Roger Marsh: The United States has a rich Christian heritage dating back to its earliest days. Many of our founding fathers were committed believers and purposefully integrated faith into the framework of America. Their deeply held beliefs in divine providence stemmed from a devoted clergy of pastors. Preachers like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield were largely instrumental in the first great awakening. They saw themselves not only as biblical teachers and caretakers, but as major influencers on the culture. The ideas of freedom and independence that defined America's revolution originated from the pulpit.
Those 18th century ministers are our focus today here on Family Talk through a fascinating presentation from historian David Barton. Now, before we hear that speech, let's listen to Dr. Dobson's thoughts about this broadcast when it aired previously.
Dr. Dobson: I've been looking forward to this program for some time because I heard it delivered live not long ago, and it is a vintage presentation by David Barton. It's appropriate that we devote our program today to this discussion of how our early leaders laid the foundation for this country with such enduring wisdom and discernment. God had to have helped them, and what they did, our constitution and our founding documents have guided us now for more than 230 years and as we will hear in a few minutes, the hand of God was evident in everything they did.
Well, let me introduce David Barton to our listeners. He's going to talk about the Black Robed Regiment, and that is the name that the British gave to the American clergy during the struggle to establish our new country. David is a founder and president of WallBuilders. It's a national pro-family organization, and he holds a bachelor of arts degree from Oral Roberts University and he has done extensive research on the early days of our nation and he's written a number of books on the topic.
I believe in this man, and I've found his perspectives to be historically accurate and reliable. He also has a very large library of original books that go back to the 1700s and some of the books in the 1800s, and he has studied these texts intensively.
Roger Marsh: Well, Mr. Barton does do a great deal of research into the topics that he is passionate about, so let's hear some of his insightful words about the Black Robed Regiment right now on Family Talk.
David Barton: In so many ways, we have been blessed as a nation and if you look at the absolute ways that we are blessed in our prosperity, 4% of the world's population, 31% of the world's wealth. Our GDP and our stability, no other nation spent 235 years under the same piece of paper, all this comes together to create what we call American exceptionalism. Now, this is where we get it a little different today. Most people can't define what this is, it's a blessing that we enjoy, it's something that God has given us, there's a lot of reasons for that, but they really can't define it in a tangible way.
Because of that, when we look in textbooks about what creates it, we say, "Well, kids who are the leaders responsible for what we enjoy in America?" Invariably, we'll go to our political leaders, we'll say, "Well, it's folks like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, John Adams." There's just a number of political folks they'll go to, which I find fascinating because when you do go to John Adams, and you read his writings, when he was asked this question, 40 years after the American revolution, whole new generation's come along, they didn't see what happened, they said, "Where'd all this come from?" He said, "Well, if you want to know who's behind what you enjoy today" he said, "Right up top, you have to have folks like the Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper. He said, "You've got to include the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, you've also got folks like the Reverend Dr. Charles Chauncy, and don't forget the Reverend George Whitfield."
All these guys were a part of who he points to and today we might know who Whitfield is, but the chances that we can say anything about Cooper or Mayhew or Chauncey are slim to none. Now, why in the world would John Adams had pointed to a bunch of preachers and say, "These are the guys behind what we enjoy today" and it's very simple. If you go to the Declaration of Independence, when you look at every single right that is set forth in the Declaration of Independence and rights that had never before been written down, when you look at those rights, what's striking is, historians have documented every single one of the rights set forth in Declaration of Independence had been preached from the American pulpit prior to 1763.
Now, what that means is the Declaration of Independence is nothing more than a list of the sermons we've been hearing at church in the last 20 years leading up to the revolution. We don't think of the declaration in that sense, but we do - we're very blessed at WallBuilders in that we own about 100,000 documents from before 1812, and I own thousands and thousands and thousands of these founding sermons and sermons preached over the last 300 years in America. When you look at them, there are some fascinating... Because one of the things that had a huge impact was what was called an election sermon, and they created what we now know as the Black Regiment.
The Black Regiment was what the British called the preachers in the American revolution. It didn't matter whether you were Catholic or Protestant, if you were black or white, Hispanic, everybody wore those black clerical robes. The British said if it hadn't been for the Black Regiment, if it hadn't been for the clergy, they said that America would still be a happy British colony, and it was the preachers that they blamed. Because of that, they singled preachers out. See, we don't get that today, that the church was responsible, that they were the ones targeted by the British, but that's literally what happened, and it's because of the sermons we preached.
