Barnstorming Georgia – Is America Worth Saving?: Is American history just the history of white men? Did you know that of the 12.7 million slaves that were taken by the North Atlantic Slave Trade (out of Africa) , only 2.5 % went to the U.S. Was America the first nation in the world to sign a law banning slave trade? Truth is vital to any nation; and, when people don’t know the truth, it’s easier to believe a lie. And, when we believe a lie, it diminishes our life or can even be dangerous.  So, tune in to hear some important truths about Biblical citizenship, American history, and more!

Air Date: 12/23/2020

Guest: To Be Announced

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:

This is the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders live. Thanks so much for joining us today. My name is Rick Green. I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. Normally here with David Barton, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. But we were together in Georgia doing a barnstorming event and we want to bring that to you today on WallBuilders Live. We’ve been trying to sort of mix it up, give you a little bits and pieces of that barnstorming tour but also give you election updates.

Not a lot of big things have happened last couple of days that would take up a whole programs. For today, I’m just going to have us pick up right back where we left off yesterday from the Georgia barnstorming event. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live and here’s the WallBuilders Live team at Georgia as we barnstorm the state.

Barnstorming Georgia:

Tim:

What you will discover is the history of America is not just the history of white people. It’s the history of all kinds of people who oppose tyranny, who worked together with people who didn’t always look like them, who didn’t always act like them, who didn’t always believe what they believe, but they found common ground, and they work together the men, the women, the Christians, the Jews. Like all kinds of people, they work together, and they were able to achieve something absolutely incredible.

And the reason this matters, is because the narrative that we hear today is that America was evil, that all black people were oppressed in America. And I don’t mean to downplay, because obviously, there were moments, there was a lot of bad things America did. 

But what we hear today, in fact, over the last couple months, there have been articles that have come out. And it seems like every week, new articles come out, talking about how bad America is and America was built on slavery and America even fought the revolution because of slavery is what some of these articles claim.

America Invented Slavery??

There was a US senator who said that actually America invented slavery. Okay? I can just tell you as a Christian, the first book of the Bible, you’ll learn about Joseph, right, the guy that had the dreams, the rainbow colored coats, his brothers sold him into something: slavery.

Yes, and I’m pretty sure that was before America, the second book of the Bible, Exodus. Moses leaves the Israelites out of something: slavery. Like, it’s either incredibly audacious or incredibly stupid to say America invented slavery. And let’s just say he didn’t know the Bible. Okay? Then you had to have the worst world history teacher ever. You thought America invented this?

Now, I don’t mean to downplay the reality of the situation of American history. But this is how stupid we are now. We’re making claims that are totally illogical and are not historically accurate. If you look, for example, at this, one of the things you need to know America was never a world leader in the global slave trade, ever.

The argument today from 1619 is America was one of the biggest leaders and they’re the biggest kind of perpetuators of this and all the bad things America did. That’s just not true at all. There’s a group of professors who went and they documented from the African slave trade to the North Atlantic slave trade, this one off for roughly 400 years, and in this 400 years, there were 12.7 million slaves taken out of Africa. Now that’s awful. It’s terrible. It’s shouldn’t have happened. Sure. I agree with all that, absolutely.

In the midst of this, they’ve documented where did those slaves actually go when they left Africa, and they’ve been able to identify the ships that were involved, the nations that were involved, and where those slaves were delivered throughout the world. And what I’m going to show you is not even historically disputed, it’s just not known very well.

And most American populace, when you look at where those slaves went, what they’ve discovered is that 43% went to Portugal and Brazil, 24% went to Great Britain, 15% went to Spain, 11% went to France, 5% went to the Dutch, 2.5% went to United States, and 1% went to Denmark. What does that mean? What we can know is America did participate in something that was very, very bad. But if you’re going to say this stupid claim that America was a leader in the global slave trade, you’re going to have to show some evidence.

Why Isn’t Portugal or Brazil Mentioned?

And in all of the research I’ve done, in all the history books I’ve ever read, I’ve never seen anybody talk about Portugal or Brazil and the northern link slave trade. That’s interesting. Because the worst people involved in this, at least, by statistical numbers by the amount of slaves they receive, like it was not America.

