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
When Culture Calls It Political, We Still Teach What The Bible Says
Headlines move fast, and too many churches step back the moment culture slaps “political” on a topic. We lean in. From life and marriage to immigration and gender, we unpack why Scripture still speaks when the room gets loud—and how pastors can guide people through hard news without turning Sunday into a shouting match. The aim isn’t outrage; it’s discipleship that equips believers to love their neighbors with conviction and clarity.
We share data on pastors who believe the Bible addresses modern issues yet rarely teach them, and we highlight encouraging shifts since COVID: weekly cultural briefings, sermon-adjacent podcasts, and a renewed focus on formation over fear. Expect practical ideas for weaving timely guidance into planned series, plus a frank look at handling pushback from the vocal few. Courage grows when congregations voice support, and we offer ways to build that culture so truth-telling feels normal, not risky.
Then we zoom out to courts and civic life. What judges “see” in the Constitution often reflects how they were taught—original text or living document. We trace how law schools shaped the bench and outline a long game for reform: elect leaders who value original meaning, strengthen civic literacy, and show up in low-turnout races that decide key pipelines. Along the way, a listener question about the Founders’ Greek, Latin, and Hebrew opens a window into early American education and the power of immersion for real understanding.
If you want faith that stands firm in a noisy world—and tools to make a difference where you live—this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend who cares about biblical clarity in public life, and leave a review telling us the next “political” topic you want addressed.
Rick Green [00:00:07] This is the intersection of faith and culture. Thank you for joining us on the WallBuilders Show today. You can visit our websites at wallbuilders.show and at wallbuilders.com. The difference being that the radio program is wallbuilder.show. So, it's real simple and easy. You just click right on that link. And you should bookmark it anyway so you can listen to the program every day and listen to today's program. But also, you can scroll down and catch up on any of the programs you might have missed over the last few weeks or months, but also share it with your friends and family. So important to make sure that you're a force multiplier out there. The WallBuilders Show is the quickest and easiest way to stay up to date on the big issues of the day. Get that biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective on that issue, but then also share with your friend and family so that they can get educated on that as well. So, you can do all of that at wallbuilders.show. And then of course wallbuilders.com is our main website for everything else especially during the 250th looking at events coming up this summer and throughout the fall and all the way through July 4th, 2027. So, we got about a year and a half here to celebrate the 250th and to do all of these things to help educate and basically raise the civic literacy of our friends and family in our community. So, make sure that you're being a part of that as well. Today of course Foundations of Freedom Thursday so we're always talking about the Declaration the Constitution all these things in history not just on the 250 but every Thursday here on the program and we love hearing from you so send in those questions that you would like us to cover with regard to all of those things. It might be even a hot topic right now happening in the world, and you may not even be thinking about a way that that ties into the Founders or the Constitution or the Declaration, but you're just curious about what the biblical perspective is on that particular issue. So send those into us radio@wallbuilders.com is the email for that radio@wallbuilders.com. All right, let's jump in guys. Foundations of Freedom Thursday. First question coming from Dolores. Dolores said, some time ago on The WallBuilders Show, I heard David give a relatively short but great explanation of why Christians need to be involved politically. If you have that written in an article somewhere that you could easily send a copy of or a link to, please do. Maybe more specifically, my question is, would you say it is ever appropriate to bring politics into the church building? In Nebraska, we are circulating a petition to get a constitutional amendment initiative on the 2026 ballot, which states, a preborn child is a person at all stages of development beginning at fertilization. Whenever under Nebraska law, the term person is used or implied. It includes such a child. So basically, this would be an amendment that would protect the child in the womb. She goes on to say, even though we have a pro-life church and our pastor has preached against abortion, asking people after the church service, if they want to sign the petition has offended a minority, including a few elders who see it as being political, I tried just having a table set up where people could sign, but very few will stop to do so. I try to listen to WallBuilders most days, thank you for your very... helpful insights. God bless you. All right, Dolores, thank you for a fantastic question, and David, Tim, I mean, I think our listeners hit this, oh, what would you call it? Roadblock, this bump in the road all the time, even asking to do a Biblical Citizenship class, or any of the activities, rather than just saying our church is pro-life, actually doing something about it, or rather just saying we're pro-biblical in the government realm. Very few of them actually do anything, and Dolores has put her finger on it. So how do we explain this to folks that politics is just part of a religion? Wow, almost quoted Finney there. Go ahead guys.
