00:00:39.000His 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.
00:00:48.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:06.000Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:09.000Back by popular demand is a great patriot and incredibly gifted communicator and someone who I'm honored to call a friend, Frank Turek.
00:02:19.000Charlie, always great being with you, brother.
00:02:21.000But we're here today to talk about your new book and really go into depth into what you've put here with your son Zach called Hollywood Heroes.
00:02:31.000Well, first of all, let's start out by saying that Hollywood puts out a lot of garbage, right?
00:02:36.000But notice, Charlie, that when they put out a blockbuster, well, maybe you haven't noticed, maybe the people out there have or haven't.
00:02:43.000When they put out a blockbuster, it's actually to a large extent stolen from the greatest story ever told.
00:02:50.000That when you look at the fantasy and superhero movies out there, Captain America, Iron Man, Lord of the Rings, Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Star Wars, these kind of movies, Charlie, they all have elements of the Christian story in them.
00:03:18.000And so these movies, my son is just an amazing movie buff.
00:03:21.000He's also in the Air Force, by the way.
00:03:23.000We went through these movies and we pulled out how so many of them parallel the Christian story and how you can learn biblical life lessons and you can learn really the story of reality, which is the Christian story, by watching these superhero and fantasy movies.
00:04:51.000That we have an internal fear and that we grow close to that fear and wear it as our identity, or is that just kind of a superficial detail?
00:05:02.000Batman obviously is motivated to try and avenge his parents' death by locking up bad guys.
00:05:10.000And for a while, he succeeds in doing it in a way that doesn't compromise his integrity.
00:05:16.000Like, he won't use weapons, he won't kill people, he'll just turn them over to the cops.
00:05:20.000But things get so bad, Charlie, that he sorts of he sort of loses his way in the later Batman movies to the point where he is branding people, he's back to using weapons, he is almost becoming as evil as the bad guys he's locking up, and he has to catch up.
00:05:38.000So, what's the biblical lesson from that?
00:05:40.000Well, one of the biblical lessons is that human nature is evil.
00:05:44.000And Charlie, you're one of the most eloquent people to talk about why Marxism doesn't work.
00:08:09.000But actually, that movie, Charlie, actually goes into probably one of the most difficult questions that anybody needs to answer, even Christians, and that is: if there is a good God, why is there evil?
00:08:22.000Because in this movie, Lex Luther, who's the evil character in it, is pitting Batman against Superman.
00:08:30.000Because he thinks Superman is the God of this world, and he thinks Superman is a bad God because this Superman did not prevent Lex Luther's father from treating Lex Luther poorly.
00:08:42.000So he's mad at God for not stopping evil in his life.
00:08:46.000And that's why he's trying to get Batman to kill Superman because he thinks Superman is a bad God.
00:08:51.000And right in this movie, Charlie, he starts quoting one of the most famous problems ever.
00:08:57.000If there is a good God, why is there evil?
00:08:59.000Is God not powerful enough or is God not loving or both?
00:09:05.000And the interesting thing about this, and we unpack it in the book Hollywood Heroes, is that notice how Lex Luther is mad that God hasn't stopped his father from doing evil to him.
00:09:16.000But you know, notice what Lex Luther is not mad about.
00:09:18.000He's not mad that God hasn't stopped him, Lex Luther, from doing evil to other people.
00:09:23.000And isn't this always the case that when we complain about evil, Charlie, we're always complaining about somebody else?
00:10:05.000He's going to quarantine evil in a place called hell, where the people who don't want to follow God are going to be quarantined, and they're not going to be able to affect the people that do want to follow God in heaven.
00:10:16.000And the way you get there is through the blood of Christ.
00:10:19.000So the Superman story is an interesting one.
00:10:22.000I don't know that one as well as Batman, but there is only one way to, you know, be able to basically stop Superman Kryptonite and the story of Superman.
00:11:58.000In the book of Heroes, yeah, Jon Favreau, who was the producer of, and I think the director of the first Iron Man, he's, by the way, the guy that plays Happy.
