The Charlie Kirk Show - What IS a Christian Nationalist, Anyway?

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, what is a Christian nationalist anyway?

00:00:03.000 Well, here is a man who calls himself a Christian nationalist.

00:00:06.000 He's a thoughtful, brilliant thinker.

00:00:09.000 You got to check it out right now.

00:00:10.000 His website, ChristasLord.com, it is Pastor Doug Wilson.

00:00:14.000 Listen to this entire episode and text it to your friends.

00:00:18.000 Email it to your colleagues.

00:00:20.000 And most importantly, send it to your pastors.

00:00:23.000 Pastor Doug Wilson joins us.

00:00:24.000 His book, Mere Christendom, is out at ChristasLord.com.

00:00:28.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:31.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:32.000 Here we go.

00:00:33.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:34.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:36.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:40.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:43.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:44.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:45.000 His spirit is love of this country.

00:00:47.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:54.000 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.

00:01:02.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:31.000 You might have seen him on the Tucker Carlson program recently for a long form interview, and I listened to it three times.

00:01:39.000 An incredibly thoughtful man and thought leader, I should say.

00:01:44.000 And they call him a Christian nationalist.

00:01:47.000 And he's okay with that.

00:01:49.000 Pastor Doug Wilson, author of Mir Christendom.

00:01:53.000 You guys could check it out at ChristisLord.com.

00:01:56.000 Pastor, thank you for taking the time and welcome to the program.

00:01:59.000 Great to be with you.

00:01:59.000 Thank you for the invitation.

00:02:01.000 So Pastor, why don't you begin by introducing yourself, your work, and your views, and we'll go from there.

00:02:08.000 Sure.

00:02:08.000 My name is Douglas Wilson.

00:02:09.000 I'm the senior pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

00:02:13.000 We're up in the panhandle of Idaho, so we're in the northern part of the state.

00:02:18.000 I've been here since the late 70s, pastoring in the same church, the long-suffering group of saints here.

00:02:28.000 And I do that.

00:02:31.000 That's my main vocation, my main calling.

00:02:34.000 But I also write a good deal.

00:02:36.000 I've written books and I blog frequently.

00:02:40.000 So that's what I do.

00:02:42.000 And what I am, I guess the reason I'm here on your program has to do with the theme of the Tucker interview.

00:02:51.000 And that has to do with Christian nationalism, which is sort of a bugbear that the left is using to scare everybody. 0.71

00:03:00.000 Christian nationalism is, according to them, the thing that's going to introduce a sea of red dresses for all the women and, you know, a handmaid's tale totalitarian situation where you have a bunch of Ayatollah weirdbeards only with reformed theology, reformed Christian theology, imposing their morality on everybody and making this a grim place to live. 0.51

00:03:28.000 That's what they want to call it.

00:03:31.000 Those of us who are tired of Clown World are simply wanting to return to an earlier arrangement here in America where we recognized that we were a Christian nation.

00:03:49.000 This was not, we didn't have an established church the way England or Denmark do.

00:03:54.000 So the Church of England is the Anglican Church.

00:03:58.000 The Church of Denmark is the Lutheran church.

00:04:01.000 Our founders wisely said they didn't want to do that.

00:04:04.000 So we didn't have a formal establishment, but we were informally very much a Christian nation and knew ourselves to be such.

00:04:12.000 So that gave us the central moral consensus that we needed to be a coherent nation, a nation that hangs together.

00:04:24.000 If you have a bunch of people, millions of people, as we do, and everybody has got their own worldview, and you've got 17 different worldviews, and those worldviews go down to the fundamental level, you don't have a nation.

00:04:40.000 What you have is a mob.

00:04:41.000 It's just a big crowd.

00:04:45.000 There has to be a shared consensus because no group of people can police everything.

00:04:52.000 And if nobody has any shared assumptions, if we don't police ourselves through our shared consensus, through our shared assumptions, then it's just going to be anarchy, which we see headed toward us on the horizon.

00:05:08.000 That anarchistic state is coming toward us because we don't have anything in common.

00:05:14.000 Yeah, and it's anarcho-tyranny.

00:05:15.000 So it's anarchy in the streets, but the government will have total tyrannical control over our micro-decisions.

00:05:23.000 But if you want to go grocery shop with your kid, your car is going to get broken into.

00:05:27.000 But if you misgender the cashier when you check out at the grocery store, they'll throw you into a gulag.