David Barton [00:03:33] Yeah, I want to go back to kind of the background of this question because as each year goes, as each election goes, there's more and more things that are considered political that are supposedly off limits for the church. Twenty years ago, marriage was not political, now it is. Fifteen years ago, gender was not politically, now, it is. And so, what happens is as things become political and we say, well that's political, I won't talk about that. There's less and less things that you can actually talk about in the church if you're going to let the culture define what's political and what's not political.
Tim Barton [00:04:05] Well, guys, it's worth pointing out that the mob that went into the church in Minnesota on Sunday, one of the things that they were talking to the people in the church really yelling and screaming at them about was, you're supposed to love everybody. Why are you not out there defending all these Somalis and these immigrants? Why are not helping us stop what's going on? As if, the Christian position on immigration is we should have open borders. We shouldn't have any immigration rules or laws. As if that contradicts the Bible. Why? Because most people think well, Jesus is love and we're supposed to love everybody and love means we accept them. We tolerate any of their behavior and their life decisions and their gender choices and whatever that is. We have so skewed and by we, that the modern church in America, has so skewed what is biblical and by kind of evacuating that vacating that position it's allowed it to become political but then the other challenge is because the church hasn't been clear on what the Bible actually teaches. We haven't done a good enough job of making disciples in general and of holding biblical standards very firmly. It's allowed people to come in and reframe what the biblical position is. Which is what we saw in that church in Minnesota, where the protesters the mob, was saying you're supposed to be on our side if you're a Christian and Jesus would love these people and He Would support them and you should be out there defending them and not letting ICE take them away, etc, etc. So not only is there confusion of what is political and what is biblical. There's also even a confusion a major confusion of whatever basic biblical positions.
David Barton [00:05:44] George Barna, a good friend, he's a national pollster, probably the most recognizable pollster in the modern generation. And he and I did a book a little bit back called U-Turn. And in that, we went through some of these very issues. So let me just kind of lay the groundwork here to kind of set the bigger, I guess, frame the issue bigger than what we have in a specific question. So, there's 384,000 churches and senior pastors in America. There were 28% of them that agreed with the Bible and said, hey, if the Bible says it, that's true. Now there were 72% of pastors who disagreed with parts of the Bible, didn't agree with what the Bible said, thought that wasn't appropriate or loving or whatever. So, there was 107,000 pastors that did agree with the bible and they were put in a category we called theologically conservative. And so, in that theologically conservative group of pastors, we started saying, okay, what do they think about issues? And so, took 14 issues and went to the pastors and said, okay, do you think the Bible addresses modern issues? Does the Bible address, and there were 14 categories, does the Bible the issue of immigration? Does it address sexuality and marriage? Does it address economics? Does it address education? Does it, and went through these 14 things. And so, getting the results back from these, what are called theologically conservative pastors agree to the Bible. Depending on which of those 14 issues it was, between 91 and 97 percent of pastors says absolutely the Bible addresses that issue, whatever one of the 14 it was. So, there wasn't a single issue where that less than 91 percent said the Bible addressed that issue. So, then the follow-up question was, okay, knowing that you're theologically conservative, that you say the Bible addresses that issues, do you have any plans to talk about that issue of your congregation? Ninety percent of pastor said absolutely not. Those are political issues. We don't political issues. Wait a minute time out. You just told me they were in the Bible and you believe the Bible addressed it. Now have you told me that you're throttling yourself because somebody has politicized that issue and it's that somehow takes it out of your necessity to address it? I mean go to Jesus look at all the times He addressed issues that made the crowds mad or the leaders mad But He did it because that's God's Word and those are issues that God addresses.
