Slaves Built This Country

The following program is recorded content created by SteveNobleShow.com and now here's your host, Steve Noble. Thank you for listening. Unpacked, okay, there's a lot there to talk about that I really want to walk you through. I'm going through this all week with all my students and my classes that I teach because it's such a teachable moment. And so we're going to do that. I'll play the video for you at the beginning of the next segment and then we'll spend the rest of the show unpacking that. But in the first segment, a couple of things I wanted to talk about.

Three, exactly. Biden, Joe Biden tonight, the State of the Union address, 9 p.m. Eastern Time, which is a little past his bedtime. So odds are he'll be all jacked up on something. But tonight you'll hear him paint the picture of a country that doesn't sound too familiar to you, especially if you're paying attention at all to the prices that you pay at the grocery store or in the gas tank or for any number of other things. And so Joe Biden is going to talk about how terrible things were when he came in as the president because, you know, inflation was at one point three percent. And then right now we're at six point five percent and got over eight percent last year.

And so he's going to he's going to basically try to manipulate all of us and anybody that's silly enough not to understand into thinking the country is one thing when it's actually another. And like Pete Buttigieg said the other day, that there's been so many accomplishments out of this administration in its first two years that it's really hard to succinctly list them all. So basically, we're at a three alarm fire now versus a four alarm fire six months ago. And so they're going to make it sound like the three alarm fire, which is still bad and terrible relative to what things were like when Biden came in, is all rosy.

And boy, we're going in the right direction, which completely disregards the amount of financial suffering that people are dealing with today. Of course, he'll talk about the southern border is under control. It's just going to be one falsehood after another.

And we'll see how many gaffes we get out of it. But that's tonight. If you the only reason I know some of my students are going to watch it is because I'm offering them extra credit.

And it'll be one of the few reasons that I watch it so that I can properly grade their extra credit papers. So that's tonight. That should be amusing. I'm pretty sure he'll he'll congratulate our brave men and women in the military who shot down the spy balloon on Saturday after it crossed good old North Carolina down over Charlotte.

And I had friends that were posting pictures of it. And of course, they talked about now that it was that happened three times under Trump when it for a short period of time, the Chinese spy balloons back then dipped down into American territory. OK, so it's going to be like Alaska.

It's not going to be what just happened, which Biden knew about. It was an eight day span from when they knew it was coming over. You can actually see the track online and go look it up, launched from within mainland China. Then it made its way of kind of polar ice cap and then over over Alaska and then into Canada and then down. And it made its way through America, taking us a good old time. And then they finally shot it down, punctured it really with a missile from an F-22, which they could have done obviously in flyover country, big sky country.

There's a reason we call it that. And so but tonight he'll probably just congratulate our brave men and women because it took a lot of bravery to do that. And but at least they got it done. But eight days too late. So you're not going to hear literally anything that's accurate tonight. It'll be Biden at all's version of reality, which is not real at all.

But that's tonight. Then the China thing is a joke. And of course, China is just pushing back and Biden and them could just sweep it under the rug and move along as quickly as possible. But it did lollygag its way from from the northern part of the country all the way through North Carolina, then off the coast of North and South Carolina. And now they're recovering parts of it.

But inexcusable and disgusting and just shows you how inept this administration is. But again, tonight he'll probably just thank the brave pilot and the military people that took it down, even though it was eight days too late. And then Grammys. OK, so a lot of people are talking about the Grammys and specifically this guy. And I know I just offended some people calling him a guy, Sam Smith, who I guess is non-binary. So he claims neither male nor female. He does a song called What's it called?

I don't even know what it's called. It's something demonic. And he's wearing a red outfit. He's a very strange, messed up, lost dude with horns coming out of there. And all these women, some of them are in like robes and there's a cage and there's fire and it's all red.

All right. So it's obviously deeply demonic. And people are going ballistic about it. And I'm like, what? Do you go ballistic if you grab a lemon and squeeze it and out comes lemon juice? Do you throw the lemon across the room and step on the ground and start screaming about how how satanic it is in this?

No, I mean, these people are deeply lost. I was telling one of my classes earlier today, this is right out of Romans. They suppress the truth.

