Howard Zinn lied. American history and perhaps its future died. That's a topic we'll discuss this Memorial Day weekend right here on the Christian Worldview Radio program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to share the good news that all people can be reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host, and our website is thechristianworldview.org.
Thank you for joining us this weekend here on the Christian Worldview. Now, if you're more than 50 years old, you have likely noticed a major shift in perspective on American history. Christopher Columbus was once the great discoverer of America, but now is considered a genocidal tyrant, thus the push to change Columbus Day over to Indigenous People's Day for his treatment of the Indians. The American founders were once the esteemed framers of the greatest nation in history, but now are dismissed and discarded as white and wealthy slaveholders.
Even America's wartime sacrifices to stop Nazism and Communism are viewed as imperialistic and profit-motivated. So where did this America is evil perspective come from? In the last 40 years, one man, Howard Zinn, in his book A People's History of the United States, has done more to deconstruct Americans' view of their own history than anyone or anything else. So this Memorial Day weekend as we honor the members of our military who sacrificed for the unique liberties constitutionalized by our founders, Mary Graybar, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America, joins us to examine who Zinn was, how he rewrote American history, and what impact this has had and will have on our country.
Let's get to the first segment with Mary Graybar. You say in the preface, with dozens of such outlandish suggestions and countless other grossly dishonest rhetorical tricks on nearly every page of his book, Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn has succeeded in convincing a generation of Americans that the nation Abraham Lincoln truly called the last best hope of earth is essentially a racist criminal enterprise built on murdering Indians, exploiting slaves, and oppressing the working man. It obviously needs to be replaced by something better and of course Zinn has the answer, a classless egalitarian society. Yes, what Zinn is selling is the very same communist utopian fantasy that killed more than a hundred million human beings in the 20th century. My first question for you, Mary, today is for someone listening today who perhaps has never even heard of Howard Zinn, could you just give us a brief overview of who he is and why it's important for someone listening today to understand who he is, what his book, A People's History of the United States, what kind of influence that has had in our country?
His influence is huge and it just grows each year. His book first came out in 1980 so I think probably we could say it's two generations now that have been raised on Howard Zinn's toxic history. So you have parents now who think it's perfectly legitimate history for their kids to learn in school and there are all other kinds of outlets that promote his book. There are downloadable free lessons at the Howard Zinn Education Project. There are films, documentaries, graphic books, spin-offs, young people's history that's used in school districts.
They collaborate with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Zinn Education Project is like this monster with thousands of tentacles going out into the culture and education. But Howard Zinn himself was born in 1922. He died in 2010 and he was born Jewish Russian immigrant parents who never escaped their lower class existence, weren't very successful financially. He was a teenager in the 1930s living in Brooklyn and that was sort of the heyday of communist recruitment. He talks about this in his memoir about how these guys would come in, try to recruit the younger guys like Zinn and tell him about how wonderful communism is and Zinn participated in a coordinated protest by the Communist Party as a teenager in Times Square and then, as he claims, got bopped on the head by a policeman and realized that this whole system is corrupt. He worked in shipyards and then he served in World War II as a bombardier, came back and got his PhD from Columbia on the GI Bill. But while he was working on his PhD in history, he was a member of the Communist Party. So in 1951, he was teaching Marxism at the Brooklyn headquarters of the Communist Party USA.
He was questioned about this and he's got this long FBI file. Of course, like all communists, he denied it. I think he officially gave up his membership around 1956, but that was only so he could go and infiltrate the educational system and our cultural institutions. He got a job at Spelman College in Atlanta. As you may know, that is a small Christian college for African American women. He proceeded to radicalize students there.
He told them he was Jewish by birth, but he didn't believe in God or any religion. So he radicalized them at Spelman College. He was fired for insubordination by the college's first black and first male president, Albert Manley, in 1963. But he then went on to Boston University, where he radicalized students. He led Vietnam War protests. He traveled to North Vietnam with Father Berrigan to bring back three American POWs, a big propaganda coup for the North Vietnamese. He worked there until his retirement in 1988, but he led a pretty charmed life, touring all over the world, giving talks, not doing much real teaching, but was just sort of a pal and an agitator to students. He died in 2010, actually, while he was on a trip in Santa Monica to discuss how to educate children with his materials. So that's a sort of a short synopsis of his life.
