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The Founders believed the number one purpose of government was to protect property. Really, they did—yet we need to understand all they meant when they used the word property. Historian David Barton, his son Tim Barton, and former Texas legislator Rick Green discuss this very issue on the May 17, 2016 broadcast of the radio program WallBuilders Live! The elder Barton first cites numerous examples in which individuals’ rights to speak and act according to their convictions are being trampled—and he points to the release of the 2016 edition of Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America, which documents hundreds of examples in which people have been denied their Constitutional rights as Americans. The three-man broadcast team forcefully demonstrates that this is not the America our Founders established. (For your convenience, the entire program is available at the end of this post.)
Tim Barton: [Founding Father] James Madison said government is instituted to protect property of every sort. So the reason government exists is to protect our property. And there are a whole slew of things that are identified as property. In fact, your money was something that was identified as that, as your own private property. So the government cannot come and take your money. That’s your private property. Well, James Madison said conscience is the most sacred of all property. So the property that was the most sacred, that government is instituted to protect…is your right of conscience.
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort…. Conscience is the most sacred of all property.
—Founding Father James Madison—
David Barton: Now, consider that. The most sacred of all property is conscience, so while we look at a store being robbed, a kid going into a store and shoplifting, we say, get the kid, nail him, he can’t take private property. It’s not his property. It belongs to somebody else. We watch a kid take a baseball bat and whack at somebody else’s car, we say he’s got to pay for the damages; he can’t destroy somebody else’s property. We watch a robber go into a house with a gun; we say he can’t do that; that’s not his property. We yell when the government takes private property. Eminent domain. They can’t do that; they’re not allowed [to do that].
More important than all of that is the government can’t take away from you your right to hear from God, to believe what God told you, and to act on what God said. That’s more important than stopping a robber that comes into your home; protecting that right is more important than stopping a shoplifter; protecting that right is more important than keeping a kid at school from stealing stuff out of your locker or taking your billfold—but we don’t look at it that way. But that’s the way the Founding Fathers looked at it.…The number one purpose for government is to protect property, and the number one property to protect is the rights of conscience. Which means there should be no religious hostility going on—
Rick Green: But it’s happening!
David Barton: and yet we have it now [in abundance].
Conscience rights, therefore, are sacred; and they’re essentially rights to exercise your religious beliefs freely, without hindrance from the government. With the founding of America, especially through the First Amendment to the US Constitution, “government essentially said, Yes, be religious. We will not only tolerate it; we will respect it and we will encourage it. But we cannot take sides or put our thumbs on the scales. But the understanding of this has been lost to many in modern America.”1
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Copyright © 2016 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All Rights Reserved.
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top image: Freedom of Worship by Norman Rockwell, 1943
WallBuilders Live! broadcast, May 17, 2016
Note:
1Eric Metaxas, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty, (New York, Viking, 2016), 73.