00:00:07.000If you are a Christian or go to a church, you need to listen to this entire episode and text it to your pastor, especially if your pastor is silent and a coward.
00:00:14.000Email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:18.000Come to our upcoming men's summit at tpfaith.com/slash men's.
00:00:58.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:36.000We've had Eric before on the program to talk about it, but we're going to do a whole other hour talking about the basic arguments made in this book and why the American church needs to awaken into action.
00:02:29.000Well, there's no way to say this, so you just have to say it.
00:02:36.000When I wrote my Bonhoeffer book over 10 years ago, as I'm writing about what happened to Germany in the 30s, I'm getting this creeping feeling as I'm doing the research that that same thing is happening here in the United States.
00:02:55.000I don't want to see these parallels, but I could begin to smell this over 10 years ago.
00:03:01.000And as time has passed, I have seen the horror of this unfold as reality.
00:03:09.000And the basic thesis of the book, the new book that I write about, deals with that.
00:03:15.000What I say, the reason I wrote the book is because it was the silence and inaction of the German church, specifically in the 30s, the silence and the inaction of the German church that allowed the rise of Hitler and an evil come into history that we can hardly process even today.
00:03:40.000The parallels to what is happening today, because of the silence of much of the American church and the inaction of the American church, the parallels are as dramatic as anything.
00:03:51.000When I really saw this, Charlie, I said, I got to write about this.
00:03:55.000And I was going to publish the book myself.
00:03:57.000I said, I just need to write this really short and to get it to Christian leaders so that they can see what I see.
00:04:04.000But Salem, my publisher, met with me and they said, hey, we've got an idea for a book for you to write, Eric.
00:04:26.000Largely because of the silence of the American church, which parallels precisely the silence of the German church.
00:04:32.000I don't just say it parallels it in that it exists.
00:04:35.000I mean, the excuses that German pastors and German leaders in the church gave for being silent in the face of evil, for saying we don't want to get political.
00:04:47.000Every one of the excuses they give in the 30s is paralleled today.
00:04:53.000So I wrote the book because I believe God wants us to save the republic.
00:04:59.000And he says the church is responsible.
00:05:01.000If the church will wake up and understand that its silence is allowing satanic evil to destroy America, if the church wakes up, America can be saved.
00:05:12.000But right now, obviously, the church has been dramatically silent.
00:05:19.000Now, I want to unpack this, you know, point by point, but let's start with one of those that you mentioned.
00:05:25.000Give us more example, more detail, more clarity into how the German church, what they were saying, for example, after Kristallnacht, after the beginning of putting Jews on trains.
00:05:36.000Oh, before, no, this was way before that.
00:06:37.000But they all bought into this and it gave them an out.
00:06:40.000They said, yeah, yeah, that's not our job.
00:06:42.000We're just going to, we're just going to skip that.
00:06:44.000It was because of that theological error, which again, just to be clear, is from the pit of hell and allowed evil to triumph.
00:06:52.000But it silenced the church at the precise time in the beginning when the church could have affected not just change, but could have really been, would have been the only institution in Germany that could have stood against the wicked, the evil of the Nazis.
00:07:11.000The church really was poised in Germany with tremendous cultural power, precisely the way the American church is in this nation.
00:07:18.000And Bonhoeffer said, let me finish here saying, Bonhoeffer said, the church is the conscience of the state.
00:07:23.000He knew if the church speaks up, these evil things won't happen.
00:07:27.000The church was silent and we know what happened.
00:07:29.000So Joram Hazzoni was on our program and he made a very interesting observation that at the founding of the modern German university, their mission statement, both privately and publicly, was to discredit and destroy the Bible's influence over Germany and of the West.
00:07:45.000That was the reason why he believed the secular university.
00:07:50.000Walk us through the ideological or philosophical underpinnings in the 20s and 30s, 1920s and 30s, that then started to seep into German Protestantism.
00:08:00.000Because this was mainly, I mean, Germany was not a largely Catholic state, correct?
00:08:10.000I mean, Luther, about whom I've written a book, Luther was Germany.
00:08:15.000I mean, he was kind of like, you know, practically the George Washington figure, except he's a theological figure, right?
00:08:21.000And they were so, I mean, this is, again, this is the danger is that when you think everything's going really great, you take your eye off the ball.
00:08:30.000So one thing we have to understand, and this is what Bonhoeffer saw, was that Germans had become so culturally Christian, had become so comfortably Christian that they forgot what it was to actually be a Christian.
00:08:55.000So once Hitler comes into power in 1930, early 33, they are not ready for what happens if the state goes to war against the church.
00:09:08.000This is really separate from what you asked, but just so people can frame it, what happens if the state says, you know what, we're going to control the church.
