The Bible, the Pulpit, and America's Founding

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Reading from Psalm 33, verse 12. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He chose for His inheritance. Psalm 33, 12.

O magnify the Lord with me, let us exalt His name together. It's Tuesday, August 18th, 2026. Welcome to Mark & Friends.

Today and tomorrow, Tim Barton of WallBuilders takes us into America's history to explore the influence of Scripture, pastors, and the Great Awakening upon the ideas that helped shape our nation. Buckle up, a lot to learn and enjoy. Here's Tim Barton.

I want to walk us through some American history. I want to tell some stories then to make some connections for us today. As we are celebrating 250 years as a nation, this is a huge thing that unfortunately a lot of Americans have not been taught to appreciate.

The reality is that for our kids, our grandkids, probably some of us in this room, we have learned more bad things about America than good things about America. And it's not that there haven't been bad things in America, but when you look in context and you go compared to who, it makes a big difference. Because America has been the greatest force for good this world has ever seen, apart from arguably the nation of Israel.

What God did with them, Ten Commandments, check. Let's give one to them. After that, America has been the greatest force for good the world has ever seen.

There's never been a nation where more freedom, more stability, more prosperity, more benevolence has come from that nation. And in the last 250 years, we've done things the rest of the world couldn't even dream of. And recognizing this, it should be celebrated, but a lot of people, again, they don't recognize how special America is.

Let me give you a few thoughts on this, and then I want to go back to what birthed America and what made us special to begin with. But let's start with, if you look at our governing documents, there was a question asked by some professors actually very close to here. It was the University of Chicago was a law school, literally like just down the road.

And they did a study, came out just a year or two ago, and I'd encourage you, go read their whole study. But this is the main question they were asking. How long does a constitution last? History of the world, what's the average length? And they said, okay, let's go back thousands and thousands and thousands of years of recorded human history.

Let's examine how long does a governing document normally last? What they discovered is that the length of a constitution in the history of the world on average lasts 17 to 19 years. Now, for perspective, our constitution came 11 years after the Declaration. 1787 is when we had the Constitution.

We're celebrating 250 years since the Declaration. But every September 17th, by federal law, it is required that every public school in America take that week to teach kids about the Constitution. Now, I'm sure you all learned about this growing up because your public schools probably did it back then too.

And I mean, no, they didn't. The reality is this September 17th, we will set yet another new world record for the nation living the longest under a single governing document. 239 years we've been living under the U.S. Constitution.

There has never been a constitutional republic or a governing document that has lasted longer or been more successful than the U.S. Constitution. So what makes the U.S. Constitution different and special? This is a question that historians have discussed and debated for decades. But if we go back and think through this question, there's a professor from the University of Houston.

His name is Donald Lutz. He asked the question, where did the Founding Fathers come up with the ideas that they put in the Constitution? Recognizing the Constitution has been really unique, special. It's been really stable, produced more stability, more prosperity, more benevolence.

Where did these ideas come from that made it in the U.S. Constitution? So his idea was let's go back and review the founders' writings. The reason was, he said, if we study their writings, if we see what influenced the founders, we'll know where they got their ideas they put in the Constitution. So his idea initially was, if we go back to the founders' writings, let's say 15,000 of their writings, let's take representative samples from right before the Stamp Act, leading the Boston Tea Party, but the Stamp Act tax back in the 1760s, and let's go through after the Bill of Rights, so about up to 1800.

So it's nearly 40 years they're looking at. He said, and let's go through and let's see what were their major writings. Let's review those writings, and we're going to look for anything in quotation marks, and then we're going to track it back to the original source.

And once we find what the original source was, we'll make a list of who they're quoting, and then we'll know where their influences really came from. Now, that doesn't seem as challenging as this did when they did this. This was a study done in the 1970s and the 1980s, and everybody in this room, I think, is old enough to remember the way research used to be done.

Kids today have no idea. I mean, they have no idea. They can pull out their phone, write search engine AI, generating stuff, reviewing thousands of documents in seconds.

It used to be, and the way they did this, he had grad students working for him, and this was over many, many years, they would find a quote in a document, and they would say, okay, let's go to the library, and let's start over here. Everybody get a book and start reading, and let me know when you find this quote. That's the way they had to do this to track every quote back to its original source.