00:12:08.000He's the security guard in the movie for Tony Stark.
00:12:13.000And anyway, he wanted Robert Downey Jr. to play this guy.
00:12:18.000And the production house said, no, no, no, we don't want Downey.
00:12:22.000He's got too much of a bad reputation.
00:12:43.000The first scene is beautiful, not beautiful, but it's well done where he's casually with a martini selling a sophisticated missile system.
00:12:51.000Right, to terrorists, to terrorists, and bragging about it.
00:12:54.000And then what happens is one of his own weapons detonates close to him.
00:12:59.000It puts shrapnel in his chest, and he has to have a device installed into his chest to protect his heart from encroaching shrapnel, to guard his heart from encroaching shrapnel.
00:13:08.000No, I don't think the movie makers intended this, Charlie, but this is a beautiful illustration of what I think is the second most important verse in the entire Bible right now.
00:13:17.000The first section, or the first most important verses, have to do with the gospel, but the second most important verse for this generation is Proverbs 4:23, which says, Above all else, guard your heart because everything you do flows from it.
00:13:29.000Notice it doesn't say follow your heart, it says guard your heart.
00:13:33.000If that device fails in Tony Stark's chest to guard his heart, he dies.
00:13:40.000If we start following our heart without moral restraint, we're going to wind up alone, addicted, full of anxiety, like Tony Stark really is.
00:13:49.000In fact, Tony Stark, Charlie, has everything we think we want to be happy.
00:14:31.000And I mean, for people who are inspired by these kind of movies, love these movies, was kind of almost a tear jerker for a superhero movie because Tony Stark is, he dies trying to.
00:14:40.000He's a very lovable character, too, right?
00:15:24.000No one wants to see, and we're going to get to this in a second as soon as we build out more of these details.
00:15:29.000From a cinematic point of view and a spectator and audience point of view, if you extrapolate secular humanism, it's the most boring movie.
00:15:38.000That's why I'm saying, Charlie, I don't think the writers of Iron Man had Christianity in mind, but they knew that they're living in God's world, whether they believe in him or not.
00:15:49.000And they know that secular humanism, they know that following your heart, they know that being selfish is never going to motivate an audience or inspire an audience.
00:16:00.000What will inspire an audience is what Jesus did for us, and that is laying his life down for his friends.
00:16:06.000Actually, laying his life down for his enemies.
00:16:09.000Love knows greater love than to lay down your life for your friends.
00:16:13.000Well, Jesus laid down his life for his enemies.
00:16:53.000And he goes on this character development arc over several movies to where, from where he is a selfish playboy, amoral arms dealer who is just in it for himself.
00:18:16.000If you're a parent and you think any of those things are going to lead your child astray, by all means, keep them away from those things.
00:18:23.000If they're mature and they can recognize that this is sin and this is not something to emulate, then perhaps there can be more value in watching it than not.
00:18:35.000Yeah, and it's important to note that I, for example, I'm not going to make a defense of Ozark.
00:18:40.000I actually think it ended poorly, but there is some incredibly biblical and just, I think, timeless wisdom baked into the story, right?
00:18:51.000I mean, so if you're watching something and they're swearing, like, I don't like that, you're not watching it for the swearing.
00:19:15.000Think about how much evil is in the Bible.
00:19:18.000And it's in there because God is just telling the truth about how immoral his people were, which is one reason why I actually believe the Bible's true.
00:19:28.000In fact, we talked about it last night on the Freedom Night.
00:19:30.000I told you that embarrassing stories, embarrassing details are actually evidence that these people are not sugarcoats.
00:19:38.000So this is Dennis Prager's number one argument.
00:20:17.000But what I said to my audience is everyone has their own scales of that.
00:20:21.000And I said, you watch it with your wife, so you're not doing it for the point of consuming it.
00:20:26.000And I will say, Ozark in the later seasons, they basically sunset it.
