Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - What They Don’t Want You to Know About America’s Biblical Foundation

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

What if everything you’ve been told about America’s foundation is missing the most important piece? In this conversation, Pastor Allen Jackson sits down with David Barton and Tim Barton, founders of WallBuilders, to uncover the biblical principles that shaped our nation from the very beginning. They explore how faith influenced the Founding Fathers, why objective truth matters, and what happens when a culture drifts from its moral foundation. This episode challenges Christians to reengage—not just in the church, but in every sphere of influence, including government and education. If we want a different future, it may start by rediscovering the truth we’ve forgotten.

When people are like, well, we can't have the Ten Commandments, you can't have religion in school. Okay, well, let me just ask a really simple follow-up basic question. How do we determine right and wrong? We can't just complain and we can't just pray. We have to be involved in the process to get to the outcomes that we need. What produces our political prosperity is religion and morality. You can't have political prosperity without religion and morality. And just having a church show up, it makes a huge difference.

The church has not been the salt like we should be the salt. But part of how we can be the salt is to get involved in that political arena. And if we do, we actually can do things that uphold biblical traditional values, that uphold an alienable right, that uphold constitutional principles. And that's exactly what the founding fathers did. Welcome to culture and Christianity. I had a privilege recently of sitting down with a couple of friends, David and Tim Barton. David is the founder of wall builders.

Tim, his son, is the current president. It is one of the premier resources for American history and the impact of our faith. And they have been working faithfully for decades. In fact, we just welcomed it at the church. We did a pop-up museum, which had hundreds of artifacts from our revolutionary period and beyond, reminding us of the Christian heritage of our nation, never a uniquely Christian nation, but from its very inception, very definitively founded upon a biblical worldview, Judeo-Christian values.

The interview is really to highlight some other things other than their amazing, comprehensive knowledge of history. They are working diligently and have been for a number of years with legislators from across the United States, state legislators, for policies that will bring, restore those biblical worldview issues into our communities again. And I wanted them to talk about that as well as what they're doing with education. I think we've all since COVID understood that there are some pretty significant and deficiencies with our education, our public education, our higher education.

And they have some great ideas about that. So I think the interview is not only informative about our history, but it helps us answer that question that we are always walking around with, and that's what can we do? And what do we do from here? And I think you'll hear in both David Barton and Tim some very practical things we can do, as simple as vote, get involved in the process, use your voice, influence your friends to participate. folks, there's no question God's moving in the earth.

The question is whether or not you and I are going to join him or whether we will remain in the bleachers and talk about what we think needs somebody else to do. So I hope you enjoyed the podcast and I hope you'll continue to pray that you will see what God is doing so you can join him in that activity. Thank you for taking some time.

You remind us consistently that we're not as well-versed in our history as we might be. But wall builders and your whole organization are engaged in some things far beyond just reminding churches of that. And I wanted to give a little broader exposure to that because I think it's so important. I had the privilege, Kathy and I had the privilege a few months ago of being a part of your legislators conference, which you do on an annual basis with legislators from across the states in helping them think about issues that are in their state with biblical worldview issues.

I don't know which one of you want to respond to that. Can you tell us a little bit about that initiative and what it involves and the kind of fruit you've seen from it? Yes, sir. So one of the things, broad picture, in case anybody doesn't know, is we do primarily stuff with American history, working with our original historic collection. Our goal is to try to help people understand from faith and have historic examples of how faith applies in lots of areas of life. We focus on the church, on education, and on the governmental arena. And so this is just one of our government arena outreaches. We work with about a thousand state legislators across the nation. There's about

7,800. So there's a significant percentage that we actually engage with. We help with model legislation among other things, but ultimately trying to go back and say, if it's not biblical, if it's not constitutional, if it's not protecting an illitable rights, we shouldn't support it. And we need to do things that are more directed in those regards. We bring in policy experts from all over the nation on whatever the topic is, or in many cases, spiritual leaders, is, well for those that have never attended the conference before. We from the morning through the afternoon have a bunch of policy walks, but all Christian worldview related people that will come in and say, okay, so this is what's going on with whether it be like an ESG, whether it be

something with, there's bills now where we are having to clarify that AI does not have human right privileges. But we're literally like, hey, that's a real thing. We have to address this, and not to digress on that, because not only should AI not have human right privileges, but the unborn should. So we kind of cover all of those bases. But then every evening, one of the things we recognize is we don't want to just give them good ammunition to go back as they're trying to navigate policy and legislation. Every evening, we will have a spiritual emphasis. And so we want to feed not just their mind, we want to feed their heart and soul as well. And so Pastor Jackson came and he was able to do one of the evenings for us where we have a spiritual emphasis, phenomenal. But we do work all over the nation.

