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June 29, 2020 - Louder with Crowder
49:28
David Barton Destroys the 'America Is a Secular Nation' Myth | Louder with Crowder
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🎵 You're a strange animal, that's what I know 🎵 🎵 I know, I know 🎵
🎵 You're a strange animal, I've got to follow 🎵 🎵 I'm a speedy goose 🎵
Uh, always glad to have this gentleman on the program.
We did them as a special, I think, last year, two years ago.
Yeah, last year.
And I was in my softies, my ranger panties, Uncle Sam.
You know, people always ask celebrities, or sometimes me, they ask Do you have regrets?
And people are like, no regrets.
That's a regret.
Yeah.
I have plenty of regrets.
I don't understand.
Like, I have no regrets.
You've lived a dummy's life, if you have no regrets.
Yeah, it's too safe.
And you're dumb now, if you have no regrets.
So that being said, I always love learning from you.
You'll probably not hear me talking a whole lot, aside from asking questions, because he is like the computer war expensive artifacts for shoes.
He founded WallBuilders.com.
Well, he founded WallBuilders, but WallBuilders.com is where you can go and learn about it.
He has all kinds of... I don't know what the value is of the historical artifacts that he has there, but you probably know who it is.
Mr. David Barton, how are you, sir?
Doing well, Steve.
Good to be with you, man.
I'm glad to be with you.
Do you have a number on... or am I letting the cat out of the bag?
I don't want to turn you into a target.
The value of... I would imagine that your little bunker is like... it's about on par with the Hope Diamond.
Yeah, it is.
The problem is the value is changing all the time.
We're adding new stuff.
Just added a bunch of space collection stuff from Moonwalkers and various things.
So we've got some of everything.
Actually, there's three of us collaborating on the collection.
And we just picked up Darth Vader's, the original 77 Darth Vader.
We picked up R2-D2.
We got the ruby red slippers from Dorothy in Wizard of Oz.
So there's all sorts of little things that keep getting added and growing and growing.
You got the slippers.
Gay people are going to be furious because they love Judy Garland and probably not your demographic.
But wow, that is incredible that you have all of those things.
And is it like a comic book where it's worth $10,000 and then if I breathe on it, it's worth $1.25?
Because when I was there, you were handing them to me.
Remember how nervous I was?
I was like, don't give it to me because I'm clumsy.
Yeah, some of the stuff you really got to be really delicate with, but it's interesting.
The older stuff is a lot more durable, and you can handle a letter of George Washington much more than I can handle a letter of Woodrow Wilson or FDR, because that stuff, it crumbles, falls apart.
They had a lot of ash in the paper in that time, and they didn't know what it did.
But back in the original founding era, they made all the papers, a lot of linen in it.
It was just a totally different world.
Did you say they had a lot of ash in the paper with Woodrow Wilson?
Acid.
Oh, acid.
Acid, yeah.
Wow.
Why is that?
Not the 60s and 70s acid.
It's different from the 60s and 70s.
I'm going to learn.
Yeah, it goes through your fingertips.
Why is that?
Why is it that something older, obviously we know the composition has more acid, but why did paper start including more acid?
Well, they found faster ways to make paper and cheaper ways to make paper.
But the way they did it, it involved components that had an acid base.
And even today, you can buy novel books that have an acid-based paper.
It's going to last about 20 years.
It's going to fall apart on your shelf.
Or you can get more like the academic books are going to last like 100 years because it's a different kind of paper.
A lot more expensive.
That's why you pay $100 for a school book and you pay $4 for a novel.
There's a paper in it.
So, about 30 years down the line, if there's some kind of a nuclear holocaust, Huck Finn will be a distant memory, but gender theory at Schenectady Community College, it'll last forever.
It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Let me ask you this.
I have so much I want to ask, and I'd maybe like to go back, since you talked about that, to hemp and ropes for ships, because that's something that's always interesting to me, why we switched over and the cotton trade.
Obviously, 4th of July, it's a time where a lot of people are obviously enjoying the fruits of this country, this wonderful country, but a lot of people aren't necessarily aware of exactly how it was founded, why it was founded.
Something that comes up a lot, I've talked about it on my show, but I know you're an expert, is the idea that it's a secular nation.
The idea, of course, there's the First Amendment and people misconstrue that with the word separation of church and state.
We hear a lot that the Founding Fathers specifically were deists, they weren't Christians, and it was really founded more on Enlightenment principles.
Can you, just as a jumping off point, let me know what's correct, what's incorrect there?
What was the intent for the United States from the people who created it?
Well, let's deal first with where they get their ideas, where the Enlightenment ideas.
And in the history of the world, you go back to all the classics and all the earliest, Cato and Cicero and Plato and all those guys.
And then you get to a period of time where the world goes into the Dark Ages, about 1300 years of illiteracy.
Nobody's reading, nobody can read, only the elites read.
Books are not common for anyone.
Then you get to the point of what we would call Reformation.
And Reformation was really a bunch of Christian folks saying, we've got to get back to reading, which means the Bible, so we've got to have literacy.
So that's why that those that first came to America, the pilgrims, the Puritans, others, they were big Bible guys.
And America had the highest literacy rate of anywhere in the world at that point, including for girls.
We educated both boys and girls, and that wasn't being done in Europe at the time.
So, literacy starts coming back in, really, in the 1300s, 1400s, 1500s.
Out of literacy, then you get back to what's called Renaissance, and so now you're back into art, you're into science, you're into all sorts of stuff, because for 1200, 1300 years in the Dark Ages, that stuff just wasn't doing anything.
Right.
And then out of that, you get philosophers coming out of Reformation and Renaissance, and that's where we call it the Enlightenment.