00:20:30.000But there was a lot of drug usage, a lot of swearing.
00:20:33.000But again, the intent for that was not, oh, let's go try to watch.
00:20:37.000There's an incredibly interesting story unfolding of someone who sinned small and ends up sinning big and did it all for the ends, justifying the means.
00:20:46.000And honestly, beautifully acted, great music, great cinematography.
00:20:52.000So I just took that detour for a reason because we're about to talk about Harry Potter from a biblical context.
00:20:58.000Now, just aside, when I grew up in Christian Heritage Academy, suburbs of Chicago, my parents were okay with me watching Harry Potter, okay with me reading Harry Potter.
00:21:09.000But a majority of the kids I went to third, fourth, and fifth grade, there was a prohibition on even mentioning Harry Potter.
00:21:22.000We comment it in the book, Hollywood Heroes.
00:21:25.000We deal with this, but let's just lay this out.
00:21:28.000First of all, if you think your child is going to get into the occult by watching a movie, then by all means, keep them away from the movie.
00:22:57.000Narnia and Lord of the Rings, Chronicles and Narnia and Lord of the Rings have magic in it too.
00:23:02.000In fact, in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is a wizard, and so is Harry Potter.
00:23:06.000Why are we okay with Gandalf and Lord of the Rings, but not Harry Potter?
00:23:11.000The reason, and this is where you're going to, they'll say, okay, Narnia and Tolkien, or Lewis and Tolkien, had Christian arcs, but you're saying Harry Potter does too.
00:23:20.000In fact, this is going to probably give you some negative emails.
00:23:26.000We argue in the book Hollywood Heroes that out of all the characters we cover, and we cover a lot of characters in this book, that arguably the person, the character that parallels Jesus more than any other in modern fiction is Harry Potter.
00:24:50.000And J.K. Rowling says that's really the inspiration for the whole series.
00:24:55.000She said, but I never wanted to talk a lot about this because I didn't want readers to know where we were going.
00:25:00.000I didn't want readers to know that I was basically using the Bible story in order to write the Harry Potter series.
00:25:08.000And so there's other biblical themes, though, weaved throughout Harry Potter.
00:25:12.000I mean, for example, in Chamber of Secrets, the idea of facing the basilisk that could turn you to stone, that's a legend that has been around for thousands of years.
00:25:23.000And the Bible deals with that in a variety of different ways of, you know, no one wants to sin.
00:25:28.000No one wants to be caught in eye contact with their sin, that you must face, you know, your enemy straight on.
00:25:35.000Talk about also this theme, and we talk about this, which is the idea of the hero's journey, which is someone who grows up without parents, usually raised by their uncle in a place of vulnerability, like under a stairwell on Tatooine or in the Shire, gets a call to adventure, Abraham, right?
00:26:34.000And then also the very wise and shrewd, discerning, but quite honestly, not very socially, let's just say, very disagreeable person, right?
00:28:22.000But Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were in a group called the Inklings, where they would get together and talk about what they were writing.
00:28:32.000And Lewis was a big fan of these dying and rising gods.
00:28:38.000Most of them came after Christianity, and he thought it was enchanting that a god would die and rise again to save people.
00:28:46.000And Tolkien said to him, Hey, Jack, because that's what they called C.S. Lewis, hey, Jack, why are you so enthralled with all these mythical stories about dying and rising gods?
00:28:54.000But when it comes to the real myth, the true myth, he called it, in the pages of the New Testament, you're turned off by that.
00:29:01.000And Jack's going, what do you mean by that?
00:29:04.000He said, Tolkien said, Christianity is the true myth.
00:29:07.000All these other myths, which didn't happen, are pointing to the event that actually did happen.
00:29:12.000Jesus actually did come, die, and rise again.
00:30:08.000Aragorn is the returning king, which is what Jesus is.
00:30:11.000And Frodo is the weak character that has to depend on them.
00:30:15.000And what we say in Hollywood Heroes is that Tolkien is showing his true Christian colors when he uses the weakest characters to achieve the greatest result.
