Defending Faith, Family and Freedom Podcast

Gary Bauer: Hi, this is Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President for Public Policy and Culture at the James Dobson Family Institute. Welcome to our podcast, Defending Faith, Family and Freedom. I'm glad you're with us. Please tell your friends about us. Well, this is a special podcast today, and so I want to begin with just a little snippet of music.

Well, of course, you probably recognized that was a part of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And you heard the Hillsdale College choir singing it at the big event that took place on the Washington Mall this past week, in the ceremony or the event Rededicate 250. This was a national jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving, and it was an unbelievable event.

Carol and I were happy to represent the James Dobson Family Institute at this event. And of course, I've been working in Washington for years, and so I've got a lot of friends at the White House. We all have a lot of friends at the White House, but I have some personal friends and even a family member at the White House. So we had special guest seats right up in the second row, right in front of the stage, as I think well over 100,000 people gathered on the mall for this really special day.

And I couldn't help but think as I was sitting there, and Carol and I talked about this, what it would have been like for Dr. James Dobson to be on the mall this past weekend to see this unbelievable event. Most of his life, Dr. Dobson, and in many of these years I was working alongside of him, we would try to convince various presidents of the United States, "Why don't you do a big event? Why don't you invite people from all over the country to gather in Washington, D.C.? Why don't we as a nation rededicate ourselves to the God of the Bible?"

Because the God of the Bible was there at the American founding, every step of the way, and in our history from then all the way through till today. And of course, sometimes presidents said the right things. Of course, all the presidents will issue statements at Christmas and Easter, and some of them are really good as far as being theologically honest and correct, but no one did something like this event. That was left to President Donald Trump to do.

And he decided that he was going to make this anniversary, this 250th anniversary of the birth of America, he was going to make it a year of one event after another. And this was one of the key things that he thought about, planned for, he sought the advice of his faith advisory board, which I'm happy to be a member of. And the result of it all was this incredible gathering at the Washington Mall.

Now, if you've ever been to Washington, D.C., or if you've seen any of the photos or videos of it, it is a very historic place all by itself because it's this green expanse of open land. But all around it, at both ends and along the sides of the mall, there are monuments and historical buildings, and every one of them have a story behind them, or evidence in them or on them, that shows the viewer, anybody paying attention, how woven Christianity is into the United States of America.

Now, we were not founded as a nation where only Christians would be welcome. We were founded as a nation that would welcome men and women of all faiths, as long as they believed in the ideals and the ideas of the American founding. And one of those main ideas, as we've talked about so many times, is that our liberty comes from God, no government. If it came from government, it could be taken away from government. Our liberty comes from God. That is absolutely clear. The founders believed it. We believe it. It's one of the founding principles of our country.

So this was a day-long event. It was 90-some degrees out, sun was beating down. It looked like at one point we were going to have a big thunderstorm. Fortunately we didn't. As we sat there and enjoyed the music and the speakers, every speaker was better than the last one. And by the way, almost, in fact I would say all of the speakers that we heard that day had a relationship with not only me, but with Dr. James Dobson.

I would think of the various stories that came to mind when one speaker after the other got up to speak. Just to give you a quick example, Eric Metaxas was one of the speakers. He has been on Dr. Dobson's radio program. I interviewed him for a radio program. He has spoken at a number of our annual meetings called the Gathering. And of course, he's smack in the middle of the great battle raging in America between those who believe that we're supposed to be one nation under God and those who believe that Christianity and religion was not supposed to have anything to do with the American Republic.

I know everybody couldn't be there. I wish there were a million people there. Quite frankly, there should have been at least a million people there. But it was available to watch in a variety of places. I don't know how many of you literally parked yourselves in front of a TV set and watched for five, six, seven hours. So I thought I'd bring you a little sampling of some of the speeches that were made that I think really stood out for some of the points that were made by the speakers.

I want to begin with Franklin Graham. Franklin Graham is the CEO of Samaritan's Purse. He's the son of the late evangelist, Billy Graham. He delivers a sobering message of the conditions in our society. And I want you to take a listen to this because it says so much about where we are today.

Franklin Graham: Our nation was born in a struggle 250 years ago, and we're still in a struggle today. Our struggle then was to be free from British rule, but our struggle today is to be free from the rule of sins that are weakening the foundations of our great Republic. The Bible warns us about this.

