This is the Truth Network. What if someone told you that you could teach the Bible in public schools legally, constitutionally? Rick Green, I don't know if that makes sense. I don't know if I believe you, my friend. I just don't know.
It almost sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Look, you can't save a constitutional republic if they don't know the Bible. It's the foundation of our republic. Benjamin Rush, the father of our public schools under the Constitution, said it should absolutely be the most important textbook in the classroom, and that without it, a republic falls apart. The problem is we stopped teaching it in schools.
In having to be shipped Murray v. Colette in 1963, we said, "Hey, it'd be a bad idea to have the Bible in schools," even though it's the foundation. Unfortunately, people don't realize that didn't mean you couldn't teach the Bible at all. It meant you couldn't require it for someone to graduate from high school. What we're doing is putting it in public schools as an elective and making it fun and entertaining, so the kids want to learn from it.
You can't even study Shakespeare without knowing the Bible.
So this is a very important turnaround for our public schools. We're super excited about it. Wow!
Now this guy here to my left, Richard Scurry, you've been passionate about getting the Word of God out out there and in the schools for a long time. Tell us why. This is something that's been that's gotten you excited for twenty-five years. I've been working on it, but the thing and the big thing was the Time magazine article where we we actually were on the cover of Time magazine with these words. It said why we should teach the Bible in public schools.
That was April of two thousand and seven, when we were a nobody. And inside is an article, a seven-page article, and the title of that is "The Case for Teaching the Bible in Public Schools." So anybody that says you can't do this, you just show them that article, and you've got it nailed. And the article said why it's important. It's important because you cannot understand educationally Western civilization unless you know the Bible. You can't.
So, Rick Green, you've been running this Patriot Academy, teaching kids Christian worldview out in Texas for years. Kids come in there, they come out fully strengthened in their faith, ready to engage the world as evangelists and also to stand up for what's right in the political realm, and you know, in our country for our freedoms and whatnot. But this, I can just hear someone's voice echoing in the back of my mind, in my ears, saying, "Separation of church and state." You can't teach the Bible in public school. What's got in is Rick. Is what kind of Kool Aid is Rick drinking?
What do you say to those people that say this is impossible? I say they need to take one of our Constitution classes so that they can actually learn the history of not only the First Amendment, but even that letter from Jefferson on separation of church and state did not at all mean what people think today that it meant. And he's the wrong guy to be asking about the First Amendment anyway because he had nothing to do with it.
So the point. Is the Constitution absolutely allows for this? I think part of the problem is we allowed people to scare us away from the public arena. We allowed people to make Christians feel like if you're involved in politics, quote unquote, which by the way, politics is nothing more than how are you going to treat your neighbor and what your neighbor is going to look like. That's what politics is.
But they got Christians to step out, and so that left a vacuum, and so people that didn't have our values went into the public schools and took over, and they, of course, didn't want the Bible being taught.
So the good news is that the Bible's coming back. In fact, there are states right now that have. Passed legislation just in the last year or so that are stepping up the requirements for biblical literacy in the schools. Texas just did a complete rewrite of our literature standards and social studies standards. All kinds of great Bible stories getting back into the public schools through those standards.
What we're going to do though is make it easy for teachers, easy for school boards to adopt this curriculum. It's been around. It's been proven to be constitutional. There's no legal questions about using it.
So combining that with the entertainment value of it, because you've got to entertain. Kids, if you want them to actually learn anything, that's what's going to make this very different. People that want to be a part of it, patriotacademy dot com forward slash Bible, patriotacademy dot com forward slash Bible. We're going to have a big informational meeting on December eighth. Anyone that wants to be a part of that can join, and they'll learn how they can take our kit and take it to their local school and get the Bible back in public schools.
Wow!
So if you're passionate about the Word of God, you're passionate about impacting the world with the Word. This is a great way to do it. Imagine that. Public school kids here in the Bible being taught in their own language. How does it work?
How does it practically work? If I say I want to do this, I know it's going to be the website. I encourage everyone to go there. But Richard Scurry, how does it work for someone to implement this? How easy is it?
It actually is not anywhere near as difficult as you might think. If you know somebody on the school board, or even better, if you are a school board member, you go. You talk to the board. And you tell them about this program, and you show them the book, you show them the textbook, you show them the Time magazine article, and you show them what that we're already in forty-five out of the fifty states. We've got over a thousand schools that that are teaching this, and so there's.
And Rick said in the last year or two, actually, it's been over the last twenty years. That we've got now, up to nine states that have passed legislation on the subject, and there's others that are trying to pass it right now, but we don't need the legislation. What it's used for, useful for, is the publicity value, and because it gives school boards in that state then the comfort level of going ahead with something that that that they are afraid might be controversial, and usually turns out not to be.
So all these people complaining about, oh, they don't let me do the Bible in schools, all the you know the secondary schools, it's done. We're history. What do you say to those folks? Because like this is like an open door. This is like the silver platter of the gospel, the Bible, the Word of God being brought right in, perfectly legally.
Not no secret, no cloak and dagger, just right through the door. Yeah, I hear that all the time from people. They're like, "Oh, we're just done. We aren't even going to mess with the public schools anymore." I'm like, "You can't leave kids in a burning building." Look, I homeschooled my kids. I encourage people to homeschool or do a private school, but 80 of the kids are still in those public schools.
