How Church History Fuels Pro-Life Courage Today - with Seth Gruber

A pastor leads his church out of the sanctuary, marches them to a city wall where unwanted infants are left to die, and starts ripping the bricks down with his bare hands. That forgotten story becomes a mirror for modern America and it is one reason I wanted you to hear Tim Barton’s conversation with pro-life advocate and filmmaker Seth Gruber.

We talk about The Last Stand event in Denver and the premiere of Seth’s new film, also called The Last Stand, along with the broader work of White Rose Resistance. Seth makes the case that the church has spent 1,900 years resisting evils that keep resurfacing: abortion and infanticide, the sexualization of kids, blurred gender lines, and the state stepping into the parent-child relationship. He brings history to life through Athanasius, the Nicene-era church leader who preached the Incarnation at the “infanticide walls” and helped spark a new legal imagination for the sanctity of life.

We also connect the dots to America’s own foundations. Tim points to Founder James Wilson and early legal reasoning about the protection of unborn life, then asks the question many listeners are thinking: are we being “too extreme”? Seth answers with a warning from civilizational history and cultural sociology, including J D Unwin’s Sex and Culture, and a hard look at 1973 as a hinge point for abortion, pornography, and the broader sexual revolution.

If you want a biblical worldview lens on pro-life convictions, Christian citizenship, and how history can fuel courage, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with the moment that challenged you most.

Transcript

Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. It's the WallBuilders Show taking all the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton are actually all traveling. Of course you got the big dedication yesterday, rededication of the nation. Unbelievable. Just absolutely incredible. So, so thankful for the moment that we are in or the things that are happening in our country. It's just, it's just amazing. So, recording from the airport, but Tim had the chance to sit down with Seth Gruber. We love working with and has a huge event coming up in just a few weeks and just all kinds of great things coming out that we wanted to highlight and share with you. And so, we're going to share that interview with Tim and Seth Gruber today, it'll give you a chance to get caught up on what's going on with White Rose Resistance and all the great work that they are doing. If you have not been to wallbuilders.show lately, make sure you go there because it's got an easy to use listing of all the programs over the last couple of weeks, you might've missed. Gives you a chance not only to listen to them, but to share them with your friends or family. And then of course, all the podcast apps be sure to do the same thing. Or if you listen to us on the radio, on Bot Radio or American Family Radio or some of the other networks that are carrying WallBuilders, then you can still share it from their websites. But the whole idea is just to get the truth in as many hands as we possibly can. So important, the diet of information that people have. So, let's get a good diet today with Seth Gruber and Tim Barton. Stay with us, you're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:02:40] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. This is Tim Barton and I am now joined by my friend, special guest, Seth Gruber. Seth, thanks for hanging out with us, man. 

Seth Gruber [00:02:48] Thanks Tim. What an honor. 

Tim Barton [00:02:50] Well, so we wanted to encourage people to attend The Last Stand, an event you have coming up that I am so honored. I get to be part of it. It's honestly, it's just a group of, of a bunch of cool friends that we get to hang out and encourage people with some basic truth, but you're also premiering something that you have a new film coming out. Tell us a little bit about your film and The Last Stand. 

Seth Gruber [00:03:16] Yeah, thanks Tim. Well, people can go to thelaststand.com if they wanna get tickets. Not only do we have Tim Barton, we have Allie Beth Stuckey, Frank Turek, Rob McCoy, Steve Dace, Abby Johnson, Andrew Sedra, Dr. George Grant, and a huge special guest we'll be announcing soon. Thelaststand.com, June 5th, Friday evening kickoff, all day June 6th, worship with Shane and Shane. And then the premiere of my film. So yeah, we're just a bunch of Christian Nationalists, I guess, whatever. I mean, I think that means that you're a Democrat in 1969. Tim, I'm pretty sure that's what a Christian Nationalist is. So you don't want to slay children in the name of radical feminism. You think that there's only two genders, that marriage is only a man and a woman, and that it's better to restore the Christian foundations of the Republic than the pagan enlightenment, Maximilien de Robespierre, Marquis de Sade, ideal. So, I guess that's where Christian Nationalism is. So that's who we are, And the film is really important. This is a second annual Last Stand Festival, Tim, but the film is also called The Last Stand. And it's really significant because it's easy to say, you know, like, oh, if the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? It's easy to say things like there's nothing new under the sun. And, and I think most conservatives and even like Christless conservative patriots who bleed red, white and blue, Tim. I think of them can kind of sense that like evil's not new. Like we throw around these phrases. It's easy to- to believe that and I think some Americans, Tim, go like oh, yeah, no, I get that evil always comes back wearing a similar mask. But like do we actually know what that means? Do we actually understand that like for 1900 years the church fought against abortion, baby-killing, infanticide, the sexualization of kids, the blurring of the gender lines, the state intervening in the parent-child relationship, drag queen story hour in the palais royale during the French Revolution, brothels full of children above the Parisian cafes while they're chopping off Marie Antoinette's head? Do we have historical specificity to what happens when the church retreats because we read too many Rick Warren or Andy Stanley books or whatever? And so we really wanted to recover the glorious and long neglected heritage of Christian resistance against the same evils that we're facing today. Heroes whose names we don't even know in the church anymore, Tim. And how this laid the foundations for the West as we know it today. So that's the elevator pitch of what the film's about. 

