Is It About Race? Or Life? – with Bishop Jim Lowe: Our black history segment today is on Wentworth Cheswell. We follow it up with an interview with Bishop Lowe of Guiding Light Church in Birmingham Alabama, regarding an article he wrote on the Tyre Nichols incident. When we consider disrespect for race, ultimately it stems from a disrespect for life. Bishop Lowe tells us about how these tie into each other, and gives some good insight on race and the brotherhood of all mankind.

Air Date: 2/27/2023

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

Guest: Bishop Jim Lowe

Bishop Jim Lowe’s article on Tyre Nichols

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Transcription:

Rick Green
Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders. We’re taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. You can be a part of that by donating at wallbuilders.com. So we appreciate you coming alongside us. You could do monthly or one time, but that helps us to train more pastors and teachers and students and legislators and all the different things that we’re doing, including the Constitution teaching that is taking place in homes and churches all over the country as people learn from Biblical Citizenship In Modern America. You can be a part of it. WallBuilders.com check it out today. I’m Rick Green, America’s constitution coach and a former legislator in Texas, here with David and Tim Barton. David, of course, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders. And Tim Burton, national speaker, and pastor and president of WallBuilders. All three of us [are] glad that you have joined us to be a part of the program today. And one of the cool things we’ve been doing the last couple of weeks, is getting a new hero of history every day. So every day we’re learning about somebody new that most of the time we’ve never heard of before. Tim, once again, who is our hero of history this time?

Tim Barton
Well, today we’re talking about Wentworth Cheswell. And we’ve actually talked about him in presentations for several years at least, alluding to, giving kind of a head nod to him. When we talk about the founding fathers, and so often we think about the shot heard around the world and what actually happened before that. Paul Revere makes his famous midnight ride. And we talk about that Paul Revere wasn’t the only guy to make a famous midnight ride. In fact, even that night, he wasn’t the only guy that rode that night. But over the next several years, and really even over the next several months, every time the British were taking troops and relocating going somewhere, there were often Americans who would ride before them alerting the other Americans that were in their path and British were coming and helping the militias and the military get prepared and defend. One of the guys who made a very famous one of those midnight rise was Wentworth Cheswell. And Wentworth Cheswell was not only a black patriot, his background’s kind of interesting. And Dad, he’s somebody you’ve talked about for many years. But if you back up, his grandfather was a slave in the early 1700s. In America in 1717, his grandfather was able to gain his freedom. And then his father, Wentworth Cheswell’s father was a carpenter, actually built the homes of several founding fathers. So Wentworth Cheswell grew up around, the founding fathers, knew them, he goes off, get a good education and some high academics. And we’ve noted that at that time, education looked a lot different, and so oftentimes, just your basic education, you were learning multiple languages, which included Latin and Greek and often Hebrew and things along the way. So he goes and gains an education, he comes back and when he’s 21 years old he is a school teacher, and he’s a property owner, he’s a leader in the church, he actually buys a pew because back then that’s what you would do. It’s how you contribute to the church. He bought a pew. He ends up getting married, and he and his wife, Mary Davis had 13 Children, which is an awful lot of children, four sons, nine daughters, and the following year is when he was elected town constable. Now, this is also kind of a big deal, because, Dad, one of the things you’ve pointed out, is when you look at his life, he was living in a white community. But he didn’t just get elected as a constable. He was elected to a government position elected as a black man in this white community. But he was elected for nearly 50 years in a row serving in this community.

David Barton
Yeah, he had eight different positions he held in the community. 49 years of elected service, as you said, nearly 50. And he’s a black man in a white community. He is literally one of the town fathers. He was actually in charge of town meetings, they elected him to be the guy to run the town, run the town meetings. So it’s just amazing the positions he held throughout time. And you think, wow, that’s got to be one of the really early black elected leaders and, yeah, kinda, but you’ve actually got to go back to 1641 to Matthias de Sousa, who’s elected as a black man in a white state, to the state legislature in Maryland is 1641. So I mean, people are not even aware of these early elections, but Wentworth Cheswell is a great example of a black elected official in a white community who served for a number of years, reelected, reelected, reelected, reelected.