So that's a mission field that we cannot leave alone. We need them to be good citizens. You know, they're going to see. Going to be voting in just a few years. I mean, if you are a high school senior next year, you are voting.
So we cannot go without teaching them the things that made America great in the first place. And again, like I said, I know I keep saying it, but it's fun, it's entertaining. They're actually going to find all kinds of words that they've used their whole life, idioms and different stories that they didn't even know it came right out of the Bible.
So there is going to be a lot of dots connected that'll make sense for them. But it's going to make them good citizens, make them good neighbors, and that's something that everybody should be for.
Now I ask both of you this question: How has the Word of God changed your life? Because both of you are passionate about this. You're lobbying. You're talking to other folks. You know, you're talking to donors.
You're promoting on broadcast. We're doing this interview. You're taking time with this big, loud, crazy guy to tell all our truth-talking listeners. You forgot tall and tall. Yeah, about about this.
How has God's Word changed your life? First, we'll start with you, Richard Scurry.
Well, it started with believing the word of God, and when I got to understand that you have this guy that only preached for three years and had nothing going for him, nothing, no powerful friends, no money, no, never wrote a book. Never owned a house, never had a wife, never did any of the things that famous people usually do, and now two thousand years later, and only three years, and now two thousand years later, if you add up all the famous people together, all the kings and all the presidents and all the authors and so forth, they haven't affected mankind as much as this one solitary life.
So when I got that, I said to myself, "It's all true." It's it's all true. Every word in the Bible's got to be true, and even that wouldn't get it if if Jesus hadn't actually risen from the dead and wasn't sitting at the right hand of the Father, making things happen down here. Otherwise, how would it happen? How is it? How does it happen that the Bible sells outsells every other book in almost every country, year after year after year, to the point that there's now.
If you take all the books, the top fifteen books, and you take the top fourteen, and you add them, add up how much what what their sales have been, and multiply it by two or three, you won't come close to even how many the the Bible is sold. It's like six hundred and eighty. Tell me, it's over six billion, six billion, six billion. Can you imagine? That is something.
And you, you saw that one solitary life. You were just attending the Radio City Rockets, the Rockefeller Center, and there was the there was the Christmas pageant that they do, and then there was this. You saw that, and everything changed in your life, huh? Changed it, totally changed it. And and once you cross the line, and you say okay to Jesus.
Then you learn a bunch of stuff. You, you, you may be worried about. Oh no, God's going to ask me to get dysentery on some donkey in East Asia. And you realize God would not ask you to do anything. It's not going to be wonderful for you, because He loves you more than you love yourself.
So, and He knows more about you than you know about yourself. Wow, wow.
So you get all that from the Bible, and then there's some verses that just blow your mind. the the the one that of course there's John three sixteen, but then there's another one in there, where Jesus says I'm the way I'm the way to heaven, and I'm the truth I'm truth itself, and I'm life itself, and you think I mean that statement is so huge it's almost un it's almost inconceivable not just unbelievable inconceivable, but that That changes your life. You say this is somebody you got to pay attention to—a guy that can do that. You've been on this show before, telling your testimony, being shot in the head, surviving all kinds of crazy stuff for the Lord to get your attention. And I want everyone to go back to that podcast and listen to that whole story.
But thank you for sharing that. I asked you that question. Let me ask Rick Green. How has the Word of God changed your life as we get out of here?
Well, as a side note, you know that that verse—you could almost build a radio network around that. I am the truth. Get it, truth.
Now, come on, I was tying down.
Okay, I'll answer your question in two parts, but I'll make it fast.
Okay, so first, for me personally, it's back to Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration. He said, "There's no better map of the human heart than what the Bible teaches." So, for me personally, whether it's Proverbs or all throughout the Bible, if you constantly read through the Bible once a year, which I try to make a habit of. I'll find stuff in there. I'm like, wow, that wasn't in there last year. But boy, that's exactly what I needed today.
It's just applicable to your daily life, and it's the direction that you need. And it understands you.
So that's one for me personally. But then for us corporately, as a nation, as a as a community, I'll give you Noah Webster. He said, "All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, slavery, and war." So, in other words, everything bad in a culture. He said that proceeds from neglecting or despising the precepts contained in the Bible.
So, in other words, he's warning. Warning us: You can get the good stuff if you put the good stuff in, but you're going to get the bad stuff if you don't put the good stuff in. And the Bible has the good stuff; it has the answers. You know, I want to live in a neighborhood where people treat each other the way they want to be treated, and that's the essence of what you get when you teach the Bible. The website one more time for okay.
We'll get the website, but well, I tell you what, you give us the website for folks to get on this information session and for folks to learn how they can get the Bible in their local public school. Yeah, tell us that website. Then Reverend Skurry will close us out. PatriotAcademy dot com forward slash Bible or theBibleLiteracyProject dot org. But I wanted to say one more thing.
I went to a meeting and the speaker. It was of young people, young. Graduates of business schools, and Peter Thiel was a speaker, who's maybe the most successful entrepreneurial funder. He funded Facebook, he funded the Apple, he funded PayPal, and and he said this. One of the guys asked him, "So, out of all the books that there are on business, what's the what's the best one for me to read?" And Peter Thiel said, "The Bible." I nearly fell out of my chair," he said.
"Because the Bible has the answer to everything, and if if you know the Bible, you will make the right decisions that you otherwise might not."
