Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NCE Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now, here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters.
As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, what a treat to get to spend some time talking with noted historian David Barton. Barton is founder of an organization called Wall Builders that's dedicated to teaching America's forgotten history. History and heroes, emphasizing the moral, Christian, and constitutional foundation on which our nation was built. David Barton has several best-selling books. He's a sought-after speaker, and he has amassed an amazing library of original writers from the founding era.
David Barton, welcome back to Family Policy Matters. Hey, Tracy, good to be with you. Thanks for having me. All right.
Well, tell us about Wall Builders. Why did you think it was important to even begin this organization many years ago? We based wall builders on the story of the Bible book of Nehemiah. And the story of Nehemiah in the Bible is one of a nation that had been great. It fell, it got into disrepair.
A lot of bad stuff was happening. It got hauled off into captivity. And Nehemiah, who was a civil leader and very God-oriented guy, came back and looked at all the mess that was there in the nation. He said, guys, let's rebuild so we'll no longer be a reproach. And as I ended up discovering a lot about America and American history, things that I had never been taught in school, but yet I found that they were the actual documents.
I felt like, you know, we need to rebuild too. We've been really torn down. We went through the 60s when everything started turning. Anti-America, and then progressives really got a hold of education in the 60s and 70s. And then we really learned to hate America.
And we just went in so many directions that were so contrary to really our heritage in so many favorable areas. We felt like, hey, we need to rebuild. And what I loved about the story of Nehemiah was there was no great expert involved in it. He said, hey, every one of you, just rebuild right around where you are, wherever you live, whatever your home is. If you want to take a little more, that's great.
Just rebuild right around you. And it's the best grassroots story in the Bible. These folks, in a matter of just 52, 53 days, were able to rebuild the entire city just because everybody took a little part of it. And so that's the story we liked. And for me, I grew up at a time when my sixth-grade history teacher told me that George Washington had 26 illegitimate children, giving new meaning to the phrase, Washington slept here.
So that's how bad we were in America.
Now, as a sixth grader, I didn't know that wasn't true. You know, that's my teacher's telling me. He knows. I don't know. And so I really didn't like the Founding Fathers.
I didn't like America. And later in life, Life as a college kid, I came across some really old original American documents and found out that Washington was not what he had been made out to be in just so many ways. And so, when I saw the originals and I heard what I'd been taught, that's where I got interested in history and trying to bring that history back so that other people know it because I knew they'd been taught what I'd been taught because I was in school.
So, that's what we've done for the last several decades: try to bring that history back out, help rediscover it, kind of like what happened with the story of Josiah and the Temple. When they rediscovered their history, they had a national revival. And I kind of think that that's where we're headed now with the 250th. It's a great opportunity for a national rediscovery of who we actually were and therefore a national revival to go with it.
Okay, so you've been doing this for a while. How do you feel? Do you feel like you've made some progress in educating people?
Well, I don't know if we're making progress, but I know the nation is. Right now, I'm one of nine individuals appointed in the state of Texas content advisors to write our textbooks. And our textbooks are significant. Texas and California is 24%. Of the nation's school kids.
So, when a textbook is written for Texas or California, pretty much everybody else is going to get it to some degree because there's just not that many publishers and they don't really publish for smaller states. But Texas has 5.5 million students. And so, between us and California, that's a lot of kids they publish for. And what's happening right now in Texas is we are going back, we're going through the Founding Fathers in these courses. I'm talking to the standards, the new standards are coming out.
We're talking the faith of the Founding Fathers. We're going back to things that haven't been discussed probably in 60 years, even though they're well historically documented. And we've had a lot of help from the legislature. Legislature says, Hey, every grade, we want stuff included from the Bible. We want biblical literature.
We want stuff out of the classics that show biblical reflection. We want excerpts from the Old New Testament taught in every class. That's not stuff that was even going 15 years ago.
So, as I look at what's happening, 22 states now have introduced legislation to restore the Ten Commandments to the classroom. That wasn't going five years ago.
So, there is stuff going all across the nation. right now. Texas passed laws to put prayer and Bible back in schools. That started this year. There's just so much going that I didn't know if I'd ever see in my lifetime, but it's going right now.
