00:00:11.000I'm excited to share with you a phenomenal conversation I had with Pastor David Engelhart from King's Church in New York City.
00:00:19.000We talk about woke Christianity, what's going on right now in America's churches and so much more.
00:00:25.000This Saturday episode of the Charlie Kirk Show is brought to you commercial free by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support, where you guys can help support our production team, help support this effort on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:39.000Pastor David Engelhart is here, everybody.
00:00:57.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:05.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:18.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:20.000Super thrilled to have with me David Engelhart in the Belly of the Beast, you could say, in New York City, fighting for Christianity.
00:01:27.000His church is scheduled to open very, very soon.
00:01:31.000And David, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:34.000Tell us a little about what you've been going through, and then I want to dive into just some of the kind of, let's say, more interesting topics of woke Christianity.
00:01:52.000Especially the statement of Trump is really being a defender of Western civilization.
00:01:58.000And we know Christianity is a central part of that.
00:02:01.000And so, man, I'm just so encouraged by what you're doing through Turning Point and really was encouraged by your speech.
00:02:07.000So me, I'm a New York City lawyer pastor.
00:02:10.000I pastored for, I was in ministry for about 10 years before I went to law school.
00:02:15.000And I have a law practice here in the Trump building on Wall Street.
00:02:18.000And I have a church just a few blocks away, a church plant that is just a couple of years new.
00:02:25.000And so we've been living this life that is both engaged in culture and also engaged in faith and attempting to bring our faith into culture in a significant way, which is why thematically our church is called King's Church, because we believe that we don't just have a priestly role like this Sunday morning, I'm praying, you know, I'm bowing.
00:02:44.000All those things are essential and important, but there's also a kingly role to engage in culture, to be salt and life as Jesus called us to and not hide our Christianity just in private because we know Christ was a public figure.
00:03:03.000And to bring all of those things and encourage people to do, to speak about that, like you've been really doing, frankly, over the last couple of years, really encouraging Christian.
00:03:11.000And I know me and a lot of my pastor friends have been emboldened by your encouragement, even over the past few months.
00:03:45.000The first way is let me just say that I just think it's honorable that you wouldn't call out churches specific or pastor specific, right?
00:03:53.000Because we have this kind of hierarchical thing in Christianity, where if you're not a pastor, you don't call out pastors.
00:03:58.000But we have the opposite in Galatians chapter 1, 2, 3, that Peter, excuse me, that Paul says to Peter, listen, I'm going to specifically call you out for publicly disparaging the truth.
00:04:11.000And actually, if you read the book of Galatians, what Paul is doing, he's saying, you're creating divisions in the body of Christ right now.
00:04:19.000You're saying there's this one caste, the Jewish people, and that's kind of the higher caste.
00:04:24.000That's what I see is happening with the Black Lives Matter movement: they're literally creating a new caste system.
00:04:31.000And there are certain acts that you do that are acts of penitence or acts of sanctification.
00:04:37.000They're symbolic acts that make you righteous according to a secular model, an educational model.
00:04:44.000And that's been picked up by all kinds of churches in New York City, Hillsong, and all of these kind of four-corner churches.
00:04:51.000And you have pastors like Carl Lentz literally saying that the church of Jesus Christ is one of the greatest propagators of racism in the United States.
00:05:06.000But when you're publicly saying that the church of Jesus Christ is one of the greatest propagators of racism, it's just fundamentally flawed.
00:05:13.000I mean, it is the church that instigated the abolition movement.
00:05:17.000It is the church that is the reconciliation factor of the world.
00:05:21.000And this is the kind of craziness that Paul was going, really, if you read Galatians, ballistic about, because he was seeing this massive division in the body of Christ.
00:05:31.000So, yeah, I mean, listen, destruction of the nuclear family, right?
00:05:36.000Pro, all of sexual progressivism, really anti-West.
00:05:41.000How can any of those precepts be pro-Christianity?
00:05:59.000So I just call out these pastors that, and I don't want to say I know what drives them, but I can suspect some of them, they're part of this whole kind of feel-good Christianity, kind of comfortable Christianity kind of posture.
