin gives the longest speech he gave. Now, Franklin seated there, 81-years-old, his speech was Thursday June the 28th, 1787. In the speech that he gave, and he gave a lot of speech at the convention. The interesting thing is he would listen to a debate in the day, he’d go home at night, think about it, he’d write out his speech and he’d come back the next day and have somebody read the speech for him. 

He did not deliver his own speech as he wrote them, but someone would give them to him. There’s only one speech he gave live and in-person, and there was this speech on Thursday, June 28th, 1787. And he’s just frustrated. He’s had it up to here, and just this whole vision is falling apart. And we know what he said because James Madison recorded it. We have it in the notes of the convention.

And so, Franklin, this is an extemporaneous speech. It’s not with notes. He has not written it down. He’s just given it off to heart and he’s just frustrated. He said, gentlemen, he says in this situation of this assembly groping as it were in the dark to find political truth and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we’ve not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lives to illuminate our understanding? He said at the beginning of the contest of Great Britain, when we were sensible danger, we had daily prayer in this room for divine protection.

Rick:

Alright, folks, out of time for today. You’ve been listening to David Barton, he’s sharing at the ProFamily Legislators Conference. These are state reps and senators from all across the nation.

And just an encouraging word to them and also a challenge for what we need to do to right the ship to get the country going back in the right direction. And so it’s great opportunity to share with you, our listeners, and hopefully you act on it in your communities as well. Tomorrow we will get the conclusion, so don’t miss it. Thanks for listening to WallBuilders Live!