But he always remained committed to communism, slash socialism, and that was his objective was to convert young people to hate their country and to embrace socialism and communism. We have Mary Grebar with us today on the Christian Worldview Radio program talking about the influence of Howard Zinn in his book, A People's History of the United States. You mentioned a bit in your first answer, but talk more about how much he and his book have influenced the country's perception of our history, rate where you would put him as to how he's influenced this country with some of the other people who have influenced the country.
Well, I would put him at the top of the list. His book has sold about three million copies. It is now openly used in classrooms. Students who take the Advanced Placement U.S. History course will likely use his book or parts of it. And the exam to pass that course is written to Howard Zinn's specifications.
Now, that test and those guidelines were changed under the Obama administration. So basically now teachers who are pressured to have their students get credit for Advanced Placement History, college credit, use Howard Zinn's book. Celebrities quote him.
There are performances. He also wrote a few plays. One is titled Marx and Soho. There is a segment in The Sopranos about Columbus Day. When people petition either their schools or city councils or states to abolish Columbus Day, they cite Howard Zinn as a matter of fact.
The Zinn Education Project has a kit for teachers to use in the classroom with their students to teach them and to enroll them in this campaign to abolish Columbus Day. He is presented as this kind of genocidal maniac, which is not what he was. He was motivated by his Christian faith. And on Columbus Day, if you read reports as we do every single Columbus Day about how statues of Columbus are defaced, how one more state, one more city has decided to abolish Columbus Day, you can trace that back to Howard Zinn. His influence is there in the lobbying.
Legislators quote him. He's having a profound influence on our education and on our culture. So even if you are not in school, you can still see the effects of the history. You talked about Columbus and his reimagination of who Christopher Columbus was. You say Howard Zinn rode to fame and fortune on the quote untold story of Christopher Columbus, a shocking tale of severed hands, raped women and gentle enslaved people worked to death in the white Europeans lust for gold.
Today, that story is anything but untold. Zinn's narrative about the genocidal discoverer of America has captured our education system and popular culture. Why has it been so destructive, Mary, the rewriting of Christopher Columbus and his interaction with the Native Americans or Indians? It's the first step of the long line of imperialists who, you know, the Europeans who came here. So Christopher Columbus is the first, he sets the precedent. It also delegitimizes the idea of discovery. If this place was discovered, it was discovered by this deranged capitalist who came here and had this lust for gold and chopped off the hands of Indians when they couldn't produce.
So you have this bloody history. That's all motivated by capitalism. He repeatedly points that out.
It's the lust for gold that drives him. Whereas the Indians supposedly are non-materialistic, they share, they're gentle, they're kind, they're enlightened, they're advanced. And then you've got the Europeans. Now Zinn's bigger point is this country really has no right to exist. You know, the idea of the United States is a myth. It's illegitimate, is a lie. And the foundation for it goes all the way back to what he claims is a bogus discovery. So what is the truth on Christopher Columbus then?
Who was he? I mean, did Howard Zinn make up these lies about him out of whole cloth, or is there truth to the way he interacted with the Indians? Okay, you're listening to an interview today in the Christian Real View with Mary Graybar, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn, exposing the fake history that turned a generation against America. She'll answer that question after this first break of the day. Just think about it. If you believe your country is illegitimate and is an evil place, and the imperialists who took it over are carrying on their worldview today, you're not going to be willing to defend any of your values or export them. It's very bad. More after this. People everywhere have anxiety about the coronavirus pandemic.
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We have a full segment with her. Let's get straight back to the interview. So what is the truth on Christopher Columbus then? Who was he? I mean, did Howard Zinn make up these lies about him out of whole cloth or is there truth to the way he interacted with the Indians? He did make it up pretty much out of whole cloth and he did it very cleverly. What he did, and I point this out by quoting the passages, is he plagiarized from a fellow socialist's book. Hans Koning was his name and this guy was not a historian or a teacher or anything like that.
