The WallBuilders Show
The WallBuilders Show is a daily journey to examine today's issues from a Biblical, Historical and Constitutional perspective. Featured guests include elected officials, experts, activists, authors, and commentators.
The WallBuilders Show
How Spiritual Awakenings Can Shape Public Life
A billion people watched a memorial defined by bold forgiveness, and something shifted. Church attendance spiked, Bible sales soared, and campus arenas from Ohio State to Florida State filled with students lining up for baptism. We take that momentum seriously and ask the harder question history demands: when hearts change, do cultures follow?
We walk through the evidence: record Easter services, mass beach baptisms, and stadium crusades drawing thousands. Then we hold it against the long arc of American revivals. The First and Second Great Awakenings shaped ideals of liberty and fueled abolition, yet later waves overlapped with the Progressive Era, when eugenics spread through state laws and media reframed faith as anti-science. The Scopes trial’s legal reality lost to a narrative that still echoes. Meanwhile, the Frankfurt School’s critical theory crossed the Atlantic, took root in elite universities, and helped redirect the formation of generations.
Our aim is clarity and responsibility. Renewal is real when it transforms not only private lives but public life—schools, laws, media, and the habits of a free people. That means pairing conviction with craft: teaching doctrine and civic duty, mentoring Gen Z leaders, building durable local institutions, and telling true stories about human dignity, science, and freedom. If we steward this moment, today’s surge can mature into a culture that protects conscience and nurtures virtue.
If this conversation sharpens your thinking, share it with a friend, subscribe for the next installments, and leave a review with one action you plan to take this week. Your voice helps turn momentum into a movement.
Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's the WallBuilders Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. We've got a great program for you, not only today, but tomorrow and Friday as well. I mentioned it briefly on Monday when we were talking about how great the Pro Family Legislators Conference was over the weekend, and how David Barton just always brings an opening presentation to kind of say, okay, let's understand what time it is. We want to be men and women of Issachar that understand the times and know what to do. And so we want to bring that to you, our listeners, as well. This was intended for legislators, but it really fits for all of us. We're all citizens of this great country, and we've all got a lot of work to do to rebuild liberty. So we're going to jump right in right here with David Barton teaching at the Pro Family Legislators Conference, opening night, getting these legislators ready for several days of preparation for truly rebuilding liberty in our country.
David Barton [00:00:57] I'm gonna try to cover some things that are going in the United States right now and where I think we might be headed. It's hard to see what's coming, but because of knowing history, it's a little easier to predict accurately sometimes. So I'm gonna go back to something that happened several weeks ago, the murder of Charlie Kirk. That point in time after that we had the memorial, and in that memorial, you had people like Rob McCoy who got up and gave a very clear Christian message to people that may not necessarily have been familiar with Christian faith. And it was followed by so many others. Marco Rubio, which was not expected, and he gave it just as clear as as a pastor would. And then following him, you had Pete Hegseth, who was very clear about his Christian faith as well. And then even J.D. Vance, who said, you know, in the last ten days since Charlie's murder, I've talked to Jesus Christ more than I have in my whole life. And if you don't know, J.D. Vance had been an atheist for a long time. He came to faith late in life, so he's still fairly young in that regard. But in talking to the leadership of Turning Point afterwards, was with them a couple weeks afterwards, and they said that with all the live casts that went on, they had more than one billion people watched that that event. So that is the greatest size audience in history. And as you look at what happened, you remember even when Erica got up and specifically forgave the man that murdered her husband. And that was a that was a real hard thing to do and say now from the Christian faith, that's what we're supposed to do. And it's interesting, I saw an article just a few weeks later by Tim Allen. Now, Tim Allen, I enjoy his movies. He's a comedian. And he talked about the fact that someone had murdered his dad 61 years earlier. And he said that when he saw Erica forgive the guy who had murdered her husband, that he realized he needed to forgive the guy who'd murdered his dad, and he did. And he said that when he did, he picked up a Bible and started reading. He said he'd been reading the Bible for the last seven days. He said, This is really awesome stuff. Yeah, exactly. So we know that so many people came to faith as a result of what happened that that morning. We know statistically, in the several weeks after that memorial event, church attendance went up by 15% nationally. And we're talking tens of millions of people who suddenly came back to faith in some way or at least explored it. You had the church attendance particularly visible among young people. So the number of young people coming back into church after having seen the secular move we've had the last several decades, you know, America's been in a dry spot for quite a while. And I mean, literally, we need a revival. I mean, that's something we talked about, we prayed about, you hear it in in churches across the country. And and praying for revival, which a lot of people have done ha have been doing that. A good question is, are we seeing a revival? And I want to show you just some headlines. That might suggest something interesting is going on. Even before Charlie Kirk, if we're back up to the start of of