00:05:32.000 So much to unpack here, Pastor.

00:05:34.000 I want to isolate one of the things you said, which I constantly battle with both pastors, Christians, and then the secular world.

00:05:42.000 They'll say, what do you mean America as a Christian nation?

00:05:46.000 Remind our audience about Holy Trinity versus the United States, the 1893 Brewer decision, which you educated me on in that podcast with Tucker, but also more broadly, make the case and present the evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation.

00:06:04.000 Yes.

00:06:06.000 The thing that in the peace treaty that was signed with Great Britain at the conclusion of our war for independence, the words of the treaty begin, in the name of the Holy Trinity, amen.

00:06:19.000 So, which is not what you see in diplomatic communiques nowadays.

00:06:24.000 No, it would be in the name of BLM or trans or some nonsense.

00:06:28.000 Right.

00:06:29.000 So when the colonies were first established in the New World, the old Christendom, the old order of Christendom, was still functioning.

00:06:40.000 It was still running.

00:06:42.000 Everybody was self-consciously Christian. 0.97

00:06:45.000 Now, that does not mean that they were entirely Christian or consistently Christian or that everybody had internalized the themes of the Sermon on the Mount and everything was fluffy clouds and unicorns.

00:06:58.000 No, it was, but there was a shared consensus.

00:07:02.000 And so when the colonies were established, they were very committed to a particular theological framework.

00:07:11.000 And even as late as the time of the adoption of the Constitution, when 13 colonies or states, by that time they were independent states, when the 13 states ratified the Constitution, at that time, nine of the 13 had official relationships with Christian denominations.

00:07:32.000 So, for example, Connecticut was the official church of Connecticut was the Congregational Church.

00:07:40.000 And that remained the case, tax dollars supporting the Congregational Church as the official mascot church of Connecticut.

00:07:48.000 That lasted down into the 1830s.

00:07:51.000 Now, I don't happen to think that establishment of a particular denomination is a great idea at the state level.

00:07:59.000 I like informal establishment at the federal level and informal establishment at the state level.

00:08:05.000 I don't like that formal, this is the official church of Connecticut or Massachusetts.

00:08:12.000 But whatever it is, even if it's a bad idea that I would disagree with, it's manifestly the case that it's not an unconstitutional idea.

00:08:21.000 Because the founders, when they said, when they established the First Amendment, the amendment begins, Congress shall make no law.

00:08:31.000 So the first thing we should recognize is the only entity that could violate the First Amendment would be Congress.

00:08:38.000 Congress shall make no law.

00:08:39.000 Now, if Congress establishes a church of the United States, then Congress would be violating the First Amendment.

00:08:48.000 And if Congress declares war on Christians practicing their faith in the public sphere, they are violating the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

00:09:02.000 They're not allowed to establish a formal church of the United States, and they're not allowed to interfere with us as we are worshiping God and influencing the political order according to the lights of our conscience.

00:09:15.000 So at the very beginning, nine of the 13 colonies were formally connected to the Christian faith.

00:09:24.000 And in the 1892 Holy Trinity decision, and I just need to set this, Congress had passed a law forbidding the importation of cheap labor for big businesses where the corporations paid their passage over and then used them on their project and then released them into the country after that.

00:09:46.000 So there was a law against paying the passage of a foreign worker.

00:09:50.000 There was a church in New York, Holy Trinity, that called a British minister to be their minister, and they paid for his passage over.

00:09:59.000 An overzealous prosecutor went after them for that.

00:10:03.000 And the Supreme Court in 1892 decided in favor of the church in a very common sense way.

00:10:10.000 It was delightful to read that opinion because here you have Supreme Court jurists making sense.

00:10:18.000 It was a very fun experience.

00:10:21.000 They handled it in a common sense way.

00:10:24.000 And then Chief Justice Brewer basically said, and while we're here, while we're on the subject, let us remind everyone that the United States is a Christian nation.

00:10:35.000 Yes.

00:10:37.000 And he went through the whole history, the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the original colonists, their faith, and all of the things that our nation had done to recognize the Christian God.

00:10:50.000 It's not just a generic deity that is a placeholder deity, however you conceive him, her, it to be.

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00:12:06.000 So Pastor, I want to read, of course, from the Declaration that commonly gets quoted by some secularists, but they say, no, you don't understand.