In fact, I think it was just this week that Tennessee approved out of the house that they're going to allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in public schools in Tennessee, which by way of background. And I appreciate the fact that everybody in the room pretty much applauded. You should have. That's very important. One of the things we have, we have, largely forgotten. The founding father said that America only works with a religious and moral foundation. And it used to be not debatable. The moral foundation was what we learned from the Bible. And ultimately, even like the legal foundation of our nation derived from the Ten Commandments, as much as if not more than virtually anything else you can identify. So this is part of the

founding of our nation. If you go back to the early colonies, every single one of the early colonies, they included the Ten Commandments as part of the legal code for every single one of the early colonies, and here's what's also interesting, is there was never a colony that had more than 15 reasons that somebody could be put to death. But in every one of the colonies, some of the reasons you could be put to death was for violating the Ten Commandments. And they actually would list, when they would write the law that thou shalt not murder, they would literally put the verse like Exodus beside it, identifying that they're taking that specifically from the Bible. Again, the reason I say this is we now have a world and a culture that's growing up where our kids are being told that there's no objective truth. Truth is subjective.

It's how you feel. It's what you think. This is my truth. This is your truth. And we're not having a moral standard for them to hold to. In fact, I would challenge when people are like, well, we can't have the Ten Commandments. You can't have religion in school. Okay, well, let me just ask a really simple follow-up basic question. How do we determine right and wrong? This is a simple question because there's only a couple options. It's either subjective, it's collective, or it's objective. Subjective means we decide for ourselves, well, that's never going to be good because if you watch the news last night, there was somebody that decided for themselves. It was okay to take a gun and go to the White House correspondent's dinner and open fire. Well, that's subjective morality,

that that's never going to work because people are always going to make bad decisions. So you have to have a different standard. Well, there's collective. We could just all vote on it. But for the majority of the world, up until like 100 years ago, thought that slavery was acceptable. The majority of the world, there was never a nation that didn't have slavery. So if we said, we just collectively, we can point out that consistently collective groups choose things that are immoral. Well, if it can't be subjective, it's not collective, the only other option is there has to be an objective standard we point to, well, you could then argue, well, there's more than one objective standard because, like, the Jews have the Torah, the Christians have the Bible, the Muslims have the Quran, and people might argue there's different

objective standards. And then what I would say is, okay, to make it easy, if we're going to say we need the best, the highest moral objective standard, instead of analyzing all the textual documents, I would say, let's just compare the heroes of those religions. And this shouldn't be all that complicated. because, by the way, fair, if you go back to the Torah, those are some of our biblical heroes. However, we can point out, Abraham had some major flaws. Moses, major flaws. David, major flaws. You go to Islam, and they have Muhammad, who believed that you should kill your enemies. You should enslave them.

You can have multiple brides and child brides. Go down the list. And then you have Jesus, who said, you should treat other people the way you want to be treated, love your neighbors yourself. And the reason I point this out is for people that say, no, we should. shouldn't have Christianity, we shouldn't have the Bible, we shouldn't have Ten Commandments in public school. Okay, so what other options are there? Because you're always going to have a standard of morality. And if we're saying, Jesus is the highest standard of morality ever given. Even if you

don't believe he's a savior, you should. But even if you're like, I'm not sure, but he's a great moral teacher, his moral teachings would help you live a better and more free life. Now, again, ultimately, he didn't come to be a good moral teacher. He came to be a savior. So don't miss the big picture on that. But again, the reason I'm saying this is there's Christians that are like, we can't have the Ten Commandments. There is going to be a moral standard. And if we're saying we can't use the Bible, then all that is left is a lower degree moral standard. So we will be teaching our kids lesser value morals that are going to equate to them having worse behavior. And as we see all kinds of horrific things where I don't want to be graphic, but where people are taking firearms

and going in places and shooting and like, that's become far too normal. Why? Because we've removed an objective standard of morality that says, thou shalt not murder. This shouldn't be that. By the way, when kids can go to jail for violating the Ten Commandments, but we've told them they can't see the Ten Commandments, you can go to jail for stealing.

You can go to jail for killing. I mean, literally. And we're saying, but they can't see it. And I'm saying all of this, because I want to get in front of the feeling for anybody who's in the room or watching online and you're like, but I don't think we should really have the Ten Commandments there, then what else are we going to show them to give them a moral standard? Because this is the best moral standard for the history of the world there has ever been.

And there was a reason it was part of every single colony's laws. There was a reason the founding fathers advocated, above all, the sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments they thought were the two most moral and significant teachings that every student should learn and memorize. Okay. Again, the reason this matters and part of why we celebrate back to our legislators conference, we introduced something to our legislators several years ago saying, hey guys, there's a unique opportunity because you remember the coach Kennedy decision, the football coach who was fired for kneeling. He won a Supreme Court case in 2022. The Supreme Court in giving him the victory. They overturned what was known as a Lemon decision.

The Lemon decision is essentially what removed all religious activity and expression from the public arena and public school. Well, the Supreme Court said, well, that was always bad policy. That was never constitutionally correct. We are vacating and we're overturning it. When the Ten Commandments were taken out of school in 1980, the thing that the Supreme Court cited was the Lemon decision. They said, well, the Lemon test says we have to take it out. Lemon test is overturned, which means the only thing that said we couldn't have it is now removed. Let me point out the Ten Commandments were part of education from the Pilgrims until 1980.