2 Timothy says, "But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power."

It seems this could have been written to describe America today. People have become lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God. The spiritual climate of 2026 is vastly different than the country that our founding fathers established in 1776. The vast majority of Americans then had at least a basic understanding of the Bible. Today the vast majority have little to no understanding of biblical truth.

250 years ago, the Bible was taught in schools. For many, it was their sole textbook. That doesn't mean everybody had faith, but they had a basic understanding and respect and knowledge of God's Word. Today, the Bible has been removed from our schools and for the most part, the public square.

But there is a downward moral decline spiraling ever deeper into the mire. Things that never would have been talked about publicly just 30 years ago, sinful behavior that should make us blush, is now celebrated and flaunted on Main Street, America. America has become morally corrupt, completely sick with sin. Transgenderism, same-sex marriage, opening women's locker rooms to men are just the tip of the iceberg.

Gary Bauer: Every time I hear Franklin Graham's voice, I immediately in my mind's eye see Billy Graham. I grew up in our family watching the great crusades conducted by Billy Graham, and Franklin Graham is clearly a son. They have that great oratorical voice and that great passion for the Lord.

There were a couple of things there that jumped out at me when Carol and I were sitting on the mall listening to Franklin Graham. One of them was when he described all of these things that are besetting America today. Those things are the public policy agenda of the James Dobson Family Institute. Those are the issues that we work on. This is why we maintain a presence in Washington, D.C. and I am happy and excited to be the person that runs this in Washington, D.C. In doing so, I'm standing up for the things that Dr. Dobson believed in his whole life, fought for his whole life, and that the James Dobson Family Institute are devoted to. Our whole team is devoted to.

It was also significant that Franklin Graham reminded us of the Bible. A lot of studies today say that it's only a minority of the American people that take the time to read the Bible at all. But when America was being founded, when the important documents were being written, when farmers and tradesmen and craftsmen rose to the occasion and confronted the British Empire, and then when the founding fathers themselves wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all the other things that many of us learned about in school, but we don't learn about so much in school these days, the most widely read book in the colonies was the Bible.

The Bible was understood by everybody. That doesn't mean all the early citizens of this what became a great nation believed the Bible or that they were all Christians, but they knew the book. They were familiar with the book. It was not unusual at all for people like George Washington and the other famous founders to refer directly or indirectly to the Bible when they wanted to make a point to the people of the colonies and then later to the people of the new United States of America.

Bible and prayer was taken out of our schools back in the '60s. Do you know anybody who thinks that our schools are a better place today than they were when the school day began with a brief prayer and perhaps a reading of a Bible verse or two? I'd like to meet that person that thinks the schools are better now than they were then.

In fact, even if you go back further in our history when we used to teach our children in school how to do cursive, how to write things out instead of just type them on a computer, there were things called the copybooks, and they were for exactly what the name suggested. The student was supposed to copy something at the top of the page and copy that over and over and over again to learn cursive.

But this tells you how different the America was then than it is now. The thing that they were supposed to copy at the top of each page was a moral lesson, something right out of the Bible. It might be something as simple as, "Thou shalt not steal." So the child while learning cursive would write over and over again, "Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not steal," because Americans in the 1700s and 1800s up into a good bit of the 1900s understood that a well-educated child, able to be a free man or woman when they were an adult, would not only know how to write, they would understand morality and the importance of morality in their lives. The founders believed that only a moral people could remain free.

Franklin Graham in his brief comments really covered a lot of important things there. Of course, the crowd reacted enthusiastically. There was tremendous applause for him. Let's go on a little bit to another one of the speakers. And of course, as you would expect, Vice President J.D. Vance spoke. I picked a selection of his remarks to share with you in this podcast. Let's listen to that right now.

J.D. Vance: George Washington declared in 1789 that it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor. These were the opening lines of America's first-ever Thanksgiving proclamation. But whatever milestone it represented in the brief life of our young Republic, the duty Washington described to honor, obey, and give thanks to our Creator was woven into America's character long before the founding.