this year, we saw record attendance at Easter on church services. And that's been declining for a number of years. And then suddenly it turned around and shot up really high. Record attendance. In the same way, we saw Bible sales take off. Some reports say up to 71% increase in Bible sales, not only in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, which they need a revival really badly as well. They seem to have forgotten a lot of their faith. And then also we're seeing a lot of things going on across college campuses. I started looking for headlines and just sat down, spent a little time on the internet, just cruising for headlines and found some really interesting trends going on. I want to take you some of these revival headlines. A group called Unite Us, it works on college campuses, and they were working to get these students away from the secular progressive kind of stuff they're in and more in a Christian direction. And so if you look at Ohio State, they had 9,000 kids gathered at Ohio State in 2000, those kids decided to become Christians at that event. That's a lot at a secular university with the kind of education professors you often have. Mississippi State was 6,000 there at Mississippi State. Purdue was 4,500. University of Georgia, massive event. You see the arena there. Revival at at Florida State. Florida State is considered the number two party school in the United States. And they had so many hundred kids that wanted to. Come to faith and get baptized and they actually baptize them in that fountain out in front of the school, which is kind of interesting. They're a cross-state rival with with University of Florida, six thousand kids were at that event. When you go to University of West Virginia, nearly a thousand, five thousand there. And and nearly all of these you're seeing somewhere between 10 and 20% responding to a call to come to faith. And so at West Virginia University, it was a thousand that came to faith. There were 10,000 at Texas AM, there were 9,000 University of Oklahoma, there were 8,000 University of Tennessee, 10,000 University of Arkansas. These are not small events, or small gatherings. And this is not what you would expect among the young people that we see so often with very different interest and and no interest in faith. And suddenly something's going on that they're finding an interest in faith. So question then becomes are we seeing a revival? I think there's other indications as well. In terms of baptism, which is a way that someone can confirm their faith when when they come to faith, we're seeing events that are unbelievable in their size. One event in Florida, 2,000 people got baptized in a single event. There was Baptize America, 28,000 people got baptized in one weekend as a result of Baptize America in a single beach event in California, 12,000 in a single event in California. So mass baptisms across the U.S. It's like the churches they'll do, you know, one or two or three or five or ten, whatever, maybe a month or a Sunday, but now we're seeing mass baptisms with thousands. And in the same way, Greg Laurie, who went into a very secular arena, at Angel Stadium, and actually sixty five hundred people said, Hey, I want to become a Christian. I've never been a Christian. I want to move in the direction of faith. You see the same kind of things even in Portland with thirty-five thousand people going to a stadium for a religious event, and thirty two hundred people deciding they want to make that decision to to live a Christian life. So there's a lot going on, and you probably didn't see much of this in the news at all. This is certainly not what interests the media, but yet the stories are out there. And if you go and just do a little serving, you find these stories. So are we in a revival? There's some more indications I would point to from headlines. This one, a major spiritual shift. Why are more and more young men flocking to church? Church is cool again, and Gen Z men are leading the way. Young men are leading a religious resurgence. The quiet revival, huge increase in young people attending church. The demographic is different. And by the way, George Barnes a good friend. He's been here a number of times. And George Barna, Barna Polling, which George has one and Barna Polling is what he used to run. And Barna Polling has now documented that on church on any given Sunday now, the largest single demographic group at church is no longer the white haired people, it is the young men, Gen Gen Y and Gen Z young men. So, are we seeing a revival? Well, I would say, based on what's going here, that yeah, we're seeing a revival. I think this is what a lot of Americans have prayed for and wanted for, a lot of Christians have prayed for and wanted for. But there's a question that goes with this, and that question is do revivals impact the culture? I mean, you got a lot of people coming to faith. Does that really make a difference in the area in which we live? And the answer to that is, well, let's go back and check history. Let's see what's happened. And as you go back in history, there are historians would point to about eight major recognized revivals in American history. Maybe there's more, but these are the ones on which historians can agree. And so you have the the first Great Awakening. We'll talk a little more about that later. First Great Awakening goes from 1730 to 1770. It is what set up the American war for Independence and American Independence or birth birth of our government. That is key to what happened. And so George Whitfield and Samuel Davies and people like Jonathan Mayhew and Samuel Cooper and Gilbert Tennet and Jonathan Edwards, I mean, just key names in that in that revival or Great Awakening. Then there's the second Great Awakening, which runs from the 1790s through about the 1820s. This is where you start seeing the rise of anti slavery sentiment in America, and so much starts shifting with policy here in the
Rick Green [00:09:34] Alright, quick break, everybody, we'll be right back. You've been listening to David Barton at the Pro Family Legislators Conference, and right now you're listening to the WallBuilders Show.
