Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Well, welcome to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, executive producer of the Family Talk broadcast, also the vice president of content here at the JDFI. You know, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That proverbial shot heard round the world, if you will, announcing the formation of our new nation, which would be guided by a government of, for, and by the people.

Now what made the Declaration such a monumental document, though, is the fact that the United States of America was founded upon certain unalienable rights endowed by our Creator, and the chief among them would be life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, here we are 250 years after America's founding, and American life has grown decidedly more secular.

The biblical principles that guided our forefathers seem to be little more than an afterthought to the majority of our citizens. But fortunately, there's a growing number of scholars as well as skeptics who've been doing a deeper dive into what it means to be part of a society which once proudly declared to be one nation under God, indivisible. I mean, that's still our motto, but are we actually living that way?

Well, on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, I'm joined by Cynthia Scott, an author who is a prayer leader and a prayer warrior, an intercessor par excellence. In fact, in November 2020, she launched a small but powerful prayer call for our nation. She's also the author of several prayer guides and has led numerous citywide prayer initiatives in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region, as well as nationwide.

And her latest book is called *Celebrating God Our Founder at America's 250th Birthday*. It reflects her conviction that God's providence shaped the United States, and she calls believers to honor Him as our true founder and to help shape America's future through prayer. Cynthia Scott invested a couple of decades of her life as a business owner before closing up that shop to serve as the chair of the leadership team for the Three Rivers Festival of Hope with Franklin Graham back in 2014 in the Pittsburgh area.

She has fostered corporate prayer, and she currently leads the prayer council at her church, which is Christ Church at Grove Farm. Cynthia Scott, welcome to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk to talk about this brand new book. We're so thrilled and excited to have you on the program with us today.

Cynthia Scott: Thank you so much, Roger. I'm delighted to be here with you.

Roger Marsh: Well, we're thrilled. Talking about America's 250th anniversary and realizing, of course, that we are one nation under God indivisible, that prayer has always played a huge role in American life, and I think God's hand of providence is on us. When did this become a big issue for you to say I want to be a prayer warrior not just for the Kingdom but also for America in particular?

Cynthia Scott: Well, it's been years. I couldn't even tell you how many. I love God, obviously I seek Him, and I've studied revivals and just cried out to God for revival in our nation for something that we have never seen, a God-consciousness that just sweeps across our people and sweeps millions into the Kingdom.

And it's so exciting to study revival, and revival is very much a part of American history. And I guess that this particular book started with prayers. It started actually as prayers for corporate prayer meetings at my church with my pastor. I wrote the prayers, we led these meetings, and that was back in 2020.

I had read some great history books like *The Light and the Glory*, which talk about the details of God's intricate involvement in the founding of America. But that summer, I picked up a book called *100 Scriptures That Made America* and loved it. It was just the influence of scripture, and it recounted many of the same things that I had heard.

And the Lord spoke to me. During COVID, the churches were closed for a while, and so we were gathering outside for weekly prayer meetings. And the Lord laid it on my heart for us to pray for the nation during that critical moment and to pray out of the history of the nation.

So I started researching God's hand in America. I went back to those books that I had read, and I began to put together prayers based on the history, starting with the pilgrims and talking about covenant, the covenant that they made with God and each other at the time of their landing here, the Puritans, the fear of the Lord, and how the biblical thinking shaped the colonies.

The educational system in our nation, which was based in the Christian faith for two reasons. Number one, to teach their children at home to know God and to be able to read the Bible. And then to create great pastors through universities, Harvard being the first of which in 1636.

And all of that was grounded in the word of God, in a biblical worldview. And as I prayed and I got through the First Great Awakening, I wrote a prayer around the Declaration of Independence and I realized, Roger, that God Himself was the founder of our nation and He was not getting the credit He deserved.

And so that sort of started this passion in me to pray for revival really, for a Third Great Awakening that would be completely transformative to our nation. And those prayers, we prayed through a dozen, 14 prayers. And then those prayers sat in my laptop for five years.

And I continued to be passionate about the subject to read, to pray. I continued this prayer call every single morning, Easter, Christmas, all of them. And my desire to see God move in this nation just grew. I think it's just God calls us.

And so last May, God opened a door to put these prayers into a book that would celebrate Him at our 250th birthday. A meaningful way to begin that celebration. Fireworks are great and parties are great, but the God of the universe gave us 250 years as a nation through an incredible Constitution that was grounded in the principles of the word. And it's time for us to remember our history, a lot of which has been written out of the books.

But we need to go back and remember as a nation, every single one of us, the God of our founding. We are a Christian nation and it is a blessing to all people, whether you believe in Christ or not. So that's my passion. That's why we're here.

