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. Welcome to Family Policy Matters.
As we approach the 250th birthday of our country, this is a great opportunity to ensure that people around us understand the foundation of our nation. Because if we're going to keep it going, we certainly need to understand it. Today, we have the privilege of learning about the Declaration of Independence with David Barton, founder of the organization Wall Builders. And that is a national pro-family organization that helps people discover the true story of America in our biblical foundation. David Barton, thanks for joining us on Family Policy Matters.
Tracy, it is great to be with you. All right.
So for those of us who sometimes marvel at the people around us who don't maybe understand what a gift this country is, can you talk to us first about the significance of the Declaration of Independence and the broader scope of our world's history? That's a great question to ask because sometimes we're so Close to blessings, we don't realize they're blessings, so we lose the blessings. And in this case, when you look at America, our 250th anniversary, under the same piece of paper, and I did say under because it is a governing document. We've gone through several attempts, particularly by secular progressives, over the last 150 years to say the Declaration has no bearing on the nation, but it does. And the Constitution even acknowledges that.
The Constitution dates itself to the Declaration, not the Constitution. When President Trump signed laws, and same with Biden before him and every president, they dated to the Declaration of Independence, not to the Constitution. States can't even come into the United States unless they agree to abide by the Constitution and the Declaration.
So while secular progressives attempt to dismiss the Declaration, and probably the first great time was during the abolition movement, 1830s and 40s, where they said, wait a minute, we took an oath to uphold the Constitution.
So don't be telling us that there's a right to liberty and that all men are created equal. That's in a document. We didn't swear to uphold. We heard the same thing in the 1960s and 70s when we were saying, Wait, the document says there's a right to life. And they said, No, we took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not the Declaration.
And then even 20 years ago, as we were talking about the Declaration, the laws of nature, nature's God, and makes it really clear that there's two genders, and those genders don't marry the same gender, they marry an opposite gender. They said, No, that's declaration.
So they always want to get away from the declaration when it produces values they don't like. But having said that, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago Law School said there's 5,800 years recorded history, there's thousands of nations. What is the average length of a governing document? And with all the research, they came back. The average length of a governing document in the history of the world is between 17 and 19 years.
And we're sitting here at 250. Are you kidding me? And just to put that in perspective, France, who's one of our allies today, but France had a revolution a decade after we did. And France has gone through 15 constitutions at the same time we've had our one.
So we are remarkably blessed. We just take it for granted because we're so used to stability. We just think it's natural. It's not. This is not the way the world goes.
So we are very blessed. And this celebration is something we should all enjoy because this is a once-in-a-lifetime, not only for us, but for nearly everybody else in the world. They don't get a 250th like we do. Hmm.
Now, that is very interesting. My husband and I just had the privilege of going to Greece, and you know, that civilization has been around a long time. And we just kept saying, oh my gosh, you know, we're just such a young country. And of course, we are in some ways.
So, what you're saying is that these countries that have been around for centuries, even that their constitutions have actually not survived. That's an interesting point. Yeah, it's, you know, Greece is one of those that has been here from ancient civilization. But when you look at the number of constitutions they've had since 1822, Greece has had 13 constitutions. That means they've set aside their government 13 times and they've created a new government.
We haven't done that. And it's not like we have presidential elections and that's a new government. That's not it because we're governed by a document as they are. And so Greece has been through a number of constitutions. Their current constitution is 1975, is when they created it.
So they're an old civilization and they have much history, much rich history, but they're fairly young as far as a constitutional republic goes. And there's just not been others that have been able to put together the string of longevity and stability and prosperity and everything else that we've had under this remarkable duo. And when I say constitution, I mean declaration and constitution both, because the founding fathers never separated those. Matter of fact, John Quincy Adams cited, and so did John Dickinson, the Constitution cited 2 Corinthians 3, where it says the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. The Declaration is the spirit of the law, and you have the Constitution is the letter of the law, but they don't work apart from each other any more than the Bible works if you ignore the spirit of the scriptures and take only the letter of the scriptures.
And that's what they pointed to back in that day, that these two documents are inseparable. Tell us about the people, the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence. I speak at a lot of universities and law schools, and so does my son Tim, all over the country, speaking to universities. And Tim, as an example, has a gift card that he carries with him when he does public presentations. We both use slides.
We put slides up. And so we'll put a slide up of the 56 signers of the Declaration. And he says, if you can name five of these 56, I will give you this gift card. And he's had the same gift card for nine years. I was at Duke University Law School, said, who are these 56 guys?