And here’s what you also need to know. Is that in this era in world history, every single nation in the world was participating in slavery, every nation. So America is not the one doing the bad thing. America is participating like every other nation is. And by the way, I’m not defending what America did. It’s okay to say that America messed up and made some mistakes.

Because one of the things that we also can point out in the midst of America having some wrongs or evils or sins in her past, is America also was one of the very first nations to correct those sins in the history of the world because America was the first nation in the history of the world to actually sign a law banning the slave trade.

We decided in March 2nd, 1807. Some people were like, well, England ended slavery first. England signed their law on March 25th 1807. We signed our law three weeks earlier. So we were the very first nation in the history of the world to ban the slave trade. America was the fourth nation in the history of the world end slavery.

At that time, and we did in 1865, England into slavery in 1833, then Denmark, then France, then America, America did in 1865, the 13th Amendment. But what is significant is there were 128 nations of the world at that time, America was fourth out of 128 nations, which means we still were leading the way before anybody else was doing this. And we actually pay the higher price and ending slavery in America than anybody else. But even if we talk about big picture, right, if you look at the world today…

Rick:

Hey, Tim, I got to stop you, man. Hang on. They do this on radio all the time. These guys drop these truth bombs of stuff that you’ve never heard before. It happens to me on radio every day and I’m going wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, back up. Hang on. Nobody taught me that.

Putting History Into Proper Context

You just reverse the narrative because everything we’ve been told all year long is America invented slavery. America was the worst with slavery. Two facts that you just had. Yeah. Okay, look. First nation to end the slave trade, and fourth nation to abolish slavery completely. Why are we thinking were the worst when we were actually one of the ones leading the way to change this?

Tim:

This is what is crazy when people don’t know history, or more specifically, when people don’t know the truth, it’s easier to believe a lie. And most of us have never learned the truth, we haven’t studied the truth, and so we don’t even know we’re being lied to. We have no idea we’re being lied to. But this is what’s happening.

And this is where if you look at the world today, okay, at the United Nations this year, there are 193 member nations, of those 193 member nations, 94 of those nations still have not passed laws banning slavery in those nations. Slavery still exists today in the world, right?

Human trafficking, sex trafficking, literal slavery still exists today, and it’s estimated there’s more than 40 million people that are legally enslaved in those nations today. In Africa, there’s 9.2 million slaves. In China, there’s more than a million slaves. We can go around the world. Slavery is still a way of life in many nations, as evil as that is.

In the midst of all of this, there is a global slave index. And that’s what this picture is showing, where slavery is the worst, but they also identify the nations doing the most to oppose slavery. And you might not see it very well, because it’s a really small image. But the number one nation opposing slavery is the Netherlands. The number two nation in the world opposing slavery is the United States of America. Even today, America does more to oppose slavery than almost anywhere else in the world. And here’s why this matters.

Because when you look at context, one of the things that you can know is that in America, we started legal opposition to slavery before any other nation in the world. In America, we paid a higher price ending slavery than any other nation in the world because slavery was ended.

Anti-Slavery America

At the end of the war, more than 600,000 lives were lost, and at the end of this, slavery was ended in America. And America also is a nation that does more to oppose slavery than virtually any other nation in the world today. What does that mean? America is one of the best records of being antislavery of any nation in the world. And I will go one even further, that the 1619 project has not done a good job highlighting.

If we look at America, I would argue we would not have America without the contribution of black patriots. Whether we talk about the American Revolution of the War of 1812, the Civil War, this is one of the things we have lost, the fact that America was not merely a white nation among other white nations.

America has always been a diverse nation. There’s always been diverse patriots, people that fought for freedom. And I could go through dozens, if not hundreds of black patriots that most of us have never heard of. But just because we don’t know the truth doesn’t mean that the story we are hearing is accurate. We are being lied to. And as Christians, as Americans, as patriots, it’s time for us to say you know what, I’m not sure I’m going to believe all this anymore. I’m going to start doing a little research.