Tim Barton [00:08:10] Well, Dad, I think is also worth pointing out that probably in some of those cases, too, this is not to defend pastors, but I know that some churches, they plan out their schedule a year in advance. And so, they are actually setting themselves up to not be as culturally relevant, even though they think they're being very spiritually significant because they're gonna have a six-week series on Galatians or on joy or forgiveness or whatever the topic might be. But they lay out their year in advance, and I know a lot of churches do this, and so for some of them they're like, man, that's just not something we've planned on talking about this year, but I say that because it does, again, show one of the challenges with the modern church is they don't show themselves to be relevant to a lot modern culture. But the other thing I would say is the steadier sighting, even though it's been one of most extensive ones done, especially for pastors, that is one that was done before COVID. And I think since COVID, it's very possible that those numbers have changed a little bit. Now, I don't think they've changed a lot, but I would estimate that there is a higher percentage because, for example, that there's a pastor from our local Dallas-Fort Worth region, his name is Josh Howerton. Josh Howerton is the senior pastor of a church, a Lakepointe over in Rockwall, but they have multiple campuses. They have 30 something thousand people attending all their campuses. I think they said at their Christmas service they had like 57,000 people. And they have churches also around the world. But one of the things I was so grateful for Josh Howerton started a podcast this last year It's Live Free and I would encourage people tit's a great podcasts listen to. He will take the study notes from a sermon and because a sermon is usually 30 40 45 minutes, whatever it is and he will do a deep dive on a podcast that's usually released on Monday I listen to it on Spotify and he will spend 30 or 45 minutes going through things from the sermon that didn't make it in the sermon but are really kind of good contextual adds to understand the sermon better. But then he spends the next 45 minutes talking practically culturally and so for example when the ICE agent killed the woman, not murdered, killed, the woman in the Honda Pilot that was trying to run over the ICE agent, he does a breakdown on his podcast and actually talks to Christians, what should we think? Anytime someone dies, obviously it's a tragedy. And he goes through a really solid biblical perspective. But one of the things he said that I think is relevant for kind of the data you're laying out is he said, that he learned from COVID that one of things maybe was a little bit of a failure for him in COVID, is when COVID happened and some of these riots were happening, he did not speak up. And he realized that in the midst of him not speaking up, that there were so many Christians, maybe even people in his church that were being pulled and swayed to go to the wrong side of the issue. And he said, for example, addressing this thing with this woman being shot, he said look, everybody's talking about it and we have to make sure as Christians, we are thinking biblically about the issue, but the reason I bring that up is because He could have been one of those pastors back before COVID that was like, you know what? That doesn't really fit what we're talking about right now. But because of COVID, not only is he addressing it, he has a podcast, it's one of the top Christian podcasts there is, period. And he is very intentionally trying to guide and disciple people on what the Bible says. So, I do think there probably are more pastors coming around, not a significant percentage enough that it comes anywhere close to a majority, but there are more pastors doing this, so it does give me some encouragement it's happening, even though not as much as it should.
David Barton [00:11:59] And I'm gonna posit that I bet one of the reasons he has the biggest podcast out there is because he is addressing the specific things. These are the questions people wanna ask. And what happens, and just like the question that came in, there's always gonna be people in the church that don't like what's happening. And they're gonna let the pastor know, and they're going to sound off, and they've got a mouth off. And you can't let the 5%, the 10%, the 30%, or even the 90% drive what you do and don't address. If Jesus was to choose His topics based on the Bible, on the reactions he got from the crowd or from the Pharisees or whatever. He wouldn't be talking about nothing because He was making people mad all the time with what He said. Even when He got into the marriage issue in Matthew 18, He addressed the definition of marriage. He addressed how many genders there were and He addressed issue of divorce. And even the disciples said, wait a minute. And the crowd came to Him and said, hey, that's hard stuff. That's not what Moses said. Well, if you let the crowd drive you, you're not gonna get the right information out there that people actually need. And so, Jesus was not driven by the reaction of the congregation or the reaction of the critics or anybody else. And somehow in seminary, we've kind of, well, you don't want to stir up a controversy. No, you know, but you do want to tell the truth. And if telling the truth creates a controversy, that's not on you. That's on the hearers who can't handle it. And by the way, I'll point out a lot of times people react negatively at first, but it makes them think because once their emotions get touched and they get stirred up, they'll think about it and they just brood on it. And they go, well, you know, maybe he was right after that, after all. It often takes an emotional reaction to start you on the road about thinking about things so that you're starting to be willing to change. If you never get challenged in your thoughts, you never change what you're thinking. And sometimes it takes that challenge. And so, my question would be, is there anything that goes on in the culture that the Bible speaks to? And if so, that's on limits for what to talk about in church. If the Bible has any connection at all to what is going on in the culture, then that's not off limits in the church. And to say that it is, man, that's no longer teaching the whole council of God, which is what we're told in the scriptures we're supposed to be teaching. So, you know, if you're part of the congregation, you want a Josh Howerton kind of pastor, encourage your pastor that we need more of that. And yeah, there's gonna be people upset with you, but I got you back, pastor. I'm gonna be standing right with you. They need to hear more from the 70, 80, 90% who agree with them than the 10, 20, 30% who get ticked off and disagree with them. And that's going to be up to the rest of us to help give our pastors courage and standing for some of this stuff.