The problem academics have today is they separate all the Enlightenment as really an anti-Christian kind of movement of intellectuals, which is silly.
There are two strains in the Enlightenment camp.
You have the secular Enlightenment and you have the Christian Enlightenment.
And so in the secular Enlightenment, you're going to have David Hume, you're going to have Rousseau and Voltaire, you're going to have those guys.
In the Christian Enlightenment, you're going to have Blackstone and Montesquieu and Locke and Grotius and Pufendorf, all these philosophers.
So, when you get into that point today, they just kind of say, if you're Enlightenment, that's secular.
That's absolute nonsense.
Matter of fact, I've got all these old things.
I want to pull out some things just for grins.
Well, that's a surprise.
You have a lot of old things.
Yeah, surprise.
Can you imagine?
These happen to be... My question is, do you have any young things out there?
Like, do you have, like, a Nintendo Switch?
Is that... Could... Would it be too much to ask?
Ooh!
I got that for my grandkids.
I got my grandkids' stuff in here.
So, I've got that.
All right, show us what you got.
So these guys are three of the Enlightenment philosophers that were the most heavily relied on by the Founding Fathers.
This book called The Origins of American Constitutionalism, political science professors said, where did the Founders get their ideas?
They looked at 15,000 writings from the Founding Era.
They found all the quotes, they tracked it back.
The number one most cited source in the Founding Fathers was this, The Spirit of Laws by Montesquieu.
So this guy is a Christian French philosopher.
The second most cited source was Blackstone's Commentaries, an English philosopher, four volume set.
This is one volume of it.
And the third most cited source was John Locke, particularly Spirit of Laws.
This goes back to 1690.
Interesting thing about John Locke is today he is considered to be one of the deist philosophers.
I have here a book from John Locke.
And can I clarify, too, for the audience really quickly?
A lot of people who aren't necessarily, you know, hobbyists with this, the term deist is often applied to Founding Fathers to separate them from Christians, where they say, well, they believed in an idea of God, but not necessarily the Judeo-Christian God.
And I think that also deist has changed, and our view of what a Christian might be today has changed.
So I just want to clarify for people who may not know, because I know you do.
That's a great point.
Deus at the time of the founding fathers, by definition, meant someone who believed in the scriptures, believed in God.
They had questions about the divinity of Jesus.
That's all it was.
That was it.
A deist today is one who believes in the clockmaker philosophy, that there is a creator out there somewhere, and he wound up the universe like a clock, but he's taken off, and it just runs on its own natural law.
If you pray, he's not going to answer.
He doesn't get involved.
Today, if you look up the word deist in Thesaurus or any other source, you'll find that synonyms are atheist and agnostic.
Right.
So it really has come to be a non-God guy, is really what it was.
Right.
Back at the beginning, a deist just simply meant you believed in God, Jesus, the Bible.
You just weren't sure Jesus was divine.
Right.
So it was a doctrinal issue rather than a God issue.
Right.
So great point.
Today's writers say that John Locke was a deist, that he was a secular enlightenment guy.
He didn't have a great belief in God.
So what I have here is a book that he did.
It's called The Commonplace Book of the Bible.
A little hard to see.
This is all the scriptures out of the Bible that deal with the Trinity or the Divinity.
I mean, this is all the major doctrines of Christianity, and it's John Locke.
So, if they say he's a secular Enlightenment guy, they're crazy, because he's got writings like this.
As a matter of fact, this one that I showed you, this is the most cited book by the Founding Fathers when they were writing the Declaration of Independence.
One of the signers of the Declaration, this guy, if I can point to him right here, this guy here is Richard Henry Lee.
He's the guy that actually made the motion for America to become an independent nation.
That's what led to the Fourth of July was his motion.
He said they copied the Declaration out of this book.
That was his term.
This book, John Locke, references the Bible more than 1,500 times.
So when a political philosopher says, oh, they quoted Enlightenment philosophers, therefore they were secular, that proves to me they don't have a clue what they're talking about.
They're running on rhetoric.
If anyone today, if any senator, congressman, or president were to cite it, how many times did you say that he referenced it?
1,400.
If anyone were to do that today upon swearing in, they'd be considered a radical extremist and hauled out in cuffs.
They would be accused of establishing a theocracy somewhere.
They're trying to get an Ayatollah in or something.
Well, I don't know about the fatwas, but the principle remains.
No, I understand what you're saying, and I do think that it's interesting, because even if someone – and we'll get to that question of the divinity of Christ.
By the way, you could refer to all Muslims as deists in that sense, because they did question the divinity, at the very least the resurrection.
That doesn't matter so much here when we're discussing people who were creating laws in a system of government pragmatically because they needed to extrapolate those from somewhere whether they believed that Christ was resurrected and an actual God in the flesh or not.
And I think people need to understand that because it changes the context of the laws we have and where they come from.
Well, not only has it changed the context, but even if you take those who question the divinity of Christ, out of the 56 signers of the Declaration, there's really only two we know who question the divinity of Christ.
That's Franklin and Jefferson.
Now, here's the deal.
If I go to a university, Duke University Law School, Southern University Law School, I'll put this picture up and I'll always ask, Who up there can you identify?
Call them by name.
Tell me who you got.
Everybody will get Ben Franklin.
Everybody will get Thomas Jefferson.
That's two out of the fifty-six.
Fifty-four more.
Franklin's easy because of the glasses and something to do with a kite.
Yeah, and that's a lot of fun, too.
That's a different story, different thing.
And we get into the scuba flippers that he invented that went with that, and all the other stuff.
But what you get is these two guys are the only two to question the divinity of Christ, and they're the only two that people know today.
And so they say, oh, well, they were deists.
