The Charlie Kirk Show - Biblical Justice vs Social Justice with Voddie Baucham and Eric Metaxas

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Sunday.

00:00:01.000 This is a conversation I had with Vodie Baccum, Eric Metaxas, at a Salem breakfast at a ridiculously early hour.

00:00:09.000 It was like 7:30 in the morning.

00:00:11.000 And this is one of the most fun conversations I've ever had about Black Lives Matter, the Bible, critical race theory, and wokeism.

00:00:21.000 And we got such unbelievable response, everybody, that we had to air it as a podcast. 0.77

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00:02:15.000 Vodie Bockam, Eric Metaxas, and more, buckle up.

00:02:19.000 Here we go.

00:02:20.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:02:22.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

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00:02:40.000 Turning point USA.

00:02:42.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

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00:02:54.000 Gentlemen, welcome to the panel.

00:02:55.000 Thank you for being here.

00:02:57.000 And let's dive in.

00:02:58.000 We're talking about biblical justice and social justice.

00:03:02.000 And to kick it off, I want to ask you about your personal engagement with these subjects.

00:03:07.000 But first, Vodi, if you could give us a working definition of each, of the distinction between social justice and biblical justice.

00:03:18.000 Social justice is distributive justice.

00:03:21.000 It's redistributive justice.

00:03:23.000 It's based on the idea of equity, not equality, but equity, equal outcomes.

00:03:29.000 So social justice is about distributing resources within a given community, culture, whatever, so that the various groups within that culture don't have disparate outcomes.

00:03:44.000 Biblical justice, on the other hand, is about applying the righteous standard of God equally to all people in all circumstances.

00:03:55.000 Thank you.

00:03:56.000 Thank you.

00:03:57.000 That's very helpful.

00:03:58.000 They use a lot of the same terms, those who promote social justice, and yet there are distinct differences.

00:04:04.000 Charlie, when did you first see these issues cropping up on campuses among younger folks or whoever in the culture and start to realize we need to make some distinctions here?

00:04:16.000 Yeah, thank you, and honor to be here, and thank you to Salem.

00:04:18.000 We've had a fun couple months working together, and we're going to have a lot more.

00:04:22.000 So, Phil and Dave and the whole Salem team, it's been great.

00:04:25.000 I also want to say, Vodi, you're our secret weapon, man.

00:04:28.000 I'm telling you, we need you in front of millions and millions and more people.

00:04:31.000 We're going to make sure that happens.

00:04:33.000 It's so important what you're doing.

00:04:38.000 Super quick, I started, as soon as I got involved with the campuses, I realized this idea of social justice is the religion of most of secular America.

00:04:47.000 And the most succinct way I think I can describe it is social justice is always changing, and biblical justice never changes.

00:04:56.000 And it's one of the world and one of the word.

00:04:59.000 It's completely different.

00:05:01.000 And social justice will always lead you to an arc and a bend of totalitarianism because there is no root, there is no anchor, there is no unchanging truth that guides you.

00:05:14.000 Therefore, it's completely and totally relativistic based on the communicators, passions, the needs, wants, and desires of the audience, or even worse, how treacherous or deceitful the people that are using whatever power they have to try to enforce that social justice.

00:05:31.000 This is a tricky subject for a lot of Christians, and it's very front and center in the church because they use our desire and our heart and our yearning to help the less fortunate as a way to try and overtake power structures to then actually deconstruct the sort of civilization that we know.

00:05:49.000 And they're using it through kind of the most vulnerable way imaginable, which is Americans' inability to understand or communicate about race.

00:06:00.000 And this is where Vodi comes in in such a helpful way.

00:06:03.000 We've all talked about this, and they use the most effective tool imaginable, which is they call you a racist and they think you're going to shut up.

00:06:09.000 And so, I'll stop there, but that's kind of where I started encountering.

00:06:13.000 That's very important that we'll come back to that theme of how the card that is really dropped on the table is that of racist, if you even dare oppose critical race theory, wokeness, intersectionality.

00:06:23.000 Eric, how did you start to see these issues, these subjects, crop up?

00:06:28.000 When did this first catch your attention?

00:06:31.000 Well, probably when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1980s.

00:06:38.000 Oh, I know I look young, but I was there.

00:06:40.000 And the fact is that I grew up in a working-class home in Danbury, Connecticut.

00:06:46.000 My mom and dad are European immigrants.

00:06:49.000 My mom came from Germany, which became East Germany.

00:06:53.000 So she was under Stalinist communism and was so grieved by it that she escaped East Germany at age 17.

00:07:04.000 My father was in Greece when the communists tried to take over that country following World War II.

00:07:09.000 So my parents, without even trying very hard, raised me to hate communism and understand it is evil.

00:07:18.000 So when I got to Yale, I was astonished suddenly to be around the cultural elites who were basically anti-American, anti-Christian.

00:07:31.000 And it's when I first began smelling this stuff.

00:07:33.000 But I was too young and naive to really understand how bad it was.

00:07:40.000 And in my book, which was flashed on the screen, published by Salem Books, because they'll publish anything.

00:07:48.000 I have to say that's only half a joke because a lot of other people won't publish some good stuff.

00:07:56.000 And that redounds to the benefit of Salem.

00:07:59.000 Praise the Lord.

00:08:00.000 Thank you for your courage in publishing truth when a lot of people are cowards.

00:08:06.000 But I guess I first noticed it then.

00:08:10.000 And it's the same thing.

00:08:11.000 We understand what it is.

00:08:12.000 It's cultural Marxism.

00:08:15.000 And if we want to just really go even be more clear, if we want to distill it, it is an anti-biblical, anti-God worldview.

00:08:28.000 Social justice is just one excrescence, you know, one blister.

