Rick Green: Thanks for joining us today. I feel like I totally cheated everybody on Tuesday by only giving you a little bit of Kirk Cameron. He gives such a good presentation in Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. That first night, opening with Kirk, is just amazing, and you only got a little taste of it on Tuesday.
Rick Green: Since we're about to do a national class, we have a chance to bring all of our listeners together to spend eight weeks on Monday nights going through Biblical Citizenship together. I teased you a little bit on Tuesday with the very end of the program. I gave you about ten minutes of Kirk's presentation out of Biblical Citizenship in Modern America, so I'm going to get to more of that today.
Rick Green: I think it's important for us to recognize what made America great in the first place if we're going to try to make our country great again. I totally agree with the whole "Make America Great Again" idea. It was one of the best slogans, maybe in the history of mankind. It really sticks, but it begs the question: What made America great in the first place? How are we going to make it great again? We've got to know what the formula was.
Rick Green: That's what we do at Patriot Academy, WallBuilders, and American Family Association. All of these ministries are about teaching biblical principles that make a good society. They are about actual discipleship. Too often, we think making disciples is just getting someone to walk the aisle, give their life to the Lord, and then we're done. What we're about is fulfilling the Great Commission: making disciples of all nations and teaching them to obey everything He commanded.
Rick Green: We're not teaching people to obey only the things that aren't politically controversial while leaving everything else off the table. We teach all of it. What we accomplished with Biblical Citizenship in Modern America was a crash course in discipleship in society. In other words, it teaches you how to be a good citizen, how to be a good member of whatever community God has put you in, and how to do that in America.
Rick Green: This course benefits people in other countries as well. We've had people in Canada and other nations take it, and we've translated it into other languages. The biblical principles work every time they're tried. The course gives you the principles and the formula, but then it shows you the apparatus and the playbook for how to live those principles out in our particular system.
Rick Green: As an extreme example, we're not in Rome. When Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's," He was speaking within a very specific form of government. When you submitted to the authority of government at that time, it was pretty much a totalitarian authority. That's not what we live in.
Rick Green: When we submit to authority, when we follow Romans 13, and when we are humble and obey the law, we have to ask ourselves, who is Caesar in America? It certainly is not the president. It is not even Congress. It is us. We are in a system where they answer to us, not the other way around.
Rick Green: If we, the people, are Caesar, then we've got a job to do. We've got to learn how to do Caesar well. We've got to learn how to live this out in a way that is good stewardship, because to not pay attention or to choose not to participate would be like the servant in the parable of the talents whom the master called a wicked and slothful servant because he did not do his job. He did not invest, protect, preserve, and pass on what he had been given.
Rick Green: It's our job to do that as citizens of a free nation. We've been handed an incredible talent of freedom, the vote, and all of the things that allow us to participate. But Christians don't know how to do that. We often talk about the statistics. Roughly half of Christians are registered to vote, and roughly half of those typically show up in an election. In a midterm election like the one we're about to have, it's even worse than that.
Rick Green: That is bad stewardship. That is being the wicked and slothful servant. If you think about it, roughly 75 percent of the church is the wicked and slothful servant in this metaphor. What we do with Biblical Citizenship is try to wake people up and equip them. We show them how to be a good citizen and how to do that biblically in America.
Rick Green: Normally, you can go to PatriotAcademy.com at any time. You can get the DVDs or a thumb drive, or you can stream the videos. You can sign up as a Constitution Coach and get access to everything for free. You can stream it and watch it by yourself if you want.
Rick Green: The goal of signing up as a coach is to host a class in your living room, at your church, at a library, or wherever you want. People have these classes in all kinds of places. You can host the class anywhere.
Rick Green: We've had about two million people go through it so far and well over ten thousand different classes across the country. A lot of people and a lot of churches have done this in their living rooms or wherever they could gather.
Rick Green: Sometimes we host the class online for an entire national audience so anybody can sign up and join us. We usually end up with several thousand people joining us on whatever night we're doing the class. It's fun because we get to do it together. We watch the videos together and take questions. It gives you a chance to dive into the material from the videos and the workbook, but it also gives you a chance to ask questions about current application.
Rick Green: You can ask what is happening right now with Iran, the Islamic invasion, the upcoming midterm elections, some of President Trump's executive orders, or whatever the current issue may be. It's a fun way to take what we're learning in the course, which is all about principles and process, and apply it to the specific issues and policies we're dealing with right now.
Rick Green: If that sounds interesting or exciting to you, go sign up at PatriotAcademy.com for the October 12 Biblical Citizenship class. It will be an eight-week class starting October 12 at 8 p.m. Central. That will be 9 p.m. on the East Coast and 6 p.m. on the West Coast.
Rick Green: We'll get online, say hello, talk about what we're going to cover that night, and introduce the special guest. Then we'll jump into the video pretty quickly. Five or ten minutes in, we'll be into the class video. The class video each week is roughly an hour, sometimes an hour and ten or fifteen minutes. Then we'll open it up to questions.
Rick Green: I usually stay on for another thirty or forty minutes, sometimes an hour, taking questions. You can put your questions in the chat. We'll have a great time.
Rick Green: This is a great way to introduce other people to these concepts. If you have people in your family or your church, or maybe even your own pastor, who have not been engaged in what is going on culturally and politically and in all the things we're supposed to be good stewards of, this is a great way to introduce them. Get them to join us on Monday night.
Rick Green: Again, it starts October 12, Monday night, at 8 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Pacific, and 9 p.m. Eastern. Each week, I'll have a different partner highlighted. The first week will feature FlashPoint and Gene Bailey and what the FlashPoint Army is doing across the country. They are having an incredible impact.
Rick Green: The second week will feature iVoterGuide and American Family Association. We'll have an opportunity before the election to tell people how to access the voter guides, how to use the website, and how to get the voter guides into the hands of as many people as possible.
Rick Green: We have other partners from across the country who will join us each week. We'll highlight them and give you a chance to learn about the different people doing all these things in the culture.
Rick Green: We try hard not to reinvent the wheel or duplicate what anybody else is doing. That's why we have so many partners. Our job is to provide the intellectual ammunition, the courses, the information, and the education, and we let anybody use it.
Rick Green: That's why so many organizations are offering these courses: Biblical Citizenship, Rebuilding Liberty, Constitutional Live, Chasing American Legends, and the other Patriot Academy courses. This time, many of our partners will be together, so you'll get a chance to learn about some of them. Most importantly, take the course, ask questions, and be a part of this with people from all over America.
Rick Green: Again, it's October 12, and you want to go to PatriotAcademy.com. There will be a graphic on the home page for you to click on and sign up.
Rick Green: I definitely want to get to some of the headlines. I've been traveling so much, and thank you for your patience. It's been an interesting few weeks with some of the things happening at Patriot Academy and around the world, along with events involving the White House, pastor groups, and different organizations pushing hard going into this election.
Rick Green: I haven't been doing the typical program where we take calls and talk about whatever is in the headlines. We just haven't had much time to do that. I won't be able to do a lot of that today, but I want to do a little bit of it and then give you more of a teaser of the Biblical Citizenship course.
Rick Green: We'll hear a little more of what Kirk Cameron was talking about on Tuesday's program. If you missed that, you can find it on the AFR website and review what he already covered. Even on Tuesday, I didn't start at the beginning of the Biblical Citizenship class. I jumped right into the part with Kirk Cameron.
Rick Green: Kirk is an incredible teacher. If you're not familiar with him, you may know him from Growing Pains. You may have grown up watching him or watched some of his movies, such as Fireproof. You may know him from The Way of the Master, which he did with Ray Comfort for years, or from his social media commentary, which often goes viral.
Rick Green: What he has been doing with Patriot Academy for several years is helping us teach the Constitution. He's hosted many of these classes and programs, and we've done a lot of events together. The night he filmed the Biblical Citizenship course, he taught on the Monument to the Forefathers. That's the largest granite monument in America. It's an amazing work of art, and it has the formula right there in stone.
Rick Green: He teaches on that during the first week of Biblical Citizenship. When we come back from the break, we'll pick up where we left off on Tuesday with him teaching on that. Before we go to break, I'll hit some of these headlines.
