I've heard people say numerous times, this was never a Christian nation. It was never founded as such. My friends, those that say that have little understanding of the historical foundation of America. D. James Kennedy Ministries presents Truths That Transform. America is celebrating another birthday this week, but there is a looming threat on the horizon. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under. We enjoy our freedoms as Americans because our founders recognized that freedom is the gift of God. But today, our nation is carving out a decidedly godless path. Then what happens to that idea of freedom? Because when that dies, then America dies. Discover the danger of cultural Marxism and what to do about it on today's Truths That Transform. Welcome to Truths That Transform, a production of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where we are standing for truth and defending your freedom. Marxism is not just an economic system. It also takes a particular view of culture. And while economic Marxism is on the rise in America, cultural Marxism already has a strong foothold in the media, in the educational system, and in many parts of government. That's dangerous for all of us as you'll see on today's program. You will discover how cultural Marxists are attempting to rewrite America's history in an effort to turn it to the hard left. And we will share some resources with you that will open your eyes to the Marxist and socialist threat in America. As we begin, one of the key tenets of cultural Marxism is to undo the foundations that America was built on so that the nation can be fundamentally transformed. That's why it has never been more important to have a clear view of the founding principles of our country, especially as we celebrate the Fourth of July. Our own Dr. Jerry Newcomb has more. We are a nation under God. And I believe God intended for us to be free. The Judeo-Christian values are the bedrock of Western civilization. They are the bedrock and foundation of the United States of America. Our founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they founded this nation and gave us the law that we have today. Not only were the original settlers here in America strong professing Christians, many of Puritan persuasion, others of Church of England and other persuasions, but definitely within the Christian faith, but that Christian faith proceeds and continues well into the 1800s. On July 4, 1776, 56 men, representing 3 million Americans, voted to declare America a new nation, separate from Great Britain. What were the ideas that helped bring about this revolutionary development? There have been studies that have been done that look at the influences that the Founders drew on in their political writings. And these studies show that the Bible is by far the source they turn to most frequently. Outside of the Bible, one of the sources the Founding Fathers quoted the most was Sir William Blackstone, a man who had a great deal of influence on America. He was cited during the founding era more times than anyone else except the Scriptures and Montesquieu. Sir William Blackstone was a teacher of law. In London, he was the first one to put together a systematic presentation of the common law. It was a four-volume set that was published from 1765 to 1769. And more copies of Blackstone, according to Sir Edmund Burke, were sold in America than in England. Phrases like the laws of nature and of nature's God in the Declaration of Independence come directly from Blackstone, who has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in a plethora of decisions through the decades. We have to recognize today the incredible influence that William Blackstone had on the revolution in America through his commentaries that were published beginning in 1765. These founders of America were reading Blackstone's biblical worldview that said that all law came from God, and if any law was contrary to God's law, it was not law at all. This is what our founding fathers were reading. And Blackstone had such a profound impact in America that he is justified in being called the source of the philosophy of America in the Declaration of Independence. The American War for Independence has been called the American Revolution, but some scholars question if it really was a revolution per se in terms of the rule of law. Independence Day is the celebration of not just American independence, but of a doctrine of what I call interposition. It is not a revolution, technically. It is not a revolt or rebellion. It is interposition of duly elected state officials throughout the state of the American colonies, against a tyrant who no longer had a legitimate basis to rule. In other words, the Founding Fathers were trying to get the King of England and the leaders in Parliament to follow the rule of law, which they were violating. Sam Adams, who many call the father of the American Revolution. Sam Adams declared after the signing of the Declaration, we have restored the rightful sovereign to his throne in America. May his kingdom come. Our founding fathers were so committed to these freedoms that many of them gave everything and most of them died broke trying to give us the freedoms that we have today. The least we can do is preserve it for the next generation. You know, you never really own freedom. You only preserve it for the next generation. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under. Karl Marx said, take away a people's roots and they can be easily moved. The documentary Evidence on America's Christian Roots is available for all to see and hear. But the left-wing secular elites in America are working overtime to obscure and even destroy these roots. Nobody more boldly defended America's Christian founding than Dr. D. James Kennedy, and I'm joined now by his daughter and my very dear friend, Jennifer Kennedy Cassidy. Jennifer, I think your dad did more than almost anybody else I can think of in the last century in explaining the importance of America's Christian roots at the founding. He really did. And you know, there were other great historians that were shedding light on the truth. But my dad had the largest megaphone. And you know, he wasn't shy about using it. My dad knew that America didn't just fall down to earth out of nowhere. It wasn't something created by secularists. America was founded by men and women who wanted to come here so they could worship Jesus Christ as the scriptures and their consciences dictated. Today, we are regularly told that America is a secular nation and that the founders wanted to wall off the government from Christianity. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. It was one of my father's great passions to proclaim America's true history, which is nothing like the one taught by our modern educational system and our media. My dad knew that America was indeed a Christian nation and could be once again. As we celebrated our nation's birthday this week, let's hear more from this portion of his classic message, America, One Nation Under God. One Nation Under God, a Pledge of Allegiance. I want to tell you something about the Pledge of Allegiance that I doubt that any of you have ever heard. It was designed as a subversive instrument to turn this nation into a socialist country. The man who wrote it was a man by the name of Francis Bellamy. He introduced it in 1891. He was a socialist. Now it was different than what we have today. For example, it said, I pledge allegiance to my flag. No mention. of the United States of America which would be submerged into the world socialist coming order. And of course, there was no mention of God. How many of you ever heard that before? One man. Well, when it was introduced into the schools, the people in America became concerned that there was no reference to the United States of America, so they got the Congress to change my flag to the flag of the United States of America, much to the utter consternation of Francis Bellamy. That was back in the 20s. And then in the 50s, 54, Congress again acted and declared that we should insert the words under God. And what happened is that now the Pledge of Allegiance is exactly opposite of what he designed it to be. It is a truly patriotic pledge to the United States flag and a nation under God. So thank the Lord we won that and most of us never knew the battle was going on, did we? Praise the Lord for his providential care. So they say that this nation is not a nation under God, that there was no godly foundation. If you go back to the beginning, to the Declaration of Independence, we find that a number of times it mentions the creator. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. You notice they're not evolved equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable, we say today inalienable rights. And among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Bellamy and his kind, who were associated with the Fabian Socialist Movement, which had just begun in England two years prior to his writing this pledge, their idea was to move stealthily and incrementally on toward establishing the same goal that the Marxist revolutionaries tried to do by sudden revolutions. They wanted to do it peacefully and little by little, deceptively deceiving the people until finally they achieve their goal. But the goal was, and always is, the total state. If our rights and liberties do not come from God and are not inalienable, then they come from the state, and they are very alienable. The state gives, and the state takes away what it gives according to its own pleasure. that when you get rid of inalienable rights come from God, you get very alienable rights that come from a totalitarian state. And when the state is the final authority, then friends, that is totalitarianism, that is despotism. This is a nation under God. This is a nation that loves God, loves His Word, and loves His Son. Well, dear friends, I think the time has come to restore, indeed, the foundations of this country as the founders gave them to us. And we will know once more of a truth that this is indeed one nation under God. As Dr. Kennedy just showed, an honest look at our history leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Bible played a key role in our nation's creation. When the U.S. Supreme Court examined America's settling and founding documents in the case of the U.S. v. The Church of the Holy Trinity in 1892, they declared, this is a Christian nation. But the secularists today are taking out their giant erasers and working overtime to rewrite our history. They are following Marx's dictum to move people by removing their roots. Dr. James S. Robbins is Senior Fellow in National Security Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council. He has written a book about this problem called Erasing History. I sat down with him recently to discuss the agenda behind all historical revisionism. One of the most astonishing things happening in the culture today is this propensity on the part of some to erase the portion of our history that people don't like. But what's behind this movement? What's really happening here? Well, I think what's behind it is this progressive impulse to redefine everything in America in a negative way. And so because of this, the progressives and people like that are trying to say, well, since everything in our past was bad, we have to junk all that, get rid of the Constitution, get rid of American history, and move forward into this new utopia that they're planning with socialism and equality and so forth. Do you think that Scrubbing the past of all the so-called bad things in it is really just a way of mandating the present and the future in conformity with what the hard left wants to see. Oh, definitely. I mean, this is the Orwellian aspect of it, and I quote George Orwell throughout the book, you know, he who controls the past controls the present, and then you control the future. If they erase the aspects of the American narrative that we rightly have pride in, you know, our various freedoms, whether it's religious freedom or freedom of speech or all of the things that America stands for, if they erase that or make us look back on it with this sense of shame and disgust, then yes, they can then write whatever future they want because they have disrupted our traditions. And it's in our traditions where we preserve our freedom. What do you see as the greatest risk, and I guess I'm thinking educationally, going forward in a nation that is trying to whitewash its path? Well, the risk is that you will have people who do not understand the basis of what this country was founded on. Ronald Reagan said that freedom is always one generation away from extinction. It is up to parents to transmit that to their kids, and it's also up to schools, hopefully, to transmit that, although we can't always trust the schools to do that. So we don't want to be the generation that fails to transmit that legacy of freedom to the next generation, because then we'll have that extinction event that Ronald Reagan talked about. And to me, when we see this sort of rising acceptability in certain sectors of politics, for things like socialism and anti-freedom, I see that as a big problem. Because it's not that people can't discuss those ideas. Obviously they can. It's a free country. but sort of the acceptance that, hey, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's the direction we have to go now, because we've tried everything else and it's failed. Well, that's their story, but it hasn't failed, and we shouldn't go down a road that we know is going to fail. You've got to be careful using strong terms and strong language, but a lot of the tactics that we watch among these people seem to me to look like 1930s Germany. It's starting to look like fascism, in which The appropriate speech is defined, and if you're outside that definition, you're