Well, they were, by definition of their day, although Jefferson would, if you called him a deist, he would argue with you.
He called himself a Christian several occasions.
Franklin one time said he was a deist, and that's in his autobiography.
And two pages later, he says, I was, but I'm not, because he essentially said it's the most foolish, the most silly belief of thought out there.
So within two pages, he renounces deism, but professors still quote that one quote from Franklin, not paying attention to the rest.
That's important for people to note, and I encourage them to read the text.
So let's do this.
We'll go back to the establishment from all of the Founding Fathers, but let's take those two, because those come up a whole lot.
You see a lot of atheists bring up Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Jefferson obviously is most cited for, you know, his desire to build, people talk about a wall of separation between the church and state, and we know about the private letter to the Danbury Baptists, but let's start with what did Jefferson believe?
What did he want for this country, the person who people argue he was the one who wanted no faith at all in any level of government?
So what did Jefferson believe regarding faith, regarding America, what aspects?
What he wanted to establish with the United States, you know, if it was, because we all know, obviously, it's not a religious theocracy, right?
It's not some kind of an oligarchy.
But then people try to say that, well, so Jefferson wanted, didn't want anyone praying or having any faith-based principles involved with the founding of government.
Give us kind of a snapshot as to who Jefferson was and what his vision for America was.
Jefferson, interestingly enough, when you look at him from a faith perspective, he was raised as a very orthodox Anglican.
An Anglican would be high church.
That's not someone we would call an evangelical like a Franklin Graham or someone else.
So he's high church, which means he's much more reserved with his expression of faith, but not necessarily his belief.
For example, he is actually one of the founders of an evangelical church in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A pastor that was in the Great Awakening, a guy named Charles Clay was his pastor, personal pastor.
And when Charles Clay got in trouble with the British Anglican Church for being too evangelical, Jefferson said, I'm raising money.
I'm going to fund you.
We're going to start you an evangelical church over here.
This is where I go.
And so, when you look at Jefferson's relationship with pastors, so many of the evangelical pastors, he was really close to.
People like John Leland.
John Leland helped do the First Amendment, and he worked with Jefferson on it, worked with Madison on it.
He worked with Jefferson to disestablish the Anglican religion.
So what happened is Jefferson, as an Anglican, is in a state that is an Anglican state established religion in Virginia, which meant that in his state, Jefferson, who's friends with all Christians, Jefferson is watching people in his state, like Quakers and Baptists and Presbyterians and Methodists, be thrown in jail, be fined, be whipped, be beat, simply because they're not Anglicans.
Right.
So Jefferson hated that, and so he worked first in 1777, right after the Declaration, he introduced a bill that would disestablish the Anglican Church and say all denominations are equal.
Then when he became governor, He specifically did that.
He removed the professor of religion from William & Mary.
And people say, ah, that proves he's anti-religion.
No.
The professor of religion in William & Mary was the professor of Anglican theology at William & Mary.
And he turned William & Mary into a Christian college, not an Anglican college.
Right.
And so that's what Jefferson's after, is free marketplace of ideas, wide open for Christian faith.
So Jefferson, actually, as you go through what he did, it becomes very interesting to see what he did before he wrote that letter, the separation letter.
So in 1789, Washington's president, Jefferson's secretary of state, Congress passes a law that said, hey, we told you in the Constitution, find a 10 mile square piece of property, not 10 square miles, but 10 miles, but 10 miles, but 10 miles, make that the federal city.
It's called the Residency Act.
So George Washington said, I know where that land is.
I surveyed it, Virginia and Maryland will give it to you.
Jefferson goes there and he lays out the federal city.
He gets a French architect, Pierre L'Enfant.
He gets a black And so Jeff's in charge of building the capital city.
So as they get it out, it starts construction in 1793.
It's finished in 1800.
So the first year is in New York City as the federal capital, then 10 years in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia is the federal capital.
1800, November of 1800, they move into the capital, Washington, DC.
When they moved in, Thomas Jefferson, who's been in charge of this, is now the Vice President of the United States, which means he presides over the Senate.
Unlike Mike Pence today, the Vice President actually sat in the Senate every day and ran the Senate, instead of Mitch McConnell or whoever.
So, Jefferson's in the Senate, and they said, now that we've got this brand new building, here's an idea.
The largest room in the Capitol is the hall of the House of Representatives.
That's the biggest room, Let's take every Sunday and start a church over in the Hall of the House, and let's have church in the U.S.
Capitol every Sunday.
Jefferson and Speaker Theodore Sedgwick do that.
So for the next three months, Jefferson attends church every Sunday in the U.S.
Capitol.
Then three months later, he's elected President of the United States.
Jefferson came to church every Sunday in the U.S.
Capitol.
Even his political opponents who hated him said, we got to give to Jefferson.
He never misses Church of the Capitol.
And so when Jefferson was asked by a minister, a guy named Ethan Allen, not the Ethan Allen of Vermont, but the Ethan Allen there in town, he said, why do you go to Church of the Capitol?
He said, I'm the chief magistrate of a Christian nation.
And that's the example you're supposed to sit as the chief magistrate.
So Jefferson not only had Church of the Capitol, Jefferson also had church at the Navy Yard, At the War Department and at the Treasury Department.
So, if you want to go to church in early Washington, D.C., you can choose four government buildings, and that's Thomas Jefferson?
Yes, that's Thomas Jefferson.
Well, was that like Mar-a-Lago and Trump's golf courses?
He had a financial interest in all of those churches.
Yeah, right.
People in the offering plate were none the wiser.
So, before we go to Franklin, then, explain to me, now when we hear that, people might be confused and say, well, hold on a second, what about the First Amendment?