00:30:26.000So who are the, in fact, according to Tolkien, the hero of the Lord of the Rings series is Sam.
00:30:56.000And he grabs Frodo and he literally carries him up the hill into hell and right up to the point of Mount Doom, right to the point of dumping the ring in the lava.
00:31:07.000And we all know what happens after that.
00:31:08.000Gollum shows up after Frodo says, I want to keep the ring.
00:31:12.000And through divine providence, that's where Gollum comes in.
00:31:16.000He actually inadvertently causes the ring to go into the lava and destroy.
00:34:32.000You can't say, I can do it without God.
00:34:34.000You need God, and you know you need God.
00:34:36.000So we list in the book Hollywood Heroes, we list all the weak characters in the Bible and say, if you want to do something great for God and you're weak, you can.
00:34:46.000You just need to depend on God in order to do it.
00:34:48.000What other movies you got before I go to two objections that I want you to help navigate?
00:35:04.000And I personally believe, and you could prove me wrong, there's parts of Star Wars that actually get the biblical story better than Lord of the Rings.
00:35:14.000I think, for example, the story of Skywalker himself is very messianic and very Christ-like from growing up in a place of vulnerability or just desolation, could be Nazarene, and going on a series of stops and trips to eventually have to confront evil itself.
00:36:28.000And in Star Wars, there's a couple of, first of all, redemption is big, as you just mentioned, right?
00:36:34.000Obviously, the redemption of Darth Vader is huge, but there's a redemption of another character that we find even more fun, and that is, of course, Han Solo.
00:36:40.000Han Solo is the rule-bending skeptic who's on the good side, but he keeps saying stuff like, Kid, this force is just mumbo-jumbo.
00:36:49.000It's nothing but simple tricks and nonsense.
00:36:51.000You need a good blaster at your side, kid, right?
00:36:54.000And then through a series of events, Han Solo, by the way, Han Solo, perfect name for this guy.
00:39:24.000You sin because you're enticed and dragged away by your own desires.
00:39:28.000And so what happens is Anakin goes from supposed to be the savior to being enticed and dragged away to the point when the future emperor displays himself as a Sith Lord.
00:39:44.000That's the guy Anakin's supposed to be fighting.
00:39:47.000But the Sith Lord says to him, I can give you what you want.
00:39:58.000And Lucas actually says, George Lucas, who as you know is no Christian, actually says in an interview, that's when Anakin gave in to the temptation of the devil, when Anakin went and became basically a Sith.
00:41:33.000And it's not anything necessarily biblical.
00:41:37.000It's just within who we are as a species that they would say, and I don't believe this, just as a disclaimer, you know, we evolved as a species.
00:41:46.000We've always had to overcome adversity.
00:41:48.000We've had to have courage, build teams, have heroes to go forage and hunt and gather.
00:41:55.000I would say it's partially right because we live in God's world and he has put eternity on our hearts, says Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3.
00:42:05.000We all have eternity on our hearts and we all want to be taken from this place of pain and suffering, Charlie, to a place of bliss.
00:42:12.000And that's what these pagan dying and rising gods are about.
00:42:18.000Redemption is a theme of humanity because we live in God's world.
00:42:23.000We all have this desire to be taken out of this place and taken to a place of bliss.
00:42:28.000All of these fictional stories are pointing to the true story, the true myth, as Tolkien put it, that Jesus literally did come and die and resurrect after living the perfect life so he could remain just and justify sinners like us and ultimately take us to a place where there is no pain, suffering, crying, or tears.
00:42:52.000It comes from God is putting this all on our heart.
00:42:55.000So you would expect that even secular writers who may not believe in God at all would include this in their stories, just like they include morality in their stories because morality is written on their hearts as well.
00:43:08.000They know what resonates with an audience.
00:43:22.000That would be true if God didn't exist and Jesus didn't rise from the dead.