Because America contrary to what people say, now, let me point out, America is not now nor have we ever been a perfect nation, ever. America is not perfect. America has made mistakes. But one of the great things about America is America has corrected those mistakes faster than almost any other nation anywhere else in the world. And the reason we corrected those mistakes is because there was always the influence of the church, of Christians, of the Bible, where people saw somebody doing something wrong, they said oh, we shouldn’t be doing that anymore.

You pick any atrocity you want in American history, any atrocity, you pick the atrocity, and I will ask the question, how did that atrocity end in America? And the answer is always the same. The answer are the Christians who stood up and said it has to stop. America is different and America is exceptional because of the impact Christians have had on this nation, including contrary to what the 1619 project says, America has been one of the best antislavery nations in the history of the world.

The Importance of Absolute Truth

David:

Now, what you saw there that Tim just presented was a lot of truth. And it’s a lot of truth that most of us have not had. And this is where we are today, truth is under attack in a way that we’ve not seen in our lifetimes. Literally, I would say truth is on life support. And I don’t mean that as political hyperbola, I’m not giving a hyperbola.

It’s own life support because of what we see with polling. If you look at where the nation is right now in polling, we know that polling-wise, three out of five Americans believe that there is no absolute moral truth. Now, I’ll point out to you, no nation can survive if you can’t get at least half of the people to agree that certain things are right and wrong. If you can’t have half the people agree on what’s right and wrong, you will not survive as a nation.

We’re at the point now where 60% say, well, that’s what you think, but here’s my opinion. I make my own truth. I make my own standards, I do my own measurement, whatever that is. But in addition to three out of five Americans, it’s interesting that four out of five Millennials.

That’s the next generation of everything, your next generation teachers, your next generation pastors, of political leaders, of surgeons of everything, four out of five think that they can create their own truth, that there is no absolute moral measurement of truth. With Christians, that is one out of two Christians who believe there’s no absolute moral truth.

Now, this one just befuddles me, I think about the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments, or a standard of absolute moral truth. But apparently, for half of Christians, the 10 Commandments are actually the 10 suggestions. Well, that’s what he says, but I’m not sure I agree with that. And so what happens we’re at a point now where that even with Christians.

We’re not sure what truth is anymore. And so the problem is that objective truth no longer matters today, and we see that a lot of areas, we see it, for example, in areas of gender. 10 years ago, we all knew there was two genders. We’re not sure how many genders there are today. Three years ago, they stopped counting when it hit 90.

Christianity in America

There’s hundreds today because you define your own gender. It’s interesting we had the LGBTQ movement. It is now the LGBTQIA+ movement. This year, they added three new letters, those three new letters cover all the hundreds of genders that are out there that you can define for yourself. So you can self-define your gender.

We also have difficulty with religions, all religions are equal. We believe all religions are good, and all religion. And Christians believe that as well. It’s interesting that right now, 80% of Christians believe that religions other than Christianity will get you to heaven. Now, that’s an amazing standard.

Because if you know what the Bible says, there’s only one way to get to heaven, that’s through Jesus Christ. If you can get there any other way, Jesus life was wasted, he didn’t need to come, he didn’t need to die. I mean, there’s no reason for him to die if you can get there through any other way.

42% of Christians believe that a belief in atheism will get you to heaven. Again, this is amazing to me. You don’t believe in God, but you think you’re going to spend eternity with Him? You know, how does that work, an atheist in heaven? And 56% of Christians believe that a belief in no religion at all will get you to heaven.

See, this is why Christianity is on its way down fast in the United States. Over the last 20 years, we dropped 20 points in the percentage of Americans who profess Christianity. It was 85% in the last 20 years, has dropped 20%, the fastest. We’re down to 65% now. The fastest growing form of religion in America is non-religion, and anti-religion; that’s going faster than anything else. Because no religion matters. They’re all equal. They’re all the same.

We have the same difficulty when we get into things like government. This is why there is such acceptance now of pushing a Marxist kind of thing. Marxist, well, that sounds good. I mean, it’s worked for other nations. No, it’s never worked for the nation. But we don’t know history anymore, but it sounds like it will work for us. I like the ideas. And if I like it, it’s going to work.