00:08:34.000 It is just another way of expressing the same kind of thing.

00:08:40.000 It's a deep philosophy.

00:08:41.000 As Charlie said, it is a religion. 0.95

00:08:43.000 It is evil. 0.79

00:08:44.000 And like all things evil, they don't say, hey, we're evil.

00:08:47.000 You know, Hitler didn't say, oh, I'm Satan's man.

00:08:50.000 Follow me. 0.94

00:08:52.000 They have to borrow from the truth.

00:08:55.000 They have to cannibalize reality since the devil can't create.

00:08:58.000 And they have nothing but the ability to twist the truth.

00:09:04.000 So even the term social justice, let's face it, it's right out of 1984.

00:09:10.000 It's a way to take something that sounds good.

00:09:13.000 And there's no way that they can do anything other than that.

00:09:18.000 And it works.

00:09:19.000 And it's our job to make sure that people understand what is happening.

00:09:25.000 It's really a Marxist vision of seeing people in either the oppressor or oppressed category.

00:09:30.000 Marx, of course, is economic in his focus.

00:09:33.000 Today, the focus is racial. 0.86

00:09:35.000 So if you have white skin, you're an oppressor. 0.52

00:09:38.000 If you don't have white skin or benefit from the system of whiteness, then you're oppressed. 0.71

00:09:43.000 And as you alluded to, this has been seen in numerous countries over the years. 0.64

00:09:48.000 Vodi, when did you first start seeing this crop up and start engaging it?

00:09:48.000 It's not new.

00:09:53.000 I started really talking about these things, I guess, in 2004, 2005.

00:10:00.000 I became aware really of the influence of Gramscian Marxism and the Frankfurt School.

00:10:08.000 And, you know, during that time, 04, 05, 06, you know, people kind of looked at you and crossed their eyes when you mentioned these kinds of things.

00:10:18.000 But then in 2008, during the election, when Obama's penchant toward Marxism, you know, became public, people started to pay a little more attention by then.

00:10:34.000 And now, this is just more of a progression of the influence of those same ideologies, but just with different manifestations.

00:10:43.000 And I would also say that, you know, this oppressor-oppressed paradigm, it's not just about black and white.

00:10:50.000 In America, it's about black and white.

00:10:52.000 But having lived as an expat for the last six years overseas, when you look at this globally, whereas in America, the oppressor is white people, white males, also white male Christians, but globally, the oppressor is America.

00:11:10.000 And so internationally, people, you know, here you say to a white person, you need to check your privilege globally.

00:11:18.000 And internationally, people say to America, you need to check your privilege.

00:11:22.000 And what's going on at the border has a lot to do with that as well, because this is about these people who need to check their privilege, America, lowering their borders so that we can redistribute among people who haven't had the privilege to be here.

00:11:41.000 That's important.

00:11:42.000 What do you three see as the ultimate vision of social justice?

00:11:46.000 I find it rather fuzzy in a lot of places, and yet I think there is a vision behind all this movement.

00:11:53.000 How would you point us?

00:11:55.000 I think there's probably three different ways you can answer that.

00:11:59.000 And they all agree on the problem, the diagnosis, and the revolution.

00:12:03.000 This is the question I get all the time.

00:12:04.000 Charlie, what do these people want?

00:12:06.000 And the first category are people that actually think they're going to usher in a utopia. 1.00

00:12:10.000 These are the useful idiots. 1.00

00:12:12.000 These are your typical college students. 1.00

00:12:14.000 They really believe that there's a way to eradicate private property.

00:12:17.000 And this is what really has frustrated me with the church.

00:12:20.000 This whole thing centers on who are we as human beings?

00:12:24.000 Are we nothing more than a collection of randomness or cells?

00:12:27.000 Or are we the speaking beings, as Aristotle would say?

00:12:30.000 Are we made of the image of God?

00:12:31.000 And are we broken by nature?

00:12:33.000 We need Christ to save us.

00:12:34.000 That's a really important argument when you try to design a political system.

00:12:37.000 When you try to design a political system and you understand that human beings are naturally likely to sin, then you're going to create a system that hopefully doesn't allow them to collectivize that sin and then destroy the kind of vocal minority, which is what the Founding Fathers did.

00:12:51.000 They think that any problem in the world is because of the system, not because of human beings.

00:12:55.000 That's a really important point.

00:12:57.000 If you go and ask a college class, do you think human beings are naturally good or naturally bad?

00:13:02.000 They think human beings are naturally good.

00:13:04.000 That's where this whole kind of argument centers.

00:13:06.000 So that's number one.

00:13:07.000 It's the utopian types.

00:13:08.000 Number two are the folks that, quite honestly, are nihilists.

00:13:12.000 This is Nietzsche in its fullest possible and brightest colors.

00:13:16.000 They are driven not by an end result, but instead by the passion and the enjoyment of watching systems burn down to the ground.

00:13:23.000 This is something that is more prevalent than you might ever possibly imagine, especially amongst young people that are 18, 19, and 20 years old that have been taught that there is no beauty, there is no truth, there is no goodness, there is no wonder.

00:13:35.000 So all there is is you that can possibly try to bring down the world down around you.

00:13:39.000 This is best personified in a 15-second clip in one of the Batman movies where the Joker says some people just want to watch the world burn.

00:13:46.000 That's exactly right.

00:13:48.000 That is a portion of the activist base.

00:13:50.000 The third part is honestly the most scary, and this is where this is heading, which is the bend towards totalitarianism.

00:13:56.000 What happens when you have these massive movements is eventually they're going to splinter, they're going to fight, there will be chaos, there'll be disorder, and then a sociopathic narcissist is going to be able to charm them to give all of that collective power to one person or a small group of people, and then we're going to live under that form of totalitarianism or tyranny.