They replace it with a lie. God is the 800 pound gorilla in the room and everybody knows he exists. Romans 1 also will tell you that there's no such thing as an atheist because God's made it plain. His existence is plain.

So everybody knows he's there. And then through your sin, you have to decide what to do with them. So you saw at the Grammys what they do with them. They're all celebrating that. The Grammys is all about diversity, equity and inclusion. What the Grammys is all about is the middle finger to the God of the Bible, because that's how lost and dark they've become.

And why do they do that? Well, they're gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Listen, verse 32, Romans chapter one, though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die. That's just basically reminding all of us. Everybody's got a conscience. Everybody knows there's the law that's written on their heart, which shows up in your conscience. OK, Paul talks about that in Romans. They not only do them meaning themselves, but here we are.

Give approval to those who practice them. So the reprobate mind, they get together and they perform their reprobate acts and then they applaud. So what you saw at the Grammys makes as much sense as lemon juice coming out of a lemon when you squeeze it. These are deeply lost, dark people. They have reprobate minds. They're a child of the devil. And so he just plays with them.

And then you get to watch it if you choose to watch the Grammys. Don't be surprised by that. Just pray for these people.

They're that lost. All right. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show, thestevenobleshow.com. You can check that out there at the podcast. As always, if you missed the show or four to five p.m. Eastern Time Live doesn't work for your schedule.

That's fine. You can get the podcast pretty much anywhere. All the major podcast platforms were there. Just look up the Steve Noble Show. You can join us right here in the studio. You can do that with Facebook Live or on Rumble. We're live on both places right now.

But it's great to have you here. And those are some things you can check out over the next couple of weeks. I'll start talking to you more about the classes that I teach for high school aged homeschoolers, as well as we're starting to get some students that are not homeschooled. They're in public school. They're in private school because you just can't get this kind of good teaching in most places that also inculcate the whole thing with a really strong biblical worldview and a gospel narrative all to boot.

You really got a lot going on there. So that's noble use school dot com is the Web site. Noble you like the letter you noble use school dot com. And we've got everything just about updated there for the new school year, which we're starting now to register people and to get that set up for the fall U.S. history, adding world history, civics and Christian ethics, which is one of the reasons why I want to talk about what I am for the rest of the show. So on Disney Plus, there's a show called The Proud Family. It's a reboot from a show that was out 15 or 20 years ago. In a recent episode, they have a bunch of whether they're like middle school, maybe something like that.

Middle school, sixth, seventh, eighth grade or something like that. Put on this little it looks like it's talent contest. And they do this little kind of spoken word music thing all about the notion that slaves built this country. Okay. And then it's been splashed all over the place.

It's like the 1619 projects. There's a lot to unpack here. But Josh, are we ready? Because I want to play this for you on radio. You'll hear it. Listen carefully.

And if you're on Facebook or rumble, you'll see it. But this is from Proud Family. Slaves built America.

Let's go. This country was built on slavery, which means slaves built this country till this land from sea to sea to sea. First, it was rice, tobacco, sugar cane.

Making as loud as you can. And we were soldiers, 4 million strong, fighting for America's freedoms, even though we remained America's slaves. This country, the descendants of slaves, continue to build it. Slaves built this country. And we, the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering and continue to earn reparations.

Every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has a lot of tone for. Slaves built this country. Not only field hands, but carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, musicians, inventors, built cities from Jamestown to New Orleans to Bannacombe, Washington, 40 acres and a mule.

We'll take the 40 acres, keep the mill. We made your families rich. From the southern plantation heirs to the northern rancors to the New England ship owners, the founding fathers, former presidents, current senators, the Illuminati, the New World Order. Slaves built this country. We had Tubman, Bill Turner, Frederick D. Then they say Lincoln freed the slaves. But slaves were men and women and only we can free ourselves. Emancipation is not freedom.

Jim Crow segregation, redlining public schools, feeding private prisons where we become slaves again. As we celebrate Juneteenth for the umpteenth time, our account is still outstanding because this country was built on slavery, which means slaves built this country and we demand our 40 acres and a mule. Okay, awesome, right?

That was awesome. Slaves built this country. Okay, so let's just back this up. There's so much going on here. I want to talk from kind of a 30,000 foot level.