This isn't a brand new idea. This is restoring what was the foundation and education that made America the most free, stable, prosperous, and benevolent nation in the history of the world. And by the way, Tennessee just passed that out of the house this week. I'll add to it that 27 states have now introduced laws to restore the Ten Commandments in their states. Five have so far passed laws. We've been at a bunch of states testifying for that because part of what we can help provide is the historical and legal background for the restoration of these things.

So there's a lot of good going on. We had states this year passed law that put prayer back in schools, they put Bible back in schools, they put Bible back in curriculum. We've had so much turnaround in the last two to three years. And so in any given legislative session with, and the Founding Fathers did a brilliant job in the Constitution and making sure that they separated the federal government from the state government. So state get control of a lot of stuff. We're going to talk later about elections.

The time place and many of elections by the Constitution belongs to each state. So every state has a different way of doing elections. But if you go back and look at all that in any given year, among all our 50 state legislatures, there will be 150,000 bills introduced. So we'll monitor those bills and see what the trends are. We'll try to provide the experts for the legislators on whatever that trend happens to be, whether it's religious and moral trends or economic or whether it happens to be something with ESG or UCC or various codes.

And so that's a service we try to provide for Christian legislators as well as get them biblical instruction during the conference through great Christian leaders like Pastor Jackson. The part that was so fascinating to me was the help that we all be. builders provided and that that's a community people because they come year after year and I watched them work on language and share their common experience so that the laws they were putting in place could withstand the challenges because inevitably the ACLU or the Southern Poverty Law Center such an august body of integrity will often challenge them in court and you were providing some wonderful environment for those things to be overcome. You know we

We have bowed at a wrong altar, and I hear this from local leadership and other places on a consistent basis. Well, if we do the right thing, we'll be sued. As if that provides you an excuse to not do the right thing. I want to ask every man in the room a question. Real question. If you knew today, you would be sued if you were faithful to your wife. Does that give you a legitimate reason to go be unfaithful?

To avoid the lawsuit? No. You're going to do the right thing? Yes. even if there's a threat of a consequence. I want to answer that question out loud? The answer would be, yes, I'm going to be faithful to my wife, even if there's a consequence. Why will we do the wrong thing because we're afraid of the concept?

That makes no sense for the Christ follower. You know, this podcast is made possible because of sponsors. And one of our sponsors is preserve gold. And I appreciate their partnership with us. And I pray it's a blessing to you. You know, one of the things that I hear most often right now is this. this, that people are doing their best plan for the future, but they're not sure what's trust anymore.

You know, the headlines, they change every day. And the economy, it feels pretty unpredictable. And that uncertainty, it's unsettling to all of us. But as people of faith, we're not called to live in fear. We're called to live with wisdom, with discernment, and with peace. Well, part of that is simply taking practical steps to protect what you've worked so hard to build and establish for yourself and your family. That's why many are turning to time-tested assets like gold and silver, not as a reaction, but as a way to bring stability into their financial plans.

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but sometimes people think, well, no, it's the church. And I would say, there's two interesting things about this. When you look at culture, culture is a reflection of two things. It is a reflection of the church and it's a reflection of politics. And a lot of times people think, well, the church is what determines culture, that determines politics. But I would point out, politics actually determines culture, especially in our modern era, at times more than the church does.

Now, that's actually an indictment on the church in America. However, I do want to point out, when Roe v. Wade became the law of the law, land, which is already silly because law doesn't come from the U.S. Supreme Court. It comes from Congress. They're the ones that pass law. So when the Supreme Court had the 1973 Road versus Wade decision, and they said, we just found a new constitutional right to abortion miraculously. The words aren't there, but we found it in the Constitution. They said this is now the law of the land. Again, they don't pass law, but here's the reason I'm bringing this up, what I want to point out. Prior to 1973, how many people are the law? How many people are the law? How many

Americans supported abortion, publicly outwardly supported abortion. And what you will find is it was in the single digits. Then abortion becomes the law of the land. Because it's the law of the land, it becomes normalized. And now, not only do you have the majority of Americans, here's a staggering part, you have the majority of Christians that think we should not end all. of abortion for whatever reason, and here's why I'm saying this, because the reason that we got involved on the legislative front in a lot of ways actually is because of our faith, because we recognize if we don't start upholding legally some of these basic traditional values, then this will change our culture for so much the worse and make it more of a challenge for us as

believers. And if that's confusing to anybody, look at Europe right now. when you are a Christian right now over in Europe, and literally, whether it's in Canada or the UK, and well, you can't teach certain Bible verses anymore, you can't read them out loud anymore. You can go to jail for hate speech for reading the Bible out loud. America, if we are not careful, can go down that same slippery path. And I'm saying this because if the church thinks, well, we don't need to get involved in politics, politics are actually directing this ship. They're the bigger rudder on the ship right now. And again, largely that's an indictment on the church because the church has not been being the salt like we should be the salt. But part of how we can be