00:14:13.000 This almost always leads to a smaller and smaller group of people controlling more, where the people that thought they were actually going to have the power end up not having the power.

00:14:21.000 And so I think it's somewhat useful to talk about those three different things, but they won't even be able to agree that amongst themselves.

00:14:29.000 What they can agree, though, is what currently generally exists is a cancer and a poison.

00:14:35.000 And what they want to do is they want to put forward a chemotherapy type of shock and awe blitzkrieg on the American Republic and on Christianity. 0.68

00:14:45.000 And they don't care the cost. 0.86

00:14:46.000 They just want it gone.

00:14:48.000 And what comes next, they'll figure out once we are no longer in power.

00:14:51.000 Because that's all they say is true.

00:14:57.000 What?

00:15:00.000 Does that make any sense?

00:15:00.000 I'm sorry, what?

00:15:02.000 Oh, it made some sense.

00:15:04.000 Thanks, Eric.

00:15:05.000 You know, honestly, I forgot the question.

00:15:08.000 What was the question?

00:15:10.000 The question is, whose idea was it to do a 7 a.m. breakfast?

00:15:14.000 And why is he still among the living?

00:15:18.000 The question is, Phil, was it you, Phil?

00:15:21.000 Who has the best blazer up here?

00:15:25.000 I think Vodi.

00:15:26.000 I think there's no question about it.

00:15:27.000 There's no question about it.

00:15:29.000 These rock people are so.

00:15:33.000 I'm not kidding.

00:15:34.000 I don't remember the question.

00:15:36.000 The question is, where is this all headed?

00:15:41.000 I'm sorry.

00:15:42.000 I do remember the question.

00:15:44.000 You know, it's important for us to understand, and this is what we're talking about here, what this is.

00:15:50.000 What this is.

00:15:51.000 You know, we have to kind of cut to the chase.

00:15:54.000 is this?

00:15:55.000 It is a view utterly antithetical to scripture.

00:15:58.000 And we've seen it since the garden.

00:16:02.000 And you've seen it in the French Revolution. 0.83

00:16:06.000 We saw it at the Tower of Babel. 0.66

00:16:09.000 When men try to exalt themselves above God or when they try to reach God in their own strength, it is a satanic project.

00:16:20.000 Buckley always quoted somebody talking about imminentizing the eschaton.

00:16:25.000 I want heaven now.

00:16:27.000 I don't want to go through the cross. 1.00

00:16:29.000 That's stupid. 1.00

00:16:30.000 I can do it. 1.00

00:16:31.000 Let's do it.

00:16:33.000 It is designed by reality itself, which God created to fail.

00:16:37.000 It cannot succeed.

00:16:39.000 But because we're living in a fallen and broken universe, we are designed to do this in our brokenness.

00:16:46.000 And apart from Jesus, this is what people do, right?

00:16:48.000 People talk about what do sinners do?

00:16:50.000 They sin.

00:16:51.000 That's what they do.

00:16:52.000 And you can't really blame them.

00:16:54.000 Apart from God's grace, that's what we do.

00:16:56.000 And so it's only because God has inserted himself into history that we have the ability at times to do other things.

00:17:04.000 And the United States of America is the time when in the history of the universe, human beings were able to take a biblical worldview and say, oh, yes, we are fallen.

00:17:15.000 So we need as many checks and balances as we can.

00:17:17.000 We don't want power to be centralized at all.

00:17:20.000 And they set that up.

00:17:21.000 And then they said, and yet, because we believe that with God we are capable of great things, we will have this free market of ideas, economic free market.

00:17:33.000 And if we can keep it, if we can keep the republic, that will flourish.

00:17:39.000 But apart from God, it won't flourish.

00:17:40.000 So what we're seeing, of course, is just another version of the anti-God philosophy.

00:17:46.000 But if you look back in my Bonhoeffer book, at one point, I talk about a place called Bielefeld, which was really a ministry place where people were ministering to handicapped people and schizophrenics and all kinds of people that the Nazis would say should be terminated.

00:18:05.000 And at the end of the day, you get those two views.

00:18:08.000 One says it's Nietzsche, it is satanic.

00:18:12.000 It says that if you can't produce, if you can't do what we need you to do, you're worthless.

00:18:17.000 You have no intrinsic value.

00:18:19.000 God doesn't exist.

00:18:20.000 Therefore, you're not sacred.

00:18:21.000 You're not made in his image.

00:18:23.000 And that's basically it.

00:18:26.000 And you see that more and more.

00:18:27.000 And obviously, to the extent that people can sell that, they will sell it.

00:18:33.000 And there are times in culture when the Christian faith is strong or when there are other forces that are partaking of the good, the true, and the beautiful, that they're strong.

00:18:44.000 And you're not able to get away with that.

00:18:45.000 So in America, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you could only say so much.

00:18:49.000 But as those forces wane, these forces come out of the closet.

00:18:54.000 And just as Hitler was able to say things in 39 and 40 that he wouldn't dare say in 34, you're seeing people say increasingly absurd things. 0.98

00:19:03.000 And so when you talk about what is the goal, I think it is really clear that some people, yeah, they're stupid enough to think you could build a utopia. 0.96

00:19:12.000 Other people don't care. 0.99

00:19:13.000 They want to burn it all down.

00:19:14.000 But the bottom line is we know where it goes. 0.81

00:19:18.000 Where it goes ultimately is to the death camps. 0.99

00:19:22.000 Those who disagree with the satanic power have to be destroyed.

00:19:28.000 They have no intrinsic value.

00:19:30.000 And so it's really like everybody's taking a ride on the zeitgeist. 0.51

00:19:34.000 And if you're not willing to go wherever that's going to take you, you need to die.