Then I want to get down. Eventually I want to talk about the economic impact on the entire nation from the institution of slavery in the south. Okay, so there's so much going on here, but one of the most dangerous things and this goes right along with critical race theory. This is the 1619 project and what is happening is stuff like this, garbage like this, is re-segregating the country in terms of emotions and reactions and manipulation. So the problem is, if you're an eight or nine or ten year old white kid, six year old, seven year old, eight year old white kid watching this, you don't know any better.

You've never been taught US history. Okay, you don't know anything, but it's a cartoon. They're emphatic. They're confident. And how, what do you think the designers of this want that eight year old white kid to think about himself, about his quote unquote people and about his country?

Right? The whole thing is rotten to the core. That all the things we see, the fact that I've got a camera in front of me and multiple screens in here and lights and a MacBook Pro in front of me and an Apple phone right here and iPhone 13 right there. The fact that I have all that is because of slavery. Slavery built the country, built the wealth of the country and you're a white person and so everything you have goes back to the institution of slavery. So it's all tainted. It's all blood money. And that makes America bad and by extension it makes you bad because you're white.

So your people took advantage of those people to give you everything that you have today. Now, if that's not a poison pill, I don't know what is. So that's on the white side. What does it do to a little black girl or boy?

Six, seven, eight year old, nine year old, little black girl or boy. What message is it sending them? Is it, is there, did you hear the word reconciliation anywhere? No.

Did you hear the word forgiveness? No, that's never a part of this. There's no gospel angle on any of this stuff ever.

Never. OK, it's just not there. No reconciliation, no forgiveness, no seeking peace, nothing. There's no gospel. What there is, which you're supposed to lead to the Lord, is vengeance.

There's a whole lot of that. I'm mad. White Europeans, white Americans did this to my people. Then you got rich off of us. You mistreated us. You beat us. You raped us.

You did this. And not only back then, but still today you're doing the same exact thing. We're still enslaved. And so for a young little black girl or boy, boy, that that's fomenting some pretty serious hatred and distaste for my white neighbors.

And I'm owed something. You got some entitlement going on there and a massive distaste for the country in general. So if the whole country is shot through like that, there's blood, there's black slave blood on everything.

Then the only answer, ultimately, the only redemption is to kill it and start over, which is largely what a lot of these people want to do. The people behind the 1619 Project, there's just so much about America that they just want to do away with it. And then you get the Marxists and the anarchists in there and it's just red meat all over the place. But it's really teaching little white boys and girls to hate the country, recognize it for what it is. Slavery built all this.

Slavery is obviously an immoral, evil institution. And you've benefited from it and you owe us. And there's that the whole reparations thing in there for what's been done then, what's been done now.

Every black person is owed reparations from the country and from white people. They don't expressly say it. But it's strongly implied, strongly implied. OK, so that's that's this major socially destructive angle from this stuff. And this stuff never includes any kind of reconciliation, forgiveness, trying to see people through God's eyes as opposed to our eyes or our geopolitical eyes.

That's never in there. There's no gospel angle whatsoever. There's entitlement and pride. And vengeance. And if you're a Christian, vengeance is the Lord's, it's not yours.

OK, but the dangerous thing also about this from the right, from a political right perspective. Is I would encourage you, especially in this culture today in 2023, you don't just throw the baby out with the bathwater, you don't just chuck the whole thing as CRT garbage indoctrination and throw it out because there's some things we're going to talk about with respect to slavery in the history of black people in this country that you need to deal with and you need to be honest about, truthful about, especially if you call yourself a Christian. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. We'll pick it up there.

Welcome back at Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show. This is definitely not Saturday in the park. We're talking about slaves built this nation.

This was this little video for kids that was on Disney Plus. And lest you think that's an isolated thing, this is pretty much the same teaching that the 1619 Project, which started with the New York Times and but has spread into a curriculum in many schools around the country and is now a Hulu documentary series that was produced by Harpo, which is Oprah Winfrey. Okay, which basically is the narrative here is that slavery built the nation. All the wealth of America came out of the soil of slavery.