A keen awareness of that duty has stretched all the way back from William Bradford's own pilgrim proclamation in 1623, to the opening prayer of our first Continental Congress, to Lincoln's call for national thanksgiving in the midst of the Civil War, to this very gathering today. We have always been and still are a nation of prayer, and thank God for that. In times of suffering and in times of triumph, millions of Americans continue to turn to prayer and their faith in God.

John Adams famously said that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. It was obvious to the founders that our faith was the ground upon which America stands. It was our very foundation as a people. And if this foundation were to crumble, so too would the very values that make us Americans. From our religious inheritance comes many of the virtues and institutions we most cherish as a people: our system of justice, our generosity to neighbors, our respect for conscience, and the moral discipline necessary for liberty itself.

As my dear friend, the late great Charlie Kirk put it, all law reflects a morality. Neither law nor morality appears in a vacuum, but ultimately come from religion. And the morality and religion that formed the American consciousness were decidedly Christian, founded upon the principles and the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Gary Bauer: Those were some inspirational words from Vice President Vance. We're blessed to have a man of his character as Vice President of the United States. Maybe you heard about this, but it's worth repeating. Not long ago, J.D. Vance was at a college event that was sponsored by Turning Point USA. As is custom and as the custom of Turning Point USA, they not only give speeches at the events, but they engage with the audience, sometimes with students and others that don't agree with them.

After the Vice President made remarks, he opened it up for questions. One of the young women that asked him a question was, "Who would you recommend that I listen to? Who did you listen to, Mr. Vice President, that helped form the way you think today and help you overcome problems?" And if you haven't heard this story yet, then this is going to be a pleasant surprise to you.

J.D. Vance said, "Well, I grew up in a broken home, and things weren't working out very well in that household. We had a lot of problems." And you probably know the Vice President's mother wrestled with alcoholism and drug issues. It was in many ways a broken family and so forth. Vance goes on to say to this young woman, "I used to listen, maybe you've heard of him, to this guy on radio, Dr. James Dobson. Dr. Dobson described what family life should be like and what the roles of parents were, mothers and fathers, in raising their children. He would do these radio broadcasts where he would talk about how to succeed in life and what the right values were, and of course he talked about his faith and how important faith was."

So here is the Vice President of the United States and when asked a question about what helped mold him, he spontaneously thought of Dr. James Dobson and Dr. Dobson's teachings. Wow. We know if the James Dobson Family Institute wanted to buy some publicity, we couldn't have paid for something that good. I believe we have that little clip up on our website so you can check it out there and see the Vice President say it in his own words.

Shirley Dobson was deeply moved when we shared with her what the Vice President said. I'm going to have the great pleasure soon to deliver a personal letter from Shirley Dobson to the Vice President, expressing her gratitude that he remembered her husband and the founder of the James Dobson Family Institute.

The Vice President's remarks, in their own way, they went further than Franklin Graham in the sense that Vance pointed out that this nation's connection to Christianity goes back to the pilgrims in 1663 and the things that they were taught. The pilgrims, one of the first groups that came to the United States, when it was just barren land occupied by some Native American tribes, saw this place as a place that could be a shining city on a hill, a biblical reference to Jerusalem. Vance mentions the pilgrims and then he goes on to how George Washington dedicated our nation in prayer.

Then he said something which I think today most people are totally unaware of. Let me just do a little detour here and tell you a quick story that I saw in the press coverage of this event. The Washington Post wrote a snotty account of the event. The sarcasm was dripping on every line. One of the things the Post reporter did was talk to some of the attendees at the event. Then when they thought the attendee had said something that the Post reporter thought was absurd, ridiculous, disgusting, un-American, that was the quote they would put in the article to mock the attendees at this great rededication of America to God.

Almost everything that the Post reporter quoted were actually the founding ideas of America, things that our founding fathers believed to a man. So one of the quotes was they asked somebody, "Why are you here? What is the message of this event?" I don't know who the individual was, but the individual said, "Well, this event is to rediscover the point that only a moral and virtuous people could remain free." This is what the Post quoted as if it was something out of left field. That quote is almost an exact quote for not one or two, but probably from a half dozen of our founding fathers.

