00:00:21.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:07.000And I thought we'd just start there just to frame up because here's the two things that we share in common: a love for Jesus and a love for this generation, young adults, to know him and to live in light of that.
00:01:18.000So quickly from high level, your story of faith or, you know, were you raised early on and trusted in Christ then?
00:01:25.000Or what's kind of your high-level faith background?
00:01:28.000So third, fourth, and fifth grade, I went to a school called Christian Heritage Academy in the suburbs of Chicago.
00:01:50.000But as I grew older, it meant more every single year.
00:01:54.000And those words that you say in fifth grade that you actually remember, and all those Bible verses they make you recite in third, fourth, and fifth grade, like Isaiah 53, you actually realize there's significant meaning to those things.
00:02:05.000You actually realize that those are not just incantations for the sake of discipline of a young person, that there's irrefutable truth within them.
00:02:14.000And so anyway, in eighth grade and then once I went to public high school, faith really started to become something that was a deeper part of my life.
00:02:25.000And then as I decided not to go to college, that became an even more important part of my faith journey.
00:02:41.000And Harvest Bible Chapel really, really kind of put me on what I think was sound theology of the inerrancy of scripture, the irrefutable word of God, who exactly was Jesus Christ and kind of how you position your life and configure it correctly.
00:02:56.000And so, yeah, that's my faith journey.
00:02:58.000And eight and a half years later, you know, I'm actually doing more in the faith space than I was even the first seven years and happy to unpack that.
00:03:06.000Just because right now you're seeing an unprecedented intersection of faith and politics.
00:03:11.000And so I'm on the political side, being a Christian and starting to see a lot of Christian churches start to embrace some of the most dangerous political movements that they have no idea what they're talking about.
00:03:23.000And so anyway, I don't mean to overly politicize it this quickly, but that's kind of how I think we're all here today.
00:04:02.000Two words, substitutionary atonement, and one word, grace.
00:04:06.000There is no other religion, there is no other belief system in the world where you can finally admit you're not enough and God will enter your life.
00:04:21.000Islam is about earthly conquest or conquering or following the certain sort of edicts of the Quran.
00:04:29.000There is no religion ever where you admit you're not enough, and then that actually gets you admission into the highest possible relationship with Jesus Christ.
00:04:39.000I can go through the apologetics of it, of no other act in human history has as much third-party corroboration as the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
00:04:49.000I can go into how we have first-person accounts, how every single person who knew Jesus Christ and considered him their teacher or the Messiah died, not just died a death in defense of it, but refused to recount it at the very final parts of their death, whether it be James the brother of Christ, which some people debate that, but that's irrelevant.
00:05:11.000Paul, important side note to what you're saying, they died not for what they believed in, like the cause.
00:05:16.000They died because they said, I saw the dead man come back from the grave.
00:05:22.000I mean, the disciples went from India to Rome to Greece.
00:05:25.000There's even accounts of them going as north to what is now southern Russia, of the gospel spreading.
00:05:29.000And every single one that knew Jesus Christ and saw him raise from the dead, when they were given an opportunity to go back on that, the dagger's on your throat, they're like, no, I believe it.
00:05:41.000And so that's a pretty remarkable thing.
00:05:44.000And then also we have, according, I think it's either Luke or Mark, at least 327 people saw the resurrected Christ post, you know, post-death, resurrection.
00:05:53.000The story of Paul is completely fascinating, right?
00:05:56.000A super wealthy Roman Jew who literally oversees the stoning of Stephen and then immediately turns and becomes the number one spreader of the gospel and really creates the framework for the church as we know it today.
00:06:07.000And so even beyond that, if that's not persuasive enough for you, which I think is highly persuasive, I go through the writings of Josephus and I can go through all those sorts of things, how there's never been an archaeological discovery that contradicts the Bible.
00:06:19.000However, the thing that really, I think is the most important thing is if you give your life to Jesus Christ completely and totally, you will be reborn.
00:07:13.000And then some of them will be like, hey, I'm familiar and I may disagree.
00:07:17.000And I want to make sure everybody knows.
00:07:19.000If you disagree with that as it relates to Jesus, by that I mean Jesus and him being the center of the universe and you need to make him the center of your life, man, you have much bigger problems than any disagreement you may have related to political.
00:07:36.000So from there, going into, you know, you are not just a believer.
00:07:41.000Those values inform some of your, I would think, the passion that you have for politics, for this generation, for the issues that are infiltrating this generation.
00:07:53.000I don't know if there's probably a better way to say that, but how did that bridge happen?
00:07:57.000How did you go from that to, hey, now I'm in the public?
00:08:10.000I was raised in a highly patriotic household, very defensive of America by nature and by default, disagreeable by nature.