Tim Barton [00:05:45] Well, you did a great job giving the elevator pitch. There's so much to unfold. And one of the things that you and I have both spent some time studying history. You blew me away one of first times we got to hang out as you were going through some of your knowledge of church history. But even with American history, one of things that WallBuilders, we've tried to do for a long time is to re-educate Americans to the reality of the biblical foundations of the nation. And part of why it matters is if you don't realize you're a frog sitting in a pot of boiling water, then you're never going to get out. But when you, when you have perspective to go, wait a second, something wrong is happening and you can pinpoint what is wrong. And you have the contrast of, no, this is the way that the understanding that the seminal foundational understanding what it was. And here's where we've gone wrong. We want to give people perspective to understand not just that there are wrong things, but to show them, no here's truth, here is error and here's how we recover truth and what we do. And so, one of the things I'm very excited about and in being able to partner and we want to encourage people go to The Last Stand, thelaststand.com, go sign up, come be part of this up in Denver, Colorado. And I do want to throw this back to you, but I do want to plug man when I, I went to college, the fall of 2000, graduated 2004, but in high school and college, there were these worship leaders down at like Baylor, I saw them at A&M and then their name is Shane and Shane. And I grew up with these guys. It's really cool to be able to be in a room full of like-minded believers that have a heart for the things of God. Because one of the things that I think we are seeing, and you are on the front lines of stirring people up for this, I think, we are saying God moving to awaken people, their hearts, their minds, and conscience. And to your point, one of the things we've had in culture is we've taught a lot of comfortable Christianity. And we've kind of lost the concept that when the Bible says the fear of the Lord is to hate evil, there's not a lot of Christians that have a lot of hate for evil and sometimes it's because they haven't identified what evil is. They haven't been exposed to how evil some things are. And so you've been a little bit of a protagonist on the front side going, hey guys! Here's evil right here. And you better hate it if you are a Christian because that's actually as much as Jesus said, they would know you're my disciples by your love for one another. It's crazy if you look up the word hate in the Bible, how often it is God saying he hates sin and wickedness and iniquity and the fear of the Lord is hating something. And it seems like this bipolar contrast for some Christians, but when you realize no, when you love God and love righteousness, then everything that is, when the thief comes, the devil comes to steal, kill, and destroy, then you hate the death and destruction of what Satan is doing. And as Christians, we should be working to stop that, which is a lot of what you've done. So let me toss back to you. 