Rick Green [00:14:34] Man. So true guys. And, you know, I was just thinking a couple quick points before we go to break the number one, when I was a legislator, every bill that I authored and passed or voted on or read was just, how do you treat your neighbor? So that's really all politics is, how are you gonna treat your neighbors? And the Bible obviously has a lot to say about how we're supposed to treat our neighbor. And I'll tell you how my pastor does it, Jimmy Pruitt at the Bridge in Fredericksburg, he just basically takes the first five, six minutes, you know, of every week and says, okay, let me hit a couple of highlights of what's happened in the last week in the culture, in case he's in that situation you're talking about, Tim, where he's got a series that he's going through. Like we're going through Colossians right now. And maybe, maybe, not a verse that day that he was going to cover applies to whatever was happening in the country and he'll tie it in. But if not, if he's dealing with a totally different issue that he's already prepared for, he just carves out that first five minutes to at least comment on Iran or, you know whatever the big subject is that just happened in the last week. And I think you're right, Josh Howerton and some of these other guys, they do it really well. And I would lastly say to those people that are really reaching a frustration point, you know, and maybe they've done what you're saying, David, where they've gone to the pastor and the ones in the church that want to have a more culturally engaged church, have done everything that they can. You know, look, there's a great website out there called mychurchfinder.org, mychurchfinder.org where you should have your pastor, if they are culturally engaged, they need to go to that website and get registered so that they can let people know in the area that they're a culturally engaged church. And if you're looking for a church that's culturally engaged you should go to that website and check out some of those churches on there. Great folks at that website, they work with us at Liberty Pastors and Patriot Academy and WallBuilders and, you know, it's just a good way to find those pastors that are speaking to these things. And then if your pastor is doing that, we would love to have them registered on that website as well. Alright! Quick break we'll come back with more questions from the audience. You're listening to the WallBuilders Show.
[00:17:39] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. Foundations of Freedom Thursday today. Next up is Nicholas. His question is about judges. He said, good afternoon, WallBuilders Trio. Hope you all are having a great day. I appreciate all you do. I've often heard that so-and-so is a liberal judge or a conservative judge, but shouldn't judges be neither left, or right? They should be upholders of the Constitution, right? Which I would say that is right today, at least for perception. Anyway, back to Nicholas. He said so how can we get back to judges being impartial and go by the Constitution and upholding the law and not be left or right? So good question. I don't know, I mean honestly unfortunately the American flag is now perceived as being right. You know you can't drive if you have an American flag on your car or your house uh people go oh that's automatically a Republican or right. And, anyway so yeah good question. But I don’t even know how to put this in context guys. Go for it!
Tim Barton [00:18:34] Yeah, I would say at this point, the Constitution is not neutral. The Constitution is the conservative position, which is crazy to think about, but that literally is where we are. Where Democrats are saying we want to move past the Constitution, it's why there was a move for a lot of years or decades to say it's a living document, it why you had actual Supreme Court Justices who were very liberal justices encouraging people to look beyond the Constitution to see how other nations do it to look to the UN, et cetera. I mean, just crazy things. So, at this point, to get a move back to the Constitution, that is the conservative position, which is the very nature of conservatism. You're trying to conserve something. Well, what are we trying to conserve? The Constitution is one of the top things we are trying to conserve. Progressives, by definition, are trying progress to a new era, and their progress. And the majority of their mind is to progress past what the Constitution says and what those actual governmental limitations are. So, I don't think we can get to a place where it's, it's as neutral of a position to uphold a Constitutional position. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was defending this idea that first of all, when she goes to the Senate confirmation hearing, she couldn't define what a woman was. But then in this hearing, in the Supreme Court chamber, she is defending kind of transgenderism and kind of this binary fluidity kind of thing. Well, that's not a Constitutional position. You can't just make words mean different things for the sake of your argument or to promote your agenda. But that is what Democrats and liberals have been doing for decades. So, I don't know that you're going to have a neutral position necessarily. At least that's my take. Dad, what do you think?