Roger Marsh: Cynthia, you know, as you were describing the foundation of the nation, I was struck with the reminder of the reality of where we are in 2026 in the United States of America. Where there are so many people who when you talk about the founding of the nation, they'll talk about the land.

They'll talk about who was here first or those kinds of arguments. Or they'll talk about the people groups or whatever. And they forget that America is more than just the geography where we stand. It's more than just the bodies that were actually here. There's a spiritual component to America that I think a lot of people, even if they weren't religious people, understood.

I mean, there's atheists and agnostics who understood that, yeah, we have to acknowledge the role of Christianity in founding our nation because regardless of what had happened before with the Pilgrims and then leading up into where we found ourselves on July 4th, 1776, people understood Christianity played a huge role in this.

This new movie that's been out, *A Great Awakening*, talks about George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin's partnership. Recently, though, it seems as though many of our fellow citizens not only want to devalue that, they're, for lack of a better phrase, they're kind of annoyed hearing people talk about how faith has shaped our values.

How do you identify, how do you explain that to people who for our vantage point we're saying, "Hey, we're a Christian nation. We understand the Spirit of God's hand of providence all over us," but then there's this other group that's saying, "You guys need to be quiet. Separation of church and state means you need to be quiet."

Cynthia Scott: Well, let's talk about separation of church and state for a minute. Let's just stop right there because I think that those people that say that we need to be quiet do not understand what was meant by separation of church and state at the time of our founding.

Good point. Keeping in mind that the Pilgrims and the Puritans, those early settlers, came primarily from England at the very beginning and the church had been under the King. The King ruled the church. And not Christ. Christ is the head of the church. We know that. But the King in England was the head and they were eager to get out from underneath that and worship God in a way that pleased God according to the Bible.

So when we understand that they meant that there would be no state governance over the church and no single church that would be the state church of America, that's what they meant. They meant in terms of the organizational governance, that those two would be separate.

The church would be one entity, the state government would be another entity. Of course the church would obey the state laws, but we would be following Christ. And they never intended that Christians would not hold public office and influence the leading of the country.

Contrarily, they felt that this nation, the freedoms that our Constitution provided for us, were inadequate for any but a moral and religious people. And by religious, they meant Christian. That was the worldview that they were operating in. They were operating out of a biblical worldview.

It's astonishing to me to think deeply about these things. Our founders were raised out of the First Great Awakening, which shows God's covenant relationship with America. We had declined in the early 1700s and God in His goodness, in response to the crying out of many Christians and godly pastors, brought great preachers across the American landscape.

George Whitefield, you named him earlier, and 80 percent of the people in the colonies heard George Whitefield preach. I mean, that is an astonishing thing. And God used him to bring about this revival in the church to save thousands and thousands of people and to give them the idea that they were created to be free.

And they grabbed onto that idea and they not only applied it to their spiritual life, they applied it to their political life. So God used the preaching and the revival and spiritual awakening that came out of that First Great Awakening to unite the colonies, to shape their thinking, and out of that arose that cry for freedom, the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution. Our nation arose out of that. It's exciting.

Roger Marsh: Well, that certainly is exciting, especially when you think about the number of preachers who were preaching about what was happening in America and how the nation was being formed. And when we think about our nation as a country that is literally one nation under God, that wasn't a stretch.

I mean, it's not a political slogan. And Cynthia Scott is with us today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk to talk about this. Her brand new book is called *Celebrating God Our Founder at America's 250th Birthday*. There's a link for this book up at jdfi.net and we highly recommend this resource, especially as we think about our nation's spiritual heritage.

Cynthia, we were just talking about that separation of church and state so-called and how many people misinterpret that. There are a lot of other people too who say, "Well, you know, when you look at what happens on the college campus right now and how many different of these Christian groups are coming in here and trying to bring pro-life clubs and this, that, and the other thing, and there's no place for that here in America's educational system."

One of the things you write about in your book is the fact that it's not the Christians that misunderstand American history when it comes to education. It's actually the secularists, the progressives, the liberals. Give us just a reminder, if you will, kind of the way you highlight in the book about America's spiritual heritage on college campuses.

Cynthia Scott: That is I love this point because there's a fact I discovered and it is like discovering treasure when we go back and see what God has done in our nation. 106 of the first 108 colleges in America were founded on the Christian faith.

The colleges, yes, that is over 98 percent. I put that in the book and people have often said that they really like that chapter on education because I think it's so eye-opening. And it's so different from what we see on college campuses today.