00:09:16.000We're going to make the church do what we want it to do.
00:09:19.000We're going to force it to stay in its quote-unquote theological lane.
00:09:23.000They can't say anything that will affect the Third Reich, that will affect our government policies.
00:09:42.000Your question of what had been happening, it's kind of complicated, Charlie, because, you know, when we talk about the church, we understand we're talking about many churches, right?
00:09:49.000I mean, there were some people that are on fire for God.
00:09:52.000There are other people that are just going through the motions.
00:09:56.000I think that because Germany was so wedded culturally with Luther and the Lutheran church, that it was very easy for anybody who thought, I'm a German, I'm a Lutheran.
00:10:10.000They didn't understand that for the church to be the church, God always calls his church, his people, to be active, to be vocal, to be soldiers for love and goodness and truth, not simply to attend some service on a Sunday morning and to get dressed up and whatever.
00:10:59.000It's not unusual to ignore danger and simply hope that will go away.
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00:12:22.000I sense that folks younger than us have increasing awareness around how gender has impacted our understanding of God and our language around God and even our roles in society.
00:12:39.000And I think there's going to be an evolving conversation about gender and how that plays into our understanding of God.
00:12:46.000Now, I'm not sure if she's a pastor, but she is on staff at a church in Raleigh, North Carolina.
00:13:04.000When you play that for me, I just can't, but you have to understand it's so painful for me to listen to that because Skye Jethani, you know, a couple of years ago, I considered him a friend.
00:13:13.000You know, we're on the same side of things.
00:13:41.000These people are importing insane ideas.
00:13:45.000And if you care about your congregation, and by the way, if you love your neighbors who live in your community, you need to stand against this.
00:14:34.000You need to speak on all of these issues from a biblical point of view.
00:14:39.000And if you're not crazy like the woman that we just heard, but you're simply silent, you're equally guilty because that is how the crazy people are taking over the culture.
00:14:49.000The silence of good pastors, the silence of pastors who might not agree with what we just heard, but say, well, she has a point.
00:14:57.000So, Eric, I want to challenge on one thing, which is I would prefer some churches to remain silent than say this, play cut 26.
00:15:06.000We give praise to the great one, the one who was identifiable as God.
00:15:13.000I am what I am, you say, the great they, the incarnate he and she, the God of trans beings.
00:15:25.000You shadow, you shatter all stereotypes, making every single person male and female, male and female, intersex, non-binary in your image.
00:15:41.000spectrum rainbow god who put your promise for non-violence in the symbol for clear love before humanity knew because you knew i would rather her be quiet than say to the great trans being rainbow god charlie let me tell you something the fact that nt right is sitting behind her having to listen to that i mean i don't know what to make of it again i want to be clear when i talk about the church being silent,
00:16:24.000The chapter 12,000 pastors says that in 1933, when the Nazis tried to take over the church, a number of heroic pastors said, no, we see what's happening.
00:16:36.000We need to write this thing called the Barman Declaration.
00:16:39.000We need to make very clear we will not allow the Nazi state to take over the church and to tell us what to think.
00:16:47.000So I think maybe something like 6,000 pastors out of the 18,000 in Germany signed that document.
00:16:55.000By 1935, two years later, the intimidation, the bullying had been so strong that only about 3,000 of the 18,000 pastors were willing to stand with the Barman Declaration, to stand for what the Bible says.
00:18:17.000Yeah, when you said to me in the first question, why did I write the book?
00:18:21.000It's because in the middle, in Germany, in the 30s, okay, remember I said we had 3,000 of these 18,000 pastors that were, they were willing to stand for God's truth against what the Nazis were trying to do and take over the church.
00:18:41.000On the other end of the spectrum, you had their equivalent of the woke crazy people, okay, in the church.
00:18:47.000But in the middle, Charlie, this is the key.
00:20:25.000You know, I'm just going to, I'm going to stand over here.
00:20:28.000Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you are not fighting this, if you claim to be a member of the church, to believe what the Bible says, and you're being silent on socialism, you're being silent on transgender lunacy, you're being silent on Black Lives Matter, which is destroying, it's a Marxist organization, destroying communities of color.
00:20:47.000You're being silent on that stuff because you're afraid that you might get, you know, somebody might look at you funny or call you a name.
00:20:54.000You claim to believe what the Bible says.
00:20:57.000You claim to believe Jesus defeated death on the cross and you have no fear.
00:21:01.000That's what God expects of us to live out our faith.
00:21:04.000And it is because of the silence and that fear that is happening in America now that we are seeing this utter madness, which by the way is affecting everyone.
00:21:14.000And it's the responsibility of those who claim to be Christians to speak against it.