the salt is to get involved in that political arena. And if we do, we actually can do things that uphold biblical traditional values, that uphold an alienable right, that uphold constitutional principles. And that's exactly what the founding fathers did. They weren't people that checked their faith at the door. They were people when the declaration says, we owe these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by they're created with certain inelible rights, and that to secure these rights, government and certitude among men, when they said those are self-evident truths, where did they discover those self-evident truths? And here's the interesting thing. So this is, if you have come to

the pop-up museum, you've seen these. This is the first printing of the original draft of the declaration. And this came out in 1829. It was Thomas Jefferson's grandson. that found the original one. It was like, this is amazing. People want to see this. Let's make some copies. So they made copies. This is from the first printing, the first copy that was made from the original draft. But here's the reason I want to bring this up. There was a historian named Alice Baldwin. She wrote a book called The New England Clergy in the American Revolution. And if you look through this, it's four pages. In her book, she talks about the influence of the pastors in early America, but the amazing part is she points out,

the founding fathers didn't come up with a single unique idea. She said instead, they repeated all of the things they'd been learning from their pastor for the decades leading up to that moment. And one of her quotes, she says, there is not a right asserted in the declaration, which had not been preached from the American clergy prior to 1763. And in her book, she goes through and she lists the pastor, and the sermons that delivered all of those rights.

Again, the reason I'm saying this is because part of the reality of the notion of the founding of our nation, it really does go back to the fact that the church was far more active in the formation of the ideas politically speaking. We didn't think our faith stays inside the church and not related to government. And let me give you a little food for thought and Pastor Jackson, if you have a different an idea. By all means correct, redirect if I say something and you're like, well, Tim, I have to see it this way. But what I would point out is if we read the Bible, it's very clear God has three institutions. God has the family, God has the church, and God created government.

And I don't know of any Christian who would debate the fact that God gave guidance on how the family is supposed to operate. And as Christians, we should follow the guidance that God gave. right and whether that's for husband and wife whether that's for raising kids whether it's for kids submitting and obeying their parents in the lord for this is right the bible gives guidance clearly on the family the bible gives guidance on the church that is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry and we can go through all the details of what the bible says in the church here's what's interesting the bible says far more about government and government leaders and in dealing and addressing government and government leaders than it does the family or the church and yet

for some reason, we spend more time on what the Bible says less about than acknowledging, you know what? The Bible has an awful lot to say about politics and government. And as Christians, we're not supposed to only care about two of the three institutions God made. We actually need to recognize the Bible speaks more to government, and therefore we should be interested in care about government in the midst of what we do. And that's literally what early pastors did going back to the fact that every single grievance or every single right in the Declaration had been preached from pastors prior to 1763.

It, again, is an indictment on the church, but it's, I want to be an encouragement of why as a Christian, we shouldn't be even reading our Bible and thinking, well, as a Christian, I shouldn't get involved politically. No, actually, if you read your Bible, you should go, man, how many times do these prophets go to these kings? How many times are they talking about you should do this? You shouldn't do this. God will bless. God will curse. That's almost all, dealing with government leaders and government officials, it's the majority of the Bible, and we can't read it disconnected from our reality that we live in a world with political leaders and the Word of God speaks to every issue we deal with, not just with family and church, but also

with politics. Let me add a challenge to that because we're coming up on the 250th anniversary, celebration of that document right there that Tim held. And it probably takes you, if you haven't read the document, read it. It's probably 15 minutes to read. And you'll find 20, grievances in that declaration. Here's 27 reasons. We're separating from Great Britain because Britain was done one, two, 27. And remember that every one of those grievances had been preached from the American pulpit prior to 1763.

So read the grievances as if they're sermon topics and see what Bible verses you can put to each of those 27 grievances because pastors did that. That's what they did in the founding era. See if you can put Bible verses to the same things that they put Bible verses to back then, and that tells us a lot about where we are with our biblical knowledge, what we even know of what the Bible says about government, because that declaration is a, it really is a listing of sermon topics. That's what we're celebrating on the 250th.

This is two sermons that were printed as a book. Those are thick sermons, if those are two sermons. So. Feeling convicted. Well, I was just going to say, anytime they think you've gone long, I just want to point out, It used to be several hours for a sermon back in the day. I got to get in on this for a minute because several hours for a sermon, John Quincy Adams, when he was president of the United States, now John Quincy Adams started keeping a diary when he's 11 years old. He kept her for 68 years.

So John Quincy Adams has this massive diary. And at one point, he was talking about, he was 40 years in Congress, president of the United States served in the first several presidential administrations. but he's talking about how that he would go to church. And by the way, they went to church at the U.S. Capitol. Church was held at the Capitol every Sunday, and that's where he attended church, was at the Capitol, and they would have sermons at the Capitol every Sunday. And he said that one Sunday they had a brand new chaplain that had just been hired in the house that chaplain came in, and he preached that Sunday service.