We have the same difficulty with education. We keep changing standards in education. Morals, we’ve already talked about people don’t believe there’s absolute moral truth. You get into things like history: if we don’t like it, we’ll just cancel it. We’re not going to have that anymore.

The Importance of a Biblical Worldview

Doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. I just disagree with this, so we’re canceling it. We have the same when you get to science. How can you look at somebody’s scientific studies, and everybody sees the same study and we come out with two opposite opinions on the same study? It’s because it’s our opinion, we don’t care what truth is anymore.

We have the difficulty when we look at economics. Economics, we’ve seen polling that says right now 75% of college students support socialism, 69% of Millennials support socialism, and 42% of all Americans support socialism. We have 5800 years of recorded history, socialism has never worked once in any culture, in any nation, in any century ever. That’s alright, it’ll work for us because we really like it. No, it won’t work for you.

Rick:

Hey, friends, quick break. We’re going to dive right back in. Just a little break here, we’ll jump right back into that Georgia barnstorming event. So stay with us, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

BREAK

Have you ever wanted to learn more about the United States Constitution but just felt like, man, the classes are boring or it’s just that old language from 200 years ago or I don’t know where to start? People want to know but it gets frustrating because they don’t know where to look for truth about the Constitution either.

Well, we’ve got a special program for you available now called Constitution Alive with David Barton and Rick Green. And it’s actually a teaching done on the Constitution at Independence Hall in the very room where the Constitution was framed. We take you both to Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty and Independence Hall and to the WallBuilders library, where David Barton brings the history to life to teach the original intent of our Founding Fathers.

We call it The Quickstart Guide to the Constitution, because in just a few hours through these videos, you will learn the citizens guide to America’s Constitution, you’ll learn what you need to do to help save our constitutional republic. It’s fun, it’s entertaining and it’s going to inspire you to do your part to preserve freedom for future generations. It’s called Constitution Alive with David Barton and Rick Green. You can find out more information on our website now and wallbuilders.com.

Biblical Citizenship

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Today, we’re sharing with you that Georgia barnstorming event where we had a lot of great speakers with us, and an opportunity to talk about what true biblical citizenship is. How do we as Christians, how do we do that duty of being salt and light? How do we actually do our duty as Christians?

What does the Bible tell us about being citizens? And then how do we do our duty as citizens under our particular government in our Constitution? That Georgia barnstorming event was a fantastic time. Let’s just jump right back into where we left off before the break. Here we are in Georgia barnstorming the state for Biblical citizenship.

David:

What happens is we create our own truth. So we’re now pursuing an economic course that will destroy the nation because it’s destroyed every nation has pursued that course. We have the same with ethics. Oh, there’s so many areas now. You know, what’s happened is truth, in fact, has given away to personal opinion. Personal opinion now is more important than truth, in fact. So what do you do with the case like that? Well, the Bible gives us good guys.

2 Thessalonians 2: 1-12 talks about a conflict between truth and lawlessness. And there’s a man of truth and a man of lawlessness. As you go down and read the passage, at the end of the passage after the man of lawlessness, seems to be prevailing. It talks about what happens if you buy into the anti-truth agenda if you get on the side of lawlessness. It says in verse 10, that they did not receive the love of the truth. I don’t accept that. That’s your truth.

That’s not my truth. No, it’s absolute truth. It’s never worked for any nation. Well, that’s your truth. So they did not receive a love of the truth. Verse 11, says, “For this reason, God will send them strong delusion.” Next part of the verse says “that they should believe the lie.” And verse 12 says, “That all might be damned who believe not to truth.” Now, damned is the King James word for judged or condemned. But notice the sequence that happens here.

Rejecting Truth

If you get to where you don’t believe or if you reject the truth, the next sequence is a delusion comes in. You will believe the lie, and once you believe the lie, you will act on the lie. And it will be with high cost and high consequence. But one example, really is an example. Let’s take something out of science.