00:08:19.000So when teachers would dare insult the country or would go out of their way, I would just find any sort of reason I could grasp onto that our country wasn't as bad as they were saying it was.
00:08:28.000And growing up in public high school in the suburbs of Chicago, you just kind of become steeped in that kind of disagreeableness if you decide to have that perspective.
00:08:39.000And so anyway, I never, it's really a great question because I actually was taught that my conservatism and my patriotism was incongruent with my Christianity.
00:09:11.000And this is like eighth, ninth grade, right?
00:09:13.000So rebellion was this, that was my idea of rebellion, right?
00:09:15.000Like going against the Presbyterian church.
00:09:17.000And now I have a much deeper understanding of first principles and who we are in the state of nature and kind of how we came across our system of governance and why we love our country, all those sorts of things.
00:09:29.000But like I said at the outset, it was very imperfect at the time.
00:10:51.000It's not where we're spending eternity, but God has done through the Christian Moral Foundation, which we're talking about in a sermon series we're doing right now, a lot of good through the nation.
00:11:02.000And America is not perfect, has had issues, it will never be perfect.
00:11:06.000But why do you think there's been such a transition in terms of being critical?
00:11:12.000Yeah, and look, I actually don't mind criticism.
00:11:32.000The first of which is the issue of liberty.
00:11:35.000Liberty is really hard if you don't have virtue.
00:11:38.000In fact, liberty will instantaneously crumble a society if you can't handle it.
00:11:44.000If you do not understand the law, which points us to Christ, Galatians 3, the law is a guardian or a school teacher to Christ, then you can't understand liberty.
00:12:23.000And so if you have a nation that can't handle liberty, because we have more liberty than any other generation in human history, we're more miserable, then all of a sudden you actually don't have liberty.
00:12:35.000You're actually then, in some ways, a pseudo-slave to those devices or the sin that you're living in.
00:12:40.000And that's why the Christian ethic is a superior ethic: you're going to continue to fail.
00:12:48.000And so, anyway, kind of going back, number one is the issue of liberty.
00:12:52.000That's one of the reasons why this has fallen over 10 years because we have not, in my opinion, had a moral backstop to be able to instruct young people in particular to deal with the multitude of wealth that we have around us or to be able to do the multitude of choices or the plurality of opportunities.
00:13:09.000And instead, we are going to screw it up.
00:13:11.000But if you have no moral framework, then it turns into absolute chaos.
00:13:26.000And if you do not come at it from at least some deeper historical background or at least a family background that has really reinforced, I think, the truth about this country, it's very seductive.
00:14:28.000But the Pledge of Allegiance, like there's so many different things that you look online and you look all over social media, and it's like you're not woke if you are participating in the things that were once so like valuable.
00:14:52.000Based on what you just said, because I totally agree, we've talked about how without morality, and you can only have morality through the Spirit of God, and without the Spirit of God and being directed towards morality, society will crumble that you can't have, can't maintain freedom.
00:16:09.000And he said, make a good shoe, sell it at a fair price.
00:16:12.000And he said, act the Christian ethic in everything you do, but you don't have to necessarily put a cross in every shoe to justify that you are pursuing the gospel in it.
00:17:21.000So just like Abraham Lincoln, who was never considered to be a Christian, but he cited more Bible verses in his first and second inaugural.
00:17:31.000And right before he gets shot in the back of the head, he turns to Mary Todd Lincoln and he says, I dream to walk on the streets of Jerusalem in the footsteps of our Savior.
00:18:22.000And he's dedicated his multi-decades of life to that.
00:18:25.000But what I am is I am someone that cares deeply about the political process and cares about what type of country we're handing the next generation.
00:18:53.000Last six months, our brothers and sisters in Christ have been penalized, imprisoned, and put at home because they just wanted to have ecclesia, which Christ told us on this rock, build my church.
00:19:06.000He coined a Greek term, a secular Greek term, ekklesia, which means the physical gathering of believers.
00:19:12.000Yet we kept weed shops open, liquor stores open, strip clubs open, BLM in the streets, home improvement stores and grocery stores, but they took Easter and Palm Sunday from us.
00:19:22.000Because we didn't get involved in politics.
00:20:10.000What are the major issues you feel like people are either blindly accepting?
00:20:18.000Like I'm talking to college students and they all seem to believe this and it's very concerning.
00:20:24.000Or things that concern you about the generation that they're believing, thinking, operating underneath.
00:20:30.000And then what encourages you as you go on college campuses and you're having conversations with people?
00:20:38.000Because it seems like through things like Turning Point and other organizations, there is some shift back in the direction of some of the values that we would say as followers of Christ are great.
00:20:50.000Practicing virtue as a byproduct of your faith in Christ is important.