00:21:18.000Cut 28, a progressive Lutheran says the Great Commission is fake and racist.
00:21:25.000Over the course of many years of study, I have come to believe that the so-called Great Commission is anything but the gospel.
00:21:35.000Indeed, I have come to believe that this particular ending to the gospel, according to Matthew, may be the source of the systemic racism which permeates not just the church, but also all of the Western cultures and institutions, which arose out of what history has dubbed the Holy Roman Empire.
00:22:06.000I don't know the terminology in Lutheran thought, but the reason I keep playing these, Eric, is not only do we have to deal with the neutrality, but the woke elements of Christianity, they're no longer worried about state.
00:22:18.000They're not debating whether or not to be silent.
00:22:21.000They are more forceful and aggressive than ever.
00:22:24.000No, Charlie, I mean, that's exactly my point in the book is that whenever somebody says, uh-uh, be quiet, you're being political, you'll notice that the people on the left are being dramatically political, insanely political, pro-abortion political.
00:22:46.000So this idea that there's some safe middle path is utter nonsense.
00:22:51.000If you are silent in the face of what you just heard and in the face of what's going on in the country, again, we know that there are crazy people in the church, but the idea that, you know what, I'm going to take a pass.
00:23:02.000I don't want to criticize what that woman said.
00:23:11.000The reason I wrote the book, Letter to the American Church, is because we know what happened in Germany when the middle, when the good guys in the middle said, we're going to take a pass, we're going to be silent.
00:23:22.000When you are going to a church or tithing to a church or part of a community that is silent in the face of the evils that we see, whether it's transgender, all of the stuff that we see, the madness that we're seeing, it is because of the silence of the church in Germany that Hitler was able to crush the church and to destroy innumerable lives.
00:23:43.000That satanic evil was unleashed because of the silence of the church.
00:23:47.000And it is the silence of pastors today.
00:23:50.000whose churches, by the way, are shrinking because they think that they're going to cling to people by avoiding these issues.
00:23:56.000When you deal with these issues and speak the truth, your churches will increase in number.
00:24:01.000Everywhere I go and you speak in these churches, their numbers are increasing because they're daring to speak about what everybody wants to hear about.
00:24:29.000What is the, what does the model look like, Eric?
00:24:32.000I mean, are you expecting sermons, seminars, workshops?
00:24:35.000Because I hear this from pastors all the time.
00:24:37.000They're like, yeah, I'm willing, but I don't know how.
00:24:40.000Well, you know, this is because I'm a writer and because I wrote this book, the first thing I would want to say, frankly, is read this book because I want to give you the biblical reasoning behind what I'm saying.
00:24:54.000In other words, before we even talk about what you're going to do, you need to be convinced that what I'm saying is right, that what I'm saying is biblical.
00:25:00.000And so I try to give the biblical foundation for why being silent and saying, oh, I'm not going to be political or I'm not going to go here.
00:25:09.000You need to understand how that's biblically wrong.
00:25:12.000And I wrote the book, Charlie, to convince those people who might, they're not where we are, but I know that there are many, many, many pastors out there.
00:25:20.000They're looking around and they're afraid.
00:25:23.000And I wrote this book to galvanize them.
00:25:24.000So the first thing, obviously, I would say, having written the book is please consider what I have said, because I'm convinced that an open-minded person reading what I wrote, and it's the shortest book I ever wrote, will say, you know what?
00:26:00.000As long as you understand God calls every one of us to take a risk, to stick our neck out, to speak the truth.
00:26:08.000I mean, you know what the perfect example of this is?
00:26:10.000When Roe v. Wade was overturned, the lack of celebration in many churches, the lack of declaring what we have prayed for for 50 years has happened.
00:26:51.000When people say you're not supposed to, in the book, I explain how we got to this place that so many churches think it's right not to be political.
00:26:59.000501c3, I don't want to lose my tax exempt status.
00:27:01.000And you think, well, where did that come from?
00:27:03.000That came from one of the most corrupt politicians in the history of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Johnson Amendment.
00:27:08.000And how did I learn about the Johnson Amendment?
00:27:11.000From Donald Trump, not from a fellow evangelical, from Donald Trump, who smartly looked into this and said, Oh, that's why all the evangelicals are silent and afraid and cowering because of the Johnson amendment.
00:27:25.000Everybody needs to understand what Johnson did, not only was that wrong, but the silence of the churches in 1954 when Johnson did that, that they said, Oh, okay, we're not going to be political.
00:27:51.000There's no such thing as the pure gospel.
00:27:53.000If somebody brings up slavery, okay, in the days when slavery was legal in parts of the United States, there were pastors who said, Oh, I don't want to speak on that because that's political.
