00:00:01.000Advertiser-free conversation brought to you by TPUSA Faith, where we just had 1,100 pastors in Nashville, Tennessee, largest gathering of its kind, with Michael Knowles.
00:00:15.000Michael Knowles and I talk about Dante.
00:01:02.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:10.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:22.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
00:01:32.000Now, I have to warn all of you, I'm only going to mention this once, okay?
00:01:36.000Michael's a Roman Catholic, so don't run out of the room.
00:01:39.000I'm waiting for a reenactment of the defenestration of Prague.
00:01:43.000Charlie's going to throw me out the window, launch the 30 Years' War.
00:01:47.000But before then, I don't know, we can talk about something else.
00:01:49.000However, I will say this, and I've said it publicly before: evangelicals, those of us that are not Catholics, we can learn a lot from the Catholics on how they've built schools for multiple generations to influence culture.
00:02:22.000So Michael is a podcaster, and Daily Wire, which many of you know, is headquartered here in Nashville.
00:02:27.000And I actually was texting Michael this morning and I said, hey, Michael, you got to come to this event.
00:02:31.000And Michael made headlines a couple months ago because Michael gave a speech where he said, we must, I don't want to misquote you, but eradicate transgenderism from the public conversation.
00:02:51.000I chose my words very carefully because I knew that the libs were going to run with it.
00:02:56.000But I wanted to make the point as clearly as I possibly could.
00:03:00.000I said, and I've now memorized this line because it was misquoted by the media, including by the White House, by Corinne Jampier.
00:03:07.000I said, for the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.
00:03:19.000The whole preposterous ideology at every level.
00:04:00.000These liberal media will run the lie on page one, and then they'll maybe issue the correction on page 2,000 three weeks later, and nobody sees it.
00:04:12.000But the reason that I gave my speech, the reason that it resonated in the room, and the reason the liberals lied about it, was because what I endeavored to do was take back ground that the liberals thought they conquered.
00:04:26.000The liberals thought that they had already won on the issue of transgenderism, and so they thought the debate at this point was between do we trans the kids at age eight or do we wait until they turn nine?
00:04:38.000Is it third grade or do we wait until fourth grade?
00:04:40.000And I said, no, either transgenderism is true or it's false.
00:04:46.000Either a man can be a woman or a man cannot be a woman.
00:04:49.000If it is true, if a man really can become a woman, not only should we tolerate this for 25-year-olds, we probably should trans the kids, right?
00:04:57.000I mean, if they really can be born in the wrong body, then it would seem cruel to force them to go through the wrong puberty or all of the jargon that they talk about.
00:05:13.000And so if it isn't true, then it isn't true for anybody else either.
00:05:17.000And so, you know, Charlie, I mean, you are so good at this.
00:05:20.000You are so good at just bringing the fight to the liberals, especially on cultural issues where the liberals think they've already won.
00:05:30.000Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
00:05:33.000And I think we need to start retaking some ground on this issue.
00:05:38.000And by the way, if men and women really are different and if men can't become women and vice versa, well, then we need to stand up for eternal truths about the relationship between men and women, of what marriage really means, of what the fundamental political institution is.
00:06:08.000And we can know these things revealed by our Lord, and we can know these things from the natural law.
00:06:14.000And we can know these things using our reason and our moral conscience from the created world.
00:06:18.000And if we don't have the courage to stand up for the basic nature of our humanity and for the basic political unit, then we're not going to stand up for anything.
00:06:29.000We might as well close up the churches.
00:06:30.000We might as well throw it all in and let the liberals run the country.
00:06:34.000So, Michael, let's get down to the root of it.
00:06:38.000The trans agenda, the ideology that transgenderism presents itself, is an affront on objective truth, on the logos, on the harmony of existence.
00:07:21.000What is the goal of the trans movement, and how is that at odds with Christianity?
00:07:28.000Obviously, to some degree, we are preaching to the choir here, because if you're in this room, you probably are quite animated by the truth and inspired and have the courage to stand up about it.
00:07:40.000But we really have to articulate these basic truths.
00:07:43.000Sometimes the liberals will say, oh, who cares?
00:07:47.000Who cares if a man wants to put on high heels and call himself Sally?
00:07:53.000And my answer to that is always, You seem to care.
00:07:58.000You people who are forcing this into our bathrooms and on our sports teams and into our schools, you seem to care a lot.
00:08:04.000You're devoting a lot of time and energy and resources to getting us to use the wrong pronouns to refer to any of these people.
00:08:11.000And so you have to ask yourselves why.
00:08:14.000And especially from your position as pastors, it cuts right to the heart of what you are preaching and what you're talking about.
00:08:23.000Because our faith is an incarnational faith.
00:08:27.000The incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ is the pivot of history.
00:08:32.000Our Lord, the second person of the Trinity, takes on flesh on humanity and dwells among us in a real time and place with a real knee and with hands and with skin and with bones and with flesh.