Vance goes even further. He says it wasn't only morality and the fact that we were a religious people that served as the foundation of America, but we were also followers of the divinity of Jesus Christ. The great overwhelming majority of the people of the colonies and the people of the new country called America through virtually our entire history, the overwhelming majority of our country believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Of course, the Washington Post also made it absolutely clear that they thought this gathering on the mall that J.D. Vance addressed and that Franklin Graham addressed and that President Trump spoke to, as well as all kinds of other political and religious leaders, thought this was a very troubling, a very scary, maybe a very dangerous event. Because you see, this was at least 100,000 people that loved America and loved Jesus, and that made them Christian nationalists.

This is something I've brought up before, this is something they're doing in order to frighten Christians who are patriots out of the public square. Christian nationalists, if you're an American and maybe you've got some questions about whether you love America, unfortunately there's a section of the country that doesn't much love America or they're kind of ambivalent about it, and there's a lot of Americans that don't believe in any particular faith, and they hear that there was a gathering on the mall of 100,000 Christian nationalists, in their mind's eye, God only knows what they imagine.

For some people, because of the rhetoric that our opponents use, they probably imagine a Nazi rally just took place on the mall, when this was about as far away from that as anybody could possibly get. What Vance is saying that the fact that we started out as a people that took morality seriously, followed the teachings of Jesus, were familiar with the Bible, tried to be a moral people, that is the secret of what American civilization and more broadly, Western civilization, has been able to accomplish. This civilization of which America is the main pillar has brought more liberty and more opportunity to more people than any competing civilization in the history of the world.

So what J.D. Vance said was these were important results. Before we go any further, I'm actually not going to play what President Trump has said at the event. He read from 2 Corinthians and they were wonderful remarks, but he did something similar to that during the national reading of the Bible that started off at the Bible Museum. I thought it would be useful today to let you know that this event was not just about President Trump, although it was his idea to do it. And thank you, Mr. President, for doing it. You knew there would be mockery. You knew people would accuse you of trying to set up some sort of religious dictatorship or whatever they're saying about you today. But I wanted you to hear all of the other people. There were 18 speakers, and every one of them was a grand slam home run.

The remarks in themselves were a lesson in American history. You could do worse than go online and find a video of this entire event and just sit down with your children sometime and watch it, maybe an hour at a time. Then stop it and talk to them about the points made by the speaker. A little bit of what I'm doing right now.

So as the third speaker I want to zero in on, I've chosen Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. I know Speaker Johnson personally. I've known him for many, many years. His remarks in their entirety was a prayer. I'm just going to play a small part of it and then make a few comments. Let's listen to that right now.

Mike Johnson: Our heavenly Father, we thank You, thank You so much for this great day that You've given us here. And we remember that Your mighty hand has been upon our nation since the very beginning, since Christopher Columbus set sail in the new world, since the settlers at Jamestown planted the cross at Cape Henry, and since the pilgrims at Plymouth made a covenant to give You the glory. In all that time, You guided us at every pivotal moment.

And when our forefathers took up the great cause of American independence, they turned to You in steadfast prayer. And on this very day now two and a half centuries ago, the Second Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia. Facing eminent battle and almost certain death, our founders held a decisive day of what they called humiliation, fasting and prayer. They did that to humble themselves and to seek Your guidance at the dawn of their fight for freedom.

Just weeks later, Lord, on July 4, 1776, You gave 56 patriots the courage and the conviction to sign their names to the Declaration of Independence, forming 13 distant and disparate colonies into a new nation, which would become, by Your mercy and grace, the freest, most successful, most benevolent nation in the history of the world. And in those early days, You safeguarded George Washington and his ragtag army as they defeated the mightiest of empires.

And You gave our fathers the wisdom and faith to establish this new nation premised on the biblical and foundational principle that all men are created equal and free before You. Through Your divine providence, our founders acknowledged and boldly proclaimed the self-evident truth that every single person is created in Your image and that we are endowed by You, our Creator, with our inalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Lord, we know that that declaration, which has been recognized as our nation's creed, has also been the inspiration for the single greatest force for peace and justice and human flourishing. It set in motion a chain of events that altered the very course of human history. And today as we seek to fulfill its true meaning, those self-evident truths still guide our nation and still call us to honor and cherish and protect the dignity of every human life.

Gary Bauer: Speaker Johnson's prayer was extraordinary and delivered from the heart. Speaker Johnson and I go back 26 years. I ran for the Republican presidential nomination in the year 2000. One of the states that was supposed to have an early vote was the state of Louisiana.

