Changing Worldviews

Announcer: Welcome to Changing World Views podcast with Sharon Hughes, broadcast journalism you can trust to bring you the truth regarding the issues of our day and the world views behind them. Now, here's Sharon.

Sharon Hughes: Happy 4th of July, friends. Thank you so much for tuning into our show, whether you're listening on the 4th of July or afterwards in the archives. This is to celebrate this great nation. Just like we celebrate the birthdays of our children or our spouses or our parents, you know, those that we love, we celebrate. And if we love our nation, we celebrate our nation. Unfortunately, not everyone is of that attitude. There are those that want to well, like we've brought out before, world community, they want a great reset after COVID, but that reset is not just recovery from a pandemic.

It's a resetting the whole world order. But today, this is our 4th of July special. We want to pause and we want to celebrate our nation's birthday. We want to celebrate freedom. Happy birthday, America.

Announcer: You're listening to Changing World Views with your host Sharon Hughes.

Sharon Hughes: And I'm calling on all of my fellow Americans to make July the beginning of the rebuilding of the walls of our nation. It is an absolute necessity for every American to get engaged in this much needed rebuilding of our nation. The walls of morality, integrity and politics, courageous churches who will stand up, the family structure, education, entertainment and the media and the marketplace, and who's going to repair, who's going to rebuild the walls if not us? For too long, too many Americans have stayed out of the public square. It's time for all of us to do our part for our children's and grandchildren's future.

There's no better time than now for all of us to resolve and to roll up our sleeves and to follow the example of our founders. And to that end, because there's so much controversy about our history, I've got an audio of the Declaration of Independence that I think is important to play here as we are celebrating America's birthday. I mean, when was the last time we read it? Well, here's the audio version by Max McLean.

Max McLean: In Congress, July 4th, 1776, the unanimous Declaration of the 13 United States of America. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience have shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies. And such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.

To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained. And when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right to representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected whereby the legislative powers incapable of annihilation have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states. For that purpose, obstructing the laws of naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, for protecting them by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states. For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, for imposing taxes on us without our consent, for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury, for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses, for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies.

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments. For suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren or to fall themselves by their hands. He has excited domestic insurrections among us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity. And we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war, in peace friends.

We therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Sharon Hughes: Other things that we can be reading on the 4th of July would be like Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or the Bill of Rights. Those things that are clearly part of our history and if we want to make sure that our view of what this nation was founded upon, then we need to go back to the original documents. Will stay with me. We've got much more ahead. Happy birthday, America.

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Announcer: Is there really modern day slavery in our country? Yes, and it's called human trafficking. Men, women and children across America are being lured into this sad reality. Victims are promised jobs, wealth and opportunities for themselves and their families, but instead they endure isolation from the rest of the world and are often mentally, physically or sexually abused. It is important to learn about the harsh reality of human trafficking so we can help end this form of modern day slavery. A message from the Christian Medical Association.

Sharon Hughes: One of my favorite personalities in the Bible is Nehemiah. When he heard that the walls of his city, of his nation were fallen, he was grieved and he rose up. He wasn't in construction, but he's determined I'm going to go and work to rebuild the walls. And he rallied his fellow countrymen to do the same and each one was responsible for rebuilding the wall right in front of their house. So, we can do that right where we live. That's where we start and we pray that God will increase our efforts and increase our ranks so that when the end of the age comes, America will be found a sheep nation and not a goat nation.

And so as we celebrate the 4th of July, let's do it with a sober understanding that while we celebrate what our founding fathers gave us, we are responsible for securing it.

Max McLean: If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look.

The sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row upon row of simple white markers, bearing crosses or stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kind of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno, and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under one such marker lies a young man, Martin Treptow, who left his job in a small town barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division.

There on the Western Front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We're told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading My Pledge, he had written these words. America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone. We must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.

It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and pray upon their neighbors. As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it. We will not surrender for it now or ever. We are Americans.

Sharon Hughes: We have Memorial Day, we have Veterans Day, but the 4th of July is to also be grateful for all Americans that have fought for our freedom from our very beginning. It's been the brave men and women throughout time that have stood up to fight for the freedom of their people. So, I celebrate freedom, but I also am grateful for those who sacrificed for the freedom we have today. And that's why we want to preserve those things that have made America the greatest nation on earth. And to that end, we're going to wrap it up with two songs.

Number one, In God We Still Trust by Diamond Rio, and then my favorite rendition of our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner by Sandy Patty. And I want to give kudos to Stan Whitmire, who is the pianist and what you've heard throughout the show playing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. You might want to check him out as well.

Diamond Rio: Just place your hand on his Bible and swear to tell the truth. His name is on our greatest monuments. All our money to And when we pledge allegiance, there's no battle where we stand. There's no separation. We're one nation under Him. In God we still trust. Here in America, He's the one we turn to. Every time we're going gets rough, He is the source of all our strength. No one to watch us over us. Here in America, In God we still trust. Rally those among us who all them push you back. And erase his name from everything.

This country's all about from the schoolhouse to the courthouse. His silence in his word and our disciple all believers to make our voices heard. In God we still trust. Here in America, He's the one we turn to. Every time we're going gets rough, He is the source of all our strength. No one to watch us over us. Here in America, In God we still trust. Here in America, here in America, here in America. In God we still trust. Here in America. In God we still trust. Here in America. Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light?

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight o'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? And still we can see as the years have gone by. There's a dream in our land like a flame that keeps burning. And the land of the free from the home still shines.

Those who seek freedom's dream to its light are still turning. Now, we look to the stars. And we lift our eyes where we know is my joy. We will see our brighter light. Still our eyes these are star spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? My home My America

Sharon Hughes: Happy 4th of July, everyone. Happy birthday, America. So, until I see you next time, this is Sharon Hughes saying it like it is.

Announcer: Thank you for tuning into this episode of Changing World Views. You can follow Sharon on social media or listen to her on many online platforms. Just go to our website changingworldviews.com for all the links. And until next time, stay informed, stay alert because we are indeed living in a changing world.