00:28:03.000Now, we now would say, What a coward, because the Bible commands you to denounce that as evil.
00:28:10.000There are always going to be people that are going to be afraid to talk.
00:28:14.000And what they're going to say, they said it in Germany in the 30s.
00:28:25.000And you need to stop being afraid of being quote unquote political because the reality is that truth, God's truth is God's truth.
00:28:32.000And by the way, if you want this kind of Christianity, you can have it in China.
00:28:35.000In China, the government will let you go in that building, do your little weird rituals, and then when you come out, you bow to the secular authority of the state.
00:28:43.000That is what silence in the face of evil from the American church today has led to.
00:28:48.000And we need to understand it's not only not biblical, it is not God's will for us today.
00:28:53.000It is his will that we speak on when we do not speak out or correct other pastors, and I'm going to help build out the how as well.
00:29:00.000You get well-known, well-published pastors that just say this heretical nonsense, like Matt Chandler, who I'm told is a very nice person.
00:29:10.000The entire experience of my life has been one of I can easily find people that look like me.
00:29:19.000Almost all my understanding of what made America great is because of efforts and the work ethic of people like me.
00:29:26.000But what happens in that kind of upbringing, which is fine, is that there were some lenses put over my eyes.
00:29:36.000I have grown up with this invisible kind of bag of privilege, this kind of invisible toolkit that I can reach in there at any given moment and have this type of privilege that a lot of other brothers and sisters don't have, don't possess.
00:30:09.000Matt Chandler is not a bad guy, but he has drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to be mouthing this stuff so that he sounds like he's hip and he gets it.
00:30:19.000And the young people will say, oh, he gets it and whatever.
00:30:22.000He is buying into ideas that are evil.
00:30:29.000But I guess my point is that I wrote the book for folks like him because there are plenty of people in the middle that they wouldn't describe themselves as crazy woke, but they're going along just enough instead of speaking against it.
00:30:43.000Somebody like Matt Chandler, there are others, there are tons like that, that they think they can have it both ways.
00:30:49.000And why I wrote the book was that's what they thought in Germany in the 30s.
00:30:54.000They really thought we don't need to go against that.
00:30:58.000We're just going to kind of go along to get along.
00:31:01.000The most dramatic example of this, frankly, I mentioned Andy Stanley.
00:31:04.000He wrote a book saying exactly the opposite of what I say in my book letter to the American Church, exactly the opposite.
00:31:10.000It's a theological mess, an historical mess.
00:31:13.000It's a nightmare, but it's going to mislead tons of people and Christian leaders into thinking, oh, yes, here's the biblical reason for me to do nothing, to say nothing, to avoid the political, and to just let this evil kind of wash over us.
00:31:27.000You know, it's not my job to deal with it.
00:31:47.000In other words, there are people that are good people that are getting this wrong.
00:31:53.000And I wrote this book to try to reach them.
00:31:55.000I know there's tons of pastors around the country just like that who are basically saying, you know what, I believe we shouldn't be divisive.
00:32:03.000I believe we shouldn't be too political.
00:32:07.000And it is because of their silence in the face of evil that evil is triumphing right now.
00:32:13.000Everything we're seeing that you talk about and I talk about every single day is happening because of the silence of pastors, the silence of good Christian leaders.
00:32:20.000I'm trying to reach the good Christian leaders in the middle and to help them understand why they've got to speak and understand is what God is asking you to do.
00:32:44.000And finally, let's talk about the people who are not pastors.
00:32:47.000What can those in the audience that have influence over a pastor, a relationship, what can they do?
00:32:53.000Well, again, I would say, first of all, if you're going to a church that's guilty of this, you know, you can give the pastor a copy of my book and forgive me for promoting the book, right?
00:33:06.000But I'm saying, like, I want to reach those folks.
00:33:09.000But if they refuse to do this, if you're going to a church where they have just said, we will not talk about whatever, go down the list, I would be sure to leave that church.
00:33:20.000So that's really my main advice is that, you know, try in a loving way to persuade them.
00:33:26.000But if they're not there, do not tithe.
00:33:38.000God is calling us to do what the German church failed to do.
00:33:42.000And when the German church failed to do it because they had a million theological reasons, we saw that the evil that was unleashed is just beyond anything we can dream of.
00:34:17.000So we're living in an impossibly important moment.
00:34:21.000And I just feel like I've never, ever wanted to write a book like this, but I felt an urge literally.
00:34:29.000I felt God calling me to write this, to say these things, because he doesn't want America to go the way Germany went.
00:34:36.000He doesn't want the American church to continue to make the errors that the German church continued to make that destroyed that nation and destroyed Europe and millions of lives, literally.