And so that being true, America, in her essence, is covered with the blood of dead slaves, therefore tainting everything that America is, everything America has, everything America has done because it all comes out of that tainted soil. That's the basic premise. Okay. And this is like so I mentioned the question, is America a Christian nation? There's no you don't answer that.

Yes or no? You have to define what are you even talking about? What do you mean by that?

You're going to ask me what is America a Christian nation? I'm going to ask you to define for me your question. I don't even know what your question means.

What are you after here? So once we clearly define the question, then I can help you with your answer. And even then my answer is not going to be yes or no. Did slavery build the country? The answer is not yes or no.

It's not no. You can't say that slavery didn't have a significant impact on this country. Because it did, especially in the south, and then the economy of the south did have an impact on the economy of the north.

So it's not zero. But conversely, it's not all of it. Because there's a whole lot of things that have happened in this country that had nothing to do with slaves. I can show you story after story after story of different settlers that came over here, didn't own slaves couldn't afford slaves had nothing to do with slaves. When they moved out and they found a piece of land, they were way more concerned with their interactions with native people, the American Indians than they were with slavery in the south, they couldn't afford slaves anyway. So when they find a little piece of land, and they cut down trees, they cut down the trees, when they turn those trees into lumber to build a basically a cabin, they did that when they assembled the cabin, they did that when they cleared the field in order to plant some food in order to feed themselves, they did that when they went hunting, they did that, not a slave. And they came over here with their own re and you don't have a you don't need a lot of money to go out there, you need to buy a few goods in the first place, which those goods already existed around the world.

And there were people coming over here and selling goods to settlers who needed to be able to go out and hew a tree down and turn it into lumber and make it into a cabin. Okay, so there are a lot of things where slavery was not involved at all. But there were other things where slavery was it drove that economic engine in the south. At first, it wasn't cotton, by the way, we didn't become a major cotton producer till after the Constitution was ratified.

That's 1991. So up until that cotton wasn't the big player tobacco was and then tobacco as we got our independence to back our tobacco business starts to tank because the British don't want to do as much business with us on the tobacco. And then this should sound familiar to you, the international markets started to play but at one point get this the south did produce somewhere between 60 and 80% of the world's cotton.

60 and 80% of the world's cotton produced in the south. That's staggering. That's amazing. Okay. And so you sit there and you look at that and go, wow, well, that's huge, man that had to have a huge impact on the country, right?

Well, you would think so. But you're thinking anecdotally because you don't actually know any numbers. You don't know what the numbers are. So if we look back at this, here's an article I'm using from the American Institute for Economic Research. It was Cornell University historian Ed Baptist 2014 book, The Half Has Never Been Told and a key passage in the book Baptist purports to add up the total value of economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at 77 million made up about 5% of the estimated gross domestic product of the United States in 1836. 1836, not before that, like I said, we had no cotton production to mention prior to 1791 when the Constitution is ratified.

Okay, so before that, there was slavery and it was dealing mostly with tobacco, but not cotton, not the big mega engine that cotton would become. So that was 5% of the estimated GDP in 1836. Baptist then commits a fundamental accounting error. Okay, why did he do that?

Most likely because he wanted to. Because when you use it and you look at it, honestly, it's 77 million, which is about 5% of GDP. But he does it makes a fundamental accounting error.

Unfortunately, he probably did it on purpose. He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions involved in cotton production, things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance and credit instruments used in each of those. Eventually that 77 million, the actual cotton production became 600 million in his accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States. Now all of a sudden it's 50% of the GDP.

And then he would go like, Oh, yeah, that slavery is touching everything at that point. But the crucial problem was his approach was his calculation of GDP, gross domestic product, formulation of national accounts and a representation of the dollar amount of economic activity in a country in a given year, that's GDP only incorporates the value of final goods and services produced. The rationale for doing so comes from accounting facts, okay, not agenda, just accounting, as the price of the final good already incorporates intermediate transactions that go into its production and distribution. Baptist numbers are not only wrong, they reflect a basic unfamiliarity with the meaning and definition of GDP gross domestic product. Okay, so, and going back 40, 50, 60, 80 years, you'll find some academic papers and books that would claim that slavery accounted for 50, 60, 70% of America's GDP.