Of course, there's a lot of opposition, but at least it's happening. And so I see really good things happening right now in the nation. And 250th, I think, is going to be part of that.
Well, that's very encouraging about what's going on in Texas. Are there some ways that we here in North Carolina can start walking in that direction? Yeah, it involves going on the offensive. I mean, that is a biblical precept of being on the offense. It says a wise man attacks the city and tears down the stronghold in which they trust.
And that concept of being offensive-minded. And what's happened, and people may not be aware of this, but let me give a little perspective legally. We've been in legal battles now for 50, 60 years. It goes back to literally the first time we ever took prayer out of schools was 1962, which means we had just about 180 years of having prayer in schools. And when the court took it out in the 1962 case, they did not give a single historical.
Or legal precedent. They just said, we're not going to do this anymore.
Next year, they took the Bible out of school. And so we've had it gone for 60 years. And people think this is the way it's always been. This is the way the founding fathers wanted it. Time out.
It had never happened until 62, 63, when a bunch of progressive justices got on and they did not cite a single historical or legal precedent.
So over that period of time, we've had so many cases go to the court. They said, well, if you're going to take prayer and Bible out, let's get rid of nativity scenes and let's get rid of the Ten Commandments and let's get rid of creation science in the classrooms. And they went through everything that was available. And so over that period of time, following 1971, there have been more than 5,000 federal cases that took religious expression out of the public. And what happened in 2019 was with new justices on the court, they said, you know, this is not right.
This is not historical. This is not constitutional. This was done in the 60s, and it's time to go back to what's constitutional.
So they introduced what's called the history and tradition test. And the Supreme Court said, if you can show us that something is historical and traditional, we're going to assert. That it's constitutional. And so that is what's happened. That's why they've turned over so many things since then.
So, with that, that's why 22 states have now reintroduced the Ten Commandments back in. I spoke just this weekend at a county in Oklahoma where they put in God We Trust in every courtroom. They have posted that on the outside of the building, backlit it with lights. Tarrant County, the 13th largest county in the nation here in Texas, they just erected a massive marble monument of the Ten Commandments. No lawsuits on any of this stuff because it's now constitutional.
So the trick now is we have to get people on the aggressive to go say, hey, it's okay to do this in schools. It's okay to post the 10. And all the teachers and all the school attorneys are going to say, no, no, that's unconstitutional. No, it's not. We're winning all these cases.
And so what it takes right now is people being on the offensive, going on the offensive. There's a great website by First Liberty, who won four of these cases in the last three years at the Supreme Court. And it's called Restoring Faith in America. And it gives citizens all sorts of practical things they can do in their local schools. And their local city councils, right where they are.
And Tracy, I'm with you, the states, this is where the stuff is going. It's not the federal level, and I'm thankful for President Trump and what he's doing, but at the state level is where we're making so much progress right now. And I just encourage everybody to go on the offense, get on that website, Restoring Faith in America, pick a project you want to do in a school, whether it's get creation science back in or anything else. Those are all back on the table now as a result of the Supreme Court decisions, a number of them since 2019.
Okay, so you talk about the Ten Commandments in schools, prayer in schools, creation science, that kind of thing, but also you're a proponent of the separation of church and state.
So talk about why those two ideas don't conflict. Yeah, separation church and state, you have to understand it, not in the way the court redefined it, because the phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote, and that letter is 233 words long. When the court used to quote all of Jefferson's letter, they used that letter to keep religious expression in public, as they did in a case called Reynolds versus United States. States 1878. But in 1947, for the first time, the Supreme Court quoted only eight words out of that 233-word letter.
They quoted a wall of separation between church and state. They then redefined it and said, hey, with this wall of separation between church and state, you can't have religious stuff in public anymore. Exactly the opposite of what Jefferson did.
So Jefferson's wall of separation was to keep the federal government from saying, hey, you all have to be Baptists or Catholics or Presbyterians or Quakers. You can't let the federal government set up a national denomination. And that's the way it had been across Europe. That's not what America was. And so separation church and state had nothing to do with religious expressions in public.