Tim Barton
He also served in the American Revolution, at some noted places, some noted battles. At the end of the revolution, he’s also a kind of like a town historian. When you look at the history of New Hampshire, the guy who wrote the history of New Hampshire says he gained a lot of the information he needed for this from the collection from Wentworth Cheswell.

David Barton
And we actually have that collection here and WallBuilders collection, we’ve got that three volume set from Jeremy Belknap, and Belknap throughout that work says, Hey, I got this from Wentworth and this came from Cheswell, and… And so we actually have that set.

Tim Barton
So when you look at his life, he was a leader, both in the nation but definitely in his community. He was a soldier, a teacher, historian and archaeologist and educator. He was a judge. He was elected numerous other offices, and he is one of America’s earliest elected black officials. So this is a guy really worth note and acknowledgments. As we’ve mentioned on so many of these stories, there’s just too few people that actually know some of these great heroes today. And actually, it’s even interesting for New Hampshire, they had a really hard time tracking down even images of this guy pictures. There’s great documentation who he is he existed, we don’t know for sure what he looked like. However, we do know he was an incredible leader in his era of America.

David Barton
You know, it’s interesting as Wentworth Cheswell is such a good example, to be able to use to push back against CRT 1619, etc. Because he’s a black official, elected by white community. And it’s just kind of fun to ask because CRT and 1619, they go after America is like the most racist nation in history the world. You… okay now wait a minute Wentwroth Cheswell was elected 1768 but Mathias de Sousa was elected 1641. So that’s pretty early. When did a nation like Great Britain elect its first black official? And the answer is 1987. How about Russia? 2010. Wait a minute, we’ve been doing this for two and a half centuries, and we’re the bad nation? He’s a great example to push back.

Tim Barton
Well, and the reason, it’s also worth noting, just for context, when you talk about Britain or Russia, when you when you start looking at these majority white nations, this is why it matters. When you look at nations that are the majority of the population is white. And then you see them electing black officials, it’s different than if you look somewhere in Africa, somewhere that’s a majority black nation or majority brown nation. But when you’re looking at America, you’re right. This is different than the narrative. But it’s also worth noting that this is an era… and certainly location, because not all of America followed the suit. There were definitely some racist areas, especially in some of the Southern colonies in America. However, this was an area in New Hampshire, where they seem to follow MLK narrative, that you should look much more at the content of the character than the color of the skin. And that certainly is what happened in New Hampshire, in the life of Wentworth Cheswell, but a great American leader and hero. To find out more go to WallBuilders.com. And you can find out more of his story and so many other stories as well.

David Barton
And another great black American hero is a current one, Bishop Jim Lowe. Bishop Jim Lowe is out of Birmingham. And we’ve had him on before and he actually was part of the civil rights movement back under MLK etc. He was actually in the church bombing in 1963, when they blew up the church simply because it was a black church. So he is such a good guy with a wholesome attitude. And he would have been a perfect Wentworth Cheswell. Because he really doesn’t care about the color of skin. He cares about the content of character. He’s a great leader in Birmingham.

Tim Barton
Well, and the reason also we talked about having him on the program today was because he wrote an article that really highlighted the fundamental issue. When when you’re looking at the nation and the racial divide, and their racial tension and all the issues going on. How do you solve the racism in America? How do you overcome this Marxism in America? And he wrote an article that really gets to the heart of the issue and we thought, okay, we need to have him on. People need to see this article. They need to read the article, but let’s hear from him, also. Let him explain what this is all about. And how do we really resolve these issues in America?

Rick Green
Bishop Jim Lowe, our special guests. Stay with us, folks, we’ll be right back on WallBuilders.

Tim Barton
This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. Many today wrongly claim our founding fathers were largely atheist agnostics and deist. Certainly some founders were less religious than others, but even they were not irreligious. Consider Benjamin Franklin, definitely one of the least religious among them yet, when the delegates at the Constitutional Convention hit an impasse in their deliberations. It was Franklin who called them to prayer, invoking numerous scriptures to make his point. As he reminded them, God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that the Empire can rise but his aid? We have been assured in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this. So even the least religious of America’s founders urge public prayer and dependence on God. For more information about the faith and the founding fathers, go to WallBuilders.com.

Rick Green
Welcome back to the WallBuilders show. Thanks for staying with us. Always good to have Bishop Jim Lowe with us. Thank you, sir, for coming back on.