Rick Green: I'm sure you've already heard about what happened in Israel yesterday and the attempted hijacking. It wasn't just an attempted hijacking. It was actually an attempted mass murder event. This man stabbed his copilot and was going to crash the plane. There would have been significant casualties.
Rick Green: It was a horrific event and an important reminder to all of us that jihad is alive and well, and that these people want to destroy anyone who does not agree with them or follow them. It was a stark reminder. It felt a lot like September 11 if you watched any of the videos or heard some of the screaming.
Rick Green: I was flying out of Washington, D.C. when I heard about it. I was just getting to the airport and thought, "Is this another 9/11, where they've done this with multiple planes and potentially would try to make that happen?" Thankfully, that did not happen.
Rick Green: Thankfully, because of the passengers and crew who intervened, they stopped this from happening and somehow got the plane landed. I still do not have the details on exactly how they got the plane on the ground, but I think it's important for us to stop for a minute and think about it.
Rick Green: This was jihad. This was a jihadist terrorist attack. That's exactly what the Israeli defense minister said about it. It was a flight out of Tel Aviv. It is hard to imagine the chaos that could have occurred on that plane.
Rick Green: I'm thankful that the passengers intervened and, as one of them said, neutralized the attacker. You basically had some Todd Beamers on that airplane. If you don't remember Todd Beamer, he's the one we get "Let's roll" from. He was the man who, along with two or three other men on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania and was headed, if I remember correctly, toward the White House, intervened because they were courageous and brave. They saved countless lives and gave their own lives.
Rick Green: These passengers were willing to do the same thing on that flight. That is worth remembering. It reminds all of us that there is a cultural struggle. One side is a culture of death, and we need to remember that.
Rick Green: We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll jump into Biblical Citizenship in Modern America and pick up where Kirk left off.
Rick Green: Welcome back. This is Rick Green. We're going to finish up what we did on Biblical Citizenship in that first week. We're going to give you a little more of a taste of that, as I said before the break. Then on Monday nights, you can do the full class with me live, including a question-and-answer session and a special guest.
Rick Green: Don't forget to go to PatriotAcademy.com to get signed up for that. Let's jump in where we left off on Tuesday. I left you on a cliffhanger as Kirk was beginning to describe the monument. Here we go.
Kirk Cameron: The soul of this American republic, our forefathers and foremothers knew this. It's not just any faith. Notice the details. Faith is pointing to the one true God of heaven.
Kirk Cameron: Faith also has a star on her forehead, representing wisdom. Faith is holding a book, and it's not just any book. It's the Bible. Its pages are being blown open as though by the wind, the wind of the Spirit of God.
Kirk Cameron: Notice that this isn't just faith in any random deity. This is faith in the one true God of heaven and faith in that God's Word, the Bible. That Bible is also very historic in that it is the Geneva Bible, which the Pilgrims brought over with them. It was the first English-translated Bible that contained chapter and verse numbers in the text.
Kirk Cameron: Literally, the first time John 3:16 could be found by going to chapter 3 and verse 16 was in that Bible carried over by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. They believed that this faith in God and His Word must be reasoned toward every aspect of life.
Kirk Cameron: We're going to reason about how to be a family through the Word of God. We're going to reason about how to have government through the Word of God. We're going to reason about how to educate our children through the Word of God.
Kirk Cameron: Her feet are firmly planted on a rock, and that rock is Plymouth Rock. Faith is primary. Faith would then be manifested in several key ways to have a healthy culture.
Kirk Cameron: The first way it was manifested is right down here at her feet. It says "morality." Morality is a woman seated in a chair. Her eyes happen to be closed. Some of the other figures have their eyes open and are looking out, but morality is looking inward because morality is an internal quality.
Kirk Cameron: She's holding the Ten Commandments in her left hand and the scroll of Revelation in her right hand. They didn't believe that morality was a moral standard imposed by a king through external rules. They believed that morality was an internal quality that began with a transformation of your heart.
Kirk Cameron: How do I know that? Look to her left. Under her chair, it says "evangelist." Why would it say "evangelist" in this statue on a hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, all about civil liberty?
Kirk Cameron: It's because they understood that civil liberty and religious liberty must begin with a transformation of the heart by the Spirit of God through the preaching of the gospel. That's what the evangelist does. There's a picture of a preacher preaching the gospel to the lost.
Kirk Cameron: Once your heart has been transformed, once you've been born again or born from above by the Spirit of God, you begin to love what God loves. As a new creature in Christ, you hate what God hates, and your morality naturally lines up with God's morality.
Kirk Cameron: There is your external standard from God's Word. You have the Ten Commandments and the Scroll of Revelation representing both the Old and New Testaments. You begin to love what God loves and hate what He hates in the Scriptures because your heart is lining up with the heart of God because of the gospel.
Kirk Cameron: Once you've got true and good morality, or virtue, you have the two most important things that our Founding Fathers said were essential: faith and morality. They told us that our government is not sufficient for any people other than a religious and moral people. Faith and morality are absolutely essential.
Kirk Cameron: Once you've got good morality, once you've got a solid biblical worldview because you have faith in His Word, it's important then to establish laws in your country. Morality is the basis for good laws.
Kirk Cameron: Notice here the man of law. He's sitting in the judge's chair. He's holding the book of law in his hand, and this book of law is directly beneath the book in Faith's hand, indicating that man's laws must always line up under God's laws or they are not good laws.
Kirk Cameron: At his side, you'll see justice on his right and mercy on his left. Justice is depicted as a woman holding a sword and a set of scales, representing that the government does not bear the sword in vain. The scales represent justice.
Kirk Cameron: On his left is mercy. There is a balance in good and godly laws based on the Bible between justice and mercy. The man of law is able to extend either one, justice or mercy, because he has a biblical worldview and his laws are based on biblical morality.
Kirk Cameron: Once you have civility and your laws are nourishing the good and punishing the evil, you no longer have chaos or anarchy. You have civility, and now you can begin the important task of education.
Kirk Cameron: We must educate our children, they said. We must train them up in the way that they should go. This is a woman, probably a mother, leading her children in their educational journey.
Kirk Cameron: She has a wreath, a laurel wreath, around her forehead representing victory. She's holding the books of knowledge in her hand, and on her right it says "youth." In the relief here, you see this mother training her children. The child is there with a notebook, a pen, and a pad. She's training up her child in the way that he or she should go so that when they are old, they will not depart from it.
Kirk Cameron: On her left is an old man with a long white beard. He's holding a globe and a Bible, indicating that he has a biblical worldview. They believed that if we would educate our children to the second and third generation, we would get these principles deep into their hearts and minds, and it would result in what everybody wants: liberty.
Kirk Cameron: Freedom comes both internally from the power of sin, because we've been set free from the power of Satan through the gospel and a transformed heart, and externally from the power of tyrants and bad governments. Remember, they had just come from England. That was tyranny on steroids.
Kirk Cameron: This is the Liberty Man. Look at this guy. He is strong and ready to fight. He is a warrior dressed in the full armor of God that you find in Ephesians chapter 6 in the Bible.
Kirk Cameron: He's wearing the breastplate of righteousness. He's got the belt of truth and the helmet of salvation. He's holding the sword of the Spirit. He's wearing the sandals of the gospel of peace, and the chains on his wrists and ankles are hanging there broken because tyranny has been overthrown.
Kirk Cameron: If you look at his shoulder, there's a big claw of a lion. If you look across the back, you'll see the head of the slain lion and the hide draped across his shoulders because the lion represented England. That was the tyrant they had escaped from.
Kirk Cameron: He has defeated tyranny. If you look down below, it says "tyranny," and it is an image of the Liberty Man with his foot on the chest of the beast and the sword at the beast's throat.
Kirk Cameron: Tyranny has been overthrown. Here on his left is his wife. Her name is Peace, and she's holding a basket full of gifts for her friends and family. He is looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, back toward where the tyranny came from, and he is ready to defend his faith, his Bible, his biblical morality, the gospel that changed his heart, the laws, the ability to self-govern, and the ability to select leaders to govern in our nation.
Kirk Cameron: He is ready to defend his right to train up his children in a biblical worldview. The last thing Liberty Man ever would have stood for was to hand his children over to a power-loving government that would undermine everything he and his wife were trying to teach their children.