He was a playwright, screenwriter, novelist. Now you were talking about how Howard Zinn is going to tell this untold story and he even goes on and on in his book about how he, even though he has his PhD in history, he never knew the truth about Christopher Columbus until he started reading his journals and doing all this research. You think, well, here was this historian, he's going into the dusty shelves and doing all this painstaking work. Well, what he does is he plagiarizes Hans Koning's book, paragraphs that are lifted with just a few phrases switched around. He does quote from Christopher Columbus's journals. He does it from a popular book that was out in the 1970s and an abbreviated form of his journals.
But what he does is he's very deceptive. He leaves out critical words so that when he quotes Columbus, you get the opposite impression of what Columbus actually intended. There's this one passage and it's been made famous by that segment on the Sopranos.
This is the way Howard Zinn has it. He's quoting from Christopher Columbus's journal and he's talking about the Indians, the Arawaks, and he says they would make fine servants. And then he's got the four dots that are the ellipses, which as we know is used to show that a phrase or a sentence or maybe two has been eliminated. They would make fine servants, dot, dot, dot.
With 50 men, we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. So if you read it that way, you get the idea, wow, these were really greedy, evil people and they wanted to subjugate them, right? Well, he's not leaving out only a phrase or a sentence in those ellipses.
He's leaving out pages worth. And what you find in those missing pages are sentences like this one by Christopher Columbus. I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our holy faith more by love than by force, right? That's quite different from subjugating them. And the other thing is when he quotes that in isolation, you don't know what they is referring to, but if you read it in the context, it's pretty clear that Christopher Columbus is discussing another tribe that has been coming and trying to subjugate them.
And this other tribe, the Caribs, see these Arawaks that Zen's talking about as servants, not the Europeans. I mean, this is not to say that Christopher Columbus's men did not get out of control and that there wasn't abuse. And historians have faulted Christopher Columbus for the fact that he wasn't a good manager.
But there are a lot of complications in that. Christopher Columbus was an explorer. He was a seamen. He wanted to spread the Christian faith. So if he didn't have complete control, yes, we can say, yeah, there were abuses that were committed. But the way Zen presents it, you get the impression that Christopher Columbus came out solely searching for gold. He didn't care how he got it. He ordered his men to hack off hands if the Indians didn't produce enough gold.
And he may have even done it personally himself, which is not the case at all. Mary Graybar with us today on the Christian Royal View, talking about the influence of Howard Zinn in his book, A People's History of the United States. Her book is Debunking Howard Zinn. We have it linked at our website, thechristianrealview.org.
Mary's website is marygraybar.com. You write about a chapter on America the racist. It has been sold now to America pretty strongly that we are the most racist, terrible, divided country in the world. And our founders, they've all been disqualified from any sort of authority because some of them own slaves. How did Howard Zinn convert the way the country thinks about our founders, Mary?
And how should we view our founders despite the fact that some of them did do things that weren't right? Howard Zinn takes a chapter from the old communist playbook, which was to sort of look at the weak point of American society at the time, which was segregation and oppression, blacks and other groups. So they pretended that this was because of our capitalist economy, because of our form of government. So that was used in their propaganda and Howard Zinn continues to use that and he presents this distorted history. He goes on and he claims that slavery was most cruel, the worst in the world in the United States. And historically, that is just not true. Slavery has been a worldwide phenomenon since time immemorial. All religions have practiced it, all places on the globe have practiced it. But Zinn presents American slavery as uniquely bad.
It's our original sin but never changed according to him. Emancipation never happened. The civil rights movement never happened. We are still tainted with racism. And according to Howard Zinn's version of history, we will be until we overthrow this form of government.
So that's his presentation. There were no, in his version, Christian abolitionists. There were no white people who were genuinely concerned about the plight of blacks and other minorities. The only ones who were were really the communists.
And they are the great heroes. And, you know, he mentions a few black communists who kind of got swept up into it and presents this very distorted view of the whole history of slave relations. And if you read The People's History of the United States, you get the impression that nothing has really changed since slavery. Mary Graybar with us today on The Christian Worldview, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn. You mentioned reading his book, A People's History of the United States. How could one even read that book and be able to separate any of the maybe small amount of facts from all the fiction and misinterpretation? And part two of the question is, who is reading that book? Where is that book taught? Is it high schools, middle schools, colleges?