00:19:38.000 You know, you're just using up fuel.

00:19:40.000 And so we do need to understand it really boils down to two views.

00:19:45.000 There's the kingdom of God and there's this stuff. 0.92

00:19:48.000 And I think we need to understand that the people who are foolish enough or lost enough to be going along with that, you know, they're destroying themselves. 0.88

00:20:00.000 And so I think it's really tempting to think of them as enemies. 0.93

00:20:04.000 The enemy is the enemy, because this really is a satanic project.

00:20:08.000 And we have to be very clear that the two views have increasingly have become clear.

00:20:17.000 Thank you.

00:20:18.000 It strikes me in the context of Christianity, the church, that especially among my generation and younger, the phrase neither left nor right has become very popular when it comes to third way.

00:20:34.000 It's become very popular in evangelical circles to describe basically our political philosophy.

00:20:40.000 We're about Jesus, as indeed all three of us are.

00:20:44.000 So that's good in my view.

00:20:46.000 And yet this, oh, we're not of the left and we're not of the right, we just sort of keep our hands clean.

00:20:53.000 There's no mud on our boots in the public square, and there's not supposed to be.

00:20:57.000 Keep them lily white and pristine.

00:21:00.000 And I think that has had a real effect with regard to what... 0.82

00:21:02.000 Why's got to be white, man? 0.84

00:21:05.000 We can't have black boots or brown boots.

00:21:08.000 Or we got to have white boots, man.

00:21:10.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.97

00:21:11.000 Racial, man.

00:21:12.000 Yeah, what he said. 1.00

00:21:14.000 I was actually mocking them.

00:21:16.000 I was trying to make fun of their white boots, but we are in Texas, so there's lots of boots.

00:21:23.000 This neither left nor right philosophy, though, I think it's deadly.

00:21:28.000 And I think it causes, especially younger people, to think, I don't need to even get my hands dirty at all in the public square.

00:21:35.000 What would you men say in response to that kind of line?

00:21:39.000 I think one of the things that drives young people to that is their unwillingness to be confrontational.

00:21:45.000 I've often said, you know, there is an 11th commandment, and the 11th commandment is thou shalt be nice.

00:21:50.000 And we don't believe the other 10.

00:21:53.000 And what these people are trying to do is avoid having to confront ideas that oppose them and to avoid debate.

00:22:06.000 I mean, like real debate and real disagreement and discussion.

00:22:12.000 We recoil from that.

00:22:12.000 We don't want that.

00:22:14.000 And one of the ways that you get around that is to not believe anything, to not stand for anything, just to say, I'm not that and I'm not that, right?

00:22:25.000 Because if I'm one of those things, then I'll have to suffer the slings and arrows that come from the other side.

00:22:32.000 And I don't want to be about combat.

00:22:35.000 I don't want to be about confrontation, which is one of the reasons that we hate masculinity.

00:22:42.000 There is a war on masculinity right now.

00:22:46.000 And all of it boils down to this same issue of thou shalt be nice.

00:22:52.000 And we don't think masculinity is nice.

00:22:57.000 Yeah, the third way, in the Christian circles, it's really puzzling to me.

00:23:03.000 So obviously I spend most of my time in the political world as a Christian, and I'm starting to do more and more things in the Christian world, spoke at over 70 churches in the last year. 1.00

00:23:12.000 I'm really shocked at how many young Christians, how weak they are. 1.00

00:23:17.000 And just they have very little direction or purpose. 1.00

00:23:21.000 They don't want to have any sort of confrontational conversations.

00:23:24.000 It says in Isaiah 1, let us reason together.

00:23:27.000 But if you go back to the ancient Hebrew, it's let us debate together.

00:23:30.000 Let's talk about this stuff.

00:23:31.000 Let's show me your ideas.

00:23:33.000 Well, I want the third way.

00:23:35.000 So you're trying to say you don't take stances on moral issues? 0.61

00:23:38.000 Is that the new position of the skinny gene Christianity?

00:23:42.000 Offense Eric, because those are the most script.

00:23:44.000 So um, is it?

00:23:49.000 Yeah, you'll get me back, I know, I guess.

00:23:54.000 And so look, Christ was a hundred percent grace and a hundred percent truth, and if, all of a sudden, we're not going to be clear about what the scriptures tell us and how to govern ourselves and how to live, then it really gets back to the true problem, which is watered down theology, And that is really what's going on here.

00:24:13.000 And I've had the opportunity to dig into this a fair amount.

00:24:18.000 I'm by no means an expert. 0.92

00:24:19.000 But when it comes down to a lot of these Christians, if you really get down to it, all of a sudden they'll say, oh, yeah, it's an allegory. 0.99

00:24:26.000 Ah, okay.

00:24:28.000 So it's not the word of God.

00:24:30.000 It's a suggestion manual or it's a place of good stories.

00:24:35.000 Now I get where we're coming from here.

00:24:37.000 This is not the authority.

00:24:39.000 It's part of your bibliography of your worldview.

00:24:42.000 It really comes down to what is the Bible?

00:24:45.000 Is the Bible a book that is of comparable moral claim as Aristotle's ethics or Robin DiAngelo's white fragility?

00:24:53.000 Or is it the word of God?

00:24:54.000 Is it something that it says in 1 Peter that was given to us divinely that we must pour into and it has an imprint on our heart?

00:25:01.000 That's really what's going on here.

00:25:03.000 And if we're having a political discussion and they say they want the third way, then they're picking and choosing from the Bible like a buffet line that makes them feel good, that actually doesn't say true things about our faith and about what we're supposed to do as Christians.

00:25:19.000 Part of the reason that this is happening is because this is always, it goes down to bad theology, right?