I mentioned that election sermon, and the first recorded election in America is in 1619. Now, that election that happened in America in 1619, at that point, we say, "You know? we believe the government's ordained by God, and as we look at government that is ordained by God, we believe out of Romans, and out of 1 Peter and out of Titus and Timothy, all these other places say it's ordained by God, so the question is, what kind of government did He give us here in this country?" The answer was self-government, we get to choose our own leaders, out of Exodus 18:21.
Starting in 1633, what they did was they started preaching an annual sermon that was called an election sermon. Once a year, churches got together and they said, "Look, here's the government that God's given us, He's told us to choose our own leaders, here's what you need to remember, and it was passages like Exodus 18:21, Deuteronomy 1:15 and 16, Acts six and seven and Proverbs 29, all these other passages that talk to us about how to choose our leaders and the right type of leaders to choose. From the very beginning, we had these sermons, these sermons went for 270 years. This is the longest traditional form of sermon in America, this was a sermon, not preached every election, but preached every single year.
Nehemiah, trying to rebuild the city, get it back to God, Nehemiah dealt with economic laws, military laws, he dealt with marriage laws, he dealt with immigration laws, he dealt with education, he dealt with every conceivable issue. We used to be able to say, "Hey guys, as you're looking at legislation, here's guidance from the Bible." Now, see if we tried to do something like that today, you know like I know they would scream to high heaven that, "That's unconstitutional, you can't do that." Timeout, it's the guys who wrote the constitution who were doing this. How is it unconstitutional when they're the ones who were actually doing this?
Now, we've got all these sermons, but we used to preach on a whole bunch of topics I've never even thought about preaching on. Let me just take you through some of the old topics, this is The Cry of Sodom, this happens to be the occasion of homosexuality being discovered in 1674 in a community. It was in the news, therefore it's in the pulpit. You will find the sermons I'm going to show you, whatever was in the news we dealt with in the pulpit, because we wanted to make sure there was a biblical perspective in everybody's head about what was going on in the news. If it's in the news, that's going to be a secular view, you need to know how God thinks about these things that are in the news.
Here's one on sodomy, here's a sermon from 1681, a sermon on judges. Why on judges? Because that's a really big deal, Isaiah 1:26 says that the righteousness of a nation is dependent on the type of judges you have in the nation and that's certainly the case with us. It's not legislators that are telling us we've got to do abortion on demand, it's judges who've told us. It's not legislators who say we can't have prayer at graduation, it's judges who've told us. It's not legislators who say, "You can't have 10 commandments" it's judges. The whole issue of righteousness is judges and that's why whether it's Psalms 2:10-12 or 2 Chronicles 19:6,7, whether it's Ezra 7:25, all these passages deal with judges. We had sermons on judges because that's a biblical issue, it's not a political issue, that's a biblical issue.
Now, what happens is we preach biblical issues and today they say, "That's a political issue." No, the Bible was there before government was there, so we precede them. We can talk about these issues before American government ever popped up. Here's one from 1755, Religion and Patriotism, the Constituents of a Good Soldier. This is a sermon that was preached in the French and Indian war as a group of soldiers were being deployed to go out to battle. Stop, let's have a sermon, let's see what God says about soldiers. What's the proper role of soldiers, what's the proper role of war? It's not that God's for war or against war, there are biblical principles, we used to look at all that type of stuff.
You may have heard now that one of the things we have done this year because of a lawsuit filed, we no longer teach what's called the Christian Just War Theory. That's what they taught in California, at Pendleton and elsewhere. You've got soldiers going in, you need to know what a just war is because you want to be able to handle your conscience. If you have to do something, you want to know that you were on the side of... But we don't want to teach that anymore because that's a biblical perspective. You know how hard that is on soldiers, not to know what a just or unjust war is? Just to go kill because somebody says so? See, we used to have a biblical perspective on how to go to war and what the Bible says about it.
In the same way, here's a sermon from 1766, this is a lot of fun. Discourse is another word they used for sermon, this sermon is preached by the Reverend Dr. Charles Chauncy, one of those guys singled out by John Adams. You see here, Good News From a Far Country, you'll recognize that from Proverbs 25:25, look what the sermon is about. This is a sermon that you see here on the occasion of the repeal of the Stamp Act. Just out of curiosity, when's the last time you've done a sermon on a tax repeal? Probably been a long time. Why would we do that? It's not that we're opposed to taxes, we're told in Romans 13:6, the reason we pay taxes is so the government can bear the sword in our defense. We know that Jesus told Peter, "You go catch that fish, when you get the coin out of his mouth, you pay your tax, you pay my tax."
