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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
From Revivals To Public Policy: When Faith Shapes Culture
If spiritual fireworks don’t change the neighborhood by Monday, what are we missing? We take a hard look at a century of American revivals that stirred the heart but barely nudged the culture, and then we trace a different path: how revivals become awakenings when believers are discipled and Scripture is applied to daily life. Not just belief, but apprenticeship. Not just emotion, but formation that shapes families, work, and public decisions.
We dig into the Great Commission’s overlooked command to “teach them to observe all things” and connect it to concrete civic questions. What does Jesus’ teaching on stewardship say about rewarding productivity? How does the vineyard wage story illuminate voluntary contracts? Why does “Where are your accusers?” echo through America’s due process rights to confront accusers and compel witnesses? Along the way, we surface sobering data on the behavior gap between professing Christians and the wider culture, making the case that conversion without discipleship leaves public ethics unchanged.
History shows a better model. Early American pulpits spoke directly to the issues of the day—earthquakes, fires, education, deployment and just war, taxation, commercial crisis, health codes, addiction, and the injustice of slavery. Sermons didn’t dodge the news; they discipled people to think biblically about it. That habit formed moral reflexes that influenced law, economics, and community life. We invite you to recover that tradition: teach “all things,” support those serving in public office, and let Scripture inform both private character and public action.
If you’re ready for faith that moves from pews to policy and from zeal to wisdom, press play, share this conversation, and join us next time. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend who serves in your state legislature so they can be part of the ProFamily Legislators Conference next year.
Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the WallBuilders Show, the place where we take on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. I'm Rick Green. You're about to hear from David Barton at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. And if you missed yesterday, go to wallbuilders.show and you can get yesterday's program because it's a three-part series here. This is a presentation David gave at the opening night just a week ago at the Pro Family Legislators Conference. And we want you, our listeners to the WallBuilders Show, to be able to hear this because it's a great understanding the times type presentation and understanding what time it is in America and then what do we do about this moment in time? How do we seize the moment before us? Let's jump in with David Barton at the Pro Family Legislators Conference.
David Barton [00:00:49] When Hitler came to power in 1933, 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. 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. 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. We know, for example, that over the last 20 years, 80% of all Christian kids who have gone to 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 eighteen seventy-one and the nineteen hundred ones that cover really from the eighteen seventies to the nineteen thirties, that's when you see the rise of Darwinian socialism. That's when you see the rise of secular progressivism, of eugenics, of atheist Marxism. That's the progressive era. Revivals didn't do anything to stop that, not even slow it down. They got firmly entrenched and fully embedded. And then if you move to the Jesus movement, which is more in in in my era, I was part of the Jesus movement. We were called Jesus people back in that day. And we were doing everything we could to share faith with people and get kids off drugs and get them out of the anti-war stuff and anti-Vietnam stuff. And maybe the grand event in that revival was what happened at Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where a hundred thousand kids gathered Cotton Bowl in Dallas and there was six days of preaching and revival and Bible and fellowship and worship and songs and all sorts of music groups and Billy Graham was there every day. All of that ha all this happened in the midst of what caught was called the sexual revolution. You know, that great revival among youth did nothing to slow the sexual revolution. As a matter of fact, the sexual revolution became the gender revolution. And if you're not real familiar with how far that's gone, I would recommend that you go to our helpful professors. It's always nice to have professors that'll help you. And helpful professors point out that right now there's eighty-one different genders in America. We're not as sophisticated as Europe because in Europe, global butterflies, their academics point out there's a hundred and fifty genders in Europe. We've lost our brains. Every single mammal species in the world only has two genders. If you doubt that, go find a cowboy somewhere and go look at his cattle herd and see how many genders you can find in that cattle herd. There's only two. It's all it's ever been. And so that revival, the Jesus Movement didn't stop anything in the sexual revolution on now to the gender revolution. So do revivals impact the culture? And if you look at these revivals for the last hundred years, you