Kirk Cameron: Education was a parental blessing and responsibility. He was ready to defend it, and he was ready to defend his liberty.
Kirk Cameron: How many of you think we need to ditch political correctness and kowtowing to tyranny and get back to these values in the United States of America?
Kirk Cameron: This is priceless for us to have because we know what to do. The only person who can follow this strategy, the only kind of person who can actually do something with this, is a person who also takes this strategy and personalizes it.
Kirk Cameron: My nation does not need to get back to faith in the abstract. My nation will become a nation that reflects these principles when each individual citizen reflects these principles. I personally, and you personally, need to ask God to help us fear Him, love Him, repent of our sins, and be men and women of biblical faith.
Kirk Cameron: We need to be men and women who reason with the wisdom God has given us in every aspect of our lives and have a personal morality that lines up with the things God loves and the things God hates.
Kirk Cameron: If I have skeletons in the closet, if I am hiding sinful activity in the darkness, I'm not going to prosper, and I'm not going to be used by God as effectively as I could be if I would humbly repent of my own sin and get a morality that washes my heart clean.
Kirk Cameron: It begins with a transformation of my heart through real faith in God, so that I begin to do the things God wants me to do and fight against the things God hates. I need to be a man of morality, and so do you.
Kirk Cameron: I need to be a person who is involved in the duties of government. I need to participate in the laws that are created in our country, and so do you if we want to have civility.
Kirk Cameron: You and I need to be individuals who care about the education of our children and do not simply hand our children over to be discipled by others. A pastor once said this, and I'll never forget it: "If we hand our children over to Caesar to be educated, we shouldn't be surprised if they come back Romans."
Kirk Cameron: We have been given the sacred task of training up our children and educating them in the way they should go. I need to educate myself in history, theology, and the principles of our country so that I can be the Liberty Man, so that you can be the liberty-driven citizen, enjoy the fruits of peace, and have tyranny overthrown in your life personally.
Kirk Cameron: That's the kind of people we need to be.
Kirk Cameron: The last thing I would like to point out about this monument is that if you're trying to destroy a free nation, this is also the strategy for how to do that. You can hijack the strategy for building a good nation and use it for evil.
Kirk Cameron: All you have to do is start here, toward the end of the strategy, with education. If you can capture the education of our youth, teach them a whole new value system, and teach them a whole new way of thinking through the textbooks in a public government school system, you can begin to unravel this whole thing.
Kirk Cameron: If you capture education, you can change the way people think, and then you can begin to change the laws in our country. Have you noticed that our education is becoming corrupt? Have you noticed that the laws being made in our nation are going against the things God says our laws should be for?
Kirk Cameron: Once you do that, people will ask, "Where did these old laws come from?" The answer will be that it is archaic morality we need to get rid of. That morality is tied to Christianity, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments. Let's get those out of our courthouses and out of our schools.
Kirk Cameron: All of this comes from the root of biblical faith. If you can hijack faith, you don't actually need to get rid of faith. All you need to do is give people a reason to put their faith in something other than the book in her hand.
Kirk Cameron: Take away the Bible and give people the Communist Manifesto. Give them a different religious book, like the Quran or some other book. Or give them the idea that we can write our own book, that we are our own gods and the masters of our own destiny.
Kirk Cameron: Then they will reason from that faith and create a new morality, a new set of laws, and a new re-education of our children. The problem people don't realize is that this does not produce liberty at the end of the strategy. What you see instead is tyranny, with the lion seated on this chair and Liberty Man's leg hanging out of its mouth.
Kirk Cameron: We're headed that way if we do not recapture education, if we do not re-institute a courageous faith, and if we do not have a church with a backbone that is preaching the Bible and using wisdom to reason through every aspect of life.
Kirk Cameron: That's what this course on Biblical Citizenship in Modern America is all about. Stay tuned and buckle your seatbelt. We're just about to get started.
Rick Green: That was your teaser with Kirk Cameron from Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. Monday nights at 8 p.m. Central. Be sure to tune in. PatriotAcademy.com is where you can sign up to be a part of the class.
Rick Green: We're going to take a quick break, and we'll come back and get some more of this in just a few minutes.
Rick Green: For this final segment today, we're going to get a piece of what David Barton does in Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. It's called "Tending the Garden." Here's David Barton.
David Barton: Biblical citizenship is a phrase that brings two reactions. On the one hand are those who say, "Of course, naturally. That's what we're supposed to do as Christians." But there is also a side that has been out there for decades and even centuries saying that Christians should not get involved in government or those kinds of affairs, but should be involved only in spiritual affairs.
David Barton: What is the right perspective, and what can we look at to help us understand our responsibility as Christians today with civil government? The best thing to see is the biblical foundation for the concept. Let's go back to the very beginning.
David Barton: If you go back to the beginning, a great place to start is the book of Genesis. Genesis is often known as the seed plot of the Bible because every major teaching that we believe as people of faith and as Christians goes back to the book of Genesis.
David Barton: When you go back and look at the beginning of Genesis, it says, "In the beginning." Let's see how things begin. In the beginning, God made creation, and He made man. Once He makes man, you start seeing the beginnings of government.
David Barton: The first form of government is self-government. We're supposed to govern ourselves. In the first three chapters of Genesis, God takes man and puts him with woman, and they have children. So you have family. This is the concept of family government.
David Barton: The next thing we find is in Genesis 9, where we have the beginning of civil government. This is where God steps in and says, "Here's what you're going to do with murderers. Here's what you do with thieves." He starts laying down laws for civil government that came from God in Genesis.
David Barton: The last form we see is what we would call church government. This is where God gets them together and says, "Let's have a congregation. Here's how you're going to worship Me. Here are your relationships." We can call that church, but it comes after civil government and family government.
David Barton: When you look at Genesis, God is in civil government. He actually gave us civil government before He gave us church government. There is a biblical foundation for saying that God's people should be involved in it.
David Barton: When you look at these separate forms of government, they are distinct. There are areas that only they are to do. For example, in the area of family, we're told in Ephesians 5 and 6 that the family is to raise up children. It is not the government's responsibility to raise children, and it is not the church's responsibility to raise children. They can help, cooperate, and support, but God says, "Parents, it is your responsibility to raise your kids."
David Barton: In the same way, with civil government, God gives it the sword of civil justice. Government is to punish wicked doers and reward the righteous, but only government gets that sword.
David Barton: There are forms of self-defense, and we can have self-defense in the family or church, but when the church picks up the sword of civil government and starts punishing wrongdoers, that's where you get into the atrocities we saw in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition and the Crusades.
David Barton: The sword of civil government is given only to civil government. That's all it belongs to. He doesn't give it to anybody else.
David Barton: The same way with the church, we're told in Ephesians 4 that the church is to raise up saints and train them for the work of ministry. It is not parents who are supposed to train the saints for the work of ministry, and it is not the government that trains saints for the work of ministry. That responsibility goes strictly to the church.
David Barton: When you look at the Bible, you have these three institutions, and God says, "Here's what you do, here's what you do, and here's what you do." There are distinct areas they are supposed to handle. But because man is involved in all of them, you cannot have them completely isolated.
David Barton: If I'm involved in civil government, I'm going to be involved in my family, and I'm going to be involved in my church. You cannot isolate them all and say, "Wait a minute, I've got to put on a different hat and move over here." I'm going to flow between the three.
David Barton: Because of that, you have to understand that they are not completely isolated, even though they are separate spheres, and there are ways they can cooperate.
David Barton: For example, take the area of family. I'm involved in family, and if I connect that with civil government, there are areas government is supposed to handle and areas family is supposed to handle, but there are also areas where they can cooperate.
David Barton: What can family and government cooperate on? What would help both of them if they worked in this area? One answer is strong families. If government works to build strong families and families work to build strong families, they both benefit without violating their jurisdictional separation.
David Barton: This is not saying that governments create strong families, because they don't. They can create an environment that helps families be strong, which is going to benefit government. It is not government's responsibility to create strong families. Its responsibility is not to damage what the family is supposed to do and to create an atmosphere for good policies.
David Barton: If you look at the area of family and church, what benefits both of them? Quite frankly, having strong Christians benefits both. If the family works on having strong Christians, that helps the church. If the church works on having strong Christians, that helps the family. Neither one violates the jurisdiction of the other.