And John Quincy Adams usually goes through and analyzes every sermon. Well, the verses were good, but he could have used this. verse and he should have used this one and the one and he just analyzed every sermon and he got through and he said this chaplain preached this morning and he has got to go he only preached 40 minutes what did he think we came to church for we came here to be here several hours but he's talked and that's literally his complaint you're applauding so this is a book with two sermons from John Wise. These sermons were actually preached back in the early 1700s, but this was reprinted in 1772 by the Sons of Liberty, because in the midst of their idea of trying to get every American

rallying together, working together, they said, we need to get everybody on the same page. How can we do that? And this was a pastor who had been in Massachusetts. And by the way, just so you know, the Sons of Liberty, that's the group started by Sam Adams and John Hancock and all the Founding Father kind of pages. So the Founding Fathers are running the group that reprinted these two sermons. They decided that if we're going to get everybody on the same page, there was just pastor years ago who had preached these great sermons. We should reprint those sermons and have them so Americans could read them because that would help them understand what we're thinking and where we're coming from. Now, how would these sermons help them understand? Well, it's interesting. Because in one of these

two sermons, John Wise, and I quote, says, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain and alienable rights. That's in the Declaration. This is also where they got the idea he taught that God's preferred form of government was the consent of the government. He taught, and this is in these sermons, these two sermons, he taught that taxation without representation is tyranny. those are all things that show up in the declaration. This was reprinted by the founding fathers, circulated. So when the founding fathers are trying to raise up these patriotic people, and the way they did it is, we need sermons.

I just want to point out, this is where we have a lot more disconnect today than we realize, and if we would go back and review some history, it's amazing the role the church had in leading so much of the movement, but by the way, they weren't leading because they wanted to be rebellious. In fact, you can go back and look up. 1776, there was a committee assigned to come up with the motto and the seal for our new nation. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams were all part of this committee. And Franklin actually wrote a suggestion.

It was not accepted. I wish it would have. It had been amazing. But he wrote a suggestion, Benjamin Franklin, considered one of the least religious founding fathers. his suggested motto was rebellion to tyrants, his obedience to God. His seal, he said we should have Moses standing on one side and then there should be in the Red Sea

and Pharaoh's army and cherry. It's all drowning in the water. And then in the background, it could be this pillar of cloud and a fire in the middle of it. Okay. Again, first of all, that would have been so cool if that had been our seal and motto. But where did Franklin come up with these ideas?

This is clearly the influence of the church, the influence of Christianity, and the fact, again, it was pastor's sermons that were shaping the culture, but specifically shaping the political culture of what led to the birth of the nation. So in the midst of this conversation, again, I would encourage you, we have to do a better job of not disconnecting our faith from the bigger picture of where God has us. In fact, if you go to Jeremiah 29, growing up as I did, born in the 80s, a kid of the 90s, my grandparents, my parents, Jeremiah 2911 was everywhere. For I know the plans I have for you declare as the Lord, plans of prosper, not to harm me

to give you hope in a future. That was like on somebody's pillow, on somebody's frame, right, Bible cover, it was everywhere. And so we probably most of us have heard and seen Jeremiah 2911. And I would ask most people in a conversation, hey, do you know what? comes before that. And most of us are like, that's the verse I know. I don't know the rest of it. And I would remind them, okay, well, back up to the beginning of Jeremiah 29, Jeremiah says, I'm writing to all who are being carried away into captivity. So people being taken as slaves into a land, they don't even want to be in. And he starts in verse four and five, and he says,

don't despair, don't lose hope. God hasn't forgotten you when you get there. Don't stop getting married. Get married. Have kids, raise families, plant crops and vineyards. He gets to verse seven. He says, and seek the peace and the prosperity of the land to which you've been carried away captive. Pray to the Lord for it. For when it goes well with that land, it will go well with you. They didn't even want to be there. And he's like, you need to seek to make the place you are living the best possible. Pragmatically, because if it goes better with them, it goes better with you.

He said, you need to pray for it and you need to seek the best for it. Okay, so as a Christian, how do you seek the best for it? well one of the ways you've got to seek the best for it is you got to get involved in the political general idea of what's happening which means voting in elections which means sometimes you need to nominate your friend or your spouse to run for school board to run for city council sometimes the problem is we don't have the right kind of people that we even can vote for but but again the reason i say this is because we have disconnected the reality that part of our calling as christians to be salt and light one of the things that god through jeremiah

tells the people the Israelites is also the place where God plants you, you should work to make it the best possible environment there is. And the way we impact our environment, well, part of it is through the school board and the city council, it's through the mayor, it's through our state reps and our governor. And again, I'm saying this, not that this is the trigger of like, that you're being Christian nationalist. I am being a Christian who loves God first, but recognizes is God's calling that I should make the place where I live better. And the tools at my disposal to do that often are political tools. And I do love God and I do love my nation. And that is not a crazy idea. The term Christian nationalism is being used as a pejorative to try to scare Christians

from keeping their faith and getting involved in the process. And that's simply not what the Bible teaches on any level whatsoever. Almost everybody I know wants to be healthy or healthier. And I think most of us would like it to happen to us by accident. But that hasn't been my experience. So what do we do in a world where there's so many options and diets seem to be like fashion trends? They change with every season. How do we respond?