00:43:28.000But the evidence is that God does exist, and Jesus did rise from the dead, which means on Jesus' authority, I'm trusting what the Bible says because he said the entire Old Testament is the word of God and he promised the New Testament.
00:43:40.000So, yeah, with those two facts that God exists and Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true.
00:43:47.000It's not just another one of these fake myths or what we're talking about.
00:43:51.000Yeah, and that's where some, and that would be the second objection that we could spend some time unpacking, which is a Bible-believing Christian might find exception with this book, saying you're flirting with allegorical gateways here.
00:44:09.000All right, let me ask a question of this skepticism.
00:45:17.000The stories, the 39, by the way, I was listening to the Charlie Kirk podcast this morning coming over here, and you were talking about how there are 39 parables.
00:45:35.000In these 39 parallels, Jesus is telling fictional stories to illustrate a moral or theological point.
00:45:43.000For example, the story or the parable of the Good Samaritan.
00:45:47.000If you were there with Jesus 2,000 years ago and he told the parable of the Good Samaritan and you said, Jesus, what was the Good Samaritan's name?
00:46:02.000I'm inventing these stories to illustrate a moral or theological point because stories drive home moral and theological points sometimes better than straight prose or just didactic teaching.
00:46:17.000We're doing both in the Bible, but I'm telling stories to illustrate a theological or moral point.
00:46:22.000Jesus is using stories in order to bring people to the truth.
00:46:30.000That's what we're doing in Hollywood Heroes.
00:46:31.000So some Christians would say the danger with this is then you're going to look through the entire Bible through an allegorical lens, right?
00:46:38.000And so this is an objection of a lot of Baptists, for example.
00:46:43.000Not to say it's just, but it seems to be a lot of the criticism comes from that denomination where they'll say the issue with this sort of a book or this sort of an approach is that all of a sudden people are going to look less about the miraculous intervention of God, Jonah and the whale, Red Sea departed, and instead, what is God, what is the story trying to tell you here?
00:49:43.000And I'm sure you've received some of these criticisms before, but whenever I'll talk about the story of the Bible, some hardline Christians, I'm not saying that negatively, by the way.
00:50:17.000From the best songs to the best paintings to the best movies, is that there needs to be, you can't just look, I think that God gave us the gift of reason and creativity to be able to look at the gospel three-dimensionally and look at it, like, oh, wow, I never thought of Jesus' sacrifice through this story, but it now means even more to me.
00:50:48.000And in fact, a friend of mine, Jay Warner Wallace, the guy I mentioned last night, the cold case homicide detective, has written a book called Person of Interest, where he does exactly that, Charlie.
00:50:56.000He looks at literature, movies, art, even architecture, science, education, and he points out how Jesus has revolutionized all of those areas of culture.
00:51:10.000That the story of Jesus, the account, the facts of Jesus have impacted culture more than any other.
00:51:17.000And what we point out in Hollywood Heroes is not only does he do that, but all of the heroes that we go through in this book point to the ultimate hero, Jesus of Nazareth.
00:51:28.000And where these characters have certain aspects of Jesus in terms of their characteristics, their hero qualities, Jesus is the perfect hero.
00:52:14.000Jesus is completely confident, but he's also humble at the same time.
00:52:19.000Do you know anybody that is completely confident and yet humble and gracious at the same time?
00:52:23.000Jesus, 100% truth, 100% grace at the same time.
00:52:27.000Jesus is actually totally confident in what he's doing, but he's still people-focused.
00:52:35.000And you look at this and you go, there's no character in all of fiction.
00:52:40.000There's no character in all of non-fiction other than Jesus.
00:52:45.000There is no way the writers of the New Testament, most of them were fishermen and just average people, who could have invented this character, made him authentic, and pulled him off if he wasn't a real character.
00:52:58.000So one of the objections that Bill Maher, for example, popularized in his movie Religilist, which I'm sure you've seen.
00:53:06.000And I'm just drawing from memory here, but it stuck with me because it is repeated on college campuses, is the mythology of Jesus, which I don't believe in.