00:12:13.000 This is not the God of the Old Testament.

00:12:16.000 This is not, you know, an omniscient, omnipotent creator God.

00:12:19.000 This is just an unmoved mover, like an Aristotelian God.

00:12:22.000 Of course, it goes one in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.

00:12:34.000 What God was Thomas Jefferson and the founders referring to and literally signing on to?

00:12:41.000 Sure.

00:12:43.000 It is commonly said that the founders were deists.

00:12:47.000 That is the standard operating line, that the founders were deists. 1.00

00:12:51.000 Two of the founders, Jefferson and Franklin, were arguably deistic in their inclinations, but they were very bad deists.

00:13:03.000 A deist is someone who believes in a clockmaker God, a God who created everything and then walked away and doesn't interact with the world at all.

00:13:14.000 That's the deist God.

00:13:16.000 Both Franklin and Jefferson believed in ongoing providence.

00:13:21.000 They believed that God interfered with human affairs and so forth.

00:13:24.000 They were not orthodox in their theology, but they weren't orthodox deist either.

00:13:30.000 They were far more influenced by the Christian milieu in the colonies than they were by Enlightenment deism on the continent.

00:13:39.000 So that's the first thing.

00:13:40.000 At the Constitutional Convention, 50 of the 55 men at the Constitutional Convention were Orthodox Trinitarian Christians, 50 of the 55.

00:13:52.000 So when people say that the founders were deists, it's simply not true.

00:13:58.000 It's not the case.

00:14:01.000 In the Constitution, I caused a stir here one time.

00:14:05.000 There was a fracas in our newspaper, and I offered a $10 reward to any high school student at the government school who could find me the reference to the Christian God in the Constitution.

00:14:19.000 And there was an uproar and a lot of people yelling and everything.

00:14:23.000 And someone finally found it.

00:14:25.000 The Constitution was ratified in the year of our Lord, 1789.

00:14:31.000 Now, people are going to say, well, they didn't mean that.

00:14:34.000 That's just boilerplate.

00:14:35.000 That's just what, you know, they didn't mean it.

00:14:39.000 Well, in the French Revolution, which occurred just shortly after our war for independence, it's more proper to call our war a war for independence and not a revolution.

00:14:51.000 The French Revolution wanted to flatten the place, bulldoze, and start over. 0.69

00:14:56.000 They were true revolutionaries.

00:14:58.000 They were impatient and they wanted to redo the calendar.

00:15:02.000 They wanted a 10-day work week. 0.64

00:15:05.000 They wanted to eradicate every trace of the Christian religion.

00:15:10.000 They started the year, the counting the years over, a new year one and two and three, four, and three and four, and so on.

00:15:21.000 Our founding fathers did not do that.

00:15:23.000 They were self-consciously Christian.

00:15:25.000 They ratified the Constitution in the year of our Lord.

00:15:28.000 They prohibited the federal government from establishing a church, but they didn't prohibit the states from doing that.

00:15:36.000 And a number of them just continued merrily on with that.

00:15:39.000 So we had a very informal arrangement, a happy arrangement between different kinds of Christians.

00:15:48.000 And the reason for this is if the United States adopts the national flower and then a state adopts a state flower, that's not likely to be a cause of contention or civil unrest or any problem.

00:16:02.000 But if you have an established church, let's say the Episcopalian church as the national church and the Presbyterian church as a local state church, you're setting the stage for conflict.

00:16:15.000 And they didn't want that kind of conflict.

00:16:17.000 They wanted the Baptists and the Presbyterians and the Methodists to be able to play nice together.

00:16:24.000 And that worked for an extended period of time.

00:16:28.000 What they did not envision was colliding worldviews where they did not envision 30 million Hindus and 20 million Muslims and 10 million Jews and 50 million Christians all trying to work it out together.

00:16:45.000 Because you get to a certain point where you don't have enough in common for the thing to cohere.

00:16:52.000 Because some people believe that you please the Almighty by flying airplanes into skyscrapers, and other people believe that you don't please the Almighty by doing that.

00:17:03.000 And that is a fundamental religious conviction.

00:17:06.000 Or even more disturbing, people believe they are the Almighty, or they don't believe that the Almighty even exists.

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00:18:35.000 So, Pastor, I want to isolate one thing you mentioned here, which included in that topic is immigration.