Jesus was not anti-tax, the Bible's not anti-tax, but it is so good on taxation that it tells us what type of taxes are good and what type of taxes are bad. See, these are very practical things, but the Bible deals with them. For some reason, we've quit messing with the practical things out of the Bible, but that's why we had sermons back years ago about things like taxes and things like economics, because the Bible deals with that. Here's another sermon, this next sermon, A Voice of Warning to Christians, on the ensuing election of a president of the United States, 1800. This election between John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, the preacher stood in the pulpit and said, "All right, we've got two guys running for office out here, now this guy belongs to this party, he believes this, this guy belongs to this party, they say this, here's what the Bible says."
Based on the Bible, there's no way a Christian can support this guy and this party, real simple stuff. Now, we would never think about doing that today. IRS 501(c)(3), all that kind of stuff is a real problem, but why did we do it for 350 years? And if you don't know, we only stopped this in 1954 through a little amendment called the Johnson amendment. A single line writer added to an Appropriation's Bill that said "If you're a 501(c)(3) you can't talk about this stuff anymore." Now, we did it for 350 years, how come we did that? Because there's precedent all over the Bible. Did you know Jesus could not stand in an American pulpit today and say what He said in the New Testament without getting in trouble from our government?
What a strange thing, in this land of free speech and liberty, Jesus couldn't even say what He said in the New Testament. See, that's why we're getting to the point now and we've done this now for four straight years for Alliance Defense Fund and others. There's four constitutional violations for saying pastors have to be controlled by government for what they say in the pulpit, nobody's ever sued the government on that. We've been trying to sue the government for four years, but they won't take the bait, they won't come after any preacher. That's because no preacher in American history has lost his 501(c)(3) for anything he said in the pulpit. For the last four years, we've been saying really big things from the pulpit, begging the IRS to come after us, we can't even get them to come after us.
The IRS knows like we know that if this gets in the court, it's going to be unconstitutional. They would rather have a few hundred pastors say anything they want than have 370,000 pastors find out that you really can't regulate what's said in the pulpit. Now, I can take you through hundreds of others, but the question is, why in the world would we preach such sermons for all these hundreds of years in America? The answer's real simple, it's because of 2 Timothy 3:16 - 17. You'll recognize the first part of this passage, it says in 2 Timothy, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." As far as I'm concerned, that's the most important doctrine in the Bible because that's what tells us the Bible's inherent, inspired and infallible. If the Bible's not true, you can't believe anything else in it, so you have to start with that as a primary doctrine, and then you can believe the other truth that's there.
But verse 17 tells us why God gave us an inspired Scripture. Why did God give us an inspired Scripture? And the answer is very simple, verse 17 says, "That the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work." Now, the word I would choose to emphasize there is the word "every" because I think our definition of the word "every" is a whole lot smaller than God's definition of the word "every". I don't mean that in a slighting way, I mean that because our culture has changed the way we think. It particularly has come out of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. Starting back in 1947, the court said, "Religion's a really, really important thing, you guys, it's so important you've got an entire first amendment to protect your religion, but here's what we need you to do. From now on, we need you to practice your religion in private. We need it in church or home, we don't need out it in public.
"If you love the nativity scene, you put it up on the mantel at Christmas time, that's great, let's just not have it out in the city park. Man, if you like to pray, you pray all you want to, just do it before you go to the football game, let's not pray at football games anymore. If you think the 10 commandments are great, put one up in the foyer of the church, let's just not have it in courtrooms anymore. What's happened is for 50 years now, we've been told that your faith is important, you just got to practice it at home or church, you can't practice it out in public.
Now, the result of that has been, that it's changed the way we think. I love the passage out of Romans 12, verse one and two, in the King James, it says, "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." I love it in the Phillips translation. The Phillips translation says, "Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold." In a very real sense, we have let the secular world tell us what our role in the world is to be. It's the very opponents and enemies that we have, have defined the role of the church, and that's not the way it's supposed to be. That literally was not the way it had been. You go back to John Adams and the comment he made that he thought was so cool about the American revolution. He said "The pulpits have thundered," literally. That's what shaped America and that's why the British, again, called them the Black Robe Regiment, the Black Regiment, because of those black clerical robes.