And, obviously, Jefferson is sort of seen as this godfather of the separation of church and state.
Obviously, I'm laying this up for you, but I would like for you to explain to people who may not be familiar, because most aren't, and that's what's sad.
They don't learn this in school.
Well, the very cool thing about the First Amendment is it's such simple language.
And by the way, separation church and state to them, and they advocated for it, meant separation of the church from being a state church.
They wanted church leaders to make their own decisions.
If you're in Great Britain, I mean, William Penn William Pence spent months in prison for going to the wrong church.
The government required him to go to an Anglican church.
He went to a Quaker church, spent months in prison.
I spent time in the principal's office in grade school, because I was raised in Quebec, and we would go to Mass.
So I went to public school, and I went to Catholic school.
Wrap your mind around that.
A lot of people don't understand it.
And I had already taken communion in a non-denominational church, and I didn't know that I wasn't allowed to take communion in the Catholic church.
When they found out, I was immediately sent to the principal's office, and my parents were called.
It was this huge deal, and my dad said, well, honestly, we go to a church where we do communion, and you have to understand what it is.
He goes, do you understand what communion is?
I said, yeah, I understand it's a representation of, you know, the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, and that he sacrificed for us.
He goes, okay, you understand that?
You're praying about that?
And I said, yeah.
He goes, okay, my son's free to go.
And they did not agree.
You don't have to go across the pond.
A lot of people don't realize this was commonplace.
And so the context of, hey, we don't want the government to be enforcing or be in the church running business, rather, is very different from, well, of course you can pray and establish a church in the Capitol building.
Of course you can do that in the Navy Yard.
So, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
No, but that's good.
That's exactly it, and the example you gave regarding yourself is what Jefferson didn't want.
He didn't want them to be able to come in and say you have to go to this church, and so the concept of separation church and state is not secularization.
By the way, this is really important to understand because the critics today say if you don't have separation church and state, the church is going to take over the government.
No, no, no.
All the history of the world, it's the government who takes over the church and makes it an arm of the state.
Right.
And so it starts back 391 A.D.
Emperor Theodosius said, I'm a Christian.
I now decree the whole world's going to be Christian or I'm going to kill you.
That's a state established church.
Right.
And so we have a number of documents here from Great Britain time, from the American Revolution.
Great Britain says, here's who can take communion.
And it's an act of Parliament.
Great Britain says, here who is licensed to preach is an act of Parliament.
Parliament's got no voice over that.
So Jefferson does not want to secularize the society at all.
What he wants to do is make sure the government can't stop it.
So what's really cool is when you read the First Amendment, the two religion clauses really short, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Key word is Congress can't make a law establishing religion.
Congress can't make us all Anglicans, or Lutherans, or Baptists, or Catholics, or Quakers, or Atheists, or anything else, and the only one limited there is Congress.
Or in Pelosi's case, Satanists.
Yeah, in Pelosi's case, Beelzebub worshipers, but yes, go ahead.
Oh, don't go there.
That's close.
Potentially.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
No, but that is important to note.
And just an aside, this is something that a lot of people don't understand when you get a lot of sort of modern intellectuals saying, well, it's such a crime, it's a crooked game, a racket, they say, because they're in the 1940s, that churches have tax-exempt status.
Well, this is exactly why.
Because like you said, governments would would go into churches, just like people are concerned
about the IRS or the FBI or the DOJ becoming political weapons at this point.
You could do a lot of damage to, by the way, any religious institution if you're picking
and choosing who gets tax breaks and who don't.
So it's an even playing field.
But yeah, so Duke, because that is very clear in the First Amendment, but we hear this word
separation of church and state a whole lot, and it's attributed to Jefferson.
Tell people a little bit about where that comes from the context of his letter to the
Danbury Baptists.
Jefferson was such an advocate for all the other nominations.
As an Anglican guy, he advocated for every other denomination that's being persecuted.
And in America at the time, or the British, there were nine of the 13 colonies that had a state-established religion.
That was different from state to state.
It might be Congregationalism.
It might be Baptist in Rhode Island.
It might be Anglican in South Carolina.
So what he's wanting is freedom, religious freedom.
So when he got elected to office in Interesting enough, he got letters, just a bunch of letters came in from Baptist pastors across the nation.
Because in every state except Rhode Island, Baptists were minority pastors and they were scared to death of the government shutting them down as they did in Virginia.
And so when Jefferson got in, they say, hallelujah, you're our guy.
You've been fighting for us for years.
You've got more than 15 years of fighting for us.
We are so glad you're president because we know you're going to do the right thing and you're not going to punish us.
So one of those groups, Danbury Baptist Association, Danbury, Danbury, Connecticut, wrote him a letter.
It's October the 7th, 1801.
And they said that we are really concerned because this thing about Congress guaranteeing our free exercise of religion They said God guarantees our free exercise of religion.
We think that even the word Congress appearing there might someday cause the government to think it has the right to regulate our religion.
And so they're concerned that the words appearing there might cause Congress to think they could.
Jefferson writes back on January the 1st of 1802.
It's Friday, and it's the reason I say Friday.
Friday, January 1st, 182.
He writes back and it's a 233 word letter.
It's three paragraphs long.
Anybody can read it in under five minutes.
If you're a slow reader, it'll take you under five minutes.
And Jefferson said, you don't have to worry about Any government establishing or taking over your faith, because there is a wall of separation between church and state that protects your religious expression.
And he goes through and says, because there's a wall of separation, you're free to express your faith however you want to, anywhere you want to, any place you want.
And so he gave this guarantee of religious freedom.
Now, what's fun is that's Friday, January the 1st, 1802.