It never did, not once. But at 5%, it's significant, right? At 5% of GDP, it's significant. And there's a lot of ancillary things that come off of there, how that impacts things. So if plantation owners and the people making money off the cotton industry are investing that money in other places, investing some of their profits in other places, you can trace that, okay?

You need to think about this like a family tree. And you can trace some of that economic impact of slavery goes here, and it goes there, and it does a little of this, and it does a little investment here, and a little investment there. And so that's why I'll sit there and say, yes, slavery had a significant impact on the economic well-being of this country, and getting the country from 1800 to 1900.

It did play a role, but it wasn't the only player. But for the 1619 Project with the people at Disney+, they want you to believe that slavery built this country, like 100%. And that's demonstrably false. But they're not interested in proper economic data. They're not interested in proper accounting. As I've said this so many times over the last five years on this show, ideology trumps reality. It does not matter, especially when reality doesn't work for you, which you're going to see tonight in the President's State of the Union address. It's all about ideology. It's not about the truth.

You just pick your script, and you keep saying it over and over again. You just tell the lie, make it big, keep saying it. And sooner or later, the amount of ignorant people only increases, and so it's easier to sell that. So now you've got all kinds of people in this country believing the entire financial well-being of the country in 2023 all came out of the soil of slavery, all of it.

And that's not true, and it's demonstrably false. So when you go into these conversations, and this is what I was talking to my students about, it's partially true when you listen to this. Like they mentioned Eli Whitney in that video, and I'll play that for you again just to stick it in your brain in the beginning of the last segment. I'll play it for you again, but they talk about Eli Whitney and make him out to be the bad guy because of the cotton gin. The cotton gin increased cotton production like 10 times over. If you actually study history and study Eli Whitney, Eli Whitney was hoping that the invention of the cotton gin would actually decrease the need for slaves by increasing productivity. You'll need less slaves.

That's what he was hoping. But of course human depravity gets factored in, and it didn't decrease the need for slaves, it increased the size of the engine. And so southern plantation owners needed even more slaves. How heartbreaking would that be for Eli Whitney, the cotton gin, thinking, oh man, I think this is going to help eliminate slavery.

And the country was moving in that direction by this point. But imagine being him. I mean, this just breaks my heart when I first started studying this to get ready for the US history class that I teach. And I didn't know that about Eli Whitney.

And I'm like, oh man, could you imagine? Thank you, Lord, look at this invention I'm coming up with. It's going to help decrease the need for slaves, the market for slaves, and it ends up increasing it 10 times over.

But they look at Eli Whitney like that's what he was trying to do. It isn't. False and demonstrably so. And then talking about all these other industries were built from slavery. Well, there was some seed money from the slave trade in terms of its impact on production in the south that went into the northern economy. But that wasn't the only thing that was in the northern economy. And the actual, the actual creation, railroad, industrial centers, meatpacking plants, all that kind of stuff, especially when you push out of the 1800s into the 1900s.

That stuff is by individuals who created their own wealth up in the north, aside from slavery, and built industries that had no slaves involved whatsoever. OK, so that's why you have to understand this, which is why I'm trying to teach my students in my classes how to do this. And from a kingdom gospel perspective, how do you get into these conversations with people that are convinced, especially if you're white like me, that you're the problem, you're evil, you can't see it, you're so blind because of your racism? Well, you have to go to facts and undeniable facts, but there's a way to get through that.

There's a way to be effective. We're going to talk about that when we come back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show.

Slaves built this country. All right, I want to go back and replay this for you. If you missed it earlier, you want to get that ready, Josh. So this was on Disney Plus, The Proud Family. This was just on a recent episode. These kids is like four or five of them. They look like they're in middle school. Maybe it's a cartoon. And then they do this kind of spoken word music, a little music in the background talking about the relationship between slavery and the United States of America back then and today.

OK, so they're painting with a very broad brush, paints the entire history of America starting in 1619 in Jamestown. OK, so let's replay this. You ready? All right, let's go and turn it up nice and high as high as you can. What's that?

All right. This country was built nice and loud. Slaves built this country. Tilled this land from sea to sea first. It was rice, tobacco, sugarcane.