would say, Well, after decades of revival, there's barely any indication of the culture at all of spiritual change. The question becomes when do revivals impact the culture? And the answer is when they become an awakening. The early ones we had in America, we had the First Great Awakening, we had the Second and Third Great Awakening, they impacted the culture. They changed a lot of stuff. America became a much, much better nation as a result. So, a good question is how does a revival become an awakening? The way that a revival becomes an awakening, there's two things that make an awakening different from revival. The first is that it involves personal biblical discipleship, and I'll explain that in a minute. The second thing is the scriptures become applied to daily public living. We don't compartmentalize our faith. We allow our faith to affect what we do around us and affect the culture around us. So, let's go back to the first one involving personal biblical discipleship. Christians remember the Great Commission given by Jesus, last words he spoke here on earth to his disciples. He told them very simply, said all power is given to Me in heaven and earth. Go therefore and teach all nations, baptize them, Father and Son, the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I've commanded you. Now, that's the Great Commission. And starting in the 1870s, the theological interpretation said, oh, that means evangelism. Get everybody to become a Christian. That's not what Jesus said. It wasn't that. He said, Go make disciples out of people. And there's a big difference between people who profess Christianity, people who are actually disciples and live that. And so, the emphasis for the last hundred and fifty years has been on making Christians rather than making disciples. And if I if if I give you examples of that, so He said, Teach them all things. May I take you back to some teachings of Jesus that we know impacted American culture. And I'll show you soon how pilgrims and other generations use that to completely shape our economic system, completely shape our form of government, etc. Goes back to teachings that were in the scriptures. So, one occasion, Jesus in Matthew 19 is speaking to a crowd, His disciples are there. And in the 15 verses in Matthew 19, He covers three things. He covers the definition of marriage. He covers how many genders there are. And then He covers the topic of no-fault divorce. And it started a controversy. Even Moses allowed us to have a bill of divorcement. Jesus said, yeah. That was because of the hardness of your heart, but that was not the way the father intended it in the garden back at the beginning. And so, I got a lot of white hair. I've been in a lot of church services in my life. I've never in my life heard his sermon on no fault divorce. And yet Jesus clearly delivered one back then that marriage is to be a permanent union. You know, even Malachi 3:15, the scripture says God says, I hate divorce. That's a statement from God in Malachi. How come we're not talking about that? Well, that's part of making disciples. It may not be part of making converts, getting people evangelized, but it's certainly discipleship. First off, you notice that it affects public policy. By the way, if you didn't know, there was no-no fault divorce in America until 1969. That's the first California was the first state that introduced no fault divorce. If you will look at divorce documents prior to nineteen sixty-nine, at the top of 'em, and s several states still do this today, it says a bill of divorcement. Why does it say a bill of divorcement? Because it took a legislative bill for you to get a divorce. You had to have a bill run through the legislature to get people divorced. That's how infrequent divorce was at that point in time. That's why it's called a bill of divorcement. And most states used a it was called cause divorce or fault divorce. There were half a dozen reasons where you could get a divorce. They were they claimed they were grounded in in biblical teachings that desertion or abuse or adultery, you know, there's a few reasons. If it's just because you're tired of someone, that's not a reason to abandon that because that breaks up one of the three institutions that's essential to any government, and that's a strong family. So that's why it was even something that the legislature dealt with until 1969. That's the way we thought. But now people think it's very common. Divorce is a natural part of life, and I'll show you some stats on that in a minute. So, public policy, if I take you to Luke 19, Jesus has a parable there of a guy, wealthy guy who's gonna be gone for a while, and he takes ten people, ten workers. He says, I'm gonna be gone for a while here. Take my stuff and invest it while I'm gone, see what you can do with it. So, he comes back and he says, All right, what's the report? What'd you guys do? And this guy says, well, I took what you gave me, I invested, I made tenfold in it. And he goes down the old and he gets to the last guy, and the last guy says, you know, I was really afraid that I might lose what you'd give me, and I knew you'd be really ticked off if that happened, so I didn't do anything with it. I gave it back to you exactly the way I got it. You have lost nothing, but I didn't gain anything, but it's exactly what and he said, You wicked and slothful servant. He said, take from him who did nothing, but then he gave it to him who had did tenfold with it. And then