00:25:28.000 Mega church pastors or whoever out there over focused on evangelism. 1.00

00:25:36.000 Now, it's bad to under focus on evangelism, but if you act as though getting people saved is the only thing we're here on earth to do, you're an idiot. 1.00

00:25:43.000 You're not reading the scripture. 0.98

00:25:45.000 The fact of the matter is that if you over focus on evangelism, what happens is you make people think, I cannot say anything ever unless it might help lead somebody to faith.

00:25:55.000 And if I say anything controversial or that they might disagree with, that's bad for the witness.

00:26:02.000 And I was hamstrung in that position for years myself.

00:26:06.000 I just thought, I've got to be careful.

00:26:08.000 I don't want to be political because it's all about, you know, getting them safe, getting them safe, getting them safe.

00:26:12.000 Well, at the end of the day, you have to trust truth.

00:26:15.000 And you have to trust that if I speak the truth, I am speaking God. 0.99

00:26:20.000 And I think we all have to understand, we've all seen idiots who drive people away from Jesus. 1.00

00:26:27.000 And I'm looking at you, Jack Graham. 1.00

00:26:31.000 So that's my love language.

00:26:33.000 Now he knows that I love him more than any of you.

00:26:36.000 But we've all seen that.

00:26:39.000 And so the left and the culture lifts this up as a boogeyman that, oh, you don't want to be that guy who's driving people away.

00:26:47.000 He's the religious fanatic, right?

00:26:49.000 Well, now we have the opposite thing.

00:26:51.000 The guy who's so nice, who he's afraid to talk about truth.

00:26:56.000 And in America, this is a particularly American issue.

00:27:00.000 Bonhoeffer, when he came to America in 1930, was kind of scandalized how everybody at Union Theological Seminary, which was woke 90 years ago, that everybody wanted to get along and get along.

00:27:13.000 And he was like, well, what about truth?

00:27:14.000 Because the Germans, you know, they don't have a problem with that.

00:27:17.000 But Americans, we want to be nice.

00:27:19.000 We want to be nice.

00:27:19.000 So every culture is uniquely blessed by God, but every culture has unique issues and possibilities of going wrong.

00:27:29.000 And our problem, Anerica, is this wanting to be nice.

00:27:32.000 And so when you wrap that together with this desire to get everybody saved, you tell people, don't get into politics, don't get into this, don't get into that.

00:27:41.000 And it's the same old thing.

00:27:42.000 Look, Wilberforce heard this, okay? 0.65

00:27:44.000 Wilberforce said, slavery is an abomination from the pit of hell.

00:27:50.000 And it is my duty as a human being and as a believer to talk about it.

00:27:54.000 And many people said to him, keep your faith private, okay?

00:27:58.000 So they didn't even like him.

00:28:00.000 But the point is, anytime these truth claims come up, it's divisive.

00:28:04.000 It's this, it's that. 0.60

00:28:06.000 But if you are an African slave, what would you want the Christians to talk about? 0.59

00:28:12.000 Would you want them to talk that slavery is bad? 0.85

00:28:15.000 Yes. 0.99

00:28:16.000 You would say, if you're any kind of a Christian, you better talk about that. 0.85

00:28:21.000 You better, if you're a Jew in a boxcar going to Treblinka, you're thinking, I hope there's some Christians out there who'll be combative and speak out against the Nazi worldview. 0.89

00:28:30.000 But there were Germans, Christians in Germany saying it's only about evangelism.

00:28:38.000 We don't want to bring up that divisive stuff.

00:28:40.000 Romans 13, Hitler is appointed by God.

00:28:43.000 Even if he's doing bad stuff, we can't speak against it. 0.84

00:28:46.000 There's just a concatenation of confusing ideas all building up into wherever you are in a given culture.

00:28:55.000 But we have had plenty of warnings before.

00:28:57.000 We've seen it before when Christians say, I don't want to be divisive.

00:29:01.000 And I'm going to tell you, a lot of good German Christians said that.

00:29:04.000 And they said, if we talk about this, we talk about that, it'll dampen our witness.

00:29:09.000 Well, my attitude is your witness can go to hell and your fake evangelism to a fake gospel can go to hell.

00:29:15.000 If you are not willing to stick up for the unborn or truth or whatever it is, your Christianity is worthless to the people you claim to want to lead, and you're the blind leading the blind.

00:29:27.000 And the church needs to understand it's not a choice between do I want to lead people to Jesus or do I want to talk about truth.

00:29:33.000 If you don't understand those two things are one, you know, you're already lost.

00:29:37.000 Amen.

00:29:42.000 And, you know, I would just say to bring these things together, this is about a poor theology because you have a problem with divisiveness if you believe that unity depends on us, if you believe that we have to do the work of reconciling us to one another.

00:30:04.000 And so one of the things is we're not holding those two halves of Ephesians 2 together.

00:30:09.000 That first half where Christ, through his death on the cross, right, reconciles us with God, reconciles lost, dead sinners to God.

00:30:18.000 But in the second half, he reconciles lost, dead sinners to one another.

00:30:24.000 The cross reconciles us vertically, vertically, and horizontally.

00:30:28.000 And what many Christians believe is, sure, the cross may reconcile us to God, but it is insufficient to reconcile us to one another.

00:30:36.000 So we have to make sure that we don't mess that up.

00:30:39.000 When the fact of the matter is, you can't, if you believe you can mess up what Christ accomplished on the cross, then you don't believe Christ accomplished it on the cross.

00:30:53.000 And that's one of the main differences between biblical justice and social justice.

00:30:57.000 You look to the justice of the cross to find divine justice and divine mercy flowing out of that.

00:31:03.000 But there's no such grace, mercy.