David Barton: In the same way, if you take church and government, we often hear this called church and state. People say, "I thought they were supposed to be separate." They are separate institutions, but there are things they can do to cooperate.
David Barton: What would benefit both of them? What could you get church and government working on that would help both? The answer is building strong citizens.
David Barton: This is why we teach civics, government, math, science, and so many other things. You want educated citizens, strong citizens, and citizens who know how the process works.
David Barton: One of the best ways to have strong citizens was given by the Founding Fathers years ago. There are so many founders we could choose from, but I'm going to choose Daniel Webster as the example. This is what Daniel Webster, a great defender of the Constitution, said: "Whatever makes men good Christians makes them good citizens."
David Barton: That's true. Good Christians are not the people the police have to arrest for drive-by shootings, violence, or all sorts of abuse. Good Christians make good citizens. Those two things do go together, and that is an area where the church and state can cooperate: building strong citizens.
David Barton: Again, government provides the atmosphere for that to occur. Government does not do it. It provides the atmosphere.
David Barton: You have all these institutions, and they do have cooperative functions. They do have things they can do together.
David Barton: Going back to Genesis as a seed plot, let's take another step. We've seen that there are institutions, that God created all of them, and that He gave jurisdictions and responsibilities to all of them. They can cooperate, which means we as individual citizens can and should be involved in that.
David Barton: Let's go back to the beginning, at creation. Creation is told in two places, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. As you see all of creation develop, God separates the waters above from the waters below, separates the firmament, puts a greater light to rule the day and a lesser light to rule the night, creates the oceans and everything in them, and then creates the land, plants, and animals.
David Barton: Finally, we get to man. A good question to ask is, why did God create man? We know God created man because He tells us that, but why did He create man?
David Barton: This is a good time to ask what the Bible says about that. An answer we've heard since 1646, when the Scottish Shorter Catechism came out, is, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." That's a really good purpose.
David Barton: But can you show me a Bible verse that says that is why God created man? That is something man should be doing, no question. But when you look at the book of Genesis, that is not what it tells us about why God created man.
David Barton: When you look in Genesis, you go back to those two chapters. After God has gone through everything in the six days and has it all created, we're told in Genesis 2:5 and 2:15 that God looked at all He had created, and it was very good. Then He saw that He had no one to tend His garden, so He made man.
David Barton: It is interesting. Man's purpose was to take care of God's stuff. God created all this stuff, but He didn't have anybody to take care of it for Him. We're told in Genesis 2:15 that once God put man in the garden, man tended the garden.
David Barton: What we see in Genesis is similar to what Jesus told us in Luke 19:13 about tending the garden. Jesus says you need to do business and be about doing things until He comes back. Taking care of the garden in the Old Testament and tending the business in the New Testament give us the same message.
David Barton: When you look at this today, it is described as a seven-mountain kind of thing. What is the Lord's garden? What is His garden? Scripture tells us, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." Everything in it.
David Barton: Today we say that includes entertainment, education, media, religion, family, government, and business. We're supposed to be taking care of His stuff in all of these areas. We've gotten out of so many of them.
David Barton: Even in entertainment, did you know that before 1968 Hollywood couldn't come out with a movie unless church leaders signed off on it? The church said, "We shouldn't be doing that. Secular stuff. Let's get out of entertainment." How has that worked out over the years?
David Barton: We recently came across an archive of seventeen letters exchanged over whether they should use one word in the movie Gone with the Wind, when Rhett Butler leaves. There was a massive outcry: "You can't use a curse word in a movie." Look how far we've come.
David Barton: We used to be involved in education and all of these areas. We've gotten out of them, and how has that worked out for us? We've gotten out of government. That is one of the parts of His garden we're supposed to be taking care of.
David Barton: There is a biblical mandate and responsibility to do this. Civil government is one of the areas where we're to operate. One of the easiest ways to do that is at least by voting.
David Barton: Voting is very significant, but a lot of people don't tend the garden through voting. Take Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the nation. The mayor of Los Angeles announced that he had been elected with 2.9 percent of the adult vote in the city.
David Barton: There are a lot more people who could have taken care of the garden of Los Angeles, especially when you consider the policies and so much of what is out there.
David Barton: Even in Texas, consider the city of Houston. The population of Houston is such that there are twenty-six states in the United States with less population than Houston. Being the mayor of Houston is like being a governor in twenty-six states, and the mayor of Houston was elected with 6 percent of adults voting.
David Barton: One easy thing we can do to tend the garden in the area of government is to be involved in elections. That includes local, county, state, and federal elections.
David Barton: But there is more to it than that. There is more we can learn about the process and more we can do in the process. This is where knowledge of the constitutional process is important, and knowledge of American history is important. The more educated and informed you are, the more effective you are and the more you can make a difference in the system.
David Barton: Let's go to the American founding and look at what these men did in creating their Constitution. There are 5,600 years of recorded human history. A question to ask is this: They created a government, but what is the average length of a constitution in the history of the world?
David Barton: History tells us seventeen years. The Constitution we got from these men is now more than 200 years old. It is the longest ongoing constitution in the history of the world. Every year on Constitution Day, we set another world record.
David Barton: We've set so many world records for stability that we don't even think about them anymore. They seem natural and normal to us. But everybody had access to the same set of ideas they had in their day. There were political writers, millions of books, thousands of years of history, and many political writers.
David Barton: Where did they get the ideas that created our government to be so different? That question was asked by political science professors at the University of Houston. They decided to collect writings from the founding era and see whom the founders quoted. If they could find out whom they quoted, they would know who was important to them.
David Barton: The results were released in a study called The Origins of American Constitutionalism. They went back and found 15,000 writings they thought were representative. As they went through them, they found 3,154 direct quotations. They then traced each quotation back to its original source.
David Barton: It took them ten years, but they tracked every quotation back to its original source. At the end of those ten years, they released the report. They said the number one most cited individual in the American founding was a French philosopher named Baron Charles Montesquieu.
David Barton: In 1750, Montesquieu wrote a two-volume set called The Spirit of Laws, which was used heavily by the Founding Fathers. They quoted from him frequently.
David Barton: The number two most cited individual in the American founding era was Sir William Blackstone, an English judge who wrote the Commentaries on the Constitution. It was a four-volume set, and they cited it regularly.
David Barton: Thomas Jefferson said that American attorneys read Blackstone like Muslims read the Quran. It was a significant book to them.
David Barton: The third most cited individual was John Locke. In 1690, he wrote a book called The Two Treatises of Civil Government. It is a little book, less than an inch thick, but 400 pages long. He references the Bible more than 1,500 times to show the preparation of civil government.
David Barton: If you think the Bible doesn't say much about government or doesn't refer to it, read that book from 1690. It has a lot in it.
David Barton: Those were the three most cited individuals, but what surprised the researchers was that the number one most cited source out of all sources was the Bible. Thirty-four percent of all the quotations they examined from the founding era came out of the Bible.
David Barton: That goes to the concept of biblical citizenship. They used the Bible to help create a form of government that is now the most stable government in the world. It was built on concepts and ideas from the Bible. There is a basis for us to know and be involved biblically.
David Barton: When you look at the Declaration of Independence, it starts with 161 words that give six principles of government. After those six principles, they give twenty-seven grievances showing how those principles have been violated. At the end, they have a resolve. They say that they mutually pledge each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, with a reliance on divine providence.
David Barton: That's the closing part, but let's go back to the 161 words. Four of those six principles of government are pretty simple. They start by saying there is a divine Creator. Then they say the divine Creator has given us a fixed moral law.
Rick Green: We're out of time for today. If you want to get the full Biblical Citizenship course, you can get it at PatriotAcademy.com, or you can join us on Monday nights starting October 12 at 8 p.m. Central, 9 p.m. Eastern, and 6 p.m. on the West Coast. Go to PatriotAcademy.com to sign up. Thanks so much for listening today.
Rick Green: Thanks for joining us today. I feel like I totally cheated everybody on Tuesday by only giving you a little bit of Kirk Cameron. He gives such a good presentation in Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. That first night, opening with Kirk, is just amazing, and you only got a little taste of it on Tuesday.