Seth Gruber [00:08:51] Well, so Tim, I mean, you just went to the word of God, the Old Testament, that's right. There are some things God hates more, right? Like killing your baby ain't the same thing as stealing a pencil, okay? No one thinks that all sin is equal. All sin puts us on an equal playing field before the foot of the cross. All sin requires repentance, but not all sin is equal, and so in the Old Testament, we get this list, Tim, you remember of the good kings of Israel, and there weren't many, uh, like Asa, Jehoshaphat, Jehoash. Amaziah, Azariah, Jotham, and it says they did what was right in the sight of the Lord. It's repeated over and over again, but there's a final epitaph attached to each of those men. A final line for your listeners who don't know what that word is. It's like the conclusion, the concluding statement, something you might put on your headstone, the epitaph, and it say, except for the high places, were not taken away. God is telling us that He wants us to remember His good king. Not by the good that they did, but by the evil that they tolerated and gave free reign to. And that tolerance brought about the eventual collapse of Jerusalem in the beginning of the Babylonian captivity. One of the high places in the Bible, brothers and sisters, they would do orgies and sacrifice infants. And that often included the sexual abuse of children as well. So weird sex rainbow cults and child sacrifice. What are the two gods of American culture today? If not weird sex cult stuff and baby killing. This is, these are not just siloed political issues that you can deal with in a cute little box or deal with on their own terms. They're connected to everything else. There's this church hero, church father, Tim, named Athanasius. He's been called Athanasius's Contra Mundum, or Athanasius's Against the World. Not only was he a patristic, church father, he took a pivotal role in drafting the Nicene Creed, the most simplest profession of the Christian faith. He wrote a book called On the Incarnation at just 15 years old, which is still a staple of any classical Christian education today, Tim. And one day in Alexandria where he pastored According to oral tradition, because the burning of the library at Alexandria is probably the greatest loss in all of Christendom, he walks his church out of the sanctuary, Tim, outside of the ancient Roman wall of cities in Alexandria, and he marches his congregation to the infanticide wall. These were very routinely placed outside of city walls because there's still some shame associated with what they would do here. And this is where it became normal and legal to abandon your infant. If you don't like the baby, just leave it on a wall or a trash heap. Some people, Tim, called these infanticide walls. Some people called them high places. 

Tim Barton [00:11:58] Oh, see, okay, I was gonna guess Planned Parenthood at first, but I just confused where you were going. 

Seth Gruber [00:12:03] That's right. And so, Athanasius stands in front of the high places, Tim, and he preaches a message on the incarnation, which is, I mean, the most pro-life story ever. Like, the word became flesh, John 1, but the Greek is it's the logos became flesh. And for anyone who's studied ancient Rome in the WallBuilders community, you'll know that the concept that ancient Romans valued the most, the thing that they place at the center of their political discourse the center of the city-state, their understanding of human dignity was Logos. Logic, rationality, speech, it's what separates us from the animals, this is what they valued the most. But the way they defined it, Tim, shocker, it excluded unborn babies, infants, toddlers, children, slaves, most women, and it was basically just a freeborn male who had Logos and was considered to be a full person. So, it's very eugenics-like, it's very- Promethean, it's very Hitlerian, right? This whole sub-human-unter-mensch kind of ideas, not full persons. And so think of the scandalous nature of John 1, when early pagans in the Roman era were reading this. Wait, the Logos became flesh? The capital-L Logos, baby, he's the divine logic of the universe. He has so much Logos that when he opens his mouth, a freaking Milky Way comes out. Wait, you're saying in Christianity, Logos is not a concept, it is a person? That's His name? The Logos became flesh, but he took on fetal flesh? Wait, hold on, hold on, he became fully God and fully human in the one location that we devalue the most, that we've declared open war and hostility upon, the uterus, where there are no people, there are not persons in Roman law, unborn babies to him were considered to be part of the mother's body. Sound familiar? Now it's The Logos, who becomes a fetus. Athanasius preaches the Incarnation outside of the old Roman infanticide walls and he turns around him and he starts ripping the infanticide wall down with his own hands, brick by brick. He turns to his congregation with bloodied hands, Tim, and he says, this blood for their blood. This story reaches the ears of Emperors Valentinian and Theodosius in 374 A.D. They're so scandalized by this, Tim, like that a pastor would walk his church out of the sanctuary and tear down the local abortion mill. I'm sorry infanticide wall, Freudian slip. That they pass edicts for the first time in human history, Tim, declaring that infants and babies have a right to life, cannot be discarded and must be cared for by their parents. And six years later Rome embraced the teaching of Christ, literally etching the sanctity of life into the very ethos of Western civilization. It might not be an overstatement to say that tearing down abortion mills and saving babies gave birth to Western Christendom as we know it today. This is just one of the many stories that we've forgotten about who we are as the Church, and so this film, Tim, is about how the first 1900 years of Church history is an indictment against the last 100. 

Tim Barton [00:15:23] Yeah, it's interesting too, Seth, as you're saying this, and for anybody that wants to know more, go to thewhiterose.life. And if they're wondering why The White Rose, there's actually some details about that and why it's there. And if we have time, you might can tell us about it. 

