In this captivating episode of Family Talk, learn about the markers of America’s spiritual heritage with Bob McEwen, who shares awe-inspiring stories from the nation’s formative years. With Gary Bauer, they address how faith and values are integral to the nation’s success and present the compelling need to revive these vital lessons in today’s educational narrative. Be inspired by tales of resilience and providence, and discover why it’s critical for our children to understand the true origins of American greatness.
You’re listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am that James Dobson, and I’m so pleased that you’ve joined us today.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, welcome to another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. From George Washington’s miraculous survival on the battlefield to the writing of our national anthem at Fort McHenry, America’s founding is filled with stories of divine providence and of ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things. Yet sadly, these inspiring accounts are being systematically removed from our children’s education. Today here on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, we are joined once again by the Honorable Bob McEwen, former U.S. Congressman from Ohio who served six terms in the House of Representatives. During his distinguished career, he was elected to the prestigious Select Committee on Intelligence and the powerful House Committee on Rules. Bob has also been an eyewitness to some of the most pivotal moments in modern history, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In today’s conversation here on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, our own Gary Bauer talks with Congressman McEwen about the remarkable stories from our nation’s past that deserve to be remembered and retold. Bob will explain why faith has always been central to America’s success and why it’s more important now more than ever before to pass these truths on to the next generation. So here now is Gary Bauer to get things rolling on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to another edition of Family Talk. Great to have you with us. Our guest today is Bob McEwen, a man that almost needs no introduction. Bob is an American hero, a great defender of faith, family, and freedom. Bob, there’s so many things I want to talk to you about today. Let’s get right into it.
SPEAKER 05 :
Gary, it’s great to be with you so much.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know, I’ve heard you talk about this many times. I know Dr. Dobson believes this. I believe it. All the successes of America that you’ve been describing comes in large part because from the very beginning, our founders relied on the God of the Bible. The American founding has a lot of principles behind. that were found from Greek and Roman political philosophy. But the really important things about the nature of man and that liberty comes from God and support, those come from Jerusalem. They come from the Torah and the New Testament. As you know, Bob, George Washington, in the first inaugural address, said that without providence, we never could have won the revolution. He added, so help me God, to the end of the oath, etc. But today, a whole lot of people are saying that if you love Jesus and you love America— That makes you a Christian nationalist, and that’s a bad thing. Well, loving Jesus and loving America describes about 97% of the American people all the way up until about two weeks ago. So can you talk a little bit about God’s hand in America? And the first thing that comes to my mind—I know you know this story—we shouldn’t have even had a George Washington taking the oath of office if he hadn’t miraculously survived a battlefield— Can you remind people of that story and what happened, the shots that were fired at George Washington?
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Well, you’re exactly right, Gary. See, freedom is a three-legged stool. And if you take one of the legs out, the three-legged stool doesn’t work. And freedom is economic freedom. It’s political liberty. And it’s spiritual truth. And so the reason that America works is because we have on our walls in our classrooms of every school when they’re growing up a series of things. Thou shalt not steal. I tell young people I never owned a bicycle lock in my life. We come out of school, there’s 200 bicycles around. None of them have locks on them. Why? Because we were taught thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet. That’s why we don’t have walls around our property. It’s because we didn’t want to take what other people have. We wanted to someday have a house like that, someday have a car like that. We didn’t covet what somebody else had. Under socialism, that is coveting. You vote for me, I will take from that person and give it to you. That covetousness brings poverty. So all of these things are the spiritual underpinning. Now, if you want to take down America… then you divorce it from the spiritual underpinning that makes everything else work. And our founders understood that. That’s why they tied it to the spiritual truth. So Satan comes along. And Satan is not foolish, by the way. He’s smart. And so he goes to the seminaries and he tells the preachers and things. He said, now you have a noble calling. You have an eternal calling. You don’t want to get involved. Let them teach any kind of perversion to your children. Don’t you go down to the city council. Don’t you get involved in the library board. You keep your eyes on Jesus. And so when a city councilman is distressed about something that’s happening, you have to ask. He means well. She means well. She’s on there to serve the community. She knows that there’s something haywire about this idea of telling little boys that they can be girls themselves. and putting full-grown men in girls’ locker rooms. So where would you go to get truth? Would you go to the editorial board of the newspaper? Or would you go to the faculty of the college? No, where