The following is excerpts taken with permission from Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America by Chuck Norris (25-30):
In 2007, Pastor Todd and members of his small, rural, northern California church, had a huge national impact, reversing aggressive and blatant historical revisionism at two major national landmarks: the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
In 2006 he was part of a church group taking an American heritage tour of the East Coast. They were visiting the Jamestown Settlement, which is a replica of the fist English colony in America in 1607 (thirteen years before the pilgrims reached Plymouth). As they were touring the settlement, a tour guide repeatedly told the group that the primary purpose of the English colonization was “to make money.” Pastor Todd told me the guide would ask them to repeat those three words several times like a mantra: “to make money.” A few from the group winced at that statement, because it didn’t coincide with the history they remembered. Another eyebrow-raising statement came when they toured a replica of the church build in the center of the settlement. They noticed three plaques hung behind the pulpit: the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles’ Creed. Pastor Todd asked the guide about them. She replied that she was “not allowed” to identify the plaques as anything more than “religious.”
Being the inquisitive sort, Pastor Todd dug into the history of Jamestown. He discovered, among other things, that the colony’s charter, issued by King James in 1606, listed as the settlement’s primary purpose the “propagating of Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God.” To leave out the colony’s Christian purpose, to downplay the role of Christianity in the colony’s life, is to misrepresent history. Unfortunately, as we all know, these sorts of politically correct omissions are shockingly routine-not only at our nation’s historic landmarks but in our public schools.
. . . . They began a letter-writing campaign of protest, including a letter to the governor of Virginia. Pastor Todd wrote articles about how history was being misrepresented at Jamestown. That led to his doing dozens of radio interviews on the subject. … .
Eight months after his visit, Pastor Todd received a phone call from an executive with the Jamestown Foundation. The executive was tart at first, but warmed after Pastor Todd assured him that his goal was not to create trouble or controversy, but to help the Foundation present the most accurate history of the Settlement.
Their conversation let to a meeting of the Jamestown Settlement historians, who confessed that Pastor Todd’s research was correct. The eventual result was a memorandum sent to all of Jamestown’s museum program assistants, asking them to present “a more comprehensive picture” of the Jamestown colony’s mission. In particular, they should teach visitor on the guided tours that the “first motivation mentioned in the 1606 charter is to spread the Christian religion.”
Coincidentally, in 2007 Pastor Todd was thrown into controversy again when he and a tour group visited the Washington Monument. On December 6, 1884, an aluminum captions weighing 100 ounces (the largest in that day) was placed on the very top of the Washington Monument, completing its long-delayed construction. On the National Park Service website, it describes what is etched on the capstone: The west face read: “Corner Stone laid on bed of foundation, July 4, 1848. First stone at height of 152 feet laid August 7, 1880. Capstone set December 6, 1884”; and the east face read “LAUS DEO” [Praise be to God]. The north and south faces contained names of the commission and the key men in the work of completion. Although weather-beaten, the inscription is still visible.
. . . . Because the capstone is not visible to the naked eye (at 555 feet up), the National Park Service created a replica some years back and placed it inside the monument, on the second floor from the top, as part of an elaborate display about the history of the capstone. But what Pastor Todd and his tour group couldn’t see on the replica was the inscription “Laus Deo.” They examined the three sides of the capstone replica (the fourth was pressed up against the wall), trying to read the small print . They read the larger wall display, and there was nothing mentioned about it there, either. Pastor Todd went back to the replica and pressed his head against the wall to seed down the hidden side of the replica. There it was, barely visible to the naked eye. When he asked on of the National Park Service representatives why the replica was pushed up against the wall so tight that you couldn’t see the inscription, her response was interesting. She said simply, “This isn’t a conspiracy.”
. . . . He discovered two photos of the replica, one from 2000 and the other from 2007. He noticed that not only was the replica away from the wall in 2000, so that all four sides could be seen, but that the display sign for the capstone said:
APEX OF THE MONUMENT
Reproduction
The builders searched for an appropriate metal for the apex that would not
tarnish and would act as a lightning rod. They chose one of the rarest metals of time, aluminum. The casting was inscribe with the phrase, Laus Deo, (Praise be to God).
In 2007, the small sign had been changed to eliminate the last sentence:
CAP OF THE MONUMENT
Reproduction
The builders searched for appropriate metal for the cap that would not
tarnish and would act as a lightning rod. The chose one of the rarest
metals of time- aluminum.
. . . . Pastor Todd mounted another campaign to get the truth out: with letters, articles, and interviews, which let to the National Park Service correcting the display. Just five days after World Net Daily broke the news online, the National Park Service had received hundreds of thousands of emails about this monumental omission. At the same time Fox News had a live broadcast at the Washington Monument, during which time their reporter discovered the display sign for the capstone replica had already been mysteriously replaced-complete with the explanations of Laus Deo!