The education in America really arose in two ways. The first was teaching children from the Bible how to read so that they could know the Bible so that they could live according to God's word. And I learned something very interesting. I learned a lot of things in the research for this book, Roger, but what I learned is that wherever the Bible is embraced, literacy is a result of it.

People learn to read, they become more educated because they are reading the Bible. It makes sense. So that was one way in the homes it started and then of course schools, primary schools came after that. But then in the colleges, Harvard was founded in 1636 named after Reverend Harvard, John Harvard, as a place to train pastors.

The Puritans were very serious about their Bible. They had a staunch, and I mean that in the best sense of the word, not mean but accurate, biblical worldview. And they relied on their pastors to teach them and lead them from the word of God.

So training had been extremely important in England and they brought that tradition with them. So establishing colleges was a big priority of the Puritans. And really that shaped the worldview of the early colonists. So these colleges and the teaching of the Bible in the schools in the homes rather and then later in the schools shaped the thinking that ultimately shaped our nation and it all was based in the scriptures.

Roger Marsh: It's amazing, Cynthia, when you two points came to mind as you were sharing that statistic, the 106 out of 108 university. I mean, I knew there was a biblical heritage there. I didn't realize it was that strong. But John Harvard would probably be excommunicated from his own university now because they've gone so politically correct.

But secondly, too, this is a note I know Dr. Dobson would love, both Dr. and Mrs. Dobson spent many years in the public school classroom as teachers before he launched his radio ministry and his writing ministry and that type of endeavor for him.

But they would underscore in a hale and hearty amen to using the Bible as a literacy piece. I mean, to help young children learn how to read, to understand, to appreciate the fact that it's written in such a literate style. I mean, there are courses you can take on some college campuses anyway where they talk about the Bible as literature.

And I think sometimes we as parents and grandparents get so caught up in the busyness of the day that we forget that simple Bible stories and taking out God's word and reading it with our children, to our children, and having that engagement, it does more than just say we're going to raise good Christians and good citizens.

But it really does, I mean, it's a perfect way to get some of the basics in with regard to recognizing words and stories and concepts and things of that nature. And I'm so grateful that you brought that point out because for those who are saying, "Gosh, I don't have time to read the Bible with my kids anymore" or whatever, you might want to take a second look at that based on what you just shared with us, Cynthia Scott. That's a very, very important point to make.

Cynthia Scott: Well, and the other thing that came out of education was their understanding that God as the creator of all things, as the creator of the universe, was the one who would reveal to them the secrets of nature. So it was completely compatible for them to put Jesus first, and they used Jesus in many of their mottos, and to put Jesus first and understand that He as the creator was the founder of science, the founder of all these disciplines that they were exploring. And that's right. I believe that that's true and correct that God is the one who created everything and He reveals it to us.

Roger Marsh: It's amazing how many people miss that and it's unfortunate that they do. But a book like *Celebrating God Our Founder at America's 250th Birthday* by Cynthia Scott, who's our guest today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk can kind of help right the ship a little bit. Cynthia, you have a chapter in this brand new book about God being the author and giver of liberty.

Can you talk a little bit about why that is important to put together? Because I think some Christians might think, "Well, I'm not super political. So when people start talking about liberties and things like that, I don't know if I have a place at the table in that conversation." But you make a pretty compelling case that we do.

Cynthia Scott: We absolutely do. And I do firmly believe that God is the author of freedom. And I take that thought right back to the Garden of Eden where God placed Adam and Eve in the garden and gave them choice right off the bat.

He never forced anyone to worship Him. So He was the author of freedom. And when you think about it, as our founders were steeped in the knowledge of Christ and biblical principles and they were trying to shape a nation and the founding documents for a nation where it would remain free.

What they arrived upon was that freedom didn't come from the King. Freedom didn't come from any man or any government. Those freedoms, those rights came directly from our creator and they were referring to the God of the Bible when you understand their biblical worldview.

And that point, I do not think as Americans we can highlight or stress enough because we can look at the rest of the world and we can see totalitarian nations where the only thing that the people are allowed to do is what the government says.

The only rights they have are as prescribed by their leaders. And some of those are sort of religious/political ideologies too that are oppressive, quite frankly, to the people. And in our nation, when our founders said that our rights came from God alone, that protected everyone, no matter what you believe.

And many people say, "Well, what about the atheist who doesn't believe in Christ or doesn't believe in any of this?" Well, I would say that if you look at our founding documents and compare them to the principles in scripture that God gives freedom, there is a God, He is referred to in those documents, and the freedom that everybody has to believe as they wish and worship as they choose, it comes from Him. And when you remove God from the nation, you remove freedom, and I think we need to be very careful about that.