Rick Green [00:10:46] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. We've got a if you just tuning in or caught us in the middle of the program, what you've been listening to is David Barton speaking at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. That's the one we do once a year, bringing in state reps and senators from across the nation, exchanging ideas. And opening night, David always gives sort of a state of the nation. You know, basically, here's where we are, here's what time it is, here's what we need to do to be men and women of Issachar that understand the times and know what to do. So we're going to jump right back in. If if you missed the first half, it's available at our website right now, wallbuilders.show. And then tomorrow and Friday, we'll get the remainder of this presentation. But let's jump right back in with David Barton.
David Barton [00:11:23] Then you get into what's considered the third Great Awakening, and that can go from the 1830s to the 1850s. Some break it into two different, separate revivals. But 1830s to 1850s, this is when you see the the Charles Finneys and so many others, they get actively involved in and helping bring an end to slavery, sitting up the stage for that, and so much else that went over social reforms back in that day. And some people break it into a second re part of that revival, sometimes called the Great Prayer Revival. For example, in major cities like New York City, they started a prayer meeting in New York City, and people didn't go home when the prayer meeting was over, and it turned out the prayer meeting went on for months and months and months and months. 24-7 around the clock involved thousands of people coming just spent time praying. And so that broke out in major cities, and so sometimes they break that out, and some people put it as part of the third great awakening. You certainly have the Civil War revivals in the Civil War, particularly in the last year of the Civil War, faith seemed to break out among both sides. And so after the Civil War, so many of those who had been soldiers, either on the Confederate side or on the Union side, ended up getting involved in some type of church ministry or being pastors or leading churches or starting Christian organizations. So there was a revival toward the end of the Civil War. And then as you get into the eighteen seventies, this is when you start seeing revivals in a lot of the major cities in the United States, Chicago and Philadelphia and New York. And there are major names involved here, like D. L. Moody, Dwight Moody, who Dwight Moody has said that he he personally brought nearly one million people to faith as Christians. You have other individuals involved there, John Wanamaker, big in Philadelphia. And this is when you see the rise of the YMCA when it actually was a religious organization back at that point in time. And also the start of Sunday schools. And Sunday Schools aren't like Christians are used to today. Sunday Schools back then, you you had no child labor laws back then. You had no mandatory education laws. And so lots and lots of young people working in the factories and textile mills and working in industrial plants. And they'd work 12, 14, 16 hours a day, six days a week. They were uneducated. They were illiterate. They were good workers, but they they didn't have any education. And so churches started saying, hey, come to church on Sunday and we'll get you an education. We'll teach you how to read, how to write, we'll teach you how to read the scriptures. And so Sunday Schools literally were school on Sundays because the kids are working the other six days of the week supporting the family. So this is going in that it's about nearly 30 years, 20, 25 to 30 years is agreed upon time. And by the way, you can't really tell when a revival starts or when it stops. You just kind of notice that it's there. It's like watching your kids grow. You don't really see it happen, but suddenly their pants are too short, and you figure out they've been growing. And that's kind of the way it is with the revivals. You can't put a point in time and say, here's where it starts. It you just kind of notice something's happening, something different is going on. Same thing in the early nineteen hundreds, maybe from about nineteen to nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty-five. Billy Sunday was a a famous baseball player. He became a believer, became a Christian, and he started having revivals in major cities across the United States in Los Angeles and across California. He preached for about thirty-seven years, kinda like a Billy Graham of of that era. He literally was in that category of Billy