00:08:46.000And so the question of transgenderism is, does our identity have anything at all to do with our bodies?
00:09:09.000Because if they were willing to use the language of traditional religion and philosophy, they would say, well, you've got the soul of a woman, even though you've got the body of a man.
00:09:20.000But then this raises a question that philosophers and theologians have debated for many years, which is, can your soul be a different sex from your body?
00:10:15.000And with that, you are trying to say that my will is over the design, right?
00:10:21.000And this is also why the trans movement is so pernicious.
00:10:24.000Is that Genesis 1 through 11, which I think most pastors need to talk more about Genesis 1 through 11, which the entire word of God really is based, it is the fulcrum point, right?
00:11:28.000We all have a lower appetite, which is, you know, you want to eat the fifth cookie even though you probably should cut it off because your pants are tight.
00:11:35.000But you also don't want to eat that fifth cookie because you want to look good and you want to be healthy.
00:12:16.000George Bernard Shaw, who's a socialist playwright, wrote a line that has been quoted by John F. Kennedy, by his brother Robert Kennedy, and by Democrat politicians ever since.
00:12:25.000And the line is, some people see things that are, I'll do it in a Kennedy voice.
00:12:30.000Some people see things that are and say, why?
00:12:33.000I dream things that never were and say, why not?
00:12:36.000And this has been quoted by countless liberals ever since.
00:12:40.000And what they never tell you, that's the only time a Kennedy, it's the only time a Kennedy is going to get applause at a TPUSA conference.
00:12:50.000But that's the line that they all quote.
00:12:52.000And what they don't tell you is that that line comes from a play cycle called Back to Methuselah, a modern pentateuch.
00:13:00.000This was a rewriting of the Bible by Bernard Shaw.
00:13:04.000And it's actually a line from the serpent in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve.
00:13:34.000And so this brings us to a point that I think is really important for pastors to understand, which is you are courageous people.
00:13:43.000Your presence in this room tells me, you get it.
00:13:45.000I'm looking at my friend Rob McCoy out there.
00:13:47.000I know these are people who understand the place we are in the culture and in politics and recognize we need to stand up against the lies and the deceit.
00:13:55.000So that's wonderful, and you have to keep doing that.
00:13:58.000But Christians are not called only to act.
00:14:02.000In fact, we're not called even primarily to act.
00:14:59.000You know, our Lord mocks the Pharisees.
00:15:03.000He says, you know the signs of the weather, but you don't see the signs of the times.
00:15:07.000And so to this wicked generation that seeks after these signs and wonders that they don't understand, no sign shall be given except for the sign of Jonah, which I always love.
00:15:16.000It's like saying, you won't get any prize today except a Ferrari.
00:15:22.000You won't get any sign except for the sign of the resurrection, the sign of salvation.
00:15:27.000And that sign is what we have to point toward.
00:15:29.000You know, we Christians understand that history has happened.
00:16:01.000And by the way, Michael, I want to compliment you.
00:16:03.000You know the Bible as a Catholic better than almost any Catholic I've come across.
00:16:07.000Maybe it's because I'm friends with so many Protestants.
00:16:09.000Yeah, it's because you're hanging around us.
00:16:16.000So, Michael, I want to emphasize the tyrannical nature in the LGBT because I think it really stands for tyranny.
00:16:23.000This is not about live and let live, which temperamentally I think most of us in this room and in the country have a live and let live attitude where we don't want to over-police people's imaginations or delusions.
00:16:33.000I think it's now triggered a lot of our response because they're in public life.
00:17:04.000I always have to relearn it going into June because it just remanifests itself as we go into June, our wonderful Pride Month, everybody, right?
00:17:11.000What a nationwide disgrace June has become, by the way.
00:17:14.000I think manifesting is the operative word.
00:17:45.000Michael, can you just add something to this?
00:17:47.000I think it's important for pastors and people that lead churches to know that this is different than most of the other kind of culture war debates that are happening in the country.
00:18:13.000And that's because this issue is premised on irrationality.
00:18:17.000This issue is premised on the idea that you can never know anything about reality beyond what a delusional person will tell you subjectively.
00:18:26.000So that's why the behavior becomes increasingly irrational.
00:19:17.000It's literally more, I mean this non-sarcastically, more lead-up, more pageantry, and more media support than the Christmas season now has in America.
00:20:44.000I really love Dante in the Divine Comedy.
00:20:47.000And in the earliest stages of hell, there are the non-committal people, the lukewarm people.
00:20:54.000They are people who are so disgusting by their surrender of their reason, by their surrender of their will and their courage, that heaven won't have them, and hell won't have them either.
00:21:17.000If we cannot take a stand and enshrine that stand in law, enforce that stand through our civil society, and yes, impose reality on people, then we simply cannot have a society at all.
00:21:33.000Revelation 20, the cowards will be the first one judged.
00:21:37.000And there's a lot of them, unfortunately, out there.