I used to be a math and science teacher. Math and science was my gig, enjoyed math and science. We have a lot of laws in science or actually not that many laws. In science, you have laws and axioms and theories and principles, etc. And a law of science is something that never ever has been violated in the history of the world and never will be violated. If it’s ever violated will no longer be a law of science, it will be an axiom, a theory or principle.

Well, Newton’s laws of gravity, that is a law. It is not a matter of personal opinion. It is a law. It has never been violated once in the history of the world. If it is ever violated once it will no longer be the law of gravity. But I also recall the last that this past summer, President Trump at the Republican convention talked about putting an American on Mars and putting a woman on the moon.

And Tim and I just last week, were with one of the guys who actually walked on the moon Charlie Duke, really good friend. He’s the 10th Moonwalker, the youngest Moonwalker. He was talking about the space force and all the new stuff that’s happening with technology. And man, when I see the technology and what we can do today, I just think gravity doesn’t have the same impact that it used to have. I mean, gravity is just not the force. And so I reject the idea that gravity limits us in any way shape, fashion, or form. Okay…

Tim:

Let’s just cancel it. Cancel gravity…

David:

Cancel gravity. I disagree with gravity, so we’re canceling gravity. Here’s what happens. Once I reject that truth, then what happens is I’m going to say there’s no law of gravity. Now, the next step, remember, is delusion. So if there’s no law of gravity, then the law of gravity doesn’t affect me; after that, I will believe a lie. And the lie is…

A Lesson From Gravity

Rick:

Maybe you skip a step. There’s a step where Facebook bans any posts that say there’s gravity…

David:

Yeah, Facebook doesn’t tend to be on the side of truth at all. That’s exactly right. That’s good. If the law of gravity doesn’t affect me, I can do what I want and tell you quite frankly, I’ve always wanted to be able to jump off a building and soar. And so because of this, I’m going to jump off a building and I am going to soar all the way to the sidewalk till I splat at which time I will be dead. So what happens is I’ll die as a result.

But notice the sequence that happens and thinking here, alright? I reject an absolute truth, delusion enters, I believe a lie, I act on it and I’ll pay a high cost as a result. Any former government’s good. Any type of morality is fine. All religions are equal. Socialism’s great. It goes with that sequence all the way.

There’s absolute truth in all these things, and it’s proven throughout all history and all cultures, all languages, all times, and it’s easy stuff to point to. So it doesn’t matter how sincere I am in my beliefs, I will still splat when I hit the sidewalk. It doesn’t matter what my personal truth is, it’ll still not work when I get them. So all of these things are things that we deal with on a regular basis, they’re more than we have at any point in our life. And it doesn’t matter the size of the lie.

Anytime you believe a lie of any size, it diminishes your life to that degree. If there’s a little lie, if it’s a big lie, doesn’t matter. Truth is always what you’re after. And you have to set your mind, I’ve never believed that before. But if you can show me that is absolutely true, I’m going to have to change, the way I think the way I believe, change my behavior. You have to love truth more than you love anything else.

And as people of God, we ought to be truth lovers because we know exactly where truth comes from. We’re given lots of guidance on truth. A love of the truth, we know where it comes from. For example, as Christians, we’re told in John 17:17, Jesus says, “Sanctify them by the truth: your word is truth.” So God’s word is a source of absolute truth.

Do We Know These Verses?

And as we talked about earlier, it gives you absolute truth on economics, on immigration, on military, on education, whatever. God laid out laws that used by any country in any age, they’ve always worked. So that’s one place it says were.

The other thing Jesus tells us, John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life: nobody comes to the Father, but by me.” So the person of Jesus is absolute truth. So if we can get in God’s word, and if we can get with the person of Jesus, we’re going to find more truth. You see, this is the problem we have as Christians today is we’re not doing a very good job of that. Right now, only 9% of Christians read the Bible on a daily basis.

Now, if this is a source of truth, and we’re not in it, then we’re not going to have the source of truth that we need, which is why right now, only 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview. Knowing that the Bible addresses every issue out there, only one out of 16 Americans today sees an issue the same way God sees the issue.