00:31:05.000 There's no mercy in social justice.

00:31:08.000 There's no love, really, in social justice.

00:31:11.000 I want to switch tracks, though, here.

00:31:12.000 In your book, Fault Lines, my book, Christianity Awokeness, we both talk about intersectionality, which is the idea basically that the interests of...

00:31:21.000 Is it, by the way, is there a new rule now that the two of us can't be in the same place at the same time after this?

00:31:29.000 Since we've, yeah.

00:31:32.000 It's a dangerous proposition.

00:31:34.000 So intersectionality is the idea that the interests of underprivileged groups intersect. 1.00

00:31:41.000 So women have been kept down by men. 0.71

00:31:44.000 Sexual minorities have been kept down by straight people. 0.84

00:31:48.000 Disabled people have been deprivileged by able-bodied people, et cetera, and so on. 0.98

00:31:54.000 And foreigners by the native-born. 0.94

00:31:56.000 Foreigners by the native-born non-Christians by Christians.

00:31:59.000 It's very important for people to understand that in the world of critical social justice, it's not just the white person that's the problem or the white male that's the problem. 0.59

00:32:09.000 It's the white male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, native-born.

00:32:13.000 And if you keep going down the list, you get to Christian. 0.73

00:32:17.000 And if you read the literature, the critical social justice literature, ultimately you realize that Christianity is seen as an oppressive, hegemonic power. 0.66

00:32:30.000 So one of those intersections where people pile up their oppression is if they are not Christian or if they are not orthodox in their Christianity as well. 0.78

00:32:42.000 That's exactly right.

00:32:43.000 So let's go to the LGBT project and its advancement just for a minute here, Vodi.

00:32:51.000 We've heard in recent years that sexual minorities need to be elevated and platformed.

00:32:58.000 They've been oppressed.

00:33:01.000 Even in the Southern Baptist Convention now, this isn't exactly the same thing.

00:33:06.000 But we've heard two consecutive presidents of the SBC, J.D. Greer and Ed Lytton, say basically that scripture whispers about sexual sin, which I think is tied into this whole embrace and softening around this issue.

00:33:22.000 I'd love to hear you respond to the claim, scripture whispers about sexual sin.

00:33:29.000 What would you say to that?

00:33:31.000 First of all, that's a lie.

00:33:34.000 But secondly, even if it was true, we need to think about it like I used to think about my mama.

00:33:40.000 I could be out playing with my friends in the street, and if I thought I heard my mama whisper my name, I'd go home just to make sure, right?

00:33:55.000 So even if it was true that God whispers about that, listen to the whisper.

00:34:03.000 But that's not what they mean.

00:34:05.000 When they say this, what they're trying to say is that God doesn't speak to this at all.

00:34:11.000 Because even if you believe he speaks to it in a whisper, that should be enough.

00:34:17.000 Amen.

00:34:18.000 Amen.

00:34:20.000 Eric and Charlie, I want to switch tracks to our children, the children.

00:34:26.000 They're being taught in public schools and colleges and universities basically to hate America because, as Vodhi talked about just a minute ago, America is a white supremacist, heteronormative, capitalist public order that is infested with sin, right?

00:34:43.000 In a structural way.

00:34:44.000 So what we saw with Antifa and BLM last summer, I don't think it was just being locked down in a terrible way.

00:34:51.000 I think it was also lots of people thinking they were doing something righteous in destroying this public order.

00:34:59.000 How should we think about our children and how they're being educated today to basically despise authority, the public order that God has made, and America itself?

00:35:12.000 Yeah, this is sort of the sweet spot of what we do every day at Turning Point.

00:35:17.000 And so to be as blunt as possible, if we don't radically change the way we do higher education in our country, we will not have a nation in 15 years.

00:35:27.000 Yeah, it's really that simple.

00:35:30.000 So we have way too many kids going to college, way too many, probably 50% too many.

00:35:36.000 We have a generation of young people that are...

00:35:38.000 Would you just back that one up?

00:35:41.000 Because I think some people didn't catch what you just said.

00:35:41.000 Yeah.

00:35:45.000 And it's incredibly important.

00:35:46.000 Okay.

00:35:48.000 Okay.

00:35:49.000 We have way too many people going to college in America.

00:35:53.000 Explain that.

00:35:54.000 So yeah, we have an entire industry designed towards trying to capture high school seniors, putting them through a debt cycle to borrow money that they don't have, obviously, because they're borrowing money, to study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist, to colleges that would otherwise go under and be financially bankrupt if it wasn't for the subsidy of the federal government.

00:36:18.000 Most of what they're studying, they don't even find jobs in those majors when they graduate.

00:36:22.000 By getting them in these environments that is basically the new Sodom and Gomorrah, where sexual degeneracy is platformed and glamorized, where dorm rooms of male and females are next to each other, where bad ideas are incubated and given a platform.

00:36:37.000 They are then exposed to evangelistic nihilism, anti-American thought, and we're supposed to believe this is some sort of rite of passage.

00:36:45.000 It's mostly and mainly, and then I'm going to offend most of the people in the room, it's mostly and mainly parents' fault because they have this idea that their kid needs to go to college because they don't want to tell their friends that their child's become a plumber and they don't want their kid to become a carpenter or work construction because that would be the worst thing, right?

00:37:02.000 They'd rather have their kid become a nihilistic, screwed up Marxist than actually have to go work HVAC for a living, right?

00:37:10.000 It's true.

00:37:12.000 And so because of that, we have this cycle of mainly tied together of this public pressure, this idea that you have to go to college to succeed.

00:37:21.000 And then let's talk about some of the numbers really quickly.

00:37:24.000 59% of kids that go to college graduate.

00:37:26.000 41% of the kids that go to college drop out.