Graham. And so about twenty-five years there they consider to be revival times. And then you also have the the Jesus Movement or the Jesus Revolution of the late 60's and and early 70's. This is when the drug culture was rampant and the sex culture was rampant and and kids were just it was post-Vietnam war and they were anti-everything and this revival breaks out and just by the millions, young young people are coming to Christ. Probably the epitome of that revival what happened, and they were known as the Jesus people, by the way, but the the epitome of that revival we'll we'll talk about in a little bit. But but back to the question, do revivals impact the culture? Well, there's there's eight that you can look at right there. And if you look to see what happened to the culture after those revivals, do revivals impact the culture? And the answers are very definite, not always. There are some of those revivals that you cannot tell anything different happened in the nation when it came to public policy, when it came to lifestyle and living, when it came to a lot of stuff. And revivals apparently are not a guarantee that things get better or that behavior changes. And so when you look at it, I'm going to take the last three particularly and focus on them. Now, if you look in these last three, which goes really from the 1870s to the 1970s, that century of time is also known as the Progressive Era. And so for that period of time in the Progressive Era, and you look at what happened in the Progressive Era, a lot of stuff went wrong at that point. Now I'm going to back up before the Progressive Era to Darwin. When Darwin came out with the origin of species in 1859, that book was and don't think of him introducing evolution because he did not introduce evolution. That's just not not even close to right. I mean, you go all the way back to Aristotle 500 years before the time of Christ, and he was already talking about the intermediary species. He's talking about the Big Bang, he's talking about the primordial slime. All the basic tenets of evolution have been out there for thousands of years. What Darwin did was take it and make it really simple, and he'd applied it to social life, that as man is always evolving, our culture needs to evolve as well, and other things need to progress. And we need to we don't need to be stuck in the past, and we don't need to be looking back. We're progressives. And and so he really kind of introduces the the foundations for the progressive movement. He didn't introduce evolution per se. That's that's an old teaching. What he did was apply it to culture in a way that had never been applied before. Now, there were states that didn't appreciate that. Tennessee was a good example. Tennessee passed a law that says it is illegal in the state of Tennessee to teach anything that contradicts the Declaration of Independence. That sounds like a good law. The reason they did that was the declaration says that there's a Creator God who gives us our rights. We're endowed by our rights with the Creator God and government exists to protect those rights given by the Creator. So what Tennessee did was they went after evolution backdoor and said, you can't teach anything that violates the Declaration. Well, John Scopes is a young 25-year-old biology teacher in Tennessee. He was a secularist, he was a progressive, and he taught secular origins, that there was no creator involved, and they said that violates our law here in Tennessee. They took him to court in 1925, and he was convicted of violating that law. Now, this is where the media got involved because if you listen to the media, you would think we got our brains beaten in that trial. We didn't. We won that trial. The law withstood. But the media says, you religious people are so backward, so anti-science, so antiquated that people to this day think the Scopes Trial was a win for the evolutionists, and it was not a win for the evolutionists. It just was again showing you the institutions that were getting involved in that in that progressive era and their and their rise. It's also in the progressive era that we get into the the items with eugenics. Eugenics, you may know Margaret Sanger introduced much of that. There were eventually 30 states that went to eugenics, but when the Supreme Court struck down eugenic laws in 1971, there were still 28 states that were practicing eugenics.
Rick Green [00:18:42] Alright, quick interruption. We gotta take a quick break. Stay with us folks, you're listening to the WallBuilders Show.
Rick Green [00:19:54] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us, jumping right back in with David Barton at the Pro Family Legislators Conference.