Sunday, January the 3rd, 1802, Thomas Jefferson is in church at the Capitol, and the guy who's preaching that day is the Reverend John Leland, who Thomas Jefferson invited to come preach at the Capitol at the church.
So if you think separation of church and state is a bad deal, what's he doing on Sunday?
He just violated everything you wrote, no?
And this is what's really significant to me, Steve.
In 1947, the U.S.
Supreme Court quoted Jefferson's letter in a case called Everson v. Board of Education.
Now, what they did then was out of 233 words in the letter, they only quoted eight words.
A wall of separation between church and state.
Every Supreme Court that used Jefferson's letter prior to 1947 quoted the whole letter.
They put it in there, and when you read it, you go, this is a no-brainer.
You've got complete exercise of religious faith.
We'll never stop anything.
Since 1947, we have not seen a single court reprint Jefferson's full letter.
All they say is a wall of separation.
There have been over 4,000 federal cases on religion since 1947.
None of them quote the full letter.
Oh my gosh, there's no space requirement in the decision.
You can let it go on 500 pages.
You can make that a footnote.
Nobody does.
I'll say, for crying out loud, I think it was 1,800 pages for Brennan Dassey making a murderer, so you think they could at least shoehorn it in there.
No, I think that's very interesting, and I hope that people do go and read the letter.
I know I've talked about it before, but I'm sure you probably have the actual authentic copy lying around there somewhere.
Let me ask you, so let's go to Benjamin Franklin then, since I think we've addressed Jefferson.
Benjamin Franklin is another one that people say, well, he was just, he was a deist.
Give us a snapshot of Benjamin Franklin and what his vision for America was and who he was as a person.
Yeah, Benjamin Franklin, in his own autobiography, I mentioned earlier, he said he was a deist.
And he said within two pages, but I found out how silly that belief was and I quickly rejected it.
In his own autobiography, he has a number of personal psalms that he writes to God, how God answered his prayers on numerous occasions.
He talks about how important God is throughout his life.
As a matter of fact, he's the guy that brought Thomas Paine to America.
Now, Thomas Paine genuinely is a deist.
I mean, he believes in a God.
We actually own a six-page letter from Thomas Paine to Sam Adams where Thomas Paine's talking about his religious faith.
And what happened was, Thomas Paine loved France, loved the French Revolution, wanted to help them get rid of Louis XIV and all the kings.
So, after the American Revolution, he goes to France to help them.
But in the American Revolution, in 1772, Ben Franklin brought him from England to America because he was being persecuted in England.
When he got into America, he got him set up in the printing business with a guy named Robert Aiken.
And in 1776, they're sitting around, and Thomas Paine says, I'm going to write this piece, and we now call it Common Sense.
But they were sitting around, he and Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush.
Benjamin Rush is this guy right here.
He and Ben Franklin were talking Sitting around talking about it, and Benjamin Rush says, you ought to call that piece Common Sense, because that's what it is, Common Sense.
So he wrote this piece, Common Sense.
Washington talked about how the death set the nation on edge.
It woke them up.
It's really kind of a spark plug that set everything off.
Washington praised it.
So all the way through the Revolution, Thomas Paine is this great writer.
He does all this great writing work.
Then he gets involved with the French Revolution in 1789.
1789 is over in France.
France is absolutely hardcore secular.
They're atheist secular.
In France, after the Revolution, they actually changed the week to a 10-day week.
They didn't want a 7-day week because that might make you think there's a Sabbath and a God.
So they changed the work week to 10 days.
I mean, they tore up all the churches.
So while he's over there, he said, I saw This is Payne's work.
I saw France running headlong into atheism, and they didn't understand how bad that would be for a nation.
So that's why he says he wrote The Age of Reason.
Now, when he wrote The Age of Reason, he wrote it in 1790, came out in 1794.
It's a very direct attack against Christianity.
It's a direct attack against Judaism.
But it is a defense of God.
And so he said, I was writing this kind of like a step for the French to say, don't get away from God.
And when it came out, however, because it attacked Christianity and Judaism, the founding fathers turned on him and said, this is terrible.
We established this nation on these principles, and now you're attacking them.
What's really cool is before that, and by the way, when it came out, Washington would never talk to Thomas Paine again after that came out.
Sam Adams did an op-ed piece against him in Boston newspapers.
Patrick Henry wrote an entire book trashing Thomas Paine when that piece came out.
I mean, Founding Fathers turned against him.
When Thomas Paine came back to America and died here, there was not a single cemetery that would let him be buried there.
They buried him in a church pasture because nobody wanted anything to do with Thomas Paine.
So, Paine is now exorcised.
What happened is in 1790, before Paine published the book, he sent it to Ben Franklin.
Said, Ben, you and I have been friends a long time.
Here's what I'm about to publish.
I really want to know what you think.
And Franklin wrote back and said, you need to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person.
He said, he that spits in the wind spits in his own face.
Right.
He said, this is like unchanging time.
I mean, Franklin tore him up.
for attacking Christianity and the Bible, and said, you do not understand how much we need Christianity and the Bible in the nation.
He said, think of all the young people whose bad behavior is restrained by the teachings of the Bible.
Without this, you have the Law of the Tiger and the Shark.
So it's the least religious Founding Father, Ben Franklin, who tears Thomas Paine up for going secular.
Which tells you something about Franklin.
Now, what I've got also right here, and I won't worry about pulling it up, I can.
This is the original Constitution for Pennsylvania, 1776, written by Ben Franklin.
In this Constitution, Ben Franklin says you can't hold office in Pennsylvania unless you believe in the divine authority of both the Old and New Testaments and believe in a future state of rewards and punishments.
And that's Franklin.