00:18:41.000 And I think one of the great failures of modern Christianity has been the weakness and the unbiblical approach to the issue of immigration. 0.50

00:18:50.000 I've spoken at over 150 churches in the last couple of years.

00:18:53.000 It's that topic that even the most on fire pastors are a little uneasy about.

00:18:59.000 They say, well, the scriptures say we must let people in and that we must love the refugee and love the stranger and love the sojourner.

00:19:06.000 Now, that's not technically correct, but I want you to address that, Pastor, because if there's a topic where the Christian gets weak at the knees and wobbly, it's on border and mass migration.

00:19:17.000 Pastor Wilson.

00:19:19.000 Sure thing.

00:19:20.000 So the illustration I use to answer the Christian who's concerned about, well, doesn't the Bible tell us to be generous to the alien and the stranger in the land?

00:19:32.000 And the answer to that is yes.

00:19:34.000 So the issue is not immigration.

00:19:37.000 The issue is anarchy.

00:19:39.000 The issue is the out-of-controlness of it.

00:19:43.000 So, for example, if you had a Christian family that had three foster children, let's say four children of their own, and then they'd taken in three foster children, and they were doing a great job with their family, and the kids were thriving and happy.

00:19:59.000 And let's say that one day the state showed up with a busload of 28 new foster children that had not been requested or arranged for and just dropped them off and said, okay, these additional 28 foster kids are now your responsibility.

00:20:15.000 The father, who was taking care of three foster kids and four of his own, could go out and argue with them, and he could rightly say something like this.

00:20:23.000 I believe that I was being generous.

00:20:25.000 I believe that I was being welcoming.

00:20:27.000 I believe that I was being hospitable, just like the Bible said.

00:20:31.000 But with these 28 that you're dropping off here, after they are dropped off, I'm not going to be helping anybody.

00:20:38.000 I'm not going to be good for anything with any of these people.

00:20:42.000 What you're doing is you're taking away my ability to do good.

00:20:46.000 You're not making me do additional good.

00:20:49.000 What you're doing is wrecking something that was working fine.

00:20:52.000 So the issue is out-of-control immigration, chaos on the border, lawlessness on the border.

00:20:58.000 That's the issue.

00:21:01.000 And so consequently, you're having all these people flood in, and they are flooding the system in a way that the system cannot assimilate them.

00:21:11.000 There's no way to incorporate them in.

00:21:15.000 And consequently, what you're doing is you're setting up the conditions for ethnic conflict, class conflict, crime. 0.75

00:21:24.000 You're not helping anybody do anything.

00:21:27.000 So yes and amen to all the good Samaritan sentiments that are there.

00:21:32.000 The issue, however, is law versus chaos.

00:21:36.000 And also, there is a very important teaching, Moses' farewell address in Deuteronomy, where there is a cautionary warning about if you allow too many foreigners into your land, they will become your masters and you will become their slaves. 0.99

00:21:53.000 And can you come back to the title?

00:21:54.000 Deuteronomy.

00:21:56.000 Yeah, Deuteronomy 28.

00:21:59.000 They will become the head and you will be the tail.

00:22:02.000 What's going to happen is you're going to lose your ability to do good to others.

00:22:08.000 So, yes, the Bible teaches that we're to be generous and willing to share.

00:22:12.000 That doesn't mean that we rent a helicopter and fly over the neighborhoods throwing cash out the window.

00:22:19.000 That's not generosity.

00:22:21.000 Generosity is intelligent.

00:22:23.000 It's local.

00:22:26.000 It's face-to-face.

00:22:28.000 You know the people you're helping.

00:22:30.000 And that really is a moral obligation for Christians.

00:22:34.000 But what's happening now does not resemble that in the slightest.

00:22:39.000 So I think that Christians ought to stop being embarrassed about being nervous about or opposed to the chaos that is being fomented on our southern border. 0.99

00:22:51.000 I totally agree.

00:22:52.000 So let's now get into the day-to-day news cycle. 0.96

00:22:56.000 As I mentioned, this published rubbish, the false white gospel, rejecting Christian nationalism, reclaiming true faith, and refounding democracy. 0.89

00:23:06.000 I'm going to ask you to repeat sort of what you said earlier, Pastor, but I think it's important. 0.73

00:23:10.000 If you were to give a definition, and you're an author and a thinker, of what Christian nationalism is, not what it isn't, but what it is, what would you say?