you would want to go is to the pulpits. You want to go, what does the scripture have to say about that? And we’ve raised a generation of pulpiteers who said, oh, no, we don’t get involved. They stiff arm them and leave them out there to flounder on their own. That’s been the tradition now since the 1960s. And that’s why this country has been going off the rails. But now as we see a rebirth of those ministers, I will say most of them younger ones who begin to see the error of that ways, who are beginning to understand that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. which was quoted by Benjamin Franklin when he moved that we have daily prayer in each one of our congressional sessions, that that’s where our strength is. And as we begin to do it, then we can right the nation. But in order to discourage people, then they use terms like Christian nationalism and things. You don’t want to get involved. You don’t want to wear your Christianity on a sleeve. You want to let everybody do what they’re doing because that is a strength. That’s Samson saying, cutting his hair. He said, I will shake myself as before. And he wished not that the spirit of the Lord had departed from him. He thought he could do it on his own. Nope. God has these standards. And if we abandon it, then our beautiful alabaster cities gleaming turn into places like Los Angeles today or Detroit or Philadelphia. But as we go back to doing it God’s way, then we can say the Renaissance. And it’s always been that way. It always will be. There’s no reason. why our future cannot be brighter than our past, and I firmly believe that we are on the cusp of it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Bob, I mentioned that story that I’ve heard you tell before. They used to teach it in school about George Washington. It was during the French and Indian Wars, and at one point all the other British officers had been shot. This was before America was even a country, and George Washington had to deliver a message from one side of the battlefield to the other, And everybody that had tried it before him had been shot off their horses. He manages to do it and he gets off his horse at the other side of the battlefield and discovers that there, I believe it was seven bullet holes in his coat and four bullet holes in his hat. But there were no bullet holes in him. Many of the colonialists at the time, when that story spread, began to think that perhaps God’s hand was on George Washington. There’s also a wonderful story I’m not sure we have the time to get into about later where he meets one of the Indian chiefs that was on the other side. And that Indian chief said, I wanted to meet you because I was the best marksman in my tribe. And I kept shooting you and nothing happened. And so I told the other, the French, don’t waste your bullets. The great power in the sky has his hand on this man. And of course, That became known as the Indian Prophecy, and it had a lot to do with the reason that the colonialists thought that George Washington was bigger than life. You know, that whole event took place, Bob, not far from where Donald Trump was saved from an assassin’s bullet. And I know you’ve talked to the president. He believes that was God’s hand that had him turn his head at that last moment.
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Just a millimeter, just a fraction of a second. And then you see all the things that are taking place at this very moment when we’re recording this. And God allowed that to happen, and we are living through it. It’s chapter and verse. It’s an exciting, exciting time. He began our nation as you described it, and we’re in the midst of it now as we speak.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s incredible to watch it play out. I mean, you look at the TV screen and you think, is this a movie or something? Did I change? It’s hard to believe it’s actual breaking news to see all of these developments around the world. Bob, you have talked many times, and we’ve touched on it today, so many great stories about America. And, you know, it’s not our children’s fault. They haven’t been taught them. I mean, a lot of the things that you and I were taught, they’re not even in the history books anymore. And I know you have made it a point every chance you get to tell those stories. I hope I’m not catching you by surprise, but you’ve got a photographic memory on all these things. A number of times you’ve talked about what happened at Fort McHenry and the writing of our national anthem. But you always make a great point about that, which is the last verse of the national anthem and what it says that is seldom sung today. And that’s telling right there. But could you share with us an audience that may not, depending on what their age, may not know about that story of what happened at the fort and what it was like after a night of bombardment? when the flag was still flying and how it inspired our national anthem.
SPEAKER 05 :
Gary, there’s no way to overemphasize the significance of what you just said. And that’s why, fortunately, we see the explosion in homeschooling. And in many parts of the country, I think of… my grandchildren in Texas, in which they still honor principled things in the public school system. But much of the public school system has been so destroyed. I was meeting with a Turning Point youngster, a college student, and she’s from Wisconsin, was describing the history that she got And the history in her family, she was describing it to Liz and my wife. And she said, the 60s, the 80s, and today. That was her history. And for the 80s, what they did was they watched MTV shows. And Liz, of course, was incredulous. And this girl was on her way to college. And she said, like, you didn’t study World War II. She said, no, no, World War I. Can you tell me anything about the Civil War? They didn’t know anything. And that’s the principle that was said many years ago. He who controls the present controls the past. And he who controls the past controls the future. And so