Name them. And they could name Jefferson and Franklin, and that's just about it. And, you know, they didn't have a clue who the others were. And it's kind of the same thing. I mean, even for you guys in North Carolina, I mean, trying to get people to name your North Carolina signers of the Declaration of the Three or the five signers of the Constitution, it's just hard to do.
So knowing who they are really does make a difference because they're not a collective. Group of all being the same. We just finished a book that's coming out on the Founding Fathers, a short biography, maybe a thousand words on each one. And the Founding Fathers all had common goals, but there's a bunch of them who didn't even like each other, but they worked together. One of the Georgia signers of the Declaration was actually shot and killed by an American revolutionary general.
That's how strong the conflicts could be, but they all held for freedom and for liberty and for the principles of the Declaration. They all had different personalities. You had attorneys, you had farmers, you had one guy who was just dirt poor. You had rich guys, you had slave owners, you had abolitionists, you had everything that came together, but they agreed on the principles of liberty and independence for the nation. And that birthed what became the liberty and independence movement against slavery as well.
It was birthed there with the Declaration. And so there's a lot of interesting individuals that are worth knowing and looking at and not just looking at them. Them considering them just a group by themselves because they're not. There are 56 separate individuals. They all made individual sacrifices for freedom and liberty.
They all paid high prices.
Some lost, seven never even lived to see what they wanted us to enjoy. Not all of them were killed in such a way, but nonetheless, they all paid high prices for us being able to enjoy what we enjoy today. What is the appropriate way to think back on these men who sacrificed so much to establish our country? We all hope That we're all not judged by subsequent generations by mistakes that we made in our life or by things that we believed at one time in our life that we didn't believe later. We all hope that our descendants, our family descendants, our great-great-great-grandkids don't look at us and hold us up by something that they no longer believe.
then in the future that we believed here today, whatever that may be. And that's the way it is with these signers. You look, well, first off, start with the entire world at that time. You cannot find a nation that did not have slavery and actively participate in slavery at the time of the Founding Fathers.
So they were doing what everybody else did. They were not unique. They were very much in with what the rest of the world was doing. What made them unique was of the 56 who signed the Declaration, 41 of them at one time held slaves. But they began the anti-slavery movement for the world, literally.
What they did in that declaration, the number of founding fathers that then went on to free their own slaves and that led abolition societies, there are just so many that have been in slavery. It's interesting that Thomas Jefferson is not known by this generation, but he's called the first abolitionist. Jefferson, who owned some 200 slaves that he inherited, they weren't like he went out and got slaves. He inherited slaves. And same with George Washington.
He had over 200 slaves, but they were inherited. Virginia law at the time made it illegal to free your own slaves. And if your wife had slaves, they're called dowry slaves. And by the law, you can never free those slaves.
Well, after the Revolution, they said, you know, maybe we've been doing the wrong thing. Freedom, we like freedom. We're sure slaves like freedom. Virginia, one of the pro-slavery states, actually passed a law that says, okay, you can free your slaves when you die. And that's how George Washington freed his slaves.
But he couldn't free Martha's slaves because the law made it illegal for him to free his wife's slaves. And so Jefferson, when Jefferson died, they said, well, we've changed the law. You can't free slaves even on your own death.
So here's Jefferson, who actually authors and is called the first emancipationist because of all the work he did to help end slavery elsewhere. As president of the United States, America starts expanding into new territories and states like Illinois. Jefferson is the one who sent a bunch of Baptist preachers into Illinois and said, you guys get there, start an anti-slavery movement, make sure Illinois does not have slavery. There's so many things he did to fight slavery, even though he was a slave owner. And people just don't think about that today or do anything.
Ben Franklin, I mean, Ben Franklin led one of the nation's first abolition societies, and yet he was a slave owner. But he freed his slaves and said, this is not right. In Pennsylvania, he could free his slaves. And so he and Benjamin Rush, another founding father, signed a declaration who owned slaves, said, this is absolutely wrong. They freed their slaves and they started the nation's first abolition society.
But today people say, oh, they were a slave owner. No, they did something nobody else in the world was doing. And that was starting to push back against slavery and starting to pass laws to end slavery. And so it's just, that's a remarkable, untold story of the Founding Fathers.