there's the whoa, that's not fair. He's already gotten. And Jesus said, to him who has and will be given to him, to him who has not will be taken away even that which he has. Guess what? There went socialism right out the door. You can't do socialism. What you're doing is rewarding profit makers. Those who are productive, you reward. Those who are not productive, you don't reward. We've gone the other way. The least productive you are, the more we're going to help you. The more productive you are, the more we're going to hurt you, the more take away from you. That's an and by the way, that was one of the five Bible verses the pilgrims used to create what we call the free market system in America. It goes back to them using Bible verses like that. So, rewarding profit makers. You have in Matthew 20 another story where that Jesus said there was a guy who went out to his vineyard, he needed to harvest the fruit in the vineyard, and he went to a guy early in the day and said, Will you come work in my vineyard? I'll give you this much if you're working in my vineyard. And the guy said, Sure, that's great. And then later in the day he said, well, I need more people in my vineyard. So, he went out and got somebody to work for him for three-fourths a day, and they agreed on how much they'd get, and then got a guy halfway through the day, and they agreed on how much he'd be paid, and then he got a guy toward the close of the day. And so, when it came time to pay off everybody, the master calls the guy who only worked three hours and said, here’s what we agreed on, and he paid him. And then he called the guy who worked six hours and here's what we agreed on, paid him, which is exactly the same that he paid the guy for three hours. Then he had the guy that worked for nine hours paid him, and it was the guy who got the same as what the six hour and three-hour guy. And then he had the guy with the 12 hours, and the guy says, I'm gonna get a whole lot more because I worked longer than these guys. And he pays them exactly the same. And the guy says, That's not fair. I worked longer. He said, well, whoa, didn't you agree with me for the wage that you got? Now, here we are, we're individually making contracts with in with individual employees. There goes the minimum wage out the door because minimum wage says here's much how much you have to pay. You can't do individual contracts. You have so That economic system, by the way, that's part of the free-market system is the right to negotiate individual contracts between employer and employee. And so again, these are all teachings of Jesus. That's a strong economic teaching. That would be an opposition to the minimum wage for sure. But the one I think is real significant for us where we are as even as legislators, is the right of legal confrontation. In John eight, there was an occasion where that a woman caught in adultery is brought to Jesus and they said stone her. And so, Jesus just started piddling around in the sand and He looks up and they're all gone. And he said, Woman, where's your accusers? Take that simple statement, where are your choosers. If you look in federal practice and procedure, which is the law books that are used to practice federal law, there's 169 volumes of federal law books for practicing federal law. Volume 30 deals with evidence and due process. And due process is the fourth to the eighth amendment of the Constitution. Due process is where you get the right to confront your accuser, the right to compel witnesses in your behalf, the right to testify in your own defense. And you know, interestingly, in that federal law book, it puts Bible verses beside those due process rights. And it points out that the pilgrims, way back when, way back in the 1600s, used John 8:10 as the right to confront your accuser. See, it was not being done in Europe and the courts there, in the in the witch courts or anything else. Whatever the government says you're guilty of, you're guilty of. And you don't get a right to ask them where they got their information, or you just you can't do it. And in the same way, you could not compel witnesses in your behalf, which came out of Proverbs 18:17, nor do you get to speak in your own defense, which came out of Acts 22:1. It's interesting how much the Bible built the due process clauses that have made justice a part of what we believe and do in America and our Constitution. And they all came from teachings that we would find from Jesus. And here, by the way, this is volume thirty of volume thirty of federal practice and procedure, and it has the rules of evidence. So, all of this stuff deals with public policy. That's what Jesus said, don't teach 'em all the stuff I taught you. See what happens in the revivals we've had for the last hundred years or so. And so, we don't do anything with public politics. Christians don't get involved in government. We don't do that. Every one of you elected, you're involved in government. But you know how little support you get from a whole lot of churches in your community, a whole lot of pastors who should be behind you. And see, that's where things start falling apart is the failure to address behavior.
Rick Green [00:13:54] Alright, quick interruption. We gotta take a quick break. Stay with us folks, you're listening to the WallBuilders Show.
Rick Green [00:15:05] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us, jumping right back in with David Martin at the Pro Family Legislators Conference.