00:23:21.000 I would say that if there is no God above the state, then the state has become your God.

00:23:28.000 If there is no transcendent authority that overarches everyone, if that is not the case, then something overarches everyone, and that has now become this humanistic state that wants to govern us all.

00:23:43.000 So we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

00:23:49.000 If you exclude the creator from your calculations, which the opponents of Christian nationalism want to do, they want us to simply have our rights to be handed us from Congress or the Supreme Court.

00:24:04.000 But if that's the case, they're not rights.

00:24:06.000 They're privileges.

00:24:08.000 And they're rapidly declining privileges.

00:24:11.000 So Christian nationalism is simply the recognition that secularism is a failed philosophy.

00:24:18.000 Secularism doesn't work. 0.81

00:24:20.000 We need to have an authority over our lives that Congress cannot reach, that the Supreme Court cannot touch, that the president has no authority to write an executive order canceling.

00:24:34.000 So I want a country where a man with an open Bible can say to the established authorities, you may not do this thing. 0.89

00:24:45.000 Right?

00:24:47.000 And this is really important.

00:24:49.000 Going back to the Wallace book, where I'm wondering, how did the word white get in there?

00:24:54.000 How did the white get in there? 0.86

00:24:55.000 I totally agree.

00:24:56.000 That seems a little strange.

00:24:58.000 Right. 0.95

00:24:59.000 What he's wanting to do is he's wanting to tar us with an implied racism smear that, okay, we want a lily white America and Christian nationalism is simply a dog whistle for getting rid of all the colored people, right? 0.55

00:25:15.000 But that's not what it is.

00:25:18.000 And this is what is so important about this.

00:25:21.000 If there is no God above the state, then there is no problem with whatever we want to do.

00:25:29.000 In other words, if there is no transcendent authority above a nation-state, then there is no problem with a racist nation-state.

00:25:40.000 Okay, imagine there's no heaven, no heaven above us, no hell below us.

00:25:47.000 The only thing that's above us is only sky.

00:25:51.000 Imagine, right, as that inane song puts it.

00:25:54.000 If we imagine that, then we are imagining a situation where democracy can be three coyotes and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.

00:26:09.000 And if you have a majority in the country that is of one ethnic group and they want to exile a minority ethnic group, or they want to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water, or they want to enslave them or exile them or commit genocide against them.

00:26:28.000 If there is no God, what would be wrong with that?

00:26:34.000 If there is no God, who could have a problem with what Stalin did to Ukraine?

00:26:40.000 If there is no God, why is Pol Pot's behavior so wrong?

00:26:45.000 If there is no God, why is Mao's behavior so wrong?

00:26:49.000 Well, people say at that point, they start sputtering and saying, well, they go back and say, what about the Inquisition?

00:26:56.000 Like, that's their...

00:26:57.000 They say, okay, yeah.

00:26:57.000 Yeah.

00:26:59.000 As you say in Tucker's interview, they've been drawn on that thing for quite a while.

00:27:04.000 Again, not diminishing the evil of the Inquisition, but it's nowhere near the horror that people think it was over the period of time that people realize in comparison to the secular atrocities.

00:27:12.000 Yes, Pastor, I'm cutting you off, yes.

00:27:14.000 Yeah, no, this is really important.

00:27:17.000 The Spanish Inquisition was one of the worst things that happened in the course of Christendom.

00:27:22.000 But over the course of a few centuries, a few thousand people lost their lives, and it was horrific.

00:27:27.000 It was really bad.

00:27:28.000 It was really, really bad.

00:27:30.000 But in a Christian framework, we have a book.

00:27:33.000 We have a law.

00:27:34.000 We have a transcendent authority which enables us to protest against that inconsistency.

00:27:40.000 When atrocities are committed in the name of Christ, true Christians can stand up and say, this is not consistent.

00:27:47.000 This is not consistent with what we all profess to believe.

00:27:51.000 But if a communist wanted to stand up against what Stalin was doing, or if a communist wanted to stand up against what Mao was doing, and remember that communists have killed 100 million people over the course of one century, 100 million people, and the Spanish Inquisition, a few thousand people over the course of a few centuries, not justifying it, but let's put it in perspective.

00:28:16.000 That was Mao on a slow afternoon, right?

00:28:20.000 And so why we should feel sheepish about the history of Christendom when the secularists, the socialists and the communists have, they don't have blood on their hands.