Now, some of them were absolutely pro-slavery, particularly some of the guys down in Georgia, even some of your guys in North Carolina, they wore slavery and they didn't move away from that. But that doesn't change the fact that the Founding Fathers, as a collective group, is what started the anti-slavery movement in the world. And Thomas Jefferson signed the first law in the world.
Well, actually, the second law. Denmark was the first in 1792. But Jefferson in 1807, when he signed that ban on the slave trade, I mean, we were the second in the world to do that in America. And we don't ever give ourselves credit for that. It turned out that Great Britain was third.
Theirs went into effect before ours, but it didn't end the slave trade until a year after it went into effect.
So ours really was in effect earlier.
So all that to say, look, we're not. Perfect. Nobody is perfect. Every person has flaws, not only us, but the founding fathers. But these guys got out of a global sin, a global wickedness, faster than most of the rest of the world.
And they were definitely the leaders in the world in starting that movement. And they need to be credited for that, even though they have plenty of flaws, just like we all do.
So let's talk about another misconception that many people have about the role of Christianity in the founding of our nation. How much of a role did Christianity play and those men's faith play in the founding documents? You know, it's a great question. And I have been to so many universities and seen so many textbooks where the founding fathers are atheists, agnostics, deists, they weren't Christian, et cetera. And I'll just go back to kind of what we started with.
We talked about America's longevity. The world average is 17 to 19 years. And here we are at 250 years. And so, professors at the University of Houston asked the question: hey. Everybody's got access to the same set of ideas.
I mean, all this stuff is written down. They've been creating governments for 5,800 years.
So, where did our Founding Fathers get their ideas that have made us such a long-lasting nation when everybody else is just flipping constitutions on a regular basis? And so they said, we think if we can go back and read the Founding Fathers' writings. And see who they quoted, then we'll know who the influences were that helped them shape their ideas.
So they started with identifying 15,000 writings of the Founding Fathers, largely governmental writings, writings where the Founding Fathers were creating state constitutions or state laws or whatever. What was it that was shaping the way they thought about government? And from that 15,000 initial writings, they got it down to the thousand most significant writings, and that would be the state constitutions that were created by the Founding Fathers that put in the first governments before we had the Constitution. And so they went through all of those thousand documents and they found 3,154 direct quotes that had quotation marks around them. That's what they're looking for: we want quotation marks around the quotes.
And so in doing that, It took them 10 years, but they tracked every one of those quotation marks back to its original source. And they found that the number one most cited source by the Founding Fathers was the Bible. 34% of all the quotes in those governing documents were quoting the Bible. Number two on that list was 8.3%, and that was Charles Montesquieu. Number 3 was William Blackstone at 7.9%.
Number 4 was John Locke at 2.9.
So your number one cited source, four times more often than any other source, is the Bible. Specifically, you have John Adams, and you have James Madison, and you have Ben Franklin talking about how Jeremiah 17:9 is where they learned about separation of powers and checks and balances.
So when you look at the research, you say, oh, the Bible was the source of their ideas, and they quoted it more than any other source when creating our government. It doesn't sound like a bunch of atheist agnostics and deists. And the other capstone I would put on that is Alice Baldwin, who started. the women's program at Duke University there where you guys are in Carolina. She started that in 1920s and in 1928 she did a book called The Pulpit of the American Revolution.
And in that book, she documented that every single Grievance set forth in the Declaration, and by the way, there were 27 grievances, and here's what we don't like about Great Britain.
So, when we did the Constitution, we said, here were the grievances, here's how we're solving those.
So, the grievances in the Declaration became the basis for the Constitution. She documented that every grievance set forth in the Declaration had been preached from the American pulpit prior to 1763.
So, the grievances in the Declaration were nothing more than a listing of sermon topics that the Founding Fathers had been hearing for 15 years before the Declaration was written. And you look even at those sermons, and you find that out of the 56 signers of the Declaration, 29 of them graduated from theological seminaries, seminaries that were training ministers of the gospel. A huge number of the founding fathers were actively involved in Christian ministry before and after the signing of the Declaration.
So to say they're atheists, agnostics, deists, people only get away with saying that because they can't name the 56 who they are. They're kind of like those kids we talked about earlier that know one or two, maybe three, and they base everything on those three, not knowing who the others are and not knowing the significant influence of faith in writing those documents.
So let's talk a little bit more then about some of the governing concepts that are in the Declaration of Independence. Why is that an important document that we need to read and reread and understand? The Declaration sets forth the reason America was founded. It was our announcement to the world. Guys, this is what we believe.