Roger Marsh: Cynthia, let's take a look at another aspect of the United States' founding with God being our founder. That is, it's kind of a tough spot, I think, because a lot of people totally get Declaration of Independence, you know.

We have inalienable rights, they are endowed by our Creator, so they all come from God. But then you fast forward 13 years later, we have a US Constitution and the Constitution doesn't give everybody all of those rights at that point. It had to be amended, we had Bill of Rights, 13th, 14th amendment, and things like that. Talk about why we can still know that God was very present in American history when the Constitution was found, even though it was ratified and then had to be amended several times.

Cynthia Scott: God is perfect but men are not. We know that. And I mean, so that's just a fact. And this is so interesting to me because I think sometimes churches miss this. He moves in the moment in time in which something is happening. He moves among the issues of the day.

And if we go back to our founding and the research that I have done shows that the original founders that penned the Constitution, they did not want slavery. But two states, Georgia and South Carolina, threatened to remove themselves from the process, which really threatened the union.

The union was extremely fragile after the war. Think about it. All that fighting, loss of men, loss of resources. Many states were out of money. And they were not only battling for the existence or the creation of a nation, but they were battling for the existence of their own colonies, their own states.

So it's messy. The affairs of men are very messy. It's amazing that God works through us at all, really, if you think about it. Very true. So the principle of freedom for all was very much present. Also present at that moment was the need to keep this fragile union together.

And interestingly, our union has only been threatened seriously twice, and both were around the issue of slavery at the time of the founding and at the time of the Civil War. And God prevailed in the end. It took more time, I think, than any of our founders wanted, and certainly more than God wanted. But God did prevail in providing freedom for all ultimately.

You mentioned also, and I'm going to just switch to a different points here slightly, theocracy. You mentioned theocracy. And the more I think about it, even after finishing the book, I still think about all of these things. I think about how amazing God is.

And when you think about the way He shaped our government, it was different than Him shaping Israel, for example, where there was at first a theocracy and then a king, right? But when it came to America, and as America having been shaped out of this 150 years of biblical thinking on the continent, even though we had a decline and needed that Great Awakening, we still had been grounded in that.

When He brought the minds of the founders together to decide how this government was going to be shaped, He didn't go in the direction of theocracy or monarchy. He went in the direction of Republic and He fashioned it, I say God fashioned it, I believe He did, around His three roles.

He is judge, He is king, and He is lawgiver. And we have our three branches of government, which reflect those roles of God. Right. And additionally, the way they shaped it is that they held each other accountable. So we have this system of checks and balances, which prevents any single man or entity or group of taking control and ruling as a dictator. And so it's brilliant. It's brilliant. And the proof of its brilliance is that it's maintained its kept the nation alive and free for 250 years. It's really astonishing to me.

Roger Marsh: Well, Cynthia Scott is our guest today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. The book is called *Celebrating God Our Founder at America's 250th Birthday*. It's up at jdfi.net. Cynthia, we've still got a lot more to talk about, but we've run out of time for today's program. Can you join us again next time and we can continue this conversation?

Cynthia Scott: I would love to. Thank you, Roger.

Roger Marsh: Rewriting history does not honor God, but remembering what He actually did does. You're listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk featuring part one of my conversation with author and prayer leader Cynthia Scott.

Cynthia's new book is called *Celebrating God Our Founder at America's 250th Birthday*, and with that coming up this Saturday, this is a must-read for every American. We've got a link for it for you up at jdfi.org. And if you'd like to hear today's program again or pass it along to a friend, you'll find the broadcast there as well.

And while you're on our website, be sure you also check out a brand new series of five videos that we're releasing this week from our own Gary Bauer. Gary's our senior vice president of public policy here at the Dobson Policy and Culture Center, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of American history.

As we celebrate America's 250th birthday, Gary brings decades of wisdom on faith and family and the founding principles that made this country great. And these videos are a wonderful way to mark this historic milestone. You'll find them at drjamesdobson.org or jdfi.org.

The Dr. James Dobson Family Institute exists to point people back to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the biblical foundation that built strong families and a free nation. That work is carried forward by listeners like you who believe America's best days are still ahead of us and who want trusted, God-fearing voices speaking truth into culture.

When you give to the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, you're helping to keep this ministry going and growing strong, defending the family, the sanctity of life, and religious freedom for the next generation. We invite you to stand with us today by making a secure donation online at drjamesdobson.org or jdfi.org.

You can also call a member of our constituent care team at 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825. Well, I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to join us again next time right here when author Cynthia Scott returns to continue our conversation about celebrating God our founder and God's hand of providence on America for the 250 years of our existence. That's coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. The voice you trust for the family you love.