00:28:32.000 They have blood up to their armpits. 0.92

00:28:36.000 This is one of the most ludicrous comparisons that you could possibly make. 0.91

00:28:42.000 Not only that, not only have these totalitarian states been hell holes and genocidal hellholes, but there is no place to stand for a communist who doesn't like what Stalin is doing or Mao is doing.

00:28:56.000 There's no place for him to stand to say what you are doing is inconsistent with true communism.

00:29:02.000 There is no transcendent authority.

00:29:06.000 There is no place to stand to rebuke it.

00:29:09.000 The Christian does have that place to stand.

00:29:12.000 So the Christian has a way of opposing atheistic atrocities, and the Christian has a place to stand when he's opposing Christian atrocities. 0.73

00:29:21.000 This is the atheist.

00:29:23.000 Yes.

00:29:24.000 The atheist who doesn't like these atrocities and he wants to oppose them has no place to stand. 0.77

00:29:30.000 He's got nothing to appeal to.

00:29:32.000 He's got nothing.

00:29:33.000 Yes.

00:29:33.000 And this is the critical point, that there really is no such thing as an atheist.

00:29:38.000 You might be a theist in the sense of you don't believe in the God of the Bible and the God as the creator, but you believe in something.

00:29:46.000 There is a standard of which you appeal to.

00:29:49.000 And that is one of the most important takeaways that you can have in a political and, of course, a religious context.

00:29:57.000 Who do you call God?

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00:30:29.000 Flynn told the truth.

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00:31:00.000 Salemnow.com.

00:31:05.000 I've been following you from afar for some time, but the Tucker interview really crystallized so much for me.

00:31:12.000 And I'm in this space dealing with pastors a lot.

00:31:14.000 So I have two remaining questions.

00:31:16.000 I want to get to them both.

00:31:16.000 So let's try to do this as quickly as possible.

00:31:18.000 Number one, why do so few Christian leaders get this?

00:31:21.000 Why do they run for the hills?

00:31:23.000 Why do they refuse to articulate a biblical worldview when it is needed now more than ever?

00:31:28.000 What is your diagnosis of American Christianity and why they refuse to engage on this?

00:31:33.000 I think that we were victims of our own success.

00:31:36.000 In other words, it says in Deuteronomy, Jeshuan waxed fat and kicked. 0.98

00:31:43.000 What has happened is Christians have had it their way for several centuries. 0.99

00:31:48.000 So, in terms of a relatively stable, very blessed, affluent society, we've had it.

00:31:57.000 We've had that society.

00:31:59.000 And we recognized the general propriety of a Christian approach to life together down into the 20th century, well into the 20th century.

00:32:12.000 And a lot of Christians went to sleep thinking, oh, this is just what it's like to be alive on planet Earth.

00:32:19.000 We needed to get out more.

00:32:20.000 And I'll put it this way: the prodigal son didn't run out of money his first weekend away from home.

00:32:28.000 He had a lot of capital that he inherited first from his father, and he started to spend it on wild living, but he didn't run out of money right away.

00:32:38.000 So that's what happened to the United States.

00:32:42.000 We accumulated a great deal of moral capital, moral social capital, and then we started to spend it on our own lusts, spend it on our own ideas, spend it on our own wild time, and we didn't run out of money right away.

00:32:57.000 And what's happening now is the checks are bouncing.

00:33:01.000 And a lot of Christians are waking up saying, wait, wait, wait, they can't do that.

00:33:05.000 This is America, right?

00:33:07.000 So, and then the secularists look at us and say, why can't we not do that?

00:33:13.000 Basically, what we're doing is we're in the position of the prodigal son, staring at the pig food, wondering how we got into this position, right?

00:33:23.000 And so, what I want to do as a preacher is I want to call people back to Christ.

00:33:29.000 I want to say, look, you can't have it both ways.

00:33:32.000 You can't refuse to return to your father's house and have your father's blessing.

00:33:37.000 We need to return to our father's house.

00:33:40.000 We need to say, you know, this was a bad idea.

00:33:43.000 Father, I've sinned against you and against heaven.

00:33:46.000 This is a bad idea.

00:33:48.000 We screwed up.

00:33:49.000 And so, and a lot of Christians were just on cruise control and they were just caught flat-footed.

00:33:56.000 That's what I think has happened.

00:33:57.000 A lot of them were living decent, middle-class lives.