This is why we're doing what we're doing. If you see and hear about this revolution in America, here's the basis for it.
So this was a declaration to the world. To explain why we're doing, so this wouldn't seem like an anarchy and wouldn't seem like a revolution like the French revolutions were, great bloodbaths.
So the founding fathers started with 161 words that set forth six principles of government. They said, these are the six inviable principles of government that need to be preserved in every single government across the world. Here they are, and this is what we're doing in America. Then they gave 27 grievances saying, Here's how these six principles have been violated. And then at the end, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor to establish a government that would honor those six principles.
Those six principles need to be known by every American today because that's how the Constitution works. This is the basis on which the Constitution was built and erected. If you don't get those six principles, you'll never get government right, you'll never get constitutional government right, and we'll become like the other nations in the world.
So that's why the Declaration is so important. It sets forth an announcement to the world: this is what we believe, this is the basis of our beliefs, and we're building everything on these beliefs. How hard is that to do in 15, 20 minutes? These six principles? First principle talks about the laws of nature and nature's God.
So there is an absolute moral standard. The second thing is there is the Creator God that gave the laws of nature and nature's God. And the third that comes from that is that Creator God gives individual rights to every individual. Individual. The fourth is that government exists first and foremost to protect the inalienable rights of the people.
The fifth principle is that outside of inalienable rights, you go with the consent of the governed. The people have the final say on this. And so that's kind of what the Founding Fathers call the will of the majority.
Now, you don't get the majority vote on inalienable rights. You don't vote on whether there's a right to life or whether there's a right to liberty, etc. But on if you want to vote on how many traffic lights you have in a city, that's fine. Go with the consent of the governed. And the sixth principle is that any government that will not Follow those first five principles, you have a right under God to create a new government that will follow those principles.
So, those are the six principles they laid forth in the Declaration. And the Constitution took all of those principles, put them in there, and then they added specifics as to how the consent of the government was going to work. The consent of the government, we're going to have a House and a Senate and a President, we're going to have three branches, which, by the way, is in Isaiah 33:22. We're going to have checks and balances.
So, they went through and laid all that out. But those six principles in the Declaration are easy to understand, and that's what governs every bit of government in America, including local government, including a school board government, doesn't matter what it is. You have to conform to the principles of the American founding. And then, past that, you can do other things under the consent of the government as long as it doesn't violate those first principles.
So, that's really the Declaration in a nutshell. And that's why, by the way, we used to require that every individual read the Declaration and read the Constitution. Constitution and know it and study it before they could even get into office. This is our governing document and governing principles.
So that's the simplicity of the Declaration. Do you feel like there are one or two of these six principles that are the most threatened? Under our current culture? I do. One of the things that our Constitution established was that we are a constitutional republic.
We keep trying to become a democracy, and we keep hearing that word democracy. Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution prohibits any state in America from becoming a democracy. And this is what we hear at school. This is particularly what progressives talk about in our democracy. Man, the Founding Fathers, they point out there's seven different forms of government, and democracy is worse than a dictatorship.
Democracy, as they call that, the rule of mobocracy, because it always goes with passions. We as Christians see that in the Bible. Look at all the passions that came out at the crucifixion of Jesus. Here's a guy who's never done anything except good his whole life. And they get the crowd stirred up and they all say, let's crucify him.
That's what a democracy does. It runs on emotions and feelings, and the emotions of the moment, and the feelings of that minute are often. You regret them later. And that's why in our Constitutional Republic, things move slowly. People talk about how slow government is.
Good for us. We can get the passions and feelings out of it, and we can move according to the rule of law. And so that is one of the things I think is the biggest thing that's out there: the mob occracy mentality that progressives have put out there, the fact that we're a democracy and we, the people, get to tell you what's right and wrong. No, we don't. We have the laws of nature, nature's God that sets moral boundaries.
We can tell you how long the session should last in Congress or how fast the speed limit should be, or should the sidewalks be five feet wide or six feet wide? But we can't tell you that you have the right to take an innocent life. We can't tell you that you can't vote in the right to enslave someone. You can't do those things. There's a right to life, liberty, and property, the pursuit of happiness.
And those are things that are inalienable rights.
So that's where I think we get it most wrong: we don't understand the difference between democracy and republic, and that the Constitution and Declaration both ban democracies. And they establish constitutional republics. That's a big deal.