Rick Green: Since we're about to do a national class, we have a chance to bring all of our listeners together to spend eight weeks on Monday nights going through Biblical Citizenship together. I teased you a little bit on Tuesday with the very end of the program. I gave you about ten minutes of Kirk's presentation out of Biblical Citizenship in Modern America, so I'm going to get to more of that today.
Rick Green: I think it's important for us to recognize what made America great in the first place if we're going to try to make our country great again. I totally agree with the whole "Make America Great Again" idea. It was one of the best slogans, maybe in the history of mankind. It really sticks, but it begs the question: What made America great in the first place? How are we going to make it great again? We've got to know what the formula was.
Rick Green: That's what we do at Patriot Academy, WallBuilders, and American Family Association. All of these ministries are about teaching biblical principles that make a good society. They are about actual discipleship. Too often, we think making disciples is just getting someone to walk the aisle, give their life to the Lord, and then we're done. What we're about is fulfilling the Great Commission: making disciples of all nations and teaching them to obey everything He commanded.
Rick Green: We're not teaching people to obey only the things that aren't politically controversial while leaving everything else off the table. We teach all of it. What we accomplished with Biblical Citizenship in Modern America was a crash course in discipleship in society. In other words, it teaches you how to be a good citizen, how to be a good member of whatever community God has put you in, and how to do that in America.
Rick Green: This course benefits people in other countries as well. We've had people in Canada and other nations take it, and we've translated it into other languages. The biblical principles work every time they're tried. The course gives you the principles and the formula, but then it shows you the apparatus and the playbook for how to live those principles out in our particular system.
Rick Green: As an extreme example, we're not in Rome. When Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's," He was speaking within a very specific form of government. When you submitted to the authority of government at that time, it was pretty much a totalitarian authority. That's not what we live in.
Rick Green: When we submit to authority, when we follow Romans 13, and when we are humble and obey the law, we have to ask ourselves, who is Caesar in America? It certainly is not the president. It is not even Congress. It is us. We are in a system where they answer to us, not the other way around.
Rick Green: If we, the people, are Caesar, then we've got a job to do. We've got to learn how to do Caesar well. We've got to learn how to live this out in a way that is good stewardship, because to not pay attention or to choose not to participate would be like the servant in the parable of the talents whom the master called a wicked and slothful servant because he did not do his job. He did not invest, protect, preserve, and pass on what he had been given.
Rick Green: It's our job to do that as citizens of a free nation. We've been handed an incredible talent of freedom, the vote, and all of the things that allow us to participate. But Christians don't know how to do that. We often talk about the statistics. Roughly half of Christians are registered to vote, and roughly half of those typically show up in an election. In a midterm election like the one we're about to have, it's even worse than that.
Rick Green: That is bad stewardship. That is being the wicked and slothful servant. If you think about it, roughly 75 percent of the church is the wicked and slothful servant in this metaphor. What we do with Biblical Citizenship is try to wake people up and equip them. We show them how to be a good citizen and how to do that biblically in America.
Rick Green: Normally, you can go to PatriotAcademy.com at any time. You can get the DVDs or a thumb drive, or you can stream the videos. You can sign up as a Constitution Coach and get access to everything for free. You can stream it and watch it by yourself if you want.
Rick Green: The goal of signing up as a coach is to host a class in your living room, at your church, at a library, or wherever you want. People have these classes in all kinds of places. You can host the class anywhere.
Rick Green: We've had about two million people go through it so far and well over ten thousand different classes across the country. A lot of people and a lot of churches have done this in their living rooms or wherever they could gather.
Rick Green: Sometimes we host the class online for an entire national audience so anybody can sign up and join us. We usually end up with several thousand people joining us on whatever night we're doing the class. It's fun because we get to do it together. We watch the videos together and take questions. It gives you a chance to dive into the material from the videos and the workbook, but it also gives you a chance to ask questions about current application.
Rick Green: You can ask what is happening right now with Iran, the Islamic invasion, the upcoming midterm elections, some of President Trump's executive orders, or whatever the current issue may be. It's a fun way to take what we're learning in the course, which is all about principles and process, and apply it to the specific issues and policies we're dealing with right now.
Rick Green: If that sounds interesting or exciting to you, go sign up at PatriotAcademy.com for the October 12 Biblical Citizenship class. It will be an eight-week class starting October 12 at 8 p.m. Central. That will be 9 p.m. on the East Coast and 6 p.m. on the West Coast.
Rick Green: We'll get online, say hello, talk about what we're going to cover that night, and introduce the special guest. Then we'll jump into the video pretty quickly. Five or ten minutes in, we'll be into the class video. The class video each week is roughly an hour, sometimes an hour and ten or fifteen minutes. Then we'll open it up to questions.
Rick Green: I usually stay on for another thirty or forty minutes, sometimes an hour, taking questions. You can put your questions in the chat. We'll have a great time.
Rick Green: This is a great way to introduce other people to these concepts. If you have people in your family or your church, or maybe even your own pastor, who have not been engaged in what is going on culturally and politically and in all the things we're supposed to be good stewards of, this is a great way to introduce them. Get them to join us on Monday night.
Rick Green: Again, it starts October 12, Monday night, at 8 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Pacific, and 9 p.m. Eastern. Each week, I'll have a different partner highlighted. The first week will feature FlashPoint and Gene Bailey and what the FlashPoint Army is doing across the country. They are having an incredible impact.
Rick Green: The second week will feature iVoterGuide and American Family Association. We'll have an opportunity before the election to tell people how to access the voter guides, how to use the website, and how to get the voter guides into the hands of as many people as possible.
Rick Green: We have other partners from across the country who will join us each week. We'll highlight them and give you a chance to learn about the different people doing all these things in the culture.
Rick Green: We try hard not to reinvent the wheel or duplicate what anybody else is doing. That's why we have so many partners. Our job is to provide the intellectual ammunition, the courses, the information, and the education, and we let anybody use it.
Rick Green: That's why so many organizations are offering these courses: Biblical Citizenship, Rebuilding Liberty, Constitutional Live, Chasing American Legends, and the other Patriot Academy courses. This time, many of our partners will be together, so you'll get a chance to learn about some of them. Most importantly, take the course, ask questions, and be a part of this with people from all over America.
Rick Green: Again, it's October 12, and you want to go to PatriotAcademy.com. There will be a graphic on the home page for you to click on and sign up.
Rick Green: I definitely want to get to some of the headlines. I've been traveling so much, and thank you for your patience. It's been an interesting few weeks with some of the things happening at Patriot Academy and around the world, along with events involving the White House, pastor groups, and different organizations pushing hard going into this election.
Rick Green: I haven't been doing the typical program where we take calls and talk about whatever is in the headlines. We just haven't had much time to do that. I won't be able to do a lot of that today, but I want to do a little bit of it and then give you more of a teaser of the Biblical Citizenship course.
Rick Green: We'll hear a little more of what Kirk Cameron was talking about on Tuesday's program. If you missed that, you can find it on the AFR website and review what he already covered. Even on Tuesday, I didn't start at the beginning of the Biblical Citizenship class. I jumped right into the part with Kirk Cameron.
Rick Green: Kirk is an incredible teacher. If you're not familiar with him, you may know him from Growing Pains. You may have grown up watching him or watched some of his movies, such as Fireproof. You may know him from The Way of the Master, which he did with Ray Comfort for years, or from his social media commentary, which often goes viral.
Rick Green: What he has been doing with Patriot Academy for several years is helping us teach the Constitution. He's hosted many of these classes and programs, and we've done a lot of events together. The night he filmed the Biblical Citizenship course, he taught on the Monument to the Forefathers. That's the largest granite monument in America. It's an amazing work of art, and it has the formula right there in stone.
Rick Green: He teaches on that during the first week of Biblical Citizenship. When we come back from the break, we'll pick up where we left off on Tuesday with him teaching on that. Before we go to break, I'll hit some of these headlines.
Rick Green: I'm sure you've already heard about what happened in Israel yesterday and the attempted hijacking. It wasn't just an attempted hijacking. It was actually an attempted mass murder event. This man stabbed his copilot and was going to crash the plane. There would have been significant casualties.
Rick Green: It was a horrific event and an important reminder to all of us that jihad is alive and well, and that these people want to destroy anyone who does not agree with them or follow them. It was a stark reminder. It felt a lot like September 11 if you watched any of the videos or heard some of the screaming.