Now, what they decided as they're getting into this, they said, look, from those 15,000 documents, this is going to be overwhelming. Let's take the 1,000 that were the most influential, that were the most copied, the most repeated, let's take those 1,000, and let's only just do it from these 1,000 documents. Well, from that 1,000, they found 3,154 quotes in those 1,000 documents.

They said, well, we still need to track all these quotes down, so they do it. It took them nearly 20 years to track down and find all of those quotes. Now, again, AI could have done this so much faster, but this is still considered the most credible academic study of this kind ever done.

So this is still what people point to and go, that was the best review. The reason it matters. His book was released.

It's called The Origins of American Constitutionalism. It came out in 1988. It was the year after the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution, and that's what this was a big buildup for.

It's what are the origins? Where did all these ideas come from? And what he discovered is the number one cited individual was a guy named Charles Montesquieu. He did Spirit of the Laws, a very influential guy in the founding era. 8.3% of the quotes he found came from Montesquieu.

The second most quoted was William Blackstone, who did Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, very influential to jurisprudence to the legal systems in America. 7.9% of the quotes came from Blackstone. The third most cited was John Locke.

Now, John Locke was actually the most quoted leading up to the American Revolution, right, where the guy that popularized life, liberty, and property, that Jefferson made life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. He was the most quoted guy at that point. But after the Revolution, he wasn't really quoted that much.

But that's 2.9. That's third place. So you can see, 8.3% is the most cited individual, goes down third place, and it just keeps going below John Locke after that. Those are the most cited individuals, but it was not the most cited source.

What he discovered was the most cited source in the founders' writings was the Bible, and 34% of all the quotes in their writings came from the Bible. But wait, there's more. Because he acknowledged, Donald Lutz, the guy who did this study, he acknowledged we had to have very strict parameters around this to be an honest academic study.

So our parameters were we were only going to include what was in quotation marks in their writings. He said, but as we were reviewing their writings, we found so many obvious references to Scripture that were not in quotation marks, that had we included those, the number would have been far higher. As someone who studies the founding documents almost exclusively, I can tell you, and I can actually show anybody that wants to see this later, the majority of the times the Founding Fathers reference and quote the Bible, it's not in quotation marks.

The majority of the time. Which means you would have to at least double that number if we included all of the obvious Bible references. Now again, why does this matter? Because they were trying to figure out, where did the Founding Fathers come up with their ideas that led to freedom, that led to independence, that gave us more stability, freedom, prosperity, that made us the most benevolent nation in the history of the world? Where did they get these ideas? And today people look and go, wait a second, are you suggesting the Founding Fathers might have been religious? Are you suggesting they weren't atheists, agnostics? What about separation of church and state? And this is where I just want to acknowledge, so much of what we think we know about the Founding Fathers is ridiculous if you actually go back and read their writings.

Most Americans know more of what professors have said about the Founding Fathers than they've actually read of the Founding Fathers. And let me just give you a few ideas. By the way, this is a far more modern narrative than most people realize as well.

Because if we go back just a few decades ago, this is Alice Baldwin. Alice Baldwin was a professor. She actually started the woman's program at Duke University back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

But in 1928 she wrote a book called The New England Clergy and the American Revolution. You can still look this book up online. There's reprints available.

But you can read it for free on Google Books. If you go look it up, it's about 170 pages. The last five pages is her conclusion.

So if you don't have time for 170 pages, just go read her conclusion where she's tying it all together for you. This is a quote from her conclusion. She says, There is not a right asserted in the Declaration of Independence, which had not been preached from American pulpits prior to 1763.

She explains, The Founding Fathers didn't come up with a single unique idea. Instead, they repeated what they'd been learning from their pastors for decades leading up to that moment. Now that's a really bold claim, by the way.

How can you defend and justify this? Oh, I'm glad you ask. Because at the end of the conclusion, there's an appendix. In her appendix, what's in there? Well, one of the things in this appendix, she says, as an example of the rights from pastors, she said, here's this pastor.

Here's this paragraph from this sermon on this date. And it's one of the rights. She literally starts listing pastors and their sermons showing that all of these ideas came from pastors.

And again, this idea, the Founding Fathers were influenced by pastors and actually that all of the rights in the declaration were things that they learned from sermons for decades leading up to the moment. It seems, it seems odd for most American listeners today. Cause it's so contrary.

It didn't use to be contrary. It used to be what everybody understood to be true until we stopped telling the truth. Let me give another example of this.