So, when you're talking about the consent of the governed, then you're not talking about a democracy. You are talking about the government, the way we've set it up for making decisions. Yeah, the consent of the governed only applies in certain areas. You don't have the consent of the governed when it comes to the Bill of Rights. In a democracy, you do.
We can vote a right out or vote another right in. You can't do that in a constitutional republic. You have to amend the Constitution, which takes the majority of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states. That's really the only time the Constitution establishes a supermajority is when you're dealing with rights and changing rights or protecting rights.
So, this is where the filibuster is absolutely wrong under the Founding Fathers. The filibuster says that 41 people in the U.S. Senate have more power than 59 people in the U.S. Senate. And so, we don't get stuff done that the majority wants to, even in non-moral areas, even in things like economics and how we spend economics, which can be moral.
We're now having. 41 people tell us how to spend our money rather than 59 people. And so that filibuster that came in under President Woodrow Wilson is a clear violation of constitutional principles, but it is a rule of the Senate, and therefore the Supreme Court will not strike it down because the Constitution says that each House, each body can set their own rules. And so that's not a completely overtly, it's not like violating Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution explicitly. The principle violates the will of the majority and the consent of the governed, but that's the Senate's rules.
And so that's what they set up.
So that's where it gets kind of complicated is the will of majority doesn't let you do anything you want to. You've got to do it according to the Constitution under the rules set forth by the Constitution. But this is where George Washington, and this is, I think, maybe to an earlier question, this is the other really big thing that I think that people don't get today. George Washington, in his farewell address, said that our Constitution was made only for a moral and a religious people. That only morality and religion would cause it to work well, and that he said he would not let anyone call themselves a patriot if they did not support morality and religion in public life.
And so, when you take out the morals and you take out the religious foundations that the nation had, there go your rights and wrongs. And now we're voting on rights and wrongs. We're voting on how many genders there are.
Well, the laws of nature and nature's God tell us very clearly, and that's the standard set forth in the Declaration, that every mammal species only has two genders. That's all it is. And heterosexual is the way that reproduction occurs in nature. That's all it is. And there's nearly no homosexual relations anyone can point to in nature.
They violate the laws of nature and nature's God.
So there are morals that are established there, and people today just kind of throw that out and say, no, we're going with whatever the 41 say in the Senate. And that's what's really hurt the nation more than anything else in the last 20 years as we've become polarized in our values. We no longer even agree on what life is and what life is not and what sexuality is and what sexuality is. how many genders there are. And when you can't have a moral and religious agreement, you can't find agreement on anything.
And this is where we've seen the real breakdown of constitutional government is with the increase of secularism and progressive secularism over the last few decades.
So where do you land as far as hope is concerned? Because we hear so often out there in the marketplace of ideas that our Constitution constantly, our Constitution is threatened, that we're not going to survive this. And it comes from whichever president happens to be in power at the time. What is your sense? How enduring do you think the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution will be?
I think the principles are absolutely enduring and will stand the test of time because they've stood the test of time up to now. They're based on principles that America did not create. America identified principles that had been set forth from biblical times back to the creation of the world. And as long as you do that, it's going to work.
Now, we know the law of gravity is a universal law, but what if I get on the top of the Empire State Building and say, I don't believe in the law of gravity? If I jump off, I'm going to splat on the ground and die, regardless of what my personal beliefs are. And that's what we've done. We've ignored a lot of the principles. We put our own personal opinions into place.
And it may take 40 or 50 years for those opinions to fail and to see how bad they are. But when you start having opinions and beliefs that contradict the laws of nature and nature's God, that contradict what God has established in the scriptures that has governed us for 5,800 years, he's governed us through his word. Those are things that when you set them aside, you're going to pay a price. History proves that. Doesn't matter the civilization, the culture, the language, or the race.
It's not going to work apart from God. That's the biggest problem we have now is some of this stuff doesn't come home to roost until a couple of generations later. And then when it does, we're so into that mindset, we don't know how to change it and get back to where we were. And that's why it's important to start with those principles from the very beginning and judge everything against those principles so that you don't get away from them. I would love for you to tell people who are loving this conversation where they need to go to learn more about these fascinating facts.
At wallbuilders.com, you can go there. We have about 160,000 original items, Founding Father. Era online where they can see those. We have two museums for Dallas. We also have a number of books like The American Story and The Founders Bible that document all these things we're talking about, give the footnotes, give the sources, and quotes.
David Barton, founder of Wall Builders, thank you for joining us today on family policy matters. 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.