It was the preachers who shaped the way everybody thought, the way we went at policy, the way we looked at everything. Now, within that framework, 100 years after the revolution, there was a church historian named Bishop Charles Galloway, who went back and studied all these preachers in the revolution, and this was his conclusion. I love what he said about them, he said, "Mighty men they were, men of iron nerve and strong hand and unblanched cheek and heart aflame," and I don't think that's the way The New York Times describes preachers today, but that's the way preachers were described back in previous generations. He continued to say, "God needed not reeds shaken by the wind or men clothed in soft raiment, Matthew 11. He needed heroes of hardihood and lofty courage, and such were the sons of the mighty who responded to the divine call."
Amazing how many of our military generals were actually pastors leading people out to defend their rights. See, this is what we had, and, significantly historians from that period, for example, you take Reverend J.T. Headley, great historian, wrote a great book. We have it on our website, you just download the whole book and read it, it's called The Pastors and Clergy of the American Revolution, really cool stuff about these guys. He talked about them, he said, "The patriotic clergy of the revolution were the soundest statesmen of the times." And that was really true. You look at that document in which we've governed ourselves for 235 years, you take the declaration, where did they get all the ideas? Notice what Malachi 2:7 says, "The priest's lips should keep knowledge, and the people should seek the law in his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts."
People used to say, "Hey, we don't understand the law, I'm going to go ask the pastor." Really? Today we'd say, "I don't understand the law, I need to go ask an attorney." Back then we understood whether the law was good or bad based on what the Bible said about that, so people went to the pastor to get statesmanship, to learn laws, to learn legislation, to learn government. The Bible is the source of all that, and that's what you see when you look at the declaration because of the 56 guys who signed the declaration, 29 of these guys had seminary or Bible school degrees. Imagine that, more than half the guys who signed the declaration where ministry trained guys. We used to understand the biblical application in every aspect of life.
If you look in 1776, after they did the declaration, they now had a need to create state governments because we've abolished 13 colonial governments, no more rural governors, we've got to have state governments. It was the preachers who were writing the constitutions. These are all noted preachers who wrote state constitutions in the early colonies. As you move out from that, and you look even at what happened in the constitution itself, we have 55 delegates who got together at the constitutional convention. Most people could never mention all the preachers that are in there, all these preachers in there. There was a time they went for five weeks and they were having fights and couldn't get along and whatever, and that's when Franklin called for prayer. Washington records in his diary that while they didn't do prayer, they took three days off and went to church. They specifically went to church at the church of the Reverend William Rogers. William Rogers had these guys in church and he prayed a prayer over them.
That prayer is so significant it appeared on the front pages of the newspapers of the day. This says, "As this is a period, O Lord, big with events, impenetrable by any human scrutiny, we fervently recommended to thy Fatherly notice that august Body assembled in this city who compose our federal convention." He's praying over the whole constitutional convention right there. He says, "Will it please thee, thou eternal I am, to favor them from day to day with thy immediate presence? Be thou their wisdom and their strength, enable them to devise such measures as may prove happily instrumental for healing all division." He's just praying, everybody knew that they were fighting and couldn't get along and he said, "God, heal this, bring them... "
They got back together and only 10 weeks later finished the constitution. Strikingly, if you look through that document, it is amazing how many biblical clauses appear, and constitutional clauses, biblical verses and phrases, you'll find them through so many concepts, the founding fathers pointed to Bible verses as the source of those concepts. See, today we're, "No, the government's secular." That's that compartmentalization again, they never believed it was secular. They looked to God to be included in everything they did and that's where so many of those great ideas came from, was right out of the Scriptures. What you find is after we finished the constitution, you need to get it ratified, you've got to send it off to 13 colonies and they got to...
Where do you send it to ratify it? You send it to the State Capitol. No, you're in Massachusetts, you're in North Carolina, you're in another state. You know where the state ratification convention was held for the federal constitution? It was held in churches. Really? And in each state you had to elect specific delegates to go together and ratify the constitution. 44 of the delegates elected to ratify the US constitution were ministers of the gospel. There was nothing in their mind to cut ministers out. It was because of ministers that we had this thing, it was because the church was involved.