00:37:28.000 41% of the kids that go to college drop out.

00:37:31.000 41%.

00:37:32.000 They exit with debt, a damaged self-esteem and confidence, very little to no direction, and they make perfect revolutionaries for the future because they're in this kind of financial purgatory.

00:37:43.000 Then the ones that do graduate, we send them to inner cities to go rent, not own.

00:37:48.000 When you don't own anything, you're far less likely to want to conserve anything.

00:37:52.000 And then we tell them, whatever you do, don't get married.

00:37:54.000 Don't have kids.

00:37:55.000 Go become a cog in the corporate machine.

00:37:57.000 And then they become early 30-something people earning $120,000 a year, not accumulating really any of that capital, by the way, because they're spending it, spending it, spending it on short-term gratification or rental expenses.

00:38:09.000 And we wonder why all of a sudden they want to uproot the entire system.

00:38:13.000 They have nothing they want to conserve.

00:38:14.000 They don't own anything.

00:38:16.000 They're not paying a principal of any mortgage.

00:38:17.000 They don't have kids.

00:38:18.000 They're not married.

00:38:19.000 And all of that originates at this one cultural institution that we have wrongly platformed in America, which is higher education.

00:38:26.000 There are some great colleges out there.

00:38:28.000 Hillsdale is one of them.

00:38:30.000 You know, Eric, you and I have done some work at Liberty.

00:38:32.000 There's some great schools. 0.57

00:38:32.000 They're in the vast 1% of 1% in the nation. 0.57

00:38:36.000 And so, and by the way, you want to talk about where this is at its worst?

00:38:42.000 Go to the seminaries across America.

00:38:44.000 Holy moly.

00:38:45.000 Go to Hope College.

00:38:46.000 Go to Wheaton.

00:38:47.000 And you want to see some of all these ideas being institutionalized to the pastors of tomorrow.

00:38:51.000 It is worse than ever before.

00:38:53.000 Calvin College, just to name a few.

00:38:55.000 And I see their critical race theory manuals.

00:38:57.000 I see what the pastors of tomorrow are being taught.

00:39:00.000 So I'm trying to radically and sometimes provocatively tell the body of Christ we have to rethink the way that we pass down our values to the next generation.

00:39:09.000 You don't need a certificate to succeed in America.

00:39:12.000 You don't need to say that you went to some college to be a good person.

00:39:14.000 I care about whether you're saved, whether you have character, and whether you want to do something in your life, not if you went to Harvard and if you want to do something like that.

00:39:24.000 Yeah, what was the question, Owen?

00:39:28.000 America is a white supremacist order.

00:39:31.000 Our youth are being told.

00:39:33.000 So how do we counter that idea?

00:39:36.000 Well, it's kind of funny because there's many ways to counter it.

00:39:38.000 The first thing you have to do is you have to loudly and forcefully say, that's a lie.

00:39:44.000 I think that oftentimes we rely too much on reason.

00:39:48.000 And sometimes you just have to kind of push people back and say, that is a lie.

00:39:52.000 And put the onus on them.

00:39:54.000 You could say, that's a lie.

00:39:55.000 That's a pernicious lie. 0.79

00:39:57.000 That's a satanic lie. 0.91

00:39:58.000 That is evil.

00:39:59.000 Don't say that again.

00:40:01.000 Explain to me how that is true.

00:40:03.000 And explain to me where you get the right even to say such a foul, untrue thing.

00:40:09.000 There are many reasons for this, but I didn't really understand this fully until I wrote a book called If You Can Keep It, The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.

00:40:19.000 And in it, I was forced myself to really see what I had kind of been missing over the decades.

00:40:27.000 And so, you know, I got the best miseducation you could get.

00:40:34.000 I went to Yale University, which is exactly where you would go to learn how the global anti-American elites think.

00:40:43.000 So I learned to speak that language.

00:40:45.000 I got those ideas in.

00:40:46.000 Then I became a Christian.

00:40:48.000 But it still took me a long time to get comfortable with what I now know to be true and to understand how dramatically over at least 50 years.

00:41:00.000 I mean, the 60s was the watershed moment when all of these evil ideas kind of bubbled into the public realm.

00:41:06.000 And of course, they've been bubbling.

00:41:07.000 And, you know, this is trickle-down evil, right?

00:41:10.000 This is cultural trickle-down theory where you see these ideas, you know, they're brought in by Marcuse and Gramsci, and there's certain people talking about them in faculty lounges and stuff and dairy-da, right?

00:41:22.000 And then they trickle down, trickle-down, trickle-down.

00:41:24.000 So when I bumped in all this stuff in the 80s at Yale, this was not yet out in the public, but I've watched it come out into the public so that now people are even using terms.

00:41:34.000 I mean, one thing for me that I noticed is when people use terms like hegemony or intersectionality or any of the, I just feel like saying, hey, shut up, like speak English.

00:41:46.000 Because all those words are sophistry.

00:41:50.000 They're designed to skew your thinking a little bit, to knock you off balance.

00:41:54.000 So like now I got to talk about critical race theory or systematic and be like, those are called weasel words.

00:41:59.000 You know what weasel words are, right?

00:42:01.000 They're empty words.

00:42:02.000 A weasel, you know, theoretically, they would suck the interior of an egg out, right?

00:42:07.000 So a weasel word is like an egg that's hollow.

00:42:10.000 And weasel words are like that.

00:42:12.000 And the left does that.

00:42:14.000 They come up with these terms.

00:42:15.000 So anytime anybody talks about privilege, it's like, that's not a thing. 0.99

00:42:20.000 Shut up. 0.99

00:42:20.000 Go back. 0.99

00:42:21.000 Find like the real word and let's talk about it.