Rick Green: I was flying out of Washington, D.C. when I heard about it. I was just getting to the airport and thought, "Is this another 9/11, where they've done this with multiple planes and potentially would try to make that happen?" Thankfully, that did not happen.
Rick Green: Thankfully, because of the passengers and crew who intervened, they stopped this from happening and somehow got the plane landed. I still do not have the details on exactly how they got the plane on the ground, but I think it's important for us to stop for a minute and think about it.
Rick Green: This was jihad. This was a jihadist terrorist attack. That's exactly what the Israeli defense minister said about it. It was a flight out of Tel Aviv. It is hard to imagine the chaos that could have occurred on that plane.
Rick Green: I'm thankful that the passengers intervened and, as one of them said, neutralized the attacker. You basically had some Todd Beamers on that airplane. If you don't remember Todd Beamer, he's the one we get "Let's roll" from. He was the man who, along with two or three other men on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania and was headed, if I remember correctly, toward the White House, intervened because they were courageous and brave. They saved countless lives and gave their own lives.
Rick Green: These passengers were willing to do the same thing on that flight. That is worth remembering. It reminds all of us that there is a cultural struggle. One side is a culture of death, and we need to remember that.
Rick Green: We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll jump into Biblical Citizenship in Modern America and pick up where Kirk left off.
Rick Green: Welcome back. This is Rick Green. We're going to finish up what we did on Biblical Citizenship in that first week. We're going to give you a little more of a taste of that, as I said before the break. Then on Monday nights, you can do the full class with me live, including a question-and-answer session and a special guest.
Rick Green: Don't forget to go to PatriotAcademy.com to get signed up for that. Let's jump in where we left off on Tuesday. I left you on a cliffhanger as Kirk was beginning to describe the monument. Here we go.
Kirk Cameron: The soul of this American republic, our forefathers and foremothers knew this. It's not just any faith. Notice the details. Faith is pointing to the one true God of heaven.
Kirk Cameron: Faith also has a star on her forehead, representing wisdom. Faith is holding a book, and it's not just any book. It's the Bible. Its pages are being blown open as though by the wind, the wind of the Spirit of God.
Kirk Cameron: Notice that this isn't just faith in any random deity. This is faith in the one true God of heaven and faith in that God's Word, the Bible. That Bible is also very historic in that it is the Geneva Bible, which the Pilgrims brought over with them. It was the first English-translated Bible that contained chapter and verse numbers in the text.
Kirk Cameron: Literally, the first time John 3:16 could be found by going to chapter 3 and verse 16 was in that Bible carried over by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. They believed that this faith in God and His Word must be reasoned toward every aspect of life.
Kirk Cameron: We're going to reason about how to be a family through the Word of God. We're going to reason about how to have government through the Word of God. We're going to reason about how to educate our children through the Word of God.
Kirk Cameron: Her feet are firmly planted on a rock, and that rock is Plymouth Rock. Faith is primary. Faith would then be manifested in several key ways to have a healthy culture.
Kirk Cameron: The first way it was manifested is right down here at her feet. It says "morality." Morality is a woman seated in a chair. Her eyes happen to be closed. Some of the other figures have their eyes open and are looking out, but morality is looking inward because morality is an internal quality.
Kirk Cameron: She's holding the Ten Commandments in her left hand and the scroll of Revelation in her right hand. They didn't believe that morality was a moral standard imposed by a king through external rules. They believed that morality was an internal quality that began with a transformation of your heart.
Kirk Cameron: How do I know that? Look to her left. Under her chair, it says "evangelist." Why would it say "evangelist" in this statue on a hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, all about civil liberty?
Kirk Cameron: It's because they understood that civil liberty and religious liberty must begin with a transformation of the heart by the Spirit of God through the preaching of the gospel. That's what the evangelist does. There's a picture of a preacher preaching the gospel to the lost.
Kirk Cameron: Once your heart has been transformed, once you've been born again or born from above by the Spirit of God, you begin to love what God loves. As a new creature in Christ, you hate what God hates, and your morality naturally lines up with God's morality.
Kirk Cameron: There is your external standard from God's Word. You have the Ten Commandments and the Scroll of Revelation representing both the Old and New Testaments. You begin to love what God loves and hate what He hates in the Scriptures because your heart is lining up with the heart of God because of the gospel.
Kirk Cameron: Once you've got true and good morality, or virtue, you have the two most important things that our Founding Fathers said were essential: faith and morality. They told us that our government is not sufficient for any people other than a religious and moral people. Faith and morality are absolutely essential.
Kirk Cameron: Once you've got good morality, once you've got a solid biblical worldview because you have faith in His Word, it's important then to establish laws in your country. Morality is the basis for good laws.
Kirk Cameron: Notice here the man of law. He's sitting in the judge's chair. He's holding the book of law in his hand, and this book of law is directly beneath the book in Faith's hand, indicating that man's laws must always line up under God's laws or they are not good laws.
Kirk Cameron: At his side, you'll see justice on his right and mercy on his left. Justice is depicted as a woman holding a sword and a set of scales, representing that the government does not bear the sword in vain. The scales represent justice.
Kirk Cameron: On his left is mercy. There is a balance in good and godly laws based on the Bible between justice and mercy. The man of law is able to extend either one, justice or mercy, because he has a biblical worldview and his laws are based on biblical morality.
Kirk Cameron: Once you have civility and your laws are nourishing the good and punishing the evil, you no longer have chaos or anarchy. You have civility, and now you can begin the important task of education.
Kirk Cameron: We must educate our children, they said. We must train them up in the way that they should go. This is a woman, probably a mother, leading her children in their educational journey.
Kirk Cameron: She has a wreath, a laurel wreath, around her forehead representing victory. She's holding the books of knowledge in her hand, and on her right it says "youth." In the relief here, you see this mother training her children. The child is there with a notebook, a pen, and a pad. She's training up her child in the way that he or she should go so that when they are old, they will not depart from it.
Kirk Cameron: On her left is an old man with a long white beard. He's holding a globe and a Bible, indicating that he has a biblical worldview. They believed that if we would educate our children to the second and third generation, we would get these principles deep into their hearts and minds, and it would result in what everybody wants: liberty.
Kirk Cameron: Freedom comes both internally from the power of sin, because we've been set free from the power of Satan through the gospel and a transformed heart, and externally from the power of tyrants and bad governments. Remember, they had just come from England. That was tyranny on steroids.
Kirk Cameron: This is the Liberty Man. Look at this guy. He is strong and ready to fight. He is a warrior dressed in the full armor of God that you find in Ephesians chapter 6 in the Bible.
Kirk Cameron: He's wearing the breastplate of righteousness. He's got the belt of truth and the helmet of salvation. He's holding the sword of the Spirit. He's wearing the sandals of the gospel of peace, and the chains on his wrists and ankles are hanging there broken because tyranny has been overthrown.
Kirk Cameron: If you look at his shoulder, there's a big claw of a lion. If you look across the back, you'll see the head of the slain lion and the hide draped across his shoulders because the lion represented England. That was the tyrant they had escaped from.
Kirk Cameron: He has defeated tyranny. If you look down below, it says "tyranny," and it is an image of the Liberty Man with his foot on the chest of the beast and the sword at the beast's throat.
Kirk Cameron: Tyranny has been overthrown. Here on his left is his wife. Her name is Peace, and she's holding a basket full of gifts for her friends and family. He is looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, back toward where the tyranny came from, and he is ready to defend his faith, his Bible, his biblical morality, the gospel that changed his heart, the laws, the ability to self-govern, and the ability to select leaders to govern in our nation.
Kirk Cameron: He is ready to defend his right to train up his children in a biblical worldview. The last thing Liberty Man ever would have stood for was to hand his children over to a power-loving government that would undermine everything he and his wife were trying to teach their children.
Kirk Cameron: Education was a parental blessing and responsibility. He was ready to defend it, and he was ready to defend his liberty.
Kirk Cameron: How many of you think we need to ditch political correctness and kowtowing to tyranny and get back to these values in the United States of America?
Kirk Cameron: This is priceless for us to have because we know what to do. The only person who can follow this strategy, the only kind of person who can actually do something with this, is a person who also takes this strategy and personalizes it.