Well, I want to tell you about something that I trust, something that has worked in my life. Ancient nutrition gives you a whole menu of supplements, sources for, protein and collagen that I have found made a difference in my life. You know, I decline most of sponsorship invitations, but this isn't something that is just an invitation to be a sponsor for something. I've actually used it in my life, and it's made a difference. Jordan Rubin happens to live in the Nashville area, so he and I have become friends long before I was doing this podcast, and his coaching has helped me lead a healthier life.

And I have found those ancient nutrition supplements to be very valuable, whether it's the multi-collagen or now the new multi-protein. It's hard to eat enough protein sometimes as you age to maintain the muscle that we want to maintain. And those supplements have been very helpful for me. They've been gracious enough to give those of you who are listeners to our program. If you'll use the code fuel 26, you'll get a 26% discount sitewide on ancient nutrition. That's ancient Nutrition.com. Let's make choices to be healthier, and maybe we can limit the pharmaceuticals will be dependent upon. That would be a God thing. God's moving in the earth, and we can be a part of it by what we put on our fork and not just the pills we take. George Washington, when he retired

at the end of 45 years of public service. I mean, he was the guy in America. Could have been king if he'd wanted to. He didn't want to. Bible talked about electing your leaders. And so in his final farewell addressed, he said, what produces our political prosperity is religion and morality. You can't have political prosperity without religion and morality. You can't have religion and morality if religious and moral people don't get involved in the political process. It's not going to be the immoral and the irreligious that bring religion and morality, and you can't have religion, you can't have political prosperity without religion and morality. If I can, I want to show you slides for just a couple minutes, show you kind of where the church is on this. We keep up with

stats and do a lot of work on this kind of stuff. So I want to show you kind of what it looks like because you guys are facing election this Tuesday, primary elections. And by the way, I just checked while sitting down with you, I just checked some of the county, like Shelby County, Memphis. If you happen to be voting on Tuesday, Shelby County, in the county, there are 30 races in the county. And 15 of those races have no candidates in the race at all. Nobody even stepped up to want to be involved. If you'd lived in Shelby County, you could have run for 15 different offices just by signing up. And if the godly, the scriptures say, when the righteous rule, the people rejoice and the wicked rule the people groan. Only way the righteous rule is they have to get on the ballot,

and then they have to get elected once they're on the ballot. And this is something the church is backed away from for several years. If I go back to the time of founding father, Daniel Webster, in his 1840 election, voter turnout was 100%. In his particular election for Congress, there were 5,000 people in his district, and there were 5,000 votes cast in that district. So everybody felt a responsibility. I'll answer to God for what I do with my vote. He gave me a vote. What am I going to do with it?

Christians have backed away from that. I want to show you where we are now. So let me put some slides up on the screen here, guys. There we go. So in voting, I'm going to take you through the numbers real quick. 100% of those that are constitutionally able to vote can, and that means if you're 18 years old and you're a legal citizen, you're constitutionally able to vote. That is a big deal, by the way, that you're a legal citizen for any state that's confused on that. That's constitutional.

So within that framework, 100% of adults that are 18 and legal citizens vote, and at this point, only 68% are registered to vote. So you see that, or actually 65.3%. So already we have about one-third of Americans who say, I don't care what the rest of the nation does. I don't care where it goes. I'm not going to do anything to direct that. So at this point, we're having one out of three adults check out. Now, let me go back to the stats here for a minute. So in presidential elections, which is where we have the highest voter turnout, only 54% of registered vote.

And that's 54% of 65.3%. So that's not high voter turnout. That means only 36% of adults vote in the presidential election. Democrat and Republican together, only 36%. And one note for this, this is from the last five decades of data. What actually skews this more recently is because of COVID with the mail-in ballots when there was in President Biden had the most incredible vote count that there's ever been for any president in American history because he's the most popular ones ever been elected,

not to digress, but this is excluding that election. So apart from that election, when there was actually in some counties, they had 125% voter turnout. It's fine. It's fine. But it's excluding that one election, just so you know, that's for five decades of data for where these numbers come from. So what you have is 36% of adults voted, constitutionally able adults voted, and it only takes half that to win, which means 18% has been choosing the president of the United States. Now, this covers 11 presidential elections. So one out of five Americans is choosing the president of the United States, 11 presidential elections. If you go to off your elections, which is where we are now, this is where you choose senators, congressmen, governors, et cetera. Your average voter turnout drops to 38% of registered voters.

It takes half that to win the election, and only 26% of registered ones vote. And so you're looking at about 13% of adults choose governors, choose U.S. senators. We were talking one out of eight Americans are choosing. People grab about the leaders they've got? Well, that's because seven out of eight didn't vote for that leader. That's because four out of five didn't vote for that presidential candidate. And that's on us. That's not on them.

So when you get down into other elections, you take that one out of five number or that one out of eight number and jump down into local elections. At local elections, it's only 6% turnout. Now, that's 6% of registered voters, which means only 4% of adults vote, which means generally we're choosing our mayors, we're choosing our city council with 2%. I'll give you a couple of quick indications. Angeles County, the county of Los Angeles is larger than the population of 23 states. So if you're the mayor of Los Angeles, that's like being a governor in 23 different states.