Where is it primarily being used? It's really hard to sort of separate fact from fiction. It's literally, I think, on every page.
There's at least a distortion. There might be a kernel of truth, Brooke, but it's so twisted around and so surrounded by this leading rhetoric, by leading questions. You know, he may not come out and say America was fascist, but boy, he sure makes you think that when you're reading about World War II. So it's very dangerous in his rhetorical strategy.
I mean, that's something I discussed too. It's very unusual for a history book to make all these emotional appeals he does and to present leading questions one right after the other. So that gets me to who's reading it. Well, a lot of adolescents. I mean, it appeals to young people who, like the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, 15-year-olds who suddenly wake up and realize every adult around him is stupid and they can see into the truth.
And Zinn is very good with that. I mean, he did that in person, corrupting young people, and he does that through his writing. So as I said before, this book is widely used for advanced placement U.S. history courses in high schools. And a lot of professors recommend the book or they'll assign chapters of it in college. There's a Young People's History of the United States, and it's being read, used in all eighth grade classrooms in Portland, Oregon and other school districts around the country. There are the downloadable lessons that teachers have access to from the Zinn Education Project.
There are the movies they can show. There's Zinn's biography. There are spinoff books.
I mean, the guy was pretty wealthy when he died. He, just for lending his name to the series of books called A People's History, he got a certain percentage of the royalties. So if students don't get the full book, they may get one of those.
I've seen it in books for middle school students. I just checked them out of my little library here in Clinton, New York. And there's a book for middle schoolers on the Vietnam War.
It had four extensive passages from Howard Zinn's A People's History. He is really held up as this kind of iconic trailblazing historian who's revealing the real truth about American history. Why isn't the left honest enough to see the plagiarism, the ellipses, the leaving out of facts from history? Why aren't they willing, I guess, to say, to point those things out? Mary Graybar will answer that question after this second break of the day on the Christian worldview. I'm sure you're beginning to understand why this nation has become so divided when you distort American history.
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Your email and mailing address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time. Call 1-888-646-2233 or visit thechristianworldview.org. Hope you are gaining from this interview today with Mary Graybar, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn. Before we get back to her on Memorial Day weekend, I just want to encourage you to go to our website thechristianworldview.org. Be sure to subscribe to our free weekly email. That's a great way to stay connected with the ministry of the Christian worldview.
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You can also support the ministry where our listeners support a ministry and we very much appreciate your support. Again, our topic today is Howard Zinn lied, American history died. Mary Graybar has written an excellent book entitled Debunking Howard Zinn, exposing the fake history that turned a generation against America and that is exactly what has taken place.
Let's get back to the rest of the interview with Mary Graybar. Why isn't the left honest enough to see the plagiarism, the ellipses, the leaving out of facts from history? Why aren't they willing, I guess, to say to point those things out? That's an interesting question. It indicates to me that they know he's lying and they don't care.
The agenda motivates what they put in schools. I've had a number of reviews and articles of my book, but other than some trolls on the Amazon site or in social media who say that I provide no research and that I'm just a right wing nut case, no one has come forward and said, I've gotten this and this wrong and Howard Zinn is right. They can't do that. No one has. As obvious as day that he has plagiarized, you can't deny that. In the least, he is an illegitimate historian. What he did in terms of plagiarism and twisting words around would have gotten any of my college freshmen kicked out of college. Anyone who's taken a college course and taken a writing course knows that on the syllabus there are the rules about plagiarism. You get a warning or you get kicked out.
You know it's a serious offense. Mary Graybar with us today on the Christian worldview, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn, Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America. We have the book linked on our website, thechristianrealview.org. You talk about in chapter five on casting a pall on the finest hour, you say Howard Zinn has made dishonest use of the discovery of America, slavery, and the Civil War to indict America and promote communist revolution. But in his treatment of World War II, he hits a new low through a series of four long leading questions about, quote, imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, and militarism. Zinn insinuates that the enemy of an unspeakable evil, Hitler's Germany, was no worse than the United States and her allies. Imperial Japan, too, was a victim of American aggression. I think most reasonable Americans would try to swallow that, that America was no worse than Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany as being, that's way, way, that's crazy talk. But yet that's what Howard Zinn writes about.