Wirecast sliding. And we were its soldiers. Four million strong. Fighting for America's freedoms even though we remained America's slaves. Built this country. The descendants of slaves. Slaves built this country. And we, the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for. Slaves built this country. Not only field hands but carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, musicians, inventors built cities from Jamestown to New Orleans to Bannacos, Washington, Forty Acres and a Mule.

We'll take the Forty Acres, keep the Mule. We made your families rich. From the southern plantation heirs to the northern bankers to the New England ship owners, the founding fathers, former presidents, current senators, the Illuminati, the New World Order. Slaves built this country.

We had Tubman, Turner, Frederick B. Then they say Lincoln freed the slaves. But slaves were men.

And women. And only we can free ourselves. Emancipation is not freedom. Jim Crow segregation, redlining public schools, feeding private prisons where we become slaves again. As we celebrate Juneteenth for the umpteenth time.

Our account is still outstanding. Cause this country was built with slavery, which means slaves built this country. And we demand our Forty Acres and a Mule. You can keep the Mule.

Keep the Forty. We're taking our freedom. OK, there you go.

So we made your families rich. By the way, in this cartoon, there's one white girl, this tall white girl. Doesn't say a word. She just holds a sign.

So she's trying to make up for her white privilege and her white guilt. Right. So you've got this. And that's out there on Disney Plus. That's on a show that's that's driven towards kids.

All right. Probably, I'd say, eight to 12 year olds. Although you have a lot older kids watching it. Proud family. And that and that gets passed off just as fact. That's just fact. Slaves built this country. And we made you rich.

And we still this still hasn't been atoned for. And there's a comment in there about the Illuminati and the New World Order, but they put their hands over the kids mouth because they like you're going off the rails, dude. Stick to the topic. So that they weren't actually trying to incorporate that.

That's why they covered up his mouth. If you see the video. And by the way, I shared this on my Facebook page over the weekend. So you can go look it up for yourself. But it comes back to this notion that if it weren't for slavery, America doesn't exist. The only reason America is the powerful nation that she is, the only reason we've experienced all the success that we've experienced in the last several hundred years is because of slavery, which is partly true. So an engagement with my students this week, I'm telling them, OK, let's look at the facts. What have you learned about U.S. history so far relative to what's being presented here? Can you bring some facts to bear to push back on the notion that slavery built the entire nation? All of it?

Yeah. And then, OK, now we're thinking through that and there's plenty of things that went on in this nation that did not involve slavery, didn't involve any money coming out of the slave trade or the industries that benefited from slavery, which was rice at first and tobacco. Then that was dying. By the time we got out of the Revolutionary War, we didn't even have any significant cotton production until after the Constitution was ratified in 1791. You get to 1850. And at that point, the cotton production is massive. I mean, we got up to about 60, 70, 80 percent of the world's cotton was being produced by the South.

That is huge, but it didn't last for very long. Then we started to deal with cotton coming in from get this India. So now you got international trade. OK, then that started to break the back of the cotton industry, which is why a lot of people thought slavery is on its way out, man. The only place that they're really using slaves now is for cotton production. Did we bring Wirecast down a little is for cotton production. OK. And then once the Civil War is over, the South gets decimated.

Their economy's toast. And actually, you can find other economic studies that will show you the overall impact of the then now freedmen, freed black slaves increased greatly once they were freed. Which shows you that ultimately slavery is a bad economic engine.

But it did have an impact. You have to concede that when you're having this conversation with your college student, with your grandson, your granddaughter, whatever, and they want to take the position that slavery built the entire country, then you just have to ask some questions. Are you telling me that every industry, every every every everything that was built in this country, industrial wise, every every industry, every business, every house, every street, every railroad, it was all built by slaves? Well, no, I didn't mean that. OK, then what do you mean? I just mean that all the financial wherewithal that came out of the slave industry built that that all provided the seed money. Really? How do you know that?

Have you ever studied? Have you ever looked that up? Did you ever see where was the money spent by the plantation owners that made money off the cotton industry? Where did they spend their money? And by the way, the closer we got to the Civil War, how much of their money do you think they were sending off to northern business interests? There was a massive division in this country for 20, 30 years before that. So there's plenty of things that happened in this country that didn't involve slavery at all, didn't benefit from slavery at all.