Now, after you get the constitution done, you've got the first Congress, now you need a Bill of Rights, so we come back with The Bill of Rights, those first 10 amendments to the constitution and it's amazing how many preachers were in that first Congress that helped frame this Bill of Rights. They gave us the first amendment, not because it guarantees separation of churches and state, because there's no such thing. It guarantees the free exercise of religion. They weren't trying to secularize the public square, they wanted to make sure that you could include God in those areas. This literally is what we have and when you look at who we are today and if it hadn't been for the church, we wouldn't have the country. Now, we don't teach that much in history anymore, but the documents are really clear.
Let me close out by taking you back to this thing about, we can't let the world squeeze us into its own mold. We've got biblical precedent, we actually have historical precedent, we have lots of constitutional precedent, and then we got secular precedent. It's the secular stuff that's overriding the constitutional, overriding the historical and overriding the biblical, and we can't let them squeeze us into that mold. I want to close out with a comment from Reverend Charles Finney. You may remember him, he was born under the founding fathers, grew up listening to the speeches of George Washington, John Adams, and all those guys. He was very significant in the second great awakening, that great American revival.
As he saw the civil war approaching and he was so involved in civil rights, so involved against slavery, so involved in abolition, and as he saw the civil war approach and he wanted to remind the preachers in his generation, "You've got this conflict coming, the church cannot sit on the sidelines. The church is what drives the culture." Look what he told preachers in his day, he said, "Brethren, our preaching will bear its legitimate fruits." He says that "If immorality prevails in the land, the fault's ours in a great degree." He says, "If there's a decay of conscience, the pulpit is responsible for it." He says, "If the public press lacks moral discrimination, the pulpit is responsible for it." He says, "If the church is degenerate and worldly, the pulpit's responsible for it. If the world loses its interest in religion, the pulpit is responsible for it. If Satan rules in our halls of legislation, the pulpit is responsible for it."
He says, "If our policies become so corrupt, the very foundations of our government ready to fall away, the pulpit's responsible for it." He said, "Let us not ignore this fact, my dear brethren, but let us lay it to heart and be thoroughly awake to our responsibilities in respect to the morals of this nation." It comes back to us, we're the guys that were there to create this thing at the beginning and if it gets away from us, it won't be their fault. It'll be our fault because we far outnumber any secular forces out there, but if we muzzle ourselves and stay silent and won't get engaged in this thing, we've just giving it away.
Roger Marsh: That's certainly a challenging end and a sobering reminder from David Barton to conclude this Family Talk broadcast. The church and its pastors are ultimately responsible for the integrity of this nation. Congregations everywhere must step up and proudly stand against this morally decaying culture. You've been listening to a gripping presentation from David Barton about America's Christian foundation today here on Family Talk. It's incredible to me how instrumental God and the Bible were to our founding fathers. Unfortunately, many in our society deny that history and are attempting to blot out Judeo-Christian values. Let's listen to Dr. Dobson's analysis of this struggle, which was recorded when this program last aired.
Dr. Dobson: We really do need to pay attention to what's happening in this country. I am appalled at the ways in which the name of God or any mention of Him is being removed from our culture and society. That started back in 1962 with the Supreme Court's removal of school prayer, and then Bible reading and the 10 commandments on the wall and from that time to this, there's just been a concerted effort to remove God from our courtrooms and our currency and even our pledge of allegiance. There's no limit to what those who are opposed to the Christian faith, such as the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation and many others, want to do.
I do hope our listeners will contact us for information about David Barton's organization, WallBuilders, to find out ways that they can get involved in protecting religious liberty in this country because it's hanging by a thread today.
Roger Marsh: Well, friend, you can visit today's broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org to learn more about David Barton and his organization. WallBuilders is an excellent resource for you and your family to get to know America's true history. That's drjamesdobson.org and then tap onto the broadcast page. Do you want to know more about the threats to our Christian values and our heritage? Then be sure to contact us for a copy of Family Talks broadcast collection titled America's Spiritual Civil War. This two disc set includes Dr. Dobson's meaningful interviews with conservative commentators Dennis Prager and David Horowitz. These conversations will open your eyes to the all-out assault against religious liberty and our nation's Christian foundation.
Request this broadcast collection by calling 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825 or you can go online to drjamesdobson.org and click on the resources tab. That's drjamesdobson.org, and then click on the resources tab. Well, that's all the time we have for today, thanks so much for joining us and for faithfully supporting this ministry. Tune it again Monday for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend, everyone.
Speaker 4: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.