It had everything to do with the federal government trying to establish a single denomination. And so when you understand separation church and state, none of this stuff should have happened, which again is why it was done without precedent and why the Supreme Court had to take a 233-word letter and edit it down to only eight words so they could find a phrase they could redefine to do what they've done in the last 60 years. Let me play devil's advocate here.
So let's say we do start putting the Ten Commandments in schools. We start teaching creation science.
Some people might argue that this would be intimidating for people who are not Christians.
So how would you answer that argument? You know, that's an easy answer because what you see is the courts, and from the beginning up to right now, the courts on hundreds and hundreds of occasions have cited the Ten Commandments as the basis of civil law in a civilized world.
Now, you may object that there's only one God, but you know what? We have that on our money. We said that from the beginning. That's our motto. And God we trust.
That's doing nothing more than acknowledging what we have as a national motto. But when it gets to don't kill and don't steal and don't purger yourself, that's in every statutory law. Matter of fact, having been involved in a number of these Ten Commandments cases, we can show that every single one of the Ten Commandments has been cited by federal and state courts for hundreds of years. This is just part of our culture. They point to the Tenth Commandment as the reason we have modern laws against cattle rustling, that we have election fraud laws.
And all these other laws, and these are courts saying this.
So, from a legal standpoint, you don't have to theologically agree with the Ten Commandments, but you know what? They are the basis of civilization in the Western world and particularly in America. And so, whether you agree with them theologically or not, you may not theologically agree that it's wrong to murder. It doesn't matter whether you agree with that or not. That is the law of the land.
And so, what's happened is we have our civil laws that are based on all 10 of the Ten Commandments. You don't have to agree theologically, but that's what's produced a civilized nation.
Okay, well, let me give you another scenario that you might hear out there in the culture, and that is that really all you want is just a white Christian nation and you would like everyone else to leave. How would you answer that kind of objection? You know, that's an interesting statement. And I'd say, well, don't you want a secular nation? You're secular.
Don't you want a secular nation? Everybody wants the nation to be what they think is good. And if you're Baptist, that's a Baptist. If you're Catholic, that's Catholic. If you're progressive, that's a progressive.
If you're secularist, that's a secularist. Sure, I think Christianity is one. Wonderful, and I hope everyone has the same great experience I've had with Christianity. I want everybody to be a Christian, but I'm not going to legislate that, and I'm not going to make that the legal code. Is it going to affect my values?
And am I going to carry those in public? Sure, I am, just like everybody else carries their values in public.
So, to say that you can do yours and I can't do mine, that's pretty crazy. And that's what they often say to try to back us out and back us away from holding our values.
Now, I will point out: you know, you may not like my values, but all 50 states have on the record right now what's known as the Good Samaritan Law. That's a teaching only that appears in the Bible of the New Testament. It doesn't appear anywhere else. That Good Samaritan law we have in all 50 states. Guess what?
That's a Christian value.
So, there are so many things where they're very misinformed. They picked up sound bites, and those sound bites actually are very good at backing our people into the corner. But the reality is, you're going to have a value system at the basis of all your laws. And whether it's a secularist or whether it's a Judeo-Christian or biblical or anything else, you have to. Make your choice on which one works best.
And that's where history steps in and shows us that Judeo-Christian biblical value system works best. Even for those who are not Christians and not biblical, we don't stop their right to worship. But you know what? It's nice to live under a code where you have a good Samaritan law and other things, which are Christian values. I'm assuming that the answers to these kinds of questions are things that can be found among your resources and your website.
Could you tell our listeners where they can go if they have more questions and they want to see how you might answer some of these objections? We have a lot of resources and a lot of stuff. We have thousands of articles on the website dealing with about any issue you can think of. We have two mega museums in Dallas-Fort Worth world class. We have about 160,000 original items out of American history going from Columbus all the way through the Bible, landing on the moon of Apollo 14, just anything you can think of.
So we have a lot of that posted on the website, including the historical artifacts. We have a lot of guidance on there from legal experts on what you can and can't do in your communities. Just about anything you can think of, we're going to have somewhere on that website in the thousands and thousands of postings we have there.
Well, all right. Thank you for that. David Barton, founder of Wall Builders, thanks for all your great work and for joining us today on Family Policy Matters. Thanks, Tracy. We appreciate all you guys do.
God bless you. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org.
And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