Tell us about that. He lists American incursions, you know, the idea of manifest destiny. And so he makes this simplistic equivalence between, you know, well, you know, Germany wanted to take over Europe and it invaded Czechoslovakia. And well, I'll look at what the US did in Haiti and in, you know, the Philippines.
And how can we claim to be any better? And look at, of course, what we did to the Indians. And you've got segregation in the United States still during World War II.
And hey, isn't that, you know, just like how the Nazis treated the Jews? And so he makes these equivalences. And one of the ways he does that is he discusses the interment of the Japanese Americans. He really distorts that. And actually, I've just had a conversation with a college professor, and students do believe this, that there really isn't a distinction between the Nazis or the Japanese and the Americans.
Howard Zinn, this is part of the research I did, pretty simple to do. But he makes this claim that US government shuttled off these Japanese Americans to these hidden concentration camps deep into the interior. And no one really knew about it. The public didn't know about it until after the war, until September 1945, when there was an article in Harper's Magazine. Well, I went to the library, and I went into the stacks of periodicals and went through some Harper's Magazines. And there in September 1942, not 45, there was an article about 10 pages long by a reporter who had visited one of these camps, I think the first one, and he had visited in June.
The order was given in February. But the way he described it was, yeah, sure, it wasn't home, but the facilities were clean. The food was good. There was plenty of it. There was a VFW branch.
Kids played baseball. There were gardens. So Zinn insinuates that these were concentration camps, and that this was hidden. And of course, if you just go through any newspaper like the New York Times, you'll see that there were articles on a daily basis written about that. Milton Eisenhower narrated a short film about this and showed the camps. It was in no way a secret. And then I also talked to a Japanese American colleague that I have whose family was interned, and he described what it was like. So there's this huge exaggeration.
And of course, we can disagree about whether that was the right move, but by no stretch of the imagination was that equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps. Our guest today is Mary Graybar, the author of Debunking Howard Zinn. The book is linked at our website, thechristianrealview.org.
We're not going to have time to get into Howard Zinn's twisting of civil rights in this country. The struggle for communism is what he's after. His perspective on Vietnam, he was cheering for the North Vietnamese to defeat the Americans, or his take on the American Revolution. We'll have to let readers read the book for themselves.
Your book, not his book. How do you see this country with the depth of his influence in this country? What's taught in public schools or just the cultural conversation that takes place today? The political discourse, Bernie Sanders, you hear this worldview of the influence of people like Howard Zinn. How do you see the country ever thriving again after Zinn's influence? How can a country who loathes itself and its founding and is critical of its founders as racists and imperialists, how can that kind of country ever succeed again?
It's very hard to do that. As you mentioned, we see his influence and his way of thinking being played out in our politics. Back when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others were claiming that there were concentration camps at the border, that goes back to Howard Zinn. You have the left saying we should not even have any borders, eliminate borders. I think Bernie Sanders even says that. You have this idea that today the economy should just shut down and everyone should just be given a living wage. Let's end capitalism once and for all.
This is a great opportunity. I see a couple glimmers of hope. I'm hoping that parents have been forced to homeschool their kids. They're seeing what's in their kids' curriculum and maybe stepping back and evaluating that. Also, we're seeing the lies of Howard Zinn in terms of the virus. What we're experiencing now is a direct result of communism, of a communist regime that, like all communist regimes, does not value human life and where rights aren't considered to come from God but from the state.
The state can do whatever it wants. China has been harvesting organs from prisoners and dissidents. There are re-education camps and work camps and there's constant spying.
Neighbors and friends are encouraged to report on each other. Of course, the government hid what was happening with this virus, so the result is death. There is always death that comes from communism.
If you go through history, it repeats itself. I saw a survey that said that two-thirds of Americans attribute the coronavirus or the Chinese Communist Party virus to communist China. They fault China for it.