Don't want you close to government in Pennsylvania if you don't believe the Bible and believe that you're going to stand before God and answer for what you do.
That's not a deist.
No way.
And in 1787, when Franklin becomes a governor of Pennsylvania, as governor, he actually came up with a statewide plan to raise church attendance in the state of Pennsylvania.
This is Governor Ben Franklin doing this.
Was it like Hershey's Kisses or something?
Was it some kind of potluck?
All sorts of incentives.
You know, he was a coercive guy.
He was a free thinker.
He wanted to force you into God.
No, I mean, he was the guy that was he wanted all these incentives for sure.
Right.
And part of the incentive was just intellectually.
Don't you realize how good religion is for a nation?
You know, one of the things that Daniel Webster said later, Daniel Webster talked to Thomas Jefferson.
Daniel Webster was the second generation of American statesman.
And when he was a young guy, he sat down with an older Thomas Jefferson.
And Thomas Jefferson, this is recorded by Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson told Daniel Webster, a studious perusal of the Bible will make us better citizens, better parents, better husbands, better fathers.
He said, you need to get in the Bible to make you a better citizen.
So what happened was Daniel Webster turned around and said, whatever makes men good Christians makes them good citizens.
And sure enough, it's not the good Christians who are killing people or who are breaking up and looting stuff.
Good Christians make good citizens.
And that's what Franklin appealed to was, hey, this is great for behavior, makes you a good neighbor, makes you a nice person to get along with.
And so, I mean, that's Franklin.
So Franklin and Jefferson, you take those two, if that's your two least religious founding fathers, then what does that tell you about the other guys who are not the least religious?
Well, that's a good point.
I did want to ask you about specifically, you know, John Adams, most people know him, Paul Giamatti.
In 1796, he did say that the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.
And so I've seen people argue that because specifically, you know, you don't see Jesus, or Christianity, right, mentioned, or Jesus, specifically Jesus, because that's obviously the center of this, in the Constitution, or Declaration of Independence, that it proves what John Adams was saying, and that's in a very limited context, that it is in no way founded on the Christian religion, because to many people, they read that quote, and they say, well, that seems pretty cut and dry.
Yeah, what's wrong with that is they're wrong on that quote in so many ways.
That quote is Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli.
The Treaty of Tripoli happened in the 32 years that we were having a war on Muslim terrorism, quite frankly.
We went from 1784 to 1816 fighting Muslim terrorists.
By the time that George Washington got in office, 10% of the federal budget was being spent fighting Muslim terrorists.
For people who don't know, we did a segment on that in your spot there, where we went through the history of Leatherneck and the Navy.
That's right.
That was very interesting for me.
I thought they were wrist amulets, because people had very small necks back then.
They were.
Well, your average soldier in the American Revolution is between 5'1 and 5'4, and they only ate two meals a day.
Gosh, that's Danny DeVito.
So they were really small.
So what happens is, when we did not have a Navy back then, and we could not defend, defeat the Muslims until Thomas Jefferson built, John Adams built the Navy, Thomas Jefferson takes it and says, now we're going over to North Africa and the Mediterranean, we're going to thump their heads.
And so that's when they attacked.
Prior to that time, all we could do was negotiate with them to not attack us.
And so starting in 1774, Congress sent Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to London to negotiate with five Muslim ambassadors to get their nations to stop attacking Americans.
And so while they were there, after two years, Jefferson records it.
This is in the State Department records.
Jefferson and John Adams were still with the Muslim Ambassadors, the five of them, and Franklin had been sent somewhere else.
So Adams and Jefferson asked the Muslim Ambassadors, said, look, you trust us, we trust you.
We don't understand why you keep attacking Americans.
We've done nothing to you.
We have Muslims in America.
Why are you attacking us?
And Jefferson recorded it, sent it to the State Department, and he said, the ambassador told us, it's required by the Koran.
We have to.
You're infidels, we have to.
And so that was like the news to them.
That's when Jefferson went out and bought a Koran for the first time and read it.
Said, I can't believe you actually go to heaven by killing people.
Right.
That was before Hitchcock, so it was very scary.
Yeah.
It was.
So with all that's gone at that point in time, we're writing treaties back and forth with the Muslims.
How can we keep the Muslims from attacking us?
Because the Muslims in that period enslaved about 1.25 million people.
Capture, ship, men, slaves, including Americans.
And so we have these treaties to say, okay, You acknowledge that we're a Christian nation, we acknowledge that you're a Muslim nation, and we want you to understand we don't fight you because of your religion.
We fight you because you're a terrorist, but we won't fight you because you're a religion.
Well, the Muslims said, well, we fight you because you're Christians.
And so, in the treaties, we had this thing that says, look, we'll acknowledge you're a Muslim nation, you acknowledge we're a Christian nation, and that means that our Embassies can harbor the others.
In other words, in America, if you want to send a Muslim to your ambassador, they'll be safe in America.
But if we want to send a Christian to our embassy in Tripoli, then they need to be safe there.
And so what happened was, in the treaties, they acknowledged that both nations were, and what they did in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli says, the government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian religion.
Period.
No, it's not.
It's 82 words in that clause.
People only quote 17 words.
17 words, they put a period there.
It says, we're not founded on the Christian religion as having an inherent hostility toward Muslims, and on it goes.
This is not the Crusades.
We don't attack you because you're Muslim.
We attack you because you're terrorist.
Right.
So, it does not say the United States is not founded on the Christian religion.
It says we're not founded on the Christian religion that you saw in the Crusades.
That's not us.
And that's why you read the 82 words.
Now, here's the other fun part.
The actual Treaty of Tripoli, which is at the National Archives, does not have an Article 11 in it.
It doesn't even exist in the actual treaty.