Jim Lowe
Good to be back on, Rick.

Rick Green
Well, appreciate it very much. Great article, by the way. 1819news.com is the website where the article is, and we’re going to have a link today at WallBuilders. So folks can get it but basically you make the point, listen, this latest tragedy is… doesn’t fit any of the narratives. Tyre Nichols story, you know, none of the narratives that people would typically go with here. And your point is this just the part of a culture that no longer respects life.

Jim Lowe
That’s exactly right. And we have trained our culture to think that way. We’ve made it clear that life is not the major issue here. It depends on whose life it is. We make more emphasis on life if it’s taken by a certain person, or if it’s done by a certain group of people, if it’s the police to do it, well, that’s an important life. If it’s a mother, that’s not an important life. We make these variances dependent upon the circumstances, when the bottom line is the Bible was made clear that all lives matter. That life is important. God gave life. Life was created by God and created in His image Man was created in His image and likeness. So whenever somebody takes a like, they are disrespecting God, number one, and they are disrespecting the human being that God created.

Rick Green
Is that also where we get the whole kind of the foundation of blind justice or equal justice is that God says that all lives matter, and therefore, that’s how we should treat it and not kind of have these different categories? Like you said, depending on who commits the crime, or who receives the crime, we change how we view it. Instead, it should be, you know, it should apply the same to everybody, that whole blind justice idea.

Jim Lowe
That is right, when we talk about equal justice. See, the word of God has made clear that the law is the law. And that should not be changed, depending upon who else… who commits the crime. There should be no favoritism, it should be straight. That which happened with Tyre Nichols was an atrocity. It should not have happened. But what changed was that here, they can’t say, oh, it’s white policeman beating up on a black man. Bacause it’s black policemen beating up on a black man. His life was important. Tyre Nichols life was a precious life. And it shouldn’t be taken by anyone without due process. That’s murder. That’s exactly what it is. And we need to face that, but we’ve become callous to the taking of life. We’ve become callous, because we are looking at life from the standpoint of who has a right to do it. We take the life of our innocent preborn. And we have become callous to the murder of a child that’s in the womb. And then you raise a child of, his father/mother is not there. And he has to learn or she has to learn to live life without the parents that are there according to God’s plan. And so they don’t even have a good basis of life. So my point is saying that we have failed God, we no longer honor the Creator, nor the order that he’s established. So we are paying the price of our rebellion against God.

Rick Green
Wow, yeah, okay, so really, you’re saying that the callousness that the culture is experiencing is downstream of those previous decisions to disrespect life? And so now we see it throughout the culture. I mean, you know, when I watched the videos, I was just like, there just seemed to be no… not only no respect for life, almost like no morality, no concept of this is not okay, or right or wrong, or any of that. It was just law of the tiger and the shark, we’ve got the power, we’ve got strength, and we’re going to impose it on this guy that we’re mad at. And, you know, that’s downstream from saying, you know, that there is no real right and wrong. No… you know, murder in the womb’s okay, so therefore, you know, murder in the street’s okay.

Jim Lowe
Yes, sir. And see, what we have in so many different ways, is dependent upon who commits the crime, whether it’s a crime or not. Whoever does it. And if you’ve got people that are empowered to get away with doing things that are wrong, because the law is not, it’s not carried out indiscriminately. The law needs to be what it is. It’s either right or wrong. It can’t be right when you do it and wrong when I do it. That’s not the law. But only just judge we have is God, and we’ve turned away from him. We no longer allow prayer in our schools. Children don’t know what is right anymore. Because there is no absolute right. There is no absolute right in our society, because we have rejected the righteous judge, we have chosen to follow the whims of the people. And God has turned us over to our own way of thinking so that we see that we no longer have wisdom, we’ve become fools. We do not honor Him. And if we don’t honor him, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. And so what we find here is that those police, they had no respect for his life. They had no respect. It’s not inside of them to have that. Something went wrong, and we as society, have turned away from the Creator. And as a result of turning from the Creator, we have seen these atrocities go on and on and on. And they will continue until we learn to respect God and we go back to the fundamentals that this nation was founded on. This nation was founded on principles respecting the Creator, that all men are endowed with certain rights from the Creator. We recognized the creator in the founding of this nation. But we’ve come to the point, we no longer recognize the Creator. We try to diminish any thought or eliminate thought of the Creator, from the public, from our private, we try to get rid of him in everything. And as a result, there is no respect for life. And that’s fundamental because God is the Creator of life, and we violate him. We have no respect of marriage anymore. There’s so many different things, Rick, that we can see that’s wrong with our society, today. We see what’s wrong with our nation, but we see our founding fathers respected the Creator. I will say this one thing and I’ll give it back to you on this. Remember, God chose Israel as a nation that he would bless. This nation chose the God of Israel. We offered ourselves to Him, we put him first and God blessed this nation. But just like Israel, when Israel turned away from the God that chose them, he withdrew hand. We chose him. And we said, we will build our nation upon the rights granted by the Creator, which is our God, and the nation has been blessed. But we have turned away from him now. And because we’ve turned away from him, we are paying the whirlwind of our rebellion against the God of Israel. Does that make sense to you?