Kirk Cameron: My nation does not need to get back to faith in the abstract. My nation will become a nation that reflects these principles when each individual citizen reflects these principles. I personally, and you personally, need to ask God to help us fear Him, love Him, repent of our sins, and be men and women of biblical faith.
Kirk Cameron: We need to be men and women who reason with the wisdom God has given us in every aspect of our lives and have a personal morality that lines up with the things God loves and the things God hates.
Kirk Cameron: If I have skeletons in the closet, if I am hiding sinful activity in the darkness, I'm not going to prosper, and I'm not going to be used by God as effectively as I could be if I would humbly repent of my own sin and get a morality that washes my heart clean.
Kirk Cameron: It begins with a transformation of my heart through real faith in God, so that I begin to do the things God wants me to do and fight against the things God hates. I need to be a man of morality, and so do you.
Kirk Cameron: I need to be a person who is involved in the duties of government. I need to participate in the laws that are created in our country, and so do you if we want to have civility.
Kirk Cameron: You and I need to be individuals who care about the education of our children and do not simply hand our children over to be discipled by others. A pastor once said this, and I'll never forget it: "If we hand our children over to Caesar to be educated, we shouldn't be surprised if they come back Romans."
Kirk Cameron: We have been given the sacred task of training up our children and educating them in the way they should go. I need to educate myself in history, theology, and the principles of our country so that I can be the Liberty Man, so that you can be the liberty-driven citizen, enjoy the fruits of peace, and have tyranny overthrown in your life personally.
Kirk Cameron: That's the kind of people we need to be.
Kirk Cameron: The last thing I would like to point out about this monument is that if you're trying to destroy a free nation, this is also the strategy for how to do that. You can hijack the strategy for building a good nation and use it for evil.
Kirk Cameron: All you have to do is start here, toward the end of the strategy, with education. If you can capture the education of our youth, teach them a whole new value system, and teach them a whole new way of thinking through the textbooks in a public government school system, you can begin to unravel this whole thing.
Kirk Cameron: If you capture education, you can change the way people think, and then you can begin to change the laws in our country. Have you noticed that our education is becoming corrupt? Have you noticed that the laws being made in our nation are going against the things God says our laws should be for?
Kirk Cameron: Once you do that, people will ask, "Where did these old laws come from?" The answer will be that it is archaic morality we need to get rid of. That morality is tied to Christianity, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments. Let's get those out of our courthouses and out of our schools.
Kirk Cameron: All of this comes from the root of biblical faith. If you can hijack faith, you don't actually need to get rid of faith. All you need to do is give people a reason to put their faith in something other than the book in her hand.
Kirk Cameron: Take away the Bible and give people the Communist Manifesto. Give them a different religious book, like the Quran or some other book. Or give them the idea that we can write our own book, that we are our own gods and the masters of our own destiny.
Kirk Cameron: Then they will reason from that faith and create a new morality, a new set of laws, and a new re-education of our children. The problem people don't realize is that this does not produce liberty at the end of the strategy. What you see instead is tyranny, with the lion seated on this chair and Liberty Man's leg hanging out of its mouth.
Kirk Cameron: We're headed that way if we do not recapture education, if we do not re-institute a courageous faith, and if we do not have a church with a backbone that is preaching the Bible and using wisdom to reason through every aspect of life.
Kirk Cameron: That's what this course on Biblical Citizenship in Modern America is all about. Stay tuned and buckle your seatbelt. We're just about to get started.
Rick Green: That was your teaser with Kirk Cameron from Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. Monday nights at 8 p.m. Central. Be sure to tune in. PatriotAcademy.com is where you can sign up to be a part of the class.
Rick Green: We're going to take a quick break, and we'll come back and get some more of this in just a few minutes.
Rick Green: For this final segment today, we're going to get a piece of what David Barton does in Biblical Citizenship in Modern America. It's called "Tending the Garden." Here's David Barton.
David Barton: Biblical citizenship is a phrase that brings two reactions. On the one hand are those who say, "Of course, naturally. That's what we're supposed to do as Christians." But there is also a side that has been out there for decades and even centuries saying that Christians should not get involved in government or those kinds of affairs, but should be involved only in spiritual affairs.
David Barton: What is the right perspective, and what can we look at to help us understand our responsibility as Christians today with civil government? The best thing to see is the biblical foundation for the concept. Let's go back to the very beginning.
David Barton: If you go back to the beginning, a great place to start is the book of Genesis. Genesis is often known as the seed plot of the Bible because every major teaching that we believe as people of faith and as Christians goes back to the book of Genesis.
David Barton: When you go back and look at the beginning of Genesis, it says, "In the beginning." Let's see how things begin. In the beginning, God made creation, and He made man. Once He makes man, you start seeing the beginnings of government.
David Barton: The first form of government is self-government. We're supposed to govern ourselves. In the first three chapters of Genesis, God takes man and puts him with woman, and they have children. So you have family. This is the concept of family government.
David Barton: The next thing we find is in Genesis 9, where we have the beginning of civil government. This is where God steps in and says, "Here's what you're going to do with murderers. Here's what you do with thieves." He starts laying down laws for civil government that came from God in Genesis.
David Barton: The last form we see is what we would call church government. This is where God gets them together and says, "Let's have a congregation. Here's how you're going to worship Me. Here are your relationships." We can call that church, but it comes after civil government and family government.
David Barton: When you look at Genesis, God is in civil government. He actually gave us civil government before He gave us church government. There is a biblical foundation for saying that God's people should be involved in it.
David Barton: When you look at these separate forms of government, they are distinct. There are areas that only they are to do. For example, in the area of family, we're told in Ephesians 5 and 6 that the family is to raise up children. It is not the government's responsibility to raise children, and it is not the church's responsibility to raise children. They can help, cooperate, and support, but God says, "Parents, it is your responsibility to raise your kids."
David Barton: In the same way, with civil government, God gives it the sword of civil justice. Government is to punish wicked doers and reward the righteous, but only government gets that sword.
David Barton: There are forms of self-defense, and we can have self-defense in the family or church, but when the church picks up the sword of civil government and starts punishing wrongdoers, that's where you get into the atrocities we saw in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition and the Crusades.
David Barton: The sword of civil government is given only to civil government. That's all it belongs to. He doesn't give it to anybody else.
David Barton: The same way with the church, we're told in Ephesians 4 that the church is to raise up saints and train them for the work of ministry. It is not parents who are supposed to train the saints for the work of ministry, and it is not the government that trains saints for the work of ministry. That responsibility goes strictly to the church.
David Barton: When you look at the Bible, you have these three institutions, and God says, "Here's what you do, here's what you do, and here's what you do." There are distinct areas they are supposed to handle. But because man is involved in all of them, you cannot have them completely isolated.
David Barton: If I'm involved in civil government, I'm going to be involved in my family, and I'm going to be involved in my church. You cannot isolate them all and say, "Wait a minute, I've got to put on a different hat and move over here." I'm going to flow between the three.
David Barton: Because of that, you have to understand that they are not completely isolated, even though they are separate spheres, and there are ways they can cooperate.
David Barton: For example, take the area of family. I'm involved in family, and if I connect that with civil government, there are areas government is supposed to handle and areas family is supposed to handle, but there are also areas where they can cooperate.
David Barton: What can family and government cooperate on? What would help both of them if they worked in this area? One answer is strong families. If government works to build strong families and families work to build strong families, they both benefit without violating their jurisdictional separation.
David Barton: This is not saying that governments create strong families, because they don't. They can create an environment that helps families be strong, which is going to benefit government. It is not government's responsibility to create strong families. Its responsibility is not to damage what the family is supposed to do and to create an atmosphere for good policies.
David Barton: If you look at the area of family and church, what benefits both of them? Quite frankly, having strong Christians benefits both. If the family works on having strong Christians, that helps the church. If the church works on having strong Christians, that helps the family. Neither one violates the jurisdiction of the other.
David Barton: In the same way, if you take church and government, we often hear this called church and state. People say, "I thought they were supposed to be separate." They are separate institutions, but there are things they can do to cooperate.
David Barton: What would benefit both of them? What could you get church and government working on that would help both? The answer is building strong citizens.
David Barton: This is why we teach civics, government, math, science, and so many other things. You want educated citizens, strong citizens, and citizens who know how the process works.