There's a guy named Clinton Rossiter. He was a professor at Cornell university. He actually was the lead historian there.

And to this day, he's still honored there because at Cornell, the head of the chair or the head of the department of history sits in what's known as the Rossiter chair of history. So like, this is their big deal guy. Historically, he wrote a book that was called the seed time of the Republic.

And in this book, he actually argued that almost all of the major ideas that led to American independence can be traced back to six people. He said, here are the six people that came up with all those ideas. Benjamin Franklin, Richard Bland, the Reverend Thomas Hooker, the Reverend Roger Williams, the Reverend John Wise, and the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew.

Now for anybody not good at categorizing, four of those names are different. The idea that, that the majority of the ideas that lead to America becoming a nation came from pastors. It seems crazy for us today because most of us have never learned who these pastors were and we have no idea what they taught.

So let me give it super, super easy example. The Reverend John Wise, this is like the low hanging fruit on this tree. Okay.

Super easy example. The Reverend John Wise was a pastor in Ipswich, Massachusetts back in the late 1600s in the early 1700s. Now that's way before the Founding Fathers, but in 1717, he came out with his last volume of sermons.

And in this volume of sermons, there's two specific sermons that are quite interesting because in two of those sermons, one of them, he says that taxation without representation is tyranny in the same sermon. He explained that God's preferred form of government is the consent of the governed. And the second sermon, he said that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights granted them by their creator.

If you haven't read the declaration recently, those are verbatim quotes in the declaration of independence. Now, how does lines from a pastor sermon from back in the early 1700s make it into the declaration of 1776? Because those sermons were reprinted in 1772. Well, who in the world reprinted those sermons? A group known as the Sons of Liberty.

Why? Because this pastor was from Massachusetts, the Sons of Liberty who are first birthed in Massachusetts. And then they have groups open around all the colonies. But when they are together in Massachusetts and they're going, Hey, we need to try to figure out a way to get these other colonies to understand what we know and understand.

How do we do it? And one of them says, Ooh, I got an idea. I got these sermons from Pastor Wise. I think we should reprint some of those and distribute them.

And they did. They printed those sermons. They distributed them through all of the colonies.

John Adams said that there was not a man in Boston who had not read the sermons of John Wise in 1776. Now, the reason this matters when the Founding Fathers come together in 1776, historians agree. All of them knew who John Wise was and had read his sermons.

Now, why again, does this matter? Because where did they come up with the ideas for the declaration? Literally, you can track it back to the pastors. And by the way, historians talk about this often BF Morse and noted historian, one of the most noted from the 19th century. This is what he said about it.

Some of those glittering sentences in the immortal declaration of independence are almost literal quotations from this essay of John Wise. It was used as a political textbook and the great struggle for freedom. Now, this is the most or one of the most noted historians from the 19th century openly saying, we know where these ideas came from.

They came from a pastor. Let's jump forward. Calvin Coolidge, one of the most underrated presidents on the 150th anniversary of the declaration of independence.

He went to independence hall where they did the declaration and he gave a very famous speech. You actually can look up and read a speech online. It is a great speech, but this is the portion significant for our conversation.

He said, the thoughts in the declaration can very largely be traced back to what John Wise was writing. Here was the doctrine of equality of popular sovereignty and inalienable rights asserted by wise, even presidents of the United States knew the declarations ideas came from pastors. Now, again, this matters because people today look at the Founding Fathers and they go, wait a second.

These guys were secular. They were deists, the separation of church and state. All of these things we hear as almost to dismiss the idea that they could have been number one Christians or number two could have been influenced by their pastors.

But let me point out, I've already showed you two very important connections early on from earlier historians. The number one source in the founding father's life was the Bible. The number one voice in their life for their pastors.

So this idea that these were secular men birthing, a secular government is ludicrous. If you understand basic history, but let me go a little further. Why also does everything we're saying make logical sense? Like even if you didn't know history, logic, logical sense.

What is the most significant thing that happens in America before the American revolution? It's not the Boston Tea Party. It's not the Boston Massacre. No, it's an event known as the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening is happening in America. The buildup before you get to the American revolution. Now, again, why does this matter? Because if we're talking about the influence of pastors, the influence of the Bible, the most significant thing that happens in the culture for 30 years before the revolution is the most amazing revival, maybe arguably in American history.