Rick Green
Yeah, yeah. Oh, 100%. I mean, 100%. And like you said in the article, it’s, you know, what you’re talking about right now is the real heart of the problem where we… you put it this way, you said we must stop misdirecting and pointing to symptoms, concealing this truth and that… Everybody wants to run from the God factor here. And then you’re saying that is the factor, that is what everything else is downstream from. If there is no God, there is no right and wrong. We’re all… decided right and wrong ourselves. This whole moral relativism that has run amok in our, culture is the cause of what we’re dealing with here. And if we’re not willing to come back to the Creator, and those basic values, like you said, that we were founded on right there in the declaration, then we can just expect more of what we’re seeing,

Jim Lowe
it’s going to be chaos. And that’s what it always resorts to. There is no rule of law, the rule of law is from God. The 10 commandments were given for societies to be built, and societies built on that had been better societies. But we’ve turned away from it, we’ve turned away, we need to turn back, it’s like in Isaiah, the whole head is sick, everything all the way down, the whole body is sick, why don’t we just come and be reasonable and realize turning away from God has brought us in this condition where we are now. You know? It’s, it’s tragic. But this is what we have done to ourselves, we brought it on ourselves.

Rick Green
Well, you’re also then, you know, touching on a very important point, which is just the responsibility instead of, instead of looking for someone else to blame, or something culturally, to blame, to actually say, hey, we’re responsible for this, we’ve allowed this to happen in our culture, we have to be the ones to lead the way back to God and cry out to God and you know, instead of just complaining, it’s time to humble ourselves and pray and seek His face and turn from our wicked ways. I mean, there’s a command there. There’s a, really a formula if it’s fair to say it that way. He basically said, here’s the formula people, you can have the good stuff, or you can have the bad stuff. And it depends on what you do on the input side of the equation.

Jim Lowe
That is correct. And that’s what… if we look at it, it doesn’t take a whole lot of people to turn this country around. It just takes the Bible said, if we. And this nation was founded as we the people. We the people have to rally together and be bold enough to stand up and let the powers that be. Let them know that we are going to work as we did with the Roe v. Wade, we overturn that. We need to come together. We need to unify to see that we get prayer back in our schools. You want to know why we have our kids that are as violent as they are, now? They have no control. Prayer needs to go back to the school. And I’ll open it up to say even if there… if you want to… if a Muslim wants to pray, let them pray. This nation shall establish nothing that talks about a religion. So let all religions have that freedom. Christianity does that. We allow everybody to have freedom. But get prayer back in schools so that the children have a moral compass. They have no moral compass, now. It depends upon what one teacher says and how one teacher does, and they’re going to impeach as a teacher who have no moral basis. So the children are confused. It’s chaotic with them. So they have no respect for it. Let’s go back to the fundamentals. Let’s go back to the first amendment rights that we had. That Congress shall enact no law regarding the establishment of religion. Then don’t get rid of religion. Don’t say, every religion works except Christian religion. Allow me to have freedom of speech, in the school. Allow me to be able to speak in school, if I want to. Pray in the school, if a teacher wants to pray, let them play. If a Muslim teacher wants to play, let them pray, don’t respect either religion, do that. And this is what we violated the first principles of the First Amendment. When we talk about freedom of speech. You attack freedom of speech, you attack, the free exercise of religion, we’ve got to go back to the fundamentals, the founding fathers knew what was important, we need to go back to what they said. And we need to make this government respect its founding principles, and its rule of law that came from the Creator, the right to life. First one violated… should come back. The pursuit of happiness to allow us freedom to do. And without all the rules regulations… I’ve got so much that I could say about this, Rick, but oh.