Eric Garcetti, the recent mayor of Los Angeles, brags that he was elected with 2.9% of the vote. A total, so you essentially have a governor that more people than most governors have, and he's elected with 2.9% of the total vote of Los Angeles. If you go to Houston in Texas where we are, Houston is larger than 20 states, and we elected in Houston a lady named Elise Parker with 4.9%. She was the first open lesbian mayor in Houston. She enacted policies and said, if from the pulpit you say marriage is between a man and a woman, that is now a crime. She went after several pastors for that. They did the same in San Antonio. They made it a class C misdemeanor to say that marriage is between a man and a woman. So I can't even say what the Bible says without violating and civil law. but again, when only 4.9% of the people in the city, and Houston, highly Christian city, and San Antonio is too. They just didn't vote in that election. A couple more I'll point to Fort Worth. This is where all this gender confusion we've had over recent years that came out of Fort Worth,

which is just unbelievable to me. That's Fort Worth is in the middle of Texas area, but Fort Worth Independent School District. They said, you know, we've considered this, and we don't think it matters anymore what restroom kids choose or what locker rooms they go to or what should. hours they use. We're going to let kids choose any. This is the school board of Fort Worth Independent School District. They're the first ones in the nation that said this. And that's out of a very red state and a very red city. So what happened is Arnie Duncan, who was Secretary of Education for Obama, said, that's a great idea. Let's make this federal. And so this is where it went from a local city to federal level. And that's where it's come across all the states now. And so

what happened is for us, this should have been a no-brainer. Anybody that goes to the Fort Worth stockyards, you watch the cattle drive, you can tell what genders there are, and there's only two of them. And it's not hard to distinguish what the genders are. Every mammal species in the world, only two genders. So the city and the world should be clearest on genders, at least have visual examples every day. They're the ones confused. So Fort Worth has 918,000 people. It's the 13th largest city in the United States. 918,000. I went and looked at the president of the school board who made this silly policy, he was elected with a total of 1,200 votes out of 918,000. Now, I start looking in his district, and I found a church in his district,

and that one church alone had 3,000 adults in that. That one church could have kept him from being the president's school board, which would save the whole nation from all this gender stupidity we've had for the last 15 years. It came back to a local district. A local church could have solved that problem. So a couple other examples I'll give you. Take it to Bentonville, Arkansas. This is the hometown of Walmart. 40,000 people lived there. There was a latest, this is not coming to Bentonville. I'm going to get on the school board and make sure it doesn't come. And she did. And that town of 40,000, she ran for school board and received a total of 35 votes out of 40,000. She got elected with the majority of 35 votes. That's a Sunday school

class got her elected, essentially, so what it amounts to. One more example. I'll go to Rice, Iowa, there was a farmer in Riceville, Iowa said, this definitely is not coming to our town. We know how many genders there are on the farm, and this is not going to be in our schools. So he signs up, he runs for school board, turned out on the day of election, he got busy on the farm, didn't vote, and don't think that he lost by one vote. That wasn't it. There was not a single vote cast in the school board election. If he had voted for himself, he would be sitting on the school board, if he just voted for himself. So there's stories like this that go forever, and the point being,

that Christians have to be involved in this arena, especially these down-ballot races. It takes a little bit of effort to find out who these people are, but a little bit of effort is worth having good leaders. Bible, again, when the righteous rule, the people rejoice and when people grow, nobody rules an American unless we put them there. That's on us. And notice how little it takes to make a difference at a local level. A lot of times we're like, oh, there's just, it's just, it's.

too big. No, you're thinking nationally when you're looking locally in many occasions. Literally, in Bentonville, she was elected with just over 30 votes. That's crazy. And Iowa, now, granted, they didn't have early voting, so it was day of voting, that's fine. No, like, do you have no friends? Could nobody show up and vote for you? It's crazy. But again, it does not take a massive movement sometimes to make. a massive impact. Sometimes it's just Gideon's little army, show it up, and they can make a major difference. And this is part of where as Christians also, the challenge should be, we shouldn't be thinking about we need the majority to win something. We should be thinking about being faithful

to what God's called us to do and recognize how often God uses the little and the faithful to do something quite significant, ultimately, because in the end, God gets credit and we can't brag about how awesome we were. We have to go, man, look what God did, but it only happens when we get involved in that process. I want to give you two examples from Fort Worth that illustrate what Tim was talking about. After Fort Worth had this wake-up call, Fort Worth is what sent this nonsense across the nation. The churches and pastors there said, this should never have happened. And so Fort Worth, being the 13th largest city, we got a lot of school boards, a lot of school districts. 70 churches got together and said, hey, let's get our churches together.