This is even logical then to assume the Founding Fathers would have been influenced by the Great Awakening because of how significant it was. Let me walk you through this. If you look back on the colonies as they are being founded, obviously we can start with the Jamestown colony, 1607, you have Plymouth colony in 1620 as colonies are continuing to be added.

The last major colony added of the 13 colonies was Georgia. When Georgia is founded, they are initially led with chaplains among all their government leaders. And it's interesting.

I mean, it's genuinely like, it's so interesting how much of the story we don't know. Do you know who the founding chaplains of Georgia were? John and Charles Wesley. Now, if you don't know who they are, you should do some church history, right? Do some hymnology history.

Okay. They're the founding chaplains of Georgia and they're there for several years and they write one of their friends over in England and they're like, bro, you need to come join us. And they convince their friend to come to Georgia.

When he comes to Georgia, they step down and say, we want you to be the chaplain of Georgia. Now that correct is George Whitefield, George Whitefield in 1738 becomes the chaplain of Georgia. Now, George Whitefield, one of the things he sees when he gets there, that there've been some diseases and things that have happened in Georgia.

And because of it, there's been families that have been decimated where moms and dads died. There's kids, there's orphans, and he's grieved for these orphans. He sees in Georgia says, we got to do something.

We got to leave this orphans. And he knows these other colonies are Christian colonies. I'm going to go North and I'm going to do a fundraising effort to raise money for this orphanage in Georgia.

And so he gets on horseback and he starts riding North. And as he goes to these other colonies, he's realizing they're not as Christian as I thought they'd be. And on the way he starts preaching.

Well, this is literally what births, what we know a lot in many parts of the Great Awakening, at least for George Whitefield's involvement of it. And what's cool. Also, this is a picture of a traveling pulpit.

He literally made a pulpit that he put on the back of his horse that he used to travel. So he would go places. And this is also important, especially for ministry leaders and pastors in the room.

Why did George Whitefield need a traveling pulpit when there were churches in almost every community he was going to? And it's not because the crowds were too big for the churches that eventually happened. Didn't happen in the beginning. It's because no pastor would allow him to preach in their pulpits.

I want to point something out. That's interesting. The First Great Awakening happened, not because of the church, but in spite of the church.

Okay. You need to process this, that we don't get so stuck in the way we do things that we miss a move of God when it happens and go, well, we can't do that. Well, that's, that's not how we do things.

I'm just, just check that for a second because the First Great Awakening goes on for roughly 30 plus years. The first 15 to 20 years of George Whitefield's ministry, he was rejected almost everywhere he went. There are literal historic records from towns where a pastor from that community would say, drive this man out, get like lettuce, heads, cabbage, heads, potatoes, tomatoes.

There's one example where George Whitefield was at the edge of a town under this like large Oak kind of tree and he's preaching and the pastor says, someone get up on that tree, urinate on, defecate on that man, drive him from this town. That was the opposition he faced in what he did. It was the last 10 years of his ministry that pastors were going, everybody loves this dude.

We do too. He's our favorite. They were so late joining.

Now it's obviously always great when a pastor wants to join the movement. We're so glad to have you, right? It's like the, the parable of the workers hired in the vineyard. Like, I'm just glad you showed up at all.

We're glad you're here, but understand the majority of the awakenings happened with the greatest opposition coming from Christians and church leaders. Okay. It was after the fact that they finally realized, Oh, there's a movement.

Well, let me get on here at the end and pretend like I was part all along again. We're glad to have you. But when you look at the First Great Awakening, when you recognize that George Whitefield, right? That the guy that we associate the most with the First Great Awakening, he's not the only guy involved.

There were a lot of very important figures, but let me just walk you through George Whitefield. Again, connect some dots for you. So George Whitefield preached for 34 years in America.

And actually that was split, but he would go back to Europe on occasion, go back to England on occasion. So in America, he delivered 18,000 sermons estimated in that 34 years. And that's a lot of sermons, by the way, you do some averages, you're preaching a lot.

And he didn't preach in the same town. What was very well known is he would preach, get on a horse, ride to the next town, next community. He would preach again.

So this is very rigorous hard work. He is doing well, 18,000 sermons in America. Oh, in that same 34 years, he also delivered approximately 14,000 sermons over in great Britain.

That's 32,000 sermons in 34 years. That is a staggering amount of preaching, right? Well, he actually died of a lung and throat disease infection. He literally would cough up blood in the midst of his last several years of preaching at the step off.