Seth Gruber [00:15:38] And if they wanna host a screening, Tim, they can go to thelaststand.film. Any church or Christian school, co-op, homeschool, anything. You can go thelastand.film, thelaststand.film and you can press host a screening, fill out the form and you could bring this to your people starting June 7th. 

Tim Barton [00:15:57] So that is exactly one of the questions on my list. So for everybody that is interested, if you can't make it, first of all, try to make it to The Last Stand up in Denver, Colorado. Try to be there. It's incredible. Seth, maybe there's still tickets available. I know that there's been a little bit of a run. But if you could make it there, try to get there. Be there in person. You can come, say hi, connect with us. And as Seth mentioned, incredible group of people there. But that's backing up to you telling part of the story. One of the things again at WallBuilders, we tried to remind people over and over and over again, if you would go back to the original document, you would rediscover and you can recover some of what has been lost and intentionally misled, intentionally misrepresented, because even when the Founding Fathers, when they acknowledged that we believe there is a divine Creator and that our rights come from Him, government exists to protect those rights, but among those rights were life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And there are people that would go, well, right. But that life, they, that they weren't talking about like you guys right now, you're talking about the unborn. They weren't, talking about that. And I wouldn't go, hang on a second. I begged to differ because James Wilson, one of the guys who signed the Declaration and he signed the Constitution and he was an original Chief Justice in the US Supreme Court. While he was a sitting justice at the Supreme Court, he is one of the law teachers, it's like the second law school that opens in America is the law school in Philadelphia. And we have his original law lectures. And one of the law lectures he gave, he said, beautiful and undeviating human life from its commencement to close is protected by the common law. In the contemplations of law, that life begins when the infant is first able to stir in the womb. Now, we could talk about, if you study some basic biology, you can learn-. 

Seth Gruber [00:17:42] They call it quickening. Yeah. 

Tim Barton [00:17:43] Right. And you would go, well, that happens at a certain, you know, week into of the pregnancy. And I would point out to people, no, you've misunderstood. What he is actually arguing is when the quickening happened, when the baby stirs in the womb, that was the first time the mom actually could know for certain that she was pregnant. His argument actually was as soon as a woman knows she's pregnant, the laws of America protect the life of that unborn child. But I say this because sometimes you have the conversation with people today and they feel like, you know, well, Seth, you're being extreme in what you say. And it's like, no, actually that this was basic foundational things. First of all, to Christianity, but secondly, even to America. And for everybody listening that has not heard Seth before, go online, go to his YouTube channel, listen to some of his speeches. It's so compelling. Seth, sometimes when I think about you, I'm reminded of John Brown, historically. I don't know if you ever get that connection. 

Seth Gruber [00:18:40] John Brown! That guy was intense, huh? 

Tim Barton [00:18:42] Well, he was someone that took it serious enough. He was so devoted in his faith. He said that we have to do something with our belief. We can't stand by and watch evil happen and not do something. And you are someone that I see so motivated by your faith that you have been actively doing things. And so that for people listening, the easy things you can do, you can show the film and your church to your group, that's easy. Uh, one step above that is come to the event, come support it. Come be inspired, motivated, challenged. But Seth, what would you say to the Christians who are listening and they're like, guys, like I'm kind of on your team, but y'all are a little extreme. What would you to people that feel like maybe you are being too extreme in your position? 

Seth Gruber [00:19:34] Um, how's this for extreme? There is not an exception to this rule in 86 civilizations over 5,000 years. These were the findings of JD Unwin in his book, Sex and Culture from 1934, 92 years ago, buried by the liberal academic left. When I go viral on my friends over at Cross Politics Podcast at AMFest that they, I guess they got lucky or I was communicating well, it went over 2 million views. But then I get meta-verified. Fact check! Fact check! Saying that the findings that I was summarizing from J.D. Unwin are in fact "not true!" Because he's been totally buried by the liberal academic left him because his findings that I'm about to summarize in 30 seconds for your audience are such a damning indictment on liberalism and its false promises. So, it has to be buried just like what else what else they bury anything that's a threat to liberalism and the status quo, Tim. The history of Planned Parenthood the Protestant founding of America all these things you have to do crazy research to find because it's not being taught in public high schools. And so he finds a 100% correlation between basically laissez-faire, French revolutionary, without responsibility cultures and the death of those civilizations and societies, and a 100%, correlation between heterosexual marriage-based cultures and cultural advancement, cultural energy prowess. And it's those civilizations, he said, who gave us the best food, architecture, standing armies, families, art, et cetera, et cetera.