That clause does not even appear.
It appeared in the later writings, but it does not appear in the treaty itself.
Try that one.
So why do you think that is so often quoted and why didn't it make it into the treaty itself?
The treaty was written in Arabic and there is no article 11, there is no clause saying that.
It was translated from Arabic into Italian and from Italian into English.
And the guy who translated it into Italian was a lousy translator and added a bunch of stuff that wasn't in any of the treaties.
Then we got it translated from Italian into English.
The English version translated what's in the Italian But it wasn't in the original treaty.
So what you have is in the United States in 1797, that treaty is printed for the U.S.
Senate, who then ratifies the treaty.
So it has an Article 11 in the Treaty of the United States the way the Senate saw it, but it's not in the original treaty.
But the way the Senate saw it had all 82 words there, not just 17 words.
And that's the difference.
Why don't we go to war with the Italians over getting a proofreader?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, the problem was, it was an American diplomat that did the translation, a guy named Joel Barlow, who didn't even speak Italian.
He thought he could read it or whatever.
Should have never let the Italians in.
I don't care what Rocky Marciano did.
Let's fast forward a little bit, because we don't have a ton of time.
So we know that now about the Founding Fathers, and I encourage everyone, of course, to go to wallbuilders.com.
If you do have the time to look up all these artifacts, it really kind of puts things in context.
But let's fast forward to, you know, the Pledge of Allegiance, because a lot of people have a problem with that and any mention of God.
And they say, well, that's not something that is really original to the United States.
It was meant to indoctrinate kids.
And I also think there's something that I'd like to get to, you know, why Americans stand before the Pledge of Allegiance, you know, hand on your heart.
Because kneeling has been very popular lately, kneeling to people, which we do not have a storied history of doing here in the United States.
So first, tell me about how the Pledge of Allegiance came about.
Let's start there.
The Pledge of Allegiance came about back in 1892, Francis Bellamy.
He thought at a time when we had so many immigrants coming in, we thought, this is a really good way to show our values.
And it's interesting, by the way, to see there's a history of immigration that would kind of blow people away.
But until the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in 1875 and 1876, immigration belonged totally to the states.
The first time the federal government gets involved is when the Supreme Court says they can, and you don't have the first federal immigration law until 1891.
So, what's happened is you have Ellis Island, all these folks coming in, all these immigrants coming in, and the Founding Fathers wrote about immigration, what you needed for good immigration, because of the 55 guys who framed the Constitution, seven of the guys were immigrants.
We had a lot of immigrants who actually framed the Constitution.
They were a nation of immigrants.
Matter of fact, that's one of the grievances in the Declaration, is King George III's trying to shut down our immigration, and that's a grievance against him.
Now, the deal is, to be an immigrant back at that point in time, the states controlled it, and you had a pledge of loyalty to the beliefs of the state, the beliefs of the nation, etc.
It wasn't just come in and be here.
Here's an interesting term for it.
Hebrew, I've been involved in a lot of hearings in Congress, etc., and one of the popular Bible verses that people like to use for open borders and open immigration is Leviticus 19, 34.
And it says, the alien or the stranger among you, you used to be strangers in Egypt, so you invite the stranger in, treat them the same as you would yourself.
And that's where people say, hey, the Bible says open immigration.
Talk to a rabbi.
I've got a rabbi.
I love him.
He's a great rabbi.
He says, no, no, no.
He says that word in Hebrew, he says in English, you only have one word.
It's alien or stranger.
He said in Hebrew, we have three words.
That word, which doesn't translate in English well, is the word proselyte.
It says if anyone comes to your nation and wants to be a proselyte, wants to become one of you, wants to adopt your laws and take your culture and take, he says, then you treat them just like they're a citizen.
Well, that's what we did with immigration.
If you come in and become an immigrant, we treat you like a citizen.
But you gotta come here to be an immigrant, not to be illegal.
Right.
If you're a communist, it's back to Ellis Island or Fire Island, right next to Judy Garland's slippers.
Yeah, right there with Darth Vader and everything else, too.
So that's, yeah, it's very interesting that that word, so three words in Hebrew.
There are three words in Hebrew, and one of them is a natural born citizen, one is an immigrant citizen, and one is what we would call a green card holder.
They're there for a job, but they still have to live by the laws of the land, but they're not there to become a citizen.
So, all that to say, we're in a big immigration time in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s.
And Francis Bellamy said, hey, what better thing to do than to sit forth a belief of what we as Americans have.
This is something every immigrant can learn.
We as Americans believe it.
It helps them assimilate into the culture.
And so that's what it was.
Now, the way we got under God in it, really interesting.
When Eisenhower became president after having done all he did in World War One, then World War Two, D-Day, everything, he becomes first NATO commander after the war, he becomes president of Columbia University, now he's president of the United States.
He said the night before that he was thinking about how secular America has become, that it's becoming way too secular, and he was really concerned about that.
He said, I don't know what to do because I'm not a preacher, so I can't preach a sermon.
But as he was going to inauguration, he thought, I know what I can do.
I can pray.
And so if you look on YouTube, Eisenhower actually praises on inaugural prayer.
It was not on the program.
He just prayed.
We actually own that original prayer here.
I mean, it's handwritten prayer.
We've got it's really cool.
So he gets in and he starts the national day, the congressional prayer breakfast,
which first Thursday of every February, about 8,000 people gather from 140 nations,
leaders across the world for the congressional prayer breakfast.
Now, really quickly, you say Eisenhower did, was that, you just mean by executive order
or kind of fill people in on that?
He worked with Congress on that.
He worked to establish that with Congress, also worked with Congress to get a prayer room
put in the capital of the United States.