an enemy of the state. The left is calling current members, the president and current members of the administration enemies of the state. It's a very fascistic kind of lingo that they're throwing around cavalierly. Do you see, do you have that kind of concern as well? Oh yeah, there's this rising rhetoric and kind of acceptance of violent rhetoric and violent deeds. When we see speakers being shut down, shouted down, or people assailed in restaurants or what have you, and some people on the left saying, good, we need more of that. We need to track these people down and say they're not welcome or something like that. Well, that's not really America. You're not going to be able to put together the kind of compromises in government you need to run the country if everybody is threatening everybody else. We've seen in the Supreme Court hearings of these paid demonstrators coming into the committee room and screaming. And one Democrat said, that's the voice of democracy. Really? Screaming in a committee room? That's how we're going to run things now? You can't run a government that way. And if speakers on college campuses are having their lives threatened by armed thugs wearing black masks, Yeah, 1930s Germany, I think that's an appropriate kind of comparison because the way down that road is not good. Did not end well. No, and it wouldn't end well here either. It would be very bad. My friends, there is a strategic agenda being carried out here. As you look around, you see political correctness reaching a fever pitch. Our history is torn up and falsely rewritten and torn up and rewritten again to purge anyone and anything that undercuts the radical leftist socialist agenda. This is indeed the work of Karl Marx, and this sort of rewriting of history is common in nations sliding down communism's slippery slope. That's why I want to ask you to do two things. First, I'm asking you to sign our petition online to your representatives in Congress, calling upon them to oppose socialism and uphold liberty. Please stand for freedom and truth by going online now to djkm.org forward slash liberty and signing this urgent petition. Secondly, you need to understand what is happening and how it's all part of an overarching plan to refashion America into a hard-left socialist country. That's why I've written the short booklet, When Truth Becomes the Enemy. the insanity of our reckless embrace of socialism. And I want to send it to you as my thanks for your generous donation to the ongoing work of this ministry. In this booklet, which features a foreword from William J. Federer, one of the key historians on America's Christian history, I show how the cultural Marxists have redefined the language, rewritten our history, and are regurgitating old, discredited ideas. And I tell you what you can personally do to help stem the tide. When truth becomes the enemy, the insanity of our reckless embrace of socialism is yours as our thanks for your generous donation to the ongoing work of this ministry. Simply write to us at D. James Kennedy Ministries, Box 11154, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 33339. Or call toll free 877-962-7677. or go online to djkm.org. And if you are able to give a donation of $50 or more, we will send you the booklet plus the exclusive DVD program, Three Big Lies of Socialism. This powerful DVD shows the dangers of socialism at a time when it is on the march in America. You will find out how the ideas of Socialism's founders and followers violate God's Word, and how they have brought slavery and death to tens and even hundreds of millions wherever Socialism has been tried. Socialism may well be the biggest threat America faces today, and it is making inroads, especially among Millennials. That's why it's extremely important that you get these resources and share them with your children and grandchildren. My booklet, When Truth Becomes the Enemy, The Insanity of Our Reckless Embrace of Socialism, is yours as our thanks for your generous donation. And for a generous donation of $50 or more, we will also include the DVD program, Three Big Lies of Socialism. Simply write to us at D. James Kennedy Ministries, Box 11154, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 33339. Or call toll free 877-962-7677 or go online to djkm.org. One of the most familiar and practical axioms of economics is, there's no such thing as a free lunch. It means that someone is always paying, even if it's not the person eating. Everything has a cost, and that cannot be avoided. However, this simple and undeniable aphorism somehow seems to elude the attention of the advocates of socialism. From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Bernie Sanders, all sorts of goodies are being offered. Medicare for all, elimination of college loan debt, free college tuition, and millions, particularly younger people, are lapping it all up. What can be better than a bunch of free stuff? It's what Winston Churchill once called the Gospel of Envy. But just like our proverbial lunch, none of it is actually free. What socialism actually does is forcibly take the fruit of labor from one who earned it, giving it to someone else who didn't. The Bible has a word for this. It's called stealing. And it never works for long as an economic system because eventually those you're stealing from will wise up and stop working so hard and join the takers. A business leader in America said recently that if the young people embracing socialism could spend only one day in socialist Venezuela, just one day, they would lose all their so-called affection for socialism. Venezuela's communist leaders took one of the best economies in all of Latin America and in a few short years bankrupted the nation. The average Venezuelan lost 24 pounds last year because of food shortages. That's not a weight loss program, that's slow motion starvation. Oh, but this time it will be different, say the slick politicians selling a socialist scheme. Listen, the only difference will be that we will have a different collection of political hucksters peddling their socialist potion. Their only real goal is that they be in charge of everything. Don't you believe them? Socialism never works and it never will because it contradicts human nature and God's design. D. James Kennedy Ministries is standing for truth and defending your freedom. Thanks for joining us for this edition of Truths That Transform. I'm Frank Wright. We'll see you next time. Next week on Truths That Transform. Well what does the Bible say about our responsibility as citizens in this country and about government? So there is a generation that arose that did not know socialism because they have enforced ignorance as the atrocities of socialism in the 20th century. That's next week. Today's program is available on DVD for your gift to this ministry of any amount. Please call, write, or log on to our website today. This has been a production of D. James Kennedy Ministries.