Tim Barton [00:20:57] Without exception for the history of civilization. 

Seth Gruber [00:20:59] Yep. Yep. And he says once a civiliz- and here's the key part, Tim, okay? This is super key. Your audience will love this. Once a civilization adopts total sexual freedom, that was the phrase he used, and he didn't just mean cultural shifts. He didn't mean just like Hollywood, you know, pushing Will and Grace. He meant like it was codified. Total sexual freedom became codified, then you have about a century. Roughly 90 to 100 years before you're done, and you're taken over by another civilization with greater social energy. So civilizational replacement, anyone? UK right now, Canada, Australia, Dearborn, Michigan? Freaking wake up. And so, the question becomes, when did America embrace total sexual freedom, Tim? I think it was 1973, okay? And I have three reasons for that. Roe v. Wade, baby killing through point of birth. Now we go, okay, well, there's not a civilization in the history of our recorded species that did not exercise ritualistic child sacrifice in some way, shape, or form. So why is that significant, Seth? Civilizations have always killed babies. Why? Because America is the most powerful child of the Reformation. That's what made that significant that within 200 years of our founding, we codified baby killing through point-of-birth in all 50 states funded by the taxpayer for any reason or no reason at all. That's kind of a big deal. So, you don't have total sexual freedom, Tim, unless you can kill the products of your total sexual freedom. Until you can sacrifice the child that's the product of your sexual freedom. Only then can you be totally free. Free from parenthood, free from responsibility, free from anything. What else happened in '73? Dude, the Supreme Court removed a bunch of the obscenity laws. 1973 was the beginning of free legal porn. Legal porn shipped everywhere. And '73 Endangered Species Act, same year. Same year, we declared open season on pre-born humans. Tim, we gave more legal protections to sea turtles and porpoises, which by the way, fulfills GK Chesterton's prophetic warning that wherever there is animal worship, there will be human sacrifice. So, wait, hold on, Old Testament, let's go back. Tim, what did I just go through? Roe v. Wade, Moloch. Animal worship, Baal, and free porn, Ashtoreth Yikes! Those are the manifestations of like the three kinds of pagan worship in the Old Testament that when tolerated or participated in, God would give His people over to be ruled by pagan hordes who hate them because of their tolerance or participation in that. So I don't think it's an overstatement, Tim, to say like if '73, that may have been the beginning of America's codification of total sexual freedom. We don't have much time left. 

Tim Barton [00:23:39] Yeah. And Seth, so for everybody listening, again, I encourage you go to thewhiterose.life. If you can come to The Last Stand, come to Last Stand. If you want to show that film to your group, you need to do it. Seth, one of the things that would add to what you just said is I think that's when it really broke out. But had it not been for 1962 and 63, had we not said we don't want kids to have the Bible or have prayer in school anymore. Until you remove a Biblical foundation you cannot have the sexual freedom you're talking about. So, I think this is absolutely built on each other. And I, I know you will not disagree with that, but this is why it matters. You have to restore a biblical foundation and part of restoring a biblical foundations, you have to oppose, fight and hate evil. And Seth, you've been on the front line of doing that. And I'm so grateful for you, bro. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. 

Seth Gruber [00:24:35] Thank you, Tim. We'll see you at The Last Stand. Can't wait to hear you. 

Tim Barton [00:24:38] We'll be there. All right, for everybody else, hang on. We'll right back in just a minute with Rick Green. 

Rick Green [00:25:50] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks for listening to Tim Barton and Seth Gruber. Thanks for all that you're doing to help usher in this, this new rededication to God for America. These events, like what happened yesterday on the Mall are, you know, once in a lifetime events. This is really once in not only a generation, but perhaps even in a century, and there's so many of these things that are happening, well, in two and a half centuries, maybe. I mean, we'll have some more celebrations, of course, for the 300th, That's 250th is the one that we've been given. In our lifetimes to be able to make the most of. Hope you're thinking about that and how you can do that. Be sure and go to wallbuilders.com today to get you some materials to get educated on these things, get our Biblical Citizenship class, make sure that you're getting together with other patriots, other people that want to be good biblical citizens and together sharpening each other, getting educated and encouraging each other and getting involved in everything that you possibly can. Thanks so much for listening today to the WallBuilders Show.