David Barton: One of the best ways to have strong citizens was given by the Founding Fathers years ago. There are so many founders we could choose from, but I'm going to choose Daniel Webster as the example. This is what Daniel Webster, a great defender of the Constitution, said: "Whatever makes men good Christians makes them good citizens."
David Barton: That's true. Good Christians are not the people the police have to arrest for drive-by shootings, violence, or all sorts of abuse. Good Christians make good citizens. Those two things do go together, and that is an area where the church and state can cooperate: building strong citizens.
David Barton: Again, government provides the atmosphere for that to occur. Government does not do it. It provides the atmosphere.
David Barton: You have all these institutions, and they do have cooperative functions. They do have things they can do together.
David Barton: Going back to Genesis as a seed plot, let's take another step. We've seen that there are institutions, that God created all of them, and that He gave jurisdictions and responsibilities to all of them. They can cooperate, which means we as individual citizens can and should be involved in that.
David Barton: Let's go back to the beginning, at creation. Creation is told in two places, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. As you see all of creation develop, God separates the waters above from the waters below, separates the firmament, puts a greater light to rule the day and a lesser light to rule the night, creates the oceans and everything in them, and then creates the land, plants, and animals.
David Barton: Finally, we get to man. A good question to ask is, why did God create man? We know God created man because He tells us that, but why did He create man?
David Barton: This is a good time to ask what the Bible says about that. An answer we've heard since 1646, when the Scottish Shorter Catechism came out, is, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." That's a really good purpose.
David Barton: But can you show me a Bible verse that says that is why God created man? That is something man should be doing, no question. But when you look at the book of Genesis, that is not what it tells us about why God created man.
David Barton: When you look in Genesis, you go back to those two chapters. After God has gone through everything in the six days and has it all created, we're told in Genesis 2:5 and 2:15 that God looked at all He had created, and it was very good. Then He saw that He had no one to tend His garden, so He made man.
David Barton: It is interesting. Man's purpose was to take care of God's stuff. God created all this stuff, but He didn't have anybody to take care of it for Him. We're told in Genesis 2:15 that once God put man in the garden, man tended the garden.
David Barton: What we see in Genesis is similar to what Jesus told us in Luke 19:13 about tending the garden. Jesus says you need to do business and be about doing things until He comes back. Taking care of the garden in the Old Testament and tending the business in the New Testament give us the same message.
David Barton: When you look at this today, it is described as a seven-mountain kind of thing. What is the Lord's garden? What is His garden? Scripture tells us, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." Everything in it.
David Barton: Today we say that includes entertainment, education, media, religion, family, government, and business. We're supposed to be taking care of His stuff in all of these areas. We've gotten out of so many of them.
David Barton: Even in entertainment, did you know that before 1968 Hollywood couldn't come out with a movie unless church leaders signed off on it? The church said, "We shouldn't be doing that. Secular stuff. Let's get out of entertainment." How has that worked out over the years?
David Barton: We recently came across an archive of seventeen letters exchanged over whether they should use one word in the movie Gone with the Wind, when Rhett Butler leaves. There was a massive outcry: "You can't use a curse word in a movie." Look how far we've come.
David Barton: We used to be involved in education and all of these areas. We've gotten out of them, and how has that worked out for us? We've gotten out of government. That is one of the parts of His garden we're supposed to be taking care of.
David Barton: There is a biblical mandate and responsibility to do this. Civil government is one of the areas where we're to operate. One of the easiest ways to do that is at least by voting.
David Barton: Voting is very significant, but a lot of people don't tend the garden through voting. Take Los Angeles, one of the largest cities in the nation. The mayor of Los Angeles announced that he had been elected with 2.9 percent of the adult vote in the city.
David Barton: There are a lot more people who could have taken care of the garden of Los Angeles, especially when you consider the policies and so much of what is out there.
David Barton: Even in Texas, consider the city of Houston. The population of Houston is such that there are twenty-six states in the United States with less population than Houston. Being the mayor of Houston is like being a governor in twenty-six states, and the mayor of Houston was elected with 6 percent of adults voting.
David Barton: One easy thing we can do to tend the garden in the area of government is to be involved in elections. That includes local, county, state, and federal elections.
David Barton: But there is more to it than that. There is more we can learn about the process and more we can do in the process. This is where knowledge of the constitutional process is important, and knowledge of American history is important. The more educated and informed you are, the more effective you are and the more you can make a difference in the system.
David Barton: Let's go to the American founding and look at what these men did in creating their Constitution. There are 5,600 years of recorded human history. A question to ask is this: They created a government, but what is the average length of a constitution in the history of the world?
David Barton: History tells us seventeen years. The Constitution we got from these men is now more than 200 years old. It is the longest ongoing constitution in the history of the world. Every year on Constitution Day, we set another world record.
David Barton: We've set so many world records for stability that we don't even think about them anymore. They seem natural and normal to us. But everybody had access to the same set of ideas they had in their day. There were political writers, millions of books, thousands of years of history, and many political writers.
David Barton: Where did they get the ideas that created our government to be so different? That question was asked by political science professors at the University of Houston. They decided to collect writings from the founding era and see whom the founders quoted. If they could find out whom they quoted, they would know who was important to them.
David Barton: The results were released in a study called The Origins of American Constitutionalism. They went back and found 15,000 writings they thought were representative. As they went through them, they found 3,154 direct quotations. They then traced each quotation back to its original source.
David Barton: It took them ten years, but they tracked every quotation back to its original source. At the end of those ten years, they released the report. They said the number one most cited individual in the American founding was a French philosopher named Baron Charles Montesquieu.
David Barton: In 1750, Montesquieu wrote a two-volume set called The Spirit of Laws, which was used heavily by the Founding Fathers. They quoted from him frequently.
David Barton: The number two most cited individual in the American founding era was Sir William Blackstone, an English judge who wrote the Commentaries on the Constitution. It was a four-volume set, and they cited it regularly.
David Barton: Thomas Jefferson said that American attorneys read Blackstone like Muslims read the Quran. It was a significant book to them.
David Barton: The third most cited individual was John Locke. In 1690, he wrote a book called The Two Treatises of Civil Government. It is a little book, less than an inch thick, but 400 pages long. He references the Bible more than 1,500 times to show the preparation of civil government.
David Barton: If you think the Bible doesn't say much about government or doesn't refer to it, read that book from 1690. It has a lot in it.
David Barton: Those were the three most cited individuals, but what surprised the researchers was that the number one most cited source out of all sources was the Bible. Thirty-four percent of all the quotations they examined from the founding era came out of the Bible.
David Barton: That goes to the concept of biblical citizenship. They used the Bible to help create a form of government that is now the most stable government in the world. It was built on concepts and ideas from the Bible. There is a basis for us to know and be involved biblically.
David Barton: When you look at the Declaration of Independence, it starts with 161 words that give six principles of government. After those six principles, they give twenty-seven grievances showing how those principles have been violated. At the end, they have a resolve. They say that they mutually pledge each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, with a reliance on divine providence.
David Barton: That's the closing part, but let's go back to the 161 words. Four of those six principles of government are pretty simple. They start by saying there is a divine Creator. Then they say the divine Creator has given us a fixed moral law.
Rick Green: We're out of time for today. If you want to get the full Biblical Citizenship course, you can get it at PatriotAcademy.com, or you can join us on Monday nights starting October 12 at 8 p.m. Central, 9 p.m. Eastern, and 6 p.m. on the West Coast. Go to PatriotAcademy.com to sign up. Thanks so much for listening today.
Rick Green examines the biblical foundations of American citizenship, government, education, and liberty. Kirk Cameron’s teaching from Biblical Citizenship in Modern America uses Plymouth’s Forefathers Monument to explain how faith, morality, law, education, and liberty fit together, while warning that capturing education can undermine a free society.
Rick also comments on a reported attempted attack aboard a flight from Tel Aviv, describing it as a reminder that jihad and the broader cultural struggle remain serious concerns.
David Barton then explores the biblical foundations of self-government, family government, civil government, and church government. He argues that Christians have a responsibility to tend the cultural garden through informed citizenship, voting, constitutional understanding, and engagement in public life.
Barton also discusses the Bible’s influence on America’s founding documents and ideas.
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