00:34:01.000 They thought, okay, all I need to do is believe in the gospel and go to church and keep my own nose clean.

00:34:07.000 And they were not aware of how much the Bible talks about social and political and cultural things.

00:34:14.000 One thing I do want you to talk about here is our audience, let's just say, is hearing a lot about a looming rapture and the end of the world.

00:34:26.000 And for that, they believe there is no reason to contest for political matters.

00:34:32.000 You have a different theological view and approach.

00:34:36.000 I believe what the Bible believes.

00:34:37.000 I'm not a theologian.

00:34:38.000 Some of my best friends are pre-trib, pre-millennial.

00:34:41.000 And, you know, I just want to say I'm whatever the Bible believes, what I believe.

00:34:44.000 I'm not an expert on this.

00:34:45.000 But I do want you to address this because you kind of a little bit with Tucker talked about it.

00:34:52.000 And I think it's important.

00:34:54.000 Sure thing.

00:34:54.000 Just very quickly, most North American evangelicals hold to what's called dispensational theology.

00:35:01.000 And this is sort of a caricature, but it's like this world is God's Vietnam. 0.85

00:35:07.000 And then there's going to be a rapture where God helicopters a few people out of Saigon, and then the whole thing falls apart.

00:35:17.000 And so you have this, God made the mistake of getting into a land war in Asia, and then God's going to snatch his people out. 0.94

00:35:24.000 I'm what's called post-millennial, which means that I have a very optimistic view of the future.

00:35:30.000 I believe the nations will be discipled. 0.56

00:35:32.000 I don't believe that everything is headed for hell in a handbasket.

00:35:37.000 Pastor, can you just lay out the biblical evidence for what you believe and why that, let's just say, connects to the view of history that you have?

00:35:46.000 Because the view of history that many on our show that come on, friends of mine like Jack Kibbs, they will say that God has a plan.

00:35:54.000 This is the end times.

00:35:56.000 There is a rapture that is imminent, and so on and so forth.

00:35:59.000 So your response or your view, because I think it's important for Christians to hear all perspectives on this.

00:36:05.000 Sure.

00:36:06.000 First, I really appreciate the charitable way you want to frame this.

00:36:10.000 I am greatly indebted to our dispensationalist brothers and sisters.

00:36:14.000 They've done a lot of good work in our country.

00:36:17.000 This is not a slam on them.

00:36:19.000 I'm very grateful for what they've contributed, but I do disagree with them at this point.

00:36:25.000 Okay, so that frames it.

00:36:28.000 Many Christians, when someone becomes a Christian and they go and buy their Bible and they read through the Bible, they think, okay, where am I?

00:36:36.000 Where's the X on the map that says you are here?

00:36:39.000 One of the reasons they think that we're in the end times is they read a passage like Matthew 24, where Jesus says the sun goes dark and the moon turns blood red and the stars fall from the heavens.

00:36:51.000 And they believe the Bible.

00:36:52.000 And they go out and look at the sky and the sun came up this morning and the moon's going to come up tonight and the stars are all still there.

00:36:59.000 So they say, oh, this must be about the future.

00:37:02.000 Because the Bible's true and they're all still there.

00:37:05.000 This is going to come to pass in the future.

00:37:08.000 But if you look at that passage closely, you see that Jesus has told the disciples at the beginning of chapter 24 that this city, this temple, not one stone is going to be left on another one.

00:37:22.000 And the disciples are astonished and say, when is this going to happen?

00:37:26.000 And Jesus starts answering their question.

00:37:28.000 And in the course of answering their question, he quotes Isaiah 13, Isaiah 13, verse 10.

00:37:35.000 And that's the sun going at, you know, what is called decreation language, what I call collapsing solar system language.

00:37:43.000 But if you back up in Isaiah 13, 10, back up to verse 1, Isaiah says, an oracle concerning the king of Babylon.

00:37:52.000 So this is not a prediction of the end of the space-time continuum.

00:37:58.000 This is a prediction of the end of Babylon. 0.96

00:38:02.000 And then Isaiah does it again in chapter 34, where it's the end of Edom.

00:38:07.000 And then the same thing happens in Ezekiel, where he predicts the end of Egypt, or in Amos, where he's predicting the end of the northern kingdom of Israel.

00:38:18.000 And it happens again in Joel, chapter 2.