00:21:40.000And speaking of Dante, this is an interesting wrinkle, though, because I feel as if we're being sold out because the seventh circle of hell, occupied by Cassius, Brutus, and Judas, the trihead of deceit, according to Dante, he believed that the worst thing you could do is to betray.
00:21:59.000And specifically betray your benefactors in that lowest part.
00:22:03.000What are we to make of our elites that make a deal with the trans lobby?
00:22:08.000As Dante would say, they get to the lowest level of hell.
00:23:09.000You have to be a party of yourself because you're going to stand there before that judgment seat.
00:23:16.000I mean, and that's going to be on you.
00:23:17.000And so we come together, we work in coalitions.
00:23:21.000I loved when you said, folks, we've got to put some minor theological quibbling aside for a second, or we're all going to be quibbling from the gulag.
00:23:31.000We have to recognize we're in society and make some priorities here.
00:23:35.000Ultimately, though, we are going to be before that judgment seat.
00:23:39.000And there are going to be people who call Lord Lord, and our Lord will say, I did not know you.
00:23:44.000And so You have to be very careful, and you have to be very courageous, and you have to be very clear about what you think.
00:23:55.000You know, Christianity is the only political revolution that has ever really mattered.
00:24:01.000When our Lord is crucified and is resurrected, that is the final political revolution, because it deprives the tyrants of the one tool they had, which is the subject's fear of death.
00:24:26.000And we shouldn't do it because the consequences of lying, the consequences of saying no to our Lord, to saying no to truth himself, are going to be a hell of a lot greater than the consequences of saying no to some woke apparatchik.
00:24:45.000So, Michael, let's get down to some action steps, okay?
00:24:57.000How should a pastor talk about it, right?
00:24:59.000First of all, I hope everyone here does talk about it.
00:25:02.000It would be my encouragement to you that you give a sermon or a series of sermons talking about how we're basically under imperialistic colonization occupation.
00:25:11.000I mean, you cannot walk into a major corporation or go to a major social media feed for an entire month without seeing a rainbow, which, by the way, is supposed to be a symbol from the Bible that has been co-opted by, let's just say, a not very good movement.
00:25:27.000We need to reclaim the rainbow, by the way.
00:25:48.000It symbolizes literally that, yes, not only a sin, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, what St. Thomas Aquinas called the queen of all vice, which my friend Andrew Clavin points out has now become the vice of all queens, which I think is very, very funny.
00:27:46.000Having your finger near any nuclear material is not great, but it's very funny.
00:27:51.000And so you can point out, you can say, guys, this is aberrant stuff.
00:27:54.000One of my favorite phrases, it's sort of an old-timey phrase, but whenever I talk about these issues, I say, you know, so-and-so, he's a little bit light in the loafers.
00:28:03.000Okay, it's not, you don't need to be totally condemnatory.
00:28:07.000You don't need to, you say, look, this is a little bit off, okay?
00:28:10.000If you think you're a man, you think you're a woman.
00:28:16.000And it's a message of love, and it's a message of truth, and it's a message of beauty.
00:28:20.000And I promise you, whatever bizarre delusion you've got, where you think you're the 57th gender, you think that will give you a euphoria.
00:28:28.000I mean, people will report, actually, that if they go through the transition, it gives them a brief feeling of euphoria and almost kind of an ecstasy.
00:28:46.000And in this case, we know from the largest data set on the transgender transition, we know that it does not improve mental health outcomes, anxiety, suicide, depression.
00:28:56.000In fact, in one case, in the case of anxiety, it would appear to make the condition worse.
00:29:01.000We know that it's spreading tremendously.
00:29:03.000We know that the rates of regret, again, according to the largest data set we have on that now, are not 1 or 2%.
00:29:10.000We know that this is harming younger and younger children.
00:29:13.000If you pursue this, you might feel a brief ecstasy or you might not, but you are very likely going to put yourself into a position of a lot of anxiety and sadness and depression.
00:29:24.000It reminds me of a line from C.S. Lewis.
00:29:45.000A happy consequence of that is it will bring you joy as well.
00:29:52.000And to piggyback on that, the church must articulate the good and the true.
00:30:01.000You do not know a line is crooked unless you have a straight line to compare it to.
00:30:05.000And the church, on a weekly and daily basis, has to articulate what that straight line is, which is the word of God, which is the logos, which is truth.
00:30:15.000And, you know, I'm sure we're going to have QA throughout this.
00:30:19.000And I'm sure some of you say, well, Charlie, how do I deal with one of these people in our congregation?
00:30:24.000Love them enough to try to get them to escape from the delusion that is currently occupying their body, where they think they have to wage war on their biology, and somehow that's going to liberate them.
00:31:58.000And you have an obligation furthermore not to cause any of them to stumble.
00:32:04.000And when you go squishy, and not that you would do this, but when pastors go squishy, when they try to compromise on the truth because they think it will be politically correct or it maybe will make someone feel better briefly in the moment, you could be causing countless members of your flock to stumble.