David Barton [00:15:10] Going back to what I mentioned earlier, George Barna, good friend, he and I have done a lot of things together. Here's a a book that we did together. And in looking at behavioral measurements. This is some of the stuff we found pointed out in the book. George points out, he says, of the more than 70 moral behaviors that we study, when we compare Christians to non-Christians, we rarely find substantial differences. Now that's not good news when a Christian and a non-Christian have the exact same behavior. That's not supposed to be the way it works. But 70 categories, and that's what we're seeing. When you look at divorces, there's a good example. For those that consider themselves born-again Christians, the divorce rate is 27%. Now it's much higher in the nation, about 47%, 48% because of second and third divorces. But for first-time divorces, 27% of born-again Christians experience divorce. For everybody else, it's only 24%. So, the divorce rate is highest among born-again Christians. And by the way, its lowest among atheists. Atheists have a 21% divorce rate. That's not the way that's supposed to work. And then in the last couple of generations, Gen Y and Gen Z, it's like marriage is not important. Cohabitation is where that's gone. But e even outside of that, just in that group of twenty-seven born-again Christians, it's interesting. 87% of Christians who got divorced, and so after they became Christians. That's not supposed to work that way. See, that's not biblical at all. And so, this is where the thinking is not changing behavior. It's like, oh, you're Christian now. No, there are there are things you need to do in lifestyle to to live that way. A point to Planned Parenthood Abortion. 76% of Protestants oppose ending abortion. 65% of abortions are performed on professing Christians, and 200,000 abortions each year are performed on born-again Christians. Christians have kept Planned Parenthood alive more than any other group in the United States. And that's why you find even in states like Missouri, heavily pro-life, you can't get an abortion amendment passed in popular elections. I mean, had it not been for Florida having a 60% threshold, if it had been a 50% threshold, Florida would have lost. But they won because only 41% were willing to protect life in a state like Florida. So again, it has an effective behavior and even on homosexuality. Today, 27% of active homosexuals were professing born-again Christians. Can't do that. That's not consistent with scripture. So, this is where I say it involves personal biblical discipleship, and that's the kind of stuff that was emphasized back then. And you see it by you guys, many of you got to the tour the museums today. What you didn't see is the museum over on the west side of Fort Worth, where we have so many of the documents. You got to see a lot of the artifacts, super cool stuff. The documents are in files and file cabinets, and we have Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sermons from that era. And a sermon tells you what they're publicly being taught about faith. And so, here's an interesting one. This is one in 1755. You see the date there, discourse, another word for sermon. It's out of the Bible book of Revelation 15, occasioned by the earthquakes in in November of 1755. Now, this sermon is done by the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Mayhew. This is a first great awakening sermon. He's one of the leading people in the First Great Awakening, that great revival. And what's happened is, hey guys, this is in the news. Everybody's thinking, New England, we don't have earthquakes. We just had an earthquake. What do we think? And so, he goes to the scripture and looks at earthquakes and the scriptures to put a biblical perspective on what's in the news. So, sermons like that, I've never in my life heard a sermon on earthquakes or on any disaster for that matter, not the floods that happened in North Carolina or anything else. And here's one, they had a fire in Boston, and its’s a big fire, big news. It's in everybody's thinking in Boston in 1760. Reverend Samuel Cooper, who is a pastor from Boston, who is another big voice in the First Great Awakening, says, guys, here's the disaster we just had. What guidance do we have from the scriptures on how to deal with a disaster like this? So, everything that's going on, they're taking that as an opportunity to say, how do we think from biblical perspective? How do we look at this? So natural disasters. Here's an early sermon, the cry of Sodom inquired into. You remember Genesis 19, Judges 19, what happened there? This is something that the Bible's very clear on. So having LGBTQIA plus sermons, we had that for hundreds of years. Try find one today. It's hard to find today. As a matter of fact, the polling that we've done, only two-point eight percent of pastors are addressing that issue to any significant degree. That's not helpful in trying to stem that that kind of movement. Here's a sermon on the importance of the early and proper education of children. This is a sermon from 1795. So, this is the start of the Second Great Awakening. Sermon on education. You know, there is not a Bible verse you can point to that endorses secular education. It's the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, fear of the Lord's beginning of knowledge. We always included God in education. We don't now because eighty-eight percent of our kids go to schools that don't include God, and we don't want to offend anybody. So, we're Doesn't matter if somebody gets offended or not, what's the right thing to be teaching? And the right thing to be teaching is you need to know that there is a God, that you're accountable to God, that He's given you standards to live by. And so, we're raising generation after generation of educators and engineers and soldiers and others who don't understand what we used to understand in previous generations. So, here's a sermon on religion and patriotism, the Constituents of a good soldier. This is preached in 1755. It's a deployment sermon. This deployment sermon preached by the Reverend Samuel Davies, who is one of the greatest preachers in