They were just other people making a life for themselves because they had the opportunity to. So you cannot tie every advance in American history to slavery. You can tie some of it in a significant portion. I'm totally with you. I'm just trying to be accurate. I'm just trying to tell the truth.

You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I'm not trying to denigrate in any way, shape or form the moral evil that was slavery and racism. That's real. That's alive today. Now, when I did the call in show not that long ago and we had some several African-American callers calling the older they are, the more they would say, hey, it's way better today than it was when I was younger.

And praise God for that. Has it been eliminated? Of course not. Are there some things in the system that are inherently racist? I think you can make that case here and there. Redlining happened.

White flight happened. This is so nuanced. There's so many pieces.

It's like one diamond that's got all these different facets. OK. And you have to, especially when you're talking to a culture and maybe your own children or grandchildren that are so hell bent on hating the country and believing that everything has the blood of slavery on it. You have to. It's very effective and helpful to be able to agree with them in some places if it's true. Was slavery a heinous evil?

Yes. And that might not be the best place if you can get an agreement there to ask them about abortion. Sooner or later, I'll get to that. But not then. This is where you have to and this is what I'm trying to teach my students. And you and myself. Is how to be wisest serpents and gentle as doves.

Wisest serpents and gentle as doves. Because you got to know stuff. You have to be educated. If you're going to wade into these conversations, you got to know something about American history. You got to know something about how big was the slave trade? How big was the the cotton industry?

What happened there? But you're going to have to know other stories of American history as well that didn't involve slavery. And then again, it's not all one way or all the other. So you can't play it completely from the right. You can't play it obviously completely from the left. So I teach my students all the time.

You know how you play it. You walk into all these conversations with the broad sword of truth. Because if you're going to call yourself a Christian, your allegiance is to the truth.

Harkening back to what Jesus said to Pontius Pilate. For this reason, I was born. And this reason I came into the world to testify to the truth.

But you got to know it. This case, from a gospel perspective, that's the truth of the gospel. There really is only one way to heaven. Every road leads to God and judgment. But only one road leads to heaven. That's through Jesus Christ.

Okay, there's that. But the Bible is going to inform you on a lot of other truth as well. And it's going to tell you that God hates lying lips. So you need to know facts. You don't spout off emotionally, slow to speak, slow to anger, quick to listen. You better be studious and know what you're talking about. In the world, and this is what I tell my students, America needs you. America needs you to get smart. America needs you to get informed. America needs you then to bring that truth into the public arena, to have these conversations with your peers and people older and younger than you. But with a gospel heart, shrewd as a viper, you know the facts.

I can go into those conversations with a lot of people. I can mess you up with facts and figures. But my ultimate goal should not be to mess you up. It should be to lift you up. It should be to come alongside you and walk down this road as we journey towards truth.

Because I want you to just become a humble, honest person that's willing to take the reality that's placed before you. This is the problem with Romans one. We know the truth. We just don't like it. So we suppress it. And that's why ideology wins the game today. Ideology narrative.

Just tell the same story over and over again. America shot through with racism. It's one hundred percent out of the ground of slavery. That's it. I don't care what kind of facts you show me.

I don't care what kind of figures you show me. That's it. That's the deal, because that allows me to just to stay in my little echo chamber and hate the country, which gives my flesh some some pleasure if you're coming from that side of the fence. And so just in those quiet moments when you have a chance to engage, to ask good questions, to point out some facts. Place a pebble in your neighbor's shoe and pray that God does something with it.

You're generally not going to convert it. Oh, thanks, Steve, for sharing all that with me. I was so wrong.

Please forgive me. I'm going to change my position right now. That rarely happens because pride is very strong. Deception is very strong. But I tell my students, it's our role to bring the truth of God's word into the world, to be ambassadors. It's our role, our role to operate in the truth and to apply the truth to everything. You walk in with a broadsword of truth, which cuts deeper right down the bone and marrow, and you're willing to swing it in both directions so that people on the right and the left get cut by the truth. That's our role. But you try to do that with as much gentleness as possible. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. God willing, I'll talk to you again real soon. And like my dad always used to say, Ever Forward.