00:20:54.000So there's so much overlap in terms of some of the goals that we shared.
00:20:59.000The mission of Turning Point is different than the mission of the church.
00:21:02.000But in terms of what is encouraging you, it seems like there's some encouraging stuff going on and what's concerning you as it relates to this generation.
00:21:09.000Yeah, I'll start with the encouraging and then I'll go to the concerning.
00:21:13.000There is a renewed sense of learning like I've never seen in our country before.
00:21:17.000The podcasts that I do that go the deepest and go the longest perform the best.
00:21:21.000When we are unpacking social contract theory with John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when we are diving deep into Aristotle and Plato, we are unpacking the ideas that built the West.
00:21:31.000We get the most emails, the most downloads, the most interest.
00:21:34.000Learning always leads to an awakening.
00:21:35.000This is something the church has always gotten wrong.
00:21:38.000You will not have an awakening if you don't have a citizenry that wants to dive deep into the scriptures, dives deep into why you're falling.
00:21:44.000Or otherwise, it's going to be the same evangelist giving the same sermon five times.
00:22:26.000It's different than most people think.
00:22:27.000So on the other side of it, let's go to the concerning side of it.
00:22:30.000I started with the optimistic and we'll go to the pessimistic is I can unpack just some of the what I think are just some of the predominant and prevailing lies that are out there, but just the general one is almost every single conversation that I find issue with in our country right now with our generation comes back to almost a blame America first perspective that our country has of course made mistakes, but we are not a mistake that we have been formed as a country.
00:22:58.000The citizens in this country are a better place for all races, all people, all genders, all backgrounds, all languages, period bar none, defendable by evidence, happy to unpack that.
00:23:07.000And so when your default position is if you're arguing from a given, if you're almost like creating a geometric equation where you already have the end result in mind and you're reversing the equation, you remember those math equations where you used to start with the answer and you work backwards what the formula would be?
00:23:25.000That's instead, that is you trying to make an argument based on a presupposition you might hold.
00:23:31.000So you're talking to college students and they come out the opposite perspective of everything you just said about, hey, it's the best for all people, all languages, all those.
00:24:32.000Don't have the most oil and natural gas.
00:24:33.000Why is it we are the first ones to go to space, go to the moon, invent brain surgery, open heart surgery, more patents, cure to polio, more vaccines, more medical breakthroughs, more charitable endeavors, more Nobel Prizes, more Olympic medals?
00:25:22.000Deist in a way that is, I think, you know, Jefferson may even disagree with you as he is alive today and painted in the light that we paint in the middle.
00:25:50.000And I would say the reason why this isn't even an important conversation is as believers, we believe that the Christian Moral Foundation is the thing that has led to the exceptionalism of America and the ways that it happens.
00:26:42.000There is an import ban of slaves that was put in there with the 20-year window, then signed by the third American president, Thomas Jefferson.
00:26:50.000When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve ties, goes on to mention God four times in the Declaration, says laws of nature and nature is God.
00:26:58.000Vermont was so inspired by that declaration, they abolished slavery the next year in 1777, the first sovereign state on the planet to ever do so.
00:27:06.000Human norm is human beings owning human beings.
00:28:17.000And when you read those guys, you know, anyways, the morality and the language and even the way that they talk about God, even Jefferson in particular, or all of those guys, there's a strong case to make that lots of them had a, we're going to see them in heaven.
00:29:37.000I don't quite know how to unpack it, but I like it.
00:29:40.000They laid the moral foundation for a people that all of a sudden started to, they stopped listening to King George and started worshiping Jesus Christ.
00:29:48.000What we have here in Western society is such a blip on the radar of human history where we're able to just have this conversation, live to war 80, have many kids, be more worried about gaining weight than losing weight.
00:30:00.000The norm of human history was you go fight somebody else's wars and you're probably going to die of a communicable disease by the time you're 15.
00:30:06.000Which is so depressing in reality for most of, you know.
00:30:10.000And so I just, part of it is just like, let's be a little bit thankful.
00:30:49.000It's much more in looking at things as they are.
00:30:52.000And I think that overindulging in highly emotive stories can become a pathological way of governing, which is very high in pathology, very low in the logos, very low in logic or the pursuit of truth.
00:31:04.000And so, yeah, I think conservatives generally do a poor job of that.
00:31:08.000And I also think that conservatives do a really bad job of going to people they disagree with and speaking to them and convincing them.
00:31:14.000And finally, I think conservatives understandably self-censor far too often.
00:31:20.000I think that, especially young, they're afraid they're going to lose their job.
00:31:23.000They're afraid they're going to lose their friends.
00:31:25.000They're afraid they're going to be called a racist.
00:31:31.000And so, and then finally, I think that I'm not saying you guys are conservatives.