00:38:21.000 Every time the Old Testament uses this kind of collapsing solar system terminology, it's always about the judgment of a nation or a nation-state, always.

00:38:31.000 And remember that Jesus is answering the question about when the temple is going to be flattened.

00:38:37.000 Well, when's this going to happen?

00:38:39.000 The disciples ask.

00:38:40.000 And then Jesus takes the language of the Old Testament.

00:38:43.000 And we know historically that all of that happened in 70 AD.

00:38:48.000 So many of the passages that evangelical Christians take and apply to the end of the world are actually, I take it, as applying to the end of the Judaic Aeon and the beginning of the Christian Aeon.

00:39:03.000 So with regard to the course of the Christian Aeon, how that's going to go, Habakkuk prophesies that the earth is going to be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

00:39:14.000 Isaiah prophesies the same thing.

00:39:17.000 Isaiah says that all the nations are going to stream to the root of Jesse, the rod of Jesse.

00:39:24.000 We have in Psalm 1.10, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool.

00:39:31.000 So Christ is at the right hand of the Father until all the enemies of Christ are subdued to him.

00:39:36.000 So post-millennialists, such as I am, believe that the gospel is going to succeed.

00:39:43.000 The great commission is going to be fulfilled.

00:39:46.000 The nations are going to come to Christ and the world will be successfully evangelized.

00:39:52.000 So we will long-term win.

00:39:57.000 But the kingdom of God does not take off like the space shuttle.

00:40:00.000 It's not like every day and every way everything gets better and better because we see apostasies and declensions and fallings away and everything.

00:40:09.000 It's more like walking from Nebraska through Colorado.

00:40:14.000 You walk up and then down and down into a valley and then up a little bit and then down into a canyon and then up again.

00:40:21.000 It's three steps forward, one step back, five steps forward, four steps back, that sort of thing.

00:40:26.000 So the kingdom of God advances very slowly, but it's like leaven that you put in the loaf, Jesus says, or like a mustard seed that grows into a great tree.

00:40:37.000 So long term, over the course of thousands of years, I'm very optimistic.

00:40:42.000 At the same time, I believe that we need to be hard-headed and clear-eyed about the apostasies and the rebellions.

00:40:48.000 I just want to say, when you said that on Tucker's interview, I kind of had to take a step back.

00:40:55.000 I said, I have not heard somebody say the words, I am optimistic.

00:41:01.000 And so it just, it was just kind of a category difference, right?

00:41:05.000 Yes.

00:41:06.000 The late Gary North said there are only two basic eschatologies.

00:41:10.000 There's optimillennialism and pessimillennialism, right?

00:41:15.000 And of course, all Christians are optimistic with regard to the future life.

00:41:19.000 We believe in the resurrection of the dead.

00:41:22.000 Anybody who believes in heaven, but I'm talking about historically optimistic.

00:41:26.000 Let me just.

00:41:27.000 Yeah, no, I totally agree.

00:41:27.000 And we're just short on time.

00:41:29.000 But I just want to be clear because I have seen amazing dispensationalists that use the urgency that they see the Bible, they use that as urgency to do good.

00:41:40.000 Then I see other dispensationalists that use it as apathy to flee and to do nothing.

00:41:47.000 So the most important question that I have is, what does your eschatology inform you to do?

00:41:52.000 Since you are an optimist and you see that the scriptures are going to go west before it goes east, right?

00:41:58.000 It goes all the way around the world.

00:42:01.000 What then do you do?

00:42:04.000 In 1 Corinthians 15, 58, Paul tells to the Corinthians that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

00:42:11.000 What we do here and now matters.

00:42:15.000 And what we do here and now matters eternally.

00:42:17.000 It's false to say, oh, it's all going to burn, man, and throw up your hands and we can't do any good.

00:42:24.000 What we do here matters.

00:42:26.000 And that's what my eschatology encourages me in.

00:42:30.000 I think that's beautiful.

00:42:32.000 And that's the most important thing is what do you do?

00:42:34.000 And if you believe what you do matters.

00:42:36.000 It's important.

00:42:36.000 Check out Christislord.com, ChristisLord.com, and the book Mere Christendom.

00:42:43.000 Pastor, thank you so much.

00:42:44.000 Great to be with you.

00:42:45.000 Thank you.

00:42:45.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:42:47.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:42:49.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

00:42:53.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 30, 2024

What IS a Christian Nationalist, Anyway?

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