00:42:23.000 But these are invented ideas.

00:42:26.000 And so that's kind of, you know, that's part of what has happened.

00:42:28.000 But I bumped into this stuff first.

00:42:30.000 And it took me decades really to perceive that we have been pushing these ideas out, So for me, Charlie said it's the parents to blame.

00:42:39.000 I agree.

00:42:40.000 It is always the leaders.

00:42:41.000 If you look at what happened in 1968, when the students took over the universities, okay?

00:42:48.000 It is just like today, if a city burns down, that's not, to me, that's not on the people doing the burning.

00:42:55.000 That's not on the people doing the burning.

00:42:56.000 That's on the people who are supposed to stop them, not stopping them.

00:43:00.000 It's very simple.

00:43:01.000 If you do not have the guts, if you do not have the ability to say that is wrong, and we will crush you if you try to disturb private property, try to do anything like that.

00:43:11.000 But the leaders have imbibed these false views going back to the 60s where people said, don't trust anybody over 30.

00:43:19.000 It's a Rousseauian idea.

00:43:20.000 It's a utopianist scheme that says the youth are pure.

00:43:25.000 The Bible says the youth are hell-bound sinners.

00:43:30.000 Those things can't coexist. 0.83

00:43:32.000 But in the 60s, you have a situation where these leaders of Columbia University, these different places, did not have the ability to stand up to the students and let these arrogant thugs.

00:43:45.000 You know, these are cultural Marxists.

00:43:48.000 These are cultural revolutionaries under Mao.

00:43:51.000 We've seen them through history.

00:43:52.000 They're the same ones that created the bloodbath of the French Revolution. 0.96

00:43:55.000 It's always these shock troops. 0.77

00:43:57.000 And then there are people who say, like, oh, they've got the truth.

00:44:00.000 And let's let them have their say.

00:44:02.000 You cannot let the devil have his say.

00:44:04.000 You cannot let the devil have a millimeter. 1.00

00:44:06.000 If you do, you're a fool. 0.99

00:44:07.000 And the fact of the matter is, we have allowed this to happen and these anti-American ideas to come in. 0.99

00:44:13.000 And it's why today we have an entire population that is not conversant in the basics of what is self-government and liberty and why is it beautiful and good and doesn't need to be perfect.

00:44:26.000 It's just way better than anything else.

00:44:29.000 So I tried to answer the question and I failed.

00:44:31.000 Thank you.

00:44:32.000 No, you did well.

00:44:33.000 Thank you.

00:44:34.000 We're concluding here in just a moment, but we need to say a couple things.

00:44:38.000 We need to say that Uncle Tom 2, the documentary, is coming out this fall on Salem Now.

00:44:45.000 It's featuring Vodi, so extensively.

00:44:48.000 I think you had like a crew filming you and all that sort of thing, right?

00:44:52.000 That must have been cool.

00:44:53.000 Okay.

00:44:54.000 So you want to check for Uncle Tom 2.

00:44:56.000 Uncle Tom 1 has had a major effect, and Uncle Tom 2 will as well.

00:45:00.000 Excellent work by Salem.

00:45:02.000 And then we want to say a quick thank you to Tim Peterson, who's the president of Salem Books.

00:45:07.000 If we could have a hand for Tim Peterson, he has acquired a number of us up here and is really leading the counterrevolution in a lot of ways because books do that in a free society.

00:45:22.000 So we're very thankful, many of us, for Tim.

00:45:25.000 And I want to just conclude here.

00:45:26.000 We have literally one minute, but I want each of you to give us 15 seconds on the antidote for what ails us.

00:45:35.000 And we'll start with Eric and finish with voting.

00:45:38.000 Speaking of Salem Books, I have a book coming out in October called Is Atheism Dead?

00:45:45.000 And I've never been as excited about a book.

00:45:47.000 And it is the answer to this question because the cover of the book essentially is a snake, you know, eating itself, biting its own tail, right?

00:45:56.000 That's what false ideology is.

00:45:59.000 If you push it to its logical conclusion, it swallows itself, disappears with a pop, and you'll never see it again.

00:46:06.000 And it is our job to point that out.

00:46:08.000 These things cannot sustain themselves.

00:46:10.000 God is truth.

00:46:12.000 And we just need to, in every way we can, with moral fiber and courage, continue to live out the truth and speak the truth and trust the Lord and be led by the Holy Spirit because there are a hundred answers to this.

00:46:28.000 But I know that you cannot go wrong speaking the truth and trusting the Lord to use you as you do and having the confidence that you cannot fail.

00:46:38.000 He defeated death on the cross.

00:46:40.000 There is nothing to fear but displeasing the Lord.

00:46:45.000 Amen.

00:46:46.000 10 seconds each.

00:46:48.000 Yeah.

00:46:48.000 It's going to cost you something.

00:46:51.000 You're going to have to give something up.

00:46:52.000 Social status, a country club membership.

00:46:54.000 Some of your Facebook friends, you're going to be called bat names.

00:46:57.000 If you're not in the fight, here's the way to tell that if you're living a comfortable life and everyone loves you.

00:47:04.000 Amen.

00:47:06.000 People are looking for things like justice, mercy, and reconciliation.

00:47:10.000 The good news is we know the only place they can find that.

00:47:18.000 The gospel of Jesus Christ is the answer, something we stand for.

00:47:22.000 Thank you, gentlemen.

00:47:23.000 Would you join me in thanking these gentlemen overall?

00:47:32.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:47:34.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:47:37.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:47:42.000 And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:47:46.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:47:48.000 God bless you.

00:47:48.000 Speak to you soon.

00:47:53.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 25, 2021

Biblical Justice vs Social Justice with Voddie Baucham and Eric Metaxas

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