00:31:37.000I'm just saying we in the conservative community, I think that we have to do a better job of explaining the moral roots of conservatism and not giving the left the moral high ground.
00:31:49.000Because I think we do a pretty good job, as I mentioned, as the empirical high ground.
00:31:53.000Like our stuff works, but why is our stuff right?
00:32:00.000If you saw one issue that you could convince every person in America on, and by issue, I mean, hey, if I could flip one switch tomorrow, you get one switch.
00:32:12.000All of a sudden, everyone would just instantaneously agree with.
00:32:14.000That would kind of be like a non-debated question.
00:32:16.000In this period of time of where we are right now, that we're not a racist country.
00:32:20.000We as human beings prior to Christ thought of each other as skin color, tribe, and where you came from.
00:32:25.000It's Christ that liberated us from that way of thinking.
00:32:28.000And if all of a sudden the lie that we're a racist country has recreated tribal groups in this country, where we judge people based on skin color, if you start judging people based on their immutable characteristics, we have an entire century to show us how that goes.
00:32:41.000And only 130 million people were murdered that way.
00:32:44.000And so if I were to try to just disrupt the programming in one way, and I guess if I could add a second, it's e pluribus unum actually matters, which is part of the American Trinity.
00:32:53.000So there's a Christian trinity, right?
00:33:17.000And this is articulated in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which says there'll be no heirs to nobility in our country.
00:33:25.000That should make everyone be like, what were they thinking?
00:33:28.000Every country prior to America gave some form of heir to nobility.
00:33:33.000Basically, they just said, your bloodline doesn't matter.
00:33:39.000And we should basically say that's something we should take seriously.
00:33:45.000I'm just thinking about a lot of people, I think our age kind of get in like political paralysis where they like feel, I know I've felt this.
00:33:57.000We're actually entering into a political series and I good luck.
00:34:11.000And I am getting over what has been like paralysis from like a social media standpoint, like using influence, using platform to advocate your beliefs and different things.
00:34:24.000And I think a lot of people feel that even just like in their interpersonal relationships, in their friend groups, in a lot of different things.
00:34:32.000And so how would you encourage people not like to lean where they should vote, but how to think about and research?
00:34:41.000Because also, have you seen Social Dilemma?
00:34:56.000The information in my pocket generation, now my information just got invalidated because now I don't even know what's coming to me, what I can see, what cannot see, all that stuff that we're dealing with.
00:35:18.000I think one of the most moral disasters in the history of our republic was the unconstitutional, illegal ruling of Roe versus Wade that nationalized abortion, right?
00:35:28.000So states had abortion bans before this.
00:35:30.000The Burger Court prior to the war in court was super liberal, but the Burger Court went even further and completely nationalized abortion.
00:35:36.00061 million unborn children have been terminated in the womb since Roe versus Wade.
00:35:41.000We as Christians are taught biblically to stand up for the innocent.
00:35:55.000And we've already saw Calvary Chapel Las Vegas sued to the highest level of Supreme Court where John Roberts, Bush appointee, Kagan Sotomayor, Breyer, and Roberts agreed in unity that church was not essential, but a casino was.
00:36:09.000But Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas dissented.
00:36:13.000During this pandemic, our Supreme Court came together and said a casino is more important than a church.
00:36:18.000Happened three months ago, so most believers don't know that.
00:36:44.000So, regardless of who wins, you are called, and I'm called, to spend time praying for even those people I agree with or disagree with, if they are in a position of leadership and authority.
00:37:21.000He's a Bible-believing Christian, and he makes the articulate defense of what Western civilization is and how the Bible built it and how Christianity built the world that we know today and how thankful we should be for it.
00:37:30.000He walks piece by piece on how the Bible built the idea of what a hero is in Western civilization, on how we tell stories, on the articulation of our framework, on how we care about the blind and the deaf and how no other civilization did it before Christianity came to the planet.
00:38:16.000It's actually Solzhenitsyn was an expat from the Soviet Union.
00:38:19.000He was like, they didn't want this thing published.
00:38:22.000And you want to see how dark human beings can be to each other.
00:38:24.000It's a wonderful note to end on, right?
00:38:26.000How dark, like what we shouldn't do is what that book talks about.
00:38:29.000Judge people based on skin color, turn people against each other, divide, stop talking, destroy the churches, imprison the pastors.
00:38:34.000Like he goes, you're like, oh, now I can understand what we shouldn't do.
00:38:38.000Sometimes that's actually the most helpful reference.
00:38:41.000It's like, maybe there's some parameters of like we shouldn't be going towards these sorts of things.
00:38:45.000And that book, it's called the Gulag Archipelago for a reason because he basically is giving the he's basically giving the funeral address, if you will, to the 100 million people that died under communism.