And by the way, America is the one who broke out of socialism before any other major nation at all. We did this back in the 1600s and we did it on the basis of five Bible verses: 2 Thessalonians 3:10, 1 Timothy 5:8, Matthew 25, Luke 19, Matthew 20.

Do we know those verses today? Do we know what God says about a progressive income tax versus a capitation tax? What does the word of God say about a capital gains tax? What does it say about a state tax? Those are all in the scriptures. But see, if we don’t get in the Scriptures, we don’t even know good economics. But we used to. And that’s why we have to get in all these areas. So this is where we get the supremacy of personal opinion.

So kind of wrapping this down, I’ll tell you, what we need is a love of truth. But today, Americans are facing something we’ve never had to face in any previous generation. Today, you’re going to have to go find the truth, because you’re not going to be able to find it. We’ve always trusted our teachers to give it to us.

We trusted the media that they would… You can’t do any of that anymore. All the institutions you can no longer trust. Which institution is talking…? See, every single state, the United States now is using the 1619 curriculum in some of the schools somewhere in the state. It’s a voluntary curriculum, states are adopting that, all 50 states have schools using it.

Online Censorship

A lot of kids are not getting any concept of black history the way it actually occurred in America. And they’re not going to get it from the schools, they’re going to have to go find it somewhere, which now means we’re going to put a lot of hard work into stuff. Give an example.

Tim and I just wrote a book a few weeks ago called The American Story: The Beginnings. So we’re working on the sequel now, which is that the story continues. So it goes from the Civil War through the space stuff. So as we were getting into that, I was into Hollywood, and looking at Hollywood, how patriotic it used to be, as Tim said, so many want to leave Hollywood today. See, we had back in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, we had two dozen Academy Award winners that were military veterans who had fought in the war, who had been part of the war efforts.

That’s a lot of veterans and a lot of guys in Hollywood. They were pro-America, they were pro-military, all sorts of good stuff. And some of the great producers like Cecil B. DeMille nominated for 12 different Academy Awards, 12 different movies, produced 81 different movies. He was a strong Christian.

So I wanted to write I knew so much stuff about Cecil B. DeMille, so I went online, my search service, I just typed in “Cecil B. DeMille, Christian”. Nothing came up. While I was also looking for John Clum. See, John Clum is a Christian guy who got involved in the Indian rights movement, because Indians were being so mistreated. He’s actually the guy that captured Geronimo. Geronimo surrendered to Him, a Christian Indian agent, 1872.

Unbelievable stuff that he did as a Christian. So I wanted to make sure we covered guys like that who fought oppression. So John Clum, I typed in “John Clum, Christian”. Nothing came up. I was using Bing as my search engine. So I said let me try something different. So I just pick DuckDuckGo, I went to DuckDuckGo, typed in the same term “Cecil B. DeMille, Christian”. D

ozens of listings. I went over to “John Clum, Christian”. Dozens of listings. See, I can’t even trust my search services anymore. We have to work harder than we’ve ever worked to find truth because there’s so many things trying to stop us from knowing what truth is…

Barnstorming Georgia – Is America Worth Saving?

Rick:

Alright, friends, we are at a time for today. That was the Georgia barnstorming event we’ve been bringing to you here in bits and pieces on WallBuilders Live. We’ll have more of that for you next week. And we have a Constitution coach program where we encourage people to host Constitution classes, in their homes, at their church, in Sunday school classes, at the local library, wherever you can get people together, perhaps even online through Zoom, that’s how a lot of people are doing classes. We’ve got thousands of these going on around the country. And you can be the catalyst for a restoration of biblical values and constitutional principles.

Join us at constitutioncoach.com. You can dial into our Monday night class that we hold nationally with 1000s of people and just observe and ask questions if you like. Or you can start your own class right now. You don’t have to know anything about the Constitution or the law or history. You just get people in the room and hit play, and you can learn with your friends and family. It’s a great way to help restore these things and also just to have good fellowship. Check it out at constitutioncoach.com.

And then last thing before we run out of time, wallbuilderslive.com. That’s the place to make a contribution and to help us continue to speak truth and be salt and light. Wallbuilderslive.com. We sure appreciate you listening today to WallBuilders Live.