David Barton [00:20:00] Eugenics was basically it's based on a farmer's kind of philosophy. If you're a farmer and you raise stock of any kind, you try to breed the best stock that you have because you don't want to take the worst stock and reproduce that. You want to reproduce the best. And they said, well, if we do that with our livestock, why don't we do that with humans too? And so they started having IQ tests in the States. And if your IQ is below 70 or below 74, 76, depending on the state, the state could forcibly sterilize you to make sure you did not reproduce and bring anything into the world. And the state had other laws as well. That's where we got into blood tests for marriage. Have blood tests before marriage. Why is that? Is that keep you from marrying? No. We want to make sure your genes are right. We want to make sure there's nothing strange in there because that might mean sterilization. And so these eugenic laws got into selective breeding. We want, we want to choose the best people to reproduce and we want to stop. And that it even involves races. There's some races that shouldn't be reproducing. And so this is eugenics stuff that comes in that period time. No, granted, remember, this is when all these big revivals are happening across the United States. So we're having mass revivals during this time, and here's Thras Eugenics. In that time is also when Hollywood got involved. 1917, this is a movie called The Black Stork. You may remember the stork was a euphemism for childbirth. And so if it says stork's coming, oh, so someone's pregnant and going to deliver a child, stork was coming. If the black stork is coming, that is death. That's the death of a child. And so what you see in the movie, this scene, you see a doctor in a black jacket looking down, and right beside him is a is a nurse. She's got the skull cap on, and they're looking down at this newborn infant. And as they look down at that newborn infant, they've just found that that newborn infant has some birth defects. And the best thing they can do is euthanize that infant. Because if it's not perfect, we need to just relieve it of its misery. We help society, we take that infant out. And so it advocates euthanization. And you see over on the side, kind of in shadowy stuff, is Jesus holding his arms out saying, Send those children to me. I want those children. And it's like euthanized, because Jesus, this is what he wants, and and He understands what we're doing here. And so this is now Hollywood getting involved in in this progressive kind of philosophy. And so this progressive era, it's all about, according to Margaret Stanger, this is all about human betterment. We're doing this to better humans. We we want we want better, better humanity, our human race. And that led to the foundation of the Human Betterment Society. Now, the Human Betterment Society, they sent out speakers all over the world teaching this eugenics kind of stuff. As they did so, two of their speakers, one is a guy named Gosni and one's a guy named Gothi. This letter is between Gosni and Gothi. And so Gothi is congratulating Gosni on the impact he's been having in Europe. And so I'll read it to you. And this is Gothi talking to Gosni. He says, You'll be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epic making program. Everywhere I sense that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life that you have really jolted into action a great government of sixty million people. That's the German government. So you Eugenists, just congratulate yourself on how much impact you've had. Now, did they really have impact on Hitler? Absolutely. In nineteen twenty three, Hitler was sitting in jail. He was a very decorated World War One veteran, very courageous, has a number of medals for valor and heroism. He didn't like the government that came out and that was in World War One. He tried to overthrow it after World War One. He gets thrown in in jail. And while he's in jail, he writes his autobiography, Mein Kopf, German for My Struggle. And that is published in 1925. And in that he thanks America for having helped shape his thinking on races and that some races are inferior of other races, and that some really need to be eliminated. And he credits particularly America and the work of Americans in doing that. So this is all going on in that progressive era. And by the way, you're probably familiar that Margaret Slinger is also the founder of Planned Parenthood, which we still fight today. So this is all going on, all came to light, all grew, all prospered in the midst of one of the greatest revivals America had at that time. And then when you look at what progressives did with higher education, over in Germany, it was called the Frankfurt School. Now the Frankfurt School. This is the first one to really institutionalize the the teachings of Marxist Leninism. And so it's in Germany and and these are the this it is in this school that they introduced what's known as critical theory. Now that has grown into what we have today with critical race theory and all the other things. You'll see a lot of terms you recognize all the stuff of gender and white privilege and social justice and intersectionality and hegemonic power. All that came from the Frankfurt school in Germany. When Hitler came to power in nineteen thirty three, he was chancellor and then made himself Fuhrer. He just appointed himself the leader of the whole nation. When he came to power, he chased The Frankfurt School out as being way too radical. Those guys are crazy. So they picked up and they moved. Do you know and they picked up staff, faculty, curriculum, they picked up the whole school, moved it. Do you know where it landed? It landed in Columbia University, came to America and got set up in our elite schools in the Northeast and started spreading through those schools. So not only Columbia, but if you look at Princeton at that time, the president of Princeton was a guy named Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson goes on to become the governor of New Jersey and the president of the United States. And one of the comments he made while he was in the school there was the purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. Now who knows exactly what that means, but we know that they were very successful at it. We know, for example, that over the last 20 years, 80% of all Christian kids who have gone to a secular universities have left the faith. So they've been very good at making kids unlike their father, whatever that happens to mean, whatever he had in mind with it, that's what's happened as a result. So when you look back at those three revivals that cover about a hundred years, particularly the two, the the 1871 and the 1900 ones that cover really from the 1870s to the 1930s, that's the progressive era. Revivals didn't do anything to stop that, not even slow it down.
Rick Green [00:26:33] All right everybody, out of time for today, we will pick up right where we left off. We'll do that tomorrow and Friday to get the full presentation from David Barton at the legislators conference. Thanks so much for listening today to the WallBuilders Show.
