As he has multiple times in the past, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton will once again serve on the committee responsible for drafting the Republican platform ahead of the Republican National Convention next month. Addressing the responsibility on his radio program today, Barton said that his mission is to see that the Republican Party platform aligns with the first twelve chapters of the book of Genesis.
Barton discussed the upcoming meeting of the platform committee with fellow committee member Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who, like Barton, has been a member several times in the past. Barton vowed to fight against any effort to “get all that social conservative stuff out of the platform.”
“Biblically, that’s just not the way it works,” Barton said. “Scripture is really clear that righteousness exalts a nation … Jesus says, ‘Seek first the kingdom and his righteousness,’ and all this other stuff will get added to you. So one of the things, as Tony pointed out, that we’re really going to work on in the platform is the first twelve chapters of Genesis.”
“If you take the first twelve chapters of Genesis, it starts with, ‘In the beginning, God.’ So what do you get out of that? God is central to everything in the story. So if you’re not acknowledging God, that’s a problem,” Barton added. “You’ve got to have a willingness to acknowledge God because if you stop being God-conscious, your behavior changes. If you stop being God-conscious, that’s a problem.”
“You start with the acknowledgement of God,” Barton continued.” Then as you go, it says that God created man. Well, God created life. So life is an important issue. That is a creation of God. You need to be protecting life; that includes unborn life. That’s throughout the scriptures. Back in the Old Testament law, God talked about the penalties for taking unborn life. So that’s a big deal in the first twelve chapters of Genesis. And then it says, ‘And he made them male and female.’ So now we get gender involved in it. Four times it says that God made them male and female, so giving up on gender stuff, or Title IX and letting that go away, those are social issues but they are the top issues of God. They’re right there at the start of the book.”
“Then Adam and Eve had children,” Barton asserted. “Now you’re into the family. So you want to protect the nuclear family, you want to protect the traditional family. And then as you continue on, you go through and you get to chapter twelve where …God makes a covenant with [Abraham] and says, ‘You’re going to become a nation, and whoever blesses that people, I’m going to bless and whoever doesn’t bless that people, I’m not going to bless.’ That’s Israel.”
“So, when you look at the first twelve chapters of Genesis, you’ve got a pretty good grid there of the first things we’ve got to be looking for,” Barton declared. “It’s going to be, number one: Are you God-acknowledging? Is God part of what you do [and] in your thinking? Are you talking about it? Number two is going to be the life issue. Number three is going to be gender. Number four is going to be family. And number five is going to be Israel. And certainly those are things we’re working very hard on in the Republican platform not to take out.”
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