00:06:11.000And I want to applaud you for standing out against this.
00:06:14.000And I know there's a cost to that, but you'll be rewarded ritually and otherwise, both now and in the future.
00:06:21.000But what I find to be really troubling is how theologically just baseless it is to even focus.
00:06:29.000First of all, the church has been the ambassador for goodness and the creator of Western civilization, the idea of e pluribus unum, liberty, who is the liberty giver, God, Christ.
00:06:38.000The entire civilization we live in that has been created around the idea of natural rights is from the Bible.
00:06:43.000And so for a pastor to say something like that is just so incredibly pathologically untrue.
00:06:48.000It's hard to even be able to have that as a starting point.
00:06:52.000Additionally, where exactly I want to find the scripture and the verse that they think that we should start valuing people based on the color of their skin, which is exactly the opening argument of BLM, is that skin color matters more than action, worldview, values, or any sort of spiritual, let's say, spiritual viewpoint.
00:08:07.000So fundamentally, they're saying we're actually called to regard you not according to the spirit, but according not to a current sin, but a sin that is 150 years down the line.
00:08:18.000And I don't know about you, but my pet grandparents came here.
00:08:21.000My grandfather was a cop and a B cop in New York City.
00:08:24.000They came here after the Civil War, right?
00:08:28.000Yeah, well, and here's why it's even more troubling.
00:08:30.000And again, this doesn't make me a good person.
00:08:32.000I want to be very clear, but this idea of institutional sin is awful, but it's also just so imprecise.
00:08:37.000My family, and again, I'm not saying this as like, oh, I'm such a good person because of it, because I'm a different individual of it, but my family fought in the American Civil War on the union side.
00:08:45.000So what kind of racism, intergenerational racist sin, am I supposed to be burdening?
00:08:51.000By the way, I say this as saying that does not necessarily give me a free pass to all of a sudden say, I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do.
00:08:58.000No, every individual is their own vessel in the eyes of God, right?
00:09:02.000This idea of intergenerational sin is against everything the Christian doctrine stands for, right?
00:09:10.000And it's interesting because Christ said this.
00:09:14.000His teaching will turn father against son, right?
00:09:58.000Yeah, listen, there's a scripture in the Old Testament that says, in the new covenant, it's a prophecy referring to our now state in Christ in Christendom.
00:10:06.000The fathers who eat sour grapes, their sons' teeth shall not be set on edge.
00:10:12.000Now, if you grew up in the country like I did and you ate like a sour piece of fruit or, you know, you've had done it before, there's that like gritty edge, weird teeth that you think and you get it under your teeth.
00:10:22.000The prophecy about the new covenant that we live in is literally the opposite of this systemic racism thing that you live under the blanket of racism.
00:10:32.000And it's not just Hillsong, it's the evangelical church is getting these marching orders from people that have separated themselves from the scripture and taken on this new ideology.
00:10:45.000I was watching this video by this lady, Dr. Anita Phillips, and she said, you know, I tried to figure out Black Lives Matter plus evangelicalism.
00:11:07.000I discovered that there were these Nordic tribes and there was this God that made them and now he judges them.
00:11:13.000And that's why Christians or white Christians are so judgmental.
00:11:16.000And then I discovered this African tribe and the God came down and lived with the African people and gave them all of the things they need and he was communally with them.
00:11:27.000Then this is how I discovered why black people understand Black Lives Matter and white people are so judgmental.
00:11:34.000This lady, Dr. Anita Phillips, that Christine Kane, who frankly is one of the most popular female speakers in evangelicalism, hosted, there was a ton of people in my church.
00:11:43.000Listen, my own mom called me and she was like, I'm really confused by this.
00:11:47.000So I listened to the hour and a half message, and it's not until an hour and 10 in, Charlie, that she says the answer was to step away from the scripture.
00:11:57.000Look, our epistemology is founded in the scripture.
00:12:01.000Our ontology, our literal being is founded in the scripture.