Someone said, well, that's not very good, only two-thirds. But I'm hoping people will wake up to really how bad communism is. They need to remember that Howard Zinn's ultimate goal with his book and everything he wrote and did was to overthrow the American government and institute a communist regime in its place. That's very clear from reading your book and every issue he takes.
It's about the quote unquote struggle for revolution and you hear the same sorts of phraseology being used today. Final question for you, Mary. You mentioned way back earlier in the interview about his personal life. Give us a snapshot on what you found out about him personally. Was he married? Did he have children? What was his personal life like?
That will be very interesting. Hope you stay tuned for that and then some summary comments as we enter our last segment of the day here on The Christian Real View. I'm David Wheaton. David Wheaton here to tell you about my boy, Ben, a story of love, loss and grace. Ben was a yellow lab and inseparable companion at a stage of my life when I was single and competing on the professional tennis tour. I invite you to enter into the story and its tapestry of relationships with Ben, my aging parents, with a childhood friend I would finally marry, and ultimately with God who caused all things, even the hard things, to work together for good. Order the book for your friend who needs to hear about God's grace in the Gospel, or the one who has gone through a difficult trial or loss, or just a dog lover in your life. Signed and personalized copies are only available at myboyben.com or by calling 1-888-646-2233.
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Am I right with him? We encourage you to order Ray Comfort's 20-page booklet, How to be Free from the Fear of Death, which explains how one can have peace with God and a confident hope for this life and the next through the good news of the Gospel. If you have never contacted The Christian Worldview, request the booklet How to be Free from the Fear of Death for free by calling us at 1-888-646-2233.
For everyone else, you can order as many as you'd like for 50 cents per booklet, perfect for sharing with others. To order, go to thechristianworldview.org or call 1-888-646-2233. That's thechristianworldview.org. Just a reminder that there's many ways you can hear the program. Again, if you didn't hear the full interview today with Mary Graybar about Howard Zinn, you can go to our website, of course, thechristianworldview.org. You can sign up for our free podcast at iTunes or Google Play.
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So lots of ways to hear The Christian Worldview that we try to provide. We have a very short segment here with Mary Graybar, and then we'll get into some follow-up comments on the interview today. Final question for you, Mary. Just you mentioned way back earlier in the interview about his personal life. Give us a snapshot on what you found out about him personally. Was he married? Did he have children? What was his personal life like? He was married and he had two children, but he was a notorious womanizer. There are two biographies of him written by his admirers. One of them really doesn't see anything morally wrong with what he did and goes into some detail.
I quote him. He goes into how Zin confided in his daughter when she was 25 that he was in love with a woman that wasn't her mother and how this kind of shattered her and decided ultimately to stay with his wife, but he continued to have flings. That was his reputation. He was not a nice man. He was not good to his wife. He was not a good family man. Given that he had the communist worldview, it's not surprising.
It kind of goes hand in hand. We appreciate your coming on the Christian worldview radio program and also for your contribution here to correct what has become a pervasive worldview in America of how bad this country is, how bad our founders are, and how everything we've done has been out of greed and racism and sexism and homophobia and everything else. We thank you for this book you've written, Debunking Howard Zinn.
We just wish all the best to you. Thank you. That was Mary Graybar, everyone, with her book Debunking Howard Zinn. She said in her last answer, his personal life was indicative, was part of who this man was. He was a wicked man. He's had a very, very negative impact on our society and I'm not sure it's going to go back from this.
When this lie begins to be propagated, it's very difficult to make the U-turn on it because it gets spread and spread and spread and it appeals to people's fallen nature. Just like Howard Zinn's personal life was ungodly and against God's will, so was his professional life as well to try to undermine the things that this country has actually brought to this world. We did a program, some of you who've listened to the program for a long time may remember a show we did about five years ago or so on who has been America's great depraver. We chose David Geffen. He was a great rock music producer, the movie director and producer. He's been a great advocate for homosexuality and leftist politics and so forth.