He also is the guy who said, we need, and God, we trust on our money, all of our money.
And he said, while we're at it, let's make that the national motto.
Under God came about a really different way.
He was attending church at New York Street Presbyterian Church.
The pastor was a Scottish immigrant, had just got to America from Scotland, George Dockery.
And we actually have a sermon, you can see it on the website, the sermon he preached in 1954.
He said, I'm new to your country, he said, but when my kids came home from school this week, he said, I've been here a few months, my kids came home from school and I said, what'd you guys do at school today?
And they said, well, we do the same thing we always do.
He said, well, I don't know what American schools do, what'd you do?
He said, well, we had a prayer and we had a scripture and we said the Pledge of Allegiance and we, you said the what?
We said the Pledge of Allegiance.
What's that?
Well, we pledge to the American flag.
The American flag has a pledge?
Yes.
What is it?
And so they recited, pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
He says, I've been thinking about that pledge all week.
And now this is at the time when the Cold War is really going hard We're in the Korean War.
We've got all the communism stuff.
He said, I've been thinking, he said, that pledge could be said by the Soviets because they claim to be a republic with liberty and justice for all.
He said, that claim could be made by the Chinese.
He said, that claim could be made by any nation in the world.
He said, but America is not any nation.
He said, what makes America different from all other nations is you guys have God.
You guys really ought to put under God in your pledge of allegiance.
Well, sitting on the front row, you've got Eisenhower and senators and representatives in church, and guess what happened on Monday morning?
They introduced the bill and said, that's great!
Let's put God in the pledge, because that's our core value.
It's what makes us different from other nations.
That's how we got under God in the pledge.
Now, we can actually go back to the Star-Spangled Banner written in 1814, because The fourth stanza says, and in God is our trust.
So we had under God back then.
That was a state motto for states like Rhode Island since way back in the 1600s.
That motto, under God and in God we trust, appeared on a whole bunch of stuff before it went in the pledge.
So it's not a brand new innovation, but the way it came about is kind of a fun story.
It is, yeah, and it's interesting that we don't have that in the American National Anthem, but they do say, God keep our land in Canada, you know, between Blackfish.
So let me ask you this.
Kneeling has been a big thing with the flag, right, with the national anthem.
We stand.
And I think that's a contrast that people maybe miss.
Why do we stand at the Pledge of Allegiance?
Let me ask you this first, kind of going back, so I know we're doing a little bit of looper here.
Were the Founding Fathers, did they ever, or is there a historical precedent where they would kneel for other men, particularly other men ruling over them?
They would kneel for God, and they would kneel in church.
Other than that, you're not going to find them kneeling.
You'll find Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge, and as an Anglican, he usually stood when he prayed.
That's like sackcloth and ashes.
When an Anglican kneels, that's big stuff for Washington to kneel.
But no, we didn't kneel to men, and that was a big deal.
They're not going to kneel to King George III.
uh... statues came down that indicated any kind of subservient we were not
serviced anybody we stood on our own two feet right so there was nothing really and that's interesting
symbolism to me because uh... and obviously people bring up slavery in the
injustices and we've done an entire segment on that i encourage people to go
uh... to go watch it even the idea of the old uh... party switch i
I think we've done a segment on that.
But anyone who is at a football game or anyone or any of these protests who says we're kneeling in protest of the flag, I don't think they understand the context in that that was a conscious decision, the Founding Fathers, to not kneel before any man, but only to God.
And when you are standing at the Pledge of Allegiance, that's saying that as Americans, we are not subservient to any other man.
The President Or King George.
And I think it's an irony that's lost on people.
The standing is already a figurative flip the bird to some kind of authoritarian figure.
And kneeling is going back to what we left.
Yeah, it is.
It's going the wrong direction.
You know, it's designed to show some disrespect, and this is a little sidebar off to the side.
So many of the guys who actually suffered racial injustice at a level that we'll never know, actually suffered the oppression, actually suffered slavery, actually were persecuted and beat because they were just black.
Guys like that, that fought in the Civil War, Folks don't understand that seven black patriots got the Medal of Honor for not allowing the American flag to be disrespected.
They were so loyal to the flag because it was the other flag that they didn't like.
It wasn't the American flag.
That's the one that brought all the liberty.
It's the other flag that they had trouble with.
And so the quotes by black soldiers in the Civil War and their absolute admiration for the flag, that that's what gave them hope and optimism.
It's the other flag that was the oppression of slavery, you know, Confederate flag or whatever you want to say.
So these guys, to have Medal of Honor winners, if you watch the movie Glory, but if you read the real story, he got shot four times because he would not let the flag touch the ground, be disrespected.
That was four shots.
Right.
And so I don't think we understand history, even in the racial sense, Sure.
where the respect for the flag was. The early congressmen, the first 13 congressmen, seven
of them had been slaves five years before. I mean, what a change to be a slave and five
years later you're sitting in Congress. Sure. I mean, it's not. And no one's saying that we're
a perfect nation and with a perfect history, of course, because we've talked about that at great
length in the past and I encourage people to go watch it.
But we stood so that we stood and it took us a little while that everybody could stand figuratively
here. That's right.
That's right.
We ended slavery.
But keep in mind, if we hadn't stood at all, everyone, black, white, red, yellow, would still be kneeling.
Good point.
I think we're going to leave it on that.
Wallbuilders.com.
Mr. Barton, thank you so much for taking the time.
I always learn something, and by something I mean a lot, because I know very little.
Thank you, sir.
We appreciate it.
We hope that you'll be back soon.
Thanks, brother.
Have a happy Independence Day.
Absolutely.
Everyone else, too.
I think we're supposed to say fourth because Independence is a little iffy.
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