00:12:04.000We don't find it from academia, besides the fact how incredibly shallow it is to say, I took the thousand, you know, polyatheistic religions and I decided that this one, that's listen, it's communism.
00:12:17.000The God that comes down, lives with you communally, and then just gives you everything you need.
00:12:21.000How is that not just communism wrapped up in some kind of strange pseudo-religion?
00:12:27.000If you go extra scriptural to try to find religious or spiritual meaning, you inevitably will go in one of two ways.
00:12:33.000You'll be confused and you'll go in a state of chaos because scripture is order, scripture is truth, or you will then get into nihilism and hedonism, or then you will get into Marxism and communism, right?
00:12:45.000So, this individual that you mentioned, Dr. Phillips, you said, Ayana Phillips?
00:12:52.000I should probably know this, but yeah.
00:12:55.000Anyway, it's my world, so I know about her.
00:12:57.000I'm a happier person because I don't know who she is, but I know exactly the type of viewpoint that she espouses and that she expresses.
00:13:05.000The issue is, and you just hit it perfectly: bad theology leads to bad politics, right?
00:13:10.000And so, since she also, now she removes herself from theology in the Bible, like, well, I have so much of a greater understanding of Nordic versus African.
00:14:04.000But when that takes precedent over the way we think, which is the other half of how we live, that takes precedence.
00:14:12.000Then we literally go down the road of having been deceived by our senses.
00:14:16.000And we have a church, frankly, that's getting A pluses on sensory experiences, right?
00:14:22.000We're more focused on lights than we are on licentiousness.
00:14:26.000We're more focused on our biceps, frankly, than we are on the Bible.
00:14:29.000And so, when we have a church that's focused on that, we lose the mind.
00:14:33.000Acts, I think, 17, it says that the Bereans were incredibly noble because everything Paul taught them, they took it to the scripture to decide if it was true or not.
00:14:44.000Listen, most people don't even read their Bible, let alone check to see if their pastor, what he's saying, is true or not.
00:14:51.000So, in Galatians, you have this picture of a people that have turned towards acts of the flesh.
00:14:58.000They're hyper-focused on these symbolic acts, circumcision specifically.
00:15:04.000And the Judaizer saying, You guys need to do these symbolic acts of the flesh to prove that you are with us.
00:15:10.000And Paul's like, you've completely lost your theology.
00:15:13.000Oh, foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?
00:15:42.000But the point is when we throw out the mind and the brain and the ability to think, which is a gift from God, the reason I hate to jump this, jump to here, but the reason I hate the word woke is because it's wrong structurally.
00:16:54.000So can you help make sense for our Christian viewers right now, some of these pastors that are indifferent on these issues because they're afraid they're going to be called bad names?
00:17:02.000And I want you to get even deeper into kind of what you consider to be a continuity of the type of Christianity that has been diving into this.
00:17:10.000So it seems, you mentioned one church in particular.
00:17:28.000There's guys there that are incredible theologians.
00:17:31.000So you definitely don't want to discount a few groups.
00:17:33.000But can you maybe help me through this?
00:17:37.000Do you think it's the more, it's the churches that have the heavier emphasis on the spirit and the Pentecostal tradition that are more likely to get into this?
00:17:43.000Or do you think there's no correlation there?
00:17:45.000Well, so I've always found that truth lies in tension, right?
00:17:50.000So when I see people that are hyper-focused on experiences of, let's call them the body or sensual experiences, sensory experiences, there is absolutely every time a proclivity to throw out structure and order.
00:18:04.000But then I go to the guys that are ultra-structured and ultra-ordered.
00:18:08.000And then you're like, where's the life, guys?
00:18:10.000Like I'm blowing dust off the books because we're missing, we need to have both things living in tension, which makes it challenging because it says of Jesus that he's full of grace and full of truth.
00:18:22.000It doesn't say he's half grace and he's half truth, that he has this paradoxical fullness that we don't quite understand.
00:18:31.000But it challenges the guys that are on, like, I want to experience something.
00:18:59.000My encouragement is, guys, we have to draw a line somewhere.
