The Declaration Project

Hey, this is Jim Graham from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explore relationship instead of religion every week. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. An entire ministry.

They've been launching an endeavor to expose and to bring about more awareness to the Declaration of Independence. Craig and Jim, are you brothers there? God bless you. Thanks for joining us for Truth Talk. Yeah, Jim Sears here. Thank you for having us on this morning. It's an honor. Craig, you go first. You started this thing, and then Jim is your wingman. Talk to us about what led to this wonderful endeavor.

Well, the real inspiration was the sort of journey that my wife and I have been on the last few months. We were living in California for the better part of our lives, and we found ourselves in a situation where it was time to leave California, sell everything we have there, and move to Nashville and, you know, in a circle where better freedom, better representative government. And sort of self-reflecting about what had happened to California, and what could we do to fix it, was sort of the inspiration for founding the Declaration of Independence Project. You know, the National Report Card came out a few weeks ago, and the numbers are not looking good in this younger generation here. The knowledge in civics and history, eighth graders were only scoring 22% proficiency and 13% proficiency in those two topics. And my sort of thesis is, how can we have a conversation about fixing what's wrong in this country when so few of America's youth have any idea how the system was actually designed, what the context was when the Founding Fathers drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

You don't have a firm foothold of what the history was, and what the norm was for government back then, and having been governed by a king who wouldn't listen, wouldn't pay attention to any of the grievances of the colonies. You know, when the young people today don't know any of this, how can we have any sort of conversation, how can we unify this country when no one knows the original intent for how the government is supposed to operate. So that was step one. Let's educate everyone. We've got to start with the Declaration of Independence. That has to be the start.

That's kind of ground zero. Jim, what's your passion related to this project? You and I have spoken a little more than Craig and I have, and every time I talk to you, you get fired up to the point of tears about the wonderful freedoms, the religious liberties that we experienced. You know, when our kids in public school today are being told that the Founders were a bunch of white supremacists and a bunch of pagan deists and this and that.

Talk about your passion, Jim, for all of this. Well, for me, it's a matter of just keeping our priorities priorities. I mean, when you look at the Declaration, our Founding Fathers made it real clear that our rights, our inalienable rights, our liberties were given to us by God, and it's up to us to protect that. I also look at people and I look at all the different polarizing comments or topics that are out there today.

You can think of a hundred of them. And I'm asking people, instead of getting bogged down in long, arduous debate with people to anger the far left when you're on the part we're on, I'm saying, hey, let's run everything through a lens of does this help preserve our liberty? And what is liberty and where did it come from? And so one of the main reasons I'm excited about this Declaration project is it gets people thinking about just how blessed we are to be in this country and how God ordained this liberty we have and how important it is for us to protect it. And when the Bible tells us that we need to teach our children so that they grow up and walk in the right way, well, part of that lesson in the United States needs to be liberty.

Wow, liberty is so important. Craig, how does the project work? Give us the boots on the ground. People listening, they want to get involved. They want to bring a chapter to their local school, local institution to tell us what exactly are y'all doing for this? We got the conceptual. How are you making the Declaration of Independence project?

How do you flesh it out? Well, the big idea we had was we want to get the American public to engage. And so the first way they can engage is to go to www.sign1776.com. S-I-G-N 1776.com. And you can sign an online version of the Declaration for free. You can also upload your photograph.

It's very touching. There's a digital wall that's up on the site. There's tens of thousands of brave Americans who signed the Declaration already. And the people are also uploading photographs, service and uploading photographs of them wearing uniform. People uploading all sorts of symbolic imagery of eagles and the American flag.

It's really, I mean, it's quite, it hugs on the heartstrings when you go up to the site and take a look at it. It's really quite a powerful movement. You also can opt in to have your signature sent to Congress. We're going to be printing out all the signatures this fall and delivering them to the steps of Congress in Washington, D.C. We will be lobbying Congress to introduce a bill to recognize these signatures as additional signatures to the Declaration. So we're, you know, we have a call to action here. Are you brave enough to sign?

And you can do the digital version. You can also purchase a replica of the Declaration of Independence with your signature added to it. So we're encouraging everyone also. We have the Sign 1776 Challenge on social media. And I have a post I've just put up in the last week of myself signing. I've attached my own signature to a printed out version of the Declaration. I encourage everyone to do that at home and post videos of them signing it and share those on social media to help build the movement.

Wow, I love it. Craig and Jim with the Declaration of Independence Project. Quickly, Jim, how would you how can you, Craig said it really well there, but how would you invite people to donate, to support, to get involved in your specific initiative?

And Craig, as we get out of here, let me get Jim, when you share that, also give the website one more time, too, if you would, Jim. You know, people can just, when you go to the website, there are different options as far as how large a signature you want to have here on your, in your signing. And so there's a free version, there's a $3 version because of the 3% of the people that actually fought in the revolution. Think about that.

3% of the people here defeated the largest military power in the world at that time. Or there's a $13 version for the 13 colonies. And there's also a $17.76 version for the John Hancock site signature. Any of that would help defray the costs that were incurring by doing mailings and that sort of thing. As far as if somebody wanted to have a sponsorship and they had a business situation where they could benefit by having their name and their website or some place they would like us to direct traffic, we could, we are sending out emails. We have a list of 100 million emails of people are owned by conservatives.

We have to tell you the ones that are Google, gmail.com, we're having a hard time getting them to go through because of persecution we're seeing from Google. But, you know, that'll make a way. And so if anybody wanted to sponsor, they could, they could do that. But just the mere fact that they're signing up and taking any one of the versions that has a dollar sign attached to it would be a tremendous help. And then just, you know, share it with your friends, you know, put it on Facebook and other forms of social media to share with people about the importance of liberty.

And, you know, it's, if you think about it, you know, we've got this document, and we've got this government that allows us to maintain representation and control without having to resort to firing a shot like any other civilization in the past because of the foresight of our founding fathers and the involvement that God had in every one of their drafting sessions. Wow. Greg, would you give them some more information about sponsorship? That's, that's your area of the game.

Yeah. We are ramping up the marketing efforts and the outreach right now. So any patriotic, similarly aligned companies that would like to sponsor, we would definitely be interested in including them in the project. We will be getting up to about a million emails a day going out as we're ramping up that effort.

And, um, you know, I think that for, for anyone that's similarly aligned, that could be a pretty good amount of outreach. We, our goal is to get over 10 million. We want at least 3% of Americans to sign the online version, which should bring us a, you know, should be roughly a little more than 10 million signatures is what we're expecting. And, uh, you know, we're, we're getting thousands of people a day are signing right now.

I want to get that tens of thousands a day, but when we say deliver, we're not talking about having FedEx deliver something. We're talking about having a van or several vans full of signatures and delivering them to the Capitol steps ourselves and, and giving them to the custody of Congress people who are willing to join the effort. And right now we have several that have expressed interest.

We don't have, I'm not prepared to, uh, name names at the moment because they haven't gotten that far. You too can sign the declaration of independence. Thanks to the declaration project. Thank you to Craig and Jim. Beware is the original signors of this great document.

It didn't vote so well for all of them. Many were killed for, they died for the cause of freedom for this great country that we serve in. And I'm grateful for these men for keeping that mantra going, especially religious liberty.

So we can all come and whatever faith, whatever religion, whatever, even Colt can come here and they can meet freely without the government telling them what to do. Give us the website one more time. Uh, Jim, as we get out of here, Jim and Craig with the declaration project, it's www.signsignn1776.com. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is the truth network.