My campaign rented a campaign bus and we drove all over Louisiana, speaking at every little place where we could get people to gather, and attending many different churches of many different denominations to try to rally them to our cause. When you have a campaign, there's always volunteers. And on my campaign bus, there was a young man and he was exactly what you want in a volunteer. This guy was enthusiastic, anything I needed doing, he would do. He would carry my luggage onto the bus. He would go get me lunch if that's what I needed.

He just aimed to please. I remember thinking to myself, "Man, if my whole campaign worked like this guy does, I might have a chance." But of course, that was a hectic campaign and there were other states to campaign in, and so after our time in Louisiana, we went on to Iowa and New Hampshire and other places, and I didn't really think about him that much.

But then a few years ago, I crossed paths with Speaker Johnson. He had just been elected speaker. And we were asking him if he could spare just a minute or two to bring greetings to Dr. Dobson at one of our annual meetings. Speaker Johnson, in spite of the fact that he was just overwhelmed with things, the media wanted to talk to him, he'd just been elected speaker after the House had gone for weeks without being able to elect a speaker, and yet when we contacted newly elected then Speaker Johnson, he said, "Of course I will do that, Gary."

Then he said, "Now Gary, you remember how we first met, right?" And I was a little embarrassed. I said, "Actually, Mr. Speaker, I don't." He then described for me, he was that eager beaver on my campaign bus. He was the guy that carried my luggage on periodically, listened to all my speeches. I noticed he was often taking notes. And now that kid from that campaign bus is the Speaker of the House of Representatives.

His faith today, if anything, his belief and fellowship with Christ is as strong or even stronger today than it was then as a young man. He is now the leader in the House of Representatives. As you know, the Republican Party has just a four-seat majority. If somebody dies, it goes down to three and then it goes up to five, but it's a very narrow majority. Speaker Johnson has done an unbelievable job in keeping usually everybody on the same page and then getting a lot of things passed that, unfortunately, the Senate has not done such a great job on.

In the part of the prayer I played, again, he goes over the history that has been so forgotten by so many people. Actually, that's probably not the right way to say it. He went over history, as many of the speakers did, about our history that intentionally has not been taught to them by the educational establishment in America.

Because everything in the American founding is an insult to or an impediment to what a lot of very far-left people, many of them socialists and Marxists, want to do to America. They can't deal with a population that knows all the things that the speakers on the National Mall knew and shared with the audience on the mall. If everybody in America knew these things, that from the very beginning God was in the calculation of a place called America, that the founders relied on God when they wrote the founding documents, that without God's grace and protection we never would have done or won a succession of battles that made no sense for us to win, this ragtag army under George Washington battling the most powerful nation in the world.

Yet one unexpected, one inexplicable event after another happened to give us this country we have today. And the left decided decades ago that if they wanted to have an overpowering government, that they decided whether we were free men or women or not, they decided what we could say or when we could worship or what we could worship about, that they had to make sure that our children and our grandchildren and the generation after that knew none of the things that Franklin Graham and the Vice President of the United States and Speaker Johnson and the President of the United States and many other speakers spoke about on the National Mall. And that's why this day of rededication to God of our country was so important.

In wrapping things up, I want to just remind you that while the Declaration of Independence is an unbelievably important document, and in the second paragraph it gives the basic truth of America that you should go read it, I've quoted it many times, I want you to look it up because you're more likely to remember it if you do.

You could have gone down to the other side of the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial and you will see there etched into one of the walls his second inaugural address. It's a very short speech or it wouldn't fit on one wall. Read that. It's got about a dozen references in it to God and the Bible. These things are words, and words are important, but they're only words.

They only matter if the people follow them and believe in them and defend them and are even willing to risk their lives for them as the original 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence did when they put their names on that document. As one of them famously said, "We will either hang separately unless we hang together."

I hope you got a little bit of a taste of what it was like on the mall just a few days ago. There's going to be other great events this year celebrating the 250th anniversary of this place the founders wanted to be a shining city upon a hill. We're begging you to listen to these moments, use them as teaching moments with your children and your grandchildren, and then become active Christian citizens because only by doing so can we save our country and preserve our liberty for the next generation. Let's close with just a few more words from that great song. Listen right here.

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