currently when they’re trying to tell these people that this nation, I repeat, this nation that has given of itself to help others, no other nation. World War II, we went in there. If you look at the condition in Japan, if you look at the conditions in Germany today, You would never see the beautiful Mercedes-Benz and Audis and Volkswagens. You would never see the Hondas and the Toyotas, except the United States. Americans, Americans went in there and gave them money to help them get started, to help them get moving. And that’s who this wonderful nation is. And there’s no way that you can look at our history and not just be awed by it. And so that’s why there’s a decision to not. Do it. And that’s why it was essential for Jimmy Carter, again, such a gem, to establish the Department of Education. And you can look at education. You look at this nation had the finest schools, the finest education system, the finest colleges. And you see that upward moment until the establishment of the Department of Education. And you see that reading and math scores and all the rest begin to decline immediately from once Washington began to take over local school districts. Once the National Education and American Federation of Teachers began their preoccupation with homosexuality and perversion and transgender and all the rest, they’d get all the teachers to begin to teach that rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic. And let’s just stop reading. They can’t read. Writing. No one. You try to read. They don’t even try to teach cursive in so many places. That means you couldn’t read the Declaration of Independence. It was written in cursive. Reading, writing, arithmetic. We know what a condition of our math is. We’re 38 and 40. The entire continents that are better than the United States is because of what has happened to our education system. So that’s why this president has decided to turn it around so that we can look back and begin to see those things. So as you mentioned, this country has always stood for what is right. And it’s never been attacked, but it didn’t stand up. And so when you’re the strongest nation on earth, which was Britain, it was in a fight with Napoleon, and they needed ships. If you need ships, then you need sailors. And so if you’re the strongest nation on earth, what do you do? You go take them. And who’s going to stop you? You’re the strong. And so you just did it, except there were seven and a half million people over in a little place called America. And they said, you don’t do that to us. And so under James Madison, the War of 1812, we declared war on Britain. Yeah, big deal. We have no army or navy, but we’re going to kill them. And so they said, well, so they sent a handful of folks over just to wipe us out. And they did. And they came marching into Washington. Nobody had the capacity to stop them. So they burned the entire city to the ground. The only thing left is the four stone walls of the White House and the four stone walls of the Capitol. Everything else was burned. And so they passed a law thereafter saying you can’t build anything in D.C. out of wood because we don’t want that to ever happen again. And so then having destroyed the government— We have no archives except they were able to save the Constitution and the Declaration. But all of the original bills, the Library of Congress and all of those things, the furniture, all of that was destroyed. And then they marched 40 miles north up to Baltimore where the strongest military was. That is the fourth largest harbor in the nation. And that’s where our fledgling little assembly was in a place called Fort McHenry. And so in the process of marching up there, they stole a doctor out of a place called Upper Marlboro when the Americans came out there to harass him. And they couldn’t stop the military, but they let him know what they thought about him. And so the Brits, everybody can always use a medic. And so they grabbed the doctor and took him with them. And went off and so the people in Upper Marlborough came down to find a lawyer who was in Georgetown, the little town just north of D.C. And they hired a fellow named Francis Scott Key and to negotiate to try to get their doctor back. And so Francis Scott Key and – And James Madison gave him a fellow Colonel Skinner to represent the United States because individuals can’t negotiate with countries. And then they rowed out to the boat there with Dr. Bean and Colonel Skinner and Francis Scott Key and said, we want our guy back. And they went around and got testimony from the people that had been served by Dr. Bean and how they were treated favorably by the Americans. And so finally the commander said, I don’t care. You can have him back, but not tonight because we’re going to take— Your country won’t be here tomorrow. We’re going to take down this fort, and that’ll be the end of it. We’ve already distorted the government. Now we’re going to take down the military. And so all night long, they began to bombard with—had these new invention called a concrete, C-O-N-C-R-E-V-E, concrete rockets that you would light the fuse, and you would estimate how long it would take to get there so that rather than just pounding the wall, as a cannon usually did, it would have an explosive to it. But you couldn’t predict it too well. They’d often explode in the midair. And so all night long, they bombarded Fort McHenry. The Americans on the ship, they were concerned about whether or not their country existed. And finally, about 1.30 in the morning, everything went quiet. And they didn’t know if their country existed because they couldn’t see the flag on the fort. But what had happened is that the land assault had begun. And those people in the neighborhood, the Baltimore Americans, had sunk 22 of their own ships in the entrance to the harbor so that the British couldn’t get in. And that’s why they had to use these rockets to try to hit Fort McHenry.
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Just average Americans, just guys like you see every day, right?
