The WallBuilders Show Biblical Citizenship in Modern America, Week 2, part 4
What if everything you've been taught about America's relationship with slavery was incomplete? In this eye-opening episode of Biblical Citizenship in Modern America, Tim Barton challenges prevailing narratives by unveiling forgotten heroes and overlooked facts that paint a more nuanced picture of American history.
Barton introduces us to James Armistead, a Black patriot whose crucial intelligence work led to the decisive American victory at Yorktown, effectively ending the Revolutionary War. He draws a powerful connection: the American Revolution began with the death of Black patriot Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre and was won largely through the intelligence provided by another Black patriot. "You can't even fully tell the story of the American Revolution without including the contributions of Black heroes and Black patriots in American history," Barton emphasizes.
The episode traces how these vital contributions were systematically erased from our historical consciousness, particularly through the racist scholarship of Woodrow Wilson, who removed every Black person from his influential history books while promoting white supremacist ideology. This deliberate omission has distorted Americans' understanding of their own history for generations.
Perhaps most challenging to contemporary narratives, Barton presents compelling evidence of America's leadership in opposing slavery. America was the first nation to legally ban the slave trade (1807), the fourth nation globally to abolish slavery entirely (1865), and currently ranks second worldwide in fighting modern slavery. While acknowledging America's participation in "something that was very, very evil," Barton contextualizes this within the universal presence of slavery throughout human history while highlighting America's exceptional record in working to end it.
"If you look at any atrocity in American history and ask 'how did it end in America?', what you will always find is the reason those atrocities ended is because Christians stood up and said 'we can't do this anymore,'" Barton explains. This moral foundation, rooted in biblical principles and constitutional values, has enabled America to correct its course faster than virtually any other nation.
Ready to discover the complete story of America's founding and development? Explore the full Biblical Citizenship course at biblicalcitizens.com and equip yourself to become part of preserving and extending America's legacy of freedom.