Let's see if we can't recruit good people and run for sport. And so what they did is out of the churches, they recruited 15 candidates for school board. And on election night, all 15 won and won by a major landslide because those 70 churches showed up to elect the people they had run. And it was easy. The other one I'll share is there was a single church in downtown Fort Worth area that said, this is unacceptable. And so out of that church, out of that church,

they ran 21 candidates and 20 got elected out of that one church. Because that one church had enough voters to be able to, because, again, people just don't show up for those kind of elections. And just having a church show up, it makes a huge difference. I have a childhood memory I want to share with you. It was our kitchen table. I've got two younger brothers. I've gathered around the table,

and my parents were consistently, persistently, inviting guests to dinner. You know, practicing that notion of hospitality. My brothers and I weren't always excited about it, but I realized that we had a front row seat for expressions of the kingdom of God. We can still do the same. Imagine your kitchen table

as an expression of God's love in this generation. God's moving in the earth. Let's join him. Hospitality doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes it begins with inviting someone to your kitchen table. To help you get started, we've created a tools for hospitality set.

It includes a custom kitchen towel that reminds you sweet tea, pecan pie, and your God's story make a difference. It also has three favorite recipes from Pastor Allen and some tips that will help make hospitality a little bit easier. Request the tools for hospitality set with your gift of $25 or more at Alan Jackson.com or call 800-880-5102. Might I suggest you vote? And if you'll allow me, in this community, every candidate, in this community,

every candidate between now and election day is going to say Jesus when asked a question. So don't be naive. If they've been in office, look at their body of work. If they've done the right thing while they were there, support them if they haven't. Don't pay attention. Look at the alternatives. That's right. I'm not telling you to vote for.

I'm telling you to use your common sense. It's important. We can't just complain and we can't just pray. It's like praying for food and not planting a garden. We have to be involved in the process. to get to the outcomes that we need. And our adversaries would like us to be quiet and talk about the Pharisees and the Sadducees

in the first century. And I'm happy to have that dialogue, but we are ambassadors for Jesus of Nazareth in the 21st century. Marriage is not a political issue, it's a biblical issue. What our children have in their libraries is not a political issue, it's a biblical issue. And we have to pay attention.

We got two minutes left. You're doing a lot of work for curriculum, curriculum in schools. I know you've got a 90-second summary of what Wall Builders is doing to make education better, but it's such an enormous body of work. They at least need a window into that so they can pray. Yeah, the Bible says, Jesus says, in 640, he says every student when he's fully trained to be like his teacher. Education has a huge impact on our teachers. So if we can get good curriculum in, so what happens is there's two states that drive curriculum in the United States because publishers published for those two states. Texas is a good curriculum. Texas is, and

in California, we have 24% of the nation's public school kids. So if a publisher's going to put $90 million in doing social studies curriculum, history curriculum, they're going to choose Texas and California. Texas and California, we're not like each other at all. We have very opposite philosophies. So generally, the national publishers choose Texas and California, put our standards together, and so you get really bad history. We've had this going on for several decades now.

Texas this year said, no, we're not doing this. anymore. We're big enough with 5.5 million students in our schools, 5.7 million, that we'll start publishing our own textbooks. And so what happens now in Texas, we've passed several laws in the last three years, but for example, now you have to, in every class, have readings from the Old Testament and New Testament as part of history, because that's what Founding Fathers read, that's what historians read. So you have that. We now teach patriotism. We now teach communism wrong, Socialism wrong. These are all things that California is on the other side of.

So I'm one of the nine people selected in Texas to write the standards for the school books in Texas. We have 23 different social studies courses. Those textbooks will be coming out. They will change the direction of the nation because we'll start raising a generation of kids and see things from the very different viewpoint. Thank you for that. I wanted you to know there are people that we, the weakness,

to the local church is it's a local church. And it's important to know that there are people working diligently across our nation beyond the ones you know to take a biblical worldview and put it back in our public square and public education. It is our heritage. Its absence is a very new thing. And they're not only doing the work. They have the largest collection of, you say it with the right words. The largest private collection of original documents from the founding era. So when the academics in these elite institutions say that's not true, they actually own the doc, they would destroy the documents. You know, they have done with our founding documents what God does with archaeology. You know, the elite academics say that you can't trust the Bible,

and God says, well, go dig over here. Or go look in that cave and we find a scroll of Isaiah that's a thousand years older than anything we had, and it's not corrupt. And the angels chuckle and go, say something else. But there are many, many, many people at work to honor the Lord in our generation. And you need to pray for these folks. David and Cheryl have been home two days this month. That's hard work. That's not fun after about day four. And that hasn't been a four-week cruise. So pray for them. God. is moving in the earth. There are good things happening. There is truth being told and things are being put in place that will spare a generation of children from some of the nonsense that we haven't

spared them from in the past. And it's up to us to be that generation. Amen? And one of the things, you know, you're not powerless. You've got to vote. And, you know, at the moment, less than 5% of the people have participated that are registered to do so. So let's make the turnout just goofy this time. Goofy being a Greek word that means many more voted than expected. Thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure and subscribe to Alan Jackson Ministries YouTube channel and follow the Culture and Christianity podcast. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to leave

with our faith, we can change our culture. I'll see you next time.