SPEAKER 05 :
Not Army, not Navy, just God-fearing, freedom-loving Americans. These are just people who loved the flag and loved America. These were men. These were American men. And they went out then and laid in the weeds because they knew that eventually they’d have to do a ground assault. And then they took them on there. And by morning time, the British had to retreat. And then those Americans wrote, Osei, can you see by the dawn’s early light? The sun’s just coming up. So proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming. When the sun was going down, we could see it. Whose broad stripes and bright stars, all the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming. The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. In other words, we could still see it. And then they asked the question, Osei, does that star-spangled banner yet? wave or the land of the free and the home of the brave. He doesn’t know if it’s still there or not. But lo and behold, as the sun comes up, he could see the flag was there and America still existed. And they rode into the Queen Anne Hotel. And he wrote three more verses, the last one being this, O thus be it ever, thinking of those of us watching the parades in 2026 as we celebrate our 250th anniversary, O thus be it ever that free men shall stand and between their loved homes and the war’s desolation. Blessed with victory and peace, may this heaven-rescued land praise the power that has made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just. Let this be our motto. In God is our trust, and the star-spangled banner in triumph will wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now, Gary, let me just make a couple of observations about that. He wrote, let this be our motto, in God is our trust. That didn’t become our motto until 150 years later. But that was the anticipation. That was the expectation. We knew where our strength lies, number one. Number two, the question remains, how did this little country of 7 million people – How did it beat the strongest power on earth? That always was frustrating to me. And lo and behold, there’s a verse of Scripture, man devises his own way, but the Lord directs his steps. And we thought that it was a horrible thing. The commander was proud of himself that he burned Washington to the ground. But, you know, God used it for good. The entire world erupted. Napoleon, when he would march, he never burned a church. If he burned a church, that’s where all the birth records were. And when he did a government building, he never burned a government building. That’s where all the property and contracts were. He never did that. And the British, the strong, came in there and destroyed everything about America. I repeat, we have no archives. Prior to that time, other than the two that I mentioned, the Library of Congress was totally burned to the ground. Everything was burned to the ground. And the world was offended by it. The parliament erupted over it such that the king appointed a team to negotiate with the United States. And we went from September there in Baltimore Harbor there. that on December 24th, on Christmas Eve that year, peace was settled. So that which Satan meant it unto me for evil, but God meant it unto me for good. And that’s how the United States never lost a war as a result of, even though it was a little tiny thing standing for righteousness.
SPEAKER 02 :
I never tire of hearing this story. What a wonderful story. A number of years ago, at some event, there was a speaker who, when he got up, said, I have a confession to make just in the interest of honesty. This guy was a British guy. He goes, the military unit I belong to today is the same military unit that burned the Capitol in this war. And there was a silence in the room. And somebody in the back of the room yelled out, burn it again. Which we are not advocating, but I thought it was an interesting sentiment that was being expressed. Well, Bob, as always, your knowledge of American history and your passion comes through so well. To our listeners, if somebody at school every day was stealing the lunch – that you packed for your child and you found out about it, you would be furious. And you would go to the school and do something about it. Well, they haven’t stolen lunches from our children. They’ve stolen from our children the rich heritage. of this country. They’ve robbed them of knowing about the heroes and heroines whose shoulders they sit upon. And if we can, because of the efforts of you and many others, if we can during this year we’re in, leading toward the 250th birthday of our country, if we can accelerate the and recapture the classroom for America. That would be the most incredible way to honor all the sacrifices that have been made by previous generations. And it would help us guarantee that the generations after us will have the same blessing that we’ve had to live in this great land. Bob, thank you for everything you’ve done. for Faith, Family, and Freedom, and for this precious country. Dr. Dobson, I appreciate you. I appreciate you. And I know the listener has just been blessed by hearing this show.
SPEAKER 04 :
When our children know their heritage, they’re better equipped to preserve it. And that’s why it’s so important for us as parents and grandparents to bring these remarkable stories back to America’s classrooms. You’ve been listening to a special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, featuring an inspiring conversation between Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, and the Honorable Bob McKeown, who is an advisor to our Board of Directors. If you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you’d like to revisit part one as well, you can visit us online at drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. That’s drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. Thank you for having me. In a time when faith, family, and freedom are under constant attack, your financial support makes it possible for us to stand firm and speak boldly. You can give a gift online at drjamesdobson.org. Our new website is absolutely secure. You can also give a gift over the phone when you call 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. Or if you prefer to write to us, our ministry mailing address is drjamesdobsonsfamilytalk.org. P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado. The zip code 80949. And this year we are celebrating 15 years of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. And we would love to hear from you. How has Dr. Dobson impacted your life or family? Maybe it was wisdom shared on the radio or a book that strengthened your marriage or parenting skills or encouragement during a particularly tough season. Well, your story would be a meaningful gift as we reflect on God’s faithfulness through these 15 years of ministry and look ahead to what God has in store for the next 15 years or more. You can share your personal tribute when you go to drjamesdobson.org. That’s drjamesdobson.org. And now on behalf of Dr. James Dobson and all of us here at Family Talk, I’m Roger Marsh. Thanks so much for joining us today and be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.
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This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is James Dobson again. As we close today’s program, I just want to thank so many of you out there who make this broadcast possible with your contributions. And I want to tell you how much your generosity is appreciated.