the First Great Awakening. Actually, there's a kid that he mentored. He took time to mentor a kid and he helped this kid with his oratory and with his rhetoric. And the kid went to church with him, was there every Sunday and just listened to to Davies and the kid was a kid named Patrick Henry. And so, Patrick Henry is a great orator because he was mentored by what's considered the greatest pulpit orator in that generation was Samuel Davies. And that's another thing about revivals is one generation mentors and transmits to the next. You take time to plant into it. And so, this is a a sermon on the military. And you know, the Bible has so much to say about the military that even early Christian theologians like Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, they wrote entire books on just war theory. What the Bible says about war, offensive wars, defensive wars, what is right and wrong in wars, work wars I mean, wars is a way of the world. So how does how does God want you to get engaged in that? And there are so many heroes in the Bible that were great warriors and great soldiers. This is a sermon on the existence of God demonstrated in the works of creation, a sermon in 1795. So, this is Second Great Awakening. Again, I mentioned Darwin didn't introduce evolution, he introduced societal evolution, that we should apply evolution to everything else, not just origins of man. When you see a sermon like this, what's significant about this sermon is evolution's not new. If you take Daniel Webster, great defender of the Constitution, Daniel Webster, his senior paper at Dartmouth University in 1801 was over the evolution/creation debate. As a senior in Dartmouth, he has it sounds like something you might hear today, because the arguments aren't new. There is nothing new under the sun, scripture says. So, creation versus evolution, scientific controversies. Here's one on the relation of the medical profession to the ministry. This is 1854. This literally was done in the Third Great Awakening. And you recall that when God delivered the Hebrews, got them out of 400 years of slavery, stopped the mountain, delivered 613 laws, including the Ten Commandments. Among those laws were many, many health laws, many, many health codes. There was actually a doctor in 1961 who did a book called None of These Diseases. It was based on Exodus 15:26, where the Lord says, if you will do what I've told you, I will put on you none of the diseases that I put on the Egyptians. And so that's a promise that you do what I tell you with this health code, and you're not going to have the sicknesses they had. And so, there's so much in the Bible on health and health code and health care for that matter. And that's sermons we had. Here's a sermon on the Present Commercial Distress. This is 1837. Andrew Jackson's president. He's made some really stupid economic decisions that led to a depression in America. The first Great Depression we had was Andrew Jackson, 1837. This is a sermon on what's happening with economics in America. Here's a sermon on the character and density of the property tax, Reverend George Glover. Property tax? Yeah. Bible has all sorts of economic guidance, including what type of taxes are wrong, what type or not. The capitation tax. There's no progressive tax in the Bible. Their capitation taxes are equally applied, like either the tithe. Everybody pays 10%. That's the tithe. But that means poor people pay less than rich people because they have less, so it's proportional, but everybody gets treated the same. You don't have different standards for different groups. Everybody's got 10%. And so those are the type of economic things that we had back then. Here's a sermon on the pernicious, the sinfulness and pernicious nature of gaming. 1751, this is preached in front of the legislature of Virginia. This is a First Great Awakening sermon. Here's a sermon. It's called The Good Law, the Sermon on the Liquor Law of Massachusetts, 1852, Third Great Awakening. And what happened? The Massachusetts legislature passed a law on liquor, and they said, okay, here's what the law said. What's the Bible say? Okay, this is a good law. This lines up with the principles. You have this sermon, this is the Injustice and Policy of the Slave Trade, the slavery of the Africans. At that point, the pulpit was the early voice in saying this is wrong. This this human trafficking kind of stuff is wrong. Pilgrims, when they did their code of 1650, they quoted specifically from Exodus 15, where the manstealing was a criminal offense. It was a capital offense in the Bible in Exodus, part of the code that the Moses had. So manstealing was out, and they talk about that, what this means. And today that would be human trafficking. Now, back in the slave trade back then, between 1501 and 1876, 375 years is 12.7 million slaves involuntarily taken out of Africa and moved elsewhere in the world. 12.7 million. Today, with 198 nations or 193 nations at the UN, there are 94 nations today that still have not criminalized slavery. Slavery is still legal in 94 nations. There are currently 40 million slaves in the world right now. So, we have three times more slaves this year than in 375 years the African slave trade.
Rick Green [00:26:01] Out of time for today, everybody, that was part two of a three-part program to get David Barton's entire presentation before the legislators at our Pro Family Legislators Conference. As we're signing off for today, great time just to remind everybody, this happens once a year. And many of our listeners have friends or, you know, people in their church, people they know that are in state legislatures across the country. Tell them about the Pro Family Legislators Conference so that they can come next year. It is an incredible time of rejuvenation, as we talked about on Monday, even here and getting texts from friends that are in legislatures or in Congress that went to this and just how rejuvenated they were. It just reminds me how important it is. Out of time for today, though, we'll tell we'll see you tomorrow. We'll get the conclusion of David Barton at the Legislators Conference. You've been listening to the WallBuilders Show.