00:53:40.000You ask the scholars that look into Jesus is just someone that has been actually talked about before in one character, they'll say, no, it's not true at all.
00:53:52.000In fact, Edwin Yamauchi, used to teach at Miami of Ohio, was an expert on this.
00:53:57.000I think he was in Case for Christianity.
00:54:01.000In fact, it was Lee Strobel who did the case for the real Jesus and had Yamauchi in that as well, pointing out, no, this is not the truth.
00:54:09.000Now, there are parallels in certain areas to Jesus from these other worldviews.
00:54:15.000But as we talked about earlier, Charlie, I think that's God pointing to the fact that, yeah, in culture, there's going to be things that parallel Jesus.
00:54:23.000And when Jesus shows up, people are going to go, yeah, that's what we've been looking for.
00:55:17.000It just so happens the facts and the evidence actually are incredibly overwhelming, which actually goes to your other book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and the work you do with Cross-Examined, which is like, wow, actually, the facts and circumstances are amazing, and the story is amazing.
00:55:33.000Because what the Peterson people would say is if you get the story wrong, the civilization falls apart, right?
00:55:41.000That the stories exist for a reason, they hold us together.
00:56:03.000Yeah, and they would say, well, because this story, and again, I don't believe this, is what helped us evolve, is what helped us survive, right?
00:56:11.000Nurturing for the young and honoring the hero.
00:56:13.000And these things are built into the moral code of what allowed us to get out of hunter-gathering and build civilization.
00:56:21.000As you know, Charlie, one of the major problems with this kind of theory is, first of all, we could go down the rabbit trail of evolution, but if our minds are not designed to actually know truth, if they evolved, why should we believe anything we think?
00:56:35.000In fact, C.S. Lewis famously said, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, Suppose my brain wasn't designed for the purpose of thinking, that thought is merely the byproduct of some atoms within my skull.
00:56:47.000He said, in that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking, so I have no warrant to believe anything I think.
00:56:54.000Yeah, well, there are some postmodernists that believe that.
00:57:51.000Because if Jesus rose from the dead, he predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, then he's validating the fact that he's God.
00:58:27.000And yeah, so that's so the that's helpful for, I think, a lot of our audience members.
00:58:32.000The book is Hollywood Heroes because that's a struggle that some people are having, which is you focus too much on the story, then you kind of do the Bill O'Reilly thing where Bill O'Reilly used to say, oh, no, no, the Bible is just a bunch of allegories, nice stories that we tell ourselves.
00:59:06.000It came into existence out of nothing.
00:59:08.000Even Stephen Hawking, who was an atheist, as you know, until probably the top atheist in the world until he died about five years ago, said, almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.
00:59:18.000Now, Hawking was an atheist, and he couldn't figure out how you could get this space-time continuum without God.
00:59:26.000Just to reinforce that, don't mean to interrupt.
00:59:28.000That is an irrefutable fact at this point.
00:59:31.000Even an ardent atheist will believe the universe started at a moment.
00:59:36.000Now, space, time, and matter had a beginning, ladies and gentlemen.
00:59:39.000Whatever created space, time, and matter can't be made of space, time, and matter.
00:59:42.000In other words, the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create, because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation, someone had to make a choice.
00:59:54.000Also, the being would have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice.
00:59:58.000So I always ask people, Charlie, I say, look, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of?
01:02:00.000You can't go on an infinite regress of causes.
01:02:02.000So the ultimate cause is what we call the uncreated energy.
01:02:07.000And isn't the atheist's job in some way annoyingly easy in the sense all they have to do is constantly try to poke holes and deconstruction?
01:02:14.000Yeah, the problem is it's easy to smell a rotten egg.
01:04:40.000And we go to college campuses, as I mentioned.
01:04:42.000We also have a bunch of online courses where we teach online via video, but then we also do live Zoom QA, which people really like so they can interact with the instructors.