Rick Green
That’s so good, though, Bishop, I tell you what, I wish we had more time because it’s so, so good. In fact, we got to get you back more often. Everything you’re saying. I mean, it’s biblical truth. It’s historical truth. I mean, it’s tied right to what made America great in the first place, and why we experienced so much success. The principles are there, the formula is there, and you’re speaking so, you know, directly to the real problem, not as you said the symptoms, and American needs to hear it. So we got to get you back again, brother, thank you, God bless you.

Jim Lowe
Well, you know, we’ve got to stop blaming the symptoms and talking about the symptoms over and over and over again. We need to cure the disease. The cure comes from our God, and He is the one to give the cure. We need to stop all this racist talk that we do. We need to get rid of that and start looking at one another. It’s we’re the children of God, or we’re not. That’s all it is, there’s only two. If you want to talk about race, or whatever it is. There’s only one race, and that’s the human race. And the human race is divided between those that honor god and those that do not. It’s nothing black or white. It’s not about that rich or poor. It’s all about you either honor God or you don’t. And that’s the way we need to see one another. Stop with this… these shallow ways of talking to people.

Rick Green
Amen, ah, powerful, powerful, powerful. Bishop Jim Lowe, god bless you, brother. Thanks for coming on today.

Jim Lowe
All right. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it anytime.

Rick Green
Stay with us, folks. We’ll be right back with David and Tim bark.

Tim Barton
Hey, this is Tim Barton with WallBuilders. And as you’ve had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you’ve probably heard the wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties about all the things that makes America exceptional. And you might be thinking as incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area, and share with my group, whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school, or public school, or some political event or activity. If you’re interested in having a WallBuilders speaker come to your area, you can get on our website www.WallBuilders.com. And there’s a tab for scheduling. And if you click on that tab, you’ll notice there’s a list of information from speakers bios, to events that are already going on. And there’s a section where you can request an event. To bring this information about who we are where we came from our religious liberties and freedoms, go to the WallBuilders website and bring a speaker to your area.

Rick Green
Welcome back to WallBuilders Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Bishop Jim Lowe for joining us as well. Back with David and Tim now, and guys. I mean, even even the opening story that we had is, is destroying the narratives, right that CRT is all about, just as you guys mentioned. And of course, Bishop Lowe has no problem taking a sledgehammer to those narratives.

David Barton
Yeah, He has so many good soundbites. The fact that we no longer honor life first, he said helps divide us into these racial groups. If it was just life, you know, like the Pro-Life movement but just life of all kind. That makes such a difference. And then he’s talking about well, we don’t have God in schools anymore. So this is what happens and now whoever commits the crime decides whether it’s a crime or not. We’ve lost the standards of what’s absolutely right and wrong, the 10 commandments kind of view of the classroom. He has put his finger on so many core issues, but they’re spiritual issues. And that lack of spiritual understanding is what creates so many of the cultural problems that we have today, including things with race.

Tim Barton
And when he talks about really does go back to the core foundation of America. When the founding fathers in the declaration articulated that we hold these truths to be self evident. The truth, the foundation that America was built on, was the reality that there was a God he did exist, and that the God who existed the God that made the entire universe, made humans and gave them those God-given rights. Well, as Bishop Lowe pointed out, the issues we have in America right now… It’s a God issue. The reality of rejecting God, rejecting that common sense notion where the Founding Fathers said, right, this obvious reality, that there is a God, these truths that are self evident. And he pinpointed where we are. Where we are right now, even. How do you overcome Marxism? It has to be through faith. Faith. Christianity and Marxism are not compatible. Christianity and socialism are not compatible. But the only way you overcome socialism, Marxism, communism is through Christ, is through God and the Bible. We got to get back to that in America.

Rick Green
Well, that’s how we get back to it. We begin to educate people, folks. You got to learn truth, then you can go defend that truth and spread that truth but you got to learn it. That’s what listening to WallBuilders is all about. So please share the program with your friends and family. Thanks so much for listening to WallBuilders.