David Barton [00:20:31] Well, I agree with that and disagree with it in some ways, and it's all in how you define it, because in my opinion, there is not a federal judge in the United States right now that is not upholding the Constitution. But it all depends on how you're defining Constitution. And this goes back to what Charles, Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes said. He said the Constitution, he said we are under a constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say that it is. And so, because we've had now nearly 80 years of law schools teaching a living constitution, Tim, as you mentioned, I don't think there's any question in their mind but what they're upholding the constitution. But I think the question being asked is, all right, an original intent constitution. So, I think in order to get all judges back to the original intent and constitution, it's really easy. You just go back to the future, get in a time machine, you back up a century and you eliminate all progressive law schools and you back a century. And you get rid of all the teaching of evolving constitution. You get rid of the teaching of judicial supremacy and then only judges can say what the constitution means. You get rid of the idea of societal evolution. All you have to do is go back a hundred years and just restructure America. Now, short of that, it's not gonna happen. But I do think that just as they took over law schools back a 100 years ago, there is starting to be a kind of a groundswell of conservatism starting to come back. Maybe it's a reaction to all the stupidity that goes with liberal progressivism, but it's starting to back. But this is where, if we don't get involved in elections and choosing people of the legislature that we have in Texas, they've gone in very well and they've started cleaning this junk out of our state universities, out of Texas A&M, out of the Texas Tech, out in University of Texas. It's amazing to me that the University of Texas at Austin is becoming fairly conservative with this faculty and staff now. They've gone in, cleaned out. And so, this stuff can be turned around, but it can't be turned around unless people get involved in elections, get involved in electing people who will go in and make systemic reforms. And I just go to the fact that in this coming election that we're going to have in 2026 for Congress, for our state reps, our state senators, only 38 percent of Americans vote in those elections. And we've got to get past that 38% threshold. Everybody needs to go out and say, hey, I'm going to participate in turning America around step by step. And so, I mean, what we've got with what Nicholas is laid out in this question is a huge problem. And that's what's got us into the progressivism that we have now. And we can get out of that. And I'm, again, I've seen really good things happening in Congress, seen good things happen in a lot of places. But it's not going to be something that just has to last for a year. It's going to have to be one election followed by another election, followed by another election. We're just going to to be involved the way they were involved. They were very committed to what they wanted back a hundred years ago. We got to be just as committed. And I think we can go back in the right direction.
Rick Green [00:23:32] Yeah, and of course, we nicknamed what you described, David, in terms of their interpretation or which constitution are they ruling on. Of course, the "Courstitution" in our Constitution Alive and Biblical Citizenship courses, and that is everything you just described, man. That's the way to get it turned around, get back to the actual Constitution instead of the "Courtstitution". But excellent question by Nicholas. All right, guys, final question of the day comes from Wayne. He said, let's see, he said, I have heard that the Founding Fathers knew Hebrew and Greek. As well as various other languages. How did they go about learning these languages? Could they both read and speak the language? My attempts at learning another language has not gone well. Hey, Wayne, in Bill Clinton's words, I feel your pain. I'm just trying to learn Spanish, brother, and Duolingo, you know, 500 something days in a row, and I still can't speak it. So yeah, Hebrew, Greek, other languages? Wow!
David Barton [00:24:22] Well, it's, I mean, if you live in Texas, you're pretty much bilingual anyway, because you can speak, you can, speak English and you can speak Texan and those are two separate languages. So, we're pretty good at being bilingual anyway. But as far as the Founding Fathers, even to get into nearly every college back then, you had to be fluent in Greek and in Latin and in English. So, you started taking foreign languages at a much younger age. It was not unusual to be six, seven, eight years old studying Latin and studying Greek. Now Hebrew is a little different there were not as many Founding Fathers that knew Hebrew or studied that because it really was considered much of a dead language It wasn't much of alive language and particularly here in America where we had so much less influence with that far Eastern side of Europe the Middle East. And so, while there were Jews in America there was just not much influence in the way of teaching Hebrew and it wasn't really available. But how you do it you just have to get immersed in it. And you know, that's one of the things when you, oftentimes when you do a language by trying to learn a little bit of time, it is so hard to fit in. It's like when I used to be fluent in Russian. And Russian, you just had to think you're in a different world because it's 33 letters in the alphabet. There's a lot of letters that don't look like anything we've got. And if you try to interpret it in what you're used to, whether it be in English or Texan or anything else, it just doesn't work. And so, it really takes an immersion in that kind of stuff or starting fairly young, or just considering that you're on a different planet. You've gone to Mars, the moon, Uranus, or somewhere else, and you're just learning a language from the beginning. It's the easiest way to go at it. It's hard to fit within the narratives that we have in our education today, but it is a great thing to learn another language. And the Founding Fathers definitely, if they went to college, they were all at least trilingual, and some of them, much more than that, were writing about Founding Fathers right now, a book that will come out in a few months. Many of the Founding fathers spoke four, five, six languages, and that was not uncommon.
Rick Green [00:26:23] All right, well, we're out of time for today. We've got more questions to get to, but also go ahead and fill up the box, guys. Send them in, radio@wallbuilders.com, radio@wallbuilder.com. Some of our topics today may have spurred on some questions in your mind or you may have had some you've been wanting to ask for a while. Send those to us, radio@wallbuilders.com. This has been Foundations of Freedom Thursday. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.