00:19:03.000And when there's a new theology coming in saying that we are all racist, that we are all like that the church has been the primary propagator or one of the, let me be clear on my language, one of the primary propagators of racism in America.
00:19:17.000Guys, we got to stand up and say that's not true.
00:19:20.000You know, Charlie, I was telling one of your guys about a church split that I had in my church through all of this craziness.
00:19:27.000And it was in part because I refused to post the black square.
00:19:32.000I refused to say the magical language.
00:19:35.000Again, it's the exact same thing as Galatians chapter three.
00:19:38.000Symbolic acts to prove you are a part of the real community.
00:19:45.000You put the black square, you raise the fist.
00:19:47.000If not, you're a second-class citizen.
00:19:50.000You are a lower class than us, and you shouldn't be disparaged.
00:19:53.000Well, and Galatians 3 also says the law is a school teacher to Christ.
00:19:57.000And I love that because with what we're doing, we bring a lot of people to Christ through talking about political structures, through moral human action, not discounting the grace of Jesus Christ, but also not throwing out the law altogether, right?
00:20:13.000And if that is the case, it's and so theologically, do you think that some of these churches have no emphasis at all on the law, almost no Old Testament teaching at all, and just kind of only focus on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, maybe a little bit of Acts?
00:20:26.000Do you think there's something to that?
00:20:28.000Yeah, yeah, I think you're exactly right, Charlie.
00:20:47.000Like we don't need to care about that anymore because grace covers it.
00:20:50.000But if you follow that line of argument, it is antinomian because we are focused more upon this idea of salvation.
00:20:59.000Like I get people to say the prayer, my church gets bigger, but we don't deal with the law, which means we don't have a school teacher.
00:21:05.000So again, back to the point of Galatians, oh, you foolish Galatians, oh, you who are shallow in analysis because you've never been trained by the law how to behave.
00:21:47.000If you follow the Ten Commandments, you actually live a very rich and prosperous life.
00:21:54.000And that's, when I say it's less sweet, it's actually what happens when the salt loses its saltiness, right?
00:21:59.000And I think you can't understand the harmony of the gospels or the entire picture of what Christ was doing without understanding the Old Testament, without understanding when Christ was tried, it was Deuteronomy, if I'm not mistaken, he was referencing, right?
00:22:16.000And understanding the references to Daniel and the fulfilling of the prophecy.
00:22:21.000If you just focus myopically on Christ's life, burial, death, and resurrection, which we'd love, that is the most important thing.
00:22:29.000I actually don't think you get the entire picture.
00:22:32.000And I would make an argument, the churches that do that are far more likely than to kind of dive into this kind of humanistic political activism.
00:23:36.000So in a couple, we have a couple minutes remaining.
00:23:38.000Can you talk about a call to action for Christians that are uneasy about these topics and issues that are just being propagated by their pastors all across the country?
00:23:49.000Give them some theological confidence that they can articulate that the BLM Incorporated movement as it is today, right, which is a political insurgence movement that is about dividing people on skin color is actually against the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
00:24:30.000The resurrection was witnessed by 500 people, right?
00:24:33.000It's a public fact that cannot be hidden.
00:24:36.000So in the sense of what to do first is you have to lift your voice up.
00:24:40.000Like you have to stop being silenced by the pressure.
00:24:45.000When I open my Instagram account, when I look at my Twitter, the primary voices are, well, not from, but like on mainstream media are all be silence, listen what we have to say, say the flag, put up the black square.
00:24:57.000If you don't, there's something wrong with you.
00:24:59.000If Christians today would raise their voice and begin to say, I refuse for you to say that I'm a racist.
00:25:26.000And it says clearly, and I'm paraphrasing, and you know the scripture better than I do, neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, we are all free in Jesus Christ, right?
00:25:36.000And that was Paul writing saying like, guys, all these tribal lines somewhat irrelevant in the dominion of Christ, right?
00:25:43.000In the kingdom that he has established here.
00:25:45.000Because prior to Christ, everything was tribal.
00:26:32.000I love what you're doing and you're standing not just for political rightness, but for righteousness and honored to be able to be on the team.
00:26:52.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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