He's a billionaire, I believe, and so we chose him. If he was the great depraver of America, Howard Zinn is the great deconstructor of America. He's taken American history, cherry-picked the parts that were not good and emphasized those to make our country seem like the most horrible, wicked country in the world that Americans should not be patriotic about. We should loathe ourselves. We should not defend our values. Matter of fact, there's a better system out there and it's called communism and socialism that we should transition to where we can finally achieve this idealistic, utopian notion of how society really can be run.
So just let this sink in for a minute. The most influential American historian who's told us what America's history is about for the last at least 40 years, whose false fake perspective on American history has influenced every sector of society, whether it's schools, whether it's professors teaching at colleges, which your kids go to, whether it's the media, what they're writing in their articles and so forth, politicians, what they're pushing for in the halls of federal and state political halls, he was a communist bent on fundamentally transforming the United States of America to a socialist utopia or a Marxist system. And this is really the battle. The battle is between, from a standpoint of just on an earthly level, the battle is between communism and constitutional liberties, individual liberties. The constitutional republic of America is the antithesis, the opposite of communism. Constitutional republic focuses on individual liberties, so freedoms of religion and speech, freedom to assemble, the press, the second amendment, freedom to defend yourself, unlimited government, yes government, but limited government, the separation of powers, free market economics. And the reason that those things are focused on is because of a Christian worldview, because a Christian worldview understands the fallen nature of man and that when man accumulates power because of his fallen nature, he's going to abuse it and become more totalitarian.
So our founders had a semblance, pretty strong semblance of a Christian worldview and understood this about the nature of man. So they try to have individual liberties, not communitarian liberties, not communitarian power, limited government rather than big government, a separation of powers rather than a consolidation of powers, which is exactly what communism is. It's dictatorial government, it's socialism, it's communitarianism, it's totalitarian, it's repressive, it's repressive. And it's always amazing to me to see the number, the amount of oppression, the number of deaths that occur under these types of governments, but those are completely ignored by people like Howard Zinn. He'll focus on the few bad things that some of the founders or some of the history of America, of course, of course, there's bad things that people are fallen and sinful, but in this realm, it's a comparative realm.
Compare what this country has contributed to the world and to individuals versus what communist Marxist country has done. Now, the problem is Zinn's perspective has been imbibed, swallowed as to make drunk. That's the dictionary definition.
A nation that sees its own founding as illegitimate and it's now its subsequent history after its founding as racist and unjust is a people who don't think its countries and values are worth defending or exporting. And it really goes back to the power of the lie and the tragedy of believing the lie. We see this in scripture from the very beginning, Satan's tactic from the very beginning, twist God's word into a lie.
And there were eternal consequences of that. If you believe a lie about from a spiritual standpoint, about who God is, what he expects, about specifically what the gospel is, is it done by our works? There's a lie. Then you're going to believe a lie. You're going to go the wrong way in life and your eternity is going to be affected. And this is why I think God inspired Moses to record the history of God's work in the early part of history, because when lies are believed, everything falls apart.
So we can talk about America and the lies about America that Howard Zinn wrote about. But the even more important lie to not believe is any lies about God and his word and how to be right with him. For by grace, you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves.
It is a gift of God, not as a result of works that no one would boast. That's one of the biggest lies about how to be right with God that is out there today. Believe the truth is by faith through grace. Thank you so much for joining us this Memorial weekend on the Christian Real View.
And until next time, think biblically and live accordingly. We hope today's broadcast turned your heart toward God, his word and his son. To order a CD copy of today's program or sign up for our free weekly email or to find out how you can be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, go to our website, the Christian worldview dot org, or call us toll free at one triple eight six four six twenty two thirty three. The Christian worldview is a weekly one hour radio program that is furnished by the Overcomer Foundation and is supported by listeners and sponsors. Request one of our current resources with your donation of any amount. Go to the Christian worldview dot org or call us toll free at one triple eight six four six twenty two thirty three or write to us at Box four zero one Excelsior, Minnesota, five five three three one. That's Box four zero one Excelsior, Minnesota, five five three three one. Thanks for listening to the Christian worldview. Until next time, think biblically and live accordingly.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-03-23 05:48:45 / 2024-03-23 06:06:19 / 18