He preached himself to death is what he did. It was the exhaustion of his lungs, his throat, his voice box, everything he did. But in the midst of all of this, it's in spite of the church that he continued going, not because of he, he wasn't being encouraged along the way by all of his pastoral brothers, by the Christian community.

No, no, no. He's doing it with much opposition. And what's amazing is he had seven missionary journeys.

He went from Georgia all the way to what we modern day Maine know as to Maine and back, but he would go different routes almost every time. Now places like Philadelphia, there's a few places he would stop over consistent, but he went different places. It's estimated that 80% of Americans physically heard him preach.

That is unbelievable market penetration, right? Like there, there is not a news outlet today that can even claim that this is crazy. And he did it through grit determination, through unbelievable work ethic. And what's incredible too, is the Founding Fathers, many of them actually wrote.

So this is Franklin Jefferson and John Adams. They actually wrote remembering what they all described as the most popular and their favorite sermon from George Whitefield. It was known as the father Abraham sermon, the father Abraham sermon.

George Whitefield says that he had a vision that he died and went to heaven and father Abraham met him at the gates. He says, father Abraham, where are my Methodist brethren? And father Abraham says, there's no Methodist in heaven. And he says, well, well, then, then where the Anglican brethren, there's no Anglicans in heaven.

Well, where are the Baptist or the Anabaptist? Where's the congregation list? And he starts listing all these denominations. And father Abraham says they didn't make it. And he says, father Abraham, then who makes it to heaven? And George Whitefield would then look at the audience and say, brethren, you have the answer in my next text.

And he would open his Bible and go to Acts 10:35. And it says, he, that fear of God and work of righteousness shall be accepted of him. And he looked at the crowd and said, God, help us forget our labels and our titles and focus on what truly matters.

The reason this was a big deal is because at that time, nine of the 13 colonies, the state established religions. And he's saying the foundational message that the Founding Fathers needed to hear to be able to unite, to do something significant for the nation, for the movement. And that was to let the superficial go away, that we hold these truths to be self-evident focus on the core things we can come together on.

Well, this is literally what shaped the Founding Fathers coming into this. Now, George Whitefield dies in 1770. This is when historians think this is kind of like the end of the First Great Awakening, but this is the most significant political thing happening leading up to this moment.

Now, also 70, 70, this is when you have the Boston masker leading up then to 1773, Boston Tea Party, 1774, First Continental Congress. This is what happens before all those major events. But I want to show you something else that a lot of people don't know or overlook from the First Great Awakenings.

If you look at the First Great Awakenings and I'm going to be plural, I'm going to include first and second grade awakenings at wall builders. We have what's considered the largest private collection of original documents from the founding era. We have about a hundred thousand items in our collection.

We actually have handwritten documents from every single founding father, every sign of declaration, every sign of the constitution. But one of the cool things in our collection, we have thousands of original sermons. So we have sermons from the first and second Great Awakening.

I want to show you some original sermons, first and second Great Awakening sermons. Now, also important for you to know the ability I have to show you these sermons is because these sermons were printed, but for a sermon to be printed, that took a lot of time and money and efforts, which meant that these were the more popular sermons that were demanded enough that a printer thought I can make enough money by doing this and selling this. I'm saying that it's important to understand that these are the popular sermons.

Okay? So, so these are the sermons that had the best reach at that time. This is just some examples. I'm going to give you maybe 15 or 20 of them.

Here's a sermon First Great Awakening. You can see it in the middle. It says November, 1755.

It's a discourse occasion by the earthquakes. This is a First Great Awakening sermon. Now, let me give you another one and I'm going to connect some dots for you.

This one is 1760. Again, First Great Awakening. It's occasioned by the great fire in Boston.

How in the world are your First Great Awakening popular sermons dealing with earthquakes and fires. So what do earthquakes, fires, revival and sermons preached more than 250 years ago have to do with America today to discover that answer along with more fascinating stories about pastors. God used during pivotal moments in our nation's history.

Be sure to join us tomorrow, Wednesday at the same time for the conclusion of Tim Barton's message on Mark and friends. If you missed a part of today's broadcast, want to hear it again, read the transcript or explore additional resources to help you learn and grow deeper in your walk with Jesus. Visit greatnewsradio.org or wluj.org and click on the Mark and friends tab.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for being a part of our radio listening family. This